had before, twelve red and two black,” he added when the hat came back
to the desk. “Who is doing it? Get up and curse him out like a man; it’s
a shame, when all but two are willing to have him in.” But no one got up
and cursed. Haydock and Ellis were the guilty ones, and they had nothing
against Leonard. No one else was nominated; and Haydock said a few words
about Wolcott before his name was voted on a second time. His manner in
saying them was the artistic bit of hypocrisy he felt the occasion
demanded. Willingness under the circumstances, rather than eagerness,
was what he sought to express. He knew the value of his own conservative
personality.
“Wolcott gets eleven red and three black,” announced Haviland; “one
better than last time.” Another ballot on Leonard’s name brought it no
nearer election than before. Haydock was quietly exultant. The election
was slowly coming to the point to which he had all along looked forward
to bringing it. The fellows who had promised to vote for
Wolcott--indifferent at first as to whether he got in or not--were
beginning now to “root” for him vigorously. Incited solely by a desire
to have their own way, they tried to find out who was black-balling him,
and made speeches urging his election that Haydock wouldn’t have dared
to make. Their eloquence succeeded by the next ballot in reducing the
number of his black-balls to two. One of them, of course, was McGaw’s.
The other, Haydock felt equally sure, had been put in by Bigelow.
Leonard had been Bigelow’s candidate from the first. Bigelow hadn’t
disguised his enthusiasm for him since he had nominated him early in
the evening; he had, in fact, declared good-naturedly that if the worst
came to the worst, he would black-ball his own father in order to get
Leonard in. Once when he didn’t happen to have any black cards in his
hand, he had asked some one to black-ball Wolcott for him. It was
undoubtedly he, thought Haydock, who furnished the second black-ball,
and continued to put one in every time a ballot was taken on Wolcott’s
name. There was no reason why Bigelow shouldn’t withhold it on the next
ballot, Haydock told himself, if he, Haydock, and Ellis showed
themselves willing to vote for Leonard. This would elect Bigelow’s
candidate unanimously, and let Wolcott in with McGaw’s one black. So
just before Leonard’s name was voted on again, Haydock went over to
Bigelow and said frankly:
“Drop in a red card for Wolcott next time, and as far as Ellis and I are
concerned, Leonard will be elected at once. We two have been keeping him
out right along.” Bigelow looked surprised, then laughed and nodded as
if he understood such things, and in a moment Leonard, amid a murmur of
relief from the crowd, was declared elected. Once more the hat was
handed from man to man. They were electing Wolcott now, actually
electing him, thought Haydock. He noticed that Bigelow voted with the
seven of hearts, then he looked in McGaw’s direction to see how the
tutor would take the news of Wolcott’s success when Haviland should
announce it from the desk. It was very late, and the rickety old room
had grown chilly in spite of the two blazing chandeliers. Three or four
of the men had put on their coats and hats; the meeting seemed about to
end.
“Wolcott gets twelve red and two black,” said Haviland, hopelessly.
“What!” exclaimed Ellis. Haydock turned incredulously toward the desk;
he felt as if some one had played him a sneaking trick. He went over to
Bigelow, astonished and rather angry.
“You voted for Wolcott, didn’t you?” he asked.
“Why, yes, of course I did,” answered Bigelow, irritably. Now that his
own candidate was safe, he was anxious to go home. “I’ve been voting
for him ever since he was put up, except just the first round.” Haydock
swore. He had taken it for granted that Bigelow had been keeping Wolcott
out when, as a matter of fact, it had been some one else,--some one who
no doubt was in complete sympathy with McGaw. His jump at the conclusion
struck him now as an incredibly dull proceeding.
“I’m sure I don’t know what to do,” Haviland was saying. “We simply must
have a seventh man. I hate to have the thing drag over until ‘next
time,’ when we’re all here to-night. Nominate Tony Wilson, or Jack
Linzee--somebody--anybody.”
“I nominate Tony Wilson!” drawled Baxford, obediently. Haydock and Ellis
ostentatiously gave the new candidate the only two black-balls he
received. Haviland grasped the situation at once.
“I think we’ll have to come to some sort of an understanding,” he said.
He was tired and annoyed, and so conscious of the fact that he forced
himself to be extraordinarily polite. “Two of us apparently want Wolcott
enough to cause a deadlock,--which I suppose is perfectly
justifiable,--and two of us don’t want him at all. Lots of things have
been said in his favour, and no one has said much of anything against
him. I think it’s only fair for the two fellows who are keeping us here
so late to get up and give us some idea of why they don’t want him. We
can’t very well throw his name out as long as he has only two black. If
the fellows who are keeping him out have a really good reason, we ought
to know it. Such things, I’m sure, won’t go beyond this room.” There was
a pause, while Haviland looked inquiringly from face to face. Then McGaw
stood up. There was just a trace of defiance in his general bearing that
vanished as soon as he saw that every one had turned toward him with
interest.
“I suppose I ought to have objected to Sears Wolcott earlier in the
evening,” he said slowly. He looked quietly, fixedly, at Haydock. “I
have met him in a way that none of you could meet him. I wish I didn’t
know that he was one kind of a fellow with men who have money and
friends and everything, and different with the other kind,--men who
can’t afford such things. I’m very sorry that I’ve seen him laugh at a
man because he was poor and underfed and dressed in somebody else’s
clothes,--clothes that didn’t fit him; because I can’t forget it now,
when I should like to. I can’t think that he has a good heart. I don’t
want to meet him here.” McGaw said this very slowly and regretfully; and
when he sat down he stared at the floor. His little speech left every
one wide-awake and uncomfortable, and so silent that the fellows could
hear the rain slapping in gusts against the window-panes outside. His
words in the mouth of--say Baxford or Dickey Dawson would have been
laughed at. As it was, Tommy murmured audibly, “‘Kind hearts are more
than coronets,’” but the observation fell rather flat. McGaw had been
painfully sincere. He had succeeded, beyond a doubt, in “getting his
effect.” Haydock knew that just that sort of thing said about Wolcott,
by some one who was liked rather than otherwise, and who more or less
represented “the extreme left,” was peculiarly fatal. No one else in the
room would have talked in that way under any circumstances, although
there were several men who didn’t object to hearing it done so
authoritatively. Wolcott, who had seemed to be on the verge of slipping
into the Signet a moment or two before, was now given seven black-balls,
and dropped without comment. Tony Wilson was elected with a feeble burst
of applause; Haydock and Ellis were putting on their overcoats when the
hat went around, and didn’t vote.
Haviland turned out the lights, and the men groped their way--holding on
to one another and striking matches from time to time--down the two
flights of steep, dark stairs to the wet street. No one spoke of the
election on the way down. Had anything been said it would have had to
do, undoubtedly, with McGaw’s speech; and McGaw was there, somewhere in
the dark, with the rest of them. Haviland walked with Ellis and Haydock
as far as the “Crimson” office,--he hoped to get the names of the Third
Seven into the morning paper. But they didn’t talk of the election.
Ellis was boiling with righteous indignation; Haydock was wondering who
had been McGaw’s ally in black-balling Wolcott; and Haviland was too
glad to have it over with, and be out in the fresh air, to think of the
Signet. It was not until Haydock and Ellis threw some fresh wood on the
fire at the club, and sank into two big leathern chairs, that they felt
at liberty to discuss the matter freely.
“I suppose it was hopeless from the first,” mused Haydock.
“It needn’t have been,--that’s what makes me furious,” returned Ellis.
“If McGaw only could have had an inkling of who he was keeping out--”
“Yes, I think he would have been the first to turn right around and work
like a pup to get him in,” agreed Haydock.
“I felt like jumping up and telling everything.”
“How awful,--think of the scene!”
“Well, it wouldn’t have been much more damnable than it was! Nobody knew
where to look. There was just enough truth to what McGaw said--that and
the way he got up and did it--it wasn’t as if anybody else had tried
to--”
“The difference is that McGaw really cared,” broke in Haydock; “there
was feeling behind it. It isn’t given to many of us to have real,
sure-enough feelings around here in college. Nothing ever seems to
happen that makes enough difference one way or the other. McGaw’s one of
the kind that has them. That’s how he got everyone to vote for Carver
the minute he put him up. He just felt all over that Carver was the
right man for the place, and somehow everybody believed him. He
slaughtered poor Searsy by the same method. You see he’s the sort of
fellow who is destined to be listened to by all kinds of people. The
masses like guts, while the upper classes prefer expression. McGaw has
the intensity of a fanatic and the manners of a gentleman; his armament
is formidable. I shouldn’t be a bit surprised to hear some day that he’d
started an entirely new and plausible religion, or written a book that
really proved something, or reorganised the Supreme Court on a less
flippant basis. The creature actually has beliefs; he’s rather
astonishing. I can’t blame him for giving it to Wolcott in the neck,
when he had such a good chance; but I’m darned sorry he was inspired to
do it.”
“I suppose you’ll tell Sears all about it,” said Ellis.
“No, I sha’n’t,” answered Haydock, after a moment. “You see, you never
can tell how he is going to take things--so what’s the use? The Signet’s
nothing to him, and he might be ever so much amused that McGaw could
keep him out of it. But then, again, it’s quite likely that he’d carry
on and swear like a trooper, and never do anything for McGaw again. I
know him better than you do. If I ever do tell him, it’ll be some day
just after he’s won a bet, or beaten me at golf, or taken a prize at the
horse show; not when he’s cooped up in his room with sore throat, the
way he is now, railing at the weather and Cambridge and the college, and
everybody who makes a sound in the hall near his door. I’m devoted to
Searsy, but I don’t think I have many illusions about him.”
“Oh, I wish we could tell McGaw about him! It might make McGaw feel
badly just at first; but I’d be so much more comfortable. Couldn’t
we--just to be just?”
“Certainly not,” yawned Haydock. “One must have the courage to be
unjust.”
And that, no doubt, would have been the end of the McGaw-Wolcott
episode, if tailors didn’t exert such extraordinary influence over human
affairs.
* * * * *
The next afternoon, when Haydock dropped into Wolcott’s room to see how
the sore throat was getting along, he found Wolcott’s mother and sister
had driven out from Boston on the same errand. Haydock’s call was
opportune, for Wolcott, in a few minutes, had another visitor,--a
somewhat agitated, incoherent young man who wished very much to speak to
Wolcott alone. The Magnificent One would have granted the interview
outside in the hall had not Mrs. Wolcott protested on account of
draughts, so he took his guest into his bed-room, and shut the door.
“How very mysterious!” said Miss Wolcott. Her mother examined the
closed door through her glasses. “Who is he?”
“That’s McGaw!” said Haydock, significantly.
“One of Sears’s friends?” asked Mrs. Wolcott. Haydock laughed.
“I never knew that he was,” he answered. Miss Wolcott seemed much
interested; but her interest not nearly as eager as Haydock’s. McGaw’s
visit baffled him. He couldn’t believe that the fellow had come, in a
fit of remorse, to apologise to Wolcott for having kept him out of the
Signet,--the idea was fantastic--ridiculous. Nor could he think it
probable that McGaw had found out what Wolcott had been doing for him;
no one but Barrows and Ellis and Miss Wolcott and Haydock himself knew.
The long interview in Wolcott’s bed-room was indeed mysterious. It was
something of a strain to Haydock to keep his attention from wandering to
the rise and fall of voices on the other side of the door long enough to
talk intelligently to Mrs. Wolcott; and when, after examining everything
in the room, she said that, since she was in Cambridge, she thought she
would improve the opportunity of making a call somewhere on Brattle
Street, Haydock inwardly applauded the intention.
“He’s not nearly as ill as his note led us to believe,” said Mrs.
Wolcott. “He wrote that he was ‘wasted away to a shadow,’ and that if we
had a desire--from idle curiosity or any other motive--to see him alive,
which he doubted, we’d better come out at once.”
“I was reassured,” added Miss Wolcott, “when I got a note by the next
post, saying, ‘Dear Josephine, If you wear that dowdy old felt hat, with
the black satin bow and the brass buckle, out to Cambridge, please sit
downstairs in the vestibule, while I talk to mamma.’ Sears really ill is
quite lamblike.”
“So you see, you mustn’t think me an unnatural parent for running away
to leave a card on old Mrs. Burlap,” said Wolcott’s mother. Haydock saw
her to the carriage, and went back to tell Miss Wolcott about the Signet
meeting, and interest her still more in her brother’s visitor. He
softened the language of McGaw’s speech a little, although he made its
general import clear. His frequent talks with Miss Wolcott about Sears
enabled him to.
“I agree with Mr. Ellis,” she said, when Haydock had finished. “I want
McGaw to know. It does seem unjust to poor Searsy.”
“Maybe he does know,” replied Haydock, listening intently to the voices
in the bed-room. Suddenly they ceased. Wolcott burst into his loud
laugh, and both men began to talk again at once. “I wish they’d hurry
up!” added Haydock, with suppressed excitement. Then the door opened,
and McGaw, looking ill at ease, but smiling wanly, came out, followed by
Wolcott, who went with him as far as the hall.
“And don’t come before ten o’clock,” Wolcott said, shaking hands. “I’m
not often in early in the evening.” Wolcott, chuckling delightfully,
came across the room, and laid a tiny oblong bit of white linen on
Haydock’s knee. On it was printed the name of a Boston tailor, followed
in handwriting by Wolcott’s name and a date and some cabalistic letters
and numerals written in a clear round hand. Wolcott folded his arms and
grinned. Haydock knew where it must have come from, yet he looked
puzzled.
“But I remember distinctly having ripped it out that afternoon before
you sent them around to Barrows,” he said, after a moment.
“Out of the coat,--not the trousers; they sew them under the right-hand
pocket of the trousers sometimes,--so McGaw says,” Wolcott laughed like
a child. “That pressed the button, so to speak, and Barrows, confound
him! did the rest.”
“Well, well, well!” was all Haydock could say; he didn’t like to let
Sears know that he had told Miss Wolcott, and that she was eager for
details.
“Who was that who just went out, Searsy?” asked Miss Wolcott,
innocently.
“That? Oh--a friend of mine,” answered The Magnificent One, winking at
Haydock, as he took back the tailor’s label, and put it in his
card-case.
WELLINGTON
“If I’d only known sooner that you were coming, I could have asked some
of the fellows round to meet you,” said Haydock, politely. No matter how
well you may know a woman, you are always apprehensive when she comes to
Cambridge that she has a thirst for tea.
“I think I like this better,” his mother answered, stopping to look
back. She was a lady of excellent taste, yet almost any one must have
preferred the Yard that Sunday afternoon. The riotous new green of early
spring had matured to an academic sombreness that made the elms, the
stretches of sun-flecked grass, the tremulous ivy, and the simple brick
buildings inseparable in one’s thoughts. The dignity of the great space
between Grays and Holworthy had grown with the late afternoon shadows,
and Haydock and his mother, who had sauntered from path to path,
listening to the leaves, and the robins, and the quiet confidences of
the wise bricks, talked of Harvard. Although the place was large and
deserted at this hour, it was far from lonely.
“Oh, yes, I like this much better,” mused Mrs. Haydock again. Philip
looked pleased.
“It’s always beautiful,” he said; “and there’s so much else,” he added
rather obscurely. But his mother seemed to know, for she looked at him
after a moment and answered,--
“I often wonder if all women can understand it,--the other things, not
just the beauty,--or if it’s only women with sons and brothers who come
here.”
“Especially sons,” smiled Philip, taking her hand and swinging it to and
fro, as they strolled back again toward Holworthy.
“But I never shall find out for sure,” went on Mrs. Haydock; “because
even the ones who do feel the place, just as if they had been here
themselves, can’t express it.”
“It’s so dreadful to try,” said Philip. Then after a moment, “I was
thinking of all the horrible Class Poems and Odes and Baccalaureate
Sermons and ghastly Memorial Day orators that are allowed to go on.”
“Oh, they probably don’t do any harm,” Mrs. Haydock interceded mildly.
“No, not positive harm,” her son admitted; “but neither would a lot of
hurdygurdies in Appleton Chapel.” Once in a while Haydock was somewhat
extreme. Just now his mother took occasion to remark on that fact.
“No, really, I don’t think I am,” Philip protested. “What can they add
to our feeling for Harvard with their trite mouthings about _veritas_
and Memorial Hall? Other places may need that sort of thing; this one
doesn’t. Most of us here recognise that fact, and conduct ourselves
accordingly. And outsiders misunderstand the attitude; Eleanor, for
example.” Eleanor was a cousin with Yale affinities. “I had to snub
Eleanor once for saying, before a lot of people, that whenever she
wanted to flatter a Harvard man, she told him he was blasé, and, if that
didn’t work, she called him a cynic, and if even that wouldn’t bring
him round, she hinted that he didn’t believe in God.”
“Eleanor is a very clever, silly little girl,” laughed Mrs. Haydock.
“Eleanor is excessively cheap at times,” corrected Philip. “We’re not
‘cynical,’ and we’re not ‘blasé,’ and whether or not we believe in God
is nobody’s business. If we don’t drool about the things here we care
for very much, it’s because people who do are indecent; they bore us.”
“They do bore one,” assented Mrs. Haydock.
“Once in a while some one does tear out his heart and drip it around the
stage in Sanders Theatre for the benefit of all the tiresome old women
in Cambridge, and the Glee Club drones Latin hymns to a shiny upright
piano hired for the occasion, while the orator calms himself with
ice-water from the bedroom pitcher that is always prominent on those
occasions. But such performances, thank God, are rare.”
“Why do you go to them?” asked Mrs. Haydock.
“I don’t,” said Philip. “That was when I was a freshman, and didn’t
know any better. Since then I have acquired ‘Harvard indifference,’” he
added, smiling to himself. They left the Yard, lingering a moment for
another look down the leafy vista, and walked slowly across to Memorial.
The beautiful transept was dark at first, after the sunlight outside.
Then it lifted straight and high from the cool dusk into the quiet light
of the stained windows. Except for the faint echo of their footsteps
along the marble floor, the two moved from tablet to tablet in silence.
Somewhere near the south door they stopped, and Philip said simply,--
“This one is Shaw’s.”
When they passed on and out, and sat in the shade on the steps,
Haydock’s mother wiped her eyes. The long, silent roll-call always made
her do that.
“It was a great, great price to pay,” she said at last.
“I never knew how great,” said Philip, “until I came here one day and
tried to live it all over, as if it were happening now. Before then the
war seemed fine, and historic, and all that, but ever so far away. It’s
been real since then. I thought of how all the little groups of fellows
would talk about it in the Yard between lectures, and read the morning
papers while the lectures were going on; and how the instructors would
hate to have to tell them not to. And I thought what it would be like to
have the men I know--Alfred and Peter Bradley, and Sears Wolcott and
Douglas and Billy and Pat, and all of them, getting restless and
excited, and sitting up all night at the club, and then throwing down
their books and marching away to the front to be shot; and how I would
have to go along too, because--well, you couldn’t stay at home while
they were being shot every day, and thrown into trenches. I don’t think
you ever realise it very much until you think about it that way.”
“It seems, now, so terrible that they had to go,” Philip’s mother broke
in earnestly; “such a cruel stamping out of youth and strength and
happiness at the very beginning.”
“But it isn’t as if you felt it were all a hideous waste. It did
something great; it’s doing something now. It can never stop,” Philip
added, gently; “for every year the new ones come,--the ones who don’t
know yet. It’s the fellows who die here at college who always seem to me
so thrown away, so wasted,” he went on. “They don’t seem to get their
show, somehow,--like Wellington, for instance.”
“Did I meet Wellington?” asked Mrs. Haydock, trying to attach a
personality to the name. She usually remembered Philip’s friends.
“Heavens, no!” answered Philip. “Nobody knew Wellington, except a few of
us,--after he got pneumonia and died, which he did last February. He was
in our class, and he must have been a nice fellow; his mother was very
nice. But I’d never heard of him. It had just happened that way,--the
way it does here.”
“Where did you know his mother?” asked Mrs. Haydock.
“Why, I thought I’d written you all that. It must have been too long, or
too dreary, or something,” said Philip.
“No, you never told me.”
“Well, the first thing that I knew about Hugh Wellington was that he
came from Chicago, or Cleveland, or some place; that ‘his pleasant
disposition was appreciated by all who knew him;’ and that,
incidentally, he was dead. I read that in the ‘Crimson’ one morning in
bed, and I knew exactly what it meant; because when the ‘Crimson’ is
reduced to the ‘pleasant disposition’ stage, there’s a good reason why.”
Mrs. Haydock looked up inquiringly.
“I mean, they can’t find out anything; there’s nothing to find out. He
went his way quietly,--decently, I suppose,--without knowing any one in
particular. No one seemed to know him, not even well enough to say that
his disposition wasn’t pleasant; so the ‘Crimson’ gave him the benefit
of the doubt.”
“It’s the least it could do for any dead man,” said Mrs. Haydock.