Philip, thoughtfully. “After that, I didn’t think of him again--you
don’t, you know; among so many it’s bound to happen pretty often--until
somebody asked who he was, at luncheon. There were ten of us at the
table, and Billy Fields was the only one who knew anything about him. He
said that he sat next to a man named H. Wellington in some big history
course, and liked the clothes he wore. I think he and Billy used to nod
to each other in the Yard. Well, in the natural course of events, that
would have been the end of him, as far as I was concerned, if Nate
Lawrence--he’s the president of the class--hadn’t dashed round to my
room that afternoon to ask me what he’d better do. Nate’s a bully
chap,--a great, big clean sort of a child who breathes hard whenever he
has to think of anything. He always wants to do the proper thing by the
class and the college, and we help him out a good deal with resolutions
and committees and impromptu speeches for athlete dinners, and all that.
He wanted me to sit right down and help him draw up some resolutions of
sympathy and ‘get it over with,’ he said. After that he could call a
class meeting, to which no one would come of course, and send the thing
home immediately. I couldn’t see any particular necessity for rushing
the matter, except that Nate had it very much on his mind. It wasn’t as
if the man were alive and might die at any moment. So I told him he’d
better wait awhile, and asked him if he knew anything about Wellington
in the first place. He said, why, yes, of course--he remembered the name
quite distinctly; Wellington had come out for the foot ball in October,
but had hurt his knee--no, come to think of it, it might have been his
collar-bone--and had dropped out pretty soon. He was either the tall lad
with the shoulders, or that wiry little man who might have made a good
quarter-back if he’d stayed on. You see, Wellington must have been a
mighty quiet sort of fellow, because Nate is a tremendously
conscientious president. He can tell almost everybody apart.
“I said, ‘You simply have to get more details, if you want me to write
the letter.’ I’m pretty good at that kind of thing, but I like to have
something to go by, naturally; it makes them easier--more spontaneous.
Nate had been up to the Office; but I didn’t find anything very
available in what he’d got there, so we looked up Wellington’s address
in the Index, and went round to his room that afternoon. He lived in a
little house on Kirkland Street.
“It was a perfectly fiendish day; you’ve never been here in February,
have you? Well, that’s the time to see dear old Cambridge. It snows and
rains most of the day, and then stops to rest and melt a little. There
aren’t any sidewalks to speak of--just dirt paths with curbstones that
keep the mud and stuff from running off into the street, so you have to
walk in it up to your neck, if you want to get anywhere. That’s what did
Wellington up, I guess.
“The front door of his house was latched, and I was fumbling round under
the crape trying to get hold of the bell, when the landlady appeared;
you know--it makes me shudder now sometimes, when I think of that
gruesome old buzzard of a woman. She was a typical Cambridge
landlady,--one of those uncorsetted, iron grey slatterns who lives in a
rancid atmosphere of hot soap-suds and never goes to bed; a room-renting
old spider who manages to break everything you own, in a listless sort
of way, and then writes home to your father that you haven’t paid your
bill. This one belonged to the class that looks on death as a social
opportunity. She was dressed for the occasion, and greeted each of us
with a kind of a soiled smile that made her old face look like a piece
of dish-rag.”
“Philip dear.”
“Well, it did. And then she said in a loud, important whisper,--
“‘He isn’t upstairs; he’s in my parlor,’ and took us in where poor
Wellington was. It was all so dreadful, that part of it, that it didn’t
seem sad. There were three other bleary old funeral coaches,--more
landladies, I suppose,--on a sofa on one side, and a girl with fuzzy,
yellow hair, in a rocking-chair, on the other; she was Mrs. Finley’s
daughter, I think. I’ve seen her round the Square since. There didn’t
seem to be much of anything for us to do; and Nate was awfully
embarrassed and uncomfortable, and seemed to fill up most of the space
in the horrid plushy little room. But I didn’t like to go away exactly,
because it made our coming there at all seem so useless; so I said to
Mrs. Finley,--I couldn’t think of anything else,--
“‘Have many of the fellows been in?’
“‘No,’ she whispered; ‘nobody’s been in but Mis’ Taylor and Mis’ Buckson
and Mis’ Myles. They come at two,’--it was then after five,--‘and the
Regent. Mr. Wellington was a real quiet young man. He didn’t have much
company. He stayed in his room nights--mostly.’ She stuck on ‘mostly’ as
a sort of afterthought, and repeated it; the old fool had a passion for
accuracy of a vague, unimportant kind that almost drove me crazy. I
asked her if any one else roomed in the house. I knew he must have known
them if there did; no matter how objectionable people are at college, if
they room near you, you can’t help borrowing matches from them--I’ve
made lots of acquaintances borrowing matches. But no one lived there
except two law students, ‘real nice gentlemen, _real_ nice,’ they were,
and they weren’t there very much. Nate asked her when the funeral was to
be, which was the most sensible thing he could have done; for she took a
telegram from her pocket, and said,--
“‘His mother’s coming to-night. She was in New York State when he passed
away. They wa’n’t able to get her till this afternoon.’ Then Nate and I
left her, and I don’t know why,--it wasn’t idle curiosity,--but we went
up to Wellington’s rooms.
“They were bully rooms. You can tell a lot about a man from his room
here. Wellington had no end of really good things: rugs and books,--the
Edinburgh Stevenson, and that edition of Balzac we have at home,--and
ever so many Braun photographs--not the every day ones, but portraits
and things that you felt he’d picked up abroad, because he happened to
like them. And on the table--he had a corking big oak table that filled
up one end of the room--his note-books and scratch block were lying
open, just the way he’d left them when he stopped grinding for the
exams. And there was a letter without a stamp, addressed to his mother,
and a little picture of his mother, with ‘For Hugo’ written on the back.
Then I got to thinking of his mother, and got her mixed up with you
somehow or other. I don’t know just how it was, but you seemed to change
places; I couldn’t see you apart for any length of time, and I thought
of you arriving at the Park Square station all alone, and trying to get
a cab in the wet, and having to pay the man anything he asked you, until
I was almost crying, and told Nate that some one ought to be there to
meet you--Mrs. Wellington, I mean. Nate agreed with me, and began to
look panicky, because he knew I meant him. He really ought to have
gone--it was his place. But I knew how he felt. He kept insisting that I
could do the thing much better than he could; and it ended by my getting
a carriage at about eight or nine o’clock, and splashing into town.
“There was a possibility, of course, that she wouldn’t come alone,
although she had been away from home, in New York, when she heard. But
it never occurred to me that I could miss her if she did come alone,
although I’d never seen her, and felt sure she wouldn’t have on black
veils and things. You can’t imagine all the different things I thought
of to say to her while I was walking up and down the platform waiting
for the train to come in. They all sounded so formal and sort of
undertakery, that I knew I shouldn’t say any of them when the time
came. But I couldn’t think of anything else--the one right one, I mean.
“Well, she came on the first train she possibly could have come on after
sending the telegram, and I knew her at once. She was the very last
person to get out of the car. It wasn’t that, or because she looked
different--anybody else would have said she was very, very tired; but I
just knew her, and before I could think of any of those other things, I
took her travelling-bag and said,--
“‘I’m one of Hugh’s friends.’
“I didn’t see her when I said it,--only her hands,--because I was
looking down at the bag.” Haydock paused a moment.
“I think it was the right thing, dear--the only one,” said his mother,
softly.
“It’s a long, long drive to Cambridge, even if you know where you are
all the time. But with the windows all blurred, and nothing to mark the
way except the rumble of the bridge or the car-tracks, or some bright
light you know pretty well, that tells you you haven’t gone nearly so
far as you thought you had, it’s terrible. We didn’t say anything on
the way. She leaned back in the corner; I think she was crying. Mrs.
Finley--the landlady--heard us coming, and had the door open when we got
out; I made _her_ go upstairs with me, and told her not to dare to go
near that room and--and disturb them. She’s just the sort of a woman who
would. It was almost midnight then, and I sat there until after two. I
tried to grind for a Fine Arts’ examination out of one of Wellington’s
books--he must have been taking the same course--until the door
downstairs opened and closed, and I heard Mrs. Wellington come slowly up
the steps. I put the book on the mantelpiece; it seemed heartless to be
reading there by his fire when she came in.
“She was a very brave woman, I think--brave and civilised. She walked
slowly round the room, sort of touching things here and there; and she
stopped a long time at the table, and put her hand on the note-books
gently, as if she were stroking them, and then closed them.”
“Did she find the letter?” asked Mrs. Haydock.
“No, I gave that to her later on--I had it in my pocket then. I didn’t
want her to find it herself; it always makes you jump so to see your own
name written out, when you’re not looking for it. Then she sat down in a
chair near me and stared at the fire. I asked her if she wanted me to go
away; and she said, no, she was glad I was there. We talked a little--I
couldn’t say much; my position was queer you know--not what she thought
it was. But it didn’t seem wrong as long as I stayed just because she
wanted me to, and I hated to spoil it by saying things that couldn’t
ring true. She talked about Hugh in such a quiet wonderful way that
every now and then I found myself wondering if she really knew.
Sometimes she doubted it herself, I think, for she left me twice and
went slowly downstairs as if she wanted to make sure. When daylight
came, she went in and lay down on his bed. I put out the lamps and wrote
a note saying where my room was if she wanted to send for me.
“At breakfast I got hold of Bradley and Sears Wolcott and Billy and four
or five other fellows, and told them they simply had to go round there
at noon, and that some of them would have to go into the station with
me. They didn’t see any particular reason for it at first; most of them
were grinding for the exams, and Sears had an engagement to play court
tennis and lunch at the B. A. A. He said he didn’t see why the man’s
friends weren’t enough without dragging out a lot of heelers who’d never
heard of him, let alone never having met him. He wasn’t ‘going to be any
damned hired crocodile!’ he said. You see, they couldn’t understand that
if they didn’t go, there probably wouldn’t be anybody there but the
preacher and Mrs. Finley, and those horrible men with the black satin
ties and cotton gloves who carry you in and out when there’s no one else
round to do it. But they all came at last--even Sears, grumbling till he
got inside the gate. Nate brought three or four fellows round from his
club, and an armful of red and white roses ‘from the class,’ he told
Mrs. Wellington. It was a nice little lie. I was surprised that Natey
thought of it. The Regent came, and Mr. Barrows, the college secretary,
and poor old Miss Shedd, Wellington’s washwoman. She was awfully cut
up, poor old thing, and made it as bad as possible for everybody. That
was about all, I think. Plummer, the college preacher, was simple and
manly; Heaven knows he couldn’t very well have been anything else under
the circumstances. And then we had that interminable drive again, back
to Boston.
“I was in the carriage with Mrs. Wellington. Any of us could have gone
with her just as well, I suppose, because we were all Hugh’s friends,
although I was the only one who knew that we were. But I wanted to ride
with her somehow, and I’m glad now that I did, for a very queer thing
happened; I’ve never quite understood it. She didn’t say anything for
ever so long, not until we got across the bridge and the carriage began
to go slower. Then she put one of her hands on mine, and said,--
“‘I didn’t know at first that you were Haydock, not until I found your
note. I’m very, very glad to know, because Hugh used to talk more about
you in his letters and when he was at home than he did about any of the
others. I think he looked up to you most of all,’ and she told me some
of the things he had said and written.”
Haydock often wondered if repeating things to your mother that you
wouldn’t repeat to any one else, made up for the things you couldn’t
tell her at all. This passed through his mind now.
“I’m afraid it’s just as well I never met Wellington,” he added. “Well,
there wasn’t much else. When we got to the station, I left Nate and the
others to attend to things, and went into the car with Mrs. Wellington.
She had the stateroom,--I’d got that for her when I went in town in the
morning,--and there wasn’t anything to do but give her her ticket, and
say good-bye. I had a feeling as if I ought to go on with her and see
the thing through; but I’d cut one examination already--I managed to
flunk two more--and she probably wouldn’t have let me anyhow. I did hunt
up the conductor and give him the other ticket,--you have to have two,
you know,--and told him to take care of it, and not let her see it; it
had a grisly word scribbled across it. She smiled when she said
good-bye--oh, so sadly.”
Haydock stood up and stretched himself.
“Did you ever hear from her again?” asked Mrs. Haydock.
“Oh, yes, I had a letter very soon. I had all his books and furniture
and stuff packed up and sent home, you know. She told me to keep
anything I wanted, because--oh, I’ll show you the letter some day. I
kept the picture with ‘For Hugo’ written on the back. It’s over in my
room.” He went down the steps, Mrs. Haydock following. They walked along
the Delta, past John Harvard, and across to one of the paths in the Yard
once more, sprinkled now with men hurrying to Memorial.
“It was such a queer waste, his having lived and come here at all,”
mused Philip. “I suppose that sounds awfully kiddish and tiresome to
you, doesn’t it?” he asked more lightly, looking at his mother.
“No,” she answered; “it sounded very old the way you said it.”
BUTTERFLIES
John Rice--somehow he was never called “Jack”--and Billy Ware roomed
together, it was said, because their mothers were congenial. These
ladies certainly had, in common, the bond of sweet stupidity, or they
never would have put into practice the ideal arrangement of having their
sons share the same apartment. Rice was always, and with justice, spoken
of as “a very fine man.” He was well put together and fine looking. His
sense of duty was fine, also his sense of honour. He possessed a fine
lot of commonplace ideas about many things, and carried with him an air
of fine, if indefinite, purpose. On the whole, Billy considered him
uninteresting.
Billy, on the other hand, was fatally gifted in his ability to please
everybody. Other things being satisfactory, personal appearance doesn’t
weigh heavily in the balance of undergraduate judgment; it was not
Billy’s extremely pretty and well cared for exterior that compelled
fellows to take him into account in their preliminary survey of the
Freshman Class; although that may have helped, just at first. People who
liked the plasticity of his quick smile and the restlessness of his
black eyebrows--there was something very un-Anglo-Saxon in their facial
importance--thought he had “an expressive face.” But what it expressed,
if anything, no man undertook to say. Hemenway, who drew for the
“Lampoon,” said it was a sketch, not a face,--the sketch of a painter
who didn’t take art seriously. Neither was it cleverness that made
fellows who met Ware remember him favourably, if they happened to be
upper classmen, and glad of a subsequent occasion that threw them in his
way, if they were his own classmates. For Billy had none of the talents
of which parlour tricks are made. In the presence of older boys, he
instinctively knew the number and kind of remarks that gain for a
freshman the negative distinction of being “able to talk enough.” With
his contemporaries, he talked a great deal--almost up to the line that
separated him from youths who chatter. But except for a whimsical manner
of attack, and his consistent frivolity of tone in regard to almost
everything, his conversation was unimportant. What he did possess, to a
rather extraordinary degree, was that which, if given the field, is more
magical among one’s fellows at college than brains, manners, looks, or
money,--that which is described only as “the indescribable something.”
And Billy had the field. S. Timothy’s sent fifteen men to Harvard that
year; he knew them all, of course, and roomed with the very fine one.
They all flocked together at first, until the acquaintance of each
equalled the fourteen others plus fourteen times the friends of every
one of them--which is all one knows, and all one needs to know. The
number--it included the nebular hypothesis of the next year’s Institute
and a few more--kept Billy’s head wagging incessantly in and about
Cambridge. Of all this throng Billy was probably interested least in the
man with whom he roomed. John Rice was a constant and living reminder
of S. Timothy’s; Billy detested S. Timothy’s. He used to tell John
pleasantly, that he not only didn’t like the school or anything he had
learned there, but that it had bored him extremely for six years,
although he hadn’t perhaps realised it at the time.
“Spend next Sunday with you up at School?” he would say, airily, to this
frequent suggestion of John’s. “My dear fellow, how foolishness! My
life-work consists just now in forgetting S. Timothy’s.” Then he would
pull John’s hair, or, perhaps, shy harmless missiles at him from across
the room; for he knew that John was abjectly grateful for any
semi-affectionate demonstrations of this nature, and it amused Billy to
be liked by people,--people for whom he didn’t particularly care. He
didn’t care much for John; he found him solicitous rather than
sympathetic. John was too contemplative--too “set”; he refused to accept
freshman standards and go ahead accordingly. Billy, who managed, before
he was through, to spread himself uncommonly thin over a considerable
area, fancied that he thought his room-mate pitifully prudent. For when
Billy entered college, he proceeded from the very first to expand in the
largeness and fulness of his glorious new life. People said, afterwards,
his development had been so slight and so artificial, in the
stained-glass atmosphere of his imitation English “fitting” school, that
it made up for lost time at a most astonishing rate when the boy became
his own master. He was very much like a supersensitive photograph plate
in the hands of a bungler. If you know what _it_ does on being plunged
into the developing solution, you have an idea of Billy’s Freshman year.
He had been such a nice little boy at S. Timothy’s,--piping liquidly in
an angelic “nighty” at Chapel,--that when the inevitable rumours reached
there, the rector and the masters were deeply pained to learn that still
another butterfly had burst from the godly chrysalis. They assumed lank,
pre-Raphaelite expressions, and murmured, “Oh, Harvard--Harvard!” Billy
himself was not left in ignorance of their distress; there was always
John, of course; and from time to time biblical excerpts, skilfully
tortured into the form of letters, came to him through the mails.
Somebody-or-other’s pamphlet on “The Life Beautiful,” and a horrid
looking little thing in white celluloid covers, entitled “Daily Seeds
for Daily Needs,” were also slipped through his letter-slide one
morning--all of which, in turn, caused Billy to murmur, “Oh, S.
Timothy’s--S. Timothy’s!” His attitude toward S. Timothy’s rapidly
became that of one who places his thumb upon his nose and extends the
fingers of his hand.
“‘_Descensus averni facilis est_,’” John, in one of his more playful
moods, had remarked to him one evening. To which Billy had replied, “Ah,
yes--_E pluribus unum nux vomica facile princeps_, as dear old Virgil
used to say.” He was standing before the mirror in his bedroom adjusting
an evening tie. Four crumpled failures already lay on the floor; from
time to time Billy kicked at them as he moved about, or arrested the
progress of his toilet to inhale deeply from the cigarette that had
already burned several holes in the cover of his dressing-table. John
was sitting on the bed, gravely watching the boy dress for the “Friday
Evening.”
“Do you think you’ll come back to-night?” he asked.
“That’s the delightful part of it all--I don’t know,” answered Billy,
with a shrug. He hadn’t told John where he was going after the
dancing-class, because John, by various pathetic little indirect
remarks, had displayed unmistakable interest in his movements. Billy
withheld the satisfaction it would have given his room-mate to know all
about him, partly because he wished to discourage a growing tendency,
and for the reason that John’s--or any one’s--serious concern always
aroused in him pleasant sensations of silliness, accompanied by a desire
to giggle.
“After all--Boston is a busy little place, isn’t it Johnny?” his smile
was radiant with mystery. “Don’t sit up for me, old man--unless you care
for winter sunrises,” he added, imitating the tones he so often heard in
Sanborn’s billiard place, and laughing at the way they sounded. “By the
way, what are _you_ going to do to-night,--something devilish of
course,--but what?” He wasn’t asking for information; he knew that John
usually spent his evenings quietly at home, or went to see one of the S.
Timothy’s boys, and talk foot-ball or the intricacies of English A.
“I? Oh, I was thinking of going over to Claverly to see
Haydock,”--Haydock was a senior. “He asked us to drop in often, you
know,” said John, so casually that, after the manner of absolutely
honest persons who attempt a subtlety, he “gave himself away.”
“Translated, I suppose that means I haven’t been there very often--that
I haven’t been there at all, in fact?” said Billy, sweetly. He was
thinking to himself that when John aimed at “foxiness,” he usually made
a very successful cow of himself.
“I may have been thinking that,” admitted John, blushing a little; “but
you really haven’t been there, you know, and after the way you didn’t
turn up the night he asked us to dine--”
“Turn up? Turn up?” said Billy, with a giggle at an imagined picture of
himself turning up at the Victoria to dine with Haydock and John. “Why,
man, I was dead to the world--I was a corpse! Turn up? I turned up about
two days later, and didn’t know where I was then. If you had any
gratitude in your withered old gizzard, you’d never stop thanking me for
not turning up.”
“It wasn’t the right thing,” was John’s comment. The appearance just
then of Dilly Bancroft, for whom Billy was waiting, averted the
discussion--the one-sided kind Rice and Ware always had--in which Billy
played matadore and picador, with grace and agility, to John’s brave but
ineffectual bull.
“I’m all ready. Let’s dash along; you’re late, Dilly,” said Billy,
slipping into his coat. He had a keen instinct in the matter of personal
antagonisms. He always felt them long before they were expressed, often
before they were even conceived. John had never said much of anything
about Billy’s friend Bancroft--not even when that young man had seen fit
to break training some months before, on the Freshman Eleven. But in
spite of John’s hearty (suspiciously hearty, thought Billy), “Hello,
Dilford, how are you?” Billy knew. Anything of the kind annoyed
him--especially in his own room, where he felt it his right to have whom
he pleased. He escaped with Bancroft as soon as possible. John struck
him just then as a very tiresome person to be saddled with. The two
left, looking so clean and well-bred and young and altogether
inconsequent in their good clothes, that John could not but smile to
himself and think kindly of them for a moment as they clattered down the
stairs and out into the Yard.