the evening. It was always with a feeling of satisfaction that one went
into Haydock’s study. Haydock himself had none of the disconcerting
habits of most people. He never came to the door with an open book in
one hand and a green shade over his eyes, protesting, with a worried
expression, that you hadn’t stopped his work and spoiled his evening
generally. He never shook you by the hand and seemed unnecessarily glad
to see you. He never began the conversation by asking, after a stupid
pause, the stupider question, “Well, how are you getting along?” It was
impossible to feel that your arrival interrupted him in the least, as
his door was usually unlatched, and he rarely seemed to be engaged in
anything more urgent than filling his pipe, putting a fresh log on the
fire, or perhaps strolling about looking at things,--occupations
suggesting somehow, that Haydock had been trying to kill time until you
should drop in. To-night he was improving the angle at which his various
pictures hung.
“Do you suppose there ever was anything more maddening than a really
conscientious ‘goody’?” he said, as John came in,--“the kind who has a
passion for dusting, a positive lust for it? Just look at these
pictures!” He straightened the photograph of a Florentine saint, whose
asceticism, at a rakish deflection from the perpendicular, had ceased to
impress.
“I don’t think we’re bothered very much by conscientious ‘goodies’ over
in Matthews,” answered John; “one of them broke Billy’s pipe this
morning.”
“Has William taken up smoking?” laughed Haydock.
“Well, rather.”
“Surprising, isn’t it,” mused the other. He really wasn’t surprised a
bit. He and Billy had been born and brought up next door to each other;
he knew the type and the temperament. He also was aware that Billy was
an enthusiastic member of the Polo Club.
Haydock had tried to see something of the child during his first month
or two in college.
“An older boy can do so much for a younger one, Philip,” Mrs. Ware had
said to him, with her hazy maternal trustfulness, just before college
opened. “William is fond of you, I know; and it’s a great comfort to
feel that you will be there, and that he’s going to room with John.” If
the good woman derived tranquillity of mind from the fact that her son
and Haydock chanced to inhabit the same town, Haydock did not consider
it worth while to explain that the coincidence, regarded in the light of
its moral significance, was unimportant. He had called on Billy and John
as soon as they were settled; but Billy had never returned the
compliment, although John did frequently. Once he had asked the
room-mates to dinner; Billy, he learned later, had been too drunk that
evening to recall the engagement for the moment. Since then, the helpful
influence, in the belief of which Mrs. Ware existed placidly, had
perforce exerted itself across a theatre, or from the platform of a
passing electric car.
“Oh, I don’t mind his smoking,” said John, with the faintest emphasis on
the last word.
“No?” Haydock kept his back turned, and continued to touch delicately,
here and there, the corners of his picture frames. As a matter of fact,
he made some of them rather more crooked than they were at first. But he
felt that if he didn’t deter John by turning suddenly and giving him all
attention, he would hear the whole story; John very evidently had
brought one with him.
“Of course, I don’t smoke, myself,” John went on slowly; “it’s just
happened that way, I suppose. But I don’t mind it in Billy. You can
always stop if it begins to hurt you. I think I like to see him do it,”
he ended, with unusual tolerance.
“Yes,” agreed Haydock, deliberately, “if it hurts you, you can always
stop smoking.” He, too, emphasised the last word softly, in a way that
left the tale still untold. Haydock was something of an artist in
assisting confidences where the spirit was willing and the vocabulary
weak.
“Ware is really a bully chap; he was a perfect corker at school.” John’s
remark was a circuitous paraphrase of, “Isn’t it too bad!”
“He certainly is most attractive; I’ve rarely known anybody who was more
so,” Haydock assented, with an enthusiasm he genuinely felt; “but I
don’t see much of him now.” His regret, too, was real.
“That’s it! that’s just it!” John burst out so hotly that the senior,
who was filling his pipe at the table, almost looked up in ill-timed
surprise. “Nobody sees anything of him any more; nobody who ought to,
like you.”
“And you,” added Haydock, to himself. The situation was perennial; he
divined it perfectly.
“Nobody but that damned Dilford Bancroft and that gang,” continued
John. “Billy could know any one in the class that’s worth knowing; he
really does know every one. But you understand what I mean, they’re not
his friends; he doesn’t go to their rooms, and they don’t come to ours.
It’s always Bancroft and just a few sports like that.”
“Cheap sports?” Haydock questioned. He knew no more of Bancroft than
that he was a decorative young person whose somewhat liberal views on
the subject of training for a foot-ball eleven had stirred a ripple of
indignation throughout the college in the autumn, and provoked some
caustic reflections in the editorial columns of the “Harvard Crimson.”
“No, I don’t suppose they’re ‘cheap’ sports,” admitted the honest
John,--“not the way you mean.”
“Expensive sports, then?”
“Well, if you mean that they seem to know how to do the things that
oughtn’t to be done at all, the way they ought to be done, if you do
them--” began John, a trifle obscurely.
“Yes, that’s precisely what I mean.”
“Then they are ‘expensive’ sports, I suppose.”
“And Billy has become absorbed by them?”
“He doesn’t care to see any one else, as far as I know.”
“Perhaps it’s merely a passing phase.”
“I can’t see that that cuts any particular ice, if he is going to be
ruined before it passes,” John objected.
“But he won’t be,” put in Haydock, confidently.
“What can possibly save him?” John was terribly in earnest. “His best
friends are loafers and snobs; they never learn anything, and they all
drink too much. All they want is a good time,--the wrong kind of a good
time. Who is going to make him take a brace? I’ve tried, and I can’t;
the college doesn’t seem to give a--”
“Hold on--hold on--hold on,” broke in Haydock; “give the college a show.
What do you expect the college to do anyhow? Supply wet-nurses for all
the silly little boys who make themselves sick on cocktails at the Adams
House?”
“It could do something.”
“Yes, and doesn’t it,--the very finest thing in the world! Doesn’t it
allow all sorts of men to come here, and give them the chance of their
lives to learn about everybody and everything that was ever good or
great or worth learning about? Isn’t it willing to share the very best
of what it has,--and it has everything,--its traditions and its
knowledge and its beauty? Doesn’t it want to make the fellows here part
of it all, if they only have the guts to keep their heads up, and follow
along the road it has built for them? Is there any place else where you
can live for four years--the four important ones--and know that the
standard of everything held up to you can’t change, like the trivial
little standards of other places, that the aim won’t swerve, no matter
what happens, and that they are the highest, the best? Isn’t that doing
something--everything?”
Haydock was occasionally enthusiastic in a calm, thoughtful sort of way.
“I know what you mean--I’ve thought about it myself; but Billy is going
to hell. What about Billy?” John insisted.
“Oh, as for that--to pass from the sublime to Billy--he simply won’t;
that is to say, he won’t here, at Harvard.”
There was a gleam of hope in John’s eyes.
“Why?” he asked.
“Because he’ll get kicked out,” said Haydock.
“Fire Billy?” John looked terrified.
“That’s what they’ll do. And why not?” the senior went on heartlessly.
“From what you say, he doesn’t seem to be quite ready for the place, as
yet; so put him out.”
“But he isn’t bad, really bad.”
“No, certainly not; merely a damn fool; when he gets over being one, let
him come back. The college understands that sort of thing much better
than you or I do. It’s not only highly intelligent, but extremely
benevolent. I’m sorry about Billy.”
“Won’t you talk to him--warn him in some way; he’ll listen to you,” said
John, earnestly.
“I should be charmed,” answered the other, although he appreciated the
delicacy of the situation, and felt that his words would fall on deaf
ears.
It was later than John’s accustomed hour for going to bed, when he left
Haydock’s room that night. This was his only reason for hurrying over
to Matthews, as he did, when he finally said good-night to the senior.
At the end of the little corridor near John’s door a man who looked like
a messenger of some kind stood peering out of the window at the lights
in the Square. He must have been standing there a long time,--long
enough to become convinced that the continual sound of footsteps in the
entry did not necessarily announce the person for whom he was
waiting,--for he turned to John only when he heard the jingle of his
keys.
“Rice?” he drawled, “J. D. Rice?” He gave John a note, and sauntered
back to the window. The communication was from Billy. John read it there
in the corridor under the gas jet:--
DEAR JOHNNY,--Please, as quickly as possible, procure all the money
you can lay your hands on--two hundred dollars at the very
least--and come bail me out. I have been arrested and compelled to
languish among hostile strangers. The man with this note will guide
you to the scene of my incarceration. Please hurry, because I wish
to go home.
BILLY.
P. S. For Heaven’s sake get a move on.
For a moment this document conveyed but little to John. He was obliged
to read it a second time, and even then he stared appealingly at the
messenger, who had turned and was eyeing him with feeble interest.
“They got pinched, didn’t they?” said the man, sadly.
“But what did he do? What’s happened?” John demanded. He was dazed;
nothing he had ever seen or done in his life had prepared him for this.
“Why, they got run in,” explained the man.
“Here--you wait for me here.” The only thing John could think of just
then was Haydock. “Or no--come into my room;” he unlocked the door and
turned up the gas. “Be sure to wait,” he commanded, as he rushed out.
Claverly was locked for the night; John remembered this after rattling
in vain at the three doors. Then he called under Haydock’s window. The
senior answered from the square of yellow light above. He was on the
point of going out anyhow, he said, and would join John below.
“Billy’s arrested! he’s in jail! What’ll I do?” John gasped
breathlessly. He thrust the note at Haydock. “Read it.”
Haydock struck a match in the shelter of a bay window and read.
“Why, the only thing to do is to bail him out,” he laughed. “It’s
horrid, not to say disgusting, to have to stay all night in a jail. How
much money have you?”
“I don’t know, five dollars, I think,” answered John. The darkness
covered his astonishment at Haydock’s calmness under the circumstances.
“I have thirty or forty myself, and I’ll evolve the rest somewhere.”
“Do you think you can?” To John the idea was incredible.
“Oh, heavens yes! That’s the trouble with Cambridge; you can always
borrow any amount at any hour. It makes every place else seem sordid and
worldly. Is the ‘guide’ in your room? I’ll meet you there in twenty
minutes.” He strolled away whistling. John hurried back to Matthews
faster than before.
For ever so long that night was a hideous memory to Billy’s room-mate.
He and Haydock and the man--a sad, silent person whom Haydock
courteously tried to engage in conversation from time to time--spent
hours in chilly suburban street-cars and bleak waiting stations. Haydock
ignored the topic that to John was of such overwhelming and painful
interest; it was as if he had disposed of the entire subject earlier in
the evening when he had uttered his prophecy: “Because he’ll get kicked
out.” Grey January dawn streaked the sky when the trio, after finding
Billy and Dilford Bancroft chatting pleasantly with the watchmen in the
police station, managed to rout up the gentleman whose function it
seemed to be to determine the amount of a criminal’s bail,--he lived
several miles away,--get a cab, and jog back to Cambridge. Billy talked
most of the way, in spite of the silence with which John received his
reflections, and Haydock’s polite but unenthusiastic attention. Dilford
covered his head with the lap-robe at intervals, and had hysterics; but
no one noticed him at all, except Billy, who occasionally joined him in
these complex emotions.
“It was the surprise--the awful surprise of it that killed me dead,”
Billy would giggle. “I was on the box-seat driving, you
know,--lickety-split, to beat the band, with Harry Hollis beside me,--he
fell off when we went over the car tracks. I’d like to know if he was
hurt; anyhow, the car didn’t run over him, because I looked back and it
never stopped. Had Jimmy fallen out then?” he appealed to Dilford, whose
reply was smothered at its birth. “Then we raced the car until the
horses--oh, they were corkers!--began to run away. I couldn’t hold them.
I tried, upon my soul, I tried! but I was laughing so that my wrists
were all sort of tickly on the inside,--you know how they do,--and I
couldn’t close my fingers very tight over the reins; they just flapped
around in the breeze any old way. So when the policeman ran out and
yelled and waved, what on earth could I do? What _could_ I do? We simply
crashed past him like a chariot race. I looked back again and couldn’t
even see the creature--only Dilly on the floor, white as a sheet,
holding on with everything he had. Oh, it was terrible! perfectly
terrible! I was glad we’d ditched the policeman, though; only we didn’t!
That was the surprise. My dear, _what_ do you suppose that man--that
devil--did? He telephoned--_telephoned_--to the next police station, and
when we got there they received us. Policemen? There were platoons of
them,--as far as the eye could reach in every direction. And they had
fish-nets and lassoes and the most fearful-looking clubs; and one of the
horses fell down, and everybody sat on the poor thing’s head,--people
always rush and do that when a horse falls down. I wonder why?”
No one ventured a theory, and William continued:--
“Well, they took us inside, and asked the most intimate impertinent kind
of questions. I gave my own name, but Dilly didn’t; he had one all ready
that went with the initials on his underclothes, so it wouldn’t be a
give-away even if they had the nerve to go too far. What was it, Dilly?
I’ve forgotten. He asked me what my occupation was, and I didn’t exactly
like to tell him I was a student.”
“Of course not,” assented Haydock, drily.
“So I merely said ‘_rentier_.’”
Haydock groaned softly in his corner.
“He just looked at me,--the great big thing! I don’t think he’d ever
been abroad. Oh, and before I forget it, we have to be in court at nine
o’clock. Now don’t go and oversleep yourself, John, the way you do
sometimes; because I must get up whether I want to or not, I suppose.
Where was I? Oh, yes; after he’d asked all the questions he could think
of, I wrote the note, and we waited a deuce of a while. But it wasn’t so
bad after that, after the ice was broken. Then you both came--I was so
relieved--and here we are ‘just off the yacht!’”
Billy thought it hardly worth while to go to bed when the cab at length
reached the Square. He would have preferred to utilise the short time
that remained before nine o’clock in talking over his little jaunt with
Dilford. He wanted to “shake” John and Haydock, and spend a pleasant
hour or two at Mr. Vosler’s hotel in town, before meeting his judge. But
the plan wasn’t one that he could innocently suggest; and as the senior
stayed with them until they said good-night to him at the entry of
Matthews, he couldn’t very well leave John without a word, as he would
have done, had they been alone. Billy tumbled into bed as soon as he got
upstairs, and giggled himself to sleep, after calling into John’s
room,--
“You did see the sunrise, didn’t you, old man?”
John lay awake until it was time to rouse Billy for his trial. At nine
that morning the two criminals rolled up to the court-room, smoking
cigarettes on the back seat of a victoria. They pleaded guilty to
something,--neither of them quite knew what,--listened with downcast
eyes to a bit of fatherly sarcasm, and drove away again--forty dollars
poorer than when they arrived. That was in January.
The midyear examinations have an unpleasant habit of disturbing the even
academic tenor early in February, as their name suggests. They announce
themselves, in various prominent places, at first, like clouds no bigger
than a man’s hand. The wary and the wise repair to their caves, and
remain there, off and on, for days and days and days. When they finally
emerge, care-worn but preserved after the deluge, they find that many
loved ones are missing. John was among the first to retire to high and
inaccessible altitudes. He pinned the “Crimson’s” supplementary schedule
of examinations and dates to his door. After deliberating long as to
where a similar reminder would most often meet the eyes of his
room-mate, he carefully marked the impending tortures with ominous
crosses and tacked the list to the frame of Billy’s mirror. He might
with just as much effect--to say nothing of the economy of anguish--have
thrown the thing into the fire.
“What the devil does this fly-paper think it’s doing on my
looking-glass?” Billy had remarked on finding the evidence of John’s
thoughtfulness. “Do you realise that you have utterly obliterated Sarah
Bernhardt and Della Fox? I think you must be crazy.” He ripped off the
paper, and let it flutter to the floor. John’s patience was
inexhaustible, but his ingenuity had well defined limits; he was aware,
with something like panic, that he had reached them. For weeks, he had
exercised what art he had at command, in trying to seduce Billy into
opening a book. He had learned that a declaration of his personal ideas
in regard to the examinations--or any work he undertook--was worse than
ineffectual as far as his room-mate went. It not only failed to quicken
in Billy the sense--prevalent at the midyears--of approaching
catastrophe, but drove him away to somebody else’s room, or perhaps to
town. So, much to his own distaste, John had essayed the rôle of the
serio-comic. He made a pretence--with reservations--of adopting Billy’s
point of view; the reservations were meant to bring about the desired
end. He would chat with Billy of the more serious aspects of
college--the courses and instructors and examinations--in an attempt at
something like the same breezy tone in which the boy himself touched on
these subjects. When Billy, for instance, would sit up in bed in the
morning and yawn and shrug and announce that he simply couldn’t go all
the way over to Sever Hall to sit through Professor So-and-so’s
lecture--that the man was ninety-five years old if he was a day, and
slobbered, John would laugh and say,--
“Yes, isn’t he deadly? I hardly ever listen to him. Lots of people live
too long. But I suppose we must go and endure it; we’re in the course,
and we’ll have to worry through it somehow.”
At first Billy was rather shocked. The abrupt change of manner was so
hopelessly out of character; he wouldn’t have been more astounded had he
heard unseemly levity issuing from the pulpit at S. Timothy’s. But he
divined almost at once--who wouldn’t have?--that John’s responsibility
for other people’s affairs, though exhibited in a fashion positively
weird, did not diminish; and Billy frequented 86 Matthews less than
ever. John knew that he himself didn’t possess the qualities that make a
man an inspiration, but he had been brought up at home and at school to
believe that he was something of an influence; that he was “just the
sort of man a fellow like Billy needs.” Apart from the genuine sorrow he
would feel at what the official college gracefully terms the
“separation” of Billy from the University, it was disconcerting to John
to find out that as a kindly light he had proved uncommonly dim. In
despair and disappointment, he impressed Haydock into the labour of
salvation.
Haydock was very amiable about the whole affair. He had, whenever he was
with Billy, the half amused affection an older fellow often feels for
anything so young and pretty and inconsequent. He liked the boy’s mother
too, although the lady’s guilelessness had always been a bar to
conversation of other than a purely theoretical value. So, in response
to John’s eleventh-hour prayers, he did what he could in spite of more
immediate interests. He picked his way, one evening, through the
darkness and the mud, and among the disabled butcher-waggons, by the
black alley that leads to the Polo Club,--once upon a time he too had
belonged to that genial institution,--and beguiled Billy and Dilford
Bancroft to his room. He gave them beer, and things to smoke, and then
wondered how, with two such elusive, mercurial creatures flitting about,
he could ever begin to “talk shop.” Strangely enough Billy himself
provided the opportunity.
“Play something, Dilly,” he said, opening Haydock’s piano. Haydock
glanced at the clock on the mantelpiece, but it was not yet nine; the
proctor couldn’t object, no matter how excruciating Dilly’s performance
might be.
“Dilly, you know, can bang the box in a way that would make you throw
stones at your grandmother,” explained Billy.
“I’m extremely fond of my grandmother,” suggested Haydock.
“What do you want?” asked Dilly, seating himself.
“What do you know?”
“Oh, any old thing.”
Haydock was on the point of discreetly asking for a Sousa march, when
Dilford plunged abruptly into the middle of a sonata, and played it
through with astonishing brilliancy.
“I do play well, don’t I?” he admitted, when he had finished. “It always
surprises me; just think what I could do if I really studied--hard, I
mean,” he added lightly.
“Good heavens! man,” exclaimed Haydock, “aren’t you going to take
highest honours in music? Why, you can do anything!” Haydock considered
his own little thumpings important only in so far as they enabled him
to understand a talent like Bancroft’s.
“Oh, I don’t know,” answered Dilford, with indifference. “My father
wants me to go to work; I don’t suppose I’ll be here long.”
“Won’t you, really? I knew that Billy wasn’t going to stay; but I had an
idea you would.” Haydock alluded to Billy’s probable departure with the
emotion he would have displayed had he been predicting a change in the
weather.
Billy pricked up his ears and his eyebrows at once. “What makes you say
that?” he demanded quickly. Even Dilford dropped his customary
listlessness, and looked interested.
“Why--I thought it was more or less settled.” The senior turned from one
to the other in slow surprise, “If I’ve said anything I ought not to
have--given things away, I mean--I’m awfully sorry. But perhaps they
were mistaken.” Billy’s face, across which flitted a shade of anxiety,
told him that he was perfectly safe in making a “bluff” at changing the
subject.
“No, no!” Billy jerked out, impatiently; “go on! who are you talking
about? You’ve heard something important,” something that didn’t emanate
from John, he was thinking. “What did they say? I insist on knowing.”
“It really wasn’t much; merely that one or two of the instructors--I
know some of the younger ones rather well--seemed to think that you
wouldn’t--that in fact you couldn’t be with us after the midyears.
That’s all. I thought you knew.”
“You’re bitched all right, all right,” laughed Bancroft.
“They said that, did they?” Billy let fall these words portentously; it
was as if he were on the point of framing a great resolution.
“That’s precisely what they said.”
“Well, then--by heaven! I’ll fool them.” He really meant it.
“Oh, I wish you would! It would be easy after all. There’s time yet.
I’ll help you with your English--both courses--and your Latin. You’re
all right in French, of course, and the History won’t be so terrible. Is
it a go?” Haydock held out his hand.
“I’ll fool them,” repeated Billy, solemnly. He gravely let his long,
brown fingers rest in Haydock’s palm. And Haydock had one of those
moments of quiet exultation that are the perquisites of the intelligent.
The next morning Billy and Dilly disappeared from Cambridge, and were
neither seen nor heard of for five days. On the afternoon of the fourth
day John, looking positively thin, turned up in Haydock’s room.
“Get up a search party and explore darkest Boston,” advised the senior,
drumming on the desk with his pencil.
“Oh, I did!” John’s tone was without hope. “Harry Hollis and Jimmy
Fenton took me all over--to the most awful hotels and places. They
seemed to know Billy at all of them; but he wasn’t there. I never had
such a night. I don’t know what to do.”