Luckily the questions raised that day died out like a false alarm. With
no further mention of the Whitelaw baby, he graduated from the Latin
School, passed his exams at Harvard, and spent the summer as second
in command of a boys' camp in a part of New Hampshire remote from the
inn-club and the Ansleys. October found him a freshman. The new life
was beginning.
He had slept his first night in his bedroom in Gore Hall, where his
quarters had been appointed. He had met the three fellow-freshmen with
whom he was to share a sitting room. The sitting room was on the ground
floor in a corner, looking out on the Embankment and the Charles. Never
having had, since he left the Quidmores, a place in which to work
better than the narrow squalid room at the end of a narrow squalid
hall, his joy in this new decency of living was naïve to the point of
childishness. He spent in that retreat, during the first twenty-four
hours, every minute not occupied with duties. Because he was glad
of the task, his colleagues had left to him as much of the job of
arranging the furniture as he would assume.
On the second day of his residence he was on his knees, behind his
desk, pulling at a rug that had been wrinkled up. His zeal could bear
nothing not neat, straight, adjusted. The desk was heavy, the rug
stubborn. When a rap sounded on the door he called out, "Come in!"
looking up above the edge of the desk only when the door had been
opened and closed.
A lady, dignified, a little portly, was stepping into the room, with
the brisk air of one who had a right there. As she had been motoring,
she was wreathed in a dark green veil, which partially hid her
features. Peeling off a gauntlet, she glanced round the room, after a
first glance at Tom.
"I'm sorry to be late, Tad. That stupid Patterson lost his way. He's
a very good driver, but he's no sense of direction. Why, where's the
picture? You said you had had it hung."
Her tone was crisp and staccato. In her breath there was the syncopated
halt which he afterward came to associate with the actress, Mrs. Fiske.
She might be nervous; or she might suffer from the heart.
For the first few seconds he was too agitated to know exactly what to
do. He had been looked at and called Tad again, this time probably by
Tad's mother. He rose to his height of six feet two. The lady started
back.
"Why, what have you been doing to yourself? What are you standing on?
What makes you so tall?"
"I'm afraid there's some mistake, ma'am."
She broke in with a kind of petulance. "Oh, Tad, no nonsense! I'm
tired. I'm not in the mood for it."
Both gauntlets peeled off, she flung them on the desk. With a motion as
rapid as her speech she stepped toward a window and looked out over the
Embankment.
"It's going to be noisy and dusty for you here. The stream of cars is
incessant."
Being now beyond the desk, she caught the fullness of his stature. Her
left hand went up with a startled movement. She gave a little gasp.
"Oh! You frightened me. You're not standing on anything."
"No, ma'am, I...."
"I asked for Mr. Whitelaw's room. They told me to come to number
twenty-eight."
Making her way out, she kept looking back at him in terror. When he
hurried to open the door for her, she waved him away. Everything she
did and said was rapid, staccato, and peremptory.
"You've forgotten your gloves, ma'am."
He reached them with a stretch of his arm. Taking them from him, she
still kept her eyes on his face.
"No! You don't look like him. I thought you did. I was wrong. It's only
the--the eyes--and the eyebrows."
She was gone. He closed the door upon her. Dropping into an armchair
by the window, he stared out on a wide low landscape, with a double
procession of motor cars in the foreground, and a river in the middle
distance.
So this was the woman who had lived through the agony of a stolen
child! He tried to recall what Honey had told him of the tragedy. He
remembered the house which five years earlier Honey had taken him to
see; he remembered the dell with the benches and the lilacs. This
woman's child had been wheeled out there one morning--and had vanished.
She had had to bear being told of the fact. She had gone through the
minutes when the mind couldn't credit it. She had known fear, frenzy,
hope, suspense, disappointment, discouragement, despair, and lassitude.
In self-defense, in sheer inability of the human spirit to endure more
than it has endured, she had thrown round her a hard little shell of
refusal to hear of it again. She resented the reminder. She was pricked
to a frantic excitement by a mere chance resemblance to the image of
what the lost little boy might have become.
A chance resemblance! He underscored the words. It was all there was.
He himself was the son of Theodore and Lucy Whitelaw. At least he
thought her name was Lucy. Not till he had been required to give the
names of his parents for some school record did it occur to him that he
didn't positively know. She had always been "Mudda." He hadn't needed
another name. After she had gone there had been no one to supply him
with the facts he had not learned before. Even the Theodore would have
escaped him had it not been for that last poignant scene, when she
stood before the officer and gave a name--Mrs. Theodore Whitelaw! Why
not? There were more Whitelaws than one. There was no monopoly of the
name in the family that had lost the child.
He didn't often consciously think of her nowadays. The memory was
not merely too painful; it was too destructive of the things he was
trying to cherish. He had impulses rather than ideals, in that impulses
form themselves more spontaneously; and all his impulses were toward
rectitude. It was not a chosen standard; neither was it imposed upon
him from without, unless it was in some vague general direction of the
spirit received while at the Tollivants. He didn't really think of it.
He took it as a matter of course. He couldn't be anything but what he
was, and there was an end of it. But all his attempts to get a working
concept of himself led him back to this beginning, where the fountain
of life was befouled.
So he rarely went back that far. He would go back to the Quidmores,
to the Tollivants, to Mrs. Crewdson; but he stopped there. There he
hung up a great curtain, soft and dim and pitiful, the veil of an
immense tenderness. Rarely, very rarely, did he go behind it. He would
not have done it on this afternoon had not the woman who had just
gone out--dressed, as anyone could see, with the expensive easy-going
roughness which only rich women can afford--neurotic, imperious,
unhappy--had not this woman sent him there. She was a great lady whose
tragic story haunted him; but she turned his mind backward, as it
hardly ever turned, to the foolish and misguided soul who had loved
him. No one since that time, no one whatever in the life he could
remember, had loved him at all, unless it were Honey, and Honey denied
that he did. How could he forsake ...? And then it came to him what it
was that pleaded within him not to be forsaken.
* * * * *
The lecture was over. It was one of the first Tom had attended.
The men, some hundred odd in number, were shuffling their papers,
preparatory to getting up. Seated in an amphitheater, they filled
the first seven or eight semicircles outward from the stage. The
arrangement being alphabetical, Tom, as a _W_, was in the most distant
row.
The lecturer, who was also putting his papers together as they lay on a
table beside him, looked up casually to call out,
"If Mr. Whitelaw is here I should like to speak to him."
Tom shot from his seat and stood up. The man on his left did the same.
Occupied with taking notes on the little table attached to the right
arm--the only arm--of his chair, Tom had not turned to the left at all.
He was surprised now at the ripple of laughter that ran among the men
beginning to get up from their seats or to file out into the corridor.
The professor smiled too.
"You're brothers?"
Tom looked at his neighbor; his neighbor looked at Tom. Except for the
difference in height the resemblance was startling or amusing, as you
chose to take it. To the men going by it was amusing.
It was the neighbor, however, who called out, in a shocked voice: "Oh,
no, no! No connection."
"Then it's to Mr. Theodore Whitelaw that I wish to speak."
Mr. Theodore Whitelaw made his way toward the platform, taking no
further notice of Tom.
For this lack of the friendly freemasonry general among young men,
general among freshmen especially, Tom thought he saw a reason. The
outward appearance which enabled him to "place" Tad would enable Tad
to "place" him. On the one there was the stamp of wealth; on the other
there must be that of poverty. He might have met Tad Whitelaw anywhere
in the world, and he would have known him at a glance as a fellow
nursed on money since he first lay in a cradle. It wasn't merely a
matter of dress, though dress counted for something. It was a matter
of the personality. It was in the eyes, in the skin, in the look, in
the carriage, in the voice. It was not in refinement, or cultivation,
or cleverness, or use of opportunity; it was in something subtler
than these, a cast of mind, a habit of thought, an acceptance, a
self-confidence, which seeped through every outlet of expression. Tad
Whitelaw embodied wealth, position, the easy use of whatever was best
in whatever was material. You couldn't help seeing it.
On the other hand, he, Tom Whitelaw, probably bore the other kind
of stamp. He had not thought of that before. In as far as he had
thought of it, it was to suppose that the stamp could be rubbed off,
or covered up. Clothes would do something toward that, and in clothes
he had been extravagant. He had come to Harvard with two new suits,
made to his order by the Jew tailor next door to Mrs. Danker's. But in
contrast with the young New Yorker his extravagance had been futile.
He found for himself the most opprobrious word in all the American
language--cheap.
Very well! He probably couldn't help looking cheap. But if cheap he
would be big. He wouldn't resent. He would keep his mouth shut and
live. Things would right themselves by and by.
They righted themselves soon. The three men with whom he shared the
sitting room, having passed him as "a good scout," admitted him to full
and easy comradeship. In the common-room, in the classroom, he held
his own, and made a few friends. Guy Ansley, urged in part by a real
liking, and in part by the glory of having this big handsome fellow in
tow, was generous of recognition. He was standing one day with a group
of his peers from Doolittle and Pray's when Tom chanced to pass at a
distance. Guy called out to him.
"Hello, you old sinner! Where you been this ever so long?" With a word
to his friends, he puffed after Tom, and dragged him toward the group.
"This is the guy they call the Whitelaw Baby. See how much he looks
like Tad?"
"Tad'll give you Whitelaw Baby," came from one of the group. "Hates the
name of it. Don't blame him, do you, when he's heard everyone gassing
about the kid all through his life?"
But that he was going in Harvard by this nickname disturbed Tom not
a little. Considering the legend in the Whitelaw family, and the
resemblance between himself and Tad, it was natural enough. But should
Tad hear of it....
With Tad he had no acquaintance. As the weeks passed by he came to
understand that with certain freshmen acquaintance would be difficult.
They themselves didn't want it. It was a discovery to Tom that it
didn't follow that you knew a man, or that a man knew you, because you
had been introduced to him. Guy Ansley had introduced him that day to
the little group from Doolittle and Pray's; but when he ran into them
again none of them remembered him.
So Tad Whitelaw did not remember him after having met him accidentally
at Guy's. The meeting had been casual, hurried, but it was a meeting.
The two had been named to each other. Each had made an inarticulate
grunt. But when later that same afternoon they passed in a corridor Tad
went by as if he had never seen him.
He continued to live and keep his mouth shut. If he was hurt there was
nothing to be gained by saying so. Then an incident occurred which
threw them together in a manner which couldn't be ignored inwardly,
even if outward conditions remained the same.
Little by little the Harvard student, following the general sobering
down which makes it harder for people in the twentieth century to
laugh than it was to those who lived fifty years ago, was becoming
less frolicsome. Pranks were still played, especially by freshmen, but
neither so many nor so wild. The humor had gone out of them.
But in every large company of young men there are a few whose high
spirits carry them away. Where they have money to spend and no cares as
to the future on their minds, the new sense of freedom naturally runs
to roistering. In passing Tad Whitelaw's rooms, which were also in Gore
Hall, Tom often heard the banging of the piano, and those shouts of
song and laughter which are likely to disturb the proctor. Guy, who was
often the one at the piano, now and then gave him a report of a party,
telling him who was at it, and what they had had to drink.
In the course of the winter his relations with Guy took on a somewhat
different tinge. In Guy's circle, commonly called a gang or a bunch,
he was Guy's eccentricity. The Doolittle and Pray spirit allowed of an
eccentricity, if it wasn't paraded too much. Guy knew, too, that it
helped to make him popular, which was not an easy task, to be known as
loyal to a boyhood's chum, when he might be expected to desert him.
But behind this patronage the fat boy found in Tom what he had always
found, a source of strength. Not much more than at school did he escape
at Harvard his destiny as a butt.
"Same old spiel, damn it," he lamented to Tom, "just because I'm fat.
What difference does that make, when you're a sport all right? Doesn't
keep me from going with the gang, not any more than Tad Whitelaw's big
eyebrows, or Spit Castle's long nose."
On occasions when he was left out of "good things" which he would
gladly have been in he made Tom come round to his room in the evening
for confidence and comfort. Tom never made game of him. There was no
one else to whom he could turn with the certainty of being understood.
Having an apartment to himself, he could be free in his complaints
without fear of interruption.
It was late at night. The two young men had been "yarning," as they
called it, and smoking for the past two hours. Tom was getting up to
go back to his room, when a sound of running along the corridor caught
their attention.
"What in blazes is that?"
By the time the footsteps reached Guy's door smothered explosions of
laughter could be heard outside. With a first preliminary pound on the
panels the door was flung open, Spit Castle and Tad Whitelaw hurling
themselves in. Though they would have passed as sober, some of their
excess of merriment might have been due to a few drinks.
Tad carried a big iron door-key which he threw with a rattle on the
table. His hat had been knocked to the back of his head; his necktie
was an inch off-center; his person in general disordered by flight.
Spit Castle, a weedy youth with a nose like a tapir's, was in much the
same state. Neither could tell what the joke was, because the joke
choked them. Guy, flattered that they should come first of all to him,
stood in the middle of the floor, grinning expectantly. Tom, quietly
smoking, kept in the background, sitting on the arm of the chair from
which he had just been getting up. As each of the newcomers tried to
tell the tale he was broken in on by the other.
"Came out from town by subway...."
"Walking through Brattle Square...."
"Not so much as a damn cat about...."
"Saw little old johnny come abreast of little old bootstore...."
"Took out a key--opened the door--went into the shop in the dark--left
the key in the keyhole to lock up when he comes outside again--just in
for something he'd forgot."
"And damned if Tad didn't turn the key--quick as that--and lock the old
beggar in."
"Last we heard of him he was poundin' and squealin' to beat all blazes."
Yellin', 'Pull-_ice_!--pull-_ice_!'--whacking his leg, Spit gave an
imitation of the prisoner--"and he's in there yet."
To Guy the situation was as droll as it was to his two friends. An old
fellow trapped in his own shop! He was a Dago, Spit thought, which made
the situation funnier. They laughed till, wearied with laughter, they
threw themselves into armchairs, and lit their cigarettes.
Tom, who had laughed a little not at their joke but at them, felt
obliged, in his own phrase, to butt in. He waited till a few puffs of
tobacco had soothed them.
"Say, boys, don't you think the fun's gone far enough?"
The two guests turned and stared as if he had been a talking piece of
furniture. Tad took his cigarette from his lips.
"What the hell business is it of yours?"
Tom kept his seat on the arm of the chair, speaking peaceably. "I
suppose it isn't my business--except for the old man."
"What have you got to do with him? Is he your father?"
"He's probably somebody's father, and somebody's husband. You can't
leave him there all night."