During the next week or ten days Tom worried over Tad Whitelaw. He
wondered whether or not he ought to go to see the boy. If he didn't,
Tad's Harvard career might end suddenly. If he did, he would probably
have humiliation for his pains. He wouldn't mind the humiliation if he
could do any good; but would he?
One thing that he could do was to take himself to task for thinking
about the fellow in one way or the other. It was the fight he put up
from day to day. What was Tad Whitelaw to him? Nothing! And yet he was
much. It was beyond reasoning about.
He was a responsibility, a care. Tom couldn't help caring; he couldn't
help feeling responsible. If Tad went to the bad something in himself
would have gone to the bad. He might argue against this instinct every
minute of the day, yet he couldn't argue it down.
He remembered that Tad went often to see Hildred. He had been on his
way to see her that afternoon before Christmas when they had met on the
esplanade. She might be able to get at him more easily than anybody
else. He rang her up.
Her life as a débutante was so crowded that she found it hard to give
him a half hour. "I'm dead beat," she confessed on the wire. "If it
weren't for mother I'd call it all off." She made him a suggestion.
She was driving that morning to lunch with a girl who lived in one of
the big places beyond Jamaica Pond. If he could be at a certain corner
she could pick him up. He could drive out with her, and come back by
the trolley car. Then they could talk. That this proposal didn't meet
the wishes of some one near the telephone he could judge by the aside
which also passed over the wire. "He wants to see me about Tad, mother.
I can't possibly refuse."
Getting into the car beside her, he had another of those impressions,
now beginning to be rare, of the difference between her way of living
and all that he was used to. Much as he knew about cars, it was the
first time he had actually driven in a rich woman's limousine. The ease
of motion, the cushioned softness, the beaver rug, the blue-book, the
little feminine appointments, the sprig of artificial flowers, subdued
him so that he once more found it hard to believe that she took him on
a footing of equality.
But she did. Her indifference to the details which overpowered him
was part of the wonder of the privilege. Having everything to bestow,
she seemed unaware of bestowing anything. She took for granted their
community of life. She did it simply and without self-consciousness.
Had they been brother and sister she could not have been easier or more
matter-of-course in all that she assumed.
Except for the coming-out ball it was the first time, too, that he had
seen her as what he called "dressed up." Her costume now was a warm
brown velvet of a shade which toned in with the gold-brown of her
eyes and the nut-brown of her complexion. She wore long slender jade
earrings, with a string of jade beads visible beneath her loosened
furs. The furs themselves might have been sables, though he was too
inexperienced to give them a name. Except for the jade, she wore, as
far as he could see, nothing else that was green but a twist of green
velvet forming the edge of her brown velvet toque. Her neat proud head
lent itself to toques as being simple and distinguished.
He himself was self-conscious and shy. He could hardly remember for
what purpose she had been willing to pick him up. A queen to her
subjects is always a queen, a little overwhelming by her presence, no
matter how human her personality. Now that he was before her in his old
Harvard clothes, and the marks of the common world all over him, he
could hardly believe, he could _not_ believe, that she had uttered the
words she had used on Sunday night.
All the ease of manner was on her side. She went straight to the point,
competent, businesslike.
"The thing, it seems to me, that will possibly save Tad is that he's
got to keep himself fit in case war breaks out."
That was her main suggestion. Tad couldn't afford to throw himself away
when his country might, within a few weeks, have urgent need of him.
He couldn't, by over indulgence let himself run down physically, as he
couldn't by neglecting his work put himself mentally at a disadvantage.
He must be fit. She liked the word--fit for his business as a soldier.
"That's just what would appeal to him when nothing else might," Tom
commended. "I wish you'd take it up with him."
"I will; but you must too."
"If I get a chance; but I daresay I shan't get one."
She had a way of asking a leading question without emphasis. Any
emphasis it got it drew from the long oblique regard which gave her the
air of a woman with more experience than was possible to her years.
"Why do you care?"
He had to hedge. "Oh, I don't know. He's just a fellow. I don't want to
see him turn out a rotter."
"If he turned out a rotter would you care more than if it was anybody
else?"
"M-m-m! Perhaps so! I wouldn't swear to it."
"I would. I know you'd care more. And I know why."
He tried to turn this with a laugh. "You can't know more about me than
I do myself."
"Oh, can't I? If I didn't know more about you than you do yourself...."
He decided to come to close quarters. "You mean that you do think I'm
the lost Whitelaw baby?"
"I know you are."
"How do you know?"
"Miss Nash told me so, for one thing."
"And for another?"
"For another, I just know it."
"On what grounds?"
"On no grounds; on all grounds. I don't care anything about the
grounds. A woman doesn't have to have grounds--when she knows."
"Well, what about my grounds when I know to the contrary?"
"But you don't. You only know your history back to a certain point."
"I've only _told_ you my history back to a certain point. I know it
farther back than that."
"How far back?"
"As far back as anyone can go, from his own knowledge."
"Oh, from his own knowledge! But some of the most important things come
before you can have any knowledge. You've got to take them on trust."
"Well, I take them on trust."
"From whom?"
"From my mother."