"A puffic' fibbous!" the monthly nurse had announced triumphantly, when
she had presented Mrs. Opdyke's first-born son to his mother for her
inspection.
The phrase, and the smile which invariably accompanied it, were the
main stock in trade of the monthly nurse. Upon these two items, she had
based her popularity which now had endured for more than a dozen years
of escorting over the threshold of this world the sons and daughters of
"first families only," as her professional card insisted. To be sure,
the constant employment of the phrase had robbed it of all critical
significance. Indeed, it is very doubtful whether, even at the start of
her career, the nurse had ever linked it in her mind with the great god
Apollo. From some one of her predecessors, she had picked it up and
found that it fitted well upon her tongue. Later, the "fibbouses"
abounded more and more plenteously, as her clientage increased, and she
applied the term indiscriminately, regardless whether the recipient
were an Apollo, or a mere Diana.
However, from the start, Reed Opdyke certainly deserved the phrase.
Long generations of clean, high-minded living cannot fail to produce an
effect upon their offspring. Reed's father had branched off from a line
of lawyers to hold the chair of chemistry in one of the great colleges
for girls. Reed's mother was of Pilgrim stock, well-nigh untainted by
the blood of later, lesser arrivals on the Massachusetts shore. On
either side of the house, it had been a matter of simple creed to hold
one's body and one's mind equally aloof from possibilities of disease.
Reed Opdyke's make-up showed the value of this creed.
Not that he thought very much about it, however. He accepted as a
matter of course his sanity, very much as he accepted most other things
that came in his way. His loosely curled fists within his pockets, his
head erect and his lips smiling, he went striding along through life,
taking the best of it as his natural right, and letting the rest of it
alone. From kindergarten into school and from school into college, the
old, old road trodden by all his ancestors, he journeyed quite as a
matter of course. In fact, it never struck him that any fellow could do
otherwise; never, that is, until he met Scott Brenton.
For Scott, in time, had also come to college. His mother had insisted
upon that; had worked for it that it might in time be possible; had
scrimped and toiled and saved, the while she had been training her only
child to a strict economy which, however galling, he must accept as
well worth the while for the sake of all that it was going to put
within his grasp. Accordingly, Scott had been sent to school throughout
the termtimes, sent well or ill, in good days and in bad. He had been
goaded into an ambition which held him at the top of his small classes
in the village school. When the top of the top class was reached, and
college was still inaccessible, Mrs. Brenton had stiffened her sinews
for yet greater toil and scrimping, and had sent her son up to Andover
where the Wheeler name was a tradition, where the knowledge of Scott's
ancestry would help him to find the employment that he needed. Scott's
education was to be by no means easy of achievement. To gain his school
diploma and his later degrees at college, he too must work, not alone
at books, but, in his off-hours, at any task that offered.
And Scott did work, too. Around him, other boys were going in for
football, making records on the track team, getting occasional leaves
to run in to Boston for an odd half-holiday. Then they came back,
hilarious and triumphant, to discuss their experience at mealtimes,
boasting, chaffing, wrangling merrily in the intimacy known to boyhood,
the world over. They never thought to pay any especial attention to the
other boy who brought them things to eat, a boy with luminous gray eyes
and clothes which were in sore need of pressing. He was just "that
waiter chap" and not a human being like themselves. They talked about
their secret plans before him, with no more thought of his personality
than as if he had been a concrete post. And, after listening to their
chatter throughout a protracted mealtime, after seeing, as he could not
fail to do, how he counted to them for absolutely nothing at all, Scott
Brenton had his hours when he too doubted the fact of his own humanity.
An active brain and an almost automatic body trained to supple service:
these by themselves, he realized, do not go far towards making a human
thing of life. Contacts are necessary for that, not total isolation;
and contact was the one thing denied him. Now and then he had his hours
of wishing that those other boys, boys whose talk was full of reference
to unfamiliar ways of life: of wishing that they would treat him a
little bit unkindly. Anything would be better than this absolute
ignoring of his individuality.
In his intervals of waiting on the table, he washed up the dishes. His
meals he took, standing by the sink, a plate on the shelf before him,
while he washed and chewed simultaneously. There were other tasks
besides, tasks all of them more or less menial, all of them adding to
the general drain upon his nerves and body. The rest of the time, his
studies kept him busy. Indeed, it was no small wonder that he was able
to maintain a decent footing in his class, so fagged out and weary was
he by the time he had a moment's leisure to prepare his next-day's
lessons. But prepare them he did, and well, although his eyes grew
heavy over the task and ached with the strain of working by the one dim
light with which his shabby garret room was equipped. It was a single
room, unhappily. Even there, all contact was denied him. Saint Simon,
sitting alone upon his pillar and gazing down upon his fellow men, was
no more solitary than was Scott Brenton. Moreover, Saint Simon had the
final consolation of being quite aware that he was looking down, a
consolation which, to Scott Brenton, was permanently refused.
And then, Andover done, there came college, not one of the small
colleges where individual idiosyncrasies count so much in making up the
estimate of the student's character; but a great university, so great
that it can stop to measure no man by any one trait or any several
traits, so busy that it must grasp him in the round, or not at all.
There lay the fact of Scott Brenton's ultimate salvation. He would have
been downed completely, judged by the finical standards of the little
college.
It was in his choice of college that, for the first time in his life,
Scott Brenton's will had become dominant. His mother would fain have
had it otherwise. The Wheelers, one and all, had been little-college
men. The tradition was in their blood, and she had inherited it to the
full: the strange belief that the smaller college offers less
temptation to go astray; the equally strange belief that the closer
contact with a few professors can quite atone for the lack of friction
against a great crowd of fellow students, alien to one another in
habits of mind and body, yet all of them, swiftly or sluggishly as may
be, moving towards the selfsame goal. It had seemed to Mrs. Brenton
something bordering on the blasphemous when Scott had endeavoured to
put this latter phase of the question before her. Realizing his own
futility upon that score, he finally had changed his tactics and
assured her that, as far as money-earning work went, there were ten
chances in the great college to one in the small.
And Scott was right, albeit his argument was wholly superficial. The
truth of the matter was that his Andover experience had left him sore
and downhearted; that he knew, in the bottom of his boyish soul, that
he must plunge beyond his depth and swim into a wider sea, or else go
down entirely, pushed out of sight beneath the overlapping circles of
the little cliques, all too self-centred to admit of any common focus.
Mrs. Brenton did not care at all about any common focus. The phrase
"college spirit" sounded intemperate, and she would have been the last
person in the world to agree to the belief that Scott could gain any
education from contact with boys of his own age. To her mind, one fusty
old professor out-valued one hundred eager undergraduates, as source of
inspiration to the young. Education, to her mind, lay in the desk-end
of the classroom; it was unthinkable to her that Scott had lost the
best of Andover, by reason of his solitary life there. As for college,
the students, all but Scott, were bound to be full of the wiles of the
devil. Scott's safety lay in his books, and in his keeping too busy in
his off-hours to have time to get into mischief.
Moreover, the purely practical end of the keeping busy was beginning to
loom large upon Mrs. Brenton's horizon. More and more she was coming to
realize that it is no small undertaking for any widow with an almost
imperceptible income to put a son through college. Valiantly she toiled
and scrimped; but it was becoming increasingly necessary for Scott to
help her out in both the toiling and the scrimping. Accordingly, the
creases deepened, both vertically about the corners of Scott's lips and
horizontally across his shiny knees and shoulder blades. His eyes,
though, grew more luminous, as time went on, perhaps because they were
surrounded by ever deepening hollows.
It was those eyes that first caught the attention of Reed Opdyke.
Midway in his sophomore year, Opdyke, with a dozen others of his kind,
had revolted from the monotony of the commons table, and had set up a
so-called joint of their own, an eating-club presided over by a gaunt
and self-helping senior, and served by a quartette of cadaverous and
self-helping sophomores among whom was Scott Brenton.
Reed Opdyke was a busy youngster, full of the countless interests that
cram the college days of a popular, easy-going student. Also he was a
potential leader of men, who gave himself leisure to study the people
with whom he came into any kind of contact, to sort them out and
classify them according to their possibilities as they unveiled
themselves to his boyish eyes. Three of the cadaverous sophomores he
dismissed with a glance. They were impossible. They lacked all
spiritual yeast and, to the end of time, they would be waiters in one
sense or another. Scott Brenton was different. A fellow with those eyes
must have it in him to count for something, some day. Lounging in his
seat at table, Opdyke kept his eye on Scott, talked at him, then talked
to him; and then, obedient to some boyish whim or other, a few days
later, the meal ended, he took him by the elbow and walked him off to
Mory's for a second supper.
Mrs. Brenton, on her knees beside her bed, that night, prayed long and
fervently and with full particulars concerning the education of her
son. Her heart would have frozen with horror, had she seen the
smoke-filled room where her son was sitting, with Reed Opdyke across
the table from him. Her hopes for his future would have shrivelled into
naught, could she have realized that, over that very table, her son,
her Scott, was to receive a lesson, new and quite unforgettable. One
hour of jovial human comradeship had opened Scott Brenton's eyes to
more things than he ever yet had dreamed of. It had taught him once for
all that irresponsible, carefree youth is not, of necessity, vicious.
As the days and the weeks ran on, the comradeship increased. Measured
by the days of Opdyke, overflowing full of interests, it took the
smallest possible share of time: a look of comprehension, a word of
casual greeting, and, on rare occasions, a bit of a walk together when
their ways chanced to coincide. Still more occasionally, a stray hour
was spent at Mory's, or in Opdyke's room in Lawrence. As yet, a boyish
delicacy had kept Opdyke from seeking to invade what he knew could not
fail to be the barrenness of Scott Brenton's quarters.
Slight as was their intercourse, viewed in Opdyke's eyes, to Scott it
filled the whole horizon, the one near and vital fact which broke in
upon its emptiness and cut away the barren wastes about him. He lived
alternately upon the memory of Opdyke as he had seen him last, and upon
the anticipations of their next meeting. His hours of table service,
ceasing to be wearisome, had become veritable social functions, for was
there not always the chance of a random word and smile? Those failing,
there was always the pleasure of watching Opdyke, now lounging lazily
in his seat and mocking at his fellows, now bending forward above the
table, heedless of his cooling plate, the while he harangued his
companions with a facility which seemed to Scott the acme of brilliant
eloquence.
At Reed's elbow, Scott followed each inflection of the persuasive
voice, his lean face glowing with appreciation at every point his idol
scored. For the time being, awkwardness was lost and all
self-consciousness. Why think about himself, when he could have the
chance to watch Reed Opdyke and to listen to him? Scott's nature
thrilled in answer to the alien touch, unconsciously as that touch was
given. It never once would have struck Opdyke that he was becoming an
object of idolatry to this gaunt starveling to whom, as he expressed
it, he had tried to be a little decent. It was quite within the limits
of his comprehension that he could step down now and then to Scott. It
never would have occurred to him, at that epoch of his experience, that
Scott could try to clamber up to him. Save for the minutes when he
consciously gave his attention to the ungainly young waiter, he
disregarded him completely.
The other boys, however, were quick to take in the situation and to
comment on it. "Reed's parson" they called Scott, and they chaffed
Opdyke mercilessly, when Scott's back was turned. Scott, had he heard
the chaff, would have been wounded to the death, a death he would have
met far, far inside his shell, regretful that ever he had come out of
it. Opdyke, however, merely laughed and stuck to his original position.
"A fellow with such eyes is bound to have it in him. He's never had a
chance," he said to his chaffing mates. "Wait till he finds himself,
and then see what happens."
"Nothing," came the prompt reply. "He won't ever find himself, Reed. He
has found you, and that's as much as such a fellow as he is, can ever
assimilate."
And the reply was by no means wide of the mark. For the present, Scott
Brenton was finding it all he could do to assimilate Reed Opdyke.
Indeed, it was only in the very end of all things that fulness of
assimilation came.
As the time went on, partly in defiance of the chaffing of his chronies,
partly on account of it, Opdyke lent himself more and more to the
assimilating process. He sought out Scott more often, had him in his
room, taught him to fill a pipe and smoke it after the fashion of a
gentleman, dropped into his ears specious hints regarding manners, and
about the efficiency of one's mattress as frugal substitute for a
tailor's pressboard. To be sure, upon that latter count Scott took him
with unforeseen literalness; and, in his zeal to carry out his teacher's
dictum, subjected his coat to the mattress treatment, as well as his
more simply-outlined nether garments. Moreover, it should be set down
as distinctly to Opdyke's credit that he suppressed his merriment, the
next time he saw the coat upon Scott Brenton's shoulders.
Just at this epoch, some waggish member of the eating club employed his
camera at their expense. The resultant film, in after weeks, became one
of the most popular assets of the class. True, the needful haste had
caused the camera to tip a little. None the less, what the picture
lacked in composition, it made up in clearness and in vitality. Taken
solely as a study of contrasting types, it was of no small sociological
value, since it proved past all gainsaying that the absolute democracy
of a great college can bring into close relationship the most
impossibly divergent natures.
Scott, at this time, was thin and lean. His shoulders were bowed a
little with the strain of unceasing work and worry; in his more
self-conscious moments, he shambled when he walked. Only moderately
tall, clothed in ill-cut garments which he wore as uneasily as
possible, his immature young figure was not one to call out much
admiration on the score of its virility. Indeed, the one really virile
thing about Scott Brenton was his hair, which sprang out strongly from
his scalp, fine, but thick and just a little wavy where it lay across
his crown. His head was well-shaped, only that it was a bit too high
above the ears, the brow a bit too salient; the eyes alone, though, at
that time, redeemed from hopeless mediocrity his worn, ill-nourished
face. Beside his hips, his hands dangled limply, showing a stretch of
unclothed wrist sticking out below the shrunken coat sleeves.
Beside him in the picture, Reed Opdyke strode lightly, still, to all
seeming, the "puffic' fibbous" that his nurse had dubbed him. Six feet
tall, lean and supple as a deerhound and as totally unconscious of his
long, slim body, it was impossible to fancy him as ever being betrayed
into an awkward motion. Above his straight, slim shoulders, his curly
brown head rose proudly, his thin lips smiled a greeting to all the
world around him, his brown eyes looked straight and true into the eyes
of every man he chanced to meet. Only his sense of humour and his
comfortable smattering of original sin could have saved Reed Opdyke
from being insupportable. Beauty like his, albeit manly, is bound to be
a certain handicap.