ST. PETER awoke the next morning with the wish that he could be
transported on his mattress from the new house to the old. But it was
Sunday, and on that day his wife always breakfasted with him. There was
no way out; they would meet at compt.
When he reached the dining-room Lillian was already at the table, behind
the percolator. “Good morning, Godfrey. I hope you had a good night.”
Her tone just faintly implied that he hadn’t deserved one.
“Excellent. And you?”
“I had a good conscience.” She smiled ruefully at him. “How can you let
yourself be ungracious in your own house?”
“Oh, dear! And I went to sleep happy in the belief that I hadn’t said
anything amiss the whole evening.”
“Nor anything aright, that I heard. Your disapproving silence can kill
the life of any company.”
“It didn’t seem to, last night. You’re entirely wrong about Marsellus.
He doesn’t notice.”
“He’s too polite to _take_ notice, but he feels it. He’s very sensitive,
under a well-schooled impersonal manner.”
St. Peter laughed. “Nonsense, Lillian! If he were, he couldn’t pick up a
dinner party and walk off with it, as he almost always does. I don’t
mind when it’s our dinner, but I hate seeing him do it in other people’s
houses.”
“Be fair, Godfrey. You know that if you’d once begun to talk about your
work in Spain, Louie would have followed it up with enthusiasm. Nobody
is prouder of you than he.”
“That’s why I kept quiet. Support can be too able--certainly too
fluent.”
“There you are; the dog in the manger! You won’t let him discuss your
affairs, and you are annoyed when he talks about his own.”
“I admit I can’t bear it when he talks about Outland as his affair. (I
mean Tom, of course, not their confounded place!) This calling it after
him passes my comprehension. And Rosamond’s standing for it! It’s brazen
impudence.”
Mrs. St. Peter frowned pensively. “I knew you wouldn’t like it, but they
were so pleased about it, and their motives are so generous----”
“Hang it, Outland doesn’t need their generosity! They’ve got everything
he ought to have had, and the least they can do is to be quiet about it,
and not convert his very bones into a personal asset. It all comes down
to this, my dear: one likes the florid style, or one doesn’t. You
yourself used not to like it. And will you give me some more coffee,
please?”
She refilled his cup and handed it across the table. “Nice hands,” he
murmured, looking critically at them as he took it, “always such nice
hands.”
“Thank you. I dislike floridity when it is beaten up to cover the lack
of something, to take the place of something. I never disliked it when
it came from exuberance. Then it isn’t floridness, it’s merely strong
colour.”
“Very well; some people don’t care for strong colour. It fatigues them.”
He folded his napkin. “Now I must be off to my desk.”
“Not quite yet. You never have time to talk to me. Just when did it
begin, Godfrey, in the history of manners--that convention that if a man
were pleased with his wife or his house or his success, he shouldn’t say
so, frankly?” Mrs. St. Peter spoke thoughtfully, as if she had
considered this matter before.
“Oh, it goes back a long way. I rather think it began in the Age of
Chivalry--King Arthur’s knights. Whoever it was lived in that time, some
feeling grew up that a man should do fine deeds and not speak of them,
and that he shouldn’t speak the name of his lady, but sing of her as a
Phyllis or a Nicolette. It’s a nice idea, reserve about one’s deepest
feelings: keeps them fresh.”
“The Oriental peoples didn’t have an Age of Chivalry. They didn’t need
one,” Lillian observed. “And this reserve--it becomes in itself
ostentatious, a vain-glorious vanity.”
“Oh, my dear, all is vanity! I don’t dispute that. Now I must really go,
and I wish I could play the game as well as you do. I have no enthusiasm
for being a father-in-law. It’s you who keep the ball rolling. I fully
appreciate that.”
“Perhaps,” mused his wife, as he rose, “it’s because you didn’t get the
son-in-law you wanted. And yet he was highly coloured, too.”
The Professor made no reply to this. Lillian had been fiercely jealous
of Tom Outland. As he left the house, he was reflecting that people who
are intensely in love when they marry, and who go on being in love,
always meet with something which suddenly or gradually makes a
difference. Sometimes it is the children, or the grubbiness of being
poor, sometimes a second infatuation. In their own case it had been,
curiously enough, his pupil, Tom Outland.
St. Peter had met his wife in Paris, when he was but twenty-four, and
studying for his doctorate. She too was studying there. French people
thought her an English girl because of her gold hair and fair
complexion. With her really radiant charm, she had a very interesting
mind--but it was quite wrong to call it mind, the connotation was false.
What she had was a richly endowed nature that responded strongly to life
and art, and very vehement likes and dislikes which were often quite out
of all proportion to the trivial object or person that aroused them.
Before his marriage, and for years afterward, Lillian’s prejudices, her
divinations about people and art (always instinctive and unexplained,
but nearly always right), were the most interesting things in St.
Peter’s life. When he accepted almost the first position offered him, in
order to marry at once, and came to take the chair of European history
at Hamilton, he was thrown upon his wife for mental companionship. Most
of his colleagues were much older than he, but they were not his equals
either in scholarship or in experience of the world. The only other man
in the faculty who was carrying on important research work was Doctor
Crane, the professor of physics. St. Peter saw a good deal of him,
though outside his specialty he was uninteresting--a narrow-minded man,
and painfully unattractive. Years ago Crane had begun to suffer from a
malady which in time proved incurable, and which now sent him up for an
operation periodically. St. Peter had had no friend in Hamilton of whom
Lillian could possibly be jealous until Tom Outland came along, so well
fitted by nature and early environment to help him with his work on the
Spanish Adventurers.
When he had almost reached his old house and his study, the Professor
remembered that he really must have an understanding with his landlord,
or the place would be rented over his head. He turned and went down into
another part of the city, by the car shops, where only workmen lived,
and found his landlord’s little toy house, set on a hill-side, over a
basement faced up with red brick and covered with hop vines. Old
Appelhoff was sitting on a bench before his door, making a broom.
Raising broom corn was one of his economies. Beside him was his
dachshund bitch, Minna.
St. Peter explained that he wanted to stay on in the empty house, and
would pay the full rent each month. So irregular a project annoyed
Appelhoff. “I like fine to oblige you, Professor, but dey is several
parties looking at de house already, an’ I don’t like to lose a year’s
rent for maybe a few months.”
“Oh, that’s all right, Fred. I’ll take it for the year, to simplify
matters. I want to finish my new book before I move.”
Fred still looked uneasy. “I better see de insurance man, eh? It says
for purposes of domestic dwelling.”
“He won’t object. Let’s have a look at your garden. What a fine crop of
apples and sickle pears you have!”
“I don’t like dem trees what don’t bear not’ing,” said the old man with
sly humour, remembering the Professor’s glistening, barren shrubs and
the good ground wasted behind his stucco wall.
“How about your linden-trees?”
“Oh, dem flowers is awful good for de headache!”
“You don’t look as if you were subject to it, Fred.”
“Not me, but my woman always had.”
“Pretty lonesome without her, Applehoff?”
“I miss her, Professor, but I ain’t just lonesome.” The old man rubbed
his bristly chin. “My Minna here is most like a person, and den I got so
many t’ings to t’ink about.”
“Have you? Pleasant things, I hope?”
“Well, all kinds. When I was young, in de old country, I had it hard to
git my wife at all, an’ I never had time to t’ink. When I come to dis
country I had to work so terrible hard on dat farm to make crops an’ pay
debts, dat I was like a horse. Now I have it easy, an’ I take time to
t’ink about all dem t’ings.”
St. Peter laughed. “We all come to it, Applehoff. That’s one thing I’m
renting your house for, to have room to think. Good morning.”
Crossing the public park, on his way back to the old house, he espied
his professional rival and enemy, Professor Horace Langtry, taking a
Sunday morning stroll--very well got up in English clothes he had
brought back from his customary summer in London, with a bowler hat of
unusual block and a horn-handled walking-stick. In twenty years the two
men had scarcely had speech with each other beyond a stiff “good
morning.” When Langtry first came to the university he looked hardly
more than a boy, with curly brown hair and such a fresh complexion that
the students called him Lily Langtry. His round pink cheeks and round
eyes and round chin made him look rather like a baby grown big. All
these years had made little difference, except that his curls were now
quite grey, his rosy cheeks even rosier, and his mouth dropped a little
at the corners, so that he looked like a baby suddenly grown old and
rather cross about it.
Seeing St. Peter, the younger man turned abruptly into a side alley, but
the Professor overtook him.
“Good morning, Langtry. These elms are becoming real trees at last.
They’ve changed a good deal since we first came here.”
Doctor Langtry moved his rosy chin sidewise over his high double collar.
“Good morning, Doctor St. Peter. I really don’t remember much about the
trees. They seem to be doing well now.”
St. Peter stepped abreast of him. “There have been many changes,
Langtry, and not all of them are good. Don’t you notice a great
difference in the student body as a whole, in the new crop that comes
along every year now--how different they are from the ones of our early
years here?”
The smooth chin turned again, and the other professor of European
history blinked. “In just what respect?”
“Oh, in the all-embracing respect of quality! We have hosts of students,
but they’re a common sort.”
“Perhaps. I can’t say I’ve noticed it.” The air between the two
colleagues was not thawing out any. A church-bell rang. Langtry started
hopefully. “You must excuse me, Doctor St. Peter, I am on my way to
service.”
The Professor gave it up with a shrug. “All right, all right, Langtry,
as you will. _Quelle folie_!”
Langtry half turned back, hesitated on the ball of his suddenly speeding
foot, and said with faultless politeness: “I beg your pardon?”
St. Peter waved his hand with a gesture of negation, and detained the
church-goer no longer. He sauntered along slackly through the hot
September sunshine, wondering why Langtry didn’t see the absurdity of
their long grudge. They had always been directly opposed in matters of
university policy, until it had almost become a part of their
professional duties to outwit and cramp each other.
When young Langtry first came there, his specialty was supposed to be
American history. His uncle was president of the board of regents, and
very influential in State politics; the institution had to look to him,
indeed, to get its financial appropriations passed by the Legislature.
Langtry was a Tory in his point of view, and was considered very English
in his tone and manner. His lectures were dull, and the students didn’t
like him. Every inducement was offered to make his courses popular.
Liberal credits were given for collateral reading. A student could read
almost anything that had ever been written in the United States and get
credit for it in American history. He could charge up the time spent in
perusing “The Scarlet Letter” to Colonial history, and “Tom Sawyer” to
the Missouri Compromise, it was said. St. Peter openly criticized these
lax methods, both to the faculty and to the regents. Naturally, “Madame
Langtry” paid him out. During the Professor’s second Sabbatical year in
Spain, Horace and his uncle together very nearly got his department away
from him. They worked so quietly that it was only at the eleventh hour
that St. Peter’s old students throughout the State got wind of what was
going on, dropped their various businesses and professions for a few
days, and came up to the capital in dozens and saved his place for him.
The opposition had been so formidable that when it came time for his
third year away, the Professor had not dared ask for it, but had taken
an extension of his summer vacation instead. The fact that he was
carrying on another line of work than his lectures, and was publishing
books that weren’t strictly text-books, had been used against him by
Langtry’s uncle.
As Langtry felt that the unpopularity of his course was due to his
subject, a new chair was created for him. There couldn’t be two heads in
European history, so the board of regents made for him a chair of
Renaissance history, or, as St. Peter said, a Renaissance chair of
history. Of late years, for reasons that had not much to do with his
lectures, Langtry had prospered better. To the new generations of
country and village boys now pouring into the university in such large
numbers, Langtry had become, in a curious way, an instructor in
manners,--what is called an “influence.” To the football-playing farmer
boy who had a good allowance but didn’t know how to dress or what to
say, Langtry looked like a short cut. He had several times taken parties
of undergraduates to London for the summer, and they had come back
wonderfully brushed up. He introduced a very popular fraternity into the
university, and its members looked after his interests, as did its
affiliated sorority. His standing on the faculty was now quite as good
as St. Peter’s own, and the Professor wondered what Langtry still had to
be sore about.
What was the use of keeping up the feud? They had both come there young
men, fighting for their places and their lives; now they were not very
young any more; they would neither of them, probably, ever hold a better
position. Couldn’t Langtry see it was a draw, that they had both been
beaten?