LILLIAN and the Marselluses sailed for France early in May. The
Professor, left alone, had plenty of time to spray his rose-vines, and
his garden had never been so beautiful as it was that June. After his
university duties were over, he smuggled his bed and clothing back to
the old house and settled down to a leisurely bachelor life. He realized
that he ought to be getting to work. The garden, in which he sat all
day, was no longer a valid excuse to keep him from his study. But the
task that awaited him up there was difficult. It was a little thing, but
one of those little things at which the hand becomes self-conscious,
feels itself stiff and clumsy.
It was his plan to give part of this summer to Tom Outland’s diary--to
edit and annotate it for publication. The bother was that he must write
an introduction. The diary covered only about six months of the boy’s
life, a summer he spent on the Blue Mesa, and in it there was almost
nothing about Tom himself. To mean anything, it must be prefaced by a
sketch of Outland, and some account of his later life and achievements.
To write of his scientific work would be comparatively easy. But that
was not all the story; his was a many-sided mind, though a simple and
straightforward personality.
Of course Mrs. St. Peter had insisted that he was not altogether
straightforward; but that was merely because he was not altogether
consistent. As an investigator he was clear-sighted and hard-headed; but
in personal relations he was apt to be exaggerated and quixotic. He
idealized the people he loved and paid his devoir to the ideal rather
than to the individual, so that his behaviour was sometimes a little too
exalted for the circumstances--“chivalry of the cinema,” Lillian used to
say. One of his sentimental superstitions was that he must never on any
account owe any material advantage to his friends, that he must keep
affection and advancement far apart, as if they were chemicals that
would disintegrate each other. St. Peter thought this the logical result
of Tom’s strange bringing-up and his early associations. There is, he
knew, this dream of self-sacrificing friendship and disinterested love
down among the day-labourers, the men who run the railroad trains and
boats and reapers and thrashers and mine-drills of the world. And Tom
had brought it along to the university, where advancement through
personal influence was considered honourable.
It was not until Outland was a senior that Lillian began to be jealous
of him. He had been almost a member of the family for two years, and she
had never found fault with the boy. But after the Professor began to
take Tom up to the study and talk over his work with him, began to make
a companion of him, then Mrs. St. Peter withdrew her favour. She could
change like that; friendship was not a matter of habit with her. And
when she was through with anyone, she of course found reasons for her
fickleness. Tom, she reminded her husband, Was far from frank, though he
had such an open manner. He had been consistently reserved about his own
affairs, and she could not believe the facts he withheld were altogether
creditable. They had always known he had a secret, something to do with
the mysterious Rodney Blake and the bank account in New Mexico upon
which he was not at liberty to draw. The young man must have felt the
change in her, for he began that winter to make his work a pretext for
coming to the house less often. He and St. Peter now met in the alcove
behind the Professor’s lecture room at the university.
One Sunday, shortly before Tom’s Commencement, he came to the house to
ask Rosamond to go to the senior dance with him. The family were having
tea in the garden; a few days of intensely warm weather had come on and
hurried the roses into bloom. Rosamond happened to ask Tom, who sat in
his white flannels, fanning himself with his straw hat, if spring in the
South-west was as warm as this.
“Oh, no,” he replied. “May is usually chilly down there--bright sun, but
a kind of edge in the wind, and cool nights. Last night reminded me of
smothery May nights in Washington.”
Mrs. St. Peter glanced up. “You mean Washington City? I didn’t know you
had ever been so far east.”
There was no denying that the young man looked uncomfortable. He frowned
and said in a low voice: “Yes, I’ve been there. I suppose I don’t speak
of it because I haven’t very pleasant recollections of it.”
“How long were you there?” his hostess asked.
“A winter and spring, more than six months. Long enough to get very
home-sick.” He went away almost at once, as if he were afraid of being
questioned further.
The subject came up again a few weeks later, however. After Tom’s
graduation, two courses were open to him. He was offered an
instructorship, with a small salary, in the Physics department under Dr.
Crane, and a graduate scholarship at Johns Hopkins University. St. Peter
strongly urged him to accept the latter. One evening when the family
were discussing Tom’s prospects, the Professor summed up all the reasons
why he ought to go to Baltimore and work in the laboratory made famous
by Dr. Rowland. He assured him, moreover, that he would find the
atmosphere of an old Southern city delightful.
“Yes, I know something about the atmosphere,” Tom broke out at last. “It
is delightful, but it’s all wrong for me. It discourages me dreadfully.
I used to go over there when I was in Washington, and it always made me
blue. I don’t believe I could ever work there.”
“But can you trust a child’s impressions to guide you now, in such an
important decision?” asked Mrs. St. Peter gravely.
“I wasn’t a child, Mrs. St. Peter. I was as much grown up as I am
now--older, in some ways. It was only about a year before I came here.”
“But, Tom, you were on the section gang that year! Why do you mix us all
up?” Kathleen caught his hand and squeezed the knuckles together, as she
did when she wanted to punish him.
“Well, maybe it was two years before. It doesn’t matter. It was long
enough to count for two ordinary years,” he muttered abstractedly.
Again he went away abruptly, and a few days later he told St. Peter that
he had definitely accepted the instructorship under Crane, and would
stay on in Hamilton.
During that summer after Outland’s graduation, St. Peter got to know all
there was behind his reserve. Mrs. St. Peter and the two girls were in
Colorado, and the Professor was alone in the house, writing on volumes
three and four of his history. Tom was carrying on some experiments of
his own, over in the Physics laboratory. He and St. Peter were often
together in the evening, and on fine afternoons they went swimming.
Every Saturday the Professor turned his house over to the
cleaning-woman, and he and Tom went to the lake and spent the day in his
sail-boat.
It was just the sort of summer St. Peter liked, if he had to be in
Hamilton at all. He was his own cook, and had laid in a choice
assortment of cheeses and light Italian wines from a discriminating
importer in Chicago. Every morning before he sat down at his desk he
took a walk to the market and had his pick of the fruits and salads. He
dined at eight o’clock. When he cooked a fine leg of lamb, saignant,
well rubbed with garlic before it went into the pan, then he asked
Outland to dinner. Over a dish of steaming asparagus, swathed in a
napkin to keep it hot, and a bottle of sparkling Asti, they talked and
watched night fall in the garden. If the evening happened to be rainy or
chilly, they sat inside and read Lucretius.
It was on one of those rainy nights, before the fire in the dining-room,
that Tom at last told the story he had always kept back. It was nothing
very incriminating, nothing very remarkable; a story of youthful defeat,
the sort of thing a boy is sensitive about--until he grows older.