"Hugh, you're not going!"
"Yes, I am."
"Why?"
"If you don't know, there's no use telling you."
"Just because I said your father intended to put you in business! Oh,
Hugh, why are you so foolish and so proud? Do you suppose that
anyone--that I--think any the worse of you?"
Yes, she had read me, she alone had entered into the source of that
prevarication, the complex feelings from which it sprang. But at that
moment I could not forgive her for humiliating me. I hugged my grievance.
"It was true, what I said," I declared hotly. "My father has not spoken.
It is true that I'm going to college, because I'll make it true. I may
not go this year."
She stood staring in sheer surprise at sight of my sudden, quivering
passion. I think the very intensity of it frightened her. And then,
without more ado, I opened the gate and was gone....
That night, though I did not realize it, my journey into a Far Country
was begun.
The misery that followed this incident had one compensating factor.
Although too late to electrify Densmore and Principal Haime with my
scholarship, I was determined to go to college now, somehow, sometime. I
would show my father, these companions of mine, and above all Nancy
herself the stuff of which I was made, compel them sooner or later to
admit that they had misjudged me. I had been possessed by similar
resolutions before, though none so strong, and they had a way of sinking
below the surface of my consciousness, only to rise again and again until
by sheer pressure they achieved realization.
Yet I might have returned to Nancy if something had not occurred which I
would have thought unbelievable: she began to show a marked preference
for Ralph Hambleton. At first I regarded this affair as the most obvious
of retaliations. She, likewise, had pride. Gradually, however, a feeling
of uneasiness crept over me: as pretence, her performance was altogether
too realistic; she threw her whole soul into it, danced with Ralph as
often as she had ever danced with me, took walks with him, deferred to
his opinions until, in spite of myself, I became convinced that the
preference was genuine. I was a curious mixture of self-confidence and
self-depreciation, and never had his superiority seemed more patent than
now. His air of satisfaction was maddening.
How well I remember his triumph on that hot, June morning of our
graduation from Densmore, a triumph he had apparently achieved without
labour, and which he seemed to despise. A fitful breeze blew through the
chapel at the top of the building; we, the graduates, sat in two rows
next to the platform, and behind us the wooden benches nicked by many
knives--were filled with sisters and mothers and fathers, some anxious,
some proud and some sad. So brief a span, like that summer's day, and
youth was gone! Would the time come when we, too, should sit by the
waters of Babylon and sigh for it? The world was upside down.
We read the one hundred and third psalm. Then Principal Haime, in his
long "Prince Albert" and a ridiculously inadequate collar that emphasized
his scrawny neck, reminded us of the sacred associations we had formed,
of the peculiar responsibilities that rested on us, who were the
privileged of the city. "We had crossed to-day," he said, "an invisible
threshold. Some were to go on to higher institutions of learning.
Others..." I gulped. Quoting the Scriptures, he complimented those who
had made the most of their opportunities. And it was then that he called
out, impressively, the name of Ralph Forrester Hambleton. Summa cum
laude! Suddenly I was seized with passionate, vehement regrets at the
sound of the applause. I might have been the prize scholar, instead of
Ralph, if I had only worked, if I had only realized what this focussing
day of graduation meant! I might have been a marked individual, with
people murmuring words of admiration, of speculation concerning the
brilliancy of my future!... When at last my name was called and I rose to
receive my diploma it seemed as though my incompetency had been
proclaimed to the world...
That evening I stood in the narrow gallery of the flag-decked gymnasium
and watched Nancy dancing with Ralph.
I let her go without protest or reproach. A mysterious lesion seemed to
have taken place, I felt astonished and relieved, yet I was heavy with
sadness. My emancipation had been bought at a price. Something hitherto
spontaneous, warm and living was withering within me.