only what I am and may become that counts. I wouldn't say ashamed. I'm
sorry, because it makes what I'm doing just that much harder; because
you, for instance, know about it, and might cause trouble."
Lambert made no difficulty about the implied question.
"I don't want to risk causing trouble for any one unjustly. It's up to
you not to make me. But don't bother my sister again."
"Let me get far enough," George said, "and you won't be able to make
trouble--you, or your sister, or your father."
Lambert grinned, the doubt leaving his face as if he had reached a
decision.
"I wouldn't bank on father. I'd keep out of his sight."
The advice placed him, for the present, on the safe side. Sylvia's
decision remained, and just then the music crashed into a silence,
broken by exigent applause. George got up, thrusting his hands in his
pockets. The orchestra surrendered to the applause, but was Sylvia
dancing now?
Voices drifted in from the hall, one high and obdurate; others better
controlled, but persistent in argument. Lambert grimaced. George
sneered.
"But that's all right, because he didn't have to work for his living."
"If you don't come a cropper," Lambert said, "you'll get fed up with
that sort of thinking. Dolly's young."
Dalrymple was the first in the room, flushed, a trifle uneven in his
movements. Goodhue and Wandel followed. Goodhue smiled in a pained,
surprised way. Wandel's precise features expressed nothing.
"Why not dancing, Lambert, old Eli?" Dalrymple called jovially. "Haul
these gospel sharks off----Waiter! I say, waiter! Something bubbly, dry,
and nineteen hundred, if they're doing us that well."
The others didn't protest. They seemed to arrange themselves as a
friendly screen between Dalrymple and the elderly men. George didn't
care to talk to Dalrymple in that condition--there was too much that
Dalrymple had always wanted to say and hadn't. He started for the door,
but Wandel caught his arm.
"Wait around, very strong person," he whispered. "Dolly doesn't know it,
but he's leaving in a minute."
George shook his head, and started on. Dalrymple glanced up.
"Morton!" he said.
Goodhue took the glass from the waiter, but Dalrymple, grinning a shamed
sort of triumph and comprehension, reached out for it and sipped.
"Not bad. Great dancer, Morton. Around the end, and through the centre,
and all that----"
"Keep quiet," Goodhue warned him.
George knew that the other wouldn't. He shrank from the breaking of the
sullen truce between them. Dalrymple glanced at his cuffs, spilling a
little of the wine.
"Damned sight more useful to stick to your laundry--it's none too good."
Quite distinctly George caught Lambert's startled change of countenance
and his quick movement forward, Goodhue's angry flush, Wandel's apparent
unconcern. In that moment he measured his advance, understood all he had
got from Squibs and books, from Betty, from Goodhue, from Princeton;
but, although he easily conquered his first impulse to strike, his rage
glowed the hotter because it was confined. As he passed close he heard
Lambert whisper:
"Good man!"
But even then Wandel wouldn't let him go, and the music had stopped
again, and only the undefinable shadows of women's voices reached him.
He tried to shake off Wandel who had followed him to the hall. He
couldn't wait. He had to enter that moving, chattering crowd to find out
what Sylvia had decided.
"Go downstairs, great man," Wandel was whispering, "get a cab, and wait
in it at the door, so that you will be handy when I bring the infant
Bacchus out."
"I'd rather not," George said, impatiently. "Someone else will do."
"By no means. Expediency, my dear friend, and the general welfare.
Hercules for little Bacchus."
He couldn't refuse. Wandel and Goodhue, and, for that matter all of
Dalrymple's friends, those girls in there, depended on him; yet he knew
it was a bad business for him and for Dalrymple; and he wanted above all
other things to pass for a moment through that brilliant screen that
moved perpetually between him and Sylvia.
He waited in the shadows of the cab until Dalrymple and Wandel left the
building. Wandel motioned the other into the cab. Dalrymple obeyed,
willingly enough, swinging his stick, and humming off the key. Probably
Wandel's diplomacy. Wandel jumped in, called an address to the driver,
and slammed the door.
"Where are you taking him?" George asked.
For the first time Dalrymple seemed to realize who the silent man in the
shadows was.
"I'm not going on any party with Morton," he said, sullenly.
"You can go to the devil," Wandel said, pleasantly, "as long as you keep
away from decent people until you're decent yourself."
"No," George said. "He's going home or I have nothing more to do with
it."
"Perhaps you're right," Wandel agreed, "but you can fancy I had to offer
him something better than that to get him out."
He tapped on the pane and gave the driver the new address. Dalrymple
started to rise.
"Won't go home--you keep your dirty hands off me, Morton. You----"
"Hercules!" softly from Wandel.
George grasped Dalrymple's arms, pulled him down, held him as in a
vise. Dalrymple raved. Wandel laughed pleasantly.
"Dirty hands," flashed through George's brain. Did Dalrymple know
anything, or was it an instinctive suspicion, or merely the explosion of
helpless temper and dislike?
The ride was brief, and the block in which Dalrymple lived was,
fortunately, at that moment free of pedestrians. Wandel descended and
rang the bell. When the door was opened George relaxed his grasp.
Dalrymple tried to spring from the opposite side of the cab. George
caught him, lifted him, carried him like a child across the sidewalk,
and set him down in the twilight of a hall where a flunky gaped.
"There's your precious friend," he accused Wandel.
He returned to the cab, rubbing his hands as if they needed cleansing.
"There's no one like you, great man," Wandel said when he had come back
to the cab. "You've done Dolly and everyone he would have seen to-night
a good turn."
But George felt he had done himself a bad one. During the rest of his
time at Princeton, and afterward in New York, he would have a dangerous
enemy. Dirty hands! Trust Dalrymple to do his best to give that
qualification its real meaning. And these people! You could trust them,
too, to stand by Dalrymple against the man who had done them a good
turn. It had been rotten of Wandel to ask it, to take him away at that
vital moment. Anyway, it was done. He forgot Dalrymple in his present
anxiety. The ride seemed endless. The ascent in the elevator was a
unique torture. The cloak-room attendants had an air of utter
indifference. When he could, George plunged into the ballroom, escaping
Wandel, threading the hurrying maze to the other end of the room where
earlier in the evening he had seen Sylvia's mother sitting with Mrs.
Alston. George passed close, every muscle taut. Mrs. Planter gave no
sign. Mrs. Alston reached over and tapped his arm with her fan. He
paused, holding his breath.
"Betty asked me to look for you," she said. "Where have you been? She
was afraid you had found her party tiresome. You haven't been dancing
much."
He answered her politely, and walked on. He braced himself against the
wall, the strain completely broken. She hadn't told. She hadn't demanded
that her mother take her home. She hadn't said: "Betty, what kind of men
do you ask to your dances?" Why hadn't she? Again he saw his big,
well-clothed figure in a glass, and he smiled. Was it because he was
already transformed?
Here she came, dancing with Goodhue, and Goodhue seemed trying to lead
her close. George didn't understand at first that he silently asked for
news of Dalrymple. His own eyes studied Sylvia. Her face held too much
colour. She gave him back his challenge, but the contempt in her eyes
broadened his smile. He managed a reassuring nod to Goodhue, but
Dalrymple, for the time, was of no importance. Sylvia was going to
fight, and not like a spoiled child. He must have impressed her as being
worthy of a real fight.
He faced the rest of the evening with new confidence. He forgot to be
over-careful with these people whose actions were unstudied. He dodged
across the floor and took Betty from Lambert Planter while Lambert
raised his eyebrows, relinquished her with pronounced reluctance, and
watched George guide her swiftly away. Maybe Lambert was right, and he
ought to tell Betty, but not now. To-night, against all his
expectations, he found himself having a good time, enjoying more than
anything else this intimate and exhilarating progress with Betty. Always
he hated to give her up, but he danced with other girls, and found they
liked to dance with him because he was big, and danced well, and was
Dicky Goodhue's friend and Betty's, and played football; but, since he
couldn't very well ask Sylvia, he only really cared to dance with Betty.
He was at Betty's table for supper. He didn't like to hear these pretty
girls laughing about Dalrymple, but then with them Dalrymple must have
exercised a good deal of restraint. It ought to be possible to make them
see the ugly side, to bare the man's instinct to go from this party to
another. Then they wouldn't laugh.
Lambert sat down for awhile.
"Where's Sylvia?" Betty asked.
Lambert shrugged his shoulders.
"It's hard enough to keep track of you, Betty. Sylvia's a sister."
George gathered that Sylvia's absence from that table had impressed them
both. He knew very well where she was, across the room, focus for as
large a gathering as Betty's, chiefly of young men, eager for her
brilliancy. Lambert went on, glancing at George his questions of the
smoking-room.
It wasn't long before the dawn when George said polite things with
Goodhue and Wandel, and after their pattern. In the lower hall he
noticed that all these pleasure seekers, a while ago flushed and happy,
had undergone a devastating change. Faces were white. Gowns looked
rumpled and old. The laughter and chatter were no longer impulsive.
"The way one feels after a hard game," he thought.
Goodhue offered to take Wandel in and drop him. The little man alone
seemed as fresh and neat as at the start of the evening.
"Had a good time, great person?" he asked as they drove off. "But then
why shouldn't great men always have good times?"
Wandel's manner suggested that he had seen to George's good time. What
he had actually done was to involve him in an open hostility with
Dalrymple. The others didn't mention that youth. Was there a tactful
thought for him in their restraint?
They left Wandel at an expensive bachelor apartment house overlooking
the park. George gathered from Goodhue, as they drove on, that Wandel's
attitude toward his family was that of an old and confidential friend.
"You see Driggs always has to be his own master," he said.
XVII
Because of the restless contrast of that trip George brought back to
Princeton a new appreciation; yet beneath the outer beauty there, he
knew, a man's desires and ambitions lost none of their ugliness. He
stared at Sylvia's portrait, but it made him want the living body that
he had touched, that was going to give him a decent fight. Already he
planned for other opportunities to meet her, although with her attitude
what it was he didn't see how he could use them to advance his cause;
and always there was the possibility of her resenting his persistence to
the point of changing her mind about telling.
He had decided to avoid Dalrymple as far as possible, but that first
night, as he drowsed over a book, he heard a knock at his door, not
loud, and suggestive of reluctance and indecision. He hid the photograph
and the riding crop, and called:
"Come in!"
The door opened slowly. Dalrymple stood on the threshold, his weak face
white and perverse. George waited, watching him conquer a bitter
disinclination. He knew what was coming and how much worse it would make
matters between them.
"It seems," the tortured man said, "that I was beastly rude to you last
night. I've come to say I didn't mean it and am sorry."
"You've come," George said, quietly, "because Goodhue and Wandel have
made you, through threats, I daresay. If you hadn't meant it you
wouldn't have been rude in just that way. I'm grateful to Goodhue and
Wandel, but I won't have your apologies, because they don't mean a damn
thing."
Dalrymple's face became evil. He started to back out.
"Wait a minute," George commanded. "You don't like me because I'm
working my way through college. That's what you shot at me last night
when you'd drunk enough to give you the nerve, but it's been in your
mind all along. I'd pound a little common-sense and decency into you,
only I wouldn't feel clean after doing it."
That, to an extent, broke down his severity. It sounded queer, from him.
If Lambert Planter could have heard him say that!
"Let the others think they've done us a good turn," he went on. "We have
to live in the same class without clawing each other's faces every time
we meet, but you can't pull the wool over my eyes, and I won't try to
pull it over yours. Now get out, and don't come here alone again."
He felt better and cleaner after that. When Dalrymple had gone he
finished his chapter and tumbled into bed.
XVIII
George was glad of the laundry, indeed, as the holidays approached. It
gave him a sound excuse for not dashing joyously from Princeton with the
rest, but it didn't cure the depression with which he saw the college
empty. He wandered about a campus as deserted as a city swept by
pestilence, asking himself what he would have done if his father and
mother hadn't exiled him as thoroughly as Old Planter had. There was no
point thinking about that; it wasn't even a question. He took long walks
or stayed in his room, reading, and once or twice answering regretfully
invitations that had sprung from encounters at Betty's party. It was
nice to have them, but of course he couldn't go to such affairs alone
just yet. Besides, he didn't have the money.
Squibs Bailly limped all the way up his stairs one day, scolding him for
sulking in his tent.
"I only heard last night that you were in town. I'm not psychic. Why
haven't you been around?"
"I didn't want to bother----"
Bailly interrupted him.
"I'm afraid I didn't appreciate you went quite so much alone."
"Altogether alone," George said. "But I don't want anybody to feel sorry
for me because of that. It has some advantages."
"You're too young to say such things," Bailly said.
He made George go to the Dickinson Street house for Christmas dinner.
There was no other guest. The rooms were bright with holly, and a very
small but dazzling Christmas tree stood in a corner, bearing a gift for
him. Mrs. Bailly, as he entered, touched his cheek with her lips and
welcomed him by his first name. She created for him an illusion that
made him choke a trifle. She made him feel as if he had come home.
"And," he thought, "Squibs and she know."
He wondered if it was that knowledge that made Squibs go into his social
views one evening when he sat with him in the study. It was then that
George realized he had no such views apart from his own case. Vaguely he
knew that somewhere outside of Princeton strikes multiplied these days,
that poor people complained of the cost of food and housing, that
communistic propaganda was talked with an increasing freedom, that now
and then a bomb burst, destroying more often than not the people it was
designed to help. He saw that Squibs sought to interest him, and he gave
a close attention while the tutor elaborated his slight knowledge of the
growing unrest.
"But it's all so far away, sir," he said. "I've so much of more
importance to me to bother about right here."
Bailly relighted his pipe.
"The happy, limited vision of youth!" he sighed. "You'll be through your
a, b, c's before you know it. Are you going to face such big issues
without any forethought?"
He smoked for a few moments, then commenced to speak doubtfully.
"And in another sense it isn't as far away as you think. It all goes on
_in petto_, right here in undergraduate Princeton. The views a man takes
away from college should be applicable to the conditions he meets
outside."
"I don't quite see what you mean, sir."
Why was Bailly going at it so carefully?
"I mean," Bailly said, "that here you have your poor men, your earnest
men, and your lords of the land. I mean there is no real community of
interest here. I mean you've made friends because you're bigger and
better looking than most, and play football like a demon. You haven't
made any friends simply because you are poor and earnest. And the poor
students suffer from the cost of things, and the rich men don't know and
don't care. And the poor men, and the men without family or a good
school behind them, who haven't football or some outstanding
usefulness, are as submerged as the workers in a mine. Prospect Street
is Fifth Avenue or Park Lane, and the men who can't get in the clubs,
because of poverty or lack of prominence, remind me of the ragged ones
who cling to the railings, peering through at plenty with evil in their
hearts."
"You're advocating communism, sir?"
Bailly shook his head.
"I'm advocating nothing. I'm trying to find out what you advocate."
"I can't help feeling," George said, stubbornly, "that a man has to look
after himself."
And as he walked home he confessed freely enough in his own mind:
"I'm advocating George Morton. How can Squibs expect me to bother with
any one else when I have so far to go?"
XIX
He thrust Squibs' uncomfortable prods from his brain. He applied himself
to his books--useful books. Education and culture were more important to
him than the physical reactions of overworked labour or the mental
processes of men who advocated violence. Such distracting questions,
however, were uncomfortably in the air. Allen, one of the poor men
against whom the careful Rogers had warned him long ago, called on him
one cold night. The manner of his address made George wonder if Squibs
had been talking to him, too.
"Would like a few minutes' chat, Morton. No one worth while's in
Princeton. It won't queer you to have me in your room."
No, George decided. That was an opening one might expect from Allen. The
man projected an appreciable power from his big, bony figure; his
angular face. George had heard vaguely that he had worked in a factory,
preparing himself for college. He knew from his own observation that
Allen wasn't above waiting at commons, and he had seen the lesser men
turn to him as a leader.
"Sit down," George said, "and don't talk like an ass. You can't queer
me. What do you want me to do--offer to walk to classes with my arm over
your shoulder? There's too much of that sensitive talk going around."
"You're a plain speaker," Allen said. "So am I. You'll admit you've seen
a lot more of the pretty crowd than you have of me and my friends. I
thought it might be useful to ask you why."
"Because," George answered, "I'm in college to get everything I can. You
and your crowd don't happen to have the stuff I want."
Allen fingered a book nervously.
"I came," he said, "to see if I couldn't persuade you that we have."
"I'm listening," George said, indifferently.
"Right on the table!" Allen answered, quickly. "You're the biggest poor
man in the class. You're logically the poor men's Moses. They admire
you. You've always been talked of in terms of the varsity. Everybody
knows you're Princeton's best football player. The poor men would do
anything for you. What will you do for them?"
"I won't have you split the class that way," George cried.
"Every class," Allen said, "is split along that line, only this class is
going to let the split be seen. You work your way through college, but
you run with a rich crowd, led by the hand of Driggs Wandel."
So even Allen had noticed that and had become curious.
"Wandel," Allen went on, "will use you to hurt us--the poor men; and
when he's had what he wants of you he'll send you back to the muck
heap."
George shook his head, smiling.
"No, because you've said yourself that whatever power I have comes from
football and not from an empty pocket-book."
"Use all the power you have," Allen urged. "Come in with us. Help the
poor men, and we'll know how to reward you."
"You're already thinking of Sophomore elections?" George asked. "I don't
care particularly for office."
Allen's face reddened with anger.
"I'm thinking of the clubs first. What I said when I came in is true.
The selfish men intriguing for Prospect Street don't dare be friendly
with the poor men; afraid it might hurt their chances to be seen with a
poler. By God, that's vicious! It denies us the companionship we've come
to college to find. We want all the help we can get here. The clubs are
a hideous hindrance. Promise me you'll keep away from the clubs."
George laughed.
"I haven't made up my mind about the clubs," he said. "They have bad
features, but there's good in them. The club Goodhue joins will be the
best club of our time in college. Suppose you knew you could get an
election to that; would you turn it down?"
The angular face became momentarily distorted.
"I won't consider an impossible situation. Anyway, I couldn't afford it.
That's another bad feature. If you want, I'll say no, a thousand times
no."
"I wouldn't trust you," George laughed, "but you know you haven't a
chance. So you want to smash the thing you can't get in. I call _that_
vicious. And let me tell you, Allen. You may reform things out of
existence, but you can't destroy them with a bomb. Squibs Bailly will
tell you that."
"You think you'll make a good club," Allen said.
"I'll tell you what I think," George answered, quite unruffled, "when I
make up my mind to stand for or against the clubs. Squibs says half the
evils in the world come from precipitancy. You're precipitate. Thrash it
out carefully, as I'm doing."
He wondered if he had convinced Allen, knowing very well that his own
attitude would be determined by the outcome of the chance he had to
enter Goodhue's club.
"We've got to make up our minds now," Allen said. "Promise me that
you'll keep out of the clubs and I'll make you the leader of the class.
You're in a position to bring the poor men to the top for once."
George didn't want to break with Allen. The man did control a large
section of the class, so he sent him away amicably enough, merely
repeating that he hadn't made up his mind; and ending with:
"But I won't be controlled by any faction."
Allen left, threatening to talk with him again.
George didn't sleep well that night. Squibs and Allen had made him
uncomfortable. Finally he cleared his mind with the reflection that his
private attitude was determined. No matter whom it hurt he was going to
be one of the fortunates with a whip in his hand; but he, above most
people, could understand the impulses of men like Allen, and the
restless ones in the world, who didn't hold a whip, and so desired
feverishly to spring.
XX
The cold weather placed a smooth black floor on Lake Carnegie. George
went down one evening with the Baillys. They brought Betty Alston, who
was just home from New York and had dined with them. A round moon smiled
above the row of solemn and vigilant poplars along the canal bank. The
shadows of the trees made you catch your breath as if on the edge of
perilous pitfalls.
Going down through the woods they passed Allen. Even in that
yellow-splashed darkness George recognized the bony figure.
"Been skating?" he called.
"Hello, Morton! No, I don't skate."
"Then," George laughed, "why don't you smash the ice?"
Allen laughed back mirthlessly, but didn't answer; and, as they went on,
Betty wanted to know what it was all about. George told her of Allen's
visit.
"But congenial people," she said, "will always gather together. It would
be dreadful to have one's friends arbitrarily chosen. You'll go to a
club with your friends."
"But Allen says the poor men can't afford it," he answered. "I'm one of
the poor men."
"You'll always find a way to do what you want," she said, confidently.
But when they were on the lake the question of affording the things one
wanted slipped between them again.
George had a fancy that Mrs. Bailly guided her awkward husband away from
Betty and him. Why? At least it was pleasant to be alone with Betty,
gliding along near the bank, sometimes clasping hands at a half-seen,
doubtful stretch. Betty spoke of it.
"Where are my guardians?"
"Let's go a little farther," he urged. "We'll find them easily enough."
It didn't worry her much.
"Why did you come back so soon?" she asked.
He hesitated. He had hoped to avoid such questions.
"I haven't been away."
She glanced up, surprised.
"You mean you've been in Princeton through the holiday?"
"Yes, I feel I ought to go easy with what little I have."
"I knew you were working your way through," she said, "but I never
guessed it meant as much denial as that."
"Don't worry," he laughed, "I'll make money next summer."
"I wish I'd known. And none of your friends thought!"
"Why should they? They're mostly too rich."
"That's wrong."
"Are you driving me into Allen's camp?" he asked. "You can't; for I
expect to be rich myself, some day. Any man can, if he goes about it in
the right way. Maybe Allen doubts his power, and that's the reason he's
against money and the pleasant things it buys. Does it make any
difference to you, my being poor for a time?"
"Why should it?" she asked, warmly.
"Allen," he said, "couldn't understand your skating with me."
Why not tell Betty the rest in this frozen and romantic solitude they
shared? He decided not. He had risked enough for the present. When she
turned around he didn't try to hold her, skating swiftly back at her
side, aware of a danger in such solitude; charging himself with a
scarcely definable disloyalty to his conception of Sylvia.
XXI
He fancied Betty desired to make up for her thoughtlessness during the
holidays when she asked him for dinner on a Saturday night. With that
dinner, no matter what others might think of his lack of money and
background, she had put herself on record, for it was a large, formal
party sprinkled with people from New York, and drawing from the
University only the kind of men Allen was out to fight. Wandel, George
thought, rather disapproved of his being there, but as a result, he made
two trips to parties in New York during the winter. Both were failures,
for he didn't meet Sylvia, yet he heard of her always as a dazzling
success.
He answered Dalrymple's cold politeness with an irritating indifference.
In the spring, however, he detected a radical alteration in Dalrymple's
manner.
By that time, the scheme discussed carelessly at the Alstons' in the
fall had been worked out. On good afternoons, when their work allowed, a
few men, all friends of the Alstons, drove out, and, with passable
ponies, played practice matches at polo on the field Mr. Alston had had
arranged. The neighbours fell into a habit of concentrating there, and
George was thrown into intimate contact with them, seeing other gates
open rather eagerly before him, for he hadn't miscalculated his ability
to impress with horses. When Mr. Alston had first asked him he had
accepted gladly. Because of his long habit in the saddle and his
accuracy of eye he played better from the start than these other
novices. As in football, he teamed well with Goodhue.
"Goodhue to Morton," Wandel complained, "or Morton to Goodhue. What
chance has a mere duffer like me against such a very distinguished
combination?"
It was during these games that Goodhue fell into the practice of
shouting George's first name across the field, and when George became
convinced that such familiarity was not chance, but an expression of a
deepening friendship, he responded unaffectedly. It was inevitable the
others should adopt Goodhue's example. Even Dalrymple did, and George
asked himself why the man was trying to appear friendly, for he knew
that in his heart Dalrymple had not altered.
It filled George with a warm and formless pleasure to hear Betty using
his Christian name, to realize that a precedent had this time been
established; yet it required an effort, filled him with a great
confusion, to call her familiarly "Betty" for the first time.
He chatted with her at the edge of the field while grooms led the ponies
up and down.
"What are your plans for the summer?" she asked.
"I don't quite know what will happen."
"We," she said, "will be in Maine. Can't you run up in August? Dicky
Goodhue's coming then."
He looked at her. He tried to hide his hunger for the companionship, the
relaxation such a visit would give. He glanced away.
"I wish I could. Have you forgotten I'm to make money? I've got to try
to do that this summer, Betty."
There, it was out. Colour stole into her white cheeks.
"I'm sorry," she said.
He had another reason for refusing. He was growing afraid of Betty. He
was conscious of an increasing effort to drive her memory from the
little room where Sylvia's portrait watched. It was, he told himself,
because he didn't see Sylvia oftener, couldn't feel his heart respond to
the exciting enmity in her brilliant eyes.
Goodhue and Dalrymple, it developed, were parting, amicably enough as
far as any one knew.
"Dolly thinks he'll room alone next year," was Goodhue's explanation.
Dalrymple explained nothing.
Driving back to town one afternoon Goodhue proposed to George that he
replace Dalrymple.
"Campus rooms," he said, "aren't as expensive as most in town."
He mentioned a figure. George thought rapidly. What an opportunity! And
aside from what Goodhue could do for him, he was genuinely fond of the
man. George craved absolute independence, and he knew Goodhue would give
him all of that he asked for.
"I'd like to," he said.
Goodhue smiled.
"That's splendid. I think we'll manage together."
Wandel frowned at the news. So did Allen. Allen came frequently now to
talk his college socialism. George listened patiently, always answering:
"I've made up my mind to nothing, except that I'll take my friends where
I find them, high or low. But I'm not against you, Allen."
Yet George was uneasy, knowing the moment for making up his mind
wouldn't be long delayed. He understood very well that already some men
knew to what club they'd go more than a year later. Secretly, perhaps
illegally, the sections for the clubs were forming in his class. Small
groups were quietly organizing under the guidance of the upper classes.
During Sophomore year these small groups would elect other men to the
limit of full membership. It was perfectly clear that unless he went in
ahead of Dalrymple his chances of making the club he wanted were
worthless. As a result of his talks with Allen, moreover, he felt that
Wandel didn't want him. If Wandel could persuade Goodhue that George
could serve the interests of the fortunates best from the outside the
issue would be settled.
"But I won't be used that way," George decided. "I'm out for myself."
Along that straight line he had made his plans for the summer. Somehow
he was going to study the methods of the greatest financial market in
the country, so that later he could apply them serviceably to his own
fortune. Bailly had other ideas. One night while they lounged on the
front campus listening to senior singing the long tutor suggested that
he take up some form of manual labour.
"It would keep you in good condition," he said, "and it might broaden
your vision by disclosing the aims and the dissatisfactions of those who
live by the sweat of their brows."
George frowned.
"I know enough of that already. I've been a labourer myself. I haven't
the time, sir."
Bailly probably knew that he was dealing with a point of view far more
determined and mature than that of the average undergraduate. He didn't
argue, but George felt the need of an apology.
"I've got to learn how to make money," he said.
"Money isn't everything," Bailly sighed.
"I've started after certain things," George justified himself. "Money's
one of them. I'll work for next to nothing this summer if I have to.
I'll be a runner, the man who sweeps out the office, anything that will
give me a chance to watch and study Wall Street. I'm sorry if you don't
approve, sir."
"I didn't say that," Bailly answered, "but the fact was sufficiently
clear."
Yet George knew perfectly well a few days later that it was Bailly who
had spoken about his ambition to Mr. Alston.
"Blodgett, I fancy," Mr. Alston said, "will offer you some small start."
He handed George a letter addressed to one Josiah Blodgett, of the firm
of Blodgett and Sinclair.
"Good luck, and good-bye until next fall."
"If you do change your mind----If you can manage it----" Betty said.
So George, two or three days before commencement, left Princeton for
Wall Street, and presented his letter.
The offices of Blodgett and Sinclair were gorgeous and extensive, raw
with marble, and shining with mahogany. They suggested a hotel in bad
taste rather than a factory that turned out money in spectacular
quantities.
"Mr. Blodgett will see you," a young man announced in an awed voice, as
if such condescension were infrequent.
In the remote room where Blodgett lurked the scheme of furnishing
appeared to culminate. The man himself shared its ornamental grossness.
He glanced up, his bald head puckering half its height. George saw that
although he was scarcely middle-aged Blodgett was altogether too fat,
with puffy, unhealthily coloured cheeks. In such a face the tiny eyes
had an appearance nearly porcine. The man's clothing would have put an
habitue of the betting ring at ease--gray-and-white checks,
dove-coloured spats, a scarlet necktie. Pudgy fingers twisted Mr.
Alston's letter. The little eyes opened wider. The frown relaxed. A bass
voice issued from the broad mouth:
"If you've come here to learn, you can't expect a million dollars a
week. Say fifteen to start."
George didn't realize how extraordinarily generous that was. He only
decided he could scrape along on it.
"Mr. Alston," the deep voice went on, "tells me you're a great football
player. That's a handicap. All you can tackle here is trouble, and the
only kicking we have is when Mundy boots somebody out of a job. He's my
office manager. Report to him. Wait a minute. I'd give a ping-pong
player a job if Mr. Alston asked me to. He's a fine man. But then I'm
through. It's up to the man and Mundy. If the man's no good Mundy
doesn't even bother to tell me, and it's twenty stories to the street."
George started to thank him, but already the rotund figure was pressed
against the desk, and the tiny eyes absorbed in important-looking
papers.
Mundy, George decided, wasn't such an ogre after all. He wore glasses.
He was bald, thin, and stoop-shouldered. He had the benign expression of
a parson; but behind that bald forehead, George soon learned, was stored
all the knowledge he craved, without, however, the imagination to make
it personally very valuable.
If he didn't sweep the office at first, George approximated such labour,
straightening the desks of the mighty, checking up on the contents of
waste-paper baskets, seeing that the proper people got mail and
newspapers, running errands; and always, in the office or outside, he
kept his ears open and his eyes wide. He absorbed the patter of the
Street. He learned to separate men into classes, the wise ones, who
always made money, and the foolish, who now and then had good luck, but
most of the time were settling their losses. And at every opportunity he
was after what Mundy concealed behind his appearance of a parson.
At night he dissected the financial journals, watching the alterations
in the market, and probing for the causes; applying to this novitiate
the same grim determination he had brought to Squibs Bailly's lessons a
year before. Never once was he tempted to seek a simple path to fortune.
"When I speculate," he told himself, "there'll be mighty little risk
about it."
Even in those days his fifteen dollars a week condemned him to a cheap
lodging house near Lexington Avenue, the simplest of meals, and
practically no relaxation. He exercised each morning, and walked each
evening home from the office, for he hadn't forgotten what Princeton
expected from him in the fall.
Sylvia's photograph and the broken riding crop supervised his labours,
but he knew he couldn't hope, except by chance, to see her this summer.
One Saturday morning Goodhue came unexpectedly into the office and
carried him off to Long Island. George saw the tiny eyes of Blodgett
narrow.
Blodgett, perhaps because of Mr. Alston's letter, had condescended to
chat with George a number of times in the outer office. On the Monday
following he strolled up and jerked out:
"Wasn't that young Richard Goodhue I saw you going off with Saturday?"
"Yes sir."
"Know him well?"
"Very. We're in the same class. We're rooming together next year."
Blodgett grunted and walked on, mopping his puffy face with a shiny blue
handkerchief. George wondered if he had displeased Blodgett by going
with Goodhue. He decided he hadn't, for the picturesquely dressed man
stopped oftener after that, chatting quite familiarly.
Whatever one thought of Blodgett's appearance and manner, one admired
him. George hadn't been in the Street a week before he realized that the
house of Blodgett and Sinclair was one of the most powerful in America,
with numerous ramifications to foreign countries. There was no phase of
finance it didn't touch; and, as far as George could see, it was all
Josiah Blodgett, who had come to New York from the West, by way of
Chicago. In those offices Sinclair was scarcely more than a name in gold
on various doors. Once or twice, during the summer, indeed, George saw
the partner chatting in a bored way with Blodgett. His voice was high
and affected, like Wandel's, and he had a house in Newport. According to
office gossip he had little money interest in the firm, lending the
prestige of his name for what Blodgett thought it was worth. As he
watched the fat, hard worker chatting with the butterfly man, George
suddenly realized that Blodgett might want a house in Newport, too. Was
it because he was Richard Goodhue's room-mate that Blodgett stopped him
in the hall one day, grinning with good nature?
"If I were a cub," he puffed, "I'd buy this very morning all the Katydid
I could, and sell at eighty-nine."
George whistled.
"I knew something was due to happen to Katydid, but I didn't expect
anything like that."
"How did you know?" Blodgett demanded.
He shot questions until he had got the story of George's close
observation and night drudgery.
"Glad to see Mundy hasn't dropped you out the window yet," he grinned.
"Maybe you'll get along. Glad for Mr. Alston's sake. See here, if I were
a cub, and knew as much about Katydid as you do, I wouldn't hesitate to
borrow a few cents from the boss."
"No," George said. "I've a very little of my own. I'll use that."
He had, perhaps, two hundred dollars in the bank at Princeton. He drew a
check without hesitation and followed Blodgett's advice. He had
commenced to speculate without risk. Several times after that Blodgett
jerked out similar advice, usually commencing with: "What does young
Pierpont Morgan think of so and so?" And usually George would give his
employer a reasonable forecast. Because of these discreet hints his
balance grew, and Mundy one day announced that his salary had been
raised ten dollars.
All that, however, was the brighter side. Often during those hot, heavy
nights, while he pieced together the day's complicated pattern, George
envied the fortunates who could play away from pavements and baking
walls. He found himself counting the days until he would go back to
Princeton and football, and Betty's charm; but even that prospect was
shadowed by his doubt as to how he would emerge from the club tangle.
He didn't meet Sylvia, but one day he saw Old Planter step from an
automobile and enter the marble temple where he was accustomed to
sacrifice corporations and people to the gods of his pocket-book. The
great man used a heavy stick and climbed the steps rather slowly,
flanked by obsequious underlings, gaped at by a crowd, buzzing and
over-impressed. Somehow George couldn't fancy Blodgett with the gout--it
was too delightfully bred.
He peered in the automobile, but of course Sylvia wasn't there, nor, he
gathered from his mother's occasional notes to thank him for the little
money he could send her, was she much at Oakmont.
"I'll see her this fall," he told himself, "and next winter. I've
started to do what I said I would."
As far as Wall Street was concerned, Blodgett evidently agreed with him.
"I can put up with you next summer," he said at parting. "I'll write Mr.
Alston you're fit for something besides football."
Mundy displayed a pastoral sadness.
"You ought to stay right here," he said. "College is all right if you
don't want to amount to a hill of beans. It's rotten for making money."
Nevertheless, he agreed to send George a weekly letter, giving his wise
views as to what was going on among the money makers. They all made him
feel that even in that rushing place his exit had caused a perceptible
ripple.
XXII
The smallness, the untidiness, the pure joy of Squibs Bailly's study!
The tutor ran his hands over George's muscles.
"You're looking older and a good deal worn," he said, "but thank God
you're still hard."
Mrs. Bailly sat there, too. They were both anxious for his experiences,
yet when he had told them everything he sensed a reservation in their
praise.
"I think I should turn my share of the laundry back," he said,
defiantly. "I've something like three thousand dollars of my own now."
"Does it make you feel very rich?" Mrs. Bailly asked.
He laughed.
"It's a tiny start, but I won't need half of it to get through the
winter."
Bailly lighted his pipe, stretched his legs, and pondered.
"You're giving the laundry up," he said, finally, "because--because it
savours of service?"
George didn't get angry. He couldn't with Squibs in the first place;
and, in the second, hadn't that thought been at the bottom of his mind
ever since Dalrymple's remark about dirty hands?
"I don't need it any more," he said, "and I'd like to have you dispose
of it where it will do the most good."
His voice hardened.
"But to somebody who wants to climb, not to any wild-eyed fellow who
thinks he sees salvation in pulling down."
"You've just returned from the world," Bailly said, "and all you've
brought is three thousand dollars and a bad complexion. I wish you'd
directed your steps to a coal mine. You'd have come back richer."
XXIII
Goodhue got in a few hours after George. There was a deep satisfaction
in their greetings. They were glad to be together, facing varsity
football, looking ahead to the pleasures and excitements of another
year, but George would have been happier if he could have shared his
room-mate's unconcern about the clubs. Of course, Goodhue was settled.
Did he know about George? George was glad the other couldn't guess how
carefully he had calculated the situation--to take the best, or a
dignified stand against all clubs with Allen getting behind him with all
the poor and unknown men. But wasn't that exactly Wandel's game?
Stringham and Green were glad enough to see him, but Green thought he
had been thoughtless not to have kept a football in the office for
kicking goals through transoms.
It was good to feel the vapours of the market-place leaving his lungs
and brain. Goodhue and he, during the easy preliminary work, resumed
their runs. He felt he hadn't really gone back. If he didn't get hurt he
would do things that fall that would drive the perplexed frown from
Bailly's forehead, that would win Betty's applause and Sylvia's
admiration. Whatever happened he was going to take care of her brother
in the Yale game.
Betty was rather too insistent about that. She had fallen into the habit
again of stopping George and Goodhue on their runs for a moment's
gossip.
"See here, Betty," Goodhue laughed once, "you're rather too interested
in this Eli Planter."
George had reached the same conclusion--but why should it bother him? It
was logical that Betty and Lambert should be drawn together. He blamed
himself for a habit of impatience that had grown upon him. Had it come
out of the strain of the Street, or was it an expression of his
knowledge that now, at the commencement of his second year, he
approached the culmination of his entire college course? With the club
matter settled there would remain little for him save a deepening of
useful friendships and a squeezing of the opportunity to acquire
knowledge and a proper manner. For the same cause, the approaching
election of officers for Sophomore year was of vital importance. It was
generally conceded that the ticket put through now, barring accident,
would be elected senior year to go out into the world at the head of the
class. The presidency would graduate a man with a patent of nobility, as
one might say. George guessed that all of Wandel's intrigues led to the
re-election of Goodhue. He wanted that influential office in his own
crowd. Even now George couldn't wholly sound Wandel's desires with him.
He yielded to the general interest and uneasiness. Squibs had been
right. Princeton did hold a fair sample of it all. He understood that
very much as this affair was arranged he would see the political
destinies of the country juggled later.
Allen got him alone, begging for his decision.
"Have you been asked for a club yet?"
"None of your business," George said, promptly.
"You've got to make up your mind in a hurry," Allen urged. "Promise me
now that you'll leave the clubs alone, then I can handle Mr. Wandel."
"You're dickering with him?" George asked, quickly.
"No. Mr. Wandel is trying to dicker with me."
But George couldn't make up his mind. There were other problems as
critical as the clubs. Could he afford to fight Dick Goodhue for that
high office? If only he could find out what the Goodhue crowd thought of
him!
He had an opportunity to learn one evening, and conquered a passionate
desire to eavesdrop. As he ran lightly up the stairs to his room he
heard through the open study door Wandel and Goodhue talking with an
unaccustomed heat.
"You can't take such an attitude," Wandel was saying.
"I've taken it."
"Change your mind," Wandel urged. "I've nursed him along as the only
possible tie between two otherwise irreconcilable elements of the class.
I tell you I can't put you over unless you come to your senses."
George hurried in and nodded. From their faces he gathered there had
been a fair row. Wandel grasped his arm. George stiffened. Something was
coming now. It wasn't quite what he had expected.
"How would you like," Wandel said, "to be the very distinguished
secretary of your class?"
George gazed from the window at the tree-bordered lawns where lesser men
contentedly kicked footballs to each other.
"It ought to be what the class likes," he muttered. "I'm really only
interested in seeing Dicky re-elected."
"If," Wandel said, "I told you it couldn't be done without your
distinguished and untrammelled name on the ticket?"
George flushed.
"What do you mean by untrammelled?"
"You stop that, Spike," Goodhue said, more disturbed than George had
ever seen him. "It's indecent. I won't have it."
George relaxed. Untrammelled had certainly meant free from the taint of
the clubs. He was grateful Goodhue had interfered.
"Why don't you run for something yourself, Mr. Wandel?" he asked, dryly.
Goodhue laughed.
"Carry your filthy politics somewhere else."
He and George, with an affectation of good nature, pushed Wandel out of
the room. They looked at each other. Neither said anything.
George had to call upon his will to keep his attention on his books that
night. In return for Allen's support for Goodhue Wandel wanted to give
Allen for a minor place on the ticket a poor man untrammelled by the
clubs. The realization angered George. Aside from any other
consideration he couldn't permit himself to be bartered about to save
any one--even Goodhue. But was Goodhue trying to spare him at a
sacrifice? George, with a vast relief, decided that that was so when
Goodhue mentioned casually one day that he was a certainty for the club.
"Don't say anything about it," he advised. "The upper classmen have been
getting a few of us together. I'm glad you're among us. We'll elect the
full section later."
"Of course I came here a stranger," George began, trying to hide his
pleasure.
"Quite a lot of us have learned to know you pretty well," Goodhue
smiled.
George wouldn't accept this coveted gift without putting himself on
record.
"I needn't ask you," he said, "if Dalrymple's already in."
Goodhue shook his head.
"Maybe later."
"I think," George said, distinctly, "that the men who are responsible
for my election should know I'll hold out against Dalrymple."
"You're a conscientious beggar," Goodhue laughed. "It's your own
business now, but there'll be a nice little rumpus just the same."
George was conscientious with Allen, too.
"I feel I ought to tell you," he said, "that I've made up my mind, if
I'm asked, to join a club. Anything that has so much to offer can't be
as bad as you think."
Without answering Allen flushed and walked off angrily.
It was the next day that the parties gathered on the top floor of
Dickinson Hall for the election. George went as an amused spectator. He
had played the game on the level and had destroyed his own chances, but
he was afraid he had destroyed Goodhue's, too, or Goodhue had destroyed
his own by insisting on taking George into the club. That was a
sacrifice George wanted to repay.
Wandel, as usual, was undisturbed. Allen's angular figure wandered
restlessly among the groups. George had no idea what the line-up was.
George sensed weakness in the fact that, when the nominations were
opened, Wandel was the first on his feet. He recited Goodhue's virtues
as an athlete and a scholar. Like a real political orator at a
convention he examined his record as president the previous year. He
placed him in nomination amid a satisfactory applause. Now what was
coming? Who did Allen have?
When he arose Allen wore an air of getting through with a formality. He
insisted on the fact that his candidate was working his way through
college, and would always be near the top scholastically. He represented
a section of the class that the more fortunate of the students were
prone to forget. And so on--a condensation of his complaints to George.
The room filled with suspense, which broke into loud laughter when Allen
named a man of absolutely no importance or colour, who couldn't poll
more than the votes of his personal friends. A trick, George guessed it,
and everyone else. But Wandel was quickly moving that the nominations be
closed. Allen glanced around with a worried, expectant air. Then George
saw that Rogers was up--a flushed, nervous figure--and had got the
floor. He spoke rapidly, nearly unintelligibly.
"My candidate doesn't need any introduction," he recited. "All factions
can unite on him--the man that smashed the Yale and Harvard Freshmen.
The man who is going to smash the Yale and Harvard varsities this
year--George Morton!"
A cheer burst out, loud, from the heart. George saw that it came from
both sides. The poor men had been stampeded, too.
Goodhue was on his feet, his arms upraised, demanding recognition.
Suddenly George realized what this meant to Goodhue, and temper replaced
his amazement. He sprang up, shouting:
"I won't have it----"
A dozen pairs of hands dragged him down. A dozen voices cried in his
ears:
"Shut up, you damned fool!"
XXIV
Goodhue got the floor and withdrew his name, but the chairman wouldn't
see or hear George. He declared the nominations closed. It was as if he
and all the lesser men, who weren't leading factions, had seen in
George the one force that could pull the class together. The vote was
perfunctory, and Allen lazily moved to make it unanimous. George took
the chair, frowning, altogether unhappy in his unforeseen victory. He
had a feeling of having shabbily repaid Goodhue's loyalty and sacrifice,
yet it hadn't been his fault; but would Goodhue know that?
"Speech! Shoot something, George! Talk up there, Mr. President!"
He'd give them a speech to chew over.
"Back-door politicians have done their best to split the class. The
class has taken matters into its own hands. There isn't going to be a
split. It won't be long before you'll have Prospect Street off your
minds. That seems to be two thirds of the trouble. Let's forget it, and
pull together, and leave Princeton a little better than we found it. If
you think anything needs reform let's talk about it openly and sensibly,
clubs and all. I appreciate the honour, but Dick Goodhue ought to have
had it, would have had it, if he hadn't been born with a silver spoon.
Ought a man's wealth or poverty stand against him here? Think it over.
That's all."
There was no opposition to Goodhue's election as Secretary.
Allen slipped to George at the close of the meeting.
"About what I'd have expected of you, anyway."
But George was looking for Goodhue, found him, and walked home with him.
"Best thing that could have happened," Goodhue said. "They're all
marvelling at your nerve for talking about Prospect Street as you did."
George spied Rogers, and beckoned the freshly prominent youth.
"See here, young man, please come to my room after practice."
Rogers, with a frightened air, promised. Wandel appeared before, quite
as if nothing had happened. He wouldn't even talk about the election.
"Just the same, Warwick," George said, "I'm not at all sure a poler
named Allen couldn't tell you something about juggling crowns."
"A penetrating as well as a great president," Wandel smiled. "I haven't
thanked you yet for joining our club."
George looked straight at him.
"But I've thanked Dicky for it," he said.
Rogers, when he arrived after Wandel's departure, didn't want to
confess, but George knew how to get it out of him.
"You've put your finger in my pie without my consent," he said. "I'll
hold that against you unless you talk up. Besides, it won't go beyond
Goodhue and me. It's just for our information."
"All right," Rogers agreed, nervously, "provided it doesn't go out of
this room. And there's no point mentioning names. A man we all know came
to me this morning and talked about the split in the class. He couldn't
get Goodhue elected because he didn't have any way of buying the support
of the poor men. Allen, he figured, was going to nominate a lame duck,
and then have somebody not too rich and not too poor spring his own
name, figuring he would get the votes of the bulk of the class which
just can't help being jealous of Goodhue and his little crowd. This chap
thought he could beat Allen at that game by stampeding the class for you
before Allen could get himself up, and he wanted somebody representative
of the bulk of the class, that holds the balance of power, to put you in
nomination. He figured even the poor men would flock to you in spite of
Allen's opposition."
"And what did he offer you?" George sneered.
Rogers turned away without answering.
"Like Driggs," Goodhue said, when Rogers had gone. "He couldn't have
what he wanted, but he got about as good. Politically, what's the
difference? Both offices are in his crowd, but he's avoided making you
look like his president."
George grinned.
"I don't wonder you call him Spike."
XXV
George, filled with a cold triumph, stared for a long time at Sylvia's
portrait that night. If she thought of him at all she would have to
admit he had come closer. At Princeton he was as big a man as her rich
brother was at Yale. He belonged to a club where her own kind gathered.
Give him money--and he was going to have that--and her attitude must
alter. He bent the broken crop between his fingers, his triumph fading.
He had come closer, but not close enough to hurt.
The Baillys and Betty congratulated him at practice the next day.
"You were the logical man," Betty said, "but the politicians didn't seem
to want you."
Bailly drew him aside.
"It was scandal in the forum," he said, "that money and the clubs were
an issue in this election."
George fingered his headgear, laughing unpleasantly.
"Yes, and they elected a poor man; a low sort of a fellow with a
shadowed past."
"Forget your past," Bailly pled, "and remember in the present that the
poor men, who helped elect you, are looking for your guidance. They need
help."
"Then," George said, "why didn't they get themselves elected so they
could help themselves?"
"Into the world there are born many cripples," Bailly said, softly.
"Would you condemn them for not running as fast as the congenitally
sound?"
"Trouble is, they don't try to run," George answered.
He looked at the other defiantly. Bailly had to know. It was his right.
"I can guess what house I'm going to on Prospect Street."
"Which?" Bailly sighed.
"To the very home of reaction," George laughed. "But it's easier to
reform from the inside."
"No," Bailly said, gravely. "The chairs are too comfortable."
He pressed George's arm.
"It isn't the clubs here that worry me in relation to you. It's the
principle of the lights behind the railing in the restless world. Try
not to surrender to the habit of the guarded light."
George was glad when Stringham called from the field.
"Jump in here, Morton!"
He took his turn at the dummy scrimmage. Such exercise failed to offer
its old zest, nor was it the first day he had appreciated that. The
intrusion of these unquiet struggles might be responsible, yet, with
them determined in his favour, his anxiety did not diminish. Was Bailly
to blame with his perpetual nagging about the outside world where grave
decisions waited? George frankly didn't want to face them. They seemed
half-decipherable signposts which tempted him perplexingly and
precariously from his path. What had just happened, added to the passage
of a year and his summer in Wall Street, had brought that headlong world
very close, had outlined too clearly the barriers which made it
dangerous; so even here he spent some time each night studying the
changing lines in the battle for money.
Yet Goodhue, with a settled outlook, shared George's misgivings at the
field.
"It isn't the fun it was Freshman year," he grumbled one night. "We used
to complain then that they worked us too hard. Now I don't believe they
work us hard enough."
That was a serious doubt for two men who realized they alone might save
inferior if eager material from defeat; and it grew until they resumed
surreptitiously the extra work they had attempted hitherto only outside
of the season or just at its commencement. Then it had not interfered
with Green's minutely studied scheme of physical development. Now it
did. The growth of their worry, moreover, measured the decline of their
condition. These apprehensions had a sharper meaning for George than for
his room-mate. Almost daily he saw his picture on the sporting pages of
newspapers. "Morton of Princeton, the longest kicker in the game." "The
keystone of the Princeton attack." "The man picked to lead Stringham's
hopes to victory over Harvard and Yale." And so on. Exaggeration, George
told himself, that would induce the university, the alumni, the Baillys,
Betty, and Sylvia--most of all Sylvia--to expect more than he could
reasonably give at his best.
"Don't forget you've promised to take care of Lambert Planter----"
In some form Betty repeated it every time George saw her. It irritated
him--not that it really made any difference--that Lambert Planter should
occupy her mind to that extent. No emotion as impersonal as college
spirit would account for it; and somehow it did make a difference.
George suspected the truth a few days before the Harvard game, and
persuaded Goodhue to abandon all exercise away from Green's watchful
eye; but he went on the field still listless, irritable, and stale.
That game, as so frequently happens, was the best played and the
prettiest to watch of the season. George wondered if Sylvia was in the
crowd. There was no question about her being at New Haven next week. He
wanted to save his best for that afternoon when she would be sure to see
him, when he would take her brother on for another thrashing. But it
wasn't in him to hold back anything, and the cheering section, where
Squibs sat, demanded all he had. To win this game, it became clear after
the first few plays, would take an exceptional effort. Only George's
long and well-calculated kicking held down the Harvard attack. Toward
the close of the first half a fumble gave Princeton the ball on
Harvard's thirty-yard line, and Goodhue for the first time seriously
called on George to smash the Harvard defence. With his effort some of
the old zest returned. Twice he made it first down by inches.
"Stick to your interference," Goodhue was begging him between each play.
Then, with his interference blocked and tumbling, George yielded to his
old habit, and slipped off to one side at a hazard. The enemy secondary
defence had been drawing in, and there was no one near enough to stop
him within those ten yards, and he went over for a touchdown, and
casually kicked the goal.
When, a few minutes later, he walked off the field, he experienced no
elation. He realized all at once how tired he was. Like a child he
wanted to go to Stringham and say:
"Stringham, I don't want to play any more games to-day. I want to lie
down and rest."
He smiled as he dreamed of Stringham's reply.
It was Stringham, really, who came to him as he sat silently and with
drooping shoulders in the dressing-room.
"What's wrong here? When you're hurt I want to know it."
George got up.
"I'm not hurt. I'm all right."
Green arrived and helped Stringham poke while George submitted, wishing
they'd leave him alone so he could sit down and rest.
"We've got to have him next week," Stringham said, "but this game isn't
won by a long shot."
"What's the matter with me?" George asked. "I'll play."
He heard a man near by remark:
"He's got the colour of a Latin Salutatorian."
They let him go back, nevertheless, and at the start he suffered his
first serious injury. He knew when he made the tackle that the strap of
his headgear snapped. He felt the leather slide from his head,
experienced the crushing of many bodies, had a brief conviction that the
sun had been smothered. His next impression was of bare, white walls in
a shaded room. His brain held no record of the hushing of the multitude
when he had remained stretched in his darkness on the trampled grass; of
the increasing general fear while substitutes had carried him from the
field on a stretcher; or of the desertion of the game by the Baillys, by
Betty and her father, by Wandel, the inscrutable, even by the
revolutionary Allen, by a score of others, who had crowded the entrance
of the dressing room asking hushed questions, and a few moments later
had formed behind him a silent and frightened procession as he had been
carried to the infirmary. Mrs. Bailly told him about it.
"I saw tears in Betty's eyes," she said, softly, "through my own. It was
so like a funeral march."
"And you missed the end of the game?" George asked.
She nodded.
"When my husband knew Harvard had scored he said, 'That wouldn't have
happened if George had been there.' And it wouldn't have."
But all George could think of was:
"Squibs missed half a game for me, and there were tears in Betty's
eyes."
Tears, because he had suggested the dreadful protagonist of a funeral
march.
His period of consciousness was brief. He drifted into the darkness once
more, accompanied by that extraordinary and seductive vision of Betty in
tears. It came with him late the next morning back into the light.
Sylvia's portrait was locked in a drawer far across the campus. What
superb luxury to lie here with such a recollection, forecasting no near
physical effort, quite relaxed, dreaming of Betty, who had always meant
rest as Sylvia had always meant unquiet and absorbing struggle.
He judged it wise to pretend to be asleep, but hunger at last made him
stir and threw him into an anxious agitation of examinations by
specialists, of conferences with coaches, and of doubts and prayers and
exhortations from everyone admitted to the room; for even the
specialists were Princeton men. They were non-committal. It had been a
nasty blow. There had been some concussion. They would guarantee him in
two weeks, but of course he didn't have that long. One old fellow turned
suspiciously on Green.
"He was overworked when he got hurt."
"I'll be all right," George kept saying, "if you'll fix a headgear to
cover my new soft spot."
And finally:
"I'll be all right if you'll only leave me alone."
Yet, when they had, Squibs came, totally forgetful of his grave problems
of the classes, foreseeing no disaster nearly as serious as a defeat by
Yale--"now that we've done so well against Harvard, and would have done
better if you hadn't got hurt"--limping the length of the sick-room
until the nurse lost her temper and drove him out. Then Goodhue arrived
as the herald of Josiah Blodgett, of all people.
"This does me good," George pled with the nurse.
And it did. For the first time in a number of weeks he felt amused as
Blodgett with a pinkish silk handkerchief massaged his round, unhealthy
face.
"Thought you didn't like football," George said.
"Less reason to like it now," Blodgett jerked out. "Only sensible place
to play it is the front yard of a hospital. Thought I'd come down and
watch you and maybe look up what was left afterward."
George fancied a wavering of the little eyes in Goodhue's direction, and
became even more amused, for he believed a more calculating man than
Blodgett didn't live; yet there seemed a real concern in the man's
insistence that George, with football out of the way, should spend a
recuperative Thanksgiving at his country place. George thought he would.
He was going to work again for Blodgett next summer.
Betty and Mrs. Bailly were the last callers the nurse would give in to,
although she must have seen how they helped, one in a chair on either
side of the bed; and it was difficult not to look at only one. In her
eyes he sought for a souvenir of those tears, and wanted to tell her how
sorry he was; but he wasn't really sorry, and anyway she mustn't guess
that he knew. Why had Mrs. Bailly bothered to tell him at all? Could her
motherly instinct hope for a coming together so far beyond belief? His
memory of the remote portrait reminded him that it was incredible in
every way. He sighed. Betty beckoned Mrs. Bailly and rose.
"Don't go," George begged, aware that he ought to urge her to go.
"Betty was having tea with me," Mrs. Bailly offered.
"I would have asked to be brought anyway," Betty said, openly. "You
frightened us yesterday. We've all wanted to find out the truth."
There was in her eyes now at least a reminiscent pain.
"Don't worry," he said, "I'll take care of Lambert Planter for you after
all."
She stooped swiftly and offered her hand.
"You'll take care of yourself. It would be beastly if they let you play
at the slightest risk."
He grasped her hand. The touch of her flesh, combined with such a
memory, made him momentarily forgetful. He held her hand too long, too
firmly. He saw the colour waver in her pale cheeks. He let her hand go,
but he continued to watch her eyes until they turned uncertainly to Mrs.
Bailly.
When they had left he slept again. He slept away his listlessness of the
past few weeks. As he confided to his callers, who were confined to an
hour in the afternoon, he did nothing but sleep and eat. He was more
content than he had been since his indifferent days, long past, at
Oakmont. All these people had deserted the game for him when he was no
longer of any use to the game. Then he had acquired, even for such
clashing types as Wandel and Allen, a value that survived his football.
He had advanced on a road where he had not consciously set his feet. He
treasured that thought. Next Saturday he would reward these friends, for
he was confident he could do it now. By Wednesday he was up and dressed,
feeling better than he had since the commencement of the season. If only
they didn't hurt his head again! The newspapers helped there, too. If he
played, they said, it would be under a severe handicap. He smiled,
knowing he was far fitter, except for his head, than he had been the
week before.
Until the squad left for New Haven he continued to live in the
infirmary, watching the light practice of the last days without even
putting on his football clothes.
"The lay-off won't hurt me," he promised.
Stringham and Green were content to accept his judgment.
As soon as he was able he went to his room and got Sylvia's portrait. He
disciplined himself for his temporary weakness following the accident.
He tried to force from his memory the sentiment aroused by Betty's tears
through the thought that he approached his first real chance to impress
Sylvia. He could do it. He was like an animal insufficiently exercised,
straining to be away.
XXVI
He alone, as the squad dressed in the gymnasium, displayed no signs of
misgiving. Here was the climax of the season. All the better. The larger
the need the greater one's performance must be. But the others didn't
share that simple faith.
He enjoyed the ride to the field in the cold, clear air, through
hurrying, noisy, and colourful crowds. He liked the impromptu cheers
they gave the team, sometimes himself particularly.
In the field dressing-room, like men condemned, the players received
their final instructions. Already they were half beaten because they
were going to face Yale--all but George, who knew he was going to play
better than ever, because he was going to face one Yale man, Lambert
Planter, with Sylvia in the stands. He kept repeating to himself:
"I will! I _will_!"
He laughed at the others.
"There aren't any wild beasts out there--just eleven men like ourselves.
If there's going to be any wild-beasting let's do it to them."
They trotted through an opening into a vast place walled by men and
women. At their appearance the walls seemed to disintegrate, and a
chaotic noise went up as if from that ponderous convulsion.
George dug his toes into the moist turf and looked about. Sylvia was
there, a tiny unit in the disturbed enclosure, but if she had sat alone
it would have made no difference. His incentive would have been
unaltered.
Again the convulsion, and the Yale team was on the field. George singled
Planter out--the other man that Sylvia would watch to-day. He did look
fit, and bigger than last year. George shrugged his shoulders.
"I will!"
Nevertheless, he was grateful for his week of absolute rest. He smiled
as the crowd applauded his long kicks to the backs. He wasn't exerting
himself now.
The two captains went to the centre of the field while the teams trotted
off. Lambert came up to George.
"The return match," he said, "and you won't want another."
George grinned.
"I've heard it's the Yale system to try to frighten the young opponent."
"You'll know more about the Yale system after the first half," Lambert
said, and walked on.
George realized that Lambert hadn't smiled once. In his face not a trace
of the old banter had shown. Yale system or Yale spirit, it possessed
visible qualities of determination and peril, but he told himself he
could lick Lambert and smile while doing it.
At the whistle he was off like a race horse, never losing sight of
Lambert until he was reasonably sure the ball wouldn't get to him. They
clashed personally almost at the start. Yale had the ball, and Lambert
took it, and tore through the line, and lunged ahead with growing speed
and power. George met him head on. They smashed to the ground. As he
hugged Lambert there for a moment George whispered:
"Nothing fantastic about that, is there? Now get past me, Mr. Planter."
The tackle had been vicious. Lambert rose rather slowly to his feet.
George's kicks outdistanced Lambert's. Once he was forced by a Princeton
fumble, and a march of thirty yards by Yale, to kick from behind his own
goal line. He did exert himself then, and he outguessed the two men
lying back. As a result Yale put the ball in play on her own thirty-yard
line, while the stands marvelled, the Princeton side demonstratively,
yet George, long before the half was over, became conscious of something
not quite right. Since beyond question he was the star of his team he
received a painstaking attention from the Yale men. There is plenty of
legitimate roughness in football, and it can be concentrated. In every
play he was reminded of the respect Yale had for him. Perpetually he
tried to spare his head, but it commenced to ache abominably, and after
a tackle by Lambert, to repay him for some of his own deadly and painful
ones, he got up momentarily dazed.
"Let's do something now," he pled with Goodhue, when, thanks to his
kicks, they had got the ball at midfield. He wanted a score before this
silly weakness could put him out. With a superb skill he went after a
score. His forward passes to Goodhue and the ends were well-conceived,
beautifully executed, and frequently successful. Many times he took the
ball himself, fighting through the line or outside of tackle to run
against Lambert or another back. Once he got loose for a run of fifteen
yards, dodging or shaking off half the Yale team while the stands with
primeval ferocity approved and prayed.
That made it first down on Yale's five-yard line. He was absolutely
confident that the Yale team could not prevent his taking the ball over
in the next few plays.
"I will! I will! I will!" he said to himself.
Alone, he felt, he could overcome that five yards against the eleven of
them.
"Let's have it, Dicky," he whispered. "I'm going over this play or the
next. Shoot me outside of tackle."
On the first play Goodhue fumbled, and a Yale guard fell on the ball.
George stared, stifling an instinct to destroy his friend. The chance
had been thrown away, and his head made him suffer more and more. Then
he saw that Goodhue wanted to die, and as they went back to place
themselves for the Yale kick, George said:
"You've proved we can get through them. Next time!"
Would there be a next time? And Goodhue didn't seem to hear. With all
his enviable inheritance and training he failed to conceal a passionate
remorse; his conviction of a peculiar and unforgivable criminality.
In the dressing-room a few minutes later some of the players bitterly
recalled that ghastly error, and a coach or two turned furiously on the
culprit. It was too bad Squibs and Allen weren't there to watch
George's white temper, an emotion he didn't understand himself, born, he
tried to explain it later, of his hurt head.
"Cut that out!" he snarled.
The temper of one of the coaches--an assistant--flamed back.
"It was handing the game on a----"
George reached out and caught the shoulders of that man who during the
season had ordered him around. The ringing in his head, the increasing
pain, had destroyed all memory of discipline.
"Say another word and I'll throw you out of here."
The room fell silent. Some men gasped. The coach shrank from the furious
face, tried to elude the powerful grasp. Stringham hurried up. George
let the other go.
"Mr. Stringham," he said, quietly, "if there's any more of this I'll
quit right now, and so will the rest of the team if they've any pluck."
Stringham motioned the coach away, soothed George, led him to a chair,
where Green and a doctor got off his battered headgear. George wanted to
scream, but he conquered the brimming impulse, and managed to speak
rationally.
"You've done all you can for us. We've got to play the game ourselves,
and we're not giving anything away. We're not making any mistakes we can
help."
Goodhue came up and gripped his shoulder. The touch quieted him.
"This man oughtn't to go back, Green," the doctor announced.
George stiffened. He hadn't made that score. He hadn't smashed Lambert
Planter half enough. Better to leave the field on a stretcher, and in
darkness again, than to quit like this: to walk out between the halves;
not to walk back. He began to lie, overcoming a physical agony of which
he had never imagined his powerful body capable.
"No, that doesn't hurt, nor that," he replied, calmly, to the doctor's
questions. "Don't think I'm nutty because I lost my temper. My head's
all right. That gear's fine."
So they let him go back, and he counted the plays, willing himself to
receive and overcome the pounding each down brought him, continuing by
pure force of will to outplay Lambert; to save his team from dangerous
gains, from possible scores; nearly breaking away himself half-a-dozen
times, although the Princeton eleven was tiring and much of the play was
in its territory.
The sun had gone behind heavy clouds. A few snowflakes fluttered down.
It was nearly dark. In spite of his exertions he felt cold, and knew it
for an evil sign. Once or twice he shivered. His throbbing head gave him
an illusion of having grown enormously so that it got in everybody's
way. Instinctively he caught a Yale forward pass on his own thirty-yard
line and tore off, slinging tacklers aside with the successful fury of a
young bull all of whose dangerous actions are automatic. He had come a
long way. He didn't know just how far, but the Yale goal posts were
near. Then, quite consciously, he saw Lambert Planter cutting across to
intercept him. The meeting of the two was unavoidable. He thought he
heard Lambert's voice.
"Not past me!"
Lambert plunged for the tackle. George's right hand shot out and smashed
open against Lambert's face. He raced on, leaving Lambert sprawled and
clawing at the ground.
The quarterback managed to bring him down on the eight-yard line, then
lost him; yet, before George could get to his feet others had pounced,
and his heavy, awkward head had crashed against the earth again.
They dragged him to his feet. For a few moments he lurched about,
shaking off friendly hands.
"Only five minutes more, George," somebody prayed.
Only five minutes! Good God! For him each moment was a century of
unspeakable martyrdom. Flecks of rain or snow touched his face, lifted
in revolt. The contact, wet and cold, cleared his brain a trifle--let in
the screaming of the multitude, hoarse and incoherent, raised at first
in thanksgiving for his run, then, after its close, altering to menacing
disappointment and command. What business had they to tell him what to
do? Up there, warm and comfortable, undergoing no exercise more violent
than occasional excited rising and sitting down, they had the selfish
impudence to order him to make a touchdown. Why should he obey, or even
try? He had done his job, more than any one could reasonably have asked
of him. He had outplayed Lambert, gained more ground than any man on the
field, made more valuable tackles. Could he really impress Sylvia any
further? Why shouldn't he walk off now in the face of those unjust
commands to the rest he had earned and craved with all his body and
mind?
"Touchdown! Touchdown! Touchdown! Morton! Morton! Morton!"
Damn them! Why not, indeed, walk off, where he wouldn't have to listen
to that thoughtless and autocratic impertinence?
He glanced down at his blackened hands, at his filthy breeches, at his
jersey striped about the sleeves with orange; and with a wave of
self-loathing he knew why he couldn't go. He had sworn never to wear
anything like livery again, yet here he was--in livery, a servant to men
and women who asked dreadful things without troubling even to
approximate the agony of obedience.
"I'll not be a servant," he had told Bailly.
Bailly had made him one after all, and an old phrase of the tutor's
slipped back:
"Some day, young man, you'll learn that the world lives by service."
George had not believed. Now for a moment his half-conscious brain knew
Bailly had been right. He had to serve.
He knocked aside the sponge Green held to his face. He indicated the
bucket of cold water the trainer had carried out.
"Throw it over my head," he said, "the whole thing. Throw it hard."
Green obeyed. He, too, who ought to have understood, was selfish and
imperious.
"You make a touchdown!" he commanded hoarsely.
The water stung George's eyes, rushed down his neck in thrilling
streams, braced him for the time. The teams lined up while the
Princeton stands roared approval that their best servant should remain
on the job.
Goodhue called the signal for a play around the left tackle. Every Yale
player was confident that George would take the ball, sensed the
direction of the play, and, over-anxious, massed there, all but the
quarter, who lay back between the goal posts. George saw, and turned
sharply, darting to the right. Suddenly he knew, because of that
over-anxiety of Yale, that he had a touchdown. Only the Yale quarterback
had a chance for the tackle, and he couldn't stop George in that
distance.
Out of the corner of his eye George noticed Goodhue standing to the
right and a little behind. He, too, must have seen the victorious
outcome of the play, and George caught in his attitude again that air of
a unique criminal. They'd hold that fumble against Dicky forever
unless--if Goodhue had the ball the Yale quarter couldn't even get his
hands on him until he had crossed the line.
"Dicky!"
The dejected figure sprang into action. Without weighing his sacrifice,
without letting himself think of the crime of disobeying a signal, of
the risks of a hurried throw or of another fumble, George shot the ball
across, then forged ahead and put the Yale quarterback out of the play,
while Goodhue strolled across the line and set the ball down behind the
goal posts.
As he went back to kick the goal George heard through the crashing
cacophony from the stands Goodhue's uncertain voice:
"Why didn't you make that touchdown yourself? It was yours. You had it.
You had earned it."
"It was the team's," George answered, shortly. "I might have been
spilled. Sure thing for you."
"You precious idiot!" Goodhue whispered.
As George kicked the goal there came to him again, across his pain, that
sensation of being on a road he had not consciously set out to explore.
He wondered why he was so well content.
Eternity ended. With the whistle and the crunching of the horn George
staggered to his feet. Goodhue and another player supported him while
the team clustered for a cheer for Yale. The Princeton stands were a
terrific avalanche descending upon that little group. Green tried to
rescue him, shouting out his condition; but the avalanche wouldn't have
it. It dashed upon him, tossed him shoulder high, while it emitted
crashing noises out of which his name emerged.
Goodhue was up also, and the others. Goodhue was gesturing and talking,
pointing in his direction. Soon Goodhue and the others were down. The
happy holocaust centred its efforts on George. Why? Had Goodhue given
things away about that touchdown? Anyhow, they knew how to reward their
servants, these people.
They carried George on strong shoulders at the head of their careening
procession. His dazed brain understood that they desired to honour the
man who had done the giant's share, the one who had made victory
possible, and he sensed a wrong, a sublime ignorance or indifference
that they should carry only him. The victory went back of George Morton.
He bent down, screaming into the ears of his bearers.
"Squibs Bailly! He found me. If it wasn't for him I wouldn't have played
to-day. Bailly, or let me down! Bailly made that run! I tell you, Bailly
played that game!"
In his earnestness he grew hysterical.
Maybe it was because they wanted to humour the hero, or perhaps they
caught his own hysteria, realizing what Bailly had done for him. They
stopped in front of the stands to which Bailly's bad foot had condemned
him during this triumphant march. They commenced a high-pitched, frantic
chant.
"We want Squibs Bailly! We want Squibs Bailly! We want Squibs Bailly!"
George waved his hands, holding the column until the slender figure,
urged by the spectators remaining in the stands, came down with
difficulty and embarrassment to be caught and lifted tenderly up beside
George.
Then, with these two aloft in the very front, the wild march was resumed
through the Yale goal posts while Squibs' wrinkled face twitched, while
in his young eyes burned the unsurpassable light of a hopeless wish
miraculously come true.
XXVII
Green rescued George when his head was drooping and his eyes blurred. He
got him to the gymnasium and stretched him out there and set the doctors
to work on his head.
A voice got into George's brain. Who was talking? Was it Goodhue, or
Stringham?
"I guess you can see him, but he's pretty vague. Played the whole game
with a broken head. Lied to the doctors."
George forced his eyes open. Lambert Planter, still in his stained
football clothes, bent over him.
"Hello, Planter!"
Lambert grasped the black hand.
"Hello, George Morton!"
That was all. Lambert went away, but George knew that what he had really
said was:
"It's only what you've made of yourself that counts."
XXVIII
At Princeton they kept him in the infirmary for a few days, but he
didn't like it. It filled him with a growing fear. Since it made no
particular difference now how long he was ill, they let him see too many
callers. He distrusted hero worship. Most of all was he afraid when such
devotion came from Betty.
"Being a vicarious hero," Mrs. Bailly said, "has made my husband the
happiest man in Princeton."
After that she didn't enter the conversation much, and again George
sensed, with a reluctant thrill, a maternal caring in her heart for him.
"You never ought to have gone back in the second half," Betty said.
"If I hadn't," he laughed, "who would have taken care of Lambert Planter
for you?"
"Squibs says you might have been killed."
"He's a great romancer," George exploded.
"Just the same, it was splendid of you to play at all."
She touched the white bandage about his head.
"Does it hurt a great deal?"
"No," he said, nearly honestly. "I only let them keep me here to cut
some dull lectures."
He glanced at Betty wistfully.
"Did I take care of Lambert Planter as you wanted?"
She glanced away.
"Are you punishing me? Haven't you read the papers? You outplayed him
and every man on the field."
"That was what you wished?"
She turned back with an assumption of impatience.
"What do you mean?"
He couldn't tell her. He couldn't probe further into her feelings for
Lambert, her attitude toward himself. He had to get his mind in hand
again.
Betty brought her mother one day. Mrs. Alston was full of praise, but
she exuded an imperial distaste for his sick-room. Both times he had to
overcome an impulse to beg Betty not to go so soon. That more than
anything else made him afraid of himself. It was, he felt, an excellent
change to escape to an active life.
Blodgett's place gave him a massive, tasteless welcome. It was one of
those houses with high, sloping roofs, numerous chimneys, and much
sculptured stone, slightly reminiscent of Mansart, and enormously
suggestive of that greatest architect of all, the big round dollar. In
its grounds it fitted like a huge diamond on a flowered shirt-front.
There were terraces; and a sunken garden, a little self-conscious with
coy replicas of regency sculpture; and formal walks between carefully
barbered trees and hedges. It convinced George that his original choice
of three necessities had been wise. Blodgett had the money, but he
didn't have Squibs Bailly and Goodhue or the things they personified.
And how Blodgett coveted The Goodhue Quality! George told himself that
was why he had been asked, because he was so close to Goodhue. But
Blodgett let him see that there was another motive. After those games
George was temporarily one of the nation's famous men.
It wasn't until he had arrived that George understood how near
Blodgett's place was to Oakmont--not more than fifteen miles. He was
interested, but he had no idea, even if the Planters were there for
Thanksgiving, that he would see any of them.
At Blodgett's bachelor enormity people came and went. At times the huge,
over-decorated rooms were filled, yet to George they seemed depressingly
empty because he knew they didn't enclose the men and the women Blodgett
wanted. Mr. and Mrs. Sinclair, indeed, motored out for Thanksgiving
dinner--a reluctant concession, George gathered, to a profitable
partnership. Blodgett brought him forth as a specimen, and the specimen
impressed, for it isn't given to everyone to sit down at the close of
the season with the year's most famous football player. It puzzled
George that in the precious qualities he craved he knew himself superior
to everyone in the house except these two who made him feel depressingly
inferior. Would he some day reach the point where he would react
unconsciously, as they did, to every social emergency?
When the dinner party had scattered, Blodgett and he walked alone on the
terrace in an ashen twilight. There the surprise was sprung. It was
clearly no surprise to his host, who beamed at George, pointing to the
drive.
"I 'phoned him he would find an old football friend here if he'd take
the trouble to drive over."
"But you didn't tell him my name?" George gasped.
"No, but why----"
Blodgett broke off and hurried his heavy body to the terrace edge to
greet these important arrivals.
Lambert sprang from the runabout he had driven up and helped Sylvia
down. She was bundled in becoming furs. The sharp air had heightened her
rich colouring. How beautiful she was--lovelier than George had
remembered! Here was the tonic to kill the distracting doubts raised by
Betty. Here was the very spring of his wilful ambition. Glancing at
Sylvia, Betty's tranquil influence lost its power.
At her first recognition of him she stopped abruptly, but Lambert ran
across and grasped his hand.
"How do, Morton. Never guessed Blodgett's message referred to you."
George disapproved of Blodgett's methods. Why had the man made him a
mystery at the very moment he used him as a bait to attract Lambert and
Sylvia? Wasn't he important enough, or was it only because he was a
Princeton man and Blodgett had feared some enmity might linger?
Lambert's manner, at least, was proof that he had, indeed, meant to give
George a message that night in the dressing-room at New Haven. George
appreciated that "How do, Morton"--greeting at last of a man for a man
instead of a man for a servant or a former servant; nor was Lambert's
call to his sister without a significance nearly sharp enough to hurt.
"Sylvia! Didn't you meet this strong-armed Princetonian at Betty's dance
a year ago?"
George understood that she had no such motives as Lambert's for altering
her attitude, so much more uncompromising from the beginning than his.
There had been no contact or shared pain. Only what she might have
observed from a remote stand that Saturday could have affected her. How
would she respond now?
She advanced slowly, at first bewildered, then angry. But Blodgett had
nothing but his money to recommend him to her. She wouldn't, George was
certain, bare any intimacies of emotion before him.
"I rather think I did."
In her eyes George recognized the challenge he had last seen there.
"Thanks for remembering me," he said rather in Wandel's manner.
"A week ago Saturday----" she began, uncertainly, as though her
remembering needed an apology.
"Who could forget the great Morton?" Lambert laughed. "With a broken
head he beat Yale. That was a hard game to lose."
"I'd heard," she said, indifferently, "that you had been hurt."
George would have preferred words as ugly and unforgettable as those she
had attacked him with the day of her accident. She turned to Blodgett.
George had an instinct to shake her as she chatted easily and casually,
glancing at him from time to time. He could have borne it better if she
hadn't included him at all.
He was glad her brother occupied him. Lambert was for dissecting each
play of the game, and he made no attempt to hide the admiration for
George it had aroused. He gave the impression that he knew very well men
didn't do such things--particularly that little trick with
Goodhue--unless they were the right sort.
Blodgett said something about tea. They strolled into the house. A fire
burned in the great hall. That was the only light. George came last,
directly after Sylvia.
"So you're a friend of Mr. Blodgett's!" she said with an intonation
intended to hurt.
"I wouldn't have expected," he answered, easily, "to find you a caller
here."
She paused and faced him. Lights from the distant fire got as far as her
face, disclosing her contempt. He wouldn't let her speak.
"I won't have you think I had anything to do with bringing you. I never
guessed until I saw your brother drive up."
She didn't believe him, or she tried to impress him with that affront.
Blodgett and Lambert had gone on into the library. They remained quite
alone in the huge, dusky hall, whose shadow masses shifted as the fire
blazed and fell. For the first time since their ancient rides he could
talk to her undisturbed. He wouldn't let that fact tie his tongue. She
couldn't call him "stable boy" now, although she did try to say "beast"
in another way. This solitude in the dusk, shared with her, stripped
every distracting thought from his mind. He was as hard as steel and
happy in his inflexibility.
"You believe me," he said.
She shook her head and turned for the door.
"Let me say one thing," he urged. "It's rather important."
She came back through the shadows, her attitude reminiscent of the one
she had assumed long ago when she had sought to hurt him. He caught his
breath, waiting.
"There is nothing," she said, shivering a little in spite of the hall's
warmth and the furs she still wore, "that you would think of saying to
me if you had changed at all from the impertinent groom I had to have
discharged."
He laughed.
"Oh! Call me anything you please, only I've always wanted to thank you
for not making a scene at Miss Alston's dance a year ago."
He would be disappointed if that failed to hurt back. The thought of
Sylvia Planter making a scene! At least it fanned her temper.
"What is there," she threatened, defensively, "to prevent my telling Mr.
Blodgett, any one I please, now?"
"Nothing, except that I'm a trifle more on my feet," he answered. "I'm
not sure your scandal would blow me over. We're going to meet again
frequently. It can't he helped."
"I never want," she said, as if speaking of something unclean and
revolting, "to see you again."
His chance had come.
"You're unfair, because it was you yourself, Miss Planter, who warned me
I shouldn't forget. I haven't. I won't. Will you? Can't we shake hands
on that understanding?"
With a hurried movement she hid her hands.
"I couldn't touch you----"
"You will when we dance."
He thought her lips trembled a little, but the light was uncertain.
"I will never dance with you again."
"I'm afraid you'll have to," he said with a confident smile, "unless you
care to make a scene."
She drew away, unfastening her cloak, her eyes full of that old
challenge.
"You're impossible," she whispered. "Can't you understand that I dislike
you?"
His heart leapt, for didn't he hate her?
XXIX
Lambert appeared in the doorway.
"Blodgett's rung for tea----"
He glanced curiously from one to the other. The broken shadows disclosed
little, but the fact that she had lingered at all was arresting.
"What's up, Sylvia?"
She went close to her brother.
"This--this old servant has been impertinent again."
Lambert smiled.
"He's rather more than that now, sis. That's over--forgotten. Still if
the Princeton fellow Morton's been impertinent----"
He spread his arms, smiling.
"Have I got to submit myself to a trouncing more than once a year?"
Sylvia shrugged her shoulders.
"No," she said, impatiently. "You say it's forgotten. All right."
George knew it would never be forgotten now by either of them. Lambert's
unruffled attitude made him uneasy. Her brother's scoffing response to
her accusation suggested that Lambert saw, since they would be more or
less thrown together, a beneficial side to such encounters as the one
just ended. For George didn't dream that Lambert had forgotten, either,
those old boasts.
Another depressing thought made him bad company for Blodgett after the
callers had driven away. It came from a survey, following his glimpse of
Sylvia's beauty, of all the blatant magnificence with which Blodgett had
surrounded himself. Blodgett after dinner, a little flushed with wine,
and the triumph of having had in his house on the same day two Sinclairs
and two Planters, attempted an explanation.
"I didn't build this, Morton, or my place in town, just for Josiah
Blodgett."
George wasn't in a mood for subtleties of expression.
"I've often wondered why you haven't married. With your money you ought
to have a big choice."
Blodgett sipped a liqueur. He smiled in a self-satisfied way.
"Money will buy about anything--even the kind of a wife you want. I'm in
no hurry. When I marry, young man, it will be the right kind."
And George understood that he meant by the right kind some popular and
well-bred girl who would make the Blodgett family hit a social average.
He carried that terrifying thought of marriage back to Princeton. He had
no fear Sylvia would ever look seriously in Blodgett's direction. Money
could scarcely bribe her. This, however, was her second season. Of
course she would marry someone of her own immediate circle. She could
take her choice. When that happened what would become of his
determination and his boasts? Frequently he clenched her riding crop and
swore:
"Nothing--not even that--can keep me from accomplishing what I've set
out to do. I'll have my way with her."
He shrank, nevertheless, from the thought of her adopting such a
defence. It was intolerable. He read the New York papers with growing
suspense. As an antidote he attacked harder than ever his study of cause
and effect in the Street. With football out of the way he could give a
good deal of time to that, and Blodgett now and then enclosed a hint in
Mundy's letters. It was possible to send a fair amount of money to his
parents; but his mother's letters never varied from their formality of
thanks and solicitations as to his health. His father didn't write at
all. Of course, they couldn't understand what he was doing. The shadow
of the great Planter remained perpetually over their little home.
Another doubt troubled George. With the club matter out of the way, and
the presidency of the class his, and a full football garland resting on
his head, was he wasting his time at Princeton? The remembrance of
Blodgett steadied him. He needed all that Princeton and its
companionships could give.
Purposefully he avoided Betty. Was she, indeed, responsible for that
softness he had yielded to in the infirmary and during the final game?
In his life, he kept telling himself, there was no room for sentiment.
Sentiment was childish, a hindrance. Hadn't he decided at the start that
nothing should turn him from his attempt for the summit? Still he
couldn't avoid seeing Betty now and then in Princeton, or at the dances
in New York to which he went with Goodhue. The less he saw of Betty,
moreover, the stronger grew his feeling of something essential lacking
from his life; and it bothered that, after a long separation, she was
invariably friendly instead of reproachful. He found that he couldn't
look at her eyes without hungrily trying to picture them wet with tears
for him.
To some extent other demands took his mind from such problems. The
rumpus Goodhue had foreseen developed. Important men came or wrote from
New York or Philadelphia in Dalrymple's cause, but at the meetings of
the section George sat obdurate, and, when the struggle approached a
crisis, Goodhue came out openly on the side of his room-mate.
"You can have Dalrymple in the club," was George's ultimatum, "or you
can have me, but you can't have us both."
If George resigned, Goodhue announced, he would follow. Dalrymple was
doomed. The important men went back or ceased writing. Then Wandel
slipped Rogers into the charmed circle--the payment of a debt; and
George laughed and left the meeting, saying:
"You can elect anybody you please now."
Cynically, he was tempted to try to force Allen in.
"You're not honest even with your own group," he said afterward to
Wandel.
The club lost its value as a marker of progress. Besides, he didn't
look forward to eating with that little snob, Rogers, for two years. Nor
did he quite care for Wandel's reply.
"You've enough class-consciousness for both of us, heroic and puissant
Apollo."
For the first time George let himself go with Wandel.
"You'll find Apollo Nemesis, little man, unless you learn to say what
you mean in words of one syllable."
And the discussion of the clubs went on, breeding enmities but
determining no radical reform.
The struggle at Princeton was over. George looked often at the younger
men, who didn't have to prepare themselves minutely for the greater
struggle just ahead, envying them their careless play, their proneness
to over-indulgence in beer and syncopated song. While he worked with
high and low prices and variations in exchange he heard them calling
cheerily across the campus, gathering parties for poker or bridge or a
session at the Nassau. Goodhue, even Wandel, found some time for
frivolity. George strangled his instinct to join them. He had too much
to do. In every diversion he took he wanted to feel there was a phase
personally valuable to him.
He counted the days between his glimpses of Sylvia, and tried not to
measure the hours dividing his meetings with Betty. If only he dared let
himself go, dared cease battle for a little, dared justify Sylvia's
attitude! Even Goodhue noticed his avoidance of Betty.
He encountered Sylvia in New York; asked her to dance with him; was
refused; cut in when she was, in a sense, helpless; and glided around
the room with a sullen, brilliant body that fairly palpitated with
distaste.
Even during the summer he ran into her once on Long Island. Then he was
always missing her. Perhaps she had learned to avoid him. He shrank each
morning from his paper, from any bit of rumour connecting her with a
man; and Blodgett, he noticed, was still making money for a bachelor
bank account.
He came to conceive a liking for his flabby employer, although he was
quite sure Blodgett wouldn't have bothered with him a moment if he
hadn't been a prominent college man with such ties among the great as
Blodgett hadn't been able to knot himself. What was more to the point,
the stout man admired George's ambition. He was more generous with his
surreptitious advice. He paid a larger salary which he admitted was less
than George earned during that summer. George, therefore, went back to
Princeton with fuller pockets. Again Mundy was loath to let him depart.
"You know more about this game than men who've worked at it for years."
His face of a parson grimaced.
"You'd soon be able to hire me, if you'd stick on the job instead of
going back to college to get smashed up at football."
George, however, didn't suffer much damage that year. He played
brilliantly through a season that without him would have been far more
disastrous than it was.
When it was all over Squibs sat one night silently for a long time. At
last he stirred, lighted his pipe, and spoke.
"I ought to say to you, George, that I was as satisfied with you in
defeat as I was in victory."
"I outplayed Planter, anyway, didn't I?"
Bailly studied him.
"Did that mean more to you than having Princeton beaten?"
"It kept Princeton from being beaten worse than it was."
"Yes," Bailly admitted, "and, perhaps, you are right to find a personal
victory somewhere in a general defeat."
"But you really think it selfish," George said.
"I wish," Bailly answered, "I could graft on your brain some of Allen's
mental processes, even his dissatisfactions."
"You can't," George said, bluntly. "I'm tired of Allen's smash talk.
Most people like him could be bought with the very conditions they
attack."
Bailly arose and limped up and down. When he spoke his voice vibrated
with an unaccustomed passion:
"I don't know. I don't think so. But I want you to realize that
prostrate worship of the fat old god success is as wicked as any other
idolatry. I want you to understand that Allen and his kind may be
sincere and right, that a vision unblinded by the bull's-eye may see
the target all awry. My fear goes back to your first days here. You are
still ashamed of service."
"I've served," George said, hotly.
"Was it real service," Bailly asked gently, "or a shot at the
bull's-eye?"
Almost involuntarily George clapped his fingers to his head.
"You're wrong, sir," he cried. "I've served when nothing but the thought
of service brought me through."
Mrs. Bailly hurried in. She put one hand on George's shoulder. With the
other she patted his hair.
"What's he scolding my boy for?"
George grinned at Bailly.
"Don't you see, sir, if I were as bad as you think she couldn't do
that?"
Bailly nodded thoughtfully.
"If you've served as you say you must be merely hiding the good."
XXX
To himself at times George acknowledged his badness, in Bailly's terms
at least. He sometimes sympathized with Allen's point of view, even
while he heckled that angular man who often sat with him and Goodhue,
talking about strikes, and violence, and drunkenness as the quickest
recreation for men who had no time for play. He longed to tell Allen in
justification that he had walked out of the working class himself.
Later, staring at Sylvia's portrait, he would grow hard again. Men, he
would repeat, wanted to smash down obstacles only because they didn't
have the strength to scramble over. He had the strength. But Bailly
would intrude again. What about the congenitally unsound?
"I'm not unsound," he would say to himself, studying the picture.
And he suspected that it was because he didn't want to be good that he
was afraid of seeing too much of Betty Alston and her kindliness and the
reminiscence of tears in her eyes. If Squibs only knew how blessedly
easy it would be to turn good, to let ambition and Sylvia slip into a
remote and ugly memory! More frequently now he stared at her portrait,
forcing into his heart the thought of hatred and into her face the
expression of it; for the more hatred there was between them, the
smaller was the chance of his growing weak.
He longed for the approaching escape from his gravest temptation. When
he was through college and definitely in New York he would find it
simpler to be hard. For that matter, why should he grow weak? He had
achieved a success far beyond the common. He would graduate president of
his class, captain of the football team, although he had tried to throw
both honours to Goodhue; member of the club that had drawn the best men
of his year, a power in the Senior Council; the man who had done most
for Princeton; a high-stand scholar; and, most important of all, one who
had acquired with his education a certain amount of culture and an ease
of manner in any company. Allen was still angular, as were most of those
other men who had come here, like George, with nothing behind them.
In his success he saw no miracle, no luck beyond Squibs' early interest.
What he had won he had applied himself to get with hardness, cold
calculation, an indomitable will. He had kept his eyes open. He had used
everybody, everything, to help him climb toward Sylvia out of the valley
of humiliation. The qualities that had brought him all that were good
qualities, worth clinging to. As he had climbed he would continue in
spite of Bailly or Allen or Betty. But when he thought of Betty he had
to fight the tears from his own eyes.
A little while before his graduation he went to her, knowing he must do
something to make her less kind, to destroy the impression she gave him
of one who, like Mrs. Bailly, always thought of him at his best.
He walked alone through a bland moonlight scented with honeysuckle from
the hedges. His heart beat as it had that day four years ago when he had
unintentionally let Sylvia know his presumptuous craving.
Two white figures strolled in front of the house. He went up, striving
to overcome the absurd reluctance in his heart. It wasn't simple to
destroy a thing as beautiful as this friendship. Betty paused and
turned, drawing her mother around.
"I thought you'd quite forgotten us, George."
Nor did he want to kill the welcome in her voice.
"You're leaving Princeton very soon," Mrs. Alston said. "I'm glad you've
come. Of course, it isn't to say good-bye."
He wondered if she didn't long for a parting to be broken only by
occasional meetings in town. He wondered if she didn't fear for Betty.
If there had been no Sylvia, if he had dared abandon the hard things and
ask for Betty, this imperious woman would have put plenty of searching
questions. But, he reflected, if it hadn't been for Sylvia he never
would have come so far, never would have come to Betty. Every
consideration held him on his course.
He feared that Mrs. Alston, in her narrow, careful manner, wouldn't give
him an opportunity to speak to Betty alone. He was glad when they went
in and found Mr. Alston, who liked and admired him. When he left there
must come a chance. As he said good-night, indeed, Betty followed him to
the hall, and he whispered, so that the servant couldn't hear:
"Betty, I've a confession. Won't you walk toward the gate with me?"
The colour entered her white face as she turned and called to her
mother:
"I'll walk to the gate with George."
From the room he fancied a rustling, irritated acknowledgment.
But she came, throwing a transparent scarf over her tawny hair, and they
were alone in the moonlight and the scent of flowers, walking side by
side across grass, beneath the heavy branches of trees.
"See here, Betty! I've no business to call you that--never have had.
Without saying anything I've lied to you ever since I've been in
Princeton. I've taken advantage of your friendship."
She paused. The thick leaves let through sufficient light to show him
the bewilderment in her eyes. Her voice was a little frightened.
"You can't make me believe that. You're not the sort of man that does
such things. I don't know what you're talking about."
"Thanks," he said, "but you're wrong, and I can't go away without
telling you just what I am."
"You're just--George Morton," she said with a troubled smile.
He tried not to listen. He hurried on with this killing that appealed to
him as necessary.
"Remember the day in Freshman year, or before, wasn't it, when you
recognized Sylvia Planter's bulldog? It was her dog. She had given him
away--to me, because she had set him on me, and instead of biting he had
licked my face. So she said to take him away because she could never
bear to see him again."
Betty's bewilderment grew. She spoke gropingly.
"I guessed there had been something unusual between you and the
Planters. What difference does it make? Why do you tell me now? Anything
as old as that makes no difference."
"But it does," he blurted out. "I know you too well now not to tell
you."
"But you and Lambert are good friends. You dance with Sylvia."
"And she," he said with a harsh laugh, "still calls me an impertinent
servant."
Betty started. She drew a little away.
"What? What are you talking about?"
"Just that," he said, softly.
He forced himself to a relentless description of his father and mother,
of the livery stable, of the failure, of his acceptance of the privilege
to be a paid by the week guardian on a horse of the beautiful Sylvia
Planter. The only point he left obscure was the sentimental basis of his
quarrel with her.
"I _was_ impertinent," he ended. "She called me an impertinent servant,
a stable boy, other pleasant names. She had me fired, or would have, if
I hadn't been going anyway. Now you know how I've lied to you and what I
am!"
He waited, arms half raised, as one awaits an inevitable blow. For a
minute she continued to stare. Then she stepped nearer. Although he had
suffered to win an opposite response, she did what he had forced Lambert
Planter to do.
"No wonder Lambert admires you," she said, warmly. "To do so much from
such a beginning! I knew at first you were different from--from us.
You're not now. It's----"
She broke off, drawing away a little again. He struggled to keep his
hands from her white, slender figure, from her hair, yellow in the
moonlight.
"You don't understand," he said, desperately. "This thing that you say
I've become is only veneer. It may have thickened, but it's still
veneer."
It hurt to say that more than anything else, for all along he had been
afraid it was the truth.
"Underneath the veneer," he went on, "I'm the mucker, the stable boy if
you like. If I were anything else I would have told you all this years
ago. Betty! Betty!"
She drew farther away. He thought her voice was frightened, not quite
clear.
"Please! Don't say anything more now. I'd rather not. I--I----Listen!
What difference does it make to me or anybody where you came from?
You're what you are, what you always have been since I've known you. It
was brave to tell me. I know that. I'm going now. Please----"
She moved swiftly forward, stretching out her hand. He took it, felt its
uncertain movement in his, wondered why it was so cold, tightened his
grasp on its delightful and bewitching fragility. Her voice was
uncertain, too. It caressed him as he unconsciously caressed her hand.
"Good-night, George."
He couldn't help holding that slender hand tighter. She swayed away,
whispering breathlessly:
"Let me go now!"
He opened his fingers, and she ran lightly, with a broken laugh, across
the lawn away from him.
The moonlight was like the half light of a breathless chapel, and the
scent of flowers suggested death; yet he had not killed what he had come
to kill.
When he couldn't see her white figure any more George Morton, greatest
of football players, big man of his class, already with greedy fingers
in the fat purse of Wall Street, flung himself on the thick grass and
fought to keep his shoulders from jerking, his throat from choking, his
eyes from filling with tears.