I
I had not known Tom Randolph a week before I was aware that life was not
real to him. All his world was a stage, with himself as chief player. He
dramatized everything--actions, emotions, income. Thus he made poverty
picturesque, love a thing of the stars, the day's work a tragedy, or, if
the professors proved kind, a comedy. He ate and drank, as it were, to
music, combed his hair and blacked his boots in the glare of footlights;
made exits and entrances of a kind unknown to men like myself who lacked
his sense of the histrionic.
He was Southern and chivalric. His traditions had to do with the doffed
hat and the bent knee. He put woman on a pedestal and kept her there. No
man, he contended, was worthy of her--what she gave was by the grace of
her own sweet charity!
It will be seen that in all this he missed the modern note. As a boy he
had been fed upon Scott, and his later reading had not robbed him of his
sense of life as a flamboyant spectacle.
He came to us in college with a beggarly allowance from an impoverished
estate owned by his grandfather, a colonel of the Confederacy, who after
the war had withdrawn with his widowed daughter to his worthless acres.
In due time the daughter had died, and her child had grown up in a world
of shadows. On nothing a year the colonel had managed, in some
miraculous fashion, to preserve certain hospitable old customs.
Distinguished guests still sat at his table and ate ducks cooked to the
proper state of rareness, and terrapin in a chafing-dish, with a dash of
old sherry. If between these feasts there was famine the world never
knew.
It was perhaps from the colonel that Randolph had learned to make
poverty picturesque. His clothes were old and his shoes were shabby. But
his strength lay in the fact that he did not think of himself as poor.
He had so much, you see, that the rest of us lacked. He was a Randolph.
He had name, position, ancestry. He was, in short, a gentleman!
I do not think he looked upon any of us as gentlemen, not in the Old
Dominion sense. He had come to our small Middle-Western college because
it was cheap and his finances would not compass education anywhere else.
In an older man his prejudices would have been insufferable, but his
youth and charm made us lenient. We contented ourselves with calling him
"Your Highness," and were always flattered when he asked us to his
rooms.
His strong suit was hospitality. It was in his blood, of course. When
his allowance came he spent it in giving the rest of us a good time. His
room was as shabby as himself--a table, an ink-spotted desk, a couch
with a disreputable cover, a picture of Washington, a half-dozen books,
and a chafing-dish.
The chafing-dish was the hump and the hoof of his festivities. He made
rarebits and deviled things with an air that had been handed down from
generations of epicures. I can see him now with his black hair in a
waving lock on his forehead, in worn slippers and faded corduroy coat,
sitting on the edge of the table smoking a long pipe, visualizing
himself as the lord of a castle--the rest of us as vassals of a rather
agreeable and intelligent sort!
It was perfectly natural that he should stage his first love-affair, and
when he was jilted that he should dramatize his despair. For days after
Madge Ballou had declared her preference for Dicky Carson, Randolph
walked with melancholy. He came to my rooms and sat, a very young and
handsome Hamlet, on my fire-bench, with his chin in his hand.
"Why should she like Dicky best?"
"She has no imagination."
"But Dicky's a--beast--"
"With a fat bank-account."
"Money wouldn't count with Madge."
"I'm not so sure--"
"Women are not like that, MacDonald."
I saw, as he went on with his arguments, that she had become to him an
Ophelia, weakly led. Women in his lexicon of romance might be weak but
never mercenary. I think he finally overthrew her in his mind with "_Get
thee to a nunnery!_" I know that he burned her picture; he showed me the
ashes in a silver stamp-box.
He had, of course, his heroes--there were moments when unconsciously he
aped them. It was after a debate that the boys began to call him
"Bonaparte." He had defended the Little Corporal, and in defending him
had personified him. With that dark lock over his forehead, his arms
folded, he had flung defiance to the deputies, and for that moment he
had been not Tom Randolph but the Emperor himself.
He won the debate, amid much acclaim, and when he came down to us I will
confess to a feeling, which I think the others shared, of a soul within
his body which did not belong there. Tom Randolph was, of course, Tom
Randolph, but the voice which had spoken to us had rung with the power
of that other voice which had been stilled at St. Helena!
The days that followed dispelled the illusion, but the name clung to
him. I think he liked it, and emphasized the resemblance. He let his
hair grow long, sunk his head between his shoulders, was quick and
imperious in his speech.
Then came the war. Belgium devastated, France invaded. Randolph was
fired at once.
"I'm going over."
"But, my dear fellow--"
"There's our debt to Lafayette."
With his mind made up there was no moving him. The rest of us held back.
Our imaginations did not grasp at once the world's need of us.
But Randolph saw himself a Henry of Navarre--_white plumes_; a Richard
of the Lion Heart--_crusades and red crosses_; a Cyrano without the
nose--"_These be cadets of Gascony_--"
"You see, MacDonald," he said, flaming, "we Randolphs have always done
it."
"Done what?"
"Fought. There's been a Randolph in every war over here, and before that
in a long line of battles--"
He told me a great deal about the ancient Randolphs, and the way they
had fought on caparisoned steeds with lances.
"War to-day is different," I warned him. "Not so pictorial."
But I knew even then that he would make it pictorial. He would wear his
khaki like chain armor.
He gave us a farewell feast in his room. It was the season for young
squirrels, and he made us a Brunswick stew. It was the best thing I had
ever tasted, with red peppers in it and onions, and he served it with
an old silver ladle which he had brought from home.
While we ate he talked of war, of why men should fight--"for your own
honor and your country's."
There were pacifists among us and they challenged him. He flung them
off; their protests died before his passion.
"We are men, not varlets!"
Nobody laughed at him. It showed his power over us that none of us
laughed. We simply sat there and listened while he told us what he
thought of us.
At last one who was braver than the rest cried out: "Go to it,
Bonaparte!"
In a sudden flashing change Randolph hunched his shoulders, set his
slouched hat sidewise low on his brows, wrapped the couch-cover like a
cloak about him. His glance swept the room. There was no anger in it,
just a sort of triumphant mockery as he gave the famous speech to
Berthier.
"They send us a challenge in which our honor is at stake--a thing a
Frenchman has never refused--and since a beautiful queen wishes to be a
witness to the combat, let us be courteous, and in order not to keep her
waiting, _let us march without sleeping as far as Saxony--_!"
I can't tell you of the effect it had on us. We were gripped by the
throats, and the room was so still that we heard ourselves breathe. Four
of the fellows left next day with Randolph. I think he might have taken
us all if we had not been advised and held back by the protests of our
professors, who spoke of war with abhorrence.