firmness. “I am a candidate, I suppose; but I refuse to campaign.”
Diccon had managed things with distressing brilliancy. Doubting members
of the trustees had to be dined and talked into reason. And they had to
be paid.
“Paid?” Kate and Gorgas asked together. Mrs. Levering had elected to
keep out of the conversation; her instinctive interest was to pilot the
boat, not to take part in the ship’s concert.
“Yes, paid,” nodded Blynn grimly. “Paid in blood.”
“Oh,” the girls gasped in relief. Blood was permitted; money, never.
“Yes,” he explained; “I had to entertain, tell sprightly stories,
plunge into theories of education, and act all the while with sweeping
smile and glittering eye--and voluble! as Tutivillus himself. And
not just to one person or to one group of persons, mind you; but to
every Tom, Dick and Harry whom Diccon sicked on me. If they had come
in battalions I could have done it, but they came in single file.
When Diccon finally started to use me, we had dinners every night and
luncheons every day, except one day, when we had two luncheons. Diccon
said there was no other way out of it.”
“I wouldn’t have done that for a peck of presidents,” said Gorgas
firmly. “I’d have been myself.”
“Myself!” echoed Allen. “Bless my soul! Myself during that whole trip
was a silent, sullen, nasty-tongued person. If I had ever let myself
out of the box he would have first lambasted the whole crew and then
sunk back into a silent scowl. You know how it is. Haven’t you done the
same thing when you were the charming hostess?” Blynn appealed to them.
“Oh, yes, indeed,” everyone chorused, including Mrs. Levering.
“There are times,” Kate remembered, “when I am strongly tempted to have
fake hysterics in the middle of the dinner, just to drive them home.”
“Exactly!” he nodded firmly. “So I avoided a scene and drove myself
home.” And therefore, one day he did not “meet” one fussy little member.
“I just couldn’t stand that fellow,” Blynn grew rigid. “He is a
puffy-looking, self-assertive sort of nobody. Everybody knows that he
was appointed on the board because he is a relative of a man who has a
friend who was able to influence somebody who knew somebody who could
get him the appointment--one of those absurd selections that happen
every now and then in America, due to the hysteric ambition of some
small person, helped out by the easy-going American character. Well,
this Nobody presumes to busy himself with the affairs of Holden, talks
about it, bothers everybody as if he really had judgment. I couldn’t
trust myself near him. If he had got off any of those loud-mouthed
advices of his, before others, too, I’d have shut him up with his own
history. So I concluded that the best thing I could do for Diccon was
to vanish. I came home and locked myself up in the University library
and hit on a fine trail--I analyzed pretty much all the ways in which
the Elizabethan courtier complimented his lady. There’s little in it
for subtle minds, but it will make a splendid popular lecture.”
Then, to avoid what was obviously to him a distressing remembrance,
he dropped Holden and its affairs and told them about the gallant
Elizabethan gentlemen.
“I wonder what the Elizabethan women thought about all that stuff,” the
practical Gorgas summed up.
“It isn’t all stuff,” protested the professor.
“Didn’t the ladies ever reply?” questioned Kate.
“Not a word,” said Allen. “Their silence is profound. Every mother’s
son was busy writing sonnets to his mistress’ eyebrow, but the ladies
stood pat. The secret of high diplomacy is, Never divulge; keep ’em
guessing. And they did!”
“I wish they had written,” Gorgas was thoughtful.
“No doubt they felt things as keenly as the men.... All the men wore
beards, I suppose?” she continued irrelevantly.
“Undoubtedly,” Blynn’s mind was rarely personal. The merry face of
Gorgas, he did not note at all; nor her attempts, with hand at mouth,
to hold back a volume of laughter; nor Kate’s furtive, elderly signal
of rebuke to the grinning sister. With eye mostly upon Kate, who was
presenting a polite face of assumed interest, the young professor
poured forth a dissertation on Elizabethan tonsorial fashions. He was
summing up his conclusions when his attention was attracted by a badly
suppressed squeak of laughter from Gorgas. “The beard,” he was saying,
“was the sign of the gentleman, and the sign of the man. Of course
they--what are you grinning at, you Cheshire kitten? Oh! see here, I’ll
pluck this thing off tomorrow. I didn’t mean to wear it, anyway. It was
forced on me by a villainous barber.”
Everyone protested except Gorgas.
“I think you had better take it off,” she shook her head. “I’ve
been bubbling with shut-in laughter all evening. I like fun, but
this--is--carrying things a little--too far.” She pushed her laughter
back with her handkerchief. “I don’t wonder the Elizabethan ladies
didn’t reply. Poems praising men’s eyes and noses and beards! Là! là!
_là!_ là! That would be _too_ funny!”
It was a relief to get away from Holden and its small politics.
Elizabethan lyrics were such a remove. So he left them in a cheerful
mood and promised to come back soon, with his notes, and let them have
his amorous studies, that substitute for fussy little trustees.
The next morning his mail brought him an unsigned communication in the
sprawling hand of Gorgas Levering. Evidently she had penned it after he
had gone the night before. It read:
To My Lord and Eke My Master
Thy beard is waggling in my thoughts, I find,
Oh, lord and master, chosen of my heart;
Thy loving prattle have I heard but part,
The waggling beard distracted all my mind.
And those gray eyes--or are they slightly green?--
I did not see, nor either freckled cheek,
Nor teeth, nor ear, nor bald spot on the peak:
The waggle, waggle, waggle held the scene.
I like thee, master, for thy forehead seared
By crash of pewters foaming to the brink;
I like thee, master, for thy fingers pink
That never once hath honest labor smeared;
I like thee for thy nose’s Roman kink,
But Zooks! I _love_ that waggle, waggle beard.
To which was added,
P.S. But I don’t. I hate it.
XXIV
THE HOLD-UP
Allen Blynn’s smile at breakfast that morning was quite Pestalozzian.
The mother looked across at him with much the same seraphic glow,
simply reflected.
“Just listen to this from Gorgas, mother. It’s a perfect little bit of
satire. Oh, this is rich!” He read with outright joy.
“I like thee, master, for thy fingers pink
That never once hath honest labor smeared;
I like thee for thy nose’s Roman kink,
But Zooks! I _love_ that waggle, waggle beard!”
The mother was keen enough to see the cleverness and as well the poet’s
criticism of her son’s tuft of beard.
“It is rather rough, my dear,” she looked over mildly.
“Do you think so?” he was surprised. “That’s remarkably smooth verse,
mother. It just flows straight to the point. And the sonnet structure!
It’s perfect. I don’t think it a bit rough, mother.”
“I was not considering the verse, my dear,” she managed to say.
“Motherlike, I was thinking only of my son’s ornamented chin. It
_is_ rather rough and bristly--the chin, not the sonnet. And it
does--uh--waggle when you talk, my dear.”
“It goes today, mother,” he eyed the postscript carefully. “I’ve
pledged my word.” But his mind went out to the little girl who was ever
tossing odd rhymes at him. “I didn’t suspect she could put anything
into such shape as this. We’ve been reading a lot of verse together;
it has counted; no doubt, it has counted.” The Pestalozzian smile of
triumph was still on his face.
“What wonders you have done with Gorgas,” the mother shared his pride.
That brought him down like a shot.
“Nonsense!” he exploded. “She’s the only one of all my children who
has baffled me. Everything she has is her own. I try to teach her one
thing, she comes forth with something different and unexpected--like
this,” flourishing the sonnet. “She picks her own way about. Some
children will bloom in spite of teachers; but we teachers have a habit
of taking credit for all our smart ones. Did you ever try to stop a
dandelion from thriving?”
Another letter of his small packet was not so consoling.
“Schmuhl is in town!” he ejaculated. “Diccon says I must have luncheon
with him at the Union League.”
“And pray, who is Schmuhl?”
“A trustee and a big wig,” he explained, but without enthusiasm. “He’s
a corporation lawyer; never seems to work; but he does work, like a
rat, in the dark. He’s the ‘legislative man’ at Holden. He can do
anything with law-makers. He seems thoroughly gentle and harmless. But
... I will not meet him.”
“Why, my dear?” the mother asked.
“I shall resign from Holden College and demand that my name shall not
be considered for the presidency,” he went on sternly.
“If it worries you, my dear,” the mother spoke complacently; she had
enormous confidence that anything her boy should decide to do would be
therefore exactly right.
“Without an atom of proof I sense this Schmuhl. He makes laws--how,
I do not know, but I strongly suspect the method. Laws are essential
to colleges that depend partly on state appropriations. Therefore I
would need Schmuhl. And I decline to need him! It would be a continuous
‘hold-up’ and I decline to be ‘held up’ by the Schmuhls of this world.
They call him respectable; I call him infamous, and I refuse to link my
life with his!”
Almost abruptly he left for his writing desk. In a short while he was
trudging down the street with letters in his hand. He strode forward
indignantly, and he dropped the letters in the corner mail box with
something of the thrust of a righteous man spurning evil. “Top-o’-the
Hill” began to loom up as a blessed certainty.
He strode into a barbershop and had the offending beard removed; and
still striding, he went on to the Leverings. On the lawn he met Bardek,
Kate, and Gorgas; they had not ceased discussing the fortunes of
Allen. “I have resigned from Holden; I will not be a candidate,” he
announced bluntly. Briefly he sketched his reasons.
Gorgas and Kate received the news with amazement. Already they had
begun to feel some of the pride of their friend’s success. As Bardek
had hinted, the “little place” was being called a big name by the
world; some of the world’s valuation was slowly changing their own. It
would seem almost like a defeat to back out now. They even forgot to
notice the absence of the beard.
“It would mean machination and continual intrigue,” Blynn shook his
head firmly. “And I’m not the man for that. Good old Galt. Somehow I
begin to see his side of the thing. A fine, old sport he was, too; he
never ‘peached.’ No matter how hard they ran him he never whimpered. I
wonder what he thought of me--a tricky politician, I guess, shouting
for ‘the youth of America’ and secretly pulling wires for the
presidency. Ugh! What a job!”
“My dear good friend,” Bardek interposed. “This President Galt, I know
him; he is good sport, yes; and he twist about and turn and you cannot
catch him--yes; I know him. But also! He know you. That is the business
of wise old Galts to know peoples. Oh, he know you. From the day he
first see you he know you. Your face, it is all on the outside--”
“Gracious! I hope so,” he stroked his face thoughtfully.
“Yes,” Bardek continued. “You will always be that way. You let your
thinkings grow right up, so they show in your eyes and around the
corners of your mouth. You would never make little diplomat--great
statesman? Yes? Perhaps; for you would fool all the little liars
and gamblers--they would look on your face and see what is to
them an unknown t’ing, the truth. It is vairy confusing to little
statesmen--the truth, m’sieu’. When the big Bismarck was in corner he
quick tell the truth so’s nobody would believe and all go the wrong
way. Sometime, I, too, have tol’ t’ truth.”
“Well, I hope so!” laughed Blynn. “But we’re all forgetting the main
business in hand. Top-o’-the-Hill is emerging out of dreamland into
reality. Come, Miss Manager, let’s discuss plans. Holden will find my
resignation in tomorrow’s mail.”
The plans were even better matured than Blynn had hoped for. Kate had
kept at work--“To keep my mind off Petruchio”--she had told him. Mac
had already cleaned paths and had made a rough estimate of the building
needs. There was much to be done there; but with some outside hired
help, and everybody joining in, September should see a school-house
prepared for those parents who had courage to trust their children to
the experimenters. Blynn’s work was already mapped out on a card. First
was the writing of the “prospectus.” He could do that “trick” with the
proper sense and style. It wasn’t to be a pedagogical document, but a
thriller to win parents over.
Blynn agreed, but insisted upon one further condition. The property
must be assessed at a marketable figure and a proper rental paid.
“Trust your manager,” advised Kate. “I don’t intend to give anything
away. A stock-company is to be formed, which will buy the land
and house. I will take 51 per cent. of the shares as security and
to control you reckless ones. The stock-company pays taxes and
improvements; but I insist upon the wild rose and all the literary
ceremonies.”
“Right!” agreed Allen. “The first wild rose of spring shall be yours;
but this is something more than poetry; it is almost my only means
of livelihood. I should be needlessly worried if I felt for a single
minute that the thing did not pay for itself entirely. I cannot live on
your property, Kate.”
“Now, that is vairy strange,” Bardek commented when the matter had
been made clear to him. “You cannot take the ol’ house and little
earth.”--He said something like “leetle airt,” but it was perfectly
clear as he spoke it.--“Oh, no! You would have such shame! But you
would take it quick if I be fool and sell it cheap! You cannot take
money! But you take rent from poor peoples who cannot pay! And you
not take my ol’, good coat which is now too little for me! Ach! you
would be beggar! But you take present from me of my best workmanship
which give me much labor and a big pain in t’ back! And you take my
dinner at my table wit’ no shame at all; and my laughter and all my
good talk and my friendliness, which take all my life to make and cost
me--everyt’ing! It is strange! As for me--poof!--I have not the shame.
When you give and I want, I jus’ take and forget, like wind and rain.”
For the next few days they toiled like slaves on the “property.” They
dug, planted, cut weeds, sawed and even plastered. Bardek secured the
help of one or two Italians to do the heavy hauling. “Work is good,” he
argued, “it is the only medicine; but a broken back, it is not good.
The little men of Italy? Ah! They are built so. See how they laugh! I
talk to them of Garibaldi and zoop! they carry like demons.”
As they trudged home one weary afternoon, full of exultant hopes, a
newspaper fell into their hands. Blynn’s picture had caught Kate’s
quick eye. “Blynn, Holden’s Chief,” ran the headlines. It told of a
special meeting of the board of trustees, and reviewed Blynn’s history
with the accuracy of a fond parent. The vote was 7 to 2.
“Never you mind,” Blynn grew rigid as he turned to his friends. “That
won’t go! I told Diccon to withdraw my name; I see he didn’t. It’s all
right, Kate. I’ll get out of this somehow. I’ve been to the top of
Pisgah; there’ll be no turning back until we reach the Promised Land.”
“Not when I have worked like a coal miner,” implored Bardek. “Who
would give me my ol’ back back?--Oof! _wass für eine Sprache!_ What a
language!--give a back back! Ho!”
“That’s good business,” Kate nodded her head, satisfied. “I’m glad they
elected you. It will boom Top-o’-the-Hill immensely. I’ll have it easy
financing this job. The trouble will be to keep the money from swamping
us.”
“‘The President of Holden College resigns to become a kindergartner,’”
exclaimed Gorgas. “Allen Blynn, that’s _too_ funny. It’s almost as
funny as the waggle-waggle beard!”
“You minx!” he shook a finger at her. “Are you cogitating another
sonnet?”
“I _may_ get on my poet-bonnet!” she smiled at him.
XXV
DAGO
[Illustration: For-ty year on when a-far and a-sunder.]
At the suggestion of Gorgas, Leopold became a member of the staff of
“Top-o’-the-Hill.” Of all the old group that used to make rendezvous
of the Levering house, Leopold and Blynn were the only two who kept
up the relationship; but both men were rather intermittent visitors.
Leopold--everyone said “Leopold,” possibly because of the impossible
surname, Hayim--called punctiliously upon Mrs. Levering, although Mrs.
Levering saw little of him. Gorgas and he spent the time exercising
their French. He was a silent, grave man, with a far-off friendly
smile; and, once enticed, he could talk out of a rare life. On festival
occasions he could always be counted upon for a plaintive song.
“Leopold will do the science, you know,” Gorgas explained. “I have
talked it over with him. You should have seen his fine eyes sparkle!
He’s got heaps of money, you know; we’ll make him treasurer. Besides,
he’s English. That will give _such_ a tone!”
What a varied group it was! At night they drew up the staff as it would
be printed in the “prospectus.” The list of names and qualifications
was almost formidable when one considered how informal and unregulated
all their teaching hoped to be; and in that list they stumbled over the
name of Bardek. He would never admit any other names. “Jus’ Bardek,” he
would say. “Why have more than one name? Even one is hard to remember.”
Here is the first faculty of “Top-o’-the-Hill,” that prototype of the
“new schools” which were soon to spring up all over America:
IN CHARGE:
MR. ALLEN BLYNN
Holden and Jena
MISS KEYSER LEVERING
The Warren School
ASSOCIATES:
MR. HAYIM LEOPOLD
Harrow and Cambridge
MR. BARDEK
Naples and Bordeaux
MISS GORGAS LEVERING
School of Applied Arts
“It sounds so learned,” Allen looked on ruefully. “We oughtn’t to print
it.”
“It ought to sound learned,” said Kate.
“But we are to deal with young life, not learning,” he reminded her.
“We’ll do all of that,” she assured him. “This list of names is just
advertising. No one will question us after they see all our vast
qualifications; they won’t even inquire if we have them. This,” tapping
the sheet, “will bring us more paying pupils than any other page in
the pamphlet. I know these people. ‘Jena,’ ‘Bordeaux,’ ‘Harrow,’
‘Cambridge’--why, that’s as good as paying dividends already. You
watch.”
“When you go fishing, my friend,” Bardek’s eyes twinkled, “it would be
big fool if you not put on the dying worm or the already dead insect.
Of _course_,” spreading his hands, “you might say to the fish, ‘Come,
jump on my hook; it won’t hurt you any worse jus’ because the dead
insect is not there. Come; quick; get it over.’ Ah! no! The fish are
too wise.
“Titles and degrees and all that,” Bardek went on, “they are vairy
great power. We see little men wit’ big decorations, and we come to
them and ask questions, and prod them with the stick of our minds,
and we turn them round and round and open their mouths and look down
their throats. How we tremble! At any minute dese great man may say
some wise thing! And you stay and stay for hundert t’ousand years and
he say, nothing--nothing that you don’t know when you were small boy.
‘It look like rain,’ maybe he say after two, t’ree thousand years. But
the world! Ah! It walks in a great wide circle and will not come near
the great man. Mystery! Mystery! They are afraid of his wisdom. It will
strike them dead, like lightning. So they send their children to him.
“And the children! First they are afraid--they believe then all the
papa and mamma has tol’ dem. Then they find he don’t know what happened
in the world day before it was yesterday. And soon they laugh. Then
he grow red in face and scold; and then because they have pains of
laughter they stop. And all their days they meet ol’ school friend and
they sit and drink and eat and laugh at that ol’ fool who did not know
what happens the day before it was yesterday.
“And t’en t’ey send _dere_ children to him and make beeg stories how
great is that man!
“Oh, put the dead insect on the hook, my friend: or there will be no
little pupils and we will be so hungry to teach t’at we fall on each
other and teach.”
It was precisely as Kate had predicted. She seemed to know exactly
where to drop her printed bait. By August she had closed the doors and
had engineered a waiting list, for they were resolved the first year to
begin with small numbers.
“We’ll pay you your wages and have something besides for improvements,”
she announced to Blynn.
Of all that enthusiastic lot of teachers he was the only one who could
not afford to give his time without salary. It hurt him to take that
money, but his good sense showed him that there was no other way out.
It was shame of the sort that Bardek thought so strange, and it must
be downed. He reflected with some grimness that while the others were
giving energy, joy, and enthusiasm to the work, he was offering all
that and something much harder to give, his pride as an independent
man.
[Illustration: “_Top-o’-the-Hill_”]
To no one he spoke of this. In spite of his innocence and in spite of
the face which, as Bardek claimed, he wore for the most part “on the
outside,” Blynn could mask a hundred worries back of his Pestalozzian
smile. Yet Gorgas knew. She had pieced together his jests and his
half-uttered opinions.
They had worked all day together on a baseball diamond and were
celebrating the conclusion by a picnic supper on the grounds of
“Top-o’-the-Hill.”
“Mein guter Kamarade,” she whispered, “you mustn’t feel bad about that
fool salary.”
“Oh, I don’t,” he smiled.
“Yes, you do,” she nodded wisely. “I’m onto your curves, old chap. I’ll
just have to talk to you like a Dutch uncle. I’ve a scheme, too; better
than anything Kate gets off. _Now_--mustn’t it be grand?”
“Phew!” he affected seriousness. “It must be a corker. Let’s hear it.”
“Here? Wouldn’t that be funny,” she asked herself aloud. “Wouldn’t that
be _too_ funny!” The idea amused her. “Oh, no, _mon capitaine_, not
here before all these folks. It’s--it’s private. Yes,” she mused, “it’s
quite private.... You must let me have an interview. I’ve been trying
to have one with you ever since June.”
“Why, my dear child!” he was surprised. “We’ve been together nearly
every blessed day, taken walks together and all that!”
“Yes, I know,” she said. “I’ve tried to say it--and couldn’t. But I’m
going to dive in soon. That’s what I came to your house for, in June;
you remember when you were teaching the Croft boy? If he hadn’t been
there I’d have done it then. Hush!” she raised a finger. “They’re
coming back. Not a word.... It’s partly about _him_.” She nudged toward
Leopold.
That was an exasperating way to end a conversation, characteristic of
Gorgas--just like an exciting continuous story. “It’s partly about
_him_.” About Leopold?
Leopold had never ceased his subtle interest in Gorgas since the
night of their first conversation in French. He was both French and
English, and, back of that, the Oriental. He seemed ever ready to do
two contradictory things; to leap into the breach and seize the enemy
by the throat, or to stand, courageous as the day, and undisturbed
take every shock. One of these--the French or the English--might
have won out and given him a positive emotional character, but the
persistent Hebrew, trained to keep emotions in check, to pass them in
review before hard, good sense, held the two contrary horses together
and dominated from the driver’s seat. One needs a mixed metaphor to
describe Leopold.
There was much more to Leopold than that--what forked, straddling biped
can be summed up in a phrase?--he had the smile of compassion and the
hovering sadness of those who have looked upon the world from afar off,
who have travelled sympathetically among peoples and have seen the
splendid futility of the life effort.