Chapter C: M. F (2)

“Well, do you remember lying down in the street and refusing to get up?”

“No-o-o--” very doubtfully. (After all, I suppose one doesn’t remember such things.)

“Well, you did, and I had a time getting you here; and don’t you remember anything at all about the hose and the proctor and--”

So it was lived over again from beginning to end, with a great deal of detail and laughing and remorse of a cheerful and unconvincing kind. Bradley looked serious when he heard the part about the proctor; but on learning that Mr. Tush had not seen him, and that Hewitt’s lie had made the chance of a more careful inquiry quite improbable, he found the whole thing immensely amusing.

“I have a lot to thank you for,” he said, staring about the room. Hewitt made the inevitable protest, and then there was a pause. These two persons, who were Harvard men, classmates, and about the same age, suddenly had nothing to talk about. The single point at which their lives touched was the tiniest dot on the page of their experience,--the sort of dot, too, that both were willing to ignore as quickly as possible. They no doubt listened to the same lectures from time to time. But one does not, apropos of nothing at all, discuss the Malthusian Doctrine or the importance of the semicolon in literature.

You can’t talk to a college man about himself, when his career is a pleasanter one than your own, because--well, because you mustn’t. And you can’t talk to a man who is to you an unknown quantity,--a nonentity, a cipher,--simply because you can’t. It’s all very distressing, and you talk about athletics. But in the month of March the effort is transparent and a bore. Neither football nor base-ball is contemporaneous; the crew is still rather vague; and when you plunge recklessly into track athletics, it occurs to you, all at once, that you haven’t taken the trouble to go near any since your freshman year. It’s impossible, therefore, to recall whether Spavins is the person who ran the hurdles in sixteen, or reached incredible heights in the pole vault; it is even likely that Spavins did neither, and was all the time behind the bleachers absorbed in putting the shot. To tell the truth, you don’t know Spavins; you have never met him; you never will, and you always skip the column in the “Crimson” that records his exploits.

This was the basis on which Hewitt and Bradley finished their talk. The peculiar occasion of their being in the same room together was at an end. Bradley lingered merely because an innate sense of proportion kept him there; to leave the minute you say the only thing you came to say, is like running out of church before the people all round you are done confiding things to the backs of the pews in front of them. Your devotions only properly cease when the subdued spontaneous exertion of stout women regaining the perpendicular gives you the signal. Bradley was waiting for the signal. The bell on Harvard Hall, calling students to the last lecture of the day, sounded it.

“There goes the bell; I must hurry along,” he said, fingering the note-book he had brought with him.

“Oh, cut your lecture!” came from Horace rather eagerly. Bradley looked up in surprise. His face was not well fashioned for concealing what went on in his head. Just now it distinctly said, “How extraordinary! Why should I cut my lecture?” His words, however, were, “Oh, no, thank you; I must run along!” He took another cigarette to smoke on the way over to the Yard, and sauntered round the room, although he mentioned more than once his fear of being late. At the door, he turned to say, “Well, good-bye; I hope you know how much obliged I am to you for all that.”

“There isn’t anything really. Good-bye.” Horace assisted at the opening and shutting of the door, in the unnecessary way one does with strangers. Then he walked slowly up and down his study, with his hands in his pockets, whistling energetically under his breath, and stopping every now and then to stare out of the window. Curtiss came in almost immediately.

“I met that good-looking classmate of yours, Bradley, at the door,” he said. Curtiss walked straight up to Hewitt,--he had a dramatic way of doing almost everything,--and grasped his friend’s hand. “Has he been here?” he asked, smiling a pleased smile.

“Yes; he’s just left.”

A pause.

“Did he ask you to go see him?”

“No,” very simply.

“Will he come back?”

“No.”

“The pig!”

“I beg your pardon, he’s nothing of the kind.”

“I’m afraid I don’t understand, then.”

“Oh, yes, you do, better than anybody, except possibly myself.”

Another silence.

“Well, go on; I’m waiting.”

“Why should the man ask me to go see him?” asked Hewitt, passionately. “He--”

“But, my dear boy!” protested Curtiss.

“Don’t! don’t!” Horace drew away pettishly. “When you bluff like that, you make me sick. Bradley has done everything he ought to have done, and more too,” he went on quietly. “If I expect more, I’m a fool; if you do, you’re a hypocrite! Bradley might have written me a polite note, and considered the thing square. Instead of that he took the trouble to climb up here to apologise and thank me. He was well-bred and polite and unget-at-able,--the way gentlemen ought to be. And that’s all; that’s the end of it. We’ll never see each other again; why should we? I suppose if I’d gone to any other college in the country, and this had happened, Bradley would have put his paws on my shoulders and lapped my face; and we’d have roomed together next year, and proposed to each other’s sisters on Class Day. But I didn’t go to any other college; I’m damned glad I didn’t,--everybody always is. I don’t know why, but I am. Between you and Bradley, I’ve learned more about this place than I ever knew there was to know. If I could write, I’d knock the spots out of any magazine article on Harvard that’s ever been printed.” Horace stopped and looked out of the window. What he had been saying was a curious mixture of bitterness and indifference.

“Come, let’s take a walk,” he exclaimed briskly, in another tone.

“Yes, let’s,” answered Curtiss; “that’s what I came for,” and he began to hum, while Horace was looking for a hat,--

“Oh, Harvard was old Harvard
When--”

THE SERPENT’S TOOTH

“College life,” murmur old men, as they pause a moment, before getting into bed, and listen to the singing of some drunken cabmen in the street below.

“College life,” whisper the Cambridge unsought, as they cut out preposterous baby clothes at the Social Union and discuss somebody or other’s ungraceful departure from the University.

“College life,” shudder apprehensive mothers, diagnosing the athletic column for dislocations.

“College life,” mutters the father of the man who got sixteen A’s and brain fever.

“College life”--but Dickey Dawson and the three fellows who had stopped in to see him that afternoon, rather prided themselves on not being typical of any recognised phase of that comprehensive platitude. They had all, thus far, in their college life, ingeniously escaped going in for anything in particular and were in the habit of regarding themselves as a nucleus for a future society, to be composed of unrepresentative Harvard men. Little Dickey Dawson even went so far as to be almost ashamed of his own undeniable popularity; but, as he remarked apologetically, “It is not always possible to avert success.”

He was not well that afternoon. The college physician had come, caused Dickey to throw back his head, open wide his mouth and say “ah-h-h, ah-h-h,” while he peered in with a sort of deprecatory craftiness and found, “no white spots, but a state of congestion.”

Generally speaking, your acquaintances at college do not realise that you have been sick until they meet you in the Yard and are given an opportunity to express their belated sympathy. The men, however, who were gossiping in Dickey Dawson’s room that day, were the men who had missed him at breakfast and luncheon and had come to hunt him up--the men, in short, whom he knew best and enjoyed most.

There was Tommy, with the profile and the glasses. He was the sort of person who occasionally writes wordy little book reviews for an obscure literary magazine, and refers to himself, now and then, as “a driven penny-a-liner.” Then there was Charlie Bolo who was not popularly credited with much sense beyond his exceedingly deformed sense of humour. There was also Bigelow--a bore with an accomplishment. All three of them had a kind of verbal agility that passed, among themselves, for cleverness.

“What means this ghastly pomp and circumstance?” asked Dickey Dawson from the sofa, as he reached out and clutched at the voluminous tails of Tommy’s frock coat.

“It means, my dear, that I have been to see two women whom I never met before,” answered Tommy, daintily gathering his skirts about him and sitting down. “One of them lived in a suburb and was perfectly horrible.”

“The other,” put in Charlie Bolo, who possessed the disagreeable gift of conversational prophecy, “lived in a dungeon on a proper street, and was merely horribly perfect.”

“Yes, you are right,” assented Tommy, complacently. “She was a Bodkin, and--well--you know--Bodkins are Bodkins.” He submitted to the _sui generical_ fashion in which one is obliged to refer to certain Boston families.

“Ah, you know a Bodkin, you know the kind of woman I mean,” he went on dramatically. “She’s the woman who lies awake at night--dreading your arrival, for her only clew to your identity is a perfunctory letter of introduction informing her that you are from a place of which she never heard. She is the woman who, when you call, roosts discreetly at the extreme end of a long sofa and extends a series of well-worn social ‘feelers,’ while her daughter makes tea in a masterly, unemotional way, and supposes, from time to time, ‘that you graduate this year,’ or ‘that you must find Cambridge dull after--after--’”

“Those are some of the local formulae for tact,” broke in Charlie Bolo.

“The other one--the suburban--was truly a most loathely creature,” continued Tommy in the harsh incisive voice that made what he said so difficult to forget. “She didn’t even give me tea; and you know how many clever things I can say about tea.” His smile was an impertinent challenge. “My Aunt got me into it,” he half yawned; “there was, I believe, some reason why I ought to go, and as it wasn’t a very urgent one--I went. The thing actually seemed glad to see me.”

“Imagine,” laughed Dickey Dawson cautiously, for he was learning how to regulate his spontaneity when talking to fellows like Tommy and Charlie Bolo and Bigelow, and had come to believe that he laughs best who laughs least.

“Yes, and she’d been abroad and seen the Passion Play, or the Lakes of Killarney, or some such thing, and was altogether a most impossible sort of a person. I fancy she is what they call ‘a superior woman’ in this country--they don’t exist anywhere else, I believe.”

Dickey Dawson’s throat was too sore to admit of his talking much himself, and as Tommy was there to entertain him he said:

“Curse her more specifically.”

“Oh, what is the use?” Tommy shrugged his shoulders. “Besides, I couldn’t very well, as the superior woman is not a human being, but a type. You’ve certainly seen lots of her--there is no man fortunate enough not to have. They appeal to the imagination of--”

“Of the unimaginative, who always marry them,” interrupted Charlie Bolo.

“Yes, and aren’t they usually stout, or inclined to be?” asked Bigelow, abstractedly. He was looking through some music books at the piano.

“Oh dear yes; no thin woman need aspire to superiority, nor no unmarried one either. They are essentially wives and mothers, but not vulgarly so necessarily.” It was what he considered accuracy rather than any latent charity that had induced Tommy to add this detail.

“A woman whose efficiency transcends every emergency, known or unknown, is in a fair way toward becoming superior,” he continued. “She’s the abnormally normal--the hope of the race--the oatmeal of humanity--_Philistia felix_--wow!”

Charlie Bolo had a habit, not uncommon among college men in college rooms, of carrying on most of his conversation with his back turned, and at the same time examining minutely every picture in the apartment, vaguely opening most of the books and putting them down again, critically peering at a “shingle” here, and striking a meaningless chord or two on the piano there, and from time to time asking questions about one’s various belongings, answers to which--if ever rashly undertaken--involved the short but intricate history of one’s life. Charlie Bolo, who from an extended practice in doing all these depressing things had reduced his method of inspecting a room to a sort of erratic system, was just finishing the third wall and passing on to the mantelpiece of Dickey Dawson’s study. Here he stopped to admire, for the hundredth time or more, a picture of Dawson’s mother. Simultaneously Tommy came to the end of his wordy little diatribe, and glanced up with what was known to the others as his most “receptive smile.” He, too, seemed to suspend animation before Mrs. Dawson’s likeness, and during the second or two of silence that followed, both Bigelow and Dickey found their attentions fixed on the picture that Charlie Bolo had taken in his hand.

Mrs. Dawson, a remarkably young-looking woman in evening dress, was leaning slightly back in one of the massive, richly carved chairs peculiar to ancient Italy and modern photography.

From the point of view of mere line Mrs. Dawson seemed to be a handsome woman. However, it was not the manner in which her somewhat haughty head stood out from the soft, dull grey of its tapestry background, nor yet the white slope of her shoulders against the dark wood, that most impressed one. The charm of the picture--for it unquestionably had great charm--came rather from the perfection of the lady’s equipment, and the regal ease with which she seemed to ignore it. Charlie Bolo, who had the wisdom of a man with sisters, always found the photograph of Mrs. Dawson faultless--from the bit of white ribbon twisted through her hair, and the fan of ostrich plumes, and the long, limp glove lying lightly across her lap, to the non-committal exposure of shoe-tip.

There was the briefest possible pause in the talk; but coming at the exact time it did, it was more than long enough to enlighten every one as to what every one else was thinking. To Dickey Dawson, who seized the opportunity of giving all three men a hasty, apprehensive glance, it was as if some one had in so many words exclaimed, “At least this woman is not superior!” But, of course, no one could have exclaimed such a thing with Tommy sitting there, exerting the tacit admonition of inspired refinement.

This tribute, manifesting itself in spontaneous silence, was fraught with both pleasure and wretchedness for Dickey Dawson: pleasure, that these fellows whom he so admired and looked up to, should unquestioningly accept the splendid picture lady as his mother, together with all that the relationship implied; wretchedness, because he was much too intelligent a young person not to be thoroughly aware that the splendid picture lady was a glorified arrangement of upholstery and apparel, bearing about as much resemblance to his mother as, for purely decorative purposes, he chose to have it bear. He was proud of the portrait, because it was a success of his own conceiving; he loathed it, because it was forever rubbing in the fact that his relations, though doubtless admirable in the exercise of their respective domestic functions, were execrable as a social background. He detested it also, because it kept unpleasantly vivid in his mind the long diplomatic struggle that had preceded its taking.

“Other boys have family pictures in their rooms at college,” he had said to his mother in the vacation that followed his sophomore year; “I want one of you to take back with me.” Whereupon Mrs. Dawson, with considerable pleasure and some reminiscent vanity, had produced several from an album. Dickey had inspected them gravely, from the one in which his mother was picking shamelessly artificial pond-lilies over the side of an unseaworthy skiff, to the jauntily posed “cabinet size.”

“I should like to have one that looked more as you do now,” he had said, affectionately smoothing her hair and wondering if he could manage it.

He had managed it, of course. He was always tactful, and could on occasions be tender and persuasive. These qualities, added to the authority he exerted in his capacity of American child, had in time overcome his mother’s objections to the background, properties, pose, coiffure, and, most difficult of all, the costume he had insisted on--had, in fact, even achieved a sublime finishing touch by having, instead of an ordinary gilt advertisement, the pliable photographer’s name scrawled carelessly in pencil across the margin of his print. Mrs. Dawson had been exceedingly shocked at the result, and had, not unnaturally, failed to recognise herself in the gracious, self-possessed personage who gave one the impression of having sunk into that picturesque seat for a moment, until her carriage should be called. She had speedily regretted, what she from time to time referred to as her “weakness,” and had hastened to exhibit the strength she still retained by breaking the negative with her own hands--not, however, before Dickey had procured some striking proofs of it. The very success of the picture was what made it such a disturbing addition to Dawson’s room. In the appreciation of his friends it had furnished him with precisely the sort of mother to which his eclectic and exotic inclinations seemed to entitle him. He himself, in his more placid moods, derived an indefinable satisfaction from the thing, and was in the habit of sitting before it, musing contentedly on his perfect adaptability to the people and surroundings he had never been used to at home--an adaptability that sometimes caused him to wonder whether he were not, after all, illegitimate or adopted. Ordinarily, however, this fanciful parent of his appeared to him in the light of a cunningly devised, automatic lie that kept on telling itself to make him miserable.

Charlie Bolo carefully returned the photograph to its place. His back had been turned to the room and he was, perhaps, the only one of the four men who did not realise the direction every one’s thoughts had taken.

“I think I shall have to get rid of that libel on my mother,” mused Dawson, brazenly.

“I was so sorry not to find Mrs. Dawson in the afternoon I called,” said Charlie Bolo, passing on to a silver candlestick. “Is she to be long in town?”

“So was I,” murmured Bigelow; “Bolo and I went together.”

“You must give her a tea,” suggested Tommy, getting up. When he had on his frock coat, he sat intermittently.

“I should like to, tremendously,” lied Dawson, with a pleasant smile; “but you see she’s going away to-morrow. She was awfully cut up about missing you fellows--I think she was at a luncheon, or some such thing.” He courageously took the chances of any one’s having seen her naïvely admiring the Washington Elm and the Longfellow House on the afternoon in question. “She’s going to be here such a very short time”--this was a detail, but it seemed just as well to dwell on it--“that you can fancy how I feel about being laid up like this.”

Bigelow said, “rotten,” or some equally piquant idiom of assent, and Charlie Bolo, by commenting technically on a Dutch tile he had come across, was on the point of giving an entirely new turn to the talk, when something happened.

It has often been told how little Dickey Dawson, once upon a time, saved somebody or other’s life by coolly dangling himself to the bridle of a big, runaway horse. The occasion on which he drew red hot poker sketches where a dog had bitten the calf of his leg, has likewise had its historians. But no one has ever described what took place when, in the midst of Charlie Bolo’s exposition of tile painting, Dickey called, “Come in!” to a doubting knock at the door, and Mrs. Dawson advanced two steps into the study and then stopped.

For a moment no one, with the exception of Dawson, grasped the situation. He had grasped it and was wrestling with it as he threw off the rug that covered him where he lay on the sofa--as he stepped across the room--as he placed his hands on his mother’s shoulders and kissed her lightly on the cheek. He had grasped the situation, but he was utterly at a loss to know what to do with it.

“Didn’t you get my telegram?” his mother was saying; “why, that’s funny--I sent one from the hotel quite a time ago, ‘Am worried about sore throat will come to see you’--just ten words exactly.”

Then he found himself introducing his three friends to her: Tommy first, Charlie Bolo second, and Bigelow last, and as he pronounced their names slowly and distinctly, he tried to look ahead and discover what he should do next.

On realising that the impassive Tommy was being presented to her, Mrs. Dawson began to extend her hand toward him; but her impulse collapsed for some reason or other and the movement resulted in nothing more definite than the disclosure of her silk mits.

The three men were so completely outside of any calculations she had made before knocking on her son’s door, that she had nothing to say to them just then, so she turned once more to Dickey with frank adoration and said,--

“I _was_ worried about your throat.”

“I suppose, like the rest of us, Mrs. Dawson, you have found out how seriously he objects to the serious,” ventured Charlie Bolo airily. The smile Mrs. Dawson gave him did not lack sweetness, for she had been looking at Dickey; but it was desperately vague, and Bolo felt that he had made a false start.

“They are taking pretty good care of me, don’t you think?” There was something pallid and heroic about Dickey’s playfulness.

“Oh, this college life!” began Mrs. Dawson, forgetfully. She was trying to recollect a clipping she had once made from a newspaper.

“There’s a lack of woman’s sweeping, without doubt,” grumbled Bigelow jocosely--the music books he had been examining had dirtied his hands.

“Richard, what was that piece I cut from the ‘Weekly’ and sent you last year?” Mrs. Dawson sat down in the chair Dickey pushed toward her. It was a heavy chair of dark wood, and gave Tommy a vicious desire to look at the picture on the mantelpiece. Dickey elaborated the little anecdote to which his mother referred and made the most of it--it was nearly dinner time; the fellows would certainly go soon.

“You have so many books, Richard,” said Mrs. Dawson, looking about the room for the first time.

“Aren’t his shelves attractive,” assented Tommy with enthusiasm. “I think you would approve of everything there too, Mrs. Dawson, with the possible exception of this, which you undoubtedly know enough about to disapprove of.” He laughingly handed her a volume of “Degeneration” from the table. Dawson could have slain him had he not realised that all three fellows must be somewhat bewildered.

“Isn’t it--isn’t it--thick--” faltered Mrs. Dawson.

“What _is_ one to think of a creature like Nordau?” asked Bigelow, theatrically; “that is to say, of course, beyond his exquisitely unconscious sense of humour.” He had made this remark on several previous occasions, and its technique was, in consequence, becoming quite perfect. Mrs. Dawson looked helplessly at Dickey and said nothing. She was at least displaying what Charlie Bolo called “admirable _savoir taire_.”

When she opened the volume and leaned over to examine the title-page, Tommy gave the photograph on the mantelpiece a surreptitious glance. There was a more or less grotesque resemblance in it to the almost portly, middle-aged original, who was dressed with a quiet absence of taste and answered in a general way Tommy’s description of a superior woman. It was very embarrassing and inexplicable and altogether impossible. Tommy did not understand it--he did not understand anything any more, and only wished to get outside and pinch himself and Charley Bolo and Bigelow.

Dickey Dawson did most of the talking, and achieved thereby a dismal sort of success. His mother had introduced--or rather stumbled on--fallen over--the subject of books, and for a time it was as if Dawson had said to himself,--

“Books! books! what can I say of the origin, development, history, and present condition of books?” For he chattered incessantly about them--his own--Tommy’s--anybody’s. He told funny stories that were not in the least funny, about book agents, and was in the midst of a detailed description of a book-case when he realised he was making a fool of himself and stopped.

“I like reading,” mused Mrs. Dawson, as she mechanically turned the leaves of “Degeneration.” “I think it cultivates the observation.”

“I feel sometimes that it would be more advisable to cultivate blindness than observation,” answered Tommy. He was becoming reckless and got up to go.

Mrs. Dawson’s lips parted to say something, but Dickey broke in with,--

“I wish one of you fellows would kindly stop at the stable and send round a cab. It is too late for my mother to go back to town in the car.”

A protest from Mrs. Dawson seemed imminent, but she apparently thought better of it and returned to the book.

The getting away was difficult, but not nearly so difficult as staying any longer would have been. They chirped “goodbyes,” and “get well soons,” and “so glad to have met yous,” galore, and Bigelow felt waxing within him a new and passionate love for his own family, who were all decently dead. Then they echoed off through a long corridor. After they had gone Mrs. Dawson said nothing for several minutes, and Dickey made a noise with the fire.

“They’re queer young men,” she finally reflected aloud. “Do you like them very much, Richard?”

“Oh, yes,” answered Dickey, indifferently, “you get to like people you see a great deal, I imagine.” He sat on the arm of his mother’s chair and held one of his mother’s hands and kissed it.

“I wonder if you get to _dis_like people you _don’t_ see much of,” said Mrs. Dawson. She was turning the leaves of her book without stopping to look at them.

“Not if you ever truly loved them,” answered Dickey, tenderly drawing nearer to her and laying his cheek against hers. He was almost overdoing the thing.

“Not if you ever truly loved them, I suppose,” thoughtfully repeated his mother with more intelligence than Dickey had ever given her credit for.

Then she began to turn the leaves of the book all over again.

WOLCOTT THE MAGNIFICENT