Chapter I

In some way or other it came to the notice of Barrows, the Recording Secretary, that Ernest McGaw was literally starving. The Secretary, being a person of appreciation, immediately gave the man food.

“I’m a horribly busy creature,” he said to McGaw; “but if you’ll come round to dinner with me at the Colonial Club this evening, we can talk about things.” Of course McGaw went and dined--for the first time in months; for two weeks he had been keeping himself half alive on oatmeal that he cooked in a shallow tin apparatus, over the lamp he studied by.

The Secretary had ridden a bicycle that afternoon, and seemed half famished himself, which soothed McGaw’s raw, quivering sensibilities from the first. Then, besides, Barrows was probably the most genial, natural, receptive, unacademic person that ever answered to an official name. So afterwards, when they went into an unoccupied room upstairs, and the Secretary smoked a cigar, it was more than easy--it was comforting--for McGaw to tell him the whole squalid little tragedy. There was nothing particularly new in it to the Secretary, since he was a gentleman who spent his life in making the struggle easier for men who tried to go through college with a capital consisting of fourteen cents and a laudable ambition. Youth and bitterness in combination were some of the materials he dealt in. Barrows could have told the story of McGaw’s pinched, colourless existence much better than McGaw could; yet for an hour or more he listened, questioned, discussed, and was moved. Later, when he and McGaw parted in the Yard, the Secretary, before going to bed, wrote a carefully thought-out letter to Sears Wolcott 2nd, of the sophomore class.

Sears Wolcott got the letter the next evening, when he stopped a moment in Claverly, on his way from the training table to his club,--that is to say, to one of his clubs. He was a member of two, besides, naturally, the Institute, of whose privileges, by the way, he rarely availed himself. After dining at the training table with his class crew, he usually dropped in at his nearest club to smoke the one pipeful allowed him by his captain. To-night, however, Barrows’ letter put him in such a bad temper that he forgot about his pipe, looked sullen, and spoke to no one. Wolcott was a very big boy; when he was angry, he seemed to swell and swell until everything in the vicinity got out of drawing. Nobody but Haydock had even noticed him come in; the others were too absorbed in drinking their coffee and chattering about the class races. Haydock’s greeting, “How is The Magnificent One this evening?” did not meet with the reception that encourages further pleasantries. Haydock was the only other man in the club who was not talking as fast and as loud as he knew how. But his quiet was as different from The Magnificent One’s as the placid stillness of a summer evening differs from the awful silence in which one waits for a funnel-shaped cloud to mature. Haydock had a big cigar in one hand and a little coffee-cup in the other. He was thinking that a good room in a good club, with its dark walls, and all its leather chairs and divans and rugs, with its magazines and convenient lights to read them by, with its absence of personal individuality, was, especially just after dinner, the most satisfactory spot in the world. Even the background of cheerful noise was agreeable. “As long as you’re not called on to help make it,” added Haydock to himself, as one of the talkers detached himself from the others, and, flourishing a paper in his face, called out:--

“Who wants to subscribe to the Prospect Union?”

Wolcott reached for the nearest newspaper, and buried himself in it; he couldn’t endure Ellis.

“Who wants to subscribe to the Prospect Union? Only a dollar,” repeated Ellis, wiggling his subscription list before Wolcott’s eyes.

“What the devil is the Prospect Union?” growled Wolcott. He crumpled the “Transcript” and tossed it back on the table.

“Why, don’t you know?” asked Ellis, in genuine surprise. “I’ve taught geography there for two years.”

Wolcott snapped back a single word. It was neither a pretty word nor a refined one; the mildest significance one could attach to it was that Wolcott was scarcely in sympathy with Ellis or anything that was his.

“The Prospect Union,” explained Haydock, in the deliberate way that was so often taken seriously, “is a most admirable educational institution, carried on in Cambridgeport by the Harvard undergraduate. It is elaborately designed to make the lower classes--the labouring man--dissatisfied with his station in life. I am proud to say, that I once went there every Friday night for six months to teach two bricklayers, three dry-goods clerks, and a nigger how to appreciate the beautiful works of the late Mr. Keats. I spoiled their lives, and they all love me. Allow me, in my humble way, to help the cause.” He rolled a silver dollar the length of the table to Ellis. Ellis smiled, and put the money in his pocket; he considered Haydock a very “unmoral” person indeed, but liked him, and hoped that some day he would make something of himself.

“That’s very nice--now who’s the next patron?” the philanthropist went on, earnestly. “The Prospect Union is really a mighty fine thing. Even if the men down there don’t learn very much out of books, they can come there and see us,” he had almost unnoticeably emphasised the “us.”

“My God!” said Wolcott, slowly. The words and the way he sized up Ellis, from top to toe, were heavy with a sort of thick-headed contempt. “They can go there and look at _you_, can they?” Wolcott muttered the unrefined word again. Then he got up with an enormous stretch, yawned, looked at Ellis once more, and laughed, as he went out of the room.

Of the lesser brutalities, a contemptuous laugh is, perhaps, the most brutal of all. Ellis’s thin face reddened. There was silence until the outer door slammed.

“Damn such a man!” declared Ellis, in a loud whisper. This was bold language for him to speak. Later in the night, he woke up and thought about it.

“Oh, I wouldn’t,” protested Haydock, mildly. “He’s so magnificent.”

“Well, I can’t see it!” Ellis was smarting; but he couldn’t relieve himself with the appropriate sharp retort; it didn’t come to him until later on, in bed. “No one has any right to be such a hog,--especially in a club. Besides, I wasn’t talking to him in particular. He needn’t have subscribed, if he didn’t want to; I never expected he would, although almost every one else has. What’s a dollar anyhow?” he shrugged his shoulders.

“Yes, what is it?” piped a tiny person, trying to relieve the tension, from the other side of the table. “I haven’t seen one since the first of last February.”

“No, but seriously,” demanded Ellis,--he was always demanding something seriously,--“what do you think of a man who does things like that, not only once, but every day--all the time?”

“Well, what did he do?” Haydock was never unprepared to take the other side of any argument in which Ellis engaged. “In the first place, he came into the club so quietly that no one but me noticed him. He sat down and read his mail, and didn’t join in the clatter about the class races, because, knowing something about the subject, what the rest of you fellows had to say probably didn’t interest him; and he isn’t a talkative person, ever. Well, then you tried to get him to subscribe to that foolish night school for æsthetic butchers. I confess his answer was not--not exactly urbane. But it’s just possible that your request was ill-timed.”

“Don’t you think that’s one trouble with Sears?” piped the tiny one, who had become interested. “He always gives you the feeling that everything you say is ‘ill-timed’!”

“The great, big, angry bull!” added Ellis. “And just the other day,” he went on, suddenly remembering another of Wolcott’s atrocities, “he took a letter away from Billy Bemis, held him off with one hand and began to read it,--right out loud in the club; and when Billy snatched it away, Wolcott picked him up and threw him clear across the room on to the divan, and almost broke his back. Now I don’t think that any man who pretends to be a gentleman--”

“Oh, write a letter to the ‘Crimson’ about it--” yelled some one who, though trying to read in the next room, apparently could not help following the discussion.

“He was probably feeling his oats a little that day,” suggested Haydock, placidly. “Why shouldn’t he? He’s just like a fine stallion snorting around a ten-acre lot.”

“Feeling his oats, yes,--that’s all right,” sniffed Ellis. “I suppose he was feeling his oats when he captained his class eleven, and used to curse the men out until everybody talked about it; that is, he cursed out the men who were smaller than himself--if it wasn’t worth his while to keep on the right side of them.”

“For Heaven’s sake shut up!” came from the other room, a trifle impatiently.

“Aren’t we just a little harsh?” asked some one who had been listening without joining in.

“Don’t repeat things like that about Sears, Johnny, even if you like to believe them,” said Haydock, simply. Haydock always seemed a little older--less haphazard in his words--than his contemporaries, and never so much so as when repressing what had once been a temper of the most flaming kind. Ellis--limited, conscientious, uncompromising--created countless occasions for such repression. He was a pale tissue of all the virtues. His sobriety was the kind that drove men to the gutter; his chastity lowered temperatures. Once at a small dinner he inadvertently got drunk and became so austere that the fellows went home. To-night, in running down a member of the club at the club, he had more than irritated Haydock. And then--which in this instance was to the point--the member had been Wolcott. As a matter of fact, Haydock liked Wolcott as he liked very few people. But even if one wasn’t fond of The Magnificent One, he thought, there were so many people all over the college who spent a generous portion of their time in cursing him,--men to whom “Sears Wolcott” was the eponym of snob, and purse-proud arrogance,--that in not sticking up for him, or, at least, in not knowing what was really fine in him, one missed a rare chance of judging by standards other than those of Thomas, Richard, and Henry. Wolcott was a snob, of course; but then he never denied the fact,--he even volunteered the information at times. And there’s hope for that kind of a snob, thought Haydock.

The club--which had a characteristic expression for almost every hour of the day--was beginning to lose what Haydock always thought of as its “just-after-dinner look.” The men had finished their coffee; some of them strolled off to their rooms to grind; others hurried in town to the theatre; two were playing cards rather solemnly in a corner; on the divan, a worn-out athlete had fallen asleep over a comic paper. Haydock finished his cigar and went across to his room in Claverly.

At ten o’clock,--Wolcott’s bedtime when in training,--Haydock lit a pipe and knocked on The Magnificent One’s door at the other end of the long corridor. His coming at that hour was such a matter of course, that the door had been left hospitably unlatched as usual.

“How was the rowing to-day?” he asked. The question, also, was a matter of course.

“Damned hard work!” Wolcott was leisurely undressing and dropping his clothes wherever he happened to be when they came off. “About ten racing starts, then down to the Basin and up to the Brighton abattoir and back. I’m tired.”

“And just a dash peevish, I believe.” Haydock sat down on the floor, and lit the shavings and kindling wood in the fireplace. Wolcott’s rooms were always as fresh and cold as the weather permitted.

“Oh, Ellis is such a God awful fool,--I’d break his face if he was bigger!” Wolcott looked at the fire a moment, and thoughtfully stroked one of his bare arms. “I got this, to-night.” He took a letter from the mantelpiece and dropped it into Haydock’s lap. Haydock read it while The Magnificent One got into his pyjamas before the fire. The letter had nothing whatever to do with Ellis. Not that Haydock supposed it had; logical sequence in any two of Wolcott’s remarks always surprised him. It was a tactfully worded appeal from Barrows, the Recording Secretary, telling, with simple realism that somehow or other stayed by one after the letter was back in its envelope, of a fine, keen, scholarly fellow in the sophomore class who had been found, literally starving, a stone’s throw from the College Yard.

“What do you think, Boy?” asked Wolcott, indifferently.

“I wonder who it is,” mused Haydock.

The Secretary’s omission of the man’s name hadn’t interested Wolcott in the least.

“Why didn’t he keep away, damn his soul?” he said.

“Well, he’s here,--that’s the main thing.”

“And Barrows wants me to give him a yacht and some polo ponies, and keep him in cigars and golf sticks.”

Haydock made an inarticulate sound of assent between puffs. He knew perfectly well that Wolcott wanted his advice, that in his characteristic way he was asking it. He also knew, for his liking was an intelligent one, how to give it.

“Well, I call it pretty nervy,” grumbled Sears.

“Oh, yes--yes--it’s nervy.” One simply had to agree with Wolcott in all minor points in order to get anywhere.

“I don’t like to have my leg pulled any more than anybody else does.”

“No, I shouldn’t think you would. But I imagine they’d have difficulty if they tried to play any little games like that with you,” Haydock added, confidently.

No one objects to being talked to this way by a slightly older person who is no fool himself.

“I’d like to see them try!” growled the other.

“They know better.”

“What do you call that, then?” Wolcott pointed with his toe to the letter in Haydock’s lap.

“Oh--that!” Haydock’s manner was most off-hand, “that’s merely the penalty of prominence and wealth. It’s tiresome, of course, this having to come up to the scratch all your life. You know--sometimes I’m mighty glad I’m not so powerful as you are--not in a position to do as much for people, because I think--of course you never can tell--but I think I’d be the kind of person to try to do it every now and then.”

“This sort of thing would be perfect fruit for you, wouldn’t it?”

“I’m inclined to think the poor devil would stop starving for a while.”

“How much would you give him, old Haystack, if you weren’t such a dirty beggar yourself?” After absorbing a certain amount of Haydock’s flattery, Wolcott always began to radiate a sort of bantering amiability.

“Who--I? Oh, I don’t know! You can’t very well send fifteen or twenty dollars, and let it go at that, I suppose; that’s too easy. I’d fix up some scheme with the Secretary,--he knows all about that kind of thing,--and keep the creature going; pay on the instalment plan for thirty or forty years,” he laughed, “you know, the way people do when they buy a piano or a set of Kipling--or any old thing.”

This was about as far as Haydock dared to go. He often wondered how Wolcott could be induced to interest himself in something along the lines suggested by Barrows, the Secretary; it was the incalculable benefit such an interest would be to Wolcott that made him wish it; and he had, as often, given the problem up. For Wolcott took the initiative in nothing; he never had known the necessity that compels one to. The only effort he was ever called on to make was that of selection. It seemed as if everything in the world--the Secretary’s letter included--came tumbling to crave approval at the boy’s feet. And he approved of so little--least of all, of the people (Ellis was one of them) who butted their heads against the mighty wall of his prejudices. Haydock, who, perhaps, knew him better than any one did, was occasionally nimble enough to clamber over the barrier. When he failed, he consoled himself with the thought that, unlike Ellis and some others, his head was still intact. For, in an odd sort of way that suggested the congeniality of mind and matter, the two were excellent friends.

“Well, ‘I must go to bed and get strong for dear old Harvard,’” announced Wolcott, abruptly. He had once read that sentence in a college story, and had quoted it, with intense amusement, every night since.

Haydock leaned against the doorway, while The Magnificent One slid into bed.

“Bed’s a good place, isn’t it?” said Wolcott, cuddling his sunburnt face in the pillow. “Oh, Haystack,--I want to get up at seven,--leave a note on my boots as you go out.”

“Have you found any one yet to tutor you in History 19?” asked Haydock, from the other room, where he was scribbling a notice for the janitor.

“Yes, I start in to-morrow.”

“I didn’t know anybody was tutoring in that course this year. Who did you get?”

“I don’t know his name. Oh, yes, I do, too. He’s a freak named McGaw; wears a black cutaway coat with braid round the edge, and looks nervous. Good-night, old Haystack. Don’t forget the lights.”

Before Haydock made the room dark, he took the Secretary’s letter from the mantelpiece, and put it on Wolcott’s desk, where it could not very well be overlooked.