Chapter II

If the primitive custom--in vogue, I believe, at certain colleges--of choosing by vote “the most popular man,” “the most unpopular man,” “the handsomest man,” and so on, were numbered among Harvard traditions (thank Heaven, it isn’t!), Wolcott would never have been elected to adorn the first of these distinctions. He would have had a large and enthusiastic backing for the second, and some scattering ballots for the third. Yet the material perquisites of popularity were his, for Wolcott presented the thought-compelling spectacle of a disliked person, to whom every social honour was paid with as much regularity as if he had come to Cambridge with a pocketful of promissory notes that called for them--to be drawn out and cashed when due. One never said of Wolcott, as is said of some fellows, “He _made_ the first ten of the Dicky”--implying a certain amount of enterprise or discretion. The assertion that he _was_ a first ten man required no implication; it was enough, for it was so ordained. Now this fact is one of significance,--of greater significance than any one, not a Harvard man, is likely to attach to the sophomore society (and it is a wise Harvard child that knows the mother of its soul). But just why Wolcott--arrogant, combative, unresponsive--had been a first ten man, is for a treatise, not a story. It is sufficient to say that he was one, and that it never occurred to his numerous acquaintances to question his individual fitness for that honour, however much they lamented the system that gave it to him. Wolcott himself never questioned it. Only in the circumstance of his having been omitted from the chosen first, would the subject have seemed to him in any way markworthy. His attitude from babyhood towards anything worth having, that he didn’t already possess, had been one of imminent proprietorship. Once when his nurse, holding him up to the window, had asked in the peculiarly imbecile way of nurses, “Whose moon is that, Searsy?” Searsy had replied, as one compelled to explain the obvious, “That’s Mr. Langdon Wolcott’s moon.” The gentleman referred to was his father. This attitude Searsy had practised through the nursery, and the fitting school, until, by the time he went to college, it was an exceedingly muscular, well-developed posture indeed. And that’s partly why he was called Wolcott The Magnificent. The other reason provoked less difference of opinion; he really was magnificent. Everybody who knew about arms, and legs, and chests, and things, agreed that he was. And as the people who don’t know about such things always have a deep admiration--either frank or sneaking--for them, Sears’s imperial subtitle was rarely disputed. As early as the close of his freshman year, the name spread to town. Girls with opera-glasses used to sit at back dining-room windows on the water-side of Beacon Street to see him row past with his crew. They took the same tender interest in the way the April sun and wind tanned his back, that a freshman takes in colouring a meerschaum pipe. In years gone by, Wolcott and these young ladies had--in the good Boston fashion--cemented their acquaintance with the mud that pies are made of. But wonderful things had happened since then; a lot of little girls, with piano legs and pigtails, had put their skirts down and their hair up; a chunky, dictatorial boy had become very magnificent.

Altogether, Sears was not the sort of fellow over whose welfare one would expect to find many people worrying. There would seem to be but little cause for anxiety about a man who knew how to spend an enormous allowance sensibly,--if selfishly,--who, on the whole, preferred to be in training most of the year rather than out of it, who rarely fell below what he called a “gentleman’s mark” in any of his studies, and who, as a matter of course, was given every social distinction in the power of the undergraduate world to bestow; yet there were several very intelligent human beings, who, when they thought about Sears--and they thought a good deal about him every day--did not meditate so much on what he had, as on what he so abundantly lacked. They wished that things were different. And Haydock used to say that worrying was merely wishing two or three times in succession that things were different. One of these persons was Sears’s eldest sister, another of them was Haydock.

Miss Wolcott was the sort of Boston girl that dresses like a penwiper, and becomes absorbed in associated charities after a second lugubrious season. In the patois of her locality, she was called a “pill;” a girl whom Harvard men carefully avoid until it is rumoured that her family shortly intends to “give something” in the paternal pill-box. Whereas, prior to her renunciation, dozens of Harvard men had been part of Miss Wolcott’s responsibility, her concern was now centred upon one, namely, her brother Sears. She and Haydock, unknown to each other, had found the same reason for wishing things different. After making each other’s acquaintance, they worried congenially in chorus. In their opinion Sears was not getting out of Harvard College the greatest things Harvard College had to offer. They did not expect him to see them,--that would have been demanding too much; the undergraduate who sees them is an extremely occasional, precocious, and, as a rule, objectionable person. But they wished earnestly that the boy might, somehow or other, be put in the way of feeling them--of realising, even dimly, that the world to which he had lent himself for four years was something besides two small clubs, a fashionable dormitory, and a class crew. They wanted him to know, for instance, that the steady, commonplace stream that flowed to five o’clock dinners in Memorial Hall, the damp, throat-clearing, tired mobs that packed Lower Massachusetts on wet Monday afternoons and smelled, the indefinite hundreds that sat at dusk on the grass in front of Holworthy to hear the Glee Club sing, were as necessary, as real, as himself. They thought that such a conviction, or even such a suspicion, would make Sears a bigger and a better man. They believed--knowing, as they did, how inevitable was the general scheme of his future--that if the glimmer of these things did not dawn now, when the horizon that bounded them all ended with the college fence, it never would. And they were perfectly right.

“Searsy is really such a splendid fellow,” Miss Wolcott would say to Haydock, with enthusiasm, “I want him to do something.” Haydock, too, wanted him to do something. But they never got much beyond that, although they had many satisfactory discussions on the subject on Sunday afternoons, while Mrs. Wolcott and the younger sisters (who weren’t failures) made tea and conversation for frock-coated youths in the next room. It was perplexing to know just where to begin with a person like Sears. Miss Wolcott laboured under a disadvantage; Sears was not the person to take suggestions from a failure. Haydock was more to the point. But he and Wolcott were of an age and a class; and it’s so easy to be a bore.

The Secretary’s letter struck Haydock as one of the few distinctly opportune requests for money he had ever heard of. After he had put out Wolcott’s lights, he walked up and down his own room, smoking his pipe and thinking it over. There were several possible outcomes to the little situation. An act of charity may be ignored, it may be performed with the enthusiasm with which one pays a bill for a suit of clothes long since worn out, or it may stir up a confusion of fine emotions that have lain quiescent in one, like the dregs of a comfortable bottle. The latter kind of charity is the sin-coverer. The chances were that Wolcott would never think of Barrows and his man again. It was just possible that he might send them a cheque for fifty dollars, and be unbearable for the next three days. But as for his being in any way stirred, awakened, made to know what he was doing, to wonder what he might do, Haydock felt, away down deep somewhere, that it was quite hopeless. And for that reason, the mind of man being so contrived, his thoughts dwelt that night, as they often did, on an apotheosised Wolcott, a Wolcott who justified himself, who didn’t disappoint, a Wolcott whose sympathies and judgments were as broad as his shoulders, a Wolcott, in short, whose inside was brother to his outside.

When Sears got up the next morning, he “puttered among dishes in his bedroom,”--a thing he usually detested,--instead of going down to the tank for a swim. He had stopped his morning plunge of late, because, since he had begun to get up early, he almost always met Ellis in the tank. Ellis was an offensively clean person; he bathed with much unnecessary splashing, and changed his shirt with a flourish of trumpets. His noisy ablutions got on Wolcott’s nerves. To-day the peacefulness of Sears’s own room, and the indescribable beauty of the College Yard,--spring in Cambridge comes to the Yard first,--as he walked to and from breakfast, combined to put him in one of his best moods,--one which expressed itself in a slow exuberance of spirits, a persistent, obstinate bantering of everybody and everything that, although far removed from ill-humour, was not yet mirth. When at nine o’clock there was a knock on his door, Sears, instead of saying, “Come in,” called out the long, unspellable “Ay-y-y-y-y,” one hears so many times a day around college; when he looked up and saw McGaw, the tutor, standing in the doorway, his manner did not change.

“Hello!--sorry to see you!” he said, without rising. “I don’t feel much like it this morning.” McGaw fingered his notebook uneasily. “But come in, anyhow--I suppose I have to,” added Wolcott, noticing with a smile that the tutor thought he had been dismissed. “Don’t sit there; it’s a rotten sofa. Sit over by the window and smoke.”

“I don’t smoke, thank you,” said McGaw, sitting down where he had been told to.

“What’s the matter; are you in training?” Let it be said, to Wolcott’s credit, that the irony of his question was unconscious, and, to his discredit, that the chuckle with which he greeted his own words as soon as their absurdity dawned on him was pointed and uncontrolled. He had asked McGaw if he was in training, because the question naturally followed a refusal to drink or smoke; its inappropriateness flashed upon him afterwards. Nothing short of incongruity, striking, absolute, could make Sears laugh as he was laughing now. McGaw in training! That hatchet-faced, slant-shouldered, chestless, leggy, comic valentine whose neck and wrists and ankles refused to desist where his clothes left off,--in training! Sears twisted half-way round that he might have a better look at the tutor, and, throwing his legs over the arm of his huge leather chair, he shook with amusement. Then a slow, disconcerting wave of regret for what he had done crept over him; it made him warm, and pricked painfully among the roots of his hair. It left him all at once with nothing to say. McGaw opened his note-book and stared at it blindly. Two brilliant spots of pink tipped his high cheek-bones.

“Let’s begin,” said Wolcott, gruffly.

“How much do you know of the subject?” asked McGaw, in a voice that might have come from an automaton.

“Nothing.”

“Do you know any Latin?”

“Damned little!”

The tutor drummed thoughtfully with his fingertips on the note-book.

“Perhaps you’d better get some writing materials and take down the main headings,” he suggested. “It’s an aid to the memory.” He looked fixedly out of the window into a mist of young green, while Sears rummaged all over the room. It was some time before he could find paper of any kind; his desk was heavy with a variety of silver topped Christmas presents, but lacking in any of the essentials for study. He succeeded, finally, in producing from a drawer some undersized note-paper, with the number of his room stamped in blue at the top. McGaw furnished the pencil. Then began a travesty on education that was, no doubt, being enacted in any number of rooms at Harvard, at that identical hour. The keen-faced, hectic-looking tutor, with his exhaustive notes, nervously outlined a period of the world’s history, the importance of which both he and Wolcott considered only in its relation to the final examinations. Charlemagne’s reign, looked at as something of a stride in the march of progress, would have bored Sears and frittered away McGaw’s time. Had popes and kings been for an instant regarded as more than names with a postscript of Roman numerals and dates, Wolcott’s brain would have struck, and the tutor’s imagination would have creaked, in the exercise of a disused function. Queens, treaties, battles, diets, bulls, crownings, and decapitations--for two stifling hours, McGaw shovelled them into Wolcott, until he sweat like a stoker. And Sears, phlegmatic, colossal, consumed them all like an ogre at his dinner. From time to time, he changed his seat and began afresh; it was as if he were setting his teeth to keep the mess down until he could disgorge it--the facts of five hundred years--on his blue book. Only once did he interrupt, and show, by asking a child’s question about the unfortunate emperor forced to stand barefooted in the snow all night, that any of these facts were attached in his mind to human beings. Since he had come to Harvard, Wolcott had done this sort of thing before every midyear and final examination period. He intended to keep on doing it until, at the end of four years, the President and Faculty would say to him, in a communication that crackled deliciously when its pink ribbons were untied:--“_Sears_ (or perhaps “Searolus”) _Wolcott, 2nd, alumnum ad gradum Baccalaurei in Artibus admisimus, eique dedimus et concessimus omnia insignia et jura ad hunc honorem spectantia._”

After two hours, McGaw closed his book, Sears dropped his notes and pencil on the floor, and leaned back with his arms above his head. The soft spring air, enervating with the smell of damp earth and new leaves, was finding its way up through the open windows. The tutor rubbed his strained eyes wearily; he had something more to say connected with the examination, but for the moment he couldn’t recall it.

“Oh, yes,” he said abruptly; “we’d better leave the Latin documents until the end. Most of them are translated in Van Witz’s ‘Mediæval Records.’ I advise you to buy the volume and begin to look it over by yourself.”

“I wish you’d get it for me,” Wolcott answered, after a moment in which he decided that the effort of picking up his pencil and paper and writing down the title was too great.

“I suppose I could,” said McGaw, slowly. He knew very well that he couldn’t; he didn’t have the necessary dollar.

“Yes, bring it round next time you come; there’s plenty of time,” added Sears.

To almost any one else, McGaw would have had no difficulty in saying, “I wish you would get it yourself.” But he shrank from what he imagined would be Wolcott’s reception of such a request. For from the time he had come into the room, and found his big pupil sprawling unconcernedly in the middle of it, the tutor had been in a whirl of uneasiness and resentment. Wolcott’s study was a very masculine, almost an austere apartment. But it was simple with the simplicity that costs a great deal of money. Its plain hard woods and dull green leather overpowered McGaw; the solid aggressiveness of Wolcott himself angered him. Both the tutor’s environment and his audience repelled an admission of poverty. In his embarrassment at having to say anything, he said it all, nervously blurting out:

“I’m afraid you’ll have to get it yourself. It’s an expensive book; I can’t afford it.”

“Why, that’s all right,” said Sears, heartily; “what’s the name of the thing?” He was as ill at ease as McGaw himself, now, and his abrupt note of sincerity was decidedly awkward. The tutor, of course, immediately discovered the intent to patronise, that, as a matter of fact, was not there. His hatred of Wolcott dated itself from that instant.

After McGaw was well out of the building, Sears would have strolled aimlessly down into the sunshine--he never stayed in his room any more than was necessary--had he not come across the Secretary’s letter when he went to his desk to put away the notes he had just taken. He reread this document, with what is conveniently known as “mingled emotions.” That is to say, his impatience at the Secretary’s “nerve” diffused itself, as he read, in a vague inclination to know exactly what Barrows wanted him to do. He would not for anything have acknowledged, even to himself, that his two hours with McGaw had brought about this frame of mind, which in Sears was almost equivalent to mellowness. He preferred to think that Haydock’s opinions were worth respecting. But, nevertheless, it was McGaw with his pinched, hectic, angular, hunted personality, all sticking out of a scant, tightly-buttoned cutaway coat, that had induced Sears, by some curiously indirect mental process, to reread the letter in the first place. For, after all, Wolcott was a gentleman, if an extremely young one, and when he hurt people’s feelings, as he very often did, he always felt uncomfortable about it afterwards. Not that his discomfort brought him to the point of an apology,--some day, perhaps, it might. But then, if he ever became softened to that extent he probably wouldn’t offend any one in the first place. He read the Secretary’s business-like statements about the man whose breakfasts and luncheons and dinners were oatmeal, oatmeal, and oatmeal, and a little milk--condensed milk. But it was McGaw himself who managed to put the breath of life into the written pages, and make the man they told about seem any more vital than Charlemagne or Martin Luther; words alone rarely told Wolcott much. McGaw’s glowing cheek-bones, his drawn, sensitive mouth, and stringy clothes were pleading his own cause, unknown to himself, to Wolcott, or to the Secretary.

Sears put down the letter and drew a sheet of the little note-paper to him. Then, after beating a preliminary tattoo, that sounded like the clicking of a telegraph instrument, with his pen, he wrote to Barrows: “I shall be glad to do what I can for your man; but you must tell me what it is you want me to do. Can I see you some time and talk it over?” On his way out to post the note, he met Haydock.

“I bet you’d like to know what’s inside this, Haystack,” he said, thrusting the envelope into his friend’s face and chuckling inscrutably. Haydock looked at the address.

“You’ll tell me some day,” he answered confidently. Wolcott jerked his note away. His reply was:--

“I’ll be damned if I do!” He meant what he said at the time because he knew Haydock was interested and thought he could tease him. As a rule, he found it impossible to tease Haydock, unless he pulled his hair or knocked him down.