Harvard episodes

THE SERPENT’S TOOTH

“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 dislike 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

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 2^nd, 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.

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.

III

“AFTER one has been out of college long enough to reckon time by a calendar, instead of by the college catalogue, May and June are sprightly preludes to all one’s operas unsung. But when the year counts nine months, instead of twelve, spring is a climax. At Harvard, it comes in a misty veil of young elm leaves and apple blossoms that floats, for a time, with the sweetest deception in the world, between you and every other disagreeable fact. It envelops you, permeates you, seduces you, and makes you drunk; yet, as hour after hour (and lecture after lecture) drifts past your open window, or your canoe, or the sun-flecked lawn under the trees in the Yard, where you lie and watch the industrious robins rip elastic angle-worms from the sod, you believe that you have awakened for the first time,—that the problem has at last solved itself. You are as blind as a poet, and you laugh and wonder why you never saw before. Had not the only verse been written, you would write it: “Come ... sit by my side and let the world slip; we shall ne’er be younger.”

But in spite of all this, these first spring days, that incline one to look upon the immoral sense as a sort of hibernating beast, are not beginnings but the end. A feeling as of many things happening at once comes over you. There is much to do, and no time whatever in which to do it. The College is in a hurry. It crashes along toward the Finals and Class Day, carrying you with it in spite of you. No single activity in which you may engage seems in itself of utmost importance. But the sum total crowds your days and nights with the interests of rowing and base-ball, and the First Ten, and the perennial squabbles of the three clubs in their efforts to pledge the most attractive of the neophytes to join their respective institutions (which, unless the neophytes are very sensible young men, doesn’t tend to make them any more attractive), and the great Spring Dinners, when the graduates come back and meet all the new men and sing songs and drink drinks (or is it the other way?), and forget that they have ever been away from Harvard at all, and the dinners of the college papers,—“The Monthly” (roistering blades), at some modest tavern; and “The Advocate,” at Marliave’s, perhaps, with nothing in particular to eat, but with all that easy indifference to the fragility of crockery by which the artistic temperament makes itself heard; “The Crimson” (typographical remonstrance), enjoying itself somewhere in its strange, reproachful way; and the “Only Successful,” “The Lampoon,” at The Empire or The Tuileries, laughing all night regardless of expense. Then there is Strawberry Night at the Signet, when the First Seven, from the Sophomore Class is taken in,—Haydock and Ellis were on the First Seven,—and the O. K. dinner (Hush-h-h-h-h!), when the First Eight from the Junior Class is initiated, and Strawberry Night at the Pudding, and the “Pop” Concerts, and Riverside, and a thousand other delightful happenings. None of them are of supreme importance, I suppose. But they combine to whirl certain men through May and part of June on a strong, swift current of Harvard life that deposits them, after Class Day and Commencement, somewhere high and dry and—although they may not know it themselves—homesick for Cambridge.

Even the mildest, farthest-meandering eddies of this current do not reach the type of student to which McGaw belonged; McGaw knew nothing of them. He had not gone to college to drift with the stream. He was there, primarily, to acquire information along certain lines laid out in the curriculum, incidentally to fight hunger and cold and darkness. If he could be “sandy” and healthy and lucky enough to stick it out for four years, he would have, at the end, concealed somewhere about his person, that distinction (of many differences),—a college education. “Sand” he had,—an incredible amount of it. But the trait had bid fair to destroy his health before it discovered his luck. For to stay where he was at all, and slave with his mind, often obliged him first to exhaust and stultify himself with the manual labour of a lout. He had taken care of furnace fires, cleaned cellars and backyards, shovelled snow, and cut grass, until these varied avocations, together with the remarkable work he did in his studies, and the farcical meals he cooked himself, broke him down and sent him in a semi-hysterical, wholly pitiful state to the kindly Barrows. And Barrows, convinced that he did not belong to the many “grinds,”—of such admirable purpose and tragic mediocrity,—who made the Secretary’s office one of constant anguish, hit upon an inspiration. Of late, it had seemed positively Heaven-sent. Wolcott had come to him, and said, in a manner that combined a child’s shyness with the omnipotence of a crowned head who believes in the divine right of kings, “I wish you would tell me just what I’m to do for this man you wrote me about.” Barrows was gratified, amused, and, perhaps, a trifle worried. His half hour with Sears, like a good deal of the time spent in The Magnificent One’s company, rather baffled the Secretary. Wolcott’s method of doing charity was in itself extraordinary. Furthermore, as far as Barrows could see,—and he was keen,—there was no particular motive for the act. Compassion was lacking; what little Sears said was impersonal, almost cold. Vanity, smug self-appreciation, there was none; the fellow neither enjoined theatrical conditions of secrecy, nor showed ill-concealed eagerness to shine his light before men. The personal equation was eliminated. Wolcott indicated nothing but a princely willingness to undertake and carry out whatever the situation required. As a matter of temporary convenience, he told Barrows he preferred sending the man a monthly allowance, to giving any particular sum at the start.

“Tell him to spend his money and—and eat things,” was perhaps his most specific suggestion.

Haydock, of course, was deeply interested in his quiet fashion. Sears told him the bald facts in a casual, indifferent way one afternoon when he was changing his clothes to row. The interview with the Secretary, Haydock was forced to reconstruct as best he could.

“Are you going to keep it up right along?” he asked, sceptically.

“Why not?” Sears’s tone implied the usual chip on his shoulder.

“Well, it’s very good of you,” commented the other, with almost imperceptible exaggeration.

“Oh, hell!—now you’re giving me the geehee; I can tell that even if I can’t write anonymous sonnets for the ‘Monthly.’” He gave Haydock one of his athletic tributes of affection. “You know there’s nothing good about it. What difference does it make?”

Yet in spite of Wolcott’s characteristic attitude to his indigent unknown,—it was equivalent, briefly, to a shrug of the shoulders,—the two dropped into the habit of talking together about him. They referred to him after a time as “It,” or “Crœsus,” or “The Bloated Bondholder;” and one of Wolcott’s favourite amusements was to describe in detail, with an idiotic brilliancy of invention that Haydock had never given him credit for, what “It” was doing at that particular moment.

“‘It’ must be dressing for dinner, don’t you think?” Sears would ask, apropos of nothing at all.

“Oh, do you think so,—at six o’clock?” Haydock would take out his watch, and deliberate seriously, “You see he dines at eight, probably, and that gives him just time to get away from the Somerset and take in the last few numbers at the ‘Pop’ Concert.”

“Yes,—he won’t care for long dinners this warm weather,” Sears would add; “some clams, a clear soup, a bird, a truffle or two, salad perhaps; all a man really needs of course, but nothing heavy or elaborate.”

Or again: “‘It’ had better hurry up and put that boat of his into commission if he wants to get to Poughkeepsie for the race.”

“Will he go round with her?” Haydock would consider doubtfully.

“Oh, dear, no; he’ll take his car and meet her there. That sailing master of his is a capital man,—perfectly invaluable he’s been to Crœsus. You remember that spring on the Mediterranean?”

“Oh, yes, yes, of course, that time!”

After some such elaborate bit of fooling, Wolcott would roll on the floor in paroxysms of mirth. And all the while McGaw and Wolcott were spending several hours a week in the same room, translating from the same page. Once when Haydock tiptoed in during a seminar to borrow something, Sears glanced up from the Latin Documents and said: