Harvard Episodes

Wolcott the Magnificent

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 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:

“Crœsus has had a mighty pretty lot of ponies sent up from Virginia,” and Haydock had answered, as he rummaged through the desk:—

“Good work,—I’ll have to look them over.”

Long practice had perfected the technique of their little game; its suggestion of mindless opulence was maddening to McGaw. He had very bitter feelings sometimes. Of late they had all come to an intense sort of focus upon Sears. For in him McGaw was able to detect every human attribute that he especially hated. Sears, on the other hand, though naturally inclined to regard the tutor as a serviceable, if unsightly, machine, became used to his high-strung, underfed personality. He would talk to him now and then, when the effort of concentration became impossible, ask his opinion of certain instructors and their courses,—whether this one was a “snap,” and that one a “stinker,”—what sort of frills he, McGaw, was going to get on his degree, and if he didn’t think the college was “a good deal of a fake, anyhow?” This sort of thing was infinitely more galling to McGaw than a business relation, pure and simple. He remembered that, with other men who interrupted the study hour from time to time, Wolcott talked rowing or horses or—what was even more bewildering—nothing at all, but fooled and laughed with easy intimacy. He resented Sears’s ponderous adaptability to his, the tutor’s, own special topics.

While these two were seeing so much of each other on this uneven basis, May came and went, bringing with it the Class Races and all the other spring novelties. Wolcott’s crew came in second in the race, with seven men in the boat. Some one had broken an oar, or a leg, or an outrigger,—some one always does,—and jumped overboard. So the order in which the four crews splashed over the finish line was, as usual, a tremendous surprise to the black crowd that stretched along the Harvard Bridge, and the sea wall, and the stable roofs back of Beacon Street. Everybody—especially the girls—said the man who jumped was a great, splendid fellow. He was, of course; but the crews and the man himself laughed a good deal when they heard it; they thought that the men who had to stay by a disabled boat and be beaten by half a length showed their sand.

One sweltering day in June, after the examinations had begun, Haydock found Sears in his room, staring helplessly at a small mountain of clothing that reared itself in chaos from his study floor. “What’ll I do?” he asked, mopping his face dejectedly with the tail of a coloured shirt.

“Why, what’s the matter with them?” Haydock turned over a gay straw hat with his foot.

“Oh, everything!” answered Sears; he was warm and cross. “They don’t fit, and they’re hideous, and no good, and in my way, and they make me sick.” He gave the pile a kick that spread it the length of the room.

“Why not let Crœsus have a whack at them?” suggested Haydock, thoughtfully.

“What!” Wolcott looked quizzical, astonished. “Oh, that would never do, Boy! It would be rotten for one college fellow to offer another one clothes.”

“I don’t see much difference between that and money.”

“Well, there is a difference, just the same. The money comes through the Secretary,—a sort of reward offered, and no questions asked. Anyhow, there’s something about money—something—Oh, you know what it is as well as I do! As soon as money belongs to you, it’s just as good as anybody’s.”

“Rather better, I should say.”

“Well, clothes aren’t.”

“Since you press me,” said Haydock, fishing among a heap of crumpled linen, “I feel obliged to possess myself of this extremely pretty necktie.” He smoothed a brilliant strip of crimson silk over his knee.

“Go on, Haystack,—what shall I do with them?”

“How many times does a simple statement have to be repeated to you before it penetrates?” Haydock rapidly began to bring a rough kind of order into the waste of shirts, neckties, odd gloves, and suits of clothes.

“Give them to Crœsus? That’s out of the question, me boy!”

Haydock worked hard a few moments in silence. Then he stood up, hot and dishevelled, but amiable, as he always was, and said, laughing:—

“That light grey suit, these shirts, those neckties, and this hat, in fact the best of this out-fit, is going this afternoon to Barrows, with a note from you. They will subsequently be presented to ‘It, Croœsus, Esquire.’” It amused Wolcott every now and then to have Haydock “boss” him. The clothes went, of course.

Two days later they returned. That is to say, the best of them did,—the grey suit, the coloured shirt, the straw hat, and one of the quieter neckties. Ernest McGaw, unspeakably jaunty, almost handsome, was inside of them.

Even before Wolcott’s bundle had enabled McGaw to blossom, like the season, into fine raiment, his whole appearance had undergone a subtle, indescribable change. Perhaps it was a recently acquired firmness of gait as he swung through the Yard to a lecture, or up the steps of Claverly to Sears’s room. Hitherto he had hated the approach to Claverly; there usually were men going in or coming out, who looked at him as they passed. Once he had found a whole group of them seated on the steps, and had walked twice round the block, rather than brush through to the door. Or it may have been the spiritual radiance that comes of good food and plenty of it, money in your pocket, and peace in your mind. At any rate, McGaw’s expression, whether it walked at you, or looked at you, or smiled at you, had, of late, become the outward and visible sign of a great inward happiness. Almost every minute of his day was dedicated to his work; yet he felt as if he were having for the first time leisure in which to breathe. By no means the least exquisite of his satisfactions was his first purchase of something unnecessary, a luxury, an extravagance; he bought one evening, in a dim musty corner of a Brattle Square bookstall, a second-hand copy of some Latin hymns for twenty cents. The demi-god who had caused such things to be—Barrows had spoken vaguely of “a friend”—had become to McGaw the occasion of the sun’s rising and the stars’ shining; through him, the earth revolved, and the college endured. McGaw was very religious; every night he prayed fervently for the man who was befriending him. To-day, when he left his room to walk down to Claverly, he had the uplifting glow of self-respect and good-will to men whose secret only barbers and tailors seem to know. Perhaps, just at first, he felt even more like a white elephant than one ordinarily does on getting into a fresh suit of grey, after wearing black for many months. But the sensation, coming as it did from the knowledge that he was conspicuously better, rather than worse dressed than most people, was not altogether an unpleasant one to McGaw.

Wolcott’s back was turned when he arrived. This fact made what followed even more unfortunate than it would have been had the somewhat astounding truth burst on Sears at the moment the tutor came into the room. For it enabled Wolcott to say, in his natural, off-hand tones, without looking away from his desk:

“Is that you, McGaw? Just sit down and wait a minute.” When his revolving chair finally did swing round, the transition was something very awful. Sears, in spite of his birth, and his bringing up, and his money, was, at times, to put it kindly, exceedingly “near to nature;” just now he behaved as one might fancy a naked Zulu behaving were an electric car or a steam-roller to dart suddenly across his path in the depths of an African jungle. He jerked back as if somebody had made a lunge at him, and held on to the arms of his chair. Then he looked quickly from side to side, at the door and windows, with his mouth open stupidly. His eyes, round, rounder, helpless, turned again and again to that dapper butterfly in the chair opposite, who got redder and redder until all the blood in his body boiled through his face and away, leaving him white, rigid, terrible. And Sears could make no sound, only a gasping effort, until all at once the entire situation seemed to gather fresh force and smite him anew. He stumbled from his chair, through the door, down the long hall, down the stairs, laughing, shrieking, cursing like a maniac, out into the street.

IV

“Sears found Haydock studying at the club, and dragged him out of his chair, upstairs to a vacant room, and shut the door. Then he paced the floor like a caged lion, holding his hands to his head and exclaiming, whenever he could stop laughing long enough, that he had lost his mind. Every now and then, when words refused to come, he expressed himself by leaning against the wall, with his back to Haydock, and kicking the air behind him. Sometimes he pounded the door with his clenched fist. Haydock waited.

“I’ll never get over this,” Sears declared, “not if I live to be a hundred.”

“Well, don’t tell it backwards,” objected Haydock; “begin at the beginning.”

“There isn’t any beginning,” roared Sears; “it never began, I just looked around and found it there; it had been there all the time; you’ve seen it yourself.” He sat on the floor and rocked to and fro.

“I’m almost inclined to believe that you have lost your mind,” remarked Haydock.

“Just wait, just wait! You’ll be a gibbering idiot yourself when I tell you, only you’ll not believe me! You can’t believe me! I don’t believe it myself! Oh, if you’d only been there!—if you could have seen him! I was writing a letter at my desk when he came in, and told him to sit down. I didn’t even notice him, or what he had on, or anything; and when I turned around—when I turned around—” Wolcott gasped—“when I turned around, I thought it would be McGaw!”

“Oh, go on, who was it?”

“It was McGaw! I’ll never get over the shock of it.” Haydock wrinkled his forehead at this clew.

“Can’t you guess? Don’t you know? Doesn’t something tell you? Try, try! think of the only person in college he could be, if he weren’t himself. Think of the only way I could have found out, the thing that made the difference—the—”

“He isn’t—he isn’t?”—Haydock stuffed his fingers in his ears and shrieked.

“He is, he is!” bellowed Sears. Then they both yelled, and made such a noise that the fellows downstairs came running up to see what was going on.

But they didn’t tell them. They couldn’t, in the first place, and the fellows wouldn’t have understood if they had. The McGaw-Crœsus episode was one of those little interpolated experiences two people own together so completely that they can’t share it if they want to. This one happened to be the kind over which the partners could laugh. When it happens the other way,—when two people get together and cry,—it isn’t nearly as valuable a factor in the divine accident of friendship; there is always one of them who very selfishly does most of the crying. For a time there was only mirth over McGaw. It was natural enough that Wolcott should have but a one-sided appreciation of the affair; he had made a discovery, he had been surprised, he had found it very startling and absurd. It was not to be expected that he would stop laughing to consider McGaw’s feelings in the matter. And Haydock, who was usually thoughtful and considerate, treated the revelation as he did at first, because it had come to him through Wolcott’s eyes. Only when his interest in detail prompted him to ask questions, did he begin to reconstruct the scene in Wolcott’s room, and feel intensely sorry for McGaw.

“What did you say when you turned around and first saw the clothes?” he asked Wolcott.

“Say? I didn’t say anything, I just looked, and wondered if the exams had gone to my brain.”

“Didn’t he do anything?”

“Why, of course not; what did you suppose he’d do? Tell me that he’d changed his shirt? I could see that for myself; heaven knows I almost dropped dead!”

“Well, you certainly didn’t just sit there staring at the man, did you?”

“Sit there? If I’d sat there another second, I’d have yelled in his face. I crashed out of the room and exploded in the hall. I came over here to find you.”

“Do you mean to say he’s in your room yet, waiting?”

“I’m sure I don’t know,—I wouldn’t go back to look for gold and precious stones.”

“What do you suppose he thought?”

“Lord, I don’t know,—I don’t care what he thought! What do you suppose I thought?” Wolcott laughed.

“But if you ran out of your room that way, and laughed in the hall, as you say you did, he must have known you were laughing at him,” said Haydock, gravely.

“Why certainly he did! I don’t suppose the creature thought I was throwing a fit like that just for exercise. What difference does it make anyhow?” Sears went on indifferently. “I’ll never see him again. To-day’s the last time he was coming to tutor me,—‘the exam’ is to-morrow; I’ll send him a cheque for what I owe him, and there you are.”

“But he must have thought you were laughing at him because he was dressed up,” persisted Haydock.

“Well, damn it, I was! If he hadn’t come looking as fine as a drunken shoemaker in my old clothes, I never should have known!” McGaw’s emotions didn’t contribute in any way to Wolcott’s enjoyment of his discovery,—why should Haydock branch off and make such a tiresome point of them!

“It’s too bad you offended him that way,” Haydock reflected; “for of course he must be frightfully offended. He’s utterly in the dark about the thing,—he wouldn’t have worn the clothes to your room if he weren’t; and he just thinks he looks like an overdressed fool in them. He’ll go home and take them off, and never wear them again.”

“Then he certainly will be a fool,” answered Wolcott, a trifle sulkily. “He looked extremely nice in them. If I’d known how well they looked on, I shouldn’t have given them away.” He spoke as if he were perfectly insensitive to McGaw’s probable anger and mortification; but Haydock knew that he wasn’t.

“It’s funny, of course; but I’m mighty sorry it happened.” The more Haydock thought of the way Sears had behaved, the more it worried him. “You can insult your friends without its making any particular difference, I suppose; they either refuse to take you seriously, or insult back, just as they please. But McGaw’s different,—he’s a defenceless, pathetic sort of a creature, and tremendously sensitive; I could see that whenever I met him in your room. He’s the kind of fellow that makes you feel that ‘something ought to be done about it.’”

“I think I have done a little,” suggested Wolcott, embarrassed at referring to his own good works, yet desirous of defending himself.

“It doesn’t put you in a better light with McGaw though; and his feelings aren’t any the less hurt on that account. All he thinks is, that he made a ridiculous exhibition of himself in somebody else’s clothes, and that you were coarse and heartless about it.”

“I’m afraid you flatter me,” muttered Wolcott.

“Come, now, Searsy, you know, just as well as I do, how people feel when you laugh at them.”

The Magnificent One’s laugh, when exerted upon certain temperaments, was indeed a terrifically effective engine. Wolcott’s sense of ridicule was not fine; it was powerless to discover the one vulnerable spot and stab neatly. But if it couldn’t dissect, it could crush like a boulder toppling from a precipice. “Remember poor little Bemis!” Wolcott coloured; he had once bet that he could make little Bemis cry inside of fifteen minutes, without touching him. That he had won the bet in eleven minutes and six seconds was a success of which he was not very proud. “This isn’t as bad as that time,” Haydock went on; “because you didn’t do it on purpose.”

“It was beastly, though,—wasn’t it?” said Wolcott, slowly, after a moment. He got up and looked out of the window, while Haydock sat and smoked in silence. “Well, for heaven’s sake, let’s not talk about it any more,” he said at length, turning around. “If you can think of anything that I ought to go and do about it, tell me, and I’ll do it.” He left the room, and, in a minute or two, Haydock heard the front door slam behind him.

“What to do?” thought Haydock. The occasions that would have made his interference in the matter anything but an elaborate bit of patronising, were lacking. Haydock never saw McGaw in the ordinary course of events. To explain things, he would have had to seek him out, and begin in a way that would have sounded to the tutor like: “See here, my good man,”—that of course would hardly do. Besides, if amends were in order, Sears was the proper person to make them. The conception of Sears apologising to McGaw was sublime; Sears actually apologising,—Haydock imagined him setting his teeth, and blurting out the fewest possible words in which he could frame a perfunctory sentence of regret. That wouldn’t do, either. Haydock, usually full of resource when it came to rectifying other people’s mistakes—he made very few himself—was quite at a loss in this instance. He ended by telling himself that what he cared most about, after all, was that Wolcott should feel genuinely uncomfortable; for the good of his soul he oughtn’t to be allowed to jeer at a man and then abandon him to his bitter reflections, without being talked to by some one. Wolcott had shown that he was “sorry,” as plainly as he ever condescended to express that state of mind. The sensible course, perhaps, was to forget the rest as soon as possible. This Haydock attempted to do.

But it was far from easy. He and Wolcott went abroad together that year. Wolcott wanted to divide the summer between Dinard and Paris. Haydock had long wished to take a bicycle trip among a lot of Italian towns that, as Wolcott told him, no one but he “and another know-it-all who wrote a guide-book about them ever heard of before.” They compromised on the Italian towns. All through the long vacation McGaw, and what Haydock believed to be the type he represented, intruded upon Haydock’s meditations at the oddest hours and in the most unlikely places. For the first time he understood something a man had said to him the summer before:—

“Why on earth are you going to spend your vacation in central Siberia?” Haydock had asked him.

“Because I want to find out what I really think about Harvard,” the man had answered, laughing. It wasn’t exactly necessary for Haydock to go to Italy in order to think; but when, in August, he found himself loafing with Wolcott through a chain of dead little towns that some one had strewn along the hills and forgotten, he was able to discuss with himself,—and occasionally with his companion,—as he never had been before, more than one aspect of life in another little town that, had he known it, is quite as dead in August as any mediæval hamlet of the Apennines. The discussions were intensely serious, unsatisfactory, and in no way markworthy, except that they concerned themselves with Ernest McGaw in particular, and a background of shadowy strugglers Haydock and Wolcott didn’t know much about, that they referred to conveniently as “McGaws in general.” They were unable to dismiss the tutor from their minds; and when college opened again, McGaw was dazed one fine morning in November on seeing his own name on the first page of the “Crimson” among six other names—some of them well known—that, together with his, the “Crimson” announced, composed the Second Seven of the Signet.

It had been Wolcott’s suggestion entirely. He wasn’t a Signet man himself; but Haydock was, “which is practically the same thing,” as Wolcott said when he asked him to do what he could for McGaw. The plan of electing McGaw to the Signet had been such a simple matter for Haydock to carry out, that he couldn’t scare up a suspicion of the smug satisfaction he had always believed was the reward of having gone out of one’s way to do some one a good turn. Even when Wolcott came to him with the “Crimson” in one hand, and patted him on the head with the other, saying: “You—are—a—good—boy,” he didn’t have any of the nice priggish sensations he had been looking forward to investigating.

“No, I’m not,” he said to Wolcott. “It was too easy.”

“How did you manage it?”

“There wasn’t much need of management,” answered Haydock. “The First Seven is so dazzled by its own general brilliancy that it firmly believes that when it was elected, the list of really interesting men in the class was exhausted. So it goes in for proposing its personal friends who are congenial, without being ‘clever’ and ‘literary;’ and as nobody will vote for anybody else’s friends, they all get tired of black-balling people after a while, and compromise on some obscure and very deserving person none of them know at all. It was when everybody was tired of fighting, that I bucked in McGaw. I said he was a scholar,—he must be if he’s able to make you pass examinations; and I said that we would be keeping up the Signet’s tradition of electing representative men, if we got him in; and that the Faculty would like it; and that McGaw would give just the necessary tone of seriousness to the Signet that I feared we of the First Seven lacked. I said that, because people are always tickled to death to think they belong to something very serious, without being serious themselves. It was the speech of my life, I assure you. McGaw was elected, on the second ballot, without a murmur.”

“You’ll have to make him an honorary member, won’t you? Can he pay his initiation fee?” Wolcott asked, with elaborate innocence. Haydock answered by unbuttoning Wolcott’s coat and finding ten dollars in his card-case.

“Now sit down and enclose it in a nice little note to Barrows, so that Crœsus can have the satisfaction of paying it himself.” He led Sears by the coat to a desk, and dipped a pen in the ink.

“This highway robbery game is a perfect damned outrage!” said The Magnificent One, as he took the pen and began to write.

McGaw was bewildered and charmed at his election, for it is a great honour to belong to the Signet, although no one—especially the twenty-one members of the distinguished junior society—knows just why. He was also considerably upset by his unexpected translation; it demolished an entire system of dreary philosophy that he had built out of the struggles and bitterness of his freshman and sophomore years. He couldn’t, logically, go on thinking himself an obscure outcast, shut off from human interests, since he had become so pleasantly conspicuous in the public eye. Some unseen, unknown power had wished him well, and had done much for him; McGaw was happy, grateful, and, at first, mystified. But when the extra ten dollars for his initiation fee came through Barrows, he considered the mystery solved. He prayed enthusiastically that night—a great deal more than ten dollars’ worth—for the hallowed being whose goodness was unfathomable. He also laid awake an hour thinking up a suitable subject for his initiation “part.” Nothing that occurred to him seemed deep enough for so intellectual an institution as the Signet.

On the evening the Second Seven was initiated, Haydock—who developed an oppressive sense of responsibility for McGaw five or ten minutes before the fellow stood up to read his part—felt rather proud of him. McGaw’s turn came between a humourous effort in feeble rhyme, and a narrative that the writer sought to disinfect,—when he became aware that there were several instructors among his audience,—by explaining apologetically, that it was “from the French.” McGaw’s part was a dissertation on “The Vocabulary of Æschylus.”

“I was glad he did it,” Haydock said to Wolcott, when telling him about the initiation later in the evening at the club; “because I’d blathered so much about his being serious and a scholar. Why it was wonderful—monumental! Nobody understood a word of it, after the first page, and there were twenty-three pages. I counted them; I had to look interested in something. If there’s a solitary iota subscript in Athens this night that didn’t get ripped up the back and disembowelled, I’d like to shake hands with it, and ask it how it escaped. Professor Tenny went over to him afterwards; they had a lemonade orgy together and made Greek puns. McGaw had the grey suit on; he’s really a rather fine-looking sort of a chap; he doesn’t seem peaked and sticky out at the sleeves the way he used to be. All the fellows wooded up in great style; I’d given Ellis a long talk to death beforehand, and told him the whole thing,”—Wolcott made a face. “Oh, you don’t mind! Ellis is just the kind to think it sort of nice and Godsome. In fact, Ellis told me he was afraid he’d always misjudged you, and asked me what he’d better do about it.” They both laughed. “It’s funny,” Haydock went on, “the way fellows are willing to accept a man here if only you can get the right people to hustle around and say that he’s ‘somebody.’ I was thinking that to-night. Not one of those fellows had ever heard of McGaw until I sprung him on them; and Ellis went around telling everybody he had ’a future before him,’—whatever that means. Ellis is perfectly happy, you know, when he can persuade himself that some one he has just met has a future before him. He thought I had, for about two weeks once. Well, what I began to say was that, in a small way, McGaw is right in the thick of things now. There’s no reason why those fellows shouldn’t like him; he seems really human in spite of Æschylus; and if they do take to him, he’ll probably make the O. K. and the Pudding, and wind up by being Class Day Orator. When I left, he was talking to that detestable snob, Baxford. Heaven only knows what they found to talk about; but Baxford was cackling his mindless cackle. They seemed to have plenty to say to each other; I didn’t disturb them. Isn’t it funny?”

It was “funny” to Haydock and Wolcott, although Wolcott, perhaps, wouldn’t have found it out by himself. When, a short time afterwards, the Editor-in-chief of the “Monthly” begged permission to print “The Vocabulary of Æschylus,” and the “Crimson” called it “a remarkably distinguished bit of research,” and the Signet remarked that real merit always found its level, Haydock and Wolcott got together and laughed, and were “just too cynical for anything,” as Ellis said, reprovingly. They laughed, too, when they met McGaw in the Yard or the Square,—somehow he had become a more familiar figure in the college scene,—and spoke to him. McGaw always had a cordial “hello” for Haydock alone. To Haydock and Wolcott together, he gave a somewhat stiff nod. Wolcott, unaccompanied, he ignored.

“That young man will succeed,” said Wolcott, one morning after he had been given—as he explained to Haydock—“the frozen eye twice, in front of Foster’s.”

“Any one who can afford to make a point of cutting you has succeeded,” laughed Haydock. McGaw’s independence and “cheek” pleased them both exceedingly.

Haydock had some foundation for his remark. McGaw was prosperous; he was happy; to many of his classmates, he had become something of a personage. He followed “The Vocabulary of Æschylus” in the “Monthly” by “Life and the Classics,” and “Hellas and the Athletic Question” in the “Advocate,”—two intelligent essays that were happy in creating varied opinions among the readers of the college papers, and in causing his name to be added very soon to the list of the “Monthly’s” editors. There are few institutions in college through which one’s tether, so to speak, can be more indefinitely extended than through the Signet and the college press. McGaw’s acquaintance became large and eclectic. It brought him work,—tutoring of all kinds,—more than he could undertake. It gave him an interest in college activities, and an intimate knowledge of them that enabled him to supply several Sunday newspapers with columns of unimportant but lucrative information and journalistic rigmarole. It made it possible for him at length to return to Barrows one of the periodical remittances and something additional, in payment of what he preferred to consider his debt. Barrows gave Wolcott, and Wolcott gave Haydock, and Haydock gave Wolcott’s sister the note that went with it. Between the lines they all read the fine feeling that McGaw, with even finer feeling, had delicately suggested. McGaw was nearing the crest of the wave. The grinds of the class, in discussing him, conceded to him a dubious facility for getting high marks in his studies, and a somewhat frivolous knack of impressing people favourably. But they agreed that, at last analysis, he lacked the instincts of a true scholar. The other men told one another that he was “a terrible grind, but a darned nice fellow!”—which was another way of saying he was “really human, in spite of Æschylus.”

Haydock had taken the fellow’s measure when he said that of him. The tutor was thoroughly “human.” He was inclined to like most of the men he had met at the Signet in a frank, simple way that demanded nothing, and ended by getting much; with corresponding naturalness, he liked being liked by them. Moreover, the dreariness of his first two years left no more permanent effect on him than the horrors of a January passage leave on a traveller who at length reaches port. McGaw proved himself a normal young person, by the comfortable manner in which the general hopelessness of his past situation receded from his memory, and left behind it one or two sharp details of a purely personal nature. He didn’t, for instance, recall very vividly how it felt to go more or less hungry for several days at a time; but, on the other hand, he couldn’t pass Wolcott on the street without tingling all over with anger and contempt. The recollection of Wolcott’s treatment of him refused to soften and fade; the sound of Wolcott’s insolent laughter never grew faint. McGaw still felt bitterly toward Wolcott. The tutor was human enough; and he hadn’t begun to show how human he could be. He was something like the little girl who, on being told that she had big eyes, answered, “Well, if you think they’re big now, you just ought to see me open them really wide once.” Whenever McGaw came across Wolcott, he thought of a remark a certain terrible old man used to make to his enemies:—

“You’ll all have a chance to get back at me if you live long enough,” this terrible old man was in the habit of saying encouragingly. “The only trouble is, so many of you seem to die at seventy.” McGaw often hoped that he wouldn’t be cut off at that age without having had a slap of some kind at Wolcott. So, although he didn’t exactly seek an opportunity, he was by no means blind to it when it presented itself, which it did with gratifying despatch.

There was the usual delay that year in electing the third and last seven of the Signet. The first two sevens had met three or four times, ostensibly for that purpose; but either there wasn’t a quorum, or some one had always played the piano, or read Kipling, or Maupassant, or Catulle Mendes aloud, or given a lively rendering of the dramas then playing at the Bowdoin Square Theatre, or the Grand Opera House, until no one felt particularly business-like. It was pleasanter to drink beer, and smoke, and “listen to something,” than to squabble over seven men far into the night, until you began to yawn, and discovered that you didn’t care whether they or any one else ever got into the Signet. As time went on, Ellis and Haviland, the president, made several attempts to impress upon the society what Ellis called, “the gravity of the situation.” But almost every one knew the president too well to be in the least impressed, and Ellis’s gravity was never very infectious; so the Signet took its own time. When, at last, fourteen men turned up in the long, dingy room of the society one rainy night in May, and no one had brought anything to read, and the fellows who played the piano were disobliging, Haviland called them to order, at the earnest request of Ellis, secretary and treasurer, and declared that the first business to come before the meeting was the election of the Third Seven. Ellis looked conscious and aggrieved; he had written several pages of minutes in rhyme, and wanted to read them.

“You look rather well behind that desk, Haviland,” drawled a fellow named Baxford; “but you make a rotten president. The first business is the reading of the minutes.” Ellis smiled again.

“Not at all, not at all,” answered Haviland, unabashed, glancing at the secretary’s book; “I am only too well aware that Mr. Ellis has written a yard and a half of poetry for the occasion. I merely hesitated to classify so delightful a prospect under the head of business. If Mr. Ellis will give us the pleasure—”

“I move we adjourn,” interrupted Haydock and Dickey Dawson and Bigelow and a tall man every one called Tommy, all rising at once.

“I’m going to get a cup of chocolate,” announced some one else. “Ellis’s poetry is always so sensual, I can’t listen to it unless I quaff thick, sweet, ’lucent syrups tinct with’ granulated sugar.”

“Have the things come?” asked Haviland, abruptly dropping what he considered his parliamentary manner.

“Yes, and there’s beer,” answered Baxford, who was sitting where he could lift the faded red portière and look into the other room. The meeting, led by the president, stampeded, leaving Ellis pounding on the table, and endeavouring to make himself heard above the uproar. He was imploring them to “be serious just for a few minutes.” Haydock stuck his head between the curtains.

“That’s what they call ‘Harvard indifference,’” he said, and disappeared.

They wasted, according to Ellis, three-quarters of an hour over beer and chocolate, and wouldn’t have come to order again at all, if he hadn’t begged them separately to do so as a personal favour to him. Then they consumed almost as long again in interrupting the reading of the minutes, to criticise gravely Ellis’s versification, to discuss his “conception of life,” as based on his doggerel lines, and to call attention, wherever poor Ellis had indulged in anything that bordered on “fine” writing, to what Tommy referred to as, “Those subtle obscenities the author has sought, with ghoulish depravity, to disguise in the bombastic periods of a Milton or an Alfred Austin.” They moved that Ellis be “expelled from the aristocracy of intellect, and sent to the Annex, there to be kissed in the face until dead,” and refused to allow the meeting to proceed until the motion had been put and lost by a unanimous vote. Baxford created an inexpensive diversion by throwing a pack of cards into the air, turning up his coat-collar, and exclaiming, as they fell on his head:—

“B-r-r-r-r, how the storm rages without! Think, lads, of the poor sailors on such a night!” Dawson set fire to the portières, because, as he explained, Ellis had said something in his poem about a “lurid glare,” and he wanted to see what they were like. The conflagration was put out with beer, and Ellis was fined three dollars for “perverting youth.” McGaw enjoyed the noise and fooling as much as any one. He didn’t quite know how to stir up that sort of thing himself; but he was no more anxious than the rest to get to the serious business of the meeting.

It was late when they finally began to nominate the Third Seven. There were in all sixteen names proposed. An informal vote was taken on them,—“a sort of preliminary canter,” as Haviland said, “just to find out what the general feeling was.” The ballots were playing-cards, cast in Ellis’s hat (when, later in the evening, its brim was torn off during a playful discussion, Ellis was fined another dollar for the ensuing delay). Baxford’s room-mate, Anderson, was the first man voted on.

“Although he isn’t just the sort of a man who would be chosen for the first two sevens,” said Baxford, in his little speech just before the hat was passed around, “he’s really a perfect corker. He doesn’t ’do’ anything in particular; but I’ve known him a long time, and he’s the most amusing sort of a chap, when he wants to be; and—and I think he’d be a mighty good sort of a man to have on.”

Of the fourteen votes cast for Anderson, thirteen of them were black.

“As an indication of feeling,” remarked Tommy, “the informal ballot is easily a success.”

“Not quite ‘in touch’ with the Signet, I’m afraid,” said Baxford, good-naturedly. Some one moved to drop all names getting six or more black balls, and this, after the first round, decreased the number of candidates to nine. McGaw had put up a man named Carver, one of the editors of the “Monthly.” The nomination was a discreet one, for Carver was neither obscure nor very well known. He was the kind of person they almost all dimly remembered having met at one time or another, in the rooms of fellows they liked. This isn’t knowing much about a man; but, at least, it isn’t knowing anything against him. Then McGaw’s manner of indorsing him was distinctly good. He managed to give the impression of having honestly picked out Carver, not because he was Carver’s friend, but because he thought the Signet was on the lookout for that kind of man. He seemed to wish, in a modest way, to please the Signet.

“I can’t say that I’ve known him very long, or well,” said McGaw, thoughtfully (the others had made a point of having been more or less born and brought up with their candidates); “but since I’ve been on the ‘Monthly,’ I’ve seen something of him. He’s a pleasant sort of a fellow, and he writes pretty good stories every now and then; although I don’t think he’s what you would call ‘literary’ exactly. He isn’t very prominent; that might be an objection,” he went on, unconscious of the implied flattery; “but I decided to put him up because I thought he seemed like a good man, and that some of you who know of him might like to consider him.”

“I know him,” spoke up Haydock, glad of a chance to help on McGaw’s candidate. “I thought of him myself. He would fit in very well.” Ellis, too, had a good word to say. Carver was then voted on.

“Fourteen red and no black,” announced Haviland from the desk. The crowd clapped; and McGaw felt the little thrill born of an awakened sense of importance and power in the community.

It took an hour and a half to elect the next four men,—an hour and a half of eulogy, discussion, diplomacy, compromise,—although, as time went on, the increasing indifference of the majority of the fellows as to who got in tended to reduce the election here and there, among those who really cared, to the process of voting “for your man, if you’ll vote for mine.” Not that the arrangement did away with animated electioneering in different corners of the room, and vehement arguments that might never have ended had not some weary outsider called attention to the fact that they had long since ceased to have any bearing on anything. But it gave a coercive publicity to pigheadedness in various quarters that made a Third Seven possible. At midnight, five men had been elected, two places remained unfilled, and the list of candidates numbered four. Then, by a curious revulsion of feeling no one sought to explain, three of the names that had hung on with a fair chance of success until that late hour, were unmercifully black-balled in rapid succession and thrown out. This left but one candidate—a man named Leonard—and two vacancies. The hat went around again bringing back to the desk, among twelve other cards, the ace of spades and the queen of clubs. Two black-balls, if persisted in, kept a man out of the Signet.

“Now we’ll have to think up some one else. Oh, Lord!” yawned Haviland. “Leonard has had two black for hours; I think he’s hopeless. Somebody suggest somebody else.”

Ellis glanced at Haydock as much as to say, “Now’s your time.” He had been doing that, off and on, all evening, until Haydock at last refused to look in his direction. Haydock was on the point of attempting something rather impossible, and he didn’t propose to ruin his chance of success at the outset, merely by being ill-timed. He had decided a week before,—as soon as the postal cards calling for an election were sent out,—that he wanted Sears Wolcott on the Signet. His reasons for getting Sears there were not obvious, and Haydock appreciated the difficulties that lay in the way of making them appear so, or of giving any reasons at all other than that he wanted him. His best motives for wishing to “buck” Sears in were hardly formulated in his own mind; he couldn’t very well undertake to make them clear to others, even if they would have carried with them any weight,—which they wouldn’t have. He was influenced wholly by the same feeling for Wolcott—a mixture of admiration and fond disapproval—that had led him the year before to do what he could to interest The Magnificent One in Barrows’s unfortunate. The little experiment had done something for Wolcott,—a good that perhaps only Haydock and Wolcott’s sister appreciated as yet, but something that was, nevertheless, worth while. Wolcott’s horizon had given a little here and there; Wolcott himself was somewhat less intolerant; he had ceased noticeably, to Haydock at least, to be actuated in everything he said and did by a kind of American adaptation of the ante-French Revolutionary opinion, that human beings began with barons. He was still a selfish high-handed youth,—no one knew it better than Haydock. But his friend found him neither as egoistic nor as arrogant as he had been; and he drew his own inferences. As for getting Wolcott into the Signet—Haydock wished to go on with what he had begun. The junior society seemed made to his hand. He not only looked forward to throwing Wolcott and McGaw together again,—on a basis of equality, this time,—he wished to put Wolcott in the way of having to see something of fellows who had a variety of interests strikingly different from his own, and who came together now and then to talk and read about them. Wolcott came in contact with men of many tastes at his clubs; but the club ideal was, after all, the placid, unimaginative ideal of fifteen or twenty pleasant young men with plenty of money, it was only too easy to live up to. Haydock had no misguided veneration for the Signet as a learned or even a very clever institution; an undergraduate literary society could hardly be one or the other. He did appreciate, however, the curiously diverse character of its components, and the semi-serious intellectual friction that went on there. For the good of Wolcott alone, he hoped to get him on the Third Seven. The attitude was quixotic, inasmuch as it was rather sentimental and as absurd as only a thoroughly fine attitude can be. Haydock had talked several men into promising to vote for Wolcott, should his name come up; and Ellis, from a variety of strange Christian motives, had done the same. Ellis had become enthusiastic over Wolcott since he had learned of the McGaw affair; whereas, formerly, he had denounced him as a selfish beast, he now called him a “temperament.”

“Do propose somebody—anybody,” repeated Haviland. “I’m so sleepy!” Two of the men had stretched themselves on the sofas, with the request that they be waked in time to vote.

“Let’s only have six on the Third Seven; it would be so quaint,” suggested Tommy.

“I think I’d even vote for Baxford’s room-mate if he were put up again,” said Dickey Dawson.

It was just this apparent willingness to elect any one and get away, that Haydock had been waiting for. He stood up.

“I can’t think of any one who seems exactly cut out for the Signet, any more than the rest of you can,” he said; “but I don’t see why that ought to make so much difference on the Third Seven. Why not get on somebody like Tony Wilson or Jack Linzee or Sears Wolcott,—not necessarily any of those three, but some one like that. They’re athletes, you know, and people outside will think we’re trying to be representative,—that always sounds well, and, besides, they’re all good fellows. Any one of those men would be surprised and pleased to be elected, I feel sure.”

“Yes,—they did that last year,” added Ellis. “Martin was a Signet man, and he used to go to all the meetings and everything, and he was nothing but an athloot. People laughed at first, but they thought it rather nice. I’ll vote for any of those fellows.”

“Well, I nominate Sears Wolcott,” called some one from the sofa,—one of the men who had pledged himself to Haydock. “I know him pretty well, and shouldn’t mind seeing him in.”

“Buck him in,—buck him in!” said two or three others, impatiently.

“And whoever’s been black-balling Leonard all evening, for Heaven’s sake don’t next time,” added Haviland.

Haydock was relieved that it hadn’t been necessary for him to nominate Wolcott directly, and that there was but little preliminary discussion of his fitness for election. One or two men did attempt to agitate his probable lack of sympathy with everything the Signet stood for, but the tendency to hurry the meeting along prevailed. A vote was called for. Haydock involuntarily glanced at McGaw, for he knew where the strongest opposition would come from. But McGaw’s face was non-committal as to future intentions. The hat went around. Haviland and Ellis assorted the cards.

“Ten red and four black,” announced Haviland, with a groan. The result was better than Haydock had expected. One of those black votes he knew would never be changed; but the other three might be tired out, as he and Ellis had combined to hold at bay every other candidate as long as Wolcott was in the running.

“Now for another go at Leonard,” said Haviland, wearily. “Just what he had before, twelve red and two black,” he added when the hat came back to the desk. “Who is doing it? Get up and curse him out like a man; it’s a shame, when all but two are willing to have him in.” But no one got up and cursed. Haydock and Ellis were the guilty ones, and they had nothing against Leonard. No one else was nominated; and Haydock said a few words about Wolcott before his name was voted on a second time. His manner in saying them was the artistic bit of hypocrisy he felt the occasion demanded. Willingness under the circumstances, rather than eagerness, was what he sought to express. He knew the value of his own conservative personality.

“Wolcott gets eleven red and three black,” announced Haviland; “one better than last time.” Another ballot on Leonard’s name brought it no nearer election than before. Haydock was quietly exultant. The election was slowly coming to the point to which he had all along looked forward to bringing it. The fellows who had promised to vote for Wolcott—indifferent at first as to whether he got in or not—were beginning now to “root” for him vigorously. Incited solely by a desire to have their own way, they tried to find out who was black-balling him, and made speeches urging his election that Haydock wouldn’t have dared to make. Their eloquence succeeded by the next ballot in reducing the number of his black-balls to two. One of them, of course, was McGaw’s. The other, Haydock felt equally sure, had been put in by Bigelow. Leonard had been Bigelow’s candidate from the first. Bigelow hadn’t disguised his enthusiasm for him since he had nominated him early in the evening; he had, in fact, declared good-naturedly that if the worst came to the worst, he would black-ball his own father in order to get Leonard in. Once when he didn’t happen to have any black cards in his hand, he had asked some one to black-ball Wolcott for him. It was undoubtedly he, thought Haydock, who furnished the second black-ball, and continued to put one in every time a ballot was taken on Wolcott’s name. There was no reason why Bigelow shouldn’t withhold it on the next ballot, Haydock told himself, if he, Haydock, and Ellis showed themselves willing to vote for Leonard. This would elect Bigelow’s candidate unanimously, and let Wolcott in with McGaw’s one black. So just before Leonard’s name was voted on again, Haydock went over to Bigelow and said frankly:

“Drop in a red card for Wolcott next time, and as far as Ellis and I are concerned, Leonard will be elected at once. We two have been keeping him out right along.” Bigelow looked surprised, then laughed and nodded as if he understood such things, and in a moment Leonard, amid a murmur of relief from the crowd, was declared elected. Once more the hat was handed from man to man. They were electing Wolcott now, actually electing him, thought Haydock. He noticed that Bigelow voted with the seven of hearts, then he looked in McGaw’s direction to see how the tutor would take the news of Wolcott’s success when Haviland should announce it from the desk. It was very late, and the rickety old room had grown chilly in spite of the two blazing chandeliers. Three or four of the men had put on their coats and hats; the meeting seemed about to end.

“Wolcott gets twelve red and two black,” said Haviland, hopelessly.

“What!” exclaimed Ellis. Haydock turned incredulously toward the desk; he felt as if some one had played him a sneaking trick. He went over to Bigelow, astonished and rather angry.

“You voted for Wolcott, didn’t you?” he asked.

“Why, yes, of course I did,” answered Bigelow, irritably. Now that his own candidate was safe, he was anxious to go home. “I’ve been voting for him ever since he was put up, except just the first round.” Haydock swore. He had taken it for granted that Bigelow had been keeping Wolcott out when, as a matter of fact, it had been some one else,—some one who no doubt was in complete sympathy with McGaw. His jump at the conclusion struck him now as an incredibly dull proceeding.

“I’m sure I don’t know what to do,” Haviland was saying. “We simply must have a seventh man. I hate to have the thing drag over until ‘next time,’ when we’re all here to-night. Nominate Tony Wilson, or Jack Linzee—somebody—anybody.”

“I nominate Tony Wilson!” drawled Baxford, obediently. Haydock and Ellis ostentatiously gave the new candidate the only two black-balls he received. Haviland grasped the situation at once.

“I think we’ll have to come to some sort of an understanding,” he said. He was tired and annoyed, and so conscious of the fact that he forced himself to be extraordinarily polite. “Two of us apparently want Wolcott enough to cause a deadlock,—which I suppose is perfectly justifiable,—and two of us don’t want him at all. Lots of things have been said in his favour, and no one has said much of anything against him. I think it’s only fair for the two fellows who are keeping us here so late to get up and give us some idea of why they don’t want him. We can’t very well throw his name out as long as he has only two black. If the fellows who are keeping him out have a really good reason, we ought to know it. Such things, I’m sure, won’t go beyond this room.” There was a pause, while Haviland looked inquiringly from face to face. Then McGaw stood up. There was just a trace of defiance in his general bearing that vanished as soon as he saw that every one had turned toward him with interest.

“I suppose I ought to have objected to Sears Wolcott earlier in the evening,” he said slowly. He looked quietly, fixedly, at Haydock. “I have met him in a way that none of you could meet him. I wish I didn’t know that he was one kind of a fellow with men who have money and friends and everything, and different with the other kind,—men who can’t afford such things. I’m very sorry that I’ve seen him laugh at a man because he was poor and underfed and dressed in somebody else’s clothes,—clothes that didn’t fit him; because I can’t forget it now, when I should like to. I can’t think that he has a good heart. I don’t want to meet him here.” McGaw said this very slowly and regretfully; and when he sat down he stared at the floor. His little speech left every one wide-awake and uncomfortable, and so silent that the fellows could hear the rain slapping in gusts against the window-panes outside. His words in the mouth of—say Baxford or Dickey Dawson would have been laughed at. As it was, Tommy murmured audibly, “‘Kind hearts are more than coronets,’” but the observation fell rather flat. McGaw had been painfully sincere. He had succeeded, beyond a doubt, in “getting his effect.” Haydock knew that just that sort of thing said about Wolcott, by some one who was liked rather than otherwise, and who more or less represented “the extreme left,” was peculiarly fatal. No one else in the room would have talked in that way under any circumstances, although there were several men who didn’t object to hearing it done so authoritatively. Wolcott, who had seemed to be on the verge of slipping into the Signet a moment or two before, was now given seven black-balls, and dropped without comment. Tony Wilson was elected with a feeble burst of applause; Haydock and Ellis were putting on their overcoats when the hat went around, and didn’t vote.

Haviland turned out the lights, and the men groped their way—holding on to one another and striking matches from time to time—down the two flights of steep, dark stairs to the wet street. No one spoke of the election on the way down. Had anything been said it would have had to do, undoubtedly, with McGaw’s speech; and McGaw was there, somewhere in the dark, with the rest of them. Haviland walked with Ellis and Haydock as far as the “Crimson” office,—he hoped to get the names of the Third Seven into the morning paper. But they didn’t talk of the election. Ellis was boiling with righteous indignation; Haydock was wondering who had been McGaw’s ally in black-balling Wolcott; and Haviland was too glad to have it over with, and be out in the fresh air, to think of the Signet. It was not until Haydock and Ellis threw some fresh wood on the fire at the club, and sank into two big leathern chairs, that they felt at liberty to discuss the matter freely.

“I suppose it was hopeless from the first,” mused Haydock.

“It needn’t have been,—that’s what makes me furious,” returned Ellis. “If McGaw only could have had an inkling of who he was keeping out—”

“Yes, I think he would have been the first to turn right around and work like a pup to get him in,” agreed Haydock.

“I felt like jumping up and telling everything.”

“How awful,—think of the scene!”

“Well, it wouldn’t have been much more damnable than it was! Nobody knew where to look. There was just enough truth to what McGaw said—that and the way he got up and did it—it wasn’t as if anybody else had tried to—”

“The difference is that McGaw really cared,” broke in Haydock; “there was feeling behind it. It isn’t given to many of us to have real, sure-enough feelings around here in college. Nothing ever seems to happen that makes enough difference one way or the other. McGaw’s one of the kind that has them. That’s how he got everyone to vote for Carver the minute he put him up. He just felt all over that Carver was the right man for the place, and somehow everybody believed him. He slaughtered poor Searsy by the same method. You see he’s the sort of fellow who is destined to be listened to by all kinds of people. The masses like guts, while the upper classes prefer expression. McGaw has the intensity of a fanatic and the manners of a gentleman; his armament is formidable. I shouldn’t be a bit surprised to hear some day that he’d started an entirely new and plausible religion, or written a book that really proved something, or reorganised the Supreme Court on a less flippant basis. The creature actually has beliefs; he’s rather astonishing. I can’t blame him for giving it to Wolcott in the neck, when he had such a good chance; but I’m darned sorry he was inspired to do it.”

“I suppose you’ll tell Sears all about it,” said Ellis.

“No, I sha’n’t,” answered Haydock, after a moment. “You see, you never can tell how he is going to take things—so what’s the use? The Signet’s nothing to him, and he might be ever so much amused that McGaw could keep him out of it. But then, again, it’s quite likely that he’d carry on and swear like a trooper, and never do anything for McGaw again. I know him better than you do. If I ever do tell him, it’ll be some day just after he’s won a bet, or beaten me at golf, or taken a prize at the horse show; not when he’s cooped up in his room with sore throat, the way he is now, railing at the weather and Cambridge and the college, and everybody who makes a sound in the hall near his door. I’m devoted to Searsy, but I don’t think I have many illusions about him.”

“Oh, I wish we could tell McGaw about him! It might make McGaw feel badly just at first; but I’d be so much more comfortable. Couldn’t we—just to be just?”

“Certainly not,” yawned Haydock. “One must have the courage to be unjust.”

And that, no doubt, would have been the end of the McGaw-Wolcott episode, if tailors didn’t exert such extraordinary influence over human affairs.

---

The next afternoon, when Haydock dropped into Wolcott’s room to see how the sore throat was getting along, he found Wolcott’s mother and sister had driven out from Boston on the same errand. Haydock’s call was opportune, for Wolcott, in a few minutes, had another visitor,—a somewhat agitated, incoherent young man who wished very much to speak to Wolcott alone. The Magnificent One would have granted the interview outside in the hall had not Mrs. Wolcott protested on account of draughts, so he took his guest into his bed-room, and shut the door.

“How very mysterious!” said Miss Wolcott. Her mother examined the closed door through her glasses. “Who is he?”

“That’s McGaw!” said Haydock, significantly.

“One of Sears’s friends?” asked Mrs. Wolcott. Haydock laughed.

“I never knew that he was,” he answered. Miss Wolcott seemed much interested; but her interest not nearly as eager as Haydock’s. McGaw’s visit baffled him. He couldn’t believe that the fellow had come, in a fit of remorse, to apologise to Wolcott for having kept him out of the Signet,—the idea was fantastic—ridiculous. Nor could he think it probable that McGaw had found out what Wolcott had been doing for him; no one but Barrows and Ellis and Miss Wolcott and Haydock himself knew. The long interview in Wolcott’s bed-room was indeed mysterious. It was something of a strain to Haydock to keep his attention from wandering to the rise and fall of voices on the other side of the door long enough to talk intelligently to Mrs. Wolcott; and when, after examining everything in the room, she said that, since she was in Cambridge, she thought she would improve the opportunity of making a call somewhere on Brattle Street, Haydock inwardly applauded the intention.

“He’s not nearly as ill as his note led us to believe,” said Mrs. Wolcott. “He wrote that he was ‘wasted away to a shadow,’ and that if we had a desire—from idle curiosity or any other motive—to see him alive, which he doubted, we’d better come out at once.”

“I was reassured,” added Miss Wolcott, “when I got a note by the next post, saying, ‘Dear Josephine, If you wear that dowdy old felt hat, with the black satin bow and the brass buckle, out to Cambridge, please sit downstairs in the vestibule, while I talk to mamma.’ Sears really ill is quite lamblike.”

“So you see, you mustn’t think me an unnatural parent for running away to leave a card on old Mrs. Burlap,” said Wolcott’s mother. Haydock saw her to the carriage, and went back to tell Miss Wolcott about the Signet meeting, and interest her still more in her brother’s visitor. He softened the language of McGaw’s speech a little, although he made its general import clear. His frequent talks with Miss Wolcott about Sears enabled him to.

“I agree with Mr. Ellis,” she said, when Haydock had finished. “I want McGaw to know. It does seem unjust to poor Searsy.”

“Maybe he does know,” replied Haydock, listening intently to the voices in the bed-room. Suddenly they ceased. Wolcott burst into his loud laugh, and both men began to talk again at once. “I wish they’d hurry up!” added Haydock, with suppressed excitement. Then the door opened, and McGaw, looking ill at ease, but smiling wanly, came out, followed by Wolcott, who went with him as far as the hall.

“And don’t come before ten o’clock,” Wolcott said, shaking hands. “I’m not often in early in the evening.” Wolcott, chuckling delightfully, came across the room, and laid a tiny oblong bit of white linen on Haydock’s knee. On it was printed the name of a Boston tailor, followed in handwriting by Wolcott’s name and a date and some cabalistic letters and numerals written in a clear round hand. Wolcott folded his arms and grinned. Haydock knew where it must have come from, yet he looked puzzled.

“But I remember distinctly having ripped it out that afternoon before you sent them around to Barrows,” he said, after a moment.

“Out of the coat,—not the trousers; they sew them under the right-hand pocket of the trousers sometimes,—so McGaw says,” Wolcott laughed like a child. “That pressed the button, so to speak, and Barrows, confound him! did the rest.”

“Well, well, well!” was all Haydock could say; he didn’t like to let Sears know that he had told Miss Wolcott, and that she was eager for details.

“Who was that who just went out, Searsy?” asked Miss Wolcott, innocently.

“That? Oh—a friend of mine,” answered The Magnificent One, winking at Haydock, as he took back the tailor’s label, and put it in his card-case.