Wellington
“If I’d only known sooner that you were coming, I could have asked some of the fellows round to meet you,” said Haydock, politely. No matter how well you may know a woman, you are always apprehensive when she comes to Cambridge that she has a thirst for tea.
“I think I like this better,” his mother answered, stopping to look back. She was a lady of excellent taste, yet almost any one must have preferred the Yard that Sunday afternoon. The riotous new green of early spring had matured to an academic sombreness that made the elms, the stretches of sun-flecked grass, the tremulous ivy, and the simple brick buildings inseparable in one’s thoughts. The dignity of the great space between Grays and Holworthy had grown with the late afternoon shadows, and Haydock and his mother, who had sauntered from path to path, listening to the leaves, and the robins, and the quiet confidences of the wise bricks, talked of Harvard. Although the place was large and deserted at this hour, it was far from lonely.
“Oh, yes, I like this much better,” mused Mrs. Haydock again. Philip looked pleased.
“It’s always beautiful,” he said; “and there’s so much else,” he added rather obscurely. But his mother seemed to know, for she looked at him after a moment and answered,—
“I often wonder if all women can understand it,—the other things, not just the beauty,—or if it’s only women with sons and brothers who come here.”
“Especially sons,” smiled Philip, taking her hand and swinging it to and fro, as they strolled back again toward Holworthy.
“But I never shall find out for sure,” went on Mrs. Haydock; “because even the ones who do feel the place, just as if they had been here themselves, can’t express it.”
“It’s so dreadful to try,” said Philip. Then after a moment, “I was thinking of all the horrible Class Poems and Odes and Baccalaureate Sermons and ghastly Memorial Day orators that are allowed to go on.”
“Oh, they probably don’t do any harm,” Mrs. Haydock interceded mildly.
“No, not positive harm,” her son admitted; “but neither would a lot of hurdygurdies in Appleton Chapel.” Once in a while Haydock was somewhat extreme. Just now his mother took occasion to remark on that fact.
“No, really, I don’t think I am,” Philip protested. “What can they add to our feeling for Harvard with their trite mouthings about veritas and Memorial Hall? Other places may need that sort of thing; this one doesn’t. Most of us here recognise that fact, and conduct ourselves accordingly. And outsiders misunderstand the attitude; Eleanor, for example.” Eleanor was a cousin with Yale affinities. “I had to snub Eleanor once for saying, before a lot of people, that whenever she wanted to flatter a Harvard man, she told him he was blasé, and, if that didn’t work, she called him a cynic, and if even that wouldn’t bring him round, she hinted that he didn’t believe in God.”
“Eleanor is a very clever, silly little girl,” laughed Mrs. Haydock.
“Eleanor is excessively cheap at times,” corrected Philip. “We’re not ‘cynical,’ and we’re not ‘blasé,’ and whether or not we believe in God is nobody’s business. If we don’t drool about the things here we care for very much, it’s because people who do are indecent; they bore us.”
“They do bore one,” assented Mrs. Haydock.
“Once in a while some one does tear out his heart and drip it around the stage in Sanders Theatre for the benefit of all the tiresome old women in Cambridge, and the Glee Club drones Latin hymns to a shiny upright piano hired for the occasion, while the orator calms himself with ice-water from the bedroom pitcher that is always prominent on those occasions. But such performances, thank God, are rare.”
“Why do you go to them?” asked Mrs. Haydock.
“I don’t,” said Philip. “That was when I was a freshman, and didn’t know any better. Since then I have acquired ‘Harvard indifference,’” he added, smiling to himself. They left the Yard, lingering a moment for another look down the leafy vista, and walked slowly across to Memorial.
The beautiful transept was dark at first, after the sunlight outside. Then it lifted straight and high from the cool dusk into the quiet light of the stained windows. Except for the faint echo of their footsteps along the marble floor, the two moved from tablet to tablet in silence. Somewhere near the south door they stopped, and Philip said simply,—
“This one is Shaw’s.”
When they passed on and out, and sat in the shade on the steps, Haydock’s mother wiped her eyes. The long, silent roll-call always made her do that.
“It was a great, great price to pay,” she said at last.
“I never knew how great,” said Philip, “until I came here one day and tried to live it all over, as if it were happening now. Before then the war seemed fine, and historic, and all that, but ever so far away. It’s been real since then. I thought of how all the little groups of fellows would talk about it in the Yard between lectures, and read the morning papers while the lectures were going on; and how the instructors would hate to have to tell them not to. And I thought what it would be like to have the men I know—Alfred and Peter Bradley, and Sears Wolcott and Douglas and Billy and Pat, and all of them, getting restless and excited, and sitting up all night at the club, and then throwing down their books and marching away to the front to be shot; and how I would have to go along too, because—well, you couldn’t stay at home while they were being shot every day, and thrown into trenches. I don’t think you ever realise it very much until you think about it that way.”
“It seems, now, so terrible that they had to go,” Philip’s mother broke in earnestly; “such a cruel stamping out of youth and strength and happiness at the very beginning.”
“But it isn’t as if you felt it were all a hideous waste. It did something great; it’s doing something now. It can never stop,” Philip added, gently; “for every year the new ones come,—the ones who don’t know yet. It’s the fellows who die here at college who always seem to me so thrown away, so wasted,” he went on. “They don’t seem to get their show, somehow,—like Wellington, for instance.”
“Did I meet Wellington?” asked Mrs. Haydock, trying to attach a personality to the name. She usually remembered Philip’s friends.
“Heavens, no!” answered Philip. “Nobody knew Wellington, except a few of us,—after he got pneumonia and died, which he did last February. He was in our class, and he must have been a nice fellow; his mother was very nice. But I’d never heard of him. It had just happened that way,—the way it does here.”
“Where did you know his mother?” asked Mrs. Haydock.
“Why, I thought I’d written you all that. It must have been too long, or too dreary, or something,” said Philip.
“No, you never told me.”
“Well, the first thing that I knew about Hugh Wellington was that he came from Chicago, or Cleveland, or some place; that ‘his pleasant disposition was appreciated by all who knew him;’ and that, incidentally, he was dead. I read that in the ‘Crimson’ one morning in bed, and I knew exactly what it meant; because when the ‘Crimson’ is reduced to the ’pleasant disposition’ stage, there’s a good reason why.”
Mrs. Haydock looked up inquiringly.
“I mean, they can’t find out anything; there’s nothing to find out. He went his way quietly,—decently, I suppose,—without knowing any one in particular. No one seemed to know him, not even well enough to say that his disposition wasn’t pleasant; so the ‘Crimson’ gave him the benefit of the doubt.”
“It’s the least it could do for any dead man,” said Mrs. Haydock.
“And the most that could be done for poor Wellington, I suppose,” added Philip, thoughtfully. “After that, I didn’t think of him again—you don’t, you know; among so many it’s bound to happen pretty often—until somebody asked who he was, at luncheon. There were ten of us at the table, and Billy Fields was the only one who knew anything about him. He said that he sat next to a man named H. Wellington in some big history course, and liked the clothes he wore. I think he and Billy used to nod to each other in the Yard. Well, in the natural course of events, that would have been the end of him, as far as I was concerned, if Nate Lawrence—he’s the president of the class—hadn’t dashed round to my room that afternoon to ask me what he’d better do. Nate’s a bully chap,—a great, big clean sort of a child who breathes hard whenever he has to think of anything. He always wants to do the proper thing by the class and the college, and we help him out a good deal with resolutions and committees and impromptu speeches for athlete dinners, and all that. He wanted me to sit right down and help him draw up some resolutions of sympathy and ‘get it over with,’ he said. After that he could call a class meeting, to which no one would come of course, and send the thing home immediately. I couldn’t see any particular necessity for rushing the matter, except that Nate had it very much on his mind. It wasn’t as if the man were alive and might die at any moment. So I told him he’d better wait awhile, and asked him if he knew anything about Wellington in the first place. He said, why, yes, of course—he remembered the name quite distinctly; Wellington had come out for the foot ball in October, but had hurt his knee—no, come to think of it, it might have been his collar-bone—and had dropped out pretty soon. He was either the tall lad with the shoulders, or that wiry little man who might have made a good quarter-back if he’d stayed on. You see, Wellington must have been a mighty quiet sort of fellow, because Nate is a tremendously conscientious president. He can tell almost everybody apart.
“I said, ‘You simply have to get more details, if you want me to write the letter.’ I’m pretty good at that kind of thing, but I like to have something to go by, naturally; it makes them easier—more spontaneous. Nate had been up to the Office; but I didn’t find anything very available in what he’d got there, so we looked up Wellington’s address in the Index, and went round to his room that afternoon. He lived in a little house on Kirkland Street.
“It was a perfectly fiendish day; you’ve never been here in February, have you? Well, that’s the time to see dear old Cambridge. It snows and rains most of the day, and then stops to rest and melt a little. There aren’t any sidewalks to speak of—just dirt paths with curbstones that keep the mud and stuff from running off into the street, so you have to walk in it up to your neck, if you want to get anywhere. That’s what did Wellington up, I guess.
“The front door of his house was latched, and I was fumbling round under the crape trying to get hold of the bell, when the landlady appeared; you know—it makes me shudder now sometimes, when I think of that gruesome old buzzard of a woman. She was a typical Cambridge landlady,—one of those uncorsetted, iron grey slatterns who lives in a rancid atmosphere of hot soap-suds and never goes to bed; a room-renting old spider who manages to break everything you own, in a listless sort of way, and then writes home to your father that you haven’t paid your bill. This one belonged to the class that looks on death as a social opportunity. She was dressed for the occasion, and greeted each of us with a kind of a soiled smile that made her old face look like a piece of dish-rag.”
“Philip dear.”
“Well, it did. And then she said in a loud, important whisper,—
“‘He isn’t upstairs; he’s in my parlor,’ and took us in where poor Wellington was. It was all so dreadful, that part of it, that it didn’t seem sad. There were three other bleary old funeral coaches,—more landladies, I suppose,—on a sofa on one side, and a girl with fuzzy, yellow hair, in a rocking-chair, on the other; she was Mrs. Finley’s daughter, I think. I’ve seen her round the Square since. There didn’t seem to be much of anything for us to do; and Nate was awfully embarrassed and uncomfortable, and seemed to fill up most of the space in the horrid plushy little room. But I didn’t like to go away exactly, because it made our coming there at all seem so useless; so I said to Mrs. Finley,—I couldn’t think of anything else,—
“‘Have many of the fellows been in?’
“‘No,’ she whispered; ‘nobody’s been in but Mis’ Taylor and Mis’ Buckson and Mis’ Myles. They come at two,’—it was then after five,—‘and the Regent. Mr. Wellington was a real quiet young man. He didn’t have much company. He stayed in his room nights—mostly.’ She stuck on ‘mostly’ as a sort of afterthought, and repeated it; the old fool had a passion for accuracy of a vague, unimportant kind that almost drove me crazy. I asked her if any one else roomed in the house. I knew he must have known them if there did; no matter how objectionable people are at college, if they room near you, you can’t help borrowing matches from them—I’ve made lots of acquaintances borrowing matches. But no one lived there except two law students, ‘real nice gentlemen, real nice,’ they were, and they weren’t there very much. Nate asked her when the funeral was to be, which was the most sensible thing he could have done; for she took a telegram from her pocket, and said,—
“‘His mother’s coming to-night. She was in New York State when he passed away. They wa’n’t able to get her till this afternoon.’ Then Nate and I left her, and I don’t know why,—it wasn’t idle curiosity,—but we went up to Wellington’s rooms.
“They were bully rooms. You can tell a lot about a man from his room here. Wellington had no end of really good things: rugs and books,—the Edinburgh Stevenson, and that edition of Balzac we have at home,—and ever so many Braun photographs—not the every day ones, but portraits and things that you felt he’d picked up abroad, because he happened to like them. And on the table—he had a corking big oak table that filled up one end of the room—his note-books and scratch block were lying open, just the way he’d left them when he stopped grinding for the exams. And there was a letter without a stamp, addressed to his mother, and a little picture of his mother, with ‘For Hugo’ written on the back. Then I got to thinking of his mother, and got her mixed up with you somehow or other. I don’t know just how it was, but you seemed to change places; I couldn’t see you apart for any length of time, and I thought of you arriving at the Park Square station all alone, and trying to get a cab in the wet, and having to pay the man anything he asked you, until I was almost crying, and told Nate that some one ought to be there to meet you—Mrs. Wellington, I mean. Nate agreed with me, and began to look panicky, because he knew I meant him. He really ought to have gone—it was his place. But I knew how he felt. He kept insisting that I could do the thing much better than he could; and it ended by my getting a carriage at about eight or nine o’clock, and splashing into town.
“There was a possibility, of course, that she wouldn’t come alone, although she had been away from home, in New York, when she heard. But it never occurred to me that I could miss her if she did come alone, although I’d never seen her, and felt sure she wouldn’t have on black veils and things. You can’t imagine all the different things I thought of to say to her while I was walking up and down the platform waiting for the train to come in. They all sounded so formal and sort of undertakery, that I knew I shouldn’t say any of them when the time came. But I couldn’t think of anything else—the one right one, I mean.
“Well, she came on the first train she possibly could have come on after sending the telegram, and I knew her at once. She was the very last person to get out of the car. It wasn’t that, or because she looked different—anybody else would have said she was very, very tired; but I just knew her, and before I could think of any of those other things, I took her travelling-bag and said,—
“‘I’m one of Hugh’s friends.’
“I didn’t see her when I said it,—only her hands,—because I was looking down at the bag.” Haydock paused a moment.
“I think it was the right thing, dear—the only one,” said his mother, softly.
“It’s a long, long drive to Cambridge, even if you know where you are all the time. But with the windows all blurred, and nothing to mark the way except the rumble of the bridge or the car-tracks, or some bright light you know pretty well, that tells you you haven’t gone nearly so far as you thought you had, it’s terrible. We didn’t say anything on the way. She leaned back in the corner; I think she was crying. Mrs. Finley—the landlady—heard us coming, and had the door open when we got out; I made her go upstairs with me, and told her not to dare to go near that room and—and disturb them. She’s just the sort of a woman who would. It was almost midnight then, and I sat there until after two. I tried to grind for a Fine Arts’ examination out of one of Wellington’s books—he must have been taking the same course—until the door downstairs opened and closed, and I heard Mrs. Wellington come slowly up the steps. I put the book on the mantelpiece; it seemed heartless to be reading there by his fire when she came in.
“She was a very brave woman, I think—brave and civilised. She walked slowly round the room, sort of touching things here and there; and she stopped a long time at the table, and put her hand on the note-books gently, as if she were stroking them, and then closed them.”
“Did she find the letter?” asked Mrs. Haydock.
“No, I gave that to her later on—I had it in my pocket then. I didn’t want her to find it herself; it always makes you jump so to see your own name written out, when you’re not looking for it. Then she sat down in a chair near me and stared at the fire. I asked her if she wanted me to go away; and she said, no, she was glad I was there. We talked a little—I couldn’t say much; my position was queer you know—not what she thought it was. But it didn’t seem wrong as long as I stayed just because she wanted me to, and I hated to spoil it by saying things that couldn’t ring true. She talked about Hugh in such a quiet wonderful way that every now and then I found myself wondering if she really knew. Sometimes she doubted it herself, I think, for she left me twice and went slowly downstairs as if she wanted to make sure. When daylight came, she went in and lay down on his bed. I put out the lamps and wrote a note saying where my room was if she wanted to send for me.
“At breakfast I got hold of Bradley and Sears Wolcott and Billy and four or five other fellows, and told them they simply had to go round there at noon, and that some of them would have to go into the station with me. They didn’t see any particular reason for it at first; most of them were grinding for the exams, and Sears had an engagement to play court tennis and lunch at the B. A. A. He said he didn’t see why the man’s friends weren’t enough without dragging out a lot of heelers who’d never heard of him, let alone never having met him. He wasn’t ‘going to be any damned hired crocodile!’ he said. You see, they couldn’t understand that if they didn’t go, there probably wouldn’t be anybody there but the preacher and Mrs. Finley, and those horrible men with the black satin ties and cotton gloves who carry you in and out when there’s no one else round to do it. But they all came at last—even Sears, grumbling till he got inside the gate. Nate brought three or four fellows round from his club, and an armful of red and white roses ‘from the class,’ he told Mrs. Wellington. It was a nice little lie. I was surprised that Natey thought of it. The Regent came, and Mr. Barrows, the college secretary, and poor old Miss Shedd, Wellington’s washwoman. She was awfully cut up, poor old thing, and made it as bad as possible for everybody. That was about all, I think. Plummer, the college preacher, was simple and manly; Heaven knows he couldn’t very well have been anything else under the circumstances. And then we had that interminable drive again, back to Boston.
“I was in the carriage with Mrs. Wellington. Any of us could have gone with her just as well, I suppose, because we were all Hugh’s friends, although I was the only one who knew that we were. But I wanted to ride with her somehow, and I’m glad now that I did, for a very queer thing happened; I’ve never quite understood it. She didn’t say anything for ever so long, not until we got across the bridge and the carriage began to go slower. Then she put one of her hands on mine, and said,—
“‘I didn’t know at first that you were Haydock, not until I found your note. I’m very, very glad to know, because Hugh used to talk more about you in his letters and when he was at home than he did about any of the others. I think he looked up to you most of all,’ and she told me some of the things he had said and written.”
Haydock often wondered if repeating things to your mother that you wouldn’t repeat to any one else, made up for the things you couldn’t tell her at all. This passed through his mind now.
“I’m afraid it’s just as well I never met Wellington,” he added. “Well, there wasn’t much else. When we got to the station, I left Nate and the others to attend to things, and went into the car with Mrs. Wellington. She had the stateroom,—I’d got that for her when I went in town in the morning,—and there wasn’t anything to do but give her her ticket, and say good-bye. I had a feeling as if I ought to go on with her and see the thing through; but I’d cut one examination already—I managed to flunk two more—and she probably wouldn’t have let me anyhow. I did hunt up the conductor and give him the other ticket,—you have to have two, you know,—and told him to take care of it, and not let her see it; it had a grisly word scribbled across it. She smiled when she said good-bye—oh, so sadly.”
Haydock stood up and stretched himself.
“Did you ever hear from her again?” asked Mrs. Haydock.
“Oh, yes, I had a letter very soon. I had all his books and furniture and stuff packed up and sent home, you know. She told me to keep anything I wanted, because—oh, I’ll show you the letter some day. I kept the picture with ‘For Hugo’ written on the back. It’s over in my room.” He went down the steps, Mrs. Haydock following. They walked along the Delta, past John Harvard, and across to one of the paths in the Yard once more, sprinkled now with men hurrying to Memorial.
“It was such a queer waste, his having lived and come here at all,” mused Philip. “I suppose that sounds awfully kiddish and tiresome to you, doesn’t it?” he asked more lightly, looking at his mother.
“No,” she answered; “it sounded very old the way you said it.”