Butterflies
John Rice—somehow he was never called “Jack”—and Billy Ware roomed together, it was said, because their mothers were congenial. These ladies certainly had, in common, the bond of sweet stupidity, or they never would have put into practice the ideal arrangement of having their sons share the same apartment. Rice was always, and with justice, spoken of as “a very fine man.” He was well put together and fine looking. His sense of duty was fine, also his sense of honour. He possessed a fine lot of commonplace ideas about many things, and carried with him an air of fine, if indefinite, purpose. On the whole, Billy considered him uninteresting.
Billy, on the other hand, was fatally gifted in his ability to please everybody. Other things being satisfactory, personal appearance doesn’t weigh heavily in the balance of undergraduate judgment; it was not Billy’s extremely pretty and well cared for exterior that compelled fellows to take him into account in their preliminary survey of the Freshman Class; although that may have helped, just at first. People who liked the plasticity of his quick smile and the restlessness of his black eyebrows—there was something very un-Anglo-Saxon in their facial importance—thought he had “an expressive face.” But what it expressed, if anything, no man undertook to say. Hemenway, who drew for the “Lampoon,” said it was a sketch, not a face,—the sketch of a painter who didn’t take art seriously. Neither was it cleverness that made fellows who met Ware remember him favourably, if they happened to be upper classmen, and glad of a subsequent occasion that threw them in his way, if they were his own classmates. For Billy had none of the talents of which parlour tricks are made. In the presence of older boys, he instinctively knew the number and kind of remarks that gain for a freshman the negative distinction of being “able to talk enough.” With his contemporaries, he talked a great deal—almost up to the line that separated him from youths who chatter. But except for a whimsical manner of attack, and his consistent frivolity of tone in regard to almost everything, his conversation was unimportant. What he did possess, to a rather extraordinary degree, was that which, if given the field, is more magical among one’s fellows at college than brains, manners, looks, or money,—that which is described only as “the indescribable something.”
And Billy had the field. S. Timothy’s sent fifteen men to Harvard that year; he knew them all, of course, and roomed with the very fine one. They all flocked together at first, until the acquaintance of each equalled the fourteen others plus fourteen times the friends of every one of them—which is all one knows, and all one needs to know. The number—it included the nebular hypothesis of the next year’s Institute and a few more—kept Billy’s head wagging incessantly in and about Cambridge. Of all this throng Billy was probably interested least in the man with whom he roomed. John Rice was a constant and living reminder of S. Timothy’s; Billy detested S. Timothy’s. He used to tell John pleasantly, that he not only didn’t like the school or anything he had learned there, but that it had bored him extremely for six years, although he hadn’t perhaps realised it at the time.
“Spend next Sunday with you up at School?” he would say, airily, to this frequent suggestion of John’s. “My dear fellow, how foolishness! My life-work consists just now in forgetting S. Timothy’s.” Then he would pull John’s hair, or, perhaps, shy harmless missiles at him from across the room; for he knew that John was abjectly grateful for any semi-affectionate demonstrations of this nature, and it amused Billy to be liked by people,—people for whom he didn’t particularly care. He didn’t care much for John; he found him solicitous rather than sympathetic. John was too contemplative—too “set”; he refused to accept freshman standards and go ahead accordingly. Billy, who managed, before he was through, to spread himself uncommonly thin over a considerable area, fancied that he thought his room-mate pitifully prudent. For when Billy entered college, he proceeded from the very first to expand in the largeness and fulness of his glorious new life. People said, afterwards, his development had been so slight and so artificial, in the stained-glass atmosphere of his imitation English “fitting” school, that it made up for lost time at a most astonishing rate when the boy became his own master. He was very much like a supersensitive photograph plate in the hands of a bungler. If you know what it does on being plunged into the developing solution, you have an idea of Billy’s Freshman year.
He had been such a nice little boy at S. Timothy’s,—piping liquidly in an angelic “nighty” at Chapel,—that when the inevitable rumours reached there, the rector and the masters were deeply pained to learn that still another butterfly had burst from the godly chrysalis. They assumed lank, pre-Raphaelite expressions, and murmured, “Oh, Harvard—Harvard!” Billy himself was not left in ignorance of their distress; there was always John, of course; and from time to time biblical excerpts, skilfully tortured into the form of letters, came to him through the mails. Somebody-or-other’s pamphlet on “The Life Beautiful,” and a horrid looking little thing in white celluloid covers, entitled “Daily Seeds for Daily Needs,” were also slipped through his letter-slide one morning—all of which, in turn, caused Billy to murmur, “Oh, S. Timothy’s—S. Timothy’s!” His attitude toward S. Timothy’s rapidly became that of one who places his thumb upon his nose and extends the fingers of his hand.
“‘Descensus averni facilis est,’” John, in one of his more playful moods, had remarked to him one evening. To which Billy had replied, “Ah, yes—E pluribus unum nux vomica facile princeps, as dear old Virgil used to say.” He was standing before the mirror in his bedroom adjusting an evening tie. Four crumpled failures already lay on the floor; from time to time Billy kicked at them as he moved about, or arrested the progress of his toilet to inhale deeply from the cigarette that had already burned several holes in the cover of his dressing-table. John was sitting on the bed, gravely watching the boy dress for the “Friday Evening.”
“Do you think you’ll come back to-night?” he asked.
“That’s the delightful part of it all—I don’t know,” answered Billy, with a shrug. He hadn’t told John where he was going after the dancing-class, because John, by various pathetic little indirect remarks, had displayed unmistakable interest in his movements. Billy withheld the satisfaction it would have given his room-mate to know all about him, partly because he wished to discourage a growing tendency, and for the reason that John’s—or any one’s—serious concern always aroused in him pleasant sensations of silliness, accompanied by a desire to giggle.
“After all—Boston is a busy little place, isn’t it Johnny?” his smile was radiant with mystery. “Don’t sit up for me, old man—unless you care for winter sunrises,” he added, imitating the tones he so often heard in Sanborn’s billiard place, and laughing at the way they sounded. “By the way, what are you going to do to-night,—something devilish of course,—but what?” He wasn’t asking for information; he knew that John usually spent his evenings quietly at home, or went to see one of the S. Timothy’s boys, and talk foot-ball or the intricacies of English A.
“I? Oh, I was thinking of going over to Claverly to see Haydock,”—Haydock was a senior. “He asked us to drop in often, you know,” said John, so casually that, after the manner of absolutely honest persons who attempt a subtlety, he “gave himself away.”
“Translated, I suppose that means I haven’t been there very often—that I haven’t been there at all, in fact?” said Billy, sweetly. He was thinking to himself that when John aimed at “foxiness,” he usually made a very successful cow of himself.
“I may have been thinking that,” admitted John, blushing a little; “but you really haven’t been there, you know, and after the way you didn’t turn up the night he asked us to dine—”
“Turn up? Turn up?” said Billy, with a giggle at an imagined picture of himself turning up at the Victoria to dine with Haydock and John. “Why, man, I was dead to the world—I was a corpse! Turn up? I turned up about two days later, and didn’t know where I was then. If you had any gratitude in your withered old gizzard, you’d never stop thanking me for not turning up.”
“It wasn’t the right thing,” was John’s comment. The appearance just then of Dilly Bancroft, for whom Billy was waiting, averted the discussion—the one-sided kind Rice and Ware always had—in which Billy played matadore and picador, with grace and agility, to John’s brave but ineffectual bull.
“I’m all ready. Let’s dash along; you’re late, Dilly,” said Billy, slipping into his coat. He had a keen instinct in the matter of personal antagonisms. He always felt them long before they were expressed, often before they were even conceived. John had never said much of anything about Billy’s friend Bancroft—not even when that young man had seen fit to break training some months before, on the Freshman Eleven. But in spite of John’s hearty (suspiciously hearty, thought Billy), “Hello, Dilford, how are you?” Billy knew. Anything of the kind annoyed him—especially in his own room, where he felt it his right to have whom he pleased. He escaped with Bancroft as soon as possible. John struck him just then as a very tiresome person to be saddled with. The two left, looking so clean and well-bred and young and altogether inconsequent in their good clothes, that John could not but smile to himself and think kindly of them for a moment as they clattered down the stairs and out into the Yard.
Haydock was at home when Rice knocked at his door in Claverly later in the evening. It was always with a feeling of satisfaction that one went into Haydock’s study. Haydock himself had none of the disconcerting habits of most people. He never came to the door with an open book in one hand and a green shade over his eyes, protesting, with a worried expression, that you hadn’t stopped his work and spoiled his evening generally. He never shook you by the hand and seemed unnecessarily glad to see you. He never began the conversation by asking, after a stupid pause, the stupider question, “Well, how are you getting along?” It was impossible to feel that your arrival interrupted him in the least, as his door was usually unlatched, and he rarely seemed to be engaged in anything more urgent than filling his pipe, putting a fresh log on the fire, or perhaps strolling about looking at things,—occupations suggesting somehow, that Haydock had been trying to kill time until you should drop in. To-night he was improving the angle at which his various pictures hung.
“Do you suppose there ever was anything more maddening than a really conscientious ‘goody’?” he said, as John came in,—“the kind who has a passion for dusting, a positive lust for it? Just look at these pictures!” He straightened the photograph of a Florentine saint, whose asceticism, at a rakish deflection from the perpendicular, had ceased to impress.
“I don’t think we’re bothered very much by conscientious ‘goodies’ over in Matthews,” answered John; “one of them broke Billy’s pipe this morning.”
“Has William taken up smoking?” laughed Haydock.
“Well, rather.”
“Surprising, isn’t it,” mused the other. He really wasn’t surprised a bit. He and Billy had been born and brought up next door to each other; he knew the type and the temperament. He also was aware that Billy was an enthusiastic member of the Polo Club.
Haydock had tried to see something of the child during his first month or two in college.
“An older boy can do so much for a younger one, Philip,” Mrs. Ware had said to him, with her hazy maternal trustfulness, just before college opened. “William is fond of you, I know; and it’s a great comfort to feel that you will be there, and that he’s going to room with John.” If the good woman derived tranquillity of mind from the fact that her son and Haydock chanced to inhabit the same town, Haydock did not consider it worth while to explain that the coincidence, regarded in the light of its moral significance, was unimportant. He had called on Billy and John as soon as they were settled; but Billy had never returned the compliment, although John did frequently. Once he had asked the room-mates to dinner; Billy, he learned later, had been too drunk that evening to recall the engagement for the moment. Since then, the helpful influence, in the belief of which Mrs. Ware existed placidly, had perforce exerted itself across a theatre, or from the platform of a passing electric car.
“Oh, I don’t mind his smoking,” said John, with the faintest emphasis on the last word.
“No?” Haydock kept his back turned, and continued to touch delicately, here and there, the corners of his picture frames. As a matter of fact, he made some of them rather more crooked than they were at first. But he felt that if he didn’t deter John by turning suddenly and giving him all attention, he would hear the whole story; John very evidently had brought one with him.
“Of course, I don’t smoke, myself,” John went on slowly; “it’s just happened that way, I suppose. But I don’t mind it in Billy. You can always stop if it begins to hurt you. I think I like to see him do it,” he ended, with unusual tolerance.
“Yes,” agreed Haydock, deliberately, “if it hurts you, you can always stop smoking.” He, too, emphasised the last word softly, in a way that left the tale still untold. Haydock was something of an artist in assisting confidences where the spirit was willing and the vocabulary weak.
“Ware is really a bully chap; he was a perfect corker at school.” John’s remark was a circuitous paraphrase of, “Isn’t it too bad!”
“He certainly is most attractive; I’ve rarely known anybody who was more so,” Haydock assented, with an enthusiasm he genuinely felt; “but I don’t see much of him now.” His regret, too, was real.
“That’s it! that’s just it!” John burst out so hotly that the senior, who was filling his pipe at the table, almost looked up in ill-timed surprise. “Nobody sees anything of him any more; nobody who ought to, like you.”
“And you,” added Haydock, to himself. The situation was perennial; he divined it perfectly.
“Nobody but that damned Dilford Bancroft and that gang,” continued John. “Billy could know any one in the class that’s worth knowing; he really does know every one. But you understand what I mean, they’re not his friends; he doesn’t go to their rooms, and they don’t come to ours. It’s always Bancroft and just a few sports like that.”
“Cheap sports?” Haydock questioned. He knew no more of Bancroft than that he was a decorative young person whose somewhat liberal views on the subject of training for a foot-ball eleven had stirred a ripple of indignation throughout the college in the autumn, and provoked some caustic reflections in the editorial columns of the “Harvard Crimson.”
“No, I don’t suppose they’re ‘cheap’ sports,” admitted the honest John,—“not the way you mean.”
“Expensive sports, then?”
“Well, if you mean that they seem to know how to do the things that oughtn’t to be done at all, the way they ought to be done, if you do them—” began John, a trifle obscurely.
“Yes, that’s precisely what I mean.”
“Then they are ‘expensive’ sports, I suppose.”
“And Billy has become absorbed by them?”
“He doesn’t care to see any one else, as far as I know.”
“Perhaps it’s merely a passing phase.”
“I can’t see that that cuts any particular ice, if he is going to be ruined before it passes,” John objected.
“But he won’t be,” put in Haydock, confidently.
“What can possibly save him?” John was terribly in earnest. “His best friends are loafers and snobs; they never learn anything, and they all drink too much. All they want is a good time,—the wrong kind of a good time. Who is going to make him take a brace? I’ve tried, and I can’t; the college doesn’t seem to give a—”
“Hold on—hold on—hold on,” broke in Haydock; “give the college a show. What do you expect the college to do anyhow? Supply wet-nurses for all the silly little boys who make themselves sick on cocktails at the Adams House?”
“It could do something.”
“Yes, and doesn’t it,—the very finest thing in the world! Doesn’t it allow all sorts of men to come here, and give them the chance of their lives to learn about everybody and everything that was ever good or great or worth learning about? Isn’t it willing to share the very best of what it has,—and it has everything,—its traditions and its knowledge and its beauty? Doesn’t it want to make the fellows here part of it all, if they only have the guts to keep their heads up, and follow along the road it has built for them? Is there any place else where you can live for four years—the four important ones—and know that the standard of everything held up to you can’t change, like the trivial little standards of other places, that the aim won’t swerve, no matter what happens, and that they are the highest, the best? Isn’t that doing something—everything?”
Haydock was occasionally enthusiastic in a calm, thoughtful sort of way.
“I know what you mean—I’ve thought about it myself; but Billy is going to hell. What about Billy?” John insisted.
“Oh, as for that—to pass from the sublime to Billy—he simply won’t; that is to say, he won’t here, at Harvard.”
There was a gleam of hope in John’s eyes.
“Why?” he asked.
“Because he’ll get kicked out,” said Haydock.
“Fire Billy?” John looked terrified.
“That’s what they’ll do. And why not?” the senior went on heartlessly. “From what you say, he doesn’t seem to be quite ready for the place, as yet; so put him out.”
“But he isn’t bad, really bad.”
“No, certainly not; merely a damn fool; when he gets over being one, let him come back. The college understands that sort of thing much better than you or I do. It’s not only highly intelligent, but extremely benevolent. I’m sorry about Billy.”
“Won’t you talk to him—warn him in some way; he’ll listen to you,” said John, earnestly.
“I should be charmed,” answered the other, although he appreciated the delicacy of the situation, and felt that his words would fall on deaf ears.
It was later than John’s accustomed hour for going to bed, when he left Haydock’s room that night. This was his only reason for hurrying over to Matthews, as he did, when he finally said good-night to the senior. At the end of the little corridor near John’s door a man who looked like a messenger of some kind stood peering out of the window at the lights in the Square. He must have been standing there a long time,—long enough to become convinced that the continual sound of footsteps in the entry did not necessarily announce the person for whom he was waiting,—for he turned to John only when he heard the jingle of his keys.
“Rice?” he drawled, “J. D. Rice?” He gave John a note, and sauntered back to the window. The communication was from Billy. John read it there in the corridor under the gas jet:—
Dear Johnny,—Please, as quickly as possible, procure all the money you can lay your hands on—two hundred dollars at the very least—and come bail me out. I have been arrested and compelled to languish among hostile strangers. The man with this note will guide you to the scene of my incarceration. Please hurry, because I wish to go home.
Billy.
P. S. For Heaven’s sake get a move on.
For a moment this document conveyed but little to John. He was obliged to read it a second time, and even then he stared appealingly at the messenger, who had turned and was eyeing him with feeble interest.
“They got pinched, didn’t they?” said the man, sadly.
“But what did he do? What’s happened?” John demanded. He was dazed; nothing he had ever seen or done in his life had prepared him for this.
“Why, they got run in,” explained the man.
“Here—you wait for me here.” The only thing John could think of just then was Haydock. “Or no—come into my room;” he unlocked the door and turned up the gas. “Be sure to wait,” he commanded, as he rushed out.
Claverly was locked for the night; John remembered this after rattling in vain at the three doors. Then he called under Haydock’s window. The senior answered from the square of yellow light above. He was on the point of going out anyhow, he said, and would join John below.
“Billy’s arrested! he’s in jail! What’ll I do?” John gasped breathlessly. He thrust the note at Haydock. “Read it.”
Haydock struck a match in the shelter of a bay window and read.
“Why, the only thing to do is to bail him out,” he laughed. “It’s horrid, not to say disgusting, to have to stay all night in a jail. How much money have you?”
“I don’t know, five dollars, I think,” answered John. The darkness covered his astonishment at Haydock’s calmness under the circumstances.
“I have thirty or forty myself, and I’ll evolve the rest somewhere.”
“Do you think you can?” To John the idea was incredible.
“Oh, heavens yes! That’s the trouble with Cambridge; you can always borrow any amount at any hour. It makes every place else seem sordid and worldly. Is the ‘guide’ in your room? I’ll meet you there in twenty minutes.” He strolled away whistling. John hurried back to Matthews faster than before.
For ever so long that night was a hideous memory to Billy’s room-mate. He and Haydock and the man—a sad, silent person whom Haydock courteously tried to engage in conversation from time to time—spent hours in chilly suburban street-cars and bleak waiting stations. Haydock ignored the topic that to John was of such overwhelming and painful interest; it was as if he had disposed of the entire subject earlier in the evening when he had uttered his prophecy: “Because he’ll get kicked out.” Grey January dawn streaked the sky when the trio, after finding Billy and Dilford Bancroft chatting pleasantly with the watchmen in the police station, managed to rout up the gentleman whose function it seemed to be to determine the amount of a criminal’s bail,—he lived several miles away,—get a cab, and jog back to Cambridge. Billy talked most of the way, in spite of the silence with which John received his reflections, and Haydock’s polite but unenthusiastic attention. Dilford covered his head with the lap-robe at intervals, and had hysterics; but no one noticed him at all, except Billy, who occasionally joined him in these complex emotions.
“It was the surprise—the awful surprise of it that killed me dead,” Billy would giggle. “I was on the box-seat driving, you know,—lickety-split, to beat the band, with Harry Hollis beside me,—he fell off when we went over the car tracks. I’d like to know if he was hurt; anyhow, the car didn’t run over him, because I looked back and it never stopped. Had Jimmy fallen out then?” he appealed to Dilford, whose reply was smothered at its birth. “Then we raced the car until the horses—oh, they were corkers!—began to run away. I couldn’t hold them. I tried, upon my soul, I tried! but I was laughing so that my wrists were all sort of tickly on the inside,—you know how they do,—and I couldn’t close my fingers very tight over the reins; they just flapped around in the breeze any old way. So when the policeman ran out and yelled and waved, what on earth could I do? What could I do? We simply crashed past him like a chariot race. I looked back again and couldn’t even see the creature—only Dilly on the floor, white as a sheet, holding on with everything he had. Oh, it was terrible! perfectly terrible! I was glad we’d ditched the policeman, though; only we didn’t! That was the surprise. My dear, what do you suppose that man—that devil—did? He telephoned—telephoned—to the next police station, and when we got there they received us. Policemen? There were platoons of them,—as far as the eye could reach in every direction. And they had fish-nets and lassoes and the most fearful-looking clubs; and one of the horses fell down, and everybody sat on the poor thing’s head,—people always rush and do that when a horse falls down. I wonder why?”
No one ventured a theory, and William continued:—
“Well, they took us inside, and asked the most intimate impertinent kind of questions. I gave my own name, but Dilly didn’t; he had one all ready that went with the initials on his underclothes, so it wouldn’t be a give-away even if they had the nerve to go too far. What was it, Dilly? I’ve forgotten. He asked me what my occupation was, and I didn’t exactly like to tell him I was a student.”
“Of course not,” assented Haydock, drily.
“So I merely said ‘rentier.’”
Haydock groaned softly in his corner.
“He just looked at me,—the great big thing! I don’t think he’d ever been abroad. Oh, and before I forget it, we have to be in court at nine o’clock. Now don’t go and oversleep yourself, John, the way you do sometimes; because I must get up whether I want to or not, I suppose. Where was I? Oh, yes; after he’d asked all the questions he could think of, I wrote the note, and we waited a deuce of a while. But it wasn’t so bad after that, after the ice was broken. Then you both came—I was so relieved—and here we are ‘just off the yacht!’”
Billy thought it hardly worth while to go to bed when the cab at length reached the Square. He would have preferred to utilise the short time that remained before nine o’clock in talking over his little jaunt with Dilford. He wanted to “shake” John and Haydock, and spend a pleasant hour or two at Mr. Vosler’s hotel in town, before meeting his judge. But the plan wasn’t one that he could innocently suggest; and as the senior stayed with them until they said good-night to him at the entry of Matthews, he couldn’t very well leave John without a word, as he would have done, had they been alone. Billy tumbled into bed as soon as he got upstairs, and giggled himself to sleep, after calling into John’s room,—
“You did see the sunrise, didn’t you, old man?”
John lay awake until it was time to rouse Billy for his trial. At nine that morning the two criminals rolled up to the court-room, smoking cigarettes on the back seat of a victoria. They pleaded guilty to something,—neither of them quite knew what,—listened with downcast eyes to a bit of fatherly sarcasm, and drove away again—forty dollars poorer than when they arrived. That was in January.
The midyear examinations have an unpleasant habit of disturbing the even academic tenor early in February, as their name suggests. They announce themselves, in various prominent places, at first, like clouds no bigger than a man’s hand. The wary and the wise repair to their caves, and remain there, off and on, for days and days and days. When they finally emerge, care-worn but preserved after the deluge, they find that many loved ones are missing. John was among the first to retire to high and inaccessible altitudes. He pinned the “Crimson’s” supplementary schedule of examinations and dates to his door. After deliberating long as to where a similar reminder would most often meet the eyes of his room-mate, he carefully marked the impending tortures with ominous crosses and tacked the list to the frame of Billy’s mirror. He might with just as much effect—to say nothing of the economy of anguish—have thrown the thing into the fire.
“What the devil does this fly-paper think it’s doing on my looking-glass?” Billy had remarked on finding the evidence of John’s thoughtfulness. “Do you realise that you have utterly obliterated Sarah Bernhardt and Della Fox? I think you must be crazy.” He ripped off the paper, and let it flutter to the floor. John’s patience was inexhaustible, but his ingenuity had well defined limits; he was aware, with something like panic, that he had reached them. For weeks, he had exercised what art he had at command, in trying to seduce Billy into opening a book. He had learned that a declaration of his personal ideas in regard to the examinations—or any work he undertook—was worse than ineffectual as far as his room-mate went. It not only failed to quicken in Billy the sense—prevalent at the midyears—of approaching catastrophe, but drove him away to somebody else’s room, or perhaps to town. So, much to his own distaste, John had essayed the rôle of the serio-comic. He made a pretence—with reservations—of adopting Billy’s point of view; the reservations were meant to bring about the desired end. He would chat with Billy of the more serious aspects of college—the courses and instructors and examinations—in an attempt at something like the same breezy tone in which the boy himself touched on these subjects. When Billy, for instance, would sit up in bed in the morning and yawn and shrug and announce that he simply couldn’t go all the way over to Sever Hall to sit through Professor So-and-so’s lecture—that the man was ninety-five years old if he was a day, and slobbered, John would laugh and say,—
“Yes, isn’t he deadly? I hardly ever listen to him. Lots of people live too long. But I suppose we must go and endure it; we’re in the course, and we’ll have to worry through it somehow.”
At first Billy was rather shocked. The abrupt change of manner was so hopelessly out of character; he wouldn’t have been more astounded had he heard unseemly levity issuing from the pulpit at S. Timothy’s. But he divined almost at once—who wouldn’t have?—that John’s responsibility for other people’s affairs, though exhibited in a fashion positively weird, did not diminish; and Billy frequented 86 Matthews less than ever. John knew that he himself didn’t possess the qualities that make a man an inspiration, but he had been brought up at home and at school to believe that he was something of an influence; that he was “just the sort of man a fellow like Billy needs.” Apart from the genuine sorrow he would feel at what the official college gracefully terms the “separation” of Billy from the University, it was disconcerting to John to find out that as a kindly light he had proved uncommonly dim. In despair and disappointment, he impressed Haydock into the labour of salvation.
Haydock was very amiable about the whole affair. He had, whenever he was with Billy, the half amused affection an older fellow often feels for anything so young and pretty and inconsequent. He liked the boy’s mother too, although the lady’s guilelessness had always been a bar to conversation of other than a purely theoretical value. So, in response to John’s eleventh-hour prayers, he did what he could in spite of more immediate interests. He picked his way, one evening, through the darkness and the mud, and among the disabled butcher-waggons, by the black alley that leads to the Polo Club,—once upon a time he too had belonged to that genial institution,—and beguiled Billy and Dilford Bancroft to his room. He gave them beer, and things to smoke, and then wondered how, with two such elusive, mercurial creatures flitting about, he could ever begin to “talk shop.” Strangely enough Billy himself provided the opportunity.
“Play something, Dilly,” he said, opening Haydock’s piano. Haydock glanced at the clock on the mantelpiece, but it was not yet nine; the proctor couldn’t object, no matter how excruciating Dilly’s performance might be.
“Dilly, you know, can bang the box in a way that would make you throw stones at your grandmother,” explained Billy.
“I’m extremely fond of my grandmother,” suggested Haydock.
“What do you want?” asked Dilly, seating himself.
“What do you know?”
“Oh, any old thing.”
Haydock was on the point of discreetly asking for a Sousa march, when Dilford plunged abruptly into the middle of a sonata, and played it through with astonishing brilliancy.
“I do play well, don’t I?” he admitted, when he had finished. “It always surprises me; just think what I could do if I really studied—hard, I mean,” he added lightly.
“Good heavens! man,” exclaimed Haydock, “aren’t you going to take highest honours in music? Why, you can do anything!” Haydock considered his own little thumpings important only in so far as they enabled him to understand a talent like Bancroft’s.
“Oh, I don’t know,” answered Dilford, with indifference. “My father wants me to go to work; I don’t suppose I’ll be here long.”
“Won’t you, really? I knew that Billy wasn’t going to stay; but I had an idea you would.” Haydock alluded to Billy’s probable departure with the emotion he would have displayed had he been predicting a change in the weather.
Billy pricked up his ears and his eyebrows at once. “What makes you say that?” he demanded quickly. Even Dilford dropped his customary listlessness, and looked interested.
“Why—I thought it was more or less settled.” The senior turned from one to the other in slow surprise, “If I’ve said anything I ought not to have—given things away, I mean—I’m awfully sorry. But perhaps they were mistaken.” Billy’s face, across which flitted a shade of anxiety, told him that he was perfectly safe in making a “bluff” at changing the subject.
“No, no!” Billy jerked out, impatiently; “go on! who are you talking about? You’ve heard something important,” something that didn’t emanate from John, he was thinking. “What did they say? I insist on knowing.”
“It really wasn’t much; merely that one or two of the instructors—I know some of the younger ones rather well—seemed to think that you wouldn’t—that in fact you couldn’t be with us after the midyears. That’s all. I thought you knew.”
“You’re bitched all right, all right,” laughed Bancroft.
“They said that, did they?” Billy let fall these words portentously; it was as if he were on the point of framing a great resolution.
“That’s precisely what they said.”
“Well, then—by heaven! I’ll fool them.” He really meant it.
“Oh, I wish you would! It would be easy after all. There’s time yet. I’ll help you with your English—both courses—and your Latin. You’re all right in French, of course, and the History won’t be so terrible. Is it a go?” Haydock held out his hand.
“I’ll fool them,” repeated Billy, solemnly. He gravely let his long, brown fingers rest in Haydock’s palm. And Haydock had one of those moments of quiet exultation that are the perquisites of the intelligent.
The next morning Billy and Dilly disappeared from Cambridge, and were neither seen nor heard of for five days. On the afternoon of the fourth day John, looking positively thin, turned up in Haydock’s room.
“Get up a search party and explore darkest Boston,” advised the senior, drumming on the desk with his pencil.
“Oh, I did!” John’s tone was without hope. “Harry Hollis and Jimmy Fenton took me all over—to the most awful hotels and places. They seemed to know Billy at all of them; but he wasn’t there. I never had such a night. I don’t know what to do.”
“How much money did he have?” Haydock continued to drum thoughtfully.
“Twenty dollars. I’m sure, because we both put our allowances in the bank that morning. Billy kept twenty.”
Now Haydock, who had met a great number of Billys and Dillys in his short life, knew that this particular Billy was not living anywhere on the modest sum of five dollars a day. So, after a little more drumming, he said,—
“Run over to the Charles River Bank, and ask them in just what metropolis of the United States or Europe, William is signing cheques at the present moment.”
When John returned, breathless, a few minutes later, he threw himself into a chair, and groaned,—
“They’re in Providence.”
Haydock gave up a dinner at his club that night, and a dance in town. He went, instead, to Providence. Late the next evening he deposited Billy—too much of a wreck to be either resentful or flippant—in 86 Matthews. The next day the Office put Billy “on probation.”
And the midyears were coming.
One night, after the examination period was well under way, Haydock went up to his room to study. Although the month was February, the night was heavy and depressing. The senior had much to accomplish before morning. He was nervous—almost irritable. His curtains floated like ghostly, beckoning sleeves in and out of the open windows, until he jumped up and tied them viciously into hard knots. His student lamp radiated the heat of hell and the unnumbered suns; he found himself waiting, in nervous suspense, for the periodic bubbling of its rudimentary bowels. The sound diverted his attention from his book, and wasted the limited time left him in which to commit to memory several hundred lines of Paradise Lost. The verse,—
“And, sweet reluctant amourous delay,”
—he came across it in the feverish scramble of learning five lines a minute by the watch,—suddenly put the situation in a light in which he had not until then been able to see it. He leaned back in his chair and laughed aloud. And as he laughed, he heard a light footstep in the hall, then a knock on his door.
“I heard you laughing and knew you couldn’t be working, so I just knocked,” said Dilford Bancroft, innocently ignoring the very unusual fact that Haydock had on neither coat nor waistcoat, that a shaded student lamp was the only light in the room, and that several open books and some scattered notes lay on the table. “What’s the joke?” he asked. Then without waiting for an answer, “Hasn’t Billy come yet?”
“Is Billy coming?” said Haydock, with an interest that sprang solely from alarm.
“Oh, yes—he’ll be here,” answered Dilly, reassuring any foolish doubts on that question. He had opened the piano and was striking careful discords in the bass, “I was sure you were talking to him when I came in; he said he’d bring round his system.”
“His what?”
“Why, his system—the ‘Rhyming Road,’ he calls it. You’re going to give us a seminar, you know—the exam comes to-morrow; and he’s going to bring round his notes and the ‘Rhyming Road’ to help out.”
Haydock was hearing of this little arrangement for the first time. He hadn’t seen Billy since the return from Providence.
“You didn’t tell me you were coming,” he began; “I have no end of work myself and—”
“Yes, yes, I know,” broke in Dilly, a trifle impatiently, without turning from the piano; “you see we never thought about it ourselves until this afternoon, when we found out that the exam comes to-morrow. We were sure you’d do it,” he wheeled slowly about until he faced Haydock; “because neither of us know anything, and if you don’t—we’ll fail.”
Haydock met this plaint with the worried silence of one who dimly foresees his own end. Dilly couldn’t have made a more persuasive appeal if he had tried. Its strength lay in the fact that Dilly hadn’t tried; he had simply laid bare, with an apparently childlike trust in Haydock’s wisdom, his own and Billy’s hopeless inconsequence. It was rather late in the day to discuss the matter.
“We were counting on you,” Dilly sighed, and looked at the floor. He ventured this statement in the hope of keeping the subject alive; somehow it had seemed to languish.
“I confess I don’t understand you two,” Haydock burst out. Every one who had the pleasure of knowing Billy and Dilly took refuge in this exclamation at one time or another. “How the devil have you managed to hang on here for four months? And why on earth did you come to college at all?” he shook the boy by the shoulders.
Dilly’s apologia might have been interesting. He had on occasions attempted—by request—to defend the fact of his being at Harvard; but as he had always prefaced his few remarks with, “To begin with, I am of a taciturn disposition,” and as no one was quite willing to believe that he had a glimmer of the meaning of “taciturn,” he had never been allowed to proceed from that point. To-night the appearance of Billy with an armful of note-books made explanation impossible.
“Oh, I’m so glad you’re not working,” said Billy, sweetly, all the note-books—there were six of them—fell to the floor when he sat down; “because we couldn’t have disturbed you, and I don’t know what we’d have done—Dilford’s told you?”
“Yes, Dilford has told me,” answered Haydock. He knew that then was the time to escort these young gentlemen to the hall, and lock the door in their faces. But he allowed it to slip by, and it never returned.
“Well, then—I don’t see why we shouldn’t dash right along. What do you think?” Billy looked from Haydock to Dilford and back again.
“What is it you want—and what are all those books doing?” Haydock asked wearily.
“Oh, these?” Billy allowed his feet to ramble among the volumes on the floor. “Oh, they’re just notes—History and French and things; there were no matches in my room, and I was in a hurry, so I had to bring them all. The Literature ones are there too; but they’re rather—rather—what shall I say?” He refrained delicately from saying what was the simple truth,—that his notes on all subjects were an illegible muddle, beginning nowhere—arriving nowhere. “Things come to me at such odd times,” he went on, “I just jot them down. Anyhow you won’t need notes; we merely want you to give us some idea to go by,” he fluttered his slender hand comprehensively, “an idea of literature.”
“Yes,” put in Dilly, stirred by the practical common sense of the suggestion, “the examination, I think, is about literature.”
“You think—good God, child, don’t you know?” Haydock mopped his forehead on the back of his arm, and stared at the two incredulously.
“Oh, he’ll catch on all right,” said Billy, easily. “You see the course only came once a week, and Darnell lectures so fast that, sitting away in the back of the room as we do—”
“You prefer, on the whole, to stay away entirely, or make the hour pass as rapidly as possible. Yes, yes, I understand,” interrupted Haydock, drily. He picked up one of Billy’s books marked “English 28,” and opened it at random, to a page devoted to the diagrams and scores of the “Harvard University Tit Tat Too and Cent Matching Association. Originators and Sole Proprietors, William Prescott Ware and Dilford Bancroft. Honorary member: President Eliot.” On the page following was a fragmentary list of the writers whose lives and achievements had been taken up in the course. After the name of Jane Austen, came the announcement, in parentheses, that “this woman was a man.” The startling bit of literary gossip was annotated by: “I was mistaken—it was George Eliot who was a woman.”
“That almost flunked me at the hour exam,” explained Billy, diffidently. “They’re so fussy about things here.” He was looking over Haydock’s shoulder. “It would have, I think, if I hadn’t thrown a new light on the temperament of Swift.”
“I’ll warrant you did,” said Haydock. “What on earth is this?” The list was followed by page after page of scrappy-looking verse.
“Oh, that’s the Rhyming Road,” exclaimed Billy, not without pride. “It sums everything up and helps the memory. See now—I never can forget about that old Eliot woman as long as I live.” Haydock followed Billy’s guiding finger, and read a stanza that began:—
“Oh, heavens, oh, heavens,
Miss Mary Ann Evans,
Why did you change your name?
But I’m on to you, Mary,
You wary old fairy—”
“And this one on Matthew Arnold,” continued Billy, “gives the whole man away at once—”
“Matthew Arnold—he’s all right,
Full of sweetness, full of light.”
“And Richardson—”
“‘Pamela, Pamela, what have you done?’
‘I’ve been shooting the chutes with Sir Charles Grandison.’”
“Do you see? It goes on like that, only I haven’t had time yet to make the thing complete. Now let’s begin; it’s late.”
Haydock closed the book thoughtfully and went over to the window. He stood a moment looking out at the thick fog, and wondering what he should do. He hadn’t the slightest intention any longer of spending the rest of the night in a futile effort to scrape Billy through an examination. The child had already cut two, and failed in one, John had said. But the senior was in doubt as to whether his concern in the mess young Ware had made of his first few months of college, ought to end there, with a bland “good-night,” or whether he ought to see the thing out, in—say, the manner in which he would engineer the calamity, had Billy happened to be his young brother. A senior feels toward a freshman, older than he will ever feel toward anything again—older, probably, than he will feel even when called on to give advice to his own offspring. Haydock realised so well what was going to happen to Billy—Billy, whose progress in college from the first, had been the progress of a flimsy butterfly in a stiff breeze. He knew to an inch the quantity of perfectly necessary but distressing red tape that would have to be measured before Mrs. Ware and the college Office could come to anything like a common understanding. And even then Mrs. Ware wouldn’t understand much of anything. It always seemed to Haydock that men and women in becoming parents somehow or other managed to forfeit a great deal of intelligence. He intended some day to ask a psychologist with children, if this was a provision or a perversion of nature. Mrs. Ware was the sort of woman who would take an hour and a half to inform the Dean that William was a “good boy at heart,”—that his cheerfulness had always been “a ray of sunshine” in her life; the Dean, all the while, knowing that the twenty-five young men he had summoned to appear before him that morning, were waiting apprehensively in the outer office to “have it over with.” Since there was no question in Haydock’s mind just then of how to keep Billy in college, he asked himself if it wouldn’t be less painful to every one concerned to get him out with decency and despatch.
“It’s late,” repeated Dilly, listlessly.
“Yes, that’s the trouble,” said Haydock, turning away from the window. He said it kindly, regretfully, but with a seriousness that rather alarmed Dilford, and could not be ignored by Billy. “It’s too late. There’s no use in being tiresome and melo-dramatic about the thing, but that’s the simple fact; you’ve come to the end of your string, and you’ve got to let go before they slap your hands and take it away from you. If you don’t know what it means,—probation, and cutting two exams, and flunking a third—”
“John told you that,” broke in Billy, angrily.
“And flunking again to-morrow, I’m sorry.” He was sorry, very, very sorry. “Because it prolongs the agony for everybody, your mother in particular.”
Dilford was sidling about the room, nearing the door by furtive stages. When Haydock glanced up, he was no longer there.
“I’m the last person in the world to advise running away as long as there’s any music to face. But there isn’t any more for you just now. The thing is played out, and you simply have to leave.” Haydock himself didn’t quite know what he meant by this tuneful figure of speech; but he thought it sounded rather well, and would impress Billy. “You know yourself that a smash of some kind is coming—you’ve known it for weeks.” The senior didn’t attempt to understand the mind in which a keen knowledge of approaching, but easily averted doom ran in a never converging parallel with an insatiable lust for the present. He merely knew that such minds could be, and that Billy’s, if left unmolested, was one of them. He undertook now to lead these lines to a point. He didn’t say very much, and his remarks weren’t in the least spiritual; as a matter of fact they were decidedly worldly. He didn’t remind Billy that his wickedness might eventually keep him out of the kingdom of Heaven, but told him,—which is of far more importance to a Harvard freshman—that if he went on making an ass of himself he would ruin his chances for the “Dickey.” Haydock played some variations on this seemingly simple theme, threw in a few merciless truths he had learned from John, an original reflection or two, and an unanswerable prediction of a general and depressing character.
“You must get out and go home, and think about it,” he ended.
Billy had probably already begun to act on the last of these suggestions, for in a minute or two he stuffed his head into the sofa-cushions and began to cry. Haydock returned to his Milton, and learned several pages to an accompaniment of smothered sobs, until Billy at length became quiet.
“Now we’ll go down and have a cool swim in the tank,” said Haydock, rousing him gently. They undressed in silence. Billy was pathetic and absurd in a long blanket wrapper, his face still wet with tears, pattering after Haydock through the halls to the bath.
“Maybe you had better see your ‘adviser,’” Haydock suggested, when they were back again in his room. Billy hadn’t spoken in the interval.
“I can’t—he hates me!” gulped Billy, turning away. Ordinarily he would have said that the man was “affreux.”
He went to bed and cried some more on the cool pillows. Haydock wrote out a respectful form of resignation from the college for him to copy in the morning, composed a letter to Mrs. Ware, tenderly adapted in all respects to that lady’s intellectual needs, and returned, when the fog at his windows was white with the morning, to Paradise Lost.