Kitabı oku: «The Guarded Heights», sayfa 11

XXIX

Lambert appeared in the doorway.

"Blodgett's rung for tea – "

He glanced curiously from one to the other. The broken shadows disclosed little, but the fact that she had lingered at all was arresting.

"What's up, Sylvia?"

She went close to her brother.

"This – this old servant has been impertinent again."

Lambert smiled.

"He's rather more than that now, sis. That's over – forgotten. Still if the Princeton fellow Morton's been impertinent – "

He spread his arms, smiling.

"Have I got to submit myself to a trouncing more than once a year?"

Sylvia shrugged her shoulders.

"No," she said, impatiently. "You say it's forgotten. All right."

George knew it would never be forgotten now by either of them. Lambert's unruffled attitude made him uneasy. Her brother's scoffing response to her accusation suggested that Lambert saw, since they would be more or less thrown together, a beneficial side to such encounters as the one just ended. For George didn't dream that Lambert had forgotten, either, those old boasts.

Another depressing thought made him bad company for Blodgett after the callers had driven away. It came from a survey, following his glimpse of Sylvia's beauty, of all the blatant magnificence with which Blodgett had surrounded himself. Blodgett after dinner, a little flushed with wine, and the triumph of having had in his house on the same day two Sinclairs and two Planters, attempted an explanation.

"I didn't build this, Morton, or my place in town, just for Josiah Blodgett."

George wasn't in a mood for subtleties of expression.

"I've often wondered why you haven't married. With your money you ought to have a big choice."

Blodgett sipped a liqueur. He smiled in a self-satisfied way.

"Money will buy about anything – even the kind of a wife you want. I'm in no hurry. When I marry, young man, it will be the right kind."

And George understood that he meant by the right kind some popular and well-bred girl who would make the Blodgett family hit a social average.

He carried that terrifying thought of marriage back to Princeton. He had no fear Sylvia would ever look seriously in Blodgett's direction. Money could scarcely bribe her. This, however, was her second season. Of course she would marry someone of her own immediate circle. She could take her choice. When that happened what would become of his determination and his boasts? Frequently he clenched her riding crop and swore:

"Nothing – not even that – can keep me from accomplishing what I've set out to do. I'll have my way with her."

He shrank, nevertheless, from the thought of her adopting such a defence. It was intolerable. He read the New York papers with growing suspense. As an antidote he attacked harder than ever his study of cause and effect in the Street. With football out of the way he could give a good deal of time to that, and Blodgett now and then enclosed a hint in Mundy's letters. It was possible to send a fair amount of money to his parents; but his mother's letters never varied from their formality of thanks and solicitations as to his health. His father didn't write at all. Of course, they couldn't understand what he was doing. The shadow of the great Planter remained perpetually over their little home.

Another doubt troubled George. With the club matter out of the way, and the presidency of the class his, and a full football garland resting on his head, was he wasting his time at Princeton? The remembrance of Blodgett steadied him. He needed all that Princeton and its companionships could give.

Purposefully he avoided Betty. Was she, indeed, responsible for that softness he had yielded to in the infirmary and during the final game? In his life, he kept telling himself, there was no room for sentiment. Sentiment was childish, a hindrance. Hadn't he decided at the start that nothing should turn him from his attempt for the summit? Still he couldn't avoid seeing Betty now and then in Princeton, or at the dances in New York to which he went with Goodhue. The less he saw of Betty, moreover, the stronger grew his feeling of something essential lacking from his life; and it bothered that, after a long separation, she was invariably friendly instead of reproachful. He found that he couldn't look at her eyes without hungrily trying to picture them wet with tears for him.

To some extent other demands took his mind from such problems. The rumpus Goodhue had foreseen developed. Important men came or wrote from New York or Philadelphia in Dalrymple's cause, but at the meetings of the section George sat obdurate, and, when the struggle approached a crisis, Goodhue came out openly on the side of his room-mate.

"You can have Dalrymple in the club," was George's ultimatum, "or you can have me, but you can't have us both."

If George resigned, Goodhue announced, he would follow. Dalrymple was doomed. The important men went back or ceased writing. Then Wandel slipped Rogers into the charmed circle – the payment of a debt; and George laughed and left the meeting, saying:

"You can elect anybody you please now."

Cynically, he was tempted to try to force Allen in.

"You're not honest even with your own group," he said afterward to Wandel.

The club lost its value as a marker of progress. Besides, he didn't look forward to eating with that little snob, Rogers, for two years. Nor did he quite care for Wandel's reply.

"You've enough class-consciousness for both of us, heroic and puissant Apollo."

For the first time George let himself go with Wandel.

"You'll find Apollo Nemesis, little man, unless you learn to say what you mean in words of one syllable."

And the discussion of the clubs went on, breeding enmities but determining no radical reform.

The struggle at Princeton was over. George looked often at the younger men, who didn't have to prepare themselves minutely for the greater struggle just ahead, envying them their careless play, their proneness to over-indulgence in beer and syncopated song. While he worked with high and low prices and variations in exchange he heard them calling cheerily across the campus, gathering parties for poker or bridge or a session at the Nassau. Goodhue, even Wandel, found some time for frivolity. George strangled his instinct to join them. He had too much to do. In every diversion he took he wanted to feel there was a phase personally valuable to him.

He counted the days between his glimpses of Sylvia, and tried not to measure the hours dividing his meetings with Betty. If only he dared let himself go, dared cease battle for a little, dared justify Sylvia's attitude! Even Goodhue noticed his avoidance of Betty.

He encountered Sylvia in New York; asked her to dance with him; was refused; cut in when she was, in a sense, helpless; and glided around the room with a sullen, brilliant body that fairly palpitated with distaste.

Even during the summer he ran into her once on Long Island. Then he was always missing her. Perhaps she had learned to avoid him. He shrank each morning from his paper, from any bit of rumour connecting her with a man; and Blodgett, he noticed, was still making money for a bachelor bank account.

He came to conceive a liking for his flabby employer, although he was quite sure Blodgett wouldn't have bothered with him a moment if he hadn't been a prominent college man with such ties among the great as Blodgett hadn't been able to knot himself. What was more to the point, the stout man admired George's ambition. He was more generous with his surreptitious advice. He paid a larger salary which he admitted was less than George earned during that summer. George, therefore, went back to Princeton with fuller pockets. Again Mundy was loath to let him depart.

"You know more about this game than men who've worked at it for years."

His face of a parson grimaced.

"You'd soon be able to hire me, if you'd stick on the job instead of going back to college to get smashed up at football."

George, however, didn't suffer much damage that year. He played brilliantly through a season that without him would have been far more disastrous than it was.

When it was all over Squibs sat one night silently for a long time. At last he stirred, lighted his pipe, and spoke.

"I ought to say to you, George, that I was as satisfied with you in defeat as I was in victory."

"I outplayed Planter, anyway, didn't I?"

Bailly studied him.

"Did that mean more to you than having Princeton beaten?"

"It kept Princeton from being beaten worse than it was."

"Yes," Bailly admitted, "and, perhaps, you are right to find a personal victory somewhere in a general defeat."

"But you really think it selfish," George said.

"I wish," Bailly answered, "I could graft on your brain some of Allen's mental processes, even his dissatisfactions."

"You can't," George said, bluntly. "I'm tired of Allen's smash talk. Most people like him could be bought with the very conditions they attack."

Bailly arose and limped up and down. When he spoke his voice vibrated with an unaccustomed passion:

"I don't know. I don't think so. But I want you to realize that prostrate worship of the fat old god success is as wicked as any other idolatry. I want you to understand that Allen and his kind may be sincere and right, that a vision unblinded by the bull's-eye may see the target all awry. My fear goes back to your first days here. You are still ashamed of service."

"I've served," George said, hotly.

"Was it real service," Bailly asked gently, "or a shot at the bull's-eye?"

Almost involuntarily George clapped his fingers to his head.

"You're wrong, sir," he cried. "I've served when nothing but the thought of service brought me through."

Mrs. Bailly hurried in. She put one hand on George's shoulder. With the other she patted his hair.

"What's he scolding my boy for?"

George grinned at Bailly.

"Don't you see, sir, if I were as bad as you think she couldn't do that?"

Bailly nodded thoughtfully.

"If you've served as you say you must be merely hiding the good."

XXX

To himself at times George acknowledged his badness, in Bailly's terms at least. He sometimes sympathized with Allen's point of view, even while he heckled that angular man who often sat with him and Goodhue, talking about strikes, and violence, and drunkenness as the quickest recreation for men who had no time for play. He longed to tell Allen in justification that he had walked out of the working class himself. Later, staring at Sylvia's portrait, he would grow hard again. Men, he would repeat, wanted to smash down obstacles only because they didn't have the strength to scramble over. He had the strength. But Bailly would intrude again. What about the congenitally unsound?

"I'm not unsound," he would say to himself, studying the picture.

And he suspected that it was because he didn't want to be good that he was afraid of seeing too much of Betty Alston and her kindliness and the reminiscence of tears in her eyes. If Squibs only knew how blessedly easy it would be to turn good, to let ambition and Sylvia slip into a remote and ugly memory! More frequently now he stared at her portrait, forcing into his heart the thought of hatred and into her face the expression of it; for the more hatred there was between them, the smaller was the chance of his growing weak.

He longed for the approaching escape from his gravest temptation. When he was through college and definitely in New York he would find it simpler to be hard. For that matter, why should he grow weak? He had achieved a success far beyond the common. He would graduate president of his class, captain of the football team, although he had tried to throw both honours to Goodhue; member of the club that had drawn the best men of his year, a power in the Senior Council; the man who had done most for Princeton; a high-stand scholar; and, most important of all, one who had acquired with his education a certain amount of culture and an ease of manner in any company. Allen was still angular, as were most of those other men who had come here, like George, with nothing behind them.

In his success he saw no miracle, no luck beyond Squibs' early interest. What he had won he had applied himself to get with hardness, cold calculation, an indomitable will. He had kept his eyes open. He had used everybody, everything, to help him climb toward Sylvia out of the valley of humiliation. The qualities that had brought him all that were good qualities, worth clinging to. As he had climbed he would continue in spite of Bailly or Allen or Betty. But when he thought of Betty he had to fight the tears from his own eyes.

A little while before his graduation he went to her, knowing he must do something to make her less kind, to destroy the impression she gave him of one who, like Mrs. Bailly, always thought of him at his best.

He walked alone through a bland moonlight scented with honeysuckle from the hedges. His heart beat as it had that day four years ago when he had unintentionally let Sylvia know his presumptuous craving.

Two white figures strolled in front of the house. He went up, striving to overcome the absurd reluctance in his heart. It wasn't simple to destroy a thing as beautiful as this friendship. Betty paused and turned, drawing her mother around.

"I thought you'd quite forgotten us, George."

Nor did he want to kill the welcome in her voice.

"You're leaving Princeton very soon," Mrs. Alston said. "I'm glad you've come. Of course, it isn't to say good-bye."

He wondered if she didn't long for a parting to be broken only by occasional meetings in town. He wondered if she didn't fear for Betty. If there had been no Sylvia, if he had dared abandon the hard things and ask for Betty, this imperious woman would have put plenty of searching questions. But, he reflected, if it hadn't been for Sylvia he never would have come so far, never would have come to Betty. Every consideration held him on his course.

He feared that Mrs. Alston, in her narrow, careful manner, wouldn't give him an opportunity to speak to Betty alone. He was glad when they went in and found Mr. Alston, who liked and admired him. When he left there must come a chance. As he said good-night, indeed, Betty followed him to the hall, and he whispered, so that the servant couldn't hear:

"Betty, I've a confession. Won't you walk toward the gate with me?"

The colour entered her white face as she turned and called to her mother:

"I'll walk to the gate with George."

From the room he fancied a rustling, irritated acknowledgment.

But she came, throwing a transparent scarf over her tawny hair, and they were alone in the moonlight and the scent of flowers, walking side by side across grass, beneath the heavy branches of trees.

"See here, Betty! I've no business to call you that – never have had. Without saying anything I've lied to you ever since I've been in Princeton. I've taken advantage of your friendship."

She paused. The thick leaves let through sufficient light to show him the bewilderment in her eyes. Her voice was a little frightened.

"You can't make me believe that. You're not the sort of man that does such things. I don't know what you're talking about."

"Thanks," he said, "but you're wrong, and I can't go away without telling you just what I am."

"You're just – George Morton," she said with a troubled smile.

He tried not to listen. He hurried on with this killing that appealed to him as necessary.

"Remember the day in Freshman year, or before, wasn't it, when you recognized Sylvia Planter's bulldog? It was her dog. She had given him away – to me, because she had set him on me, and instead of biting he had licked my face. So she said to take him away because she could never bear to see him again."

Betty's bewilderment grew. She spoke gropingly.

"I guessed there had been something unusual between you and the Planters. What difference does it make? Why do you tell me now? Anything as old as that makes no difference."

"But it does," he blurted out. "I know you too well now not to tell you."

"But you and Lambert are good friends. You dance with Sylvia."

"And she," he said with a harsh laugh, "still calls me an impertinent servant."

Betty started. She drew a little away.

"What? What are you talking about?"

"Just that," he said, softly.

He forced himself to a relentless description of his father and mother, of the livery stable, of the failure, of his acceptance of the privilege to be a paid by the week guardian on a horse of the beautiful Sylvia Planter. The only point he left obscure was the sentimental basis of his quarrel with her.

"I was impertinent," he ended. "She called me an impertinent servant, a stable boy, other pleasant names. She had me fired, or would have, if I hadn't been going anyway. Now you know how I've lied to you and what I am!"

He waited, arms half raised, as one awaits an inevitable blow. For a minute she continued to stare. Then she stepped nearer. Although he had suffered to win an opposite response, she did what he had forced Lambert Planter to do.

"No wonder Lambert admires you," she said, warmly. "To do so much from such a beginning! I knew at first you were different from – from us. You're not now. It's – "

She broke off, drawing away a little again. He struggled to keep his hands from her white, slender figure, from her hair, yellow in the moonlight.

"You don't understand," he said, desperately. "This thing that you say I've become is only veneer. It may have thickened, but it's still veneer."

It hurt to say that more than anything else, for all along he had been afraid it was the truth.

"Underneath the veneer," he went on, "I'm the mucker, the stable boy if you like. If I were anything else I would have told you all this years ago. Betty! Betty!"

She drew farther away. He thought her voice was frightened, not quite clear.

"Please! Don't say anything more now. I'd rather not. I – I – Listen! What difference does it make to me or anybody where you came from? You're what you are, what you always have been since I've known you. It was brave to tell me. I know that. I'm going now. Please – "

She moved swiftly forward, stretching out her hand. He took it, felt its uncertain movement in his, wondered why it was so cold, tightened his grasp on its delightful and bewitching fragility. Her voice was uncertain, too. It caressed him as he unconsciously caressed her hand.

"Good-night, George."

He couldn't help holding that slender hand tighter. She swayed away, whispering breathlessly:

"Let me go now!"

He opened his fingers, and she ran lightly, with a broken laugh, across the lawn away from him.

The moonlight was like the half light of a breathless chapel, and the scent of flowers suggested death; yet he had not killed what he had come to kill.

When he couldn't see her white figure any more George Morton, greatest of football players, big man of his class, already with greedy fingers in the fat purse of Wall Street, flung himself on the thick grass and fought to keep his shoulders from jerking, his throat from choking, his eyes from filling with tears.

PART III
THE MARKET-PLACE

I

George left Princeton with a sense of flight. The reception of a diploma didn't interest him, nor did the cheers he received class day or on the afternoon of the Yale baseball game when, beneath a Japanese parasol, he led the seniors in front of admiring thousands who audibly identified him for each other.

The man that had done most for Princeton! He admitted he had done a good deal for himself. Of course, Squibs was right and he was abnormally selfish; only it was too bad Betty couldn't have thought so. He had tried to make her and had failed, he told himself, because Betty couldn't understand selfishness.

He avoided during those last days every chance of seeing her alone; but even in the presence of others he was aware of an alteration in her manner, to be traced, doubtless, to the night of his difficult confession. She was kinder, but her eyes were often puzzled, as if she couldn't understand why he didn't want to see her alone.

He counted the moments, anxious for Blodgett and the enveloping atmosphere of his marble-and-mahogany office. That would break the last permanent tie. He would return to Princeton, naturally, but for only a day or two now and then, too short a time to permit its influences appreciably to swerve him.

Without meaning to, he let himself soften on the very edge of his departure when the class sang on the steps of Nassau Hall for the last time, then burned the benches about the cannon, and in lock step, hands on shoulders, shuffled slowly away like men who have accomplished the interment of their youth.

A lot of these mourning fellows he would never meet again; but he would see plenty of Goodhue and Wandel and other useful people. Why, then, did he abruptly and sharply regret his separation from all the others, even the submerged ones who had got from Princeton only an education taken like medicine and of about as much value? In the sway of this mood, induced by permanent farewells, he came upon Dalrymple.

"There's no point saying good-bye to you," George offered, kindly.

Of course not. They would meet each other in town too frequently, secreting a private enmity behind publicly worn masks of friendship. George was wandering on, but Dalrymple halted him. The man was a trifle drunk, and the sentiment of the moment had penetrated his narrow mind.

"Not been very good friends, George, you and I."

Even then George shrank from his apologies, since he appreciated their precise value.

"Why don't you forget it?" he asked, gruffly.

Dalrymple nodded, but George knew in the morning the other would regret having said as much as he had.

Immediately after that sombre dissolution of the class George said good-bye to the Baillys. Although it was quite late they sat waiting for him in the study, neat and serene as it had been on that first day a hundred years ago. The room was quite the same except that Bill Gregory's picture had lost prominence while George's stood in the place of honour – an incentive for new men, although George was confident Squibs didn't urge certain of his qualities on his youngsters.

Squibs looked older to-night, nearly as old, George thought, as the disgraceful tweeds which he still wore. Mrs. Bailly sat in the shadows. George kissed her and sank on the sofa at her side. She put her hand out and groped for his, clinging to his fingers with a sort of despair. For a long time they sat without speaking. George put his arm around her and waited for one or the other to break this silence which became unbearable. He couldn't, because as he dreamed among the shadows there slipped into his mind the appearance and the atmosphere of another room where three had sat without words on the eve of a vital parting. Tawdry details came back of stove and littered table and ungainly chairs, and of swollen hands and swollen eyes. He had suffered an unbearable silence then because he had found himself suddenly incapable of speaking his companions' language. With these two the silence was more difficult, because there was too much to say – more than ever could be said.

He started. Suppose Squibs at the very last should use his father's parting words:

"It's a bad start, but maybe you'll turn out all right after all."

His lips tightened. Would it be any truer now than it had been then? For that matter, would Squibs have cared for him or done as much for him, if he had been less ambitious, if he had compromised at all?

One thing was definite: No matter what he did these two would never demand his exile; and the old pain caught him, and he knew it was real, and not a specious cover for his relief at not having to see his parents again. It hurt – most of all his mother's acceptance of a judgment she should have fought with all her soul.

He stroked the soft hand that clung to his. From that parting he had come to the tender and eager maternal affection of this childless woman, and he knew she would always believe he was right.

But she wanted him to have Betty —

He stood up. He was going away from home. She expressed that at the door.

"This is your home, George."

Bailly nodded.

"Never forget that. Don't let your ideas smoulder in your own brain. Come home, and talk them over."

George kissed Mrs. Bailly. He put his hands on Bailly's narrow shoulders. He looked at the young eyes in a wrinkled face.

"The thing that hurts me most," he muttered, "is that I haven't paid you back."

"Perhaps not altogether," Bailly answered, gravely, "but someday you may."