"Pellams Chase, the Glee Club Man,Swore upon the bookFor wife he'd have a cider-can,For bed the ingle-nook—Petticoats he thus forsook!"
"Pellams Chase, the Glee Club Man,Swore upon the bookFor wife he'd have a cider-can,For bed the ingle-nook—Petticoats he thus forsook!"
Instead of raising the expected storm of denial, Pellams looked guilty and uncomfortable. In spite of their knowledge of the man, they did not divine that their teasing had given him an inspiration.
THEY DROVE AWAY TOWARD THE LA HONDA REDWOODS.THEY DROVE AWAY TOWARD THE LA HONDA REDWOODS.
His idea for a josh involved Miss Graham. So he waited for her deliberately outside the door of the French class next morning; she had stopped to talk to the instructor after the class had left. Jimmy Mason and four or five of the regular Quad loafers were talking football on the curbing. Pellams joined them. Then the gravity of the step he was about to take came over him with a sense of oppression. He felt much as on that Easter morning, years before, when his mother had dragged him out to be confirmed.
"The Berkeley faculty won't let Dudley play," Mason was saying. "He hasn't—where are you speeding in such a rush?" he added and then stopped, paralyzed.
It is probable that if her eyes had not laughed at him with that twinkle of good-fellowship which he had noted on the night of the supper, Pellams never would have had the nerve. That look hauled him over the Rubicon; they went down the arcade together, in the face of Jimmy Mason, the loafers, the whole crowd shifting between lectures. Yet the sun shone as brightly on the palm-circles, the Quadrangle pillars kept their perpendicular. A little later Mason saw the couple sitting under the 'Ninety-five Oak. He whistled to himself with a look that meant: "You wait, old josher till you get into the Knockery again!"
"Now," said Pellams, under the Oak, "you have about the same ideas on love-affairs as I have and you'll sympathize with me in this thing. When I got in to dinner last night, the gang gave me the hottest jolly of my misspent life. They're all alike; they can't understand having a straight friendship for a girl without it's being a puppy-love. So they tumble at once that my driving you means I'm yours for keeps. That sort of a thing makes me tres fatigué and I've a scheme."
"Not your first, is it?"
"In what way do you—"
"I know something of your 'schemes,' young man; that fake fraternity and the snipe-hunts and an examination in English 1 c."
"Oh, those!" Pellams did not blush at the record. Instead, he smiled. His smile was always worth seeing. It was the point of one of his Club stunts. Every muscle got into the interference and his round face grew rosy into the roots of his thick brown hair.
This grin was not lost upon Katharine.
"What am I to do, pray?" asked she; "pose as Professor of Domestic Economy?"
"This is a bird of a josh on the house," he cried. "You'll come in on it, won't you?"
"Plans first, before I commit myself. You might want me to elope in a buggy."
"Never again!" declared Pellams; "my ideais, why can't we pretend to have a case on each other—not any passing fancy, but a real peacherino, like the best of them?"
Somewhat to his surprise, the girl was not visibly enthusiastic.
"Just how do I profit, please, if I butcher myself to make your Roman holiday?"
"You can die happy, knowing we've pulled their le—bluffed 'em beautifully. You're down on love-affairs yourself, you told—"
"Your philosophy of heaven includes a josh on the other fellow, I verily believe," returned Katharine, smiling; "but it is just possible, you know—shall I be very frank?"
"You have been, before!"
"Well, then, I might, you know, prefer the society of some other men in college to the exclusive privilege of yours, even with this wonderful josh thrown in."
"Who, Smith?"
"There are others."
"I know I'm not much of a sq—ladies'-man," he persisted; "but I can learn, can't I?"
"Your manners are not very dreadful when you think about them; but oh, you have lots to master, the little things, you know."
"I let you carry your books this morning—"
"Bravo!—if you only learn to think of them sooner—all the little ways a girl—"
"Sure—you can teach me and rap my knuckles—"
"That would be a pleasure. I've wanted to do it for months."
"And, you see, you'd have the distinction of being the only one I couldn't hold out against."
"Oh, above all things, don't be conceited, or I can't think of it."
"That means you will think of it?"
"You're really not half bad! You caughtthaton time. Yes, I'll help you in your joke, to punish their silliness, but only for a week, on trial you understand."
Pellams, gratified, put out his hand, not in fashionable wise, but as he would grip a man's. Yet in doing so he noted, looking at her fully for the first time, that the light hair on her temples came down low on the sides, as his mother's did.
On the way up to her room, Miss Graham stood for some moments smiling at an irrelative picture of Westminster Abbey, hanging in the parlor. Having gone driving before their faces, it was more presentable not to be dropped. Also, there was an undeniable pleasure in refuting any of Florence Meiggs's arguments, the one concerning love-affairs and scholarship, for instance. Besides, he was a dear, amusing thing, and a perfect novice.
During the week that followed, Pellams learned a few things. The experiment was by no means a bore. He discovered that it is easier to be joshed than to josh—when you know in your heart you have the joke on the other fellow. He learned the revengefulness of Perkins' nature, old Ted, who was ragged to death when his case on Lillian Arnold developed and who now paid him back with interest. He found how great an object of interest to the co-ed element a man becomes when he is in love. All this was good for the woman-hater, giving him new views of things and teaching him patience. Many times during the ordeal he blessed his dramatic talent. It helped him to pretend a chap when he did not feel it. It served him in assuming an air of "the game is worth the candle," when the whole tableful at the house requoted to him certain scathing remarks on the girl-habit which, in the day of his single blessedness, he had made to each one of them separately. It was more than useful to him when he rolled into the "Knockery," the second evening after his sad condition had become patent, and the assembled company rose to smother him with sofa cushions and lecture him, with decided seriousness, on the evil effect of girling. There were times, indeed, when he didn't have to assume any chap at all, when it came of itself; for example, whenthe crowd punned on the girl's name, "Graham gems" was a favorite. Somehow, he wished that they wouldn't drag in names that way.
The week ended. He had done beautifully. Looking it over, he was proud of his achievements. Two evenings at the library; a brazen walk every day at the 10.30 period, which both had vacant; a stroll in the moonlit Quad, planned to interest the crowd at the Tuesday evening lecture; two calls at Roble—that was going it pretty heavy. The whole college was smiling at them, and the foolish Rho house hugged itself in the blissful silence of his sarcastic tongue.
A STROLL IN THE MOONLIT QUAD, PLANNED TO INTEREST THE CROWD AT THE TUESDAY EVENING LECTURE.A STROLL IN THE MOONLIT QUAD, PLANNED TO INTEREST THE CROWD AT THE TUESDAY EVENING LECTURE.
This review of the week delighted Pellams. He hunted up Katharine the last afternoon and asked for a renewal of the contract.
She laughed.
"Are you sure you can help the extremes? You know the Quadrangle and the walks in the country—"
"Listen to the Mocking Bird!" gurgled Pellams. He was feeling very well pleased with things in general.
"The product of the means is a bully good josh," he laughed, "and I'm not afraid of the product of the extremes; it's only equal to the same thing—now there's higher mathematics for you!" and Pellams danced theand she made him be serious and take up his work. The first quarter of an hour she called him to order twice—first for trying to trap with a lariat of grass an inquisitive gray lizard spying at them from a fence-rail; second, for enticing into conversation the huge Danish hound, whose bark is so much worse than his bite, and who, having been a pup with the University, knows something of every Stanford "case" ever developed in the pleasant shade of his domain. After fifteen minutes of impeccable behavior, Pellams whispered:
"Say—"
"Silence!"
"Well, I'd like to havesomeattention paid me. Call me down just to show that you're alive."
She pointed to his History and subsided into her English Poets. When she came to earth again, the sun was low beyond the eucalyptus trees. There was a regular sound near her which she realized having heard for some time in her sub-consciousness. She peeped over the high-growing root between them. The man whom she was helping slept peacefully, his book closed and his mouth open, and only the suspicion of a snore stirring the quiet autumn air.
"I shall never have any trouble with him!" thought Katharine, with just the faintest discontent, as she dropped a twig on his face, by way of waking him without embarrassment.
The autumn rains came and the dry, sniffly dust of the campus lay flat under the quiet air; the clear, fall weather that is mixed in one's mind with the pungent smell of tarweed in the pasture lands, and with long exciting afternoon practices, hung cool over the land, and still Pellams went girling, with his beautiful joke on the college. Katharine's secret joke on him had succeeded equally well. The woman-hater's class work had undergone a transfiguration. People noticed it. At the opening of the term he had put Professor Leyne's course in "Renaissance Poets" on his schedule card, because it was a proclaimed snap and because two of the three Rhos who took it the year before had kept their set-papers. Professor Leyne loved to draw covert allusions from what he called "the ocean of young life that swells around us." One day he threw out a direct allusion. Stopping in his remarks about chivalry, he sunk his voice to an impressive, confidential tone, looking almost directly at the impassive Pellams in the back row.
"And I think sometimes," he said, "when I see the youth feeling the uplifting earnestness of first love—when I see it taking him gently by the hand and saying to him 'my son, there are higher things'; when I see him putting hisspirit with new zeal to the tasks that are laid before him, when I see him realizing that life is indeed serious and its end the fulfilment"—and so on until the bell rang, while the subject of the eulogy, outwardly calm, grinned fiendishly in his secret soul, for only himself, the professor and one other knew that he had scored an A on his last two papers as against a D earlier in the year. The professor himself did not know that these same papers were a good part Katharine Graham, who had suggested the ideas to Pellams and had then stood over him while he put them into his own turgid but interesting English.
Similar results ensued in French, which they prepared together, and he so endeared himself to the History professor that that worthy expanded to the point of a hint at an entrance to the seminary the next semester. The superior Miss Meiggs, pondering upon the remarkable change in her classmate, saw with concern this renegade disproving an argument with which she had enlivened many a Theta Gamma meeting. She never guessed with what patience Katharine was training his wandering attention. She was not present during the afternoons of real, quiet study which were forced out of him between luncheon and football practice.
By the time their contract, renewed from week to week, had been operating for twomonths, Pellams began to wonder just where the point of the joke came in. People had become used to the condition. The House could rely on him and his singing, and girls came oftener than ever to Sunday supper. The Knockery took his affairs as an accepted fact. They no longer had any new jokes on it. Jimmy Mason grumbled now and then because his chum was queening "like all the rest of the frat-men," and their jovial expeditions to Mayfield were over, "becauseshewouldn't understand" (most conclusive proof!), but he ended by taking it as he might have taken an inequality of temper—as a flaw in character to be overlooked in a friend. Then again, Pellams found it positively uncanny to be getting on so well in his work, an uneasy feeling as though he were walking along the edge of a steep place. As for the joke itself, he could laugh over it with Katharine, but there was no way to spring it. A josh that has not a public end lacks art. He realized that the idea had seemed very rich when he conceived it and that he had plunged into it without considering its finish, and of course an impractical girl wouldn't look so far ahead. Now, he saw that it had ceased to be a josh at all, where other people were concerned.
When he came to the thought of dropping it, he suspected that it was no longer a joshwhere he himself was concerned. The realization of this quite stunned him, the afternoon it came to him. They were sitting below the Sphinx, at the back of the Mausoleum, and the quail were calling among the pines. Katharine was reading to him from one of his text-books. He heard very little of what she read. To him the book kept repeating that she had the most attractive mouth and chin he had ever noticed; that the low-drawn hair on her forehead was made to be smoothed back, very gently, from her clear skin. The consciousness that he could not give up these study-afternoons came over him with a stab, and told him that he had not been listening at all well lately; that this was why he could not remember the stuff in recitation and why he had not dared to tell her his recent marks. She trusted him so thoroughly now that she did not stop him so often when he talked, instead of working. If she had guessed the real reason of his laziness, she would have been honestly disappointed in him. This was the tragedy of it. He could never let her suspect that he was not still fooling the Rho house. She was a girl entirely without sentimentality—this was what he liked in her at first, and now it was his overthrow. If she should so much as dream that his feeling toward her was anything more than the friendship he had outlined in the beginning, she would shut herbook with a slap and declare the compact at an end. He must keep on acting, only his audience had changed and the people he had been joking with were now behind the scenes, though they didn't know it. So he would put his chin in his hand and gaze at her as though the peculiarities of the Renaissance Poets were his greatest concern. He laughed, too, about the joke itself, finding a sort of painful relief indouble entendre. Sometimes his mind wandered, and when Katharine failed to reprove him, as in the earlier days of the compact, he felt as though he had betrayed a confidence. Once they had forgotten all about football practice, and it frightened him; but she seemed not to have realized the gravity of the thing, and he laughed the alarming incident away. During lectures, he tried to reason himself out of the predicament. It was entirely possible that this feeling toward her was but another instance of habit, a natural affection for a chum, with some subtle influence of sex combining to frighten him into thinking it more serious. But he was not entirely comforted.
Crises occur properly at the end of a semester. On the evening of Friday, the closing day, Roble gave an impromptu dance. Katharine made Pellams come; it would be final evidence in their joke, since he was known to dislike dances. He agreed to attend, adding his own emphasis to the reason as stated. Katharine filled out his card for him, allowing him three dances with herself. The evening began in misery for the woman-hater, and ended in perturbation of spirit. There were girls, oceans of them, and not one of them had any sense. Katharine was different. These girls didn't know when they were joshed, and they couldn't josh back. They were an uninteresting lot. She had filled his card with them and he had to hunt them up and dredge his head for conversation. It was an awful bore. Katharine was the only girl whom he had ever seemed able to talk with easily, and he had only three little dances with her. He was savage.
During the third dance, he was floundering through an absent-minded conversation with a Freshman girl, whose eyelashes were pale pink, when Cap Smith glided past him, waltzing with Katharine. They looked as though they were having a very good time. Pellams felt that Cap, fine fellow as he was, generally grew too familiar with girls. He noticed with disapproval the man Katharine drew for the fourth dance, and she had Cap again for the fifth. He went over after that dance and asked for her program. Cap was down for two more dances. Pellams gave her back her card. He laughed a joking sentence on another subject, then he slipped down stairs and blundered out into the rainy night in a towering rageat Katharine, at Smith, most of all at himself for being a certain Thing.
Jimmy Mason had not attended the Roble dance. Instead, he sat at his table in the Knockery, going over his accounts as laundry agent. He was deep in these end-of-semester figures when Pellams burst in at the window, like a storm-driven creature. People never stand on ceremony at the Knockery. It is the corner room on the ground floor. The place has always been the Knockery ever since Mason roomed there, just as the big room over the old dining-hall will be the "Bull-pen" forever. It is the universal avenue after the lights are out, and the doors locked. You open the window as gently as you can and slide in. If the tenants are in bed, you get through into the hall on tiptoe, if possible; if awake, you stop and chat a bit by the way of courtesy; no one ever has to study in this enchanted bower. Moreover, if you do not live in the Hall, if you are an Alumnus visitor from town, if there are girls at your frat-house, or if you dwell off the campus and are belated, there are extra blankets under the lounge in the corner. Make up your own bed and turn in, without waking the sleepers. You are not crowding anybody. Once a whole baseball team, with the help of two extra mattresses, slept comfortably in the Knockery—but that is history.
When Pellams slammed in and flopped disconsolately into a chair, Mason looked up, knowing that there was trouble somewhere.
"What is it?" he asked. No answer. Jimmy rose, locked the door and closed the ventilator. Then he disposed himself on the lounge.
"Tell your dad. Is it the girl?"
Pellams's affirmative was put in language unrepeatable in a book for young persons.
"Something gone wrong?"
"Yes,"etc.
Jimmy wished to offer consolation. "Can I do anything?"
"Yes," growled the man in a dress suit. "You can give me a sweater and take me to Mayfield!"
Now Jimmy was a true friend. He would have gone anywhere for Pellams.
When the dance music at Roble had ceased, and the quiet of the December night was broken by only the patter of raindrops and the sound of singing in the Mayfield distance, punctuated by sharp whoops, Jimmy had got Pellams back to the Knockery pretty well consoled. It might not have made much difference just then, even if the lover could have known that over in darkened Roble, Katharine Graham, who did not approve of love affairs, lay crying herself to sleep.
Pellams rose late next day, and ate his lunch mournfully at the House. He was in an exaggerated state of repentance and resolve.After luncheon he made a sorrowful pilgrimage to the Quad. Here he learned that he had lost five hours and that the Glee Club would tour the South without him.
Chastened in spirit, he asked for Katharine at Roble. She had gone to Mrs. Stillwell's on the Row. He went again at night, calling late that she might have her packing finished for the morning steamer.
By diplomacy, arranged beforehand with the door-girl, he got her downstairs. There was only a trace of reserve in her manner when she told him that she had all her packing yet to do, and that she couldn't walk about the Quad even once; there was more than a trace of embarrassment about him when he pleaded something very important.
"Perhaps I know what it is," said she.
"More than likely you don't," he persisted; "anyhow, I deserve a chance to explain."
Katharine went down the steps with him.
"Well?" she said, on the walk outside.
"What do you think I want to say?" He was not so brave now.
"The same thing that I have in my mind, that our little arrangement would better end. I have got my very first condition through wasting time on a foolish josh, and I don't believe you've been doing good work lately."
"They gave me two of 'em."
"Indeed? Then Florence Meiggs was right, wasn't she?"
"Dead right."
Silence for awhile, then she said: "But you mustn't blame me. I did my best, and if we both failed it's proof positive that it has to end."
Another pause, with the whirr of distant machinery breaking the stillness. No speech on either side until Pellams felt that he must say something or the blood in his throat would choke him.
"Do—don't you really know what I wanted you out here for?"
"Perhaps to insult me further. Pellams!" impetuously, "why did you do it?"
"What? flunk?"
"No. Cut those dances."
"You ought to know!"
"Yes; Idoknow, and your wanting to go to Mayfield was a good, gentlemanly excuse, and I ought to accept it, I suppose. Of course, it shouldn't make any difference to me; you have humiliated me enough already, but you might have considered the other girls."
"Yes, and you are blaming me for cutting down there when you and Cap Smith were floating around——"
"You will please leave Mr. Smith out of the conversation;" she turned toward the Hall. "I have to go in, the shades are down already."
Pellams' courage came up with a flash. By blind instinct, he reached out and caught her hand. She did not struggle, though the moment he released his pressure she drew her hand away, and quickened her pace. He followed close, and she turned upon him.
"This is what I might have expected when I cheapened myself with you! Will you let me go in?"
"Not until I have said what I came to say; Katharine, can't you—can't you guess it? Oh, I know—Kathie, youmusthave seen it—you know why I cut the dance—you know"—and again words failed him and he reached for her hand.
But she put him off this time. "I am sorry to spoil such a beautiful piece of acting; but our arrangement is going to end, and this is a worn-out joke."
They had come by now to the corner of Roble, where it is indiscreet to talk over private affairs, and neither said anything until they reached and mounted the steps into the shadow of the porch. Then she said:
"After all, since it is over, I won't be unkind. Good-bye. We've had a pleasant semester, haven't we?" and this time she gave him her hand.
A girl raised one of the hallway curtains just then. The sudden flash of light came upon Katharine where she stood with her handin Pellams'. She had meant that look, that softening of the eyes, that little quiver of the mouth, for darkness and concealment, and he caught it all before she could blot it out with a smile.
And, having argued to a conclusion, it mattered not to either that Miss Meiggs stood looking out at them with supreme contempt.
"And it's we who have to rustleIn the cold, cold world!"
"And it's we who have to rustleIn the cold, cold world!"
Dr. Williamson's landlady would not listen any further. She stood on the threshold of her lodger's combination of bedroom and office and said, with an offensively clear enunciation:
"You haven't any patients, and no more have I any longer, and I want that money to-morrow or I rent the room."
The door closed.
Williamson listened to her footsteps, as hard and uncompromising as her voice, and when they had ceased he got up from his chair, a despairing soul. After all, this was the rope's end. He would have to own up to a failure.
If Williamson had been a man of more force he would not have acknowledged so much, perhaps; but he had been conscientious and faithful to the limit of his understanding, patient to the verge of philosophy, and the result discouraged him.
He drew out his last clean collar and put iton, with the vague idea of going somewhere and doing something—what, he could not have told. His eyes fell on a framed document hanging near his mirror, a small but ornate instrument, setting forth that the Faculty and Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University, by virtue of the authority in them vested, etc., conferred the degree of Bachelor of Arts in Chemistry on Philip Howard Williamson.
His thoughts turned back toward a morning over four years gone, when he walked down the platform bearing that "last of his childhood's toys," and in imagination P.H. Williamson, M. D., held conversation with Philip Howard Williamson, A. B.
Williamson, A. B., standing just the other side of the mirror, spoke and said:
"It looks as though you were up against it."
Williamson, M. D., arranging his tie so as to hide his soiled shirt, answered:
"I am up against it. And it's your fault."
Williamson, A. B., did not seem to see it. But he was a conceited creature, anyway.
"It's more than half your fault," went on the man on the real side of the mirror. "You dug and worked, and you thought that if you only kept ahead of your class in Physiology you had a clean card to success. How many fellows did you know in college?"
"Some. I never went in for being popular. There were Trueman, and Miller, and Rodney—"
"And how many of them were of the sort to help you? Trueman, without family or brains, and Miller, who lived in the East, and little Rod—"
"They were the best I could meet. They were the only ones who understood that I really wanted people. No one understood how I loved the college and wanted to be in things. I wasn't good at telling; and besides, I had my work to do. They knew the way I used to look across the campus on Spring nights—"
Williamson, M. D., checked him at this point. That impractical creature thought that they were talking of friendship, when it was only a question of Pull. He conveyed that point to the Bachelor.
"Why didn't you find some friends who would be of use to Me?" he asked, savagely. "While you were following out sutures and involuntary reactions, what was Marshall doing? Running for class president and making the Mandolin Club and getting acquainted with people of some use to him. He isn't one-two-six with me for ability and never was; but he has patients to give away, and I—"
Williamson, A. B., came to bat.
"You do mightily well to reproach me with all this. How haveyoudone in making friends? Did you work up any connections at Columbia those three years? Have you tried to find anyone here in town? What friends have you except Stanford men? What have you done for yourself, anyway?"
The other weakly quoted what the Head Demonstrator had said of his surgery.
Williamson, A. B., held him to the point: "I also was called the keenest student of my time," said he; "but it isn't bringing you patients."
The M. D. broke sullenly away, leaving the A. B. frowning back of the mirror. These dead selves are so crude! He ended the interview by slamming out of the house.
For the twentieth time that week he cast up accounts with himself, as the electric car sped toward civilization. Assets, one dollar and five cents, just reduced by a grinding monopoly from a dollar-ten; liabilities, a laundry bill and six weeks' rent. Truly, a squalid failure. If he could only hold out a little longer! There was in sight a situation as consulting physician to a lodge in his father's Order, which would mean a living at least. He had the promise of it in a month's time. A loan of twenty-five dollars now would save him, but no good angel occurred to him,think as he might, and he had nothing he could afford to pawn.
Troubled in spirit, he sauntered listlessly up Post street from Kearny. The mid-day rain had not yet dried from the pavements, and the air was clear and fresh. Against the last of a January sunset, the tops of the city were growing indistinct. The personnel of the crowd on the streets had changed; the promenaders and the cocktail-route procession had dwindled to a few stragglers. There was less of a press now, and most of the people were of the class that work until six, belated bookkeepers and girls from shops and sewing rooms. He watched these toilers with a vague feeling of envy; he dragged the feeling to the light and found that he was coveting the day's work just passed. What would not he have given to be tired at the end of a day of profitable toil? It was the hour when comfortable people sit down to dinner.
In front of an art store he saw Lincoln, theChronicleman, idly studying the pictures. Williamson had known him as well as he had known any man at Palo Alto, but he walked by without a word, feeling in no mood for companionship. A few steps further he turned, and went back and stood behind his friend.
"Hello, Phil!" said Lincoln, in cheery surprise. "Well, you are a stranger! Been keeping pretty close to your office, haven't you?"
"Yes," answered Williamson, without going into particulars.
"I haven't happened to get a detail out in your direction and my health has been unfortunately good, so I haven't seen you for moons, not since the night at the Zink, last Thanksgiving."
"You newspaper men see more of the fellows than a man in my profession can hope to do," said the physician. "It isn't ethics for me to hunt them up, you know."
"How is the practice, so far?"
"Well," answered Williamson, hiding the bitterness of it with a laugh; "the practice is about all I have got out of it."
"Not so bad as that, I'll bet," protested Lincoln. "Are you going down for Commencement, or the Ball, or anything?"
"No, I shan't be able to get down," answered the other, turning in his fingers the lonely dollar in his pocket. "That's the worst of the medical profession," he added, equivocally.
His thoughts came fast as they stood there in the fading daylight before the picture-shop. It was entirely probable that Lincoln would lend him the money he needed, and would lend it gladly. Their college friendship had been sincere, and a few years do notchange a thing like that. He knew that the man had a good position on theChronicleand that he saved a large portion of his money—he had been economical at the University. Fortune could never smile upon Lincoln sufficiently to work any material change in his dress; he had always looked like a pauper; to-day, poverty showed in the journalist rather than in the carefully-dressed physician.
Williamson's heart grew lighter. This Stanford man, rising before him in his hour of desperation, should tide him over his temporary trouble. Of all the men at the University there had been none who had spoken so often and so sincerely of the Stanford spirit as Lincoln. Here was a chance to put it to a test. He knew his man. Williamson felt himself filled with a faith in Divine Providence.
But it was not easy to ask the loan. To suggest such a thing is less difficult to some people than to others. To Williamson it was anything but a simple thing. He could never broach the subject there on the sidewalk. The matter must be led up to in some way; to brace in cold blood was impossible. He moved his fingers in nervous irresolution, and the dollar touched them significantly.
"Say, Lew, let's not stand here all night; come to dinner with me, can't you? We'llhave a good Alumni chat; we don't bump into each other very often."
He felt horribly hypocritical, yet this was the only way.
"You haven't had dinner, have you?" he went on, when Lincoln hesitated a bit.
"No. I'll be glad to, thank you, Phil. Where do you go?"
"Let's try Sanguinetti's for the fun of the thing. We can talk down there, and it won't break us, either."
They found a corner table in the restaurant. The room wore the quiet look of Monday evening, the calm that follows the storm of Sunday, when the place rocks with post-picnic revelry. A squat negro, perched on the edge of a serving-table by the wall, sang vociferously to a resonant banjo. Now and then a party of swarthy Latins joined in mildly when the selections incurred their favor.
The two college men found it easy chatting. Williamson's dollar had brought a very good dinner, particularly the chicken and the tortillas; the claret was abundant and not half bad when jollied with seltzer. He was trusting to Lincoln for tobacco.
Still the physician could not bring himself to the point toward which the dinner was intended to smooth the road. The "Dago red" had mellowed them both and they talked merrily of the days at Palo Alto, bringing up onegood memory after another, drifting gradually to an exchange of Alumni personals of which the newspaper man furnished the larger part. They talked of the men their young University had sent into the distant parts of the world, youngsters running mines in the Antipodes, with fat salaries to keep up their courage; of the little Stanford colony in Western Australia and the Pioneers in China. There were a good many for so new a college. Then there were the commonplaces who were doing well at home. The thought of bringing the serious side of his own case into this chat gave Williamson a chill. It was a foolish bit of pride, but it was getting harder every minute to down it. He deftly turned the subject his way.
"It isn't all prosperity, though. I've noticed that some of them seem to be up against it lately—just hard luck stories, I suppose. There's Rawdon, for example."
Lincoln leaned back comfortably in his chair.
"Let me tell you a case that has come under my notice lately and see what you think of it," he said. "I won't mention names, but it's about a man we both knew at College. He had a place on the paper, theChronicle, and during the political season did very well; after that there came a slump and the city editor let him out; the other papers had no roomfor him, of course—they were dropping men—and he couldn't get a thing of any sort to do, though he rustled hard. You know Coles and Harrison, the boys call them the Stanford Employment Bureau, they have found quite a number of places for the fellows; but this particular man was evidently up against it, and there wasn't the smallest symptom of a job. He managed to get something in the Sunday supps, but barely enough to keep him alive, and nothing certain. Meanwhile he pawned his things gradually and grew pretty well discouraged. I remember I heard him say once, and his laugh covered more than I guessed at the time, that Jewish holidays ought to be prohibited by state law, since closed doors under the three balls meant some Stanford man's going hungry. He got down to bedrock and finally reached the point where he had gone without three successive meals. Pretty rough, wasn't it?"
"I should say so," answered Williamson. His own distress was trivial beside a trouble like this.
Lincoln fed the alcohol flame burning around the omelet just brought them.
"It seems to me," he went on, "that there is a case in which a man is justified in asking help; he ought to ask it long before he gets to such a pass as that; if he lets his pride prevent him it's his own fault. We certainlyhave carried away from the University something of the spirit we learned there. I know for my part that such a man has a claim on whatever help I can give him, and as a Stanford man he has a right to seek it. Don't you agree with me?"
Williamson had been waiting through the course of the dinner for a chance to advance an identical theory. He could not have hoped for a better opening.
"Indeed I do," he said. "You have the old Stanford spirit as strong as ever, haven't you, Lew? Now I want to tellyoua story."
At a table near them a woman who looked as though she had a history, one that dated far back at that, began to sing—one of those ballads about home and the wandering boy. The two men tipped back in their chairs and listened to the song. Williamson was planning what he should say as soon as it was ended. It would be better to tell the whole thing.
During the applause that followed, Lincoln dropped his cigarette into his coffee cup and started to speak. Williamson, unwilling that another subject should follow the last words they had exchanged, interrupted him.
"I have a story, too, Lew, and it's about myself. I don't doubt this is rather a surprise to you," he went on, noticing the look on the other's face, "although you know theway of the young physician is hard. The fact is, I have got to the point where I must get a little temporary lift or give up the struggle for a while, and I can't bear the thought of that."
Then he went on swiftly, ignoring his friend's attempts at interruption, until he had told the whole story of his uphill work and his defeat.
"You asked me just now, Lew, if I didn't think one Stanford man should help another who really needed help, if he could. I put up my last coin for an opportunity to ask you the same question, but with a different purpose."
Lincoln's eyes were moist as he reached across the table and grasped Williamson's hand.
"I think you know me well enough, old man, to know my answer to that question. But you did not let me finish my story. You see, I—er—I'm the man I was telling you about."
"Oh think what anxious moments pass betweenThe birth of plots and their last fatal periods!"Addison.
"Oh think what anxious moments pass betweenThe birth of plots and their last fatal periods!"
Addison.
Addison.
It would never have happened if Boggs hadn't dropped in on Jimmy Mason and Pellams when they were cramming for an examination, for, although Pellams had long "kept an axe" for Boggs, he needed the inspiration of the moment to swing it like this. It was always so with Pellams' best things.
The inspiration in this case came one evening when he and Jimmy were doing genuine work. People who have seen it declare that the spectacle of Mason cramming for an examination was one of the show sights of the University. He generally let things go until the last day of grace; then with sundry fellow-victims and a motley collection of notes, syllabi, books, reports—anything on the subject—gathered on the green cloth of his table, he would start in. Raps might come from time to time on the locked door; Jimmy would hold up a warning finger for silence, while the outsider shot through the keyholesuch remarks as "Jimmy Mason, loosen up. You've mixed my clothes again;" or, "Hi, Jimmy! give me the markings;" or, possibly, hurled a mass of unrepeatable terms at the unresponsive door. Perhaps his roommate, Marion, would come in when the lights went out; then Jimmy would call a breathing-spell, during which, while "Nosey" went to bed behind the portieres, he drew his lamp from its hiding-place and made strong coffee in the coffee-pot or chafing-dish, whichever had been washed the more recently. Somewhere in the small hours the seminary would adjourn with "international complications," "tendencies of the age," "sub-head B," heating their brains. Out of bed at seven for a final swift review of the subject, Mason would sail over to class with a great unbreakfasted hollow beneath his sweater, to pass freely and gloriously, and to forget the whole mess by the time he had finished his afternoon nap.
And to see Jimmy in the seminary itself! How masterfully he kept track of headings, sub-headings and modifying circumstances! How he could scent at a day's distance the things which the professor was going to ask, as well as those he was going to skip! When he said, "Now, old Morton is heavy on this," the seminary digested the subject in all its bearings and ramifications; and when he said, "No use looking that up," they skipped theheading, though pages of syllabi were slighted thereby. When the wandering mind of Pellams slid off the work, it was beautiful to see Jimmy lead it back with a word and a look; when he sent some sleepy Senior to bed with the remark, "You're no more good. Sleep it off and be fresh to-morrow," Jimmy touched the sublime.
The glory of it all was that upper-classmen as well as Freshmen put themselves absolutely under the Sophomore's rule when it was a question of an examination. Thus does the elective system level all ranks and give genius opportunity.
On the night that Boggs dropped in on them, Jimmy and Pellams were cramming alone. Two seniors who were usually in the group had gone somewhere to mix up in a complication over Student-Body treasurer. A Junior seldom out of line was a candidate for the Executive Committee; he had put his head in at the door to say, "Dead sorry, fellows, but can't get in it," and then gone down to Palo Alto to make himself agreeable to a dig girl who had "influence." The popularity of some people waxes strangely the latter part of April. A Freshman who was taking the course when he shouldn't and who stood on the dizzy brink of flunking it, had gone off with a Junior who wanted to stand well with certain Freshmen of importance, and who hadoverjoyed the youngster with an invitation to Mayfield, an event which made flunking clear out of the University a thing of small moment to the Freshman's mind.
Pellams alone showed up. He was not in politics; further, he knew the value to himself of these evenings with Jimmy; not that the syllabi made much impression on him, but he carried enough to class next day to shadow forth an apparent knowledge of the subject. This he supplemented with two or three original reflections that interested the instructor and slipped him through. It was these flashes of intelligence that made him worth the labor to Mason. Sometimes he could set the whole seminary right on an obscure phrase; this made up for an hour of imperfect attention.
To-night the two men were hard at it. They sat at opposite sides of the table, the electric drop-light illuminating the papers between them.
"Say," said Pellams, "Bob Duncan's the luckiest baby in the bunch. He doesn't know as much about this course as I do, and he's got appendicitis, the doctor says—no fake."
"Now, Pellams," said Mason seriously, "you have to remember Cromwell. He did all this in sub-headings four to eleven. You've placed him, haven't you?"
"The guy that made them keep the powder dry?"
"TheministerCromwell; you rememberhim—the one who was bald."
Jimmy had learned that Pellams needed a concrete peg on which to hang his memories.
"Oh, sure, I've got him; that throw-away-ambition boy. Hadn't a hair between him and heaven."
A knock came at the door.
"That's it. Sh—sh!"
"Let me in, Jimmy." The room was still.
"I know you and Pellams are digging. I won't say a word to either of you, only give me a smoke."
"Haven't any," said Jimmy, rapidly transferring a sack of Durham and a package of papers from the table.
"Well, let me in, anyway. I want to read by your lamp. Oh, say, open up!"
"It's Boggs. If we don't let him in he'll stand and plead in outer darkness all night."
The door rattled. Jimmy howled "Ye-e-es!" in a tone of provoked affirmative, and Boggs was opened unto.
It would be hard to tell in what way Boggs did not block the seminary. He found the tobacco by invading Jimmy's sacred drawer during an absorbing discussion on land tenure; then he rolled and consumed exactly fourteen cigarettes. Pellams kept count out of the corner of his eye. Boggs was making smoke in the sunshine of free tobacco. Heput his feet on Mason's laundry packages, freshly stacked in the corner. He broke his word by talking politics steadily, and finally, when he drew out of the room just ahead of ten-thirty lights, a double sigh of relief went up from the crammers.
"That article needs fixing," said Pellams, meditatively, as Jimmy got out the chafing-dish and prepared the black coffee that makes additional pages of syllabi possible before sleep comes.
"I wonder," said Jimmy, "if he ever bought an ounce of tobacco since he came here. He's smoked mine every time he could find it since I've been in college. I remember," here Jimmy stopped to laugh, "that when I was a Freshmen—you'll bear witness I was a fresh one, too—I used to be pleased clear to the red at getting all that attention from an upper-classman. The satisfaction cost me a good many pounds of tobacco, though."
"His opinion of himself politically is what kills me. Lyman is his ideal. He loafs in Frank's room until Frank has had to give up smoking. It's fun to see him. I was in there the other night. 'How are you going to stand on the election, Frank?' says Boggsie, as though it were a conference of the powers. 'Oh, I think Higgins is pretty good,' says Frank; 'what do you think?' Not that he gave a whoop; he was trying to be polite.'Well, I may use my influence for Castleton,' says Boggsie, with his pet air of mystery. His influence consists of his roommate. 'The deuce you will!' says Frank, with sarcasm. All wasted though, for Boggsie fairly chapped at the compliment of having surprised him. 'Yes,' said Boggs, 'that's what I like to see, the office seeking the man; you know, a fellow ought to wait and go about his business until people recognize him. I don't like to see a man going around with his hand out, raking the Freshmen in.' Then he looks around for applause and slopes out, smoking the last of Lyman's Durham."
"He rake in the Freshmen! It would cost too much! Boggs wants the office to seek him, so as to save expense. When he was small I think he must have been the sort of kid that won't play his marbles for fear that he'll wear them out. He'd do anything mean to get office, but he won't spend money for it; he has enough, too; he doesn't have to pinch as he does, but he hates to spend a nickel when he can worm it out of other people. I'd love to get a feed out of him in some way; oh, it would taste good!"
Pellams' ruddy face glowed fire-red with the dawn of an idea. His inspiration had come.
"James Russell Lowell Mason, I'll bet you the price of—anything you name—that I canget a feed, a genuine, Mayfield-with-all-accompaniments, a Mayfield beer-beefsteak-Swiss-cheese-wine-and-song feed out of Boggsie!"
The aroma of the coffee filled the room. Jimmy polished his stein and a tumbler and poured for the two of them.
"But for my principle never to bet on a sure thing, I'd take you," he answered calmly. "You exclusive frat-men over on the Row" (Pellams was always loafing around the Hall) "haven't lived long enough with Boggsie to know him. He's a lobster, Pellams."
But the fat Junior sat there with mirth shining from every line of his face, and drank his coffee; then he rolled on the floor in joyous delirium and beat Jimmy's rugs with an Indian club until the man overhead jumped out of bed and shouted uncultured things down the elevator.
"Jimmy, darling!" cried he, waving a leg in the air for pure rapture, "Boggsie will treat, sure. We'll get him on his one big weakness; we'll play politics against pinching; you watch the office seek the man."
"I don't—"
"I do. Look here; to-morrow we nominate him. You have a mob on the back seats applauding like fiends, and I'll be the power behind the throne to such a campaign of blood, beer and boodle as you never saw, oldLaundry-bags. We'll make Boggsie think he's ahead all the time; we can get himsomevotes, you know; and then he's to go away election day for the sake of the proprieties. I telegraph to him, 'Elected by one vote. Feed!' We have the feed business all properly worked up by that time, of course; just sizzling in his brain, and when he gets off the train we'll meet him with a mob and a brass band, run him to Mayfield or Menlo, and there'll be a sound of revelry by night at his expense."
The ruin of this particular cramming seminary was accomplished. The "coffee hours" were spent in a conference broken by smothered laughter, and by "Nosey" Marion's sleepy protests from behind the curtains.
Next day, after Higgins and Castleton had been duly placed in nomination, Pellams rose from his seat in Chapel and nominated "Lorenzo Boggs, gentleman and student; a man who has let college politics alone, never having sought office from his fellow-students until now, when the office seeks him—Lorenzo Boggs for Student-Body president," amidst a storm of applause half ironical, half worked up by Jimmy Mason.
Pellams flunked in the examination; his co-conspirator passed meagerly; but Pellams' heart lost little of its wonted buoyancy. This was about the last class of any kind he attended in the week between nomination and election. From the Row to the Hall and from the Hall to Palo Alto he moved with an energy rare to his rotund body. It was a new sensation, politics with a josh behind. He revelled in it.
"We have to put up some show of constituents, you know," he said to Mason; "and, as Higgins and Castleton have no strings on me, I might as well help Boggsie out. Too bad my personal magnetism isn't being diffused for a more likely candidate."
"Looks curious," said Jimmy, "the fight Boggs is putting up. Yesterday I struck the Women's Debating League; they won't vote for Higgins because they have been credibly informed—by the Castleton people, of course—that he's bad, and—"
"You and I should have been nominated, St. James," interrupted Pellams, crossing his hands on his breast and looking at the gas fixture.
"And they won't vote for Castleton because they have found out that when he fixed up the open meeting between his society and theirs he was only playing for votes."
"Do you know that Boggs has a girl cousin in Palo Alto? He has worked her to whoop it up for him down there."
"His literary society will go for him all right. They are tired of the way Castletonand Higgins have been waiting for the job to drop down like a ripe plum. Those two marks have worked the thing too long."
"Jimmy, you don't mean that Boggs has any chance?"
"Not a ghost. But we don't have to work up the whole thing; there'll be enough to make a decent showing and lend an air of truth to that telegram of ours. What have you done?"
"Got the Rhos, anyway. We won't vote for anyone as a frat; the fellows hate Castleton on account of that Annual-board election last Christmas, and Higgins has thrown mud at us that we know of. I've about signed them all, except Duncan. Bob knew Higgins' wife's cousin in some dark corner of the country. Say, it's funny how tired people in general are getting of Higgins and Castleton and their gang politics. At Palo Alto yesterday I heard a crowd talking about it. 'Down with organized politics,' they said, and one of them who works in the laboratory with Boggsie said he was going to vote for modest merit."
"Keep it going, Pellams, it won't hurt. Soothe his feelings beautifully after the banquet. I have it all fixed up to get him off the campus."
Higgins' stock went down wonderfully in the next few days. Higgins, said the Castleton men, had pulled wires and worked combinations ever since he had been in the University. It hurts a College politician to have it known that he has been in politics. They pointed to his rather doubtful record as a member of theDaily Palo Altoboard. The sins of his Freshman days rose up against him when they touched on the fact that he had been elected class-president on a barb ticket, and had immediately gone over to the enemy in a fraternity house. Finally, to fill his cup a Freshman, who had withstood fraternity blandishments for a year, glided through the hands of the Gamma Chi Taus, who fully believed they had him, and appeared on the very Sunday preceding election in all the glory of Higgins' frat pin. It was a bad slip; right there it cost fifteen Gamma Chi votes with a large girl following.
"It isn't the swell girls that count for numbers, anyway," reflected the Higgins' supporters, wisely, and they turned to the cultivation of the dig girl who trails up the cinder paths mornings at eight, and who lives in the library during football practice. But the girl cousin of Boggs had been there to good purpose when they turned in that direction, and Roble only showed Castleton still ahead. Then a not over-scrupulous Junior in Higgins' trail started a story on Castleton, a tale calculated to put him in the same category,so far as being "bad" was concerned. Wednesday evening the anecdote reached Roble; a girl who had a brother heard it spreading at dinner, and by noon next day half the girls in Roble had their opinion of a crowd that would start such a malicious libel on Mr. Castleton "just to get votes." The Encina politicians did not know Roble girls for nothing.
So it happened on Thursday that Pellams clumped breathlessly into Jimmy's room with a still wet copy of theDailyand tragically pointed to the notice: "Withdrawal: I hereby withdraw from my candidacy for Student-Body presidency in favor of Lorenzo Boggs. Andrew Higgins."
"Ye gods," gasped the Sophomore, "he can't win, Pellams, he can't! Castleton gets it sure. For heaven's sake, don't put the gang on to this until after to-morrow, though. I wouldn't have the double-cross worked on us for a cool ten credits."
Fair dawned the day that was to float or to wreck so many little hopes. There are two periods of the year when the professor who has been young forgets the roll-call, and the one who never has been, remembers it. The first period comes in late November; the other is the morning of the Student-Body election.
With consummate tact, Jimmy had come to an understanding with Boggs as to the propriety of his leaving the campus during the election.
"You see, you stand a splendid show of getting it," he explained, "and the appropriate thing for you is to keep out of sight. When Pellams nominated you he made a point out of the fact that the office was seeking you; that has been a leading feature of the campaign, and it has won you lots of votes. You must not spoil the impression you have made for yourself and which we have emphasized all along. See?"
Boggs saw, or thought he did, and went to town, ostensibly to carry out a commission for Pellams, but not before he had rallied some of his constituents and given them final instructions. It was wonderful to see what a variety of tastes and interests were represented. An older politician would have scented danger from the fact that so many of them had never come out into the arena before; but Jimmy only looked with smiling curiosity on the Ethics major or the Education "shark," dug up somewhere from their abstruse speculations.
It was on their way to the station that Jimmy touched on the remaining issue of the campaign which he was managing.
"You remember my speaking about a feed the other day? I ought to have spoken more fully, but I've been busy with other details."
"Oh,"—began Boggs.
"You know the custom," cut in the conspirator; "it will be expected of you if you get the office; it ought to come off to-night to be done properly."
"That will all be attended to," said Boggs calmly.
"You've seen about it?"
"It's all fixed."
"There'll be a lot of them; they will meet you at the train and you'll have to do it in shape. I can lend you a little."
"Thanks, old man," said the victim, squeezing Mason's arm, "but just you leave that to me. It's all arranged to do the square thing by the people who have stood in with me. So long. Look out for me, won't you? I'll be down on the Flyer."
When Jimmy got back to the Quadrangle there was a shifting mass about the polls. Encina politicians were there, Palo Alto politicians, serious-looking fellows from the Camp, and spruce ones from the Row. Castleton's followers stood in groups, looking smug and confident, while sour-faced Higgins people were revengefully putting in all their work for Boggs.
Every election has its Mark Hanna; this time it was Jennie Brown, whom Pellams knew as "Boggsie's dig girl cousin." She was the silent spirit of the whole Boggs campaign. Mason, in telling the story of it afterward, said:
"Pellams and I were there when the polls opened. That girl was on hand, too, with a gang of Palo Alto girls all ready to start things for Boggsie. Well, you ought to have seen her. Heaven help us and our masculine schemes if they get women suffrage and the Brown lives. At ten-thirty in the first rush she steered a whole Education class, worked them beautifully past Castleton's hungry heelers, right up to the ballot-box.Shewasn't working combinations; it cut no ice with her how they voted for managers, and treasurers and editors, so long as they were solid for Lorenzo Boggs.