My promise to Mr. Richards brought more than one result. The first of them was a serious quarrel with my Aunt Selina. Her horror at the idea of my spending the summer at a slum-settlement was beyond curbing. She had planned that I should accompany her and Mrs. Fleming-Cohen upon a trip to Europe. They did not need me; they would be in no way dependent on my company ... and I flatly declined. Aunt Selina, outraged at my actual intentions, left for France a week earlier than she had expected—and, in high indignation, gave me leave to do "whatever I pleased by way of disgracing her reputation."
Her letter from the steamer warned me to bathe every day in very hot water, lest I should be contaminated by the filth of that section of the city which I had chosen for my summer home ... and to be sure and give her warmest regards to that delightful Mr. Trevelyan!
I lost no time in moving into Mr. Richards' company at the East Side settlement. I wasgiven a room there which was small, dark, but neat and comfortable enough. College had no sooner closed than I was settled in it, ready for the two months of work which had been allotted me.
In return for my board and lodgings, the settlement demanded all my time. There was hardly an hour which was not given to some sort of club or class, rehearsal or supervision or gymnastic training. Almost immediately after breakfast the playground work began; by noon I was helping a crowd of little ragamuffins to forget the heat in the splashing fun of the swimming pool, in the basement. In the afternoon there were classes for young boys who needed tutoring—hungry-eyed, eager little fellows who reminded me of what I must have been when I was their age.
I would not have you believe that I was readily sympathetic with every case I met. These boys and girls—though I rarely had to do with the latter—were all Jewish. The appearance of some of them would perhaps have justified my aunt's antipathy to the East Side. Those that were new to the settlement, I noticed, were shabby, dull, rough of speech, surly of manners. It would need a few weeks before I could see how subtle, yet how fundamental, were the changes which the settlement would have wrought in them.
I was shy, too, in the presence of so many boys: shy of their hastily-offered friendship, their rushing eagerness to bring me into all their schemes and boyish dreams. But I was still young enough to know those dreams upon my own account: young enough to feel with little Mosche, a cripple, who wanted so much to become an expert at the swinging of Indian clubs, and who was forever dropping the heavy things in clumsy weakness; young enough to realize how much his mother's love meant to thirteen-year-old Frank Cohen, who had been caught stealing fruit from a corner grocery and was "on parole."
But the feeling in itself was not enough, evidently. I must try and try to make that feeling eloquent—to make these boys feel, in turn, the sureness and helpfulness of my understanding. Sometimes it was torture. It is harder to conquer shyness than to slap a dragon.
Mr. Richards saw this in me—watched the struggle, appreciated it. He spoke of it to me, once, and I did not hesitate to tell him how I felt. How inadequate, how chagrined and humbled in the face of all the poverty and suffering which life down here disclosed.
"It was the same when I first came down here," he said to me in turn. "But I gained courage. Thank God for that!"
He said it quietly, but there was a good deal of fervor in the tones. It surprised me, somehow, because, I had never before heard him mention the name of the Deity. It gave me a new question to ask.
"Why is it that you don't lay more stress on religion down here? Don't the boys and girls need it?"
"Need it? Who doesn't?" A shadow crossed his face. His vivacity gave way for a moment before deep thoughtfulness. "But they get all they need, these kids. They are mostly all of them members of strictly orthodox Jewish families. Religion is given them at all hours in their own homes. Many of them get more of it than they can ever need. They get so much of it that they flee from it, just anxious for the freedom of the streets and the novelty of the bar room and the brothel and the gambling den. I have made investigations. I know that half of the East Side boys who land in the police court have been driven there by the religious strictness of their parents."
"Mr. Richards," I began ... but stopped in dismay. What I had been about to say was no more nor less than a hot, strong denial of his opinion. I felt sure he was wrong—and yet it seemed humorous to me that I, who a year ago, had hated all things Jewish, wasnow defending all the worth and venerability of its ritual.
"I do not agree with you altogether," I said lamely. "But ... but still, don't think I am a very enthusiastic Jew. Because I'm not."
"Aren't you? Why not?"
I did not answer—had no answer to make, in fact. I did not want to tell him of my aunt, of her influence, of my own cowardice. But, looking at me, I think he did guess something of the longing I had had ... something of that strange night when I had stood outside the synagogue and heard the music coming from within the depths of its golden haze. For he put his hand on my shoulder and bade me think for a moment why I was not a Jew in spirit as well as in name.
"You're not a snob," he said, trying to help me. "You're not thinking that, because your religion is in the minority in the midst of a Christian land, it is necessarily an ignominy to be a Jew—and to act as one."
My silence held. I let him go on talking. "Anyhow, you need religion. Every man does to a variable extent. I should feel sorry for the man who didn't. And do you mind my telling you—" he paused only for a second—"that you are one of those who need it most?"
I hung my head. He had hit so truly upon what was right, what was most secret in me.... I could not ask him how he had guessed it, I remembered his assertion that he knew men—all men—and saw now that he had not been boasting.
He went on, presently, to explain that religion was a thing for the fathers and mothers and rabbis to teach to the children—not for the settlement to teach them. He knew that boys needed the guidance of religion ... but he felt that it was supplied in even too large doses already.
"The pity of it is," he said in closing, "that wherever Jewish children turn away from the faith of their fathers, they have nothing to turn towards next. They are at sea ..." he gave me another of his quick, deep set glances ... "and that applies to rich and poor alike. Christians forget their religion when they feel they have outgrown it ... because they have lost interest in it. Jews forsake theirs but never forget it. Under certain circumstances they grow impatient with it, slink from the inconveniences which it entails ... but their hearts are always desperate for the Faith. It is a hidden loneliness, a stifled longing to them."
I thought of Aunt Selina and wondered ifshe had ever felt that loneliness, that longing, as I had. I could hardly imagine her happy in devoutness to Judaism. It was so comical, I laughed aloud ... and got up and left Mr. Richards, lest he should ask me at what I was laughing.
It was his remark about Jewish children getting all the religion they need which nettled me the most. I felt that I would like to go out upon the streets and see for myself. The streets are the East Side's parliament, its court of law and high opinion.
They were hot and glaring with the noonday sun when first I appealed to them. Their pavements, white and littered with unspeakable confusion, gave off a dancing wave of heat. Old women, squatting on their doorsteps, their coarse wigs low upon perspiring foreheads, dozed and woke and gabbled to each other and dozed again. Old men, with long grey beards, long, tousled hair and melancholy eyes shuffled listlessly up and down, stopping only to make way for playing children or to pat them on the head. The gutters had their Jewish peddlers, each window its fat Jewish matron who leaned upon a cushioned window-sill and gazed apathetically at nothing. There was a Babel of Yiddish and Russian and guttural English. At one corner there was a crap-game going on in fullsight of the policeman across the street. Young men of my age were in it; youths with mean, furtive faces and laughs that were cruel and raucous.
So this was Judea? This was where religion played too strong a part ... where parents and rabbis taught so fully to their charges the word and the comfort of God? It did not seem so to me. It seemed all hateful, smeared, repellant. And, with the question unanswered, I fled from it.
But the next morning, in the settlement playground, something happened which began the solution for me. It was an accident and I regretted it for a long while, feeling that it was my fault.
I had been teaching little Frank Cohen some tricks on the horizontal bar. Frank, the boy on parole for petty theft, was daring in this gymnastic work. No sooner was my back turned on him than he tried one of the tricks without my help. His fingers slipped, he fell heavily from the bar to the ground. When we picked him up, his arm was found to be broken.
We got him home in Mr. Richards' little run-about, and put the boy to bed. The doctor set his arm and put it into splints. I met Frank's mother here, and, later on, his father who, having heard of the accident, came rushing upstairsfrom his bakery shop. They were a nervous, frightened pair; and it needed all the talk my lungs were capable of to assure them that their son would soon recover the use of his arm and be out of his bandage.
As I left their stuffy little flat, they were reciting some Hebrew prayers of gratitude. Tears were on the cheeks of both of them, and their eyes were uplifted to a God I could not know. I went downstairs bitterly conscious of that.
And this was why, when Frank Cohen, pale, his arm in a sling, but the hero of his comrades, came again to the settlement, I sought him out and made an especial friend of him. Of what that friendship should become I had then no plan.
One hot evening, when the fire-escapes were crowded with hundreds of sleeping children, and the streets were shrieking canyons of heated stone and iron, and men and women lay in the grass of little parks, breathing heavily as if in prayer for coolness, I learned the secret in the heart of young Frank Cohen.
He was sitting beside me in the amateur roof-garden which Mr. Richards had contrived atop the settlement. We had wicker chairs there, a few potted palms and a solitary, tiny goldfish in a small glass bowl. That was the extent of its furnishings; but in the later afternoons the old Jewish mothers would come and sit here and doze in the sun, grateful for the breeze, city-fed and redolent, which might carry relief towards them.
This afternoon Frank's mother had been among them. I had seen her there, a pale, little woman who sat with her sewing in her lap, staring dully out over the roofs below her. I had been detailed to go around among thesewomen and to make them as comfortable as I could. Hardly a one, however, could understand English; and Frank's mother, when I came to her, took no notice of anything that I said or mentioned. She looked at me from under lowered eyebrows. Later on Mr. Richards, who had had her under his attention for some months, told me how frightened she had been by her son's misdemeanor—it had been no more than that, according to the police report—and it was easy to imagine that she looked with suspicion upon every comrade whom Frank followed, now. The fact that I was so much older and was a member of the staff of the settlement workers was not enough to overcome the whole of her distrust.
And when the evening came, and Frank and I had emerged from one of the club meetings—for he was president of his particular club of boys of his own age—hot and tired from wrangling over Robert's Rules of Order and the wording of a baseball challenge to be sent to a rival organization, he told me the entire story of that misdemeanor. He would not speak of it readily. He too felt the shame of it, differently of course, but no less heavily. He had been in bad company. He had been going for months with some sons of one of the East Side's notorious gamblers—boys who were wise beyond their years andbrutal beyond their strength. Cowardly, sneaky, they had prompted him to steal things at the counters of all the shops on their street. He had never realized, under their whispered urgings, how wrong it was—and he had never had a chance to profit by his thefts himself. The petty business had gone on for a couple of weeks, the other boys praising him, bullying him by turn, and dividing the loot between them. And when the inevitable happened and Frank found himself locked for the night in a police court, frantic at the disgrace which the loathsome night exaggerated, these boys informed against him.
When he told me of this, and how they had come snivelling before the police lieutenant, and had lied to make that fat, gruff, old master believe that Frank had stolen even more than he actually had, and all for the sake of becoming the chief of their "gang"—then his narrow face darkened and writhed with a hate that was too great for him to bear—and presently tears came into his black eyes.
"Were they Jewish boys?" I asked him. "No," he answered passionately. "I think I should have gone crazy if they had been."
I glanced at him quickly. He did not smile as he said it, nor was there anything too melodramatic about his manner.
"Why do you say that? That you would have gone crazy?"
"Don't you see? You're a Jew, ain't you?"
I said, "Yes."
"Well, I couldn't talk about it to you at all if you wasn't. And if they had been Jews—my own people—and had gone back on me like that, it would've been just a little too much. They were just tough kids—and so they didn't know any better. If they had been Jews they wouldn't have taught me to steal, they wouldn't have done what they—God, my father and mother were right about it, for sure!"
"Your father and mother? Why, what had they to do with it?"
"Oh, you know how parents are. They used to warn me against going with those tough kids. They seemed to know from the beginning that something'd happen out of it. They said—you know, it's like old folks—that Christian boys would never want to go with me unless to gain their own ends—and then to desert me, see? They wanted me to go with the Jewish boys I'd been going with all my life, before then. But I laughed and didn't listen. And—and when I had to pay back for all the things I stole, it was—well, it was the Jewish boys I knew who clubbed together and earned money by odd jobs after school—and if it wasn't for them, I'd be in the workhouse."
"But all Christian boys aren't like the ones you went with," I argued.
"No, I suppose not. But I like to think that all Jewish boys are like the ones on this street. They made a good Jew of me!"
I turned on him quickly. "Did they? How?"
"They made me proud of being one of them. They made me feel the close something-or-other—well, I ain't much when it comes to speeches but you know what I mean."
Perhaps I did, but I would not admit it to myself. Perhaps I did see the faith reborn in him through the faith that other boys had given him. Perhaps, too, I could picture something of the welling joy that had come to his parents when he returned to the only right path that their simple, unquestioning eyes could see. And how jealously they must be guarding him now, to keep him in that code which was their life's law and had become his daily lesson!
"Don't you see?" he begged. "Can't you? Why, a fellow's justgotto have a side to fight on—and to fight for. And he's got to believe that his side is the only one, the right one. Life wouldn't be worth living without it. You don't know what it means to befighting for the right!"
From below came the droning of the unquiet streets. A little higher up a hot wind went almost noiselessly among the chimneys, so that we heard but faint sighs. The roof garden wasin darkness, naught gleaming but the little glass bowl of gold fish. There was a sense of utter darkness and loneliness—and yet into it had come, like the glad, brave blast of New Year's trumpet, a battle cry of the One God. A battle cry which made throb the heart of a young, rough boy; a battle cry which would be his whole life's secret well of gratitude and bravery.
"You don't know what it means to be fighting for the right!"
He was so slight, so meagre in appearance, that I could not help finding something gently humorous about his utterance. But when I looked at him and saw how his eyes glowed through the dark, and how he stood straight and at full height, his narrow shoulders thrown back, in spite of his bandaged arm, and his face upraised to the summer stars, my smile passed quickly.
There came over me that same queer panging sense of being only on the outside of things—only on Life's outermost border. I was looking straight into the heart of a boy and seeing the gladness which blazed there—and yet I could not have it, as he had it. Here was this sudden, all-forgetting boldness of belief which he had won—and I could only watch it covetously through the bars of my exiled doubts.
No, no, he was right—a thousand times moreright than I. If faith in the One God did all of this for him, then that faith was surely justified.
And if I could only bring myself to believe as deeply, as powerfully as he did—then my whole life would be remade as his had been—and I, too, would fight for what I must believe: would fight—for the right!
I did not let him talk any further, but sent him home. I did not want his parents to be worrying as to where he was, this time of night. I stayed on a little while, looking over the roofs and the white-faced huddlings of the fire-escapes, and then I went to bed, to toss with heat and battle with my thoughts throughout the night.
When the morning came, I went early to Frank's house. The pavements were fresh and damp with the water of a sprinkling cart, and the shops, just beginning to open, had a Sabbath air of cleanliness. It was cooler than yesterday, too, and the street corners were still cleared and quiet.
I had been granted permission to take Frank and two other boys on a picnic to Westchester. He was ready for me when I knocked at his door, and let me into the darkened kitchen.
His mother was there, too, cutting bread for sandwiches which we would take along. Her old morning wrapper and her hastily-shawled headgave her an even more forbidding appearance than ever. But when her sandwiches were packed into a box and wrapped and tied, she wiped her hands on a towel and looked at me steadfastly, not unkindly, for fully a minute.
I could not understand what she said. It was in Yiddish, and I have never learned that tongue. But here and there I caught a word which gave me enough of her meaning.
She was telling me that Frank had spoken to her of me last night when he returned from the blessed settlement. He always came to her bedside, nowadays, knowing that she would be awake and waiting to hear where he had been. And so he had whispered, while his father slept, of the strange young man who was so kind—a Jew, like them—and yet who had no faith in God.
Then suddenly she began to beg something. "Mutter, mutter," was all I could make of it—and I guessed that she was asking me of my mother, and wondering why I did not listen at her knee as Frank had done at his own mother's. And when I told her that my mother was dead, tears came into her eyes, and this was the finest sympathy I had ever known.
For she put her big, buttery hand on mine and shook her head. "You must learn to know God," I think she said. "He alone can take your mother's place. He made my son what I longedhe should be. He will make you what you most desire. In God alone is there happiness."
And so Frank and I went out and down the dirty, narrow stairs, and came into a street of Heaven itself—a street of early sunlight, and a clear sky above—and morning smiles upon the faces of all passersby. Or so it seemed to me, at any rate.
Because, for once in my life, I had seen the happiness of mother and child swept up into glory that is God's.
And I laughed to think of Mr. Richard's remark that religion works harm among these East Side people.
The summer came to an end only too quickly. I had enjoyed every moment of it, every opportunity. I had built up three clubs of which I was personal leader; I had given service in the gymnasium and playground; I had helped in the development of a roof-garden cordiality between the settlement workers and the mothers of children on the street. Mr. Richards, the last night I was there, presented me with a loving-cup on behalf of the other workers.
It was at supper that he did this, in front of them all. He called upon me, then, to describe to them the most interesting experience I had had in the course of the summer. So I told them the incident of Frank Cohen and his mother—but I do not think they saw much that was interesting about it. Mr. Richards may have, perhaps, because he must have remembered that dictum of his which the incident disproved; but even he could guess little of the impression it had made upon my thought and character.
I had had a letter from my Aunt Selina, to tellme curtly that she was back in New York, but intended starting out immediately upon an automobile tour through New England into Canada, in company with Mrs. Fleming-Cohen and some ship-board acquaintances—"personages," she called them in her much underlined letter, which probably meant that she had succeeded in capturing some stray society folk. She bade me go back to our apartment and to have it ready for her on her return. The servants, she said, were already there, engaged in cleaning away the summer's dust. She hoped "I would be able to start the college year without her, and that I would comport myself on the campus in a manner creditable and befitting, etc., etc."
But in spite of the servants' efforts to make things bright and comfortable, the apartment was a dismal and lonely place. College kept me uptown all day long, of course, but when the evening came and I must return to the big, empty rooms that were our substitute for home, I did not like it. I began to linger more and more about the campus at night: it was truly the most beautiful time to be there, when the autumn moon silvered its lawns and gave the buildings a marble whiteness. There was singing on the fences, then, and all sorts of meetings of all kinds of college organizations. The campus hummed with a hundred undergraduateactivities—so that I saw, as never before, how much I missed through having to go downtown each night to live. But so long as my aunt wanted it, I felt I owed it to her to obey, and would not even consider the renting of Trevelyan's suite of rooms in the principal dormitory. Trevelyan had given up these rooms to move into his fraternity house.
"It's a dreadful bore," he said to me in his lazy, rueful way. "I'd be ten times more comfortable here—but I don't want to insult the brothers. However, you'll come up to the house and see me just as often, won't you?"
I promised him I would, but he seemed to know as well as I that I would not. A sophomore paying nightly visits to a senior in the fraternity house where that sophomore had only a year ago been smiled politely out—no, it didn't seem even probable. And so, when I had helped Trevelyan put his last bit of furniture upon a truck—and had tucked among the rungs of many Morris chairs the bundle of flags and college shields which he had overlooked—I could hardly bear to shake hands with him. We both knew that it was something in the nature of a definite goodbye; at any rate, so far as college was concerned.
"A damned nuisance, this," he said thickly, his short-sighted eyes screwing up oddly. "Andif it wasn't for the brothers—" But the brothers did win him, and I lost a friend thereby.
The home to which I must go seemed lonelier than ever now. I was not expecting Aunt Selina for two more weeks, and so I hit upon the idea of inviting some one to stay with me until then.
Frank Cohen! Yes, I would ask Frank Cohen. He was going to high school now, and the branch which he attended was not so far from where I lived. It would be convenient for him, and perhaps a happy change from the East Side crowdedness which he had had to encounter all his life.
He was as glad to come as I to have him. I gave him Aunt Selina's room to sleep in, and we sat there, when our homework was done, many evenings until past midnight, talking gently and thoughtfully of many things. He was a boy much as I had been—and perhaps, still was. He was shy to an uncomfortable degree, low of voice, dreamy in manner. But when he was aroused to something especial, he became uncontrollably intense, his eyes flashing and his knees trembling, so that his whole small body seemed but the sheer vibration of his thoughts.
He was hoping to go to college, when his high school days were over. He had not dared mention it at home, though, because he knewhow poor his father was, and how much of a help he would be when he could go to work and begin to carry home his weekly earnings. He hated to go into a shoddy little business; he wanted to study further, to take up some profession—perhaps the law. Or if he did go into business, he wanted to have had a few years of college first, so that he might see things broadly and with a mind trained for bigness. But he had only dreamed all this, only longed for it in secret. He would rather forego all of it than urge his father to make the big sacrifice.
I had come to be so fond of him, it was not long before I decided upon what seemed to be a proper solution. Without a word to Frank, I escaped from college early one afternoon and went downtown to that East Side street where he lived. I found his father in the cellar of the bakery shop which he owned, his beard all whitened with flour dust, his thin, bare arms thick with the paste of dough.
With rehearsed gesticulations I made him understand what I offered. My own father had left me fairly well off; I wanted to lay out the money which would be necessary to afford Frank a college education. They could pay it back when they pleased—not for many years would I need it.
I had a distinct surprise, then. My generositywas taken somewhat aback by the man's apparent anger. He seemed to be resenting any suggestion of charity. I tried to assure him that this was not what I intended, but he did not understand. At length we had to call in one of the bakery's oven-tenders to act as interpreter. And through this third party Mr. Cohen thanked me kindly. He appreciated all I offered, but he had long ago made arrangements for Frank.
"And what are those arrangements?" I asked anxiously, picturing the boy at work in this dark, mouldy cellar.
"It is a secret," said Mr. Cohen. "But it is time now for me to disclose what his mother and I have planned for him. For ten years we have saved. And we have saved enough to send him to college. He shall go there and we ourselves shall send him." He drew himself up as he said it, so that I had a glimpse of that pride which all Jewish fathers seem to take in hardships which they undergo for their children. "It is so with the son of the president of my synagogue," he said. "It shall be no less so with my son, either. He shall have what his father could not have, though his father starve and slave to give it to him!"
The dull interpreter gave me this in flat, spiritless tones; but I could see the clenched handsand the earnest face of Mr. Cohen, and I nodded quickly.
"I am very glad," I told him. "And I know it will mean ten times more in happiness to you because you are giving him all this with your own hands. Frank said to me he dared not ask it of you—he thought the sacrifice too great—and that is why I came to you with my offer. Do not think me rude, therefore."
He answered gravely. I was not rude, he assured me, and he owed me deep thanks. He had only one favor to ask; that I should not tell Frank the secret, but would leave it and the joy that it would bring, for him, his father. He would tell him immediately after Frank had returned home from his stay at my apartment.
I hurried home, for it was now nearly suppertime. To my amazement I found Frank sitting in the lobby of the apartment, his old suitcase beside him, his look one of fevered disconsolement.
"What's the trouble?" I asked him.
"Oh, I just wanted to say goodby to you," he said hurriedly. "I did not want to go without doing that. I've—I've had a pleasant time."
"But why are you going?"
"Oh, I want to be home ... you know, I get a little homesick." But he said it so stumblingly that I was sure he was not telling me all.
"Frank," I demanded, "tell me the truth. Has anything gone wrong? I had hoped you would stay until my aunt returned."
He laughed at that, and mystified me the more. "Have any of the servants offended you in any way?" I asked, searching my brain for some reason for his change of attitude.
"The servants? Oh, no, of course not!" He picked up his suitcase and started for the street. "Well, goodby," he said. He stopped as if he wanted to explain, then thought better—or worse—of it, and went on. I was a little nettled by this time, and let him go.
As I went up in the elevator, it seemed to me a mighty mystery. But no sooner had I let myself into the apartment than I was due for a bigger surprise.
For there, blocking the hallway, a figure of offended pride, stood Aunt Selina.
I went to her to kiss her, but she stepped back and glared into my face.
"It's a lucky thing I came back unexpectedly," she said. "The idea of finding a little Jew boy like that in my room—sitting in my own bedroom with his copy books spread all over my directoire desk! A common little boy with an accent!"
I saw it all, now.
"That boy was one of my best friends," Itold her as calmly as I could. "Had I thought you would have objected to his presence here, I would never have invited him to stay with me for these weeks."
"Weeks? What, you have had that little East Side creature here for weeks?" She began to walk up and down the hall in feline fury. "Haven't you any idea of what is proper? Here I go away with some of the most cultured and well-known society people in New York—an absolute triumph—and you use my home as a refuge for nasty little scum of the slums. It isn't bad enough for you to spend your summer in such disgusting company. You have to cap it all by bringing them up into my own home. Think of the disgrace it would mean if any of these new friends of mine were to discover it!"
"I have my own friends to consider," I told her patiently. "And this boy is one of them. What did you tell him?"
"Tell him? What should I tell him?" She made a great show of shuddering. "I told him to get out. To—to get out as fast as he could."
I looked at her evenly for as long a while as she could stand it. Then her miserable pose gave way to pettishness, and she cried:
"And what's more, you'll have to get out yourself, if you insist on trying any more of these outrageous things. I can't bear it, that's all.You'll have to get out before you disgrace me!"
"I shall," I agreed, and, passing her, went into my own room and began to pack.
We had a silent, sullen supper. At the end of it I told her that my clothes were packed and that I intended moving on the morrow to Trevelyan's empty suite, up at college. I would take none of the furniture from my room, however, since I did not wish to inconvenience her. I would not trouble her at all after tonight.
She may have thought this was pure bragging, she may have been reconciled to it. At any rate she made no answer, and let me go to my room without a word of comment.
And it was only two weeks later, when I was comfortably settled in my room on the campus, that I received a stormy letter from her, calling me a "most ungrateful monster of a nephew."
Across the hall from Trevelyan's rooms lived one of the college "grinds." Now that I had moved there and came and went at all hours of the day, I saw this man often.
Fallon—that was his name—stood fully six-feet four, and had about a thirty-two-inch waist. He stooped until his thin shoulder blades were at directly right angles to each other. He would never talk to any one he met on his way; his nose was always deep in the book which he held outspread. He was the most ferocious grind I have ever known.
Next to Fallon lived Waters, a cheery, well-dressed little person, who had pink cheeks and no disturbing thoughts. Waters was a member of one of the minor fraternities; he spoke longingly of the day when he would be living in his "chapter lodge." Waters was easy company. He had four hundred "friends" around the campus, and when I met him was engaged in capitalizing on those friendships by canvassing votes for his election to a team managership.
That perhaps is why he came into my room so often to sit and chat pleasantly, lightly, about almost every topic known to the college man. He was very much of a type. There were at least thirty other men in that class who were like him, no better nor worse, nor more nor less attractive than he was. Popularity was an end and a means with him. It was all he wanted of college.
"Well, how are you, old top?" was the greeting that came singing from his room, each time I passed its open door. It was a door perennially open, lest some passerby might escape without the greeting.
"D'you know, old chap," he'd say, sweeping into my room in the midst of a study-hour and slumping down upon the divan with a great show of silk socks and shirtings, "it's high time you and I did something for that 'grind' across the hall."
He was tremendously interested in Fallon, it would appear. Not personally, he explained to me—but just because Fallon might become a valuable friend in time. A college man needed friends—and he, Waters, had only four hundred of them!
Fallon, however, had something of his own opinion about it. He went about the building with his book before him, bowing neither to menor Waters nor any one else. It was dreadful to have to speak to him. He could scarcely answer; his big Adam's-apple would go juggling painfully up and down, and finally he would succeed in emitting a barely audible whisper. He would blush, stammer, clap his mouth shut, then hurry away.
That was Fallon, worst of "grinds." He was beginning to be the butt of all sorts of miserable jokes. Even the freshmen over-stepped the line to make fun of him. For, like Waters and myself, he was a sophomore.
In the guise of helping a classmate, Waters took charge of him. He gave him nightly lectures in cordiality, in self-confidence, in the bettering of one's appearance. Once, when I chanced to go by, I heard him delivering glib advice upon what "Fallon, old top" ought to eat, in order that he might grow stouter and more favorable to look upon. And Fallon sat through it all and clutched his bony knees and grinned the grin of the helpless.
But one day, the story goes, he surprised Waters by finding his voice—and a very full-toned, convincing voice it proved to be, not at all like his usual whisper. And he told Waters to keep out of his room in study hour; he told him that he did not care to have his chances of becoming class valedictorian spoiledthrough having to divert his attention and listen to such superficial tommy-rot. And he told him to keep himself away, now and forever more, from his room and its owner.
"Oh, very well!" I heard the injured Waters say. A second later he had come across into my room and was pouring into my ear a complaint concerning the beggarly rudeness of that "grind, Fallon, who never would amount to anything in the college world, anyhow!"
He had just returned from a very important meeting, he told me, for the express purpose of having that heart-to-heart talk with Fallon—and the big, uncouth beggar didn't appreciate it at all. No wonder some fellows never did get along in college—and here he was, absent from this most important meeting, with no results at all.
He didn't mind telling me—(here his voice died down into an impressive whisper)—that it was from a fraternity meeting he had come. They were great things, these fraternity meetings. It was really too bad that I had never been able to join a fraternity—but then, of course, I must realize that fraternities had to draw the line somewhere! Now, I mustn't take that as a reflection on me personally—because it wasn't. I was all right, I was—and some day, he was sure, I was going to be a big man in the college world—bigger than he himself ever hoped to be.But Jews were a funny people—and I must admit, if I wanted to be fair, that some of them weren't fit to come to college at all, not to speak of joining fraternities.
And so he went on, until, thoroughly nauseated by the bland niceness of his speech, I followed Fallon's example and threw him out, though he refused to be insulted at this move, and promised to come around the next night and discuss the question of who should be elected our next football manager.
A little while after he was gone, Fallon came across the hall and knocked at my door. It was a timid, scared sort of a knock, and it needed a loud and repeated, "Come in," before he finally obeyed my summons.
He was pitifully wrought up over the incident. He had wanted to be polite to Waters, but he had had to study. He hadn't wanted to insult him, but somehow Waters never did understand how valuable time was, and what it would mean to Fallon's mother if he could come out a valedictorian at the end of our four years.
"Which would you rather have," I asked him, "a valedictory or a friend?"
He stammered a good deal over it. He knew that Waters was right about that: he did not have a single friend in the whole college—didn't know how to go about it—but he didn't wantsuch men as Waters trying to teach him the way either.
That began my friendship for Fallon. I had acquaintances enough on the campus, but I was almost as friendless as he—for friendlessness, I think, is not so much a matter of other people's as of one's own habit of mind. And there was something so grotesquely miserable about his loneliness—something so like a grinning gargoyle, solitary in its elevation—that I was drawn to him without much conscious effort.
I began by taking him for long walks. It was the first exercise of any sort, outside of the required freshman gymnasium course, which he had had in college. At first he would not talk at all; would just walk beside me through the city's fringes into the half-suburban roads, his eyes drinking in the green vistas as if they were astounding novelties, his breath coming fast with exertion, his cheeks glowing with new color. Gradually I urged him into talking—and, like all beginners, he talked of himself entirely. It was good for him. The more he spoke of himself, the more highly he thought of himself. He needed pride.
I had already been elected an editor of the college joke paper. I was qualified, therefore, to persuade Fallon to contribute what he could to that periodical. But he had not a jot of humor,and his contributions turned out to be very long and serious bits of verse in studied French rhyme schemes. I did not even risk reading them at a meeting of the board, but always turned them over to Trevelyan who could have them used in the coming issue of the other magazine, the literary monthly. This set Fallon writing entirely for the "lit," as we called it—and, as a result, when the elections to that paper were announced in the middle of the sophomore year, Fallon's name and mine stood together.
But the happiest inspiration came to me one Sunday when at noon Fallon and I were resting atop the Palisades, whither we had gone upon an all-day tramp. I watched him pick up a flat rock and sent it sailing out and down through space. His long thin arm gave the toss a surprising power.
I asked him, had he ever seen a discus. He said, "No."
The next day I had overcome all his scruples as to the immodesty of a track costume and had led him out upon the field to practice with the discus. It was hard work, because he was by far the clumsiest man I have ever known. Later on I interested the old coach on his behalf. Before Thanksgiving Fallon gave promise of becoming one of the college's best discus throwers.
When winter began, I took him down to thegymnasium. At first I had in mind only to keep him in good condition; but his handling of the heavy medicine ball gave me another idea. I put him to work with a basketball—and here the training I had given the young boys at the settlement served me in good stead. He was so tall, he need only swing up his arms to drop the ball into the basket. He was the ideal build for a "center," and our 'varsity team needed a center.
He did not make the 'varsity—not that year, anyhow. But he did make our class team, and won his numerals.
Also when spring came in, he was chosen as one of the track team's discus throwers. Add to this the fact that he had lately been elected to the board of the literary monthly, and it will be seen that Fallon had had a skyrocket rise. No wonder that Waters, the genial, now forgot that autumn affront and paid nightly visits upon his particular friend Fallon. And Fallon, of course, having had his attention diverted into so many foreign channels, no longer cared so singularly for his studies, but was willing to receive Waters and such as Waters with an ever-increasing cordiality.
The inevitable happened. Fallon, exhibiting his latest development—a full-sized, roistering swagger—came into my room one evening andtold me jubilantly that he was pledged to join Waters' fraternity.
"It's not the best in college," he admitted loftily, "but it'll tone up a bit when I get the track captaincy and Waters gets elected to a managership."
"And how about that senior year valedictory?" I asked him.
"Oh, I was a fool in those days, wasn't I?"
He mistook my silence. "Say, old chap," he went on, "this is no time for you to be jealous of me. I know well enough, you ought to be in a fraternity—in the very best one. I wish I could get you into ours—but, say, you know how it is about Jews."
Yes, I knew, I assured him, and gave him the heartiest hand-clasp I could manage.
"You know, my mother's going to be awfully proud of this," he exclaimed huskily.
But though Waters did succeed in winning himself a team managership, Fallon never became the captain of the track team. For his election to that fraternity meant his ruin. He lost his grip upon everything. Perhaps it was his fellow-members, perhaps he had only himself to blame. He began to drink. At the end of junior year he was expelled from college.
And I wondered if the mother, who had wanted him to be the class valedictorian, was as proud of him as ever.