David Malcolm Part 10

I realized that this Miss Todd was the doctor's daughter, of whom I had heard Boller speak in the most extravagant terms, and now it seemed to me that his praise had quite failed to convey an adequate idea of her charms. She was very fair, very pink and white, with a Psyche knot of s.h.i.+mmering hair; a tall, slender girl, clad in clinging, gauzy blue.

To my mind came the picture of Penelope Blight, the only girl to whom I had ever given a thought; I remembered her tanned cheeks, her brown arms, and hard little hands, and it seemed to me that even she could never grow to such loveliness as this.

I loved Miss Todd. Had she offered herself to me at that moment, I should have married her on the spot, and now there was shattered my boyish contempt for all that was weak and gentle, however beautiful.

The ideas which composed my mind rattled and tumbled about like the bits of colored gla.s.s in a kaleidoscope, and in a flash they formed a softer and more harmonious design. The world was something more to me than a happy hunting-ground, life more than an exciting adventure. The world was the home of Gladys Todd; life was to win her love; happiness was to sit at her side.

And now I was sitting at her side in a seventh heaven; in one of the silent places of the seventh heaven, for we had little to say to each other. We were tyros in the art of conversing, and our promising ideas born of long mental struggles were stilled with bludgeons of a.s.sent and dissent. We knew not how to nourish and embellish them, and yet, though there were long stretches of embarra.s.sed silence, we were not unhappy. Even Boller found his subterfuges to drag me away quite futile, and Miss Todd herself seemed content, for she met a dozen like efforts with a quiet and unpenetrable smile.

So Gladys Todd and I sat the evening through as on a calm cloud, looking down to earth and the antics of little men. They crowded close to us, laughing and talking; they called up to us and we did not hear them; they jostled one another and they jostled us, but they could not entice us into their restless social game. They offered us coffee, sandwiches and cake, and we brushed them away. The very thought of food was repulsive to me, and this was not because I had reached that point where the immeasurable yearning of the heart dwarfs all mean desire. I was really hungry, but I had no mind to spoil the impression which it was evident I had made; I had no mind to let Miss Todd see me with a half-eaten sandwich poised in one hand and scattering crumbs untidily, and in the other a cup of muddy, steaming fluid. She seemed to have a like conception of the undignity of eating, for when she declined the proffered feast it was with the air of one who never ate at all, who never knew the pangs of appet.i.te, but lived on something infinitely higher. She even spurned the cake, and I was glad to let her deceive me. I liked to coddle myself with the belief that she never ate. I knew that she did not want me to see her eating, for then I must have cla.s.sed her with the ma.s.s of women--with Mrs. Ruffle, whom I heard choking on a bit of nutsh.e.l.l; with her mother, who was standing near us talking in a voice m.u.f.fled in food; I must have slipped off the cloud to earth.

But Gladys Todd was wise, with that innate wisdom of her s.e.x in matters of appearance when appearance is to be considered, and we held in silence, loftily on our cloud. And looking back on that evening, my recollection is of misty, nebulous things; not of a pa.s.sing flow of incident, but of a welling up of new thoughts as I sat awkwardly pulling at my fingers and caressing my collar. Yet there were incidents, too, of high importance to McGraw. Doctor Todd declared that the evening was historical. Standing in the centre of a hushed company, he announced that the year had broken all records for matriculation; McGraw was growing; McGraw could not long be contained within her present walls, and the world must soon realize that in simple justice something must be done for her. The doctor was not cast down by the fact that nothing had been done and that there was no sign of anything being done. Hope was his watchword, and so hopefully did he speak of the future that the collegiate Gothic quadrangles began to rise in the imaginations of the company as dreams almost accomplished, and so infectious was his confidence that his hearers caught the high pitch of his enthusiasm, and when he had finished Boller sprang to a chair, and, waving a coffee-cup, struck the first deep tones of "Here's to old McGraw, drink her down!" and everybody joined in as fervently as though it were a hymn. They were not satisfied with it once, but Doctor Todd himself cried, "Again," and, waving an imaginary cup, led us off once more into the bibulous and inspiring song.

I remember joining in the first bars, but not because I was unduly stirred by the love of my alma mater. It was rather to give Gladys Todd a hint of the rich depths of my voice. To make an impression on Gladys Todd had become the business of my life. I was glad that I had come to McGraw, because here I had met her. McGraw's past and future were of no moment to me; her growth was nothing. She might shrivel up until I was the only student, yet I should still be happy in my nearness to Gladys Todd. And what of Penelope? I did think of Penelope that night as I sat alone in my room, c.o.c.ked on two legs of my chair, gazing blankly at the ceiling. I remembered the foolish, childish promises which I had made to her that I should never forget her. Of course I should never forget her, no more than I should forget the moon because I had beheld the sun's dazzling splendor.

But a man's ideas change, I said; his view broadens. And I remembered Penelope as I first saw her, in her tattered frock and with the faded ribbon tossing in her hair. I liked Penelope. I thought of her with brotherly affection. But I said to myself that she could never grow to the wonderful beauty of this Miss Todd.

CHAPTER IX

I was not long at McGraw University before I had attained my ambition to be like Boller of '89. I draped my legs in wide folds of shepherd's plaid; the corners of a purple silk handkerchief protruded from my top pocket; and as long as the "smoky city" was the proper form I crowned myself with one of them, and as promptly discarded it for the newer tourist's helmet, and that in turn for a yachting cap. Must I confess it?--before Boller left McGraw I had quite surpa.s.sed him as a model of fas.h.i.+on. But my ambition did not end here. The very conceit which had made me such an insufferable youth in my last days at home was the spur which drove me to win every honor that could come to an undergraduate.

As Boller stepped out of offices I stepped into them--in presidencies and secretarys.h.i.+ps almost innumerable, into editors.h.i.+ps, and even captaincies. Physically timid, I endured much pain in winning these last honors. The stretch of rolling turf which we called the foot-ball field became the arena in which I suffered martyrdom daily. I hated the game.

When I donned my padded toggery it was with the secret spirit I should have felt in preparing for the rack, yet I played recklessly for the _eclat_ it gave me. To-day I have an occasional reminder of those struggles in a weak knee, which has a way of twisting unexpectedly and causing excruciating pain, but I consider that these twinges are fair payment for the pleasure with which I contemplated my picture years ago in the Harlansburg _Sentinel_, showing me in my foot-ball clothes, poised on a photographer's fence. The subject, the _Sentinel_ explained, was Captain Malcolm of McGraw, who had made the winning touch-down in the Thanksgiving-Day game with the Northern University of Pennsylvania. The photographer's fence, you might think, was the summit of my career at McGraw, reached as it was in my last year there. To the admiring eyes of my fellows it was, but the McLaurins of Tuckapo and the Malcolms of Windy Valley were above all a practical people and to them I am indebted for a little common-sense, which told me that I could not play foot-ball all my life, nor would the heavy ba.s.s voice, so effective in the glee club, support a family, and deep in my heart I admitted the possibilities of a family. I might strive to keep that thought in the background, but it would rise when I dreamed of a home. That home was not a plain stone farm-house, hidden among giant trees. My view had broadened. I dreamed of a Queen Anne cottage, with many gables, and a flat clipped lawn, with a cement walk leading over it to an iron gate. I looked back with affectionate contempt to the art I had known in my youth, to the Rogers group, Lady Was.h.i.+ngton's ball, Lincoln and his cabinet, the lambrequin and the worsted motto. On my walls there would be a Colosseum, Rembrandt's portrait of himself, a smattering of Madonnas, a Winged Victory, and a Venus de Milo. To preside with me over such a house, to sit at the piano of an evening and play accompaniments while I sang sentimental songs, to fly with me over the country in a side-bar buggy, behind a fleet trotter, I thought only of Gladys Todd. She was accomplished, highly trained, it seemed to me, in all the finer arts of life. In our valley the women never rose above their petty household problems. They could talk, but only of recipes and church affairs, and if they left this narrow environment at all it was to fare far--to India and China, the foreign mission field. My view had broadened. Gladys Todd had her being in higher airs. She painted. Pastels of flowers and plaques adorned with ideal heads covered the walls of the Todd parlor.

She wrote. Doctor Todd a.s.sured me, speaking without prejudice, that his daughter's essay on "The Immortality of the Soul," which she had written out of pure love of the labor, equalled, if it did not surpa.s.s, the best work of the senior cla.s.s. She sang. Perhaps I see her now in the same wizard lights of distance that glorified the mountains in my boyhood, but I always recall her as a charming old-fas.h.i.+oned picture, sitting at her piano and babbling her little songs in French and German. Of the quality of her French and German I had no means of judging, but that she could use them at all was to me surpa.s.singly enchanting.

So Gladys Todd had her part in completing the wreck of my worthy ambition. What Boller had begun, she unconsciously finished. Yesterday I had planned to make self-sacrifice the key-note of my life. To-day I could not picture her contented to move in the narrow sphere of a Mrs.

Pound, cramping her talents in the little circle of the Sunday-school and the Ladies' Aid. Her influence for good must be a subtler one than this.

To wield it, she must have her being in higher airs, in an atmosphere of Colosseums, of Rembrandts, and Madonnas. Remember, she was no longer the shy girl whom I had met on the first night of my university life. Then she was only in her fifteenth year. I was a junior when she produced her lauded essay on "The Immortality of the Soul," and it revealed to me the profundity of her mind. To match her, I must sit many a night driving my way through difficult pages of the cla.s.sics, and often when my heart was in some smoky den with a few choice spirits, my body bent over my table and my brain wearied itself with abstruse equations.

If Gladys Todd unconsciously wrecked my early scheme of life, she unconsciously spurred me to the hard task of learning. I flattered myself that in the new calling which I had chosen I should be able to be even a greater power for good than in the old. Having attained to Boller's perfection, as I had abandoned Mr. Pound for him, I now abandoned him for ex-Judge Bundy. As Harlansburg was far above Malcolmville, so ex-Judge Bundy was above Mr. Pound. He was not the creator of Harlansburg, but he was its providence. He owned the bank and the nail works, he was a patron of its churches, the leading figure at the bar, and a man of wonderful eloquence. Every year he delivered the graduation address at the university, and mentally I modelled my future appearance on the rostrum from his benign demeanor, his forceful gestures, his rolling periods. Yet deep as was my admiration, he held views on which I differed with him. I felt that I had gone deeper than he into the logic of things. To him, for example, the high tariff was the source of all good, of life, health, food, clothes, and even morals.

My view was broader. I brushed aside the beneficent local effect of any system and went on to study its relation to all mankind. He was p.r.o.ne to forget mankind, and yet his faults were those of his generation and he remained a heroic figure in my eyes, and it seemed to me that in setting myself to reach the mark he had made I was aiming very high indeed.

Perhaps I should have gone on, striving to attain to the Bundian perfection had not the ex-judge himself been the instrument by which I was awakened and shaken out of my self-complacence. Among the benefactions which had brought him such high esteem in our college community was "the Richardson Bundy course of lectures on the activities of life." He paid for the services of orators whom Doctor Todd delighted to call "leaders in every branch of human endeavor." In my last year at McGraw we heard the Fourth a.s.sistant Secretary of the Treasury on "Finance," the art critic of a Philadelphia paper on "Raphael," and as a fitting climax to the course we were to listen to the famous Armenian scholar and philosopher, the Reverend Valerian Hara.s.san in a discourse on "Life." The adjective is not mine. I had never heard of the famous Armenian until Doctor Todd in chapel announced his coming, and made it clear that it was a special privilege to listen to the eloquent preacher, and that we owed a tremendous debt to our friend and benefactor, Judge Bundy.

The picture of the Reverend Valerian Hara.s.san, which was posted on the bulletin-board, gave promise of a realization of the hopes which the good doctor had raised. It showed a man in evening clothes, impressively ma.s.sive, with a clean-shaven face and Roman features, a broad, low forehead from which the hair rolled back in glistening black folds, curling around his ears to the line of his collar. The deep-set eyes seemed to look out from a mind packed with knowledge, and the firmly set mouth to hold in check a voice of marvellous power for eloquence.

In high spirits I went one evening to hear this eastern philosopher. It was cold and raining, but in those days the worst of weather could cast no shadow over me. It was a pleasure even to battle with the elements with no other weapon than an umbrella, and multiplied a hundred-fold was that pleasure when with that weapon I was battling also for Gladys Todd.

Though as yet I had said nothing to her of my cherished hope, I know that when we stepped out together into the night, we both believed that we should face many another storm under the same umbrella. I was conscious that she clung more closely than usual to my arm, and, with spirits keyed high with the sense of protecting her, my feet hardly touched the dripping pavement which led from the doctor's house to the college building and the chapel. We said little on the way. We had long since pa.s.sed the point where idle chatter is needed in communing. I remember that I did ruminate pleasantly on my good fortune in having found this sympathetic spirit to share with me the intellectual pleasure of a scholarly discourse, whose heart could beat quicker in time with mine at the inspiration of some fine thought. I remember that she broke the current of these meditations to ask if I had decided to make Harlansburg my home after my approaching graduation. She asked it with a tone of deep personal interest. At that moment I should have proposed to Gladys Todd had not the wind been tugging at the umbrella, and had we not come from the shadow of the trees into the glare of the college lights. So I answered affirmatively. Of course I should remain in Harlansburg. At that moment my resolution was fixed unalterably, if only for the sake of Gladys Todd; and if I had settled in my mind that I should walk in the way of Judge Bundy till, like him, I dominated the town and the county and my name was known in the farthest corners of the State, that, too, would be for the sake of this gentle, clinging girl whose nearness to me made my umbrella seem like the sheltering roof of home. But in this calculation I left out of my equation one important element--the throat of the Reverend Valerian Hara.s.san.

The source of the Armenian's flowing eloquence would have seemed as far from affecting my life as the source and flow of the sacred Ganges, and yet it was some trivial irritation of it that kept us from hearing his philosophy that night, and, more important to me, that sent another to expound ideas far different than could ever have come from the famous thinker. All the college, all in Harlansburg who were well-to-do and wise, watched for his coming expectantly; but when the door on the chapel platform opened and Judge Bundy stepped forth, he had on his arm, not the monumental preacher of the clean-shaven face and rolling black hair, but a man who in no line met the hopes raised by the impressive picture. A murmur of disappointment ran through the hall. Doctor Todd, following the great men in the humble capacity of beadle, stilled it with a raised hand.

To Judge Bundy's mind, as he expressed it to us, there was no cause for disappointment. While the Reverend Valerian Hara.s.san's bronchial affection was unfortunate for us and for him, yet for us it was in a way, too, a blessing, for he had sent in his place to speak to us on "Life" no other than the famous journalist and traveller Andrew Henderson. The judge paused to give time for a play of our imaginations, and such a play was needed. I do not think that a soul in the audience had ever heard of the famous journalist and traveller, but we should not have admitted it, and set ourselves to looking as though his name were a household word.

It was enough that Judge Bundy declared him to be famous. It was decreed, and for Harlansburg, at least, he became a celebrity. Having given us time to imagine the deeds which had won fame for the lecturer, Judge Bundy saw no need to trouble himself with specifications. The rolling periods of his speech would have been rudely halted by facts, so he spoke in general terms of the inspiration it would give to the young men before him to see such a man face to face--a man who knew life, a man who had lived life, who had ideas on life. It seemed as though the judge himself was about to deliver the lecture on "Life," but he paused, out of breath, and Andrew Henderson, mistaking the moment of rest for the end of the introduction, rose from the chair about which he had been s.h.i.+fting uneasily and came to the rostrum's edge.

He came with a shambling gait. The tall, thin, loose-jointed man, resting with one hand on the pulpit at his side, in every way belied the pompous tribute which had just been paid him.

I watched him. I studied the face masked in a close-cropped gray beard.

I studied the angles of the loosely hung limbs and the swinging body clad in un.o.btrusive brown. For a moment I doubted. Then he spoke. I heard his voice, and it seemed as though it were threaded with a sharp, shrill note of bitterness. His eyes were not turned to us. Gladys Todd must have thought them fixed on a spot in the ceiling, but to me they were watching a flake of cloud hovering just above the tall pine across the clearing. Gladys Todd must have thought me beside her, sitting upright on the very edge of my seat, but I was back in the mountains; I could feel Penelope's brown hand in mine and I could see her proud smile as she looked up at me and said: "That's father; he's studying"; I could see her father as he leaned on his hoe, beaten in his fight with the ever-charging weeds; I could see him in the murky light of the cabin, a trembling hazy figure in the gun smoke; and again, with the devils of retribution at his heels, flying for the bush. Now the worthless, s.h.i.+ftless man, after long years, stood before me, a professor in truth, a professor of life, and perhaps he would give belated expression to what was in his mind that day as he studied the flake of cloud.

Unrolling a portentous ma.n.u.script on the pulpit, the lecturer began to read in a mechanical voice. The restless shuffling of feet and a volley of dry coughs soon spoke the hostile att.i.tude of the audience, a longing for the coming of Valerian Hara.s.san. The Professor did not heed them.

He read on, pompous phrases such as might have come from the lips of Mr.

Pound. He was unconscious of the increasing hostility of his hearers.

When he stopped suddenly, it was not because the feet in the rear of the hall were shuffling a rising chorus of protest, despite the frantic signals of Judge Bundy and Doctor Todd's upraised hand. What he saw in his own ma.n.u.script checked him, for stepping back from the desk, he frowned at it. The corners of his mouth twitched in a pa.s.sing smile, and pouncing upon his handiwork, he held it at arm's length, dangling before the astonished eyes of the company.

"What rot!" he cried. "What utter rot!"

A shout from the rear of the room evidenced the approval of his younger hearers. The elders glowered at what they thought a trick to catch their attention. But trick or not, he did catch their attention, and he held it; he ceased to be the utterer of pompous plat.i.tudes; dropping his paper to show that he had done with it, he leaned across the pulpit and brought his long arms into action. He became the caustic iconoclast of the valley.

"We all agree that what I have been reading is nonsense," he said in a sharp-edged voice. "But I am here in the place of Valerian Hara.s.san, and it seemed to me that I must give you what you were paying him for. I have been trying to say the kind of things he would have said. If you had been able to stand it a little longer, I should have told you that all the world's a stage and men and women but the players. I might even have attacked your risibles by anecdotes about my little boy at home and the southern colonel. Of course, I should have given you some inspiring thoughts, convinced you that life was a wonderful gift, something to be treasured and joyously lived, that work was a pleasure, that happiness came from accomplis.h.i.+ng a set task. It's all here in this paper. I wrote it--and it was easy enough to do--because that is the kind of stuff you pay for. But it is one thing to write what you don't believe; quite another to speak it face to face. And yet if I am to speak the truth as I see it on such a simple little subject as life, I guess I am here on a fool's errand."

Doctor Todd and Judge Bundy seemed to be of the same mind, for they were whispering together; debating, I suspected, whether it were better to let him go on and try to talk fifty dollars' worth or to break abruptly into his discourse and end it. For so harsh a measure as the last they lacked courage, and the Professor hurled on, unconscious of the hostile stares with which they were stabbing him in the back.

Now, optimism was the foundation on which McGraw strove to build up character. Optimism permeated every part of our life there. From a narrow environment we looked out hopefully into broadening distances.

Every year some confident youth told us from the college rostrum in rounded sentences that life was worth living; that sickness, poverty, disappointment, the countless evils which dog our footsteps, were nothing in the scale against the boon of opportunity. Every morning in chapel the doctor voiced our grat.i.tude for the privilege of living and working.

And now over heads that moved in such charged airs the Professor cast his pall of pessimism. He took his text from Solomon, and found that all was vanity. It mattered little whether or not what he said was true. He believed it to be true, and for the moment at least his incisive voice and long forefinger carried with them conviction. He railed at the old dictum that man was G.o.d's n.o.blest work. The ordinary dog, he declared, was more pleasing to the eye than the ordinary man, and the life of the ordinary dog more to be envied than that of the ordinary man. Knowledge only lifted us above the animal to be more buffeted by a complexity of desires. The greatest thing in the world was self, and even the roots of our goodness burrowed down into the depths where the ego was considering its own comfort either in this world or the next. The proud man for whom the universe was made was nothing but a fragile thread of memories wrapped in soft tissue, packed away in a casket of bone, and made easily portable by a pair of levers called legs. After countless ages spent on earth seeking the true source of happiness men were still countless ages from agreement. One half sought by goodness to attain happiness in immortality; the other in Nirvana. One half found the shadow of happiness in inertia, in stupefaction, a mere satisfying of physical needs; the other in motion, joining in the mad procession which we call so boastfully Progress. By accident of birth we were of the progressive half and we paraded around and around, puffed up with pride of our little accomplishment, until we fell exhausted and another took our place.

Judge Bundy nudged Doctor Todd again. Doctor Todd shook his head and looked at the ceiling, as if to show that he found more of interest there than in the speaker's words, and he held them there defiantly as the Professor went on to controvert the optimistic philosophy which had been taught at McGraw for so many years. That knowledge was the greatest source of unhappiness was a bold dictum to hurl at a company of seekers after it, but Henderson Blight had little respect for mere persons. The ignorant animal did not exist, he argued; it was with knowledge that the plague of ignorance came to man. A draught of knowledge was like a cup of salt-water to the thirst, and the more we learned the less value we could place on the things for which we labored. A man worked a lifetime to obtain a peach-blow, and it crumbled to dust in his hands. What, then, should we strive for?

At this question Doctor Todd brought his eyes down from the ceiling and Judge Bundy lifted his from the red rug of the platform. The judge was our great authority on striving. He had qualified himself by years of successful labor. To us he was a living example of the rewards which come to endeavor, and so it was with evident self-consciousness that he now sat very erect, thinking, perhaps, that he would hear some views akin to his own.

"I was born in a narrow valley," the Professor pursued, "and perhaps I might have dozed there like the dogs, but I learned that beyond the mountains there was another valley, broader and richer. I longed to live there. One day I crossed the mountains to it and I found it all that I had heard. But it, too, had its wall of mountains and my eyes followed them, and I learned that beyond them was still another valley, broader and richer. And I went on. So it will be with you. There is a big nail factory down by the river--I saw it as I came in, and I am sure that to some of us to own that factory might be a life's ambition. How fine it would be when our work was ended to fold our hands peacefully and say: 'I have fought the good fight, I have run the race, I have made a million kegs of nails!'"

Judge Bundy half rose from his chair. Through the hall sounded a smothered murmur of applause, for it is always satisfying to hear a truth which hits another. Judge Bundy would have wholly risen from his chair, but he was checked by a hundred covert smiles and Doctor Todd laid a hand upon his quivering, indignant knee. All unconscious of the cause of this stifled mirth, and fired by it as in the old days he was fired when Stacy Shunk leered beneath the shadow of his hat, the Professor leaned far over the desk with both hands outstretched.

"I have failed utterly in my own living," he cried. "I have loafed and lagged. At times I have worked hard until I wearied myself chasing shadows. But in my failure I have learned a few things. We may live and doze in our little valley, but still we shall long for the broader and richer valley across the mountains. The yearning for that something better is born in us all. Shall we call it simply something more; shall we measure our service in kegs of nails or shall we seek for something really better? If we listen we can hear in the depths of our souls the divine drumbeat, and it is strange what cowards we are when we come to march to it. But we can march to it. We may not know why we go, nor where, but we can go straight. The country we travel may seem waste, but we cross it under G.o.d's sealed orders, given to us when we opened our eyes on life, and only when our eyes are closed again will they be opened to us."

So it was that the Professor carried me again from my little valley! The great Judge Bundy standing at the platform's edge, brusquely dismissing us, had dwindled to pygmy height. He was a mere maker of nails. Life a moment since had been very simple, very concrete, a mere game in which the stake was food and clothes, a Queen Anne house, a clipped lawn and trotting horses. Now it was a mysterious expedition into the unknown.

With the Professor's last word I rose, ready to march, not knowing whither, but sure that it would not be to a conquest measured in kegs of nails. In this exalted mood Gladys Todd could have no part, for I knew that I could go faster and farther in light marching order, unhampered by impedimenta of any kind. Gladys Todd suddenly took her place with impedimenta. Her first act was to confirm this judgment of her, for as I was forcing my way down the crowded aisle, intent on reaching my old friend, she kept tugging at my sleeve and entreating me not to hurry.

Her remonstrances aroused my antagonism. Inwardly I was calling down maledictions on her head, for I saw the Professor's tall form receding through the door. I would have rushed after him; there were a thousand things I wanted to know, a thousand questions I had to ask him. But I was checked. I could not abandon Gladys Todd; nor had I the courage to present myself to him after so many years in the light of a youth given to sentimental dalliance. He would remember the boy who had come to him, cold and wet, from the depths of a mountain stream, the boy who had run miles in the early morning to warn him of the approach of the terrible Lukens, the boy whom he had called his only friend. He would see me dignified by a tail coat and beautified by a mauve tie, a white waistcoat and gleaming patent-leather shoes. He would remember me as I stood by the cabin door, a strong, rugged lad. He would see me a devotee of fas.h.i.+on, a dawdler after a pretty face. So it was with a feeling of relief that I saw the study door close after my friend. I intended to find him, but not until I was as free as on that day when I first came upon him in the clearing.

Gladys Todd was inclined to lag. There were a dozen persons to whom she wished to speak, but with rude insistence I hurried her away. Outside the rain fell heavily. I held my umbrella at arm's length now and abandoned my fine feathers to the storm. She feigned not to notice my changed demeanor and tried to talk pleasantly, but I answered only in monosyllables, and brusquely, I fear. The interminable journey ended.

From the steps of the president's house, with all the graciousness she could command, she asked me not to hurry away when we had so many things to talk over. My answer was a quick "good-night," and I ran as I had run years before to the mountains, with my heart in every stride.

When I entered the doctor's study I found him alone. Mr. Henderson, he explained, had gone to Judge Bundy's. Judge Bundy always entertained the lecturer, and he was too generous a man to make an exception even in this case. In speaking of the lecturer the doctor made a wry face. He could not understand how a man of Valerian Hara.s.san's reputation ever allowed such a mountebank to take his place. At McGraw we believed in life; we believed in ambition, and it was terrible--terrible, sir, to have to sit in silence and hear our dearest traditions a.s.sailed by one who admitted that he was a failure. Did Mr. Malcolm hear the brutal cut at Judge Bundy? Judge Bundy, sir, was----

I did not stop to hear the eulogy, nor did I consider how I might be prejudicing myself with the president by so rudely breaking from him.

But the Professor had come back to me. I cleared the college steps with a bound, and ran over the campus and down the hill into the town. I ran with all a boy's reckless waste of strength, so that when I had covered my half-mile course I had to lean for support against the iron fence which guarded the Bundy home. The great stone pile, with many turrets and a dominating cupola, with wide-spreading verandas and marble lions on the lawn, in the daylight comported itself with dignified aloofness, and now, when night exaggerated its size and a single lonely light flickered in all its vast front, it was forbidding. With something of that forced boldness with which years before I had braved the dark mountains, I made the gate ring a proper notice of my approach and groped my way about the door until I found the bell. The answer came from over my head.

Stepping back and looking up, I saw framed in a lighted window a white figure, coatless and collarless, not the distinguished jurist, but a portly man who had been interrupted in the act of preparing for bed.

Clothes go a long way toward making a man, and the lack of them brought the judge down to hailing distance.

"What do you want?" he demanded of me, addressing me as any disrobed plebeian might have done.

"I'm Malcolm, sir, David Malcolm," I returned apologetically. "I wish to see Mr. Henderson."

"Henderson, eh?" The judge leaned over the window-sill, and he spoke less sharply. "You'll find him at the station waiting for the night train out. I tried to persuade him to stay, but he wouldn't. How in the world, Mr. Malcolm, could Hara.s.san have sent such a fool in his place?

Did you ever hear such utter nonsense? I forgive him about the nails--that was inadvertent, but that stuff about ambition----"

I did not wait to hear the judge controvert my friend's pessimistic philosophy, but with a brusque "good-night" hurried away. The window banged behind me, a sharp commentary on my rudeness. The iron gate clanged again, and I was off down the hill, running toward the lower town.

A shrill whistle stopped me. Looking into the valley I saw a chain of lights weaving their way along the river. They wound through the gap in the mountain, and I saw them no longer. I heard the whistle again, far off now, and it seemed to mock me.