Chapter 8

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 his spirit 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 two months, 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, "because _she_ wouldn'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 josh where 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 her book 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 in _double 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 rage at 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; I _do_ know, 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, you _must_ have 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 hand in 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.

AN ALUMNI DINNER.

An Alumni Dinner.

"And it's we who have to rustle In 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 it on, 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 have _you_ done 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, the _Chronicle_ man, 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 not change a thing like that. He knew that the man had a good position on the _Chronicle_ and 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'll have 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."