Part 23

"Let's hike it in by the Embankment," was Guy's way of extending this invitation. "I don't mind if you come along, and Hildred likes it. Dad don't care one way or another. He isn't democratic like Hildred and me; but he's only a snob when it comes to his position as one of the grand panjandrums of Boston. Mother kicks, of course; but then she'd accept the devil himself if I was to tote him behind me."

Long usage had enabled Tom to translate these sentiments into terms of eagerness. Guy really wanted him. He was Guy's haven of refuge as truly as when they had been growing boys. Every few weeks Guy turned from his "bunch of sports," or his "bunch of sports" left him in the lurch, so that he came back like a homing pigeon to its roost. Tom was fond of him, was sorry for him, bore with him. Moreover, beyond these tactless invitations there was Hildred.

They fell to talking of Tad Whitelaw. Guy swung round to the piano, beating out a few bars of throbbing, deep-seated grief.

"One more little song and dance and Tad'll get this. Know what it is?"

Confessing that he didn't know, Tom learned that it was Händel's Dead March in "Saul."

"Played at all the British military funerals, to make people who feel bad enough already feel a damn sight worse. Be our morning and evening hymn when we get into the trenches."

Tom was anxious. "You mean that Tad's on probation?"

"I don't know what he's on. Hear the Dean's been giving him a dose of kill-or-cure. That's all." He pounded out the heartbreaking chords, with the deep bass note that sounded like a drum. "Ever see a fellow named Thorne Carstairs?"

"Seen him, yes. Don't know him. Yale chap, isn't he?"

"Was." The drumbeat struck sorrow to the soul. "Kicked out. Hanging round Tad till he gets him kicked out too. Lives at Tuxedo. Stacks of dough, just like Tad himself." There was some personal injury in Guy's tone, as he added, "Like to give him the toe of my boot."

It was perhaps this feat of energy that sent him into the martial phrases of the Chopin polonaise in A major, making the room ring with joyous bravery.

Having dropped into Mrs. Ansley's corner of the gilded canapé, Tom found Hildred silently slipping into a seat beside him.

"No, don't get up." She put her hand on his arm in a way she had never done before. "I can only stay a few minutes. There's something I want to say."

Guy was passing to the D major movement. His back was turned to them. They sat gazing at each other. They sat gazing at each other in a new kind of avowal. All the things he dared not say and she dared not listen to were poured from the one to the other through their eyes. She spoke hurriedly, breathlessly.

"I want you to know that if we enter the war, and you're sent over there, I'll find a way to go too."

He began some kind of protest, but she silenced him.

"I know how I could do it. There's a woman in Paris who'd take me on to work with her. You see, I'm used to Europe. You're not. I can't bear to think of you--with no family--so far away from everyone--and all alone. I'll go."

Before he could seize anything like the full import of what she was telling him she had slipped away again. Guy was still playing, martially and majestically.

Tom sat wrapt in a sudden amazed tranquillity. Now that she had told him, told him more, far more, than was in her words, he was not surprised; he was only reassured. He realized that it was what he had expected. He had not expected it in the mind, nor precisely with the heart. If the heart has reasons which the reason doesn't know, it was something beyond even these. The nearest he could come to it, now that he tried to express it by the processes of thought, was that between him and her there existed a community of life which they had only to take for granted. She was taking it for granted. To find out if she loved him he would never have to ask her; she would never have to ask him. _They knew!_ He wondered if the knowledge brought to her the peace it brought to him. He felt that he knew that too.

Having ended his polonaise, Guy let his fingers run restlessly up and down the keys. He had not turned round; he had heard nothing; he hadn't guessed that Hildred had come and gone. That was their secret. They would keep it as a secret. One of them at least had no wish to make it known.

He had no wish that it should go farther, even between him and her, till the future had so shaped itself that he could be justified. That it should remain as it was, unspoken but understood, would for a long, long time to come be joy and peace for them both.

Suddenly Guy broke into a strain enraptured and exultant. It flung itself up on the air as easily as a bird's note. It was lyric gladness, welling from a heart that couldn't tire.

Caught by his own jubilance, Guy took up the melody in a tenor growing liquid and strong after the years of cracked girlishness.

"Guy, for heaven's sake, what's that?"

The singer cut into his song long enough to call back over his shoulder:

"Schumann! 'To the Beloved'!"

He began singing again, his head thrown back, his big body swaying. All the longing for love of a fellow on the edge of twenty, but for him made shamefaced by his fat, found voice in that joyousness.

Tom had not supposed that in the whole round of the universe there was such expression for his nameless ecstasies. It was not Guy whom he heard, nor the piano; it was the morning stars singing together; it was the sons of God shouting for joy; it was all the larks and all the thrushes and all the nightingales that in all the ages had ever trilled to the sun and moon.

"Don't stop," he shouted, when the song had mounted to its close. "Let's have it all over again."

So they had it all over again, the one in his wordless, mumbled tenor, and the other singing in his heart.

XL

During the next week or ten days Tom worried over Tad Whitelaw. He wondered whether or not he ought to go to see the boy. If he didn't, Tad's Harvard career might end suddenly. If he did, he would probably have humiliation for his pains. He wouldn't mind the humiliation if he could do any good; but would he?

One thing that he could do was to take himself to task for thinking about the fellow in one way or the other. It was the fight he put up from day to day. What was Tad Whitelaw to him? Nothing! And yet he was much. It was beyond reasoning about.

He was a responsibility, a care. Tom couldn't help caring; he couldn't help feeling responsible. If Tad went to the bad something in himself would have gone to the bad. He might argue against this instinct every minute of the day, yet he couldn't argue it down.

He remembered that Tad went often to see Hildred. He had been on his way to see her that afternoon before Christmas when they had met on the esplanade. She might be able to get at him more easily than anybody else. He rang her up.

Her life as a débutante was so crowded that she found it hard to give him a half hour. "I'm dead beat," she confessed on the wire. "If it weren't for mother I'd call it all off." She made him a suggestion. She was driving that morning to lunch with a girl who lived in one of the big places beyond Jamaica Pond. If he could be at a certain corner she could pick him up. He could drive out with her, and come back by the trolley car. Then they could talk. That this proposal didn't meet the wishes of some one near the telephone he could judge by the aside which also passed over the wire. "He wants to see me about Tad, mother. I can't possibly refuse."

Getting into the car beside her, he had another of those impressions, now beginning to be rare, of the difference between her way of living and all that he was used to. Much as he knew about cars, it was the first time he had actually driven in a rich woman's limousine. The ease of motion, the cushioned softness, the beaver rug, the blue-book, the little feminine appointments, the sprig of artificial flowers, subdued him so that he once more found it hard to believe that she took him on a footing of equality.

But she did. Her indifference to the details which overpowered him was part of the wonder of the privilege. Having everything to bestow, she seemed unaware of bestowing anything. She took for granted their community of life. She did it simply and without self-consciousness. Had they been brother and sister she could not have been easier or more matter-of-course in all that she assumed.

Except for the coming-out ball it was the first time, too, that he had seen her as what he called "dressed up." Her costume now was a warm brown velvet of a shade which toned in with the gold-brown of her eyes and the nut-brown of her complexion. She wore long slender jade earrings, with a string of jade beads visible beneath her loosened furs. The furs themselves might have been sables, though he was too inexperienced to give them a name. Except for the jade, she wore, as far as he could see, nothing else that was green but a twist of green velvet forming the edge of her brown velvet toque. Her neat proud head lent itself to toques as being simple and distinguished.

He himself was self-conscious and shy. He could hardly remember for what purpose she had been willing to pick him up. A queen to her subjects is always a queen, a little overwhelming by her presence, no matter how human her personality. Now that he was before her in his old Harvard clothes, and the marks of the common world all over him, he could hardly believe, he could _not_ believe, that she had uttered the words she had used on Sunday night.

All the ease of manner was on her side. She went straight to the point, competent, businesslike.

"The thing, it seems to me, that will possibly save Tad is that he's got to keep himself fit in case war breaks out."

That was her main suggestion. Tad couldn't afford to throw himself away when his country might, within a few weeks, have urgent need of him. He couldn't, by over indulgence let himself run down physically, as he couldn't by neglecting his work put himself mentally at a disadvantage. He must be fit. She liked the word--fit for his business as a soldier.

"That's just what would appeal to him when nothing else might," Tom commended. "I wish you'd take it up with him."

"I will; but you must too."

"If I get a chance; but I daresay I shan't get one."

She had a way of asking a leading question without emphasis. Any emphasis it got it drew from the long oblique regard which gave her the air of a woman with more experience than was possible to her years.

"Why do you care?"

He had to hedge. "Oh, I don't know. He's just a fellow. I don't want to see him turn out a rotter."

"If he turned out a rotter would you care more than if it was anybody else?"

"M-m-m! Perhaps so! I wouldn't swear to it."

"I would. I know you'd care more. And I know why."

He tried to turn this with a laugh. "You can't know more about me than I do myself."

"Oh, can't I? If I didn't know more about you than you do yourself...."

He decided to come to close quarters. "You mean that you do think I'm the lost Whitelaw baby?"

"I know you are."

"How do you know?"

"Miss Nash told me so, for one thing."

"And for another?"

"For another, I just know it."

"On what grounds?"

"On no grounds; on all grounds. I don't care anything about the grounds. A woman doesn't have to have grounds--when she knows."

"Well, what about my grounds when I know to the contrary?"

"But you don't. You only know your history back to a certain point."

"I've only _told_ you my history back to a certain point. I know it farther back than that."

"How far back?"

"As far back as anyone can go, from his own knowledge."

"Oh, from his own knowledge! But some of the most important things come before you can have any knowledge. You've got to take them on trust."

"Well, I take them on trust."

"From whom?"

"From my mother."

She was surprised. "You remember your mother?"

"Very clearly."

"I didn't know that. What do you remember about her?"

"I remember a good many things--how she looked--the way she talked--the things she did."

"What sort of things were they?"

"That's what I want to tell you about. It's what I think you ought to know."

She allowed her eyes to rest on his calmly. "If you think knowing would make any difference to me--"

"I think it might. It's what I want to find out."

"Then I can tell you now that it wouldn't."

"Oh, but you haven't heard."

"I don't want to hear, unless you'd rather--"

"That you did. That's just what I do. I don't think we can go any farther--I mean with our--" the word was difficult to find--"I mean with our--friendship--unless you do hear."

"Oh, very well! I want you to do what's easiest for you, and if it does make a difference I'll tell you honestly."

"Thank you." For a second, not more, he laid his hand on her muff, the nearest he had ever come to touching her. "We were talking about the things my mother did. Well, they weren't good things. The only excuse for her was that she did them for me, because she was fond of me."

"And you were fond of her?"

"Very; I'm fond of her still. It's one of the reasons--but I must tell you the whole story."

He told as much of the story as he thought she needed to know. Beginning with the stealing of the book from which he had learned to read, he touched only the points essential to bringing him to the Christmas Eve which saw the end; but he touched on enough.

"Oh, you poor darling little boy! My heart aches for you--all the way back from now."

"So you see why I became a State ward. There was nothing else to do with me. I hadn't anybody."

"Of course you hadn't anybody if...."

"If my mother stole me. But you see she didn't. I was her son. I don't want to be anybody else's."

"Only--" she smiled faintly--"you can't always choose whose son you want to be."

"I can choose whose son I don't want to be. That's as far as I go."

"Oh, but still--" She dismissed what she was going to say so as not to drive him to decisions. "At any rate we know what to do about Tad, don't we? And you must work as well as I."

"I will if he gives me a look-in, but very likely he won't."

And yet he got his look-in, or began to get it, no later than that very afternoon.

He had gone to Westmorley Court to give Guy a hand with some work he was doing for his mid-years. On coming out again, a little scene before the main door induced him to hang back amid the shadows of the hall.

Thorne Carstairs was there with his machine, a touring car that had seen service. In spite of his residence in Tuxedo Park, and what Guy had called his stacks of dough, he was a seedy, weedy youth, with the marks of the cheap sport. Tad was there also, insisting on being taken somewhere in the car. Spit Castle being on the spot as a witness to a refusal accompanied by epithets of primitive significance, Tad waxed into a rage. Even to Tom, who knew nothing of the cause of the breach, it was clear that a breach there was. Tad sprang to the step of the car. Thorne Carstairs pushed him off, and made spurts at driving away. Before he could swing the wheel, Tad was on him like a cat. Curses and maulings were exchanged without actual blows, when a shove from Carstairs sent Tad sprawling backward. Before he could recover himself to rush the car again its owner had got off.

There was a roar of laughter from Spit, as well as some hoots from spectators who had viewed the scuffle from their windows. Tad's self-esteem was hurt. Not only had his intimate friend refused to do what he wanted, but he was being laughed at by a good part of Westmorley Court.

He turned to Spit, his face purple. "By God, I'll make that piker pay for this before the afternoon's out."

Hatless as he was, without waiting for comment, he started off on the run. Where he was running nobody knew, and Tom least of all. By the time he had reached the street Tad was nowhere to be seen.

For the rest of the day the incident had no sequel. Tom had almost dismissed it from his mind, when on the next day, while crossing the Yard, he ran into Guy Ansley.

Guy was brimming over. "Heard the row, haven't you?"

Tom admitted that he had not. Guy gave him the version he had heard, which proved to be the correct one. He gave it between fits of laughter and that kind of sympathetic clapping on the back which can never be withheld from the harum-scarum dare-devil playing his maddest prank.

When Tad had run from the door of Westmorley Court he had run to the police station. There he had laid a charge against an unknown car-thief of running off with his machine. He could be caught by telephoning the traffic cops on the long street leading from Cambridge to Boston. He gave the number of the car which was registered in the State of New York. His own name, he said, was Thorne Carstairs; his residence, Tuxedo Park; his address in Boston, the Hotel Shawmut, where he was known and could be found. Having lodged this complaint, and put all the forces of the law into operation, he had dodged back to Westmorley Court, had his dinner sent in from a restaurant, locked his door against all comers, and turned into bed.

In the morning, according to Guy, there had been the devil to pay. As far as Tad was concerned, the statement was literally true. Thorne Carstairs had been locked in the station all night. Not only had he been caught red-handed with a stolen car, but his lack of the license he had neglected to carry on his person, as well as of registration papers of any kind, confirmed the belief in the theft. His look of a cheap sport, together with his tendency to use elementary epithets, had also told against him. Where another young fellow in his plight might have won some sympathy he roused resentment by his howlings and his oaths.

"We know you," he was assured. "Been on the look-out for you this spell back. You're the guy what pinched Dr. Pritchard's car last week, and him with a dyin' woman. Just fit the description--slab-sided, cock-eyed, twisted-nosed fella we was told to look for, and now we've got our claw on you. Sure your father's a gintleman! Sure you live at the Hotel Shawmut! But a few months in a hotel of another sort'll give you a pleasant change."

In the morning Thorne had been brought before the magistrate, where two officials of the Shawmut had identified him as their guest. Piece by piece, to everyone's dismay, the fact leaked out that the law of the land, the zeal of the police, and the dignity of the court had been hoaxed. Thorne himself gave the clue to the culprit who had so outraged authority, and Tad was paying the devil. Guy didn't know what precisely had happened, or if anything definite had happened as yet at all; he was only sure that poor Tad was getting it where the chicken got the ax. He deserved it, true; and yet, hang it all! only a genuine sport could have pulled off anything so audacious.

With this Tom agreed. There were spots in Guy's narrative over which he laughed heartily. He condemned Tad chiefly for going too far. It was his weakness that he didn't know when he had had enough of a good thing. Anyone in his senses might know that to hoax a policeman was a crime. A policeman's great asset was the respect inspired by his uniform. Under his uniform he was a man like any other, with the same frailties, the same sneaking sympathy with sinners; but dress him up in a blue suit with brass buttons on his breast, and you had a figure to awe you. If you weren't awed the fault was yours. Yours, too, must be the penalty. The saving element was that beneath the brass buttons the heart was kindly, as a rule, and humorous, patient, generous. Tom had never got over the belief, which dated from the night when his mother was arrested, of the goodness of policemen. He trusted to it now.

He was not long in making up his mind. Leaving Guy, he cut a lecture to go to see the Dean. He went to the Dean's own house, finding him at home. The Dean remembered him as one of two or three young fellows who in the previous year had adjusted a bit of friction between the freshmen and the faculty without calling on the higher authorities to impose their will. He was cordial, therefore, in his welcome.

He was a big, broad-shouldered Dean, human and comprehending, with a twinkle of humor behind his round glasses. There was no severity in the tone in which he discussed Tad's escapade; there was only reason and justice. Tad had given him a great deal of trouble in the eighteen months in which he had been at Harvard. He had written to his father more than once about the boy, had advised his being given less money to spend, and a stricter calling to account at home. The father was distressed, had done what he could, but the mischief had gone too far. Tad was the typical rich man's son, spoiled by too easy a time. He had been so much considered that he never considered anybody else. He was swaggering and conscienceless. The Dean was of the opinion now that nothing but harsh treatment would do him any good.

Tom put in his plea. The matter, as he saw it, was bigger than one fellow's destiny; it involved bigger issues. It was his belief that the country would soon be at war. If the country was at war, Tad Whitelaw's father would be one of the first of the bankers the President would consult. The Dean knew, of course, that the bankers would have to swing as much of the war as the army and navy. Henry T. Whitelaw was a man, as everyone knew, already terribly tried by domestic tragedy. You wouldn't want to add to that now, just at the time when he needed to have a mind as free as possible. This boy was the apple of his eye; and if disgrace overtook him....

But that was only one thing. Should the country go to war, it would call for just such young fellows as Tad Whitelaw; fellows of spirit, of daring, of physical health and strength. Didn't the Dean think that it might be well to nurse him along for a few weeks--it wasn't likely to be many--so that he could answer to the country's call with at least a nominal honorable record, instead of being under a cloud? If the Dean did think so, he, Tom, would undertake to keep the fellow straight till he was wanted. He wasn't vicious; he was only foolish and headstrong. Though he didn't make a good student, he had in him the very stuff to make a soldier. Tom would answer for him. He would be his surety.

In the long run the Dean allowed himself to be won by Tom's own earnestness. He would do what he could. At the same time Tom must remember that if the college authorities stayed their hand the civil authorities might not. The indignation at police headquarters was unusually bitter. Unless this righteous wrath were pacified....

Having thanked the Dean, Tom ran straight to the police station. The Chief of Police received him, though not with the Dean's cordiality. He too was a big, broad-shouldered man, but frigid and stern through long administration of law, discipline, and order. He impressed Tom as a mechanical contrivance which operates as it is built to operate, and with no power of showing mercy or making exceptions to a rule. Outwardly at least he was grave and obdurate.

The victory lay once more with Tom's earnestness. The Chief of Police made no secret of the fact that they were already considering the grounds on which "the crazy fool" could most effectively be prosecuted. The law was not, however, wholly without a heart, and if in the present instance the country could be served, even in the smallest detail, by giving the blamed idiot the benefit of clemency it could be done. Tom must understand that the nonsense had not been overlooked; it was only left in abeyance. If his protégé got into trouble again he would be the more severely dealt with because of the present lenity.