Don-A-Dreams/Part 1/Chapter 7
VII
The months that followed are no more to be described than the love-fancies of a girl. The boy worked over his books with a mind that was in a mist, and as soon as he was free of school he went to his make-believe meetings like an opium-eater to his dreams. Of what he did there, of what he thought there, he wrote her not a word. He filled his letters with news of the acquaintances whom she had left in Coulton—particularly of Conroy, for whom she inquired. Her own letters were made up of apologies for not being able to write more frequently and of accounts of her boating and bathing and picnicking about the lake. It was a boy and girl correspondence, more idle than chatter. He told her that Dexter was "not very well"; that the stream in the ravine had almost dried out to a trickle because a farmer had dammed it up to make a pool for his cows; that the church had been struck by lightning; that he was writing on his "exams." She sent him blue-print pictures of herself in a group of cottages on the beach. He pasted them in an old "Composition Book " with her letters.
When his examinations were finished and his school closed, he began to make plans. He would go up to the University for four years. Then he would take his course in the law school and accept a call to the bar. As soon as he had set up his office, they would be married. He would work till four o'clock every day at his cases—just as he did now at school—but at four o'clock sharp, he would hurry home to her, and they would go for a little walk before supper, and after supper he would read to her until it was time for her to go to bed. It was to be a feather bed, like his mother's. He would kiss her good -night, there, before he went upstairs to his attic.
He could no more have told her of all this than he could have told Conroy. But Dexter's illness ended suddenly—he was found dead on the lawn one August morning—and Don turned to her for consolation. His grief was not as bitter as it would have been six months earlier, but it left him with a feeling that he had only her now. She wrote back, in girlish sympathy, that she wished she were with him in Coulton, or he at the lake with her; that none of the boys were as nice as he. And Don, on the impulse of loneliness, shut himself up in his room and wrote his first love-letter.
He told her that he was to spend four years at college, three years at the law school, and then perhaps a year in which to get up a practice. (He had heard his father say it took a long time to work up a practice.) He did not wish to bind her—or anything like that—but if she would just write to him, and let him see her sometimes, and remember that he was waiting for her, he would not care how long he waited or how hard he worked. He would work so hard that they would be rich, and be able to travel, and have a cottage at the lake to spend their summers in. He would not care if he were never famous—unless, of course, she wished him to be. All he wanted was to make her happy. He felt he could do that because he—he hesitated a long time over the word; he had never known anyone to use it outside of a book. But there was no other word for it; he understood that women expected a man to say it; and with a tremulous pen he wrote it—because he loved her.
He signed it, blushing like a girl, and then he turned his back on the window, put his head down, and shamefacedly kissed the paper. He ran out to post it, so as to have it away from his eyes as soon as possible; and he sat down to wait for the reply.
He was still waiting when his father, coming home from his office early, sent the maid upstairs to tell Don that he was wanted in the library. He went downstairs frightened. His father was sitting by his smoking-table with a newspaper in his hand. "Well," he said, "you've failed in your examinations."
Don's first thought was that it would postpone his marriage.
"Mr. McCutcheon tells me that your work during the Spring term was uniformly bad."
Postpone his marriage! What would she say to that?
"I think I warned you that—what would happen if you continued to waste your time. Your brother has passed his examinations at the head of his class."
To work hard! To get rich! He had failed at the very beginning!
"I don't intend to sacrifice his future to yours. I told you I could not send you both to college." He threw down the paper decisively. "I will get you a position down town—in a bank, if I can."
"But—but," Don stammered.
His father turned away. He was used to courtroom scenes. He was sorry; but he knew that his decision was wise.
Don stood, stupefied with the horror of the disaster. Then he ran for his room, stumbling up the stairs, holding his breath, in a desperate attempt to get out of sight before he lost control of himself.
The little room that had hidden so many of his boyish griefs sheltered this one too; but it was to be the last. For though he cried like a child for five despairing minutes, he jumped up then, and shook his fists at the door, and sobbed: "No! No, you won't!... No, you won't! No, you won't!" He was engaged to be married; his first duty was to his wife. He had promised her that he would go to college—and be a lawyer. His father stop him?
He laced up his shoes, washed his face frantically, and hurried out. He bought a newspaper and found that he had been "starred" in mathematics. He could write it off in the Supplemental Examination. His father stop him?
He came into his aunt's sitting-room—at the other side of the town—with his cap set awry on his head, pale, and with a face that startled her. "Why, Don!" she said.
He took the newspaper from his pocket. "I've failed in my examination—in mathematics." His voice shook, but not with tears. "Father says I can't go to college. If I promise to pay you back, will you lend me the money?"
"Don!" She started toward him.
He backed away; it was no time for caresses. "I can write off the mathematics at the Supplementals. I know I can. I must—I must go." His voice failed him.
"What a shame!" she cried. "Oh! To do such a thing!"
"He says he can't send us both—that Frankie"
"John!" she called to her husband. "John!" He was already at the door. "What do you think? Roger—he has refused to let Don go to college now. He says Frankie"
"He says he can't send us both. He says Frankie"
Mr. McLean came slowly into the room. "Well," he said, "isn't that like him?" He did not love the lawyer.
"I failed in mathematics. I could write it off in September if he'd let me. He—he says he'll get me a place in a bank."
His uncle snorted contemptuously. "In a bank. Isn't that like him?"
"He shan't do it!" she cried. "What a shame! He's always been like this about Don. And Frankie"
"If I could borrow the money," Don pleaded, his under-lip beginning to tremble. "I—I could pay it back."
His uncle looked at him keenly; he swallowed and stood up to it. "How much?"
He shook his head; he could not trust his voice.
His uncle flicked an imaginary speck of dust off his coat front. "Hmmm. Go ahead with your examinations." He took off Don's cap for him, and patted him on the shoulder. "Go ahead and do your work." And when Don had stammered through his thanks and got himself out of the room again, his uncle said: "That—that brother of yours! What's the matter with him anyway? Educate a boy that way—and then put him in a bank! What use would anything he knows be in a bank?" He added, after a moment's thought: "I'll send Conroy with him, too. He can take some special course. He ought to be allowed to see for himself about how much good this college business is."
They had noticed a change in the timid Don; and his father also noticed it at the evening meal: for though Don did not speak, neither did he sulk; he was thoughtful, without being depressed; and he left the table before his father in violation of the parental rule. He said nothing of the scene with his aunt—except to his mother. Her, he told, dry-eyed and resolute, and she listened with an invalid's helplessness, and wept over him. "Your father means it for the best, Don," she pleaded. "I know he does. He thinks you would be better at work."
"I have to go to college," Don said; and that was all he would say.
He went to his room, and remained there, waiting. He was working at his mathematics when his father came in. "So ... you have gone to your uncle for money."
Don answered, with his heart in his mouth: "I have to go to college. I don't care how I get there." He did not look up. He drew a shaking line under the problem he had finished, and turned the page to the next.
His father took one quick stride into the room—and stopped. He had never struck Don since that 24th of May. He tried to be strictly just with his boys, and he expected to be strictly obeyed. He saw the defiance in his son's face. "Very good," he said. And without another word, he went out.
Don worked until midnight. Then he took her note from his breast pocket, and knelt down to his prayers with it clasped in his hands. When he went to bed, it was under his pillow.
Two evenings later he received a reply to his love-letter. It was from Mrs. Richardson. "My dear Donald," it read. "Margaret, of course, has shown me your letter. You are both too young to think of such things for years yet. Certainly Margaret is, and I do not wish her to think of them until she has finished her schooling, at least, and is old enough to know her own mind. You have your studies to attend to, and I do not think that either of you should waste your time in sentimental correspondence. When you have taken your degree—however, it is better not to think of it. You are both much too young. I was sorry to hear that your pretty dog had died. Remember me to your aunt. I have asked Margaret not to write. I know you will be a sensible boy and understand."
He read it a second time, with the face of a bankrupt. Then he put it away quietly, and returned to his mathematics. At ten o'clock he took it out again, and slowly tore it to pieces, his lips shut thin and tight.
And Donald was no longer a boy.
He was no longer a boy; and for the time he was no longer a lover. It was as if, having eaten a sickly-sweet Eastern poison, he had come out of dreams and delirium weak and shaken; and the mere thought of the girl gave him an almost physical sensation of empty nausea that sent him, hungrily, to his work. He avoided the books, the walks and the associations that might remind him of her. He grappled with his mathematics in a renewal of mind that rejoiced in its own keenness. He avoided even solitude—except the busy solitude of his studies—and returned to the wholesome companionship of his cousin without any reference to what had separated them. His father, secretly proud of the unexpected determination and independence which his son had shown, watched him in a silence that gave consent to the boy's ambition, but held aloof in a desire to confirm this new strength of spirit by doing nothing to prop it.
It was his mother who gave him word that he would be allowed to go to college, and be maintained there as long as he passed the examinations in his course. It was she who packed his trunk—sitting in her chair and wrapping all his things, needlessly, in tissue paper as white as her own hands—with the eyes of a mother who is sending her boy into those spiritual wars of the world which have made her husband a stranger to her. And it was she, unseen, who still waved good-bye to him from the window when he turned, with Conroy, at the street corner, and saw only the old house standing there, strangely dead and mute, a thing of the past already, all the glow of young expectation gone from it into the unknown scenes to which he was hastening.