Don-A-Dreams/Part 2/Chapter 1
I
THEY arrived at the college gates on a late September afternoon, and stood to look across the green at the "Norman pile" which was "'Varsity." Its walls, romantically ivied, rested, as if without foundations, on the perfect level of the lawn; it was flanked, on either wing, by large and solemn oaks; its towers rode in an autumn sunlight that mellowed them with a warm tone—like an old landscape painter's transparent "glaze"—as if rich with culture and ripe with ease; and against the background of the raw civilization around it, that artful imitation of an English University had the effect on Don of the first sight of Rome on a pilgrim. Surprised, in a sort of eager reverence, his lips parted, flushed under the eyes, he looked at it as if he were a young novice come to the studious quiet of a cloister. There was suddenly something beautiful in his face, for although his cheekbones were high and his lips thin, he had that transparent paleness—as clear as fine porcelain—which seems to light up from within at the first glow of enthusiasm; and his eyes, under a boyish wide forehead, were the speaking eyes of a poet.
His cousin—browner, sturdier, his feet firmer on the ground—looked the buildings over with a shadow of distaste. For him, there was something alien and "imported" in the conventional lawns, the perfect oaks, the carved and battlemented grey walls; and he had the same vague feeling of dissatisfaction that was to irritate him again when he heard the careful "English accent" of some of his teachers. But while he was still looking, a "practice team" of young athletes in the dirt-brown costumes of the football field came running out on the campus, "passing" the ball and dodging with it; and Conroy pricked up his interest with a quick change of expression. "Say, Don," he said, "I'll bet that's the 'Varsity team. They've been training all summer."
Don nodded abstractedly.
"Come on," Conroy laughed. "Let's 'get into this game.'"
They were entered by the Registrar on the rolls of the University as "Donald Bailey Gregg, aged 18, Anglican," taking the course in Political Science as a preparation for the study of the law, and "Conroy Gregg McLean, aged 19, Presbyterian," a special student in Modern Languages. In respectful silence they enrolled with the spectacled professors whose lectures they were to attend. They wandered through the panelled corridors of the college buildings, walking almost on tip-toe in their efforts to prevent their heels from clattering on the hardwood floors. They found themselves a boarding-house, and unpacked their books. And Donald did all these things almost without emotion, in a sort of thoughtful dulness, incurious, and perversely sad.
When his cousin went out, after supper, to see the town, he remained in his room, like one of those immigrants who come into the port of their hopes in high spirits, and, having looked over the rail at the strangeness of the land, retire below decks and sit on their trunks, reluctant to go ashore. All the past, which he had put behind him irrevocably, came to him, now, in a more vivid presence than the present itself. The strange room in which he sat "dazing" over his book—as Miss Morris would have said—was lost in the shadows that hung around his lamp; and he was sitting in the room in which he had used to lock himself from Miss Morris's persecutions, the room which he had shared with his imaginary playmate, the room in which he had read his "Faerie Queene," in which he had written his first love-letter, in which he had defied his father, in which he had planned his future and thought to leave his past. Celt that he was, he sat there turning over his recollections like the pages of an old book, slowly idealizing even his most unhappy experiences and seeing all beautiful through the mists of regretful memory.
And that mood was to be the dominant one of his first weeks at college. Conroy was separated from him by the divergence of their studies, and Donald avoided his new classmates as shyly as he had his old. They—the prize students of small towns, the ambitious sons of poor farmers—had come, by the hundreds, to study for the "professions" at the expense of the government, with no pocket-money beyond what paid their board, working for free scholarships with the same untiring labour that had made clearings in the wilderness and forced crops from the very stones. Shiny at the elbows, clumsy in the feet, they had as little wish to cultivate the social graces as he had himself; and, like him, they came from their boarding-house garrets to their morning lectures, and went from the class-rooms to the library and from the library back to the class-rooms diligently all day, and returned at last, blinking through the twilight and loaded down with books, to swallow a hasty supper and begin a long evening's work bent double over the discarded "parlour" tables that stood beside their boarding-house beds.
Conroy, of course. Joined the ranks of the more leisured students who had time for athletics, college clubs and fraternal societies. He became what was called, in the student slang, "a sport"; whereas Don was already marked as one of the "plugs." The sports had a sharp contempt for these latter—round-shouldered and bilious word-grubbers who worked like convicts and gave the University the atmosphere of a penal institution—and Conroy began to be ashamed of his cousin when they met on the lawns. "You're getting to be an awful fish," he remonstrated, one night in their room. "A man doesn't come to college just for the books. You ought to do something to keep up the—the college spirit."
He, himself, had learned to smoke a "bulldog" briar; he wore a class pin conspicuously on the lapel of his coat; he had an inch of college ribbon sewed in the band of his hat; he had caught the tone of almost brutal frankness which his new companions used in their social relations with one another. And Don, looking up from his work, saw anew the distance that had widened between them, and could not speak across it.
"I'm not plugging," he tried to defend himself. "I'm reading outside of my course."
"Rats!" Conroy retorted. "That's what they always say."
Don rearranged his books impatiently. "That cant about the college spirit is a trifle stale itself."
"Oh, is it?... You have a cheek to accuse me of canting."
"You shouldn't accuse me of being a plug."
"I didn't."
Don's hand trembled as he turned up his lamp. He was not timid in a quarrel, but he was afraid of making a violent end of this friendship that was already too weak to bear the slightest rupture. He did not speak.
Conroy turned his back on the table and stood frowning disgustedly at the shabby discomfort of the room. "We should have gone into Residence," he said, "instead of coming to this hole.... If I can get a room there, will you come?"
"I can't afford it. Can't you get one of the other boys to take a room with you?"
"I don't know," Conroy answered. "I might."
He had, in fact, already talked the matter over with a sophomore, who had advised him to join "the Residence gang" if he wished a place in the football team; and Don guessed as much from the tone in which Conroy had said "I might." When his cousin went out rather guiltily, he turned, almost with relief, to the page of his book.
He had come to college with a conception of the universe which he had formed, as a boy, in the Sabbath school, accepting as literally true all the symbols of his religion. And the first lectures in biology and geology had come on him like Miss Morris's first criticisms of his childish fancies. But now, instead of an infantile resentment of change, he had a young man's eagerness for knowledge; he did not pause to examine what he was learning; he hurried along, blindly, with a pathetic trust in the guidance of his teachers, assured that he was rising above his boyish ignorance of Science to the serene heights of wisdom and broad views of life.
In the absorption of such a progress, all his cousin's noisy claims on his time were a trivial interruption. He received calmly the news that Conroy had found a room-mate in the University Residence. And he sat down alone to his studies, on the night after Conroy's removal, like a philosophic anchorite to his meditations.
He had had two startling shocks within the week—one in a biological lecture that had ended a long series of proofs of the kinship of man with the animals by discussing the intimate physiological relation between man and the anthropoid apes; and the other in a geological lecture in which the professor, having put down the tooth of a mammoth and dusted the black-board chalk from his hands, had announced, smiling: "We come, now, to the first appearance, so far as we know, of an animal that by reason of a superior development of its brain was destined to subjugate all the other members of the animal kingdom—the animal which we know as Man." And Donald had been facing the picture of his own infinite littleness in the mighty scheme of a universe which had existed so many ages before the first appearance of that prehistoric animal, the first Man, and which would exist when all the inhabitants of the modern world were fossil remains to an endless future of geologists.
In his later years he was to consider that this same brave Science had once taught confidently that the stars were set in crystal spheres revolving tunefully about the earth, that it had prescribed dissolved pearls as a medicine, and believed the liver to be the seat of love. But now he saw only that his teachers had led him to confront a terrible query—a query which for days he had been afraid to face. If it were true that Man was only an animal of a superior development of brain, and if all animals died the everlasting death?
In the hope of finding an answer to that query, he had been reading hungrily and in the large. Now he was gulping the conclusions of a materialist who had just said the last word on Science and Immortality; and the book had led him to the plain edge of the depths for which he had hoped it would find him a bridge— and had left him standing there.
When he looked up from the final page of the volume, he felt lonely. He missed his cousin from the room.
He rose from his chair and began to pace up and down with a frightened restlessness. He halted, staring at the cheerful glow of his "student" lamp, and finding it, in some strange way, a tragically small light in the vast darkness of the night. He turned with a quiver, struck cold again by the thought that was crouching, like a terror, in his brain. If it were true that death?
Suddenly, he smiled—the ghastly smile of a man trying to deride his fear. It was impossible that all this immense activity of civilization—all this labour and art and learning, all this doing and suffering, all this loving and nobility, praying and aspiring of man—was the chattering business of a world of untailed apes. God would not
His smile set on his mouth in a fixed grimace in which there was no mirth. His eyes slowly narrowed and shut as if he had been stricken with a pain in the temples. He jerked back his head, and threw his hands up to his face.
When the stroke had passed, he was on his knees beside his bed, praying—praying with the fervour of a condemned man who has suddenly realized the whole meaning of the sentence of death, praying with the increasing feverishness of doubt, praying against the thought that his prayers were addressed to the deaf heaven of Science that is hung with barren stars and the cold night of endless emptiness. He stopped and looked up, his jaw fallen, as if listening to the echo of his own whisper on the dead silences, his eyes fixed in a frightened despair—for it seemed to him, now, in his newly critical view of his faith, that he had been believing in another Santa Claus.