Don-A-Dreams/Part 2/Chapter 11

by Harvey J. O'Higgins

XI

Although he had been late for supper, Mrs. Stewart had kept him a plate of potatoes and meat warm in the oven, and he had eaten them without thanking her for the trouble she had taken for him, and without paying any attention to her complaint that Conroy had not yet come to the table. And now, shut in his room, he remembered Conroy only to pity him for having missed the ecstasy of such days as this; and looking out over the rustling maples that lined the street and reached their topmost branches almost to the level of his window-sill, he watched the stars brightening peacefully in the dark blue of the sky, above the blind roofs of the houses on the slope below him, feeling himself in tune with the joyful order of the universe and pitying the busy absorption of the inmates of those houses, imprisoned under their shingles, ignorant of the happy night that sparkled above them in its eternal calm. He went over the memory of his afternoon, incident by incident, like a miser counting the day's gains; and he only turned from it to thoughts of a future rich with the golden promise of many such days. The moon swung itself up among the horizon clouds, majestically; and it was no longer to him the skull of a dead world, hung in the heavens as a memento mori to this still warm earth and its inhabitants; it was the moon of lovers, the glimmering summer moon, whose light was all poetry and pallid gentleness and quiet thoughts. He rested his chin in his hands and smiled at it like a boy listening to a fairy tale.

It was midnight before he heard Conroy stumbling up the porch steps. He lit his lamp, and began to unlace his shoes, guiltily aware that Conroy would be surprised to find him up so late. It was this thought that made him ask his cousin, as soon as he came in, "Well, what kept you?" When he received no answer, he looked over his shoulder, smiling confusedly, and saw Conroy standing with his hand on the door-knob, swaying.

His hat was broken and crushed down on his eyes. His necktie was awry, his waistcoat torn open. He swung the door shut with a lurch, and grunted "Uh?"

Don stood up and watched him stumble across the room to his cot and sit down on it heavily. "Wha' kep' me, uh?" He tried to hang his hat on the bed-post, dropped it on the floor, and laughed feebly. "Nothin' kep' me—stayed. Lossofun. As' the Dean wha' kep' me. As' the Dean." He waved his hand. "Fullows said I was 'fraid t'—t'—throw brick through 's window. Uh? Wha' say?"

Don turned his back, sickened by the sight of that imbecile face, with the glazed eyes and the swollen lips.

Conroy mumbled: "You—I'm eck—hic—spelled."

"Expelled!"

"Ever been ek—spelled, uh? Man on each arms 'n legs throw y' over a fence. Lossofun."

It was not until the next morning that Don heard the story from a sick and repentant Conroy. He had won a bet on a 'Varsity baseball game, and with his winnings he had celebrated the victory with Pittsey and some others of the coterie. Pittsey and he had "taken too much." On a "dare" from the others, they two had gone back to Residence and thrown stones, in a drunken folly, through the Dean's windows. They had both been caught, the others escaping in the darkness; the Dean had told them that they might consider themselves expelled from the University; and when they had tried to attack him, they had been put out of the college grounds by the beadle and the janitor and the hired men of the houses. "It was a regular riot," he said weakly, and those d——d cads, after getting us into it, ran away and left us." He turned on his side with his face to the wall, faint with nausea, and he abandoned himself to a sulky despair, refusing to reply to Don's half-hearted attempts to console him with the hope that the affair might be hushed up, and not even speaking when Don said, "I'm going to see the Dean as soon as I've had breakfast."

He had small hope of aiding his cousin, but what hope he had was increased by the Dean's attitude of mind. "I should be very sorry," he said frankly, "to see McLean expelled. I understand, as well as you do, that he has been led into these escapades by older boys than he. But I'm afraid the affair is not in my hands, since it is not a matter of house discipline, your cousin being no longer in Residence. The President already knows of the incident—it was impossible to conceal it—and he will, no doubt, act as he sees fit. I can promise you most willingly that I shall use my influence to have McLean treated leniently, and I should advise you to see the President yourself."

But the President—in his public office with his secretary—standing before his world as the head of the University, had no such paternal view to take of Conroy's offence. He listened to Don's stammering appeal with a stern face. "The Dean," he said curtly. "No! Such drunken vandalism is a disgrace to the University. I will recommend the expulsion of every student whom I can connect with it." And Don left his hope in that office when he went out.

He returned to his room, intending to advise Conroy that he had better hurry home and throw himself on his father's mercy before the Board could meet to pass sentence upon him; but Conroy had dressed and left the house, and Mrs. Stewart did not know where he had gone. Don waited for him all the afternoon, trying to feel worried and depressed, but unable to do so because of the happy thoughts of Margaret that kept singing in his mind like music. And the sum of his reflections was a sentimental foresight that whatever grief or calamity might fall on him in his future, it would strike him only a glancing blow so long as he had her affection to fortify him.

At five o'clock he went to meet her, hastening through the mild sunlight with a rising spirit; and he greeted her with a smile which he concealed hypocritically when he saw her expression. He thought that she had heard the bad news of Conroy.

She said abruptly: "Mrs. Kimball has written to mother." And standing on the street corner, digging the ferule of her parasol into the grass of the "boulevard," she told him of the scene of the previous evening, how Mrs. Kimball had scolded her, how she had defied the woman, how the daughters had taken part with their mother against her, and how, finally, they had written to Mrs. Richardson, refusing to have in their house "any girl who would go unchaperoned into the woods with a 'Varsity student and remain there until after nightfall." She was still defiant, still unrepentant. "I've written, too," she said, "but I know mother 'll not understand. If she doesn't come up here to take me away, she'll write for me to go to her."

"And leave your music?" He had been counting on another month of meetings at the least, to bring her so near to him that she would never be able to go free and forgetful of him again.

"The term is practically over now. There's nothing left but the examinations. I'm not taking them." When she looked up at him, she cried: "Well, it's your own fault! Why didn't you see what time it was?"

He had no thought of defending himself. He was dumb on the edge of the gulf of years—the three years of his college course at the very least—which separated him from New York and the hope of winning her.

His helplessness irritated her; he had been so confident of his plans, under the pine, that she had believed he would see some way of writing to her mother and defending her. "What are you going to do?"

He took out his watch and looked at it dazedly, shaking his head in answer to her question; for it was as if the stroke of the disaster had broken the continuity of his life; and with his future suddenly gone from him, he tried to pick up the broken strands that were left, and found himself wondering simply what day of the week it was and what day the morrow would be.

The sight of her tears brought him to himself. He said hoarsely: "Don't. Don't. I'll fix it. I'll do something. Give me time—to think. It isn't any worse than it was the day I got your mother's letter." He turned her quickly into a side street, talking at random in his attempts to reassure her and almost in tears himself. "It will all come out all right. I'll think of something. Your mother—see the way she came around about the letter. She didn't forbid you to let me call—or anything. Look! Here are some people coming. Don't let them see you——"

She put up her parasol and screened her face from the passers-by. He went the rest of the way in a miserable silence, she holding the parasol down against him too. When he left her at the gate, he pleaded: "I'll know to-morrow. I'll meet you—there. Don't——"

She cut him short with a blind gesture of dismissal. She could not tell him that she had been crying with anger and self-pity because of the insolence of the Kimballs, and with disappointment because he had not thought of any way to defend her from them. She went indoors without a backward glance at him.

He began an interminable walk that led him in circles of thought, around and around, to no plan, to no conclusion, to no hope. She was going to leave him, for three years at least. There was nothing he could do, nothing he could say, to prevent it. She was going to leave him. And would she be waiting for him on the other side of that desert of separation? He was tormented by the fear that she might not. She was going to leave him. And suddenly he felt desperate, in revolt against the fate that was persecuting him, ready to do anything that would break this tyranny of circumstances and set him free to model his life to his desire.

He did not return to the boarding-house for supper, and when he did return he found Conroy and his friend Pittsey, evidently waiting for him, in the room. "Hello!" they greeted his despondence. "What does His Holiness say?"

He sat down, wearily, to tell them of his interviews with "His Holiness"—as they called the Dean—and with the President, whom Pittsey referred to as "Old Skeesicks." And he concluded, in a hopeless resignation that was more for himself than Conroy: "You'd better go home and tell your father, before the Board meets. You'd better not let him hear the first of it from them."

"Not on your life!" Conroy replied. "I'm not going home."

"What are you going to do?"

"I'm going to get out of reach until this blows over." He look at Pittsey as if referring the leadership in their plans to him; and Pittsey, having emptied his lungs of cigarette smoke, exclaimed: "We're going to New York."

Don stared incredulously. Pittsey, with his hat on the back of his head, his chair tilted, smiled an amused challenge to his amazement.

"New—— But—but what are you going to do?"

Conroy replied recklessly: "Oh, we'll find something, I guess. Pittsey is going into newspaper work. He has a brother there. I have enough money to keep me for a month or two—till the governor comes around again."

Don cried: "But supposing he doesn't come round!"

"Well, Great Scott!" Conroy said, "I'm not a three-year-old, and I'm sick of being treated as if I were. This government kindergarten business makes me tired. What's the use of hanging around here for four years? You don't learn anything that'll ever be any good to you. We'll have to strike out for ourselves sometime, and we might as well face it now as any other day!"

Don looked from one to the other, silenced.

"You'll never learn to swim until you go into the water," Pittsey put in airily. He reached a text-book that was lying on Don's table, and began to turn over the leaves. Conroy smoked feverishly. It was evident to Don that their minds were made up. He looked at them almost with envy. They were going to do what he would, too—if he dared.

Then Pittsey, tossing the book back on the table with a gesture of decision, said: "Expelled? We'll expel them! The pompous flat-heads with their machine-made college education, we'll expel them out of our lives. Eh, Mac?" And without bitterness, as if the whole affair were a lark to him, alert and self-assured, he began to make fun of the college, the professors, the lectures, the students, the country—everything that they were leaving; and Conroy listened, fascinated, smiling when Pittsey smiled and agreeing with everything in resolute nods, his teeth bitten into his pipe. "What's the use of staying here?" Pittsey demanded, his close-set black eyes sparkling on Don's gloomy abstraction. "Everything's scaled to the wage of a dollar a day. They keep their savings in an old sock. A fellow never gets an increase in salary until he gets married; and then they raise him every time his wife has a baby. As for literature!" He flicked his cigarette ashes on the floor. "They don't charge you anything for printing your stuff—unless you want to bring out a book. You have to pay for a book. There's money in writing school readers, I understand—and City Directories. If they want anything to read after they leave school, they buy a set of Dickens or Thackeray, and enjoy the latest thing in literature. I'd sooner write ads for a New York department store on a salary of three thousand a year."

Don heard him without heeding him. . . . They were going to New York! At one stroke they were setting themselves free! He crossed his knees to hide a trembling that took him in the legs, standing on the verge of a resolution, afraid of the leap. . . . At a pause in Pittsey's babble, he asked Conroy: "When are you going?"

"I'm waiting for my month's cheque from the governor. It ought to be here Monday. Why?"

Both Pittsey and he saw something in Don's face. They watched him in a puzzled silence. He blinked and swallowed like a boy about to make his first dive. "Well," he said, pale, "I may go with you."

"What!"

"Wha-a-at!"

"I've been thinking of it for some time. . . . I'll never pass these exams. . . . I've been saving every cent I could. ... I had a quarrel with my father at Christmas—about not studying law——" He gulped on his secret, with an expression of beseeching them not to press him for the whole truth.

Pittsey came to his relief with a shrill laugh. "Cæsar's ghost!" he cried. "The three of us. Let's eat on it. Come on. It's my treat. Come on. Have a feed on me at Durkin's." Conroy was staring at his cousin over the pipe which he held, forgotten, at his lips. Eh, Mac?" Pittsey prodded him.

Don smiled tremulously at Conroy, and said, "I—I'm hungry enough."

"Come on, then!"