Don-A-Dreams/Part 2/Chapter 8
VIII
That began the struggle between his romantic ideals and his natural instincts; and it began a week of constraint and strangeness in his manner toward her; and it ended by making her fear that he was bored by her, that he was no longer interested in her small talk, walking with her through the melting snows or freezing rains of March in a depressing silence that was either absent-minded or worse. She contrasted the stupidity of these meetings with the gallantry of his cousin's evenings, and she knew that the difference was not in her. And Don, unable to respond to her little coquetries, because he was clinging to the high solemnity of adoration which he brought to her from his solitary thoughts, felt the estrangement between them and worried over it in a silence that increased her discouragement.
When, at the end of the week, she found herself with a cold which kept her from her lesson, she made no effort to let him know that he would not find her coming home at the usual hour. She told herself that if he wished to break with her, it would serve as an excuse; and if he did not, it would bring him to his senses. With a young girl's cruelty, she was willing to punish affection in order to prove it; and she remained in the house, reading her books and practising her music, and noting with a somewhat guilty satisfaction that it was storming on him out of doors.
Don passed and repassed the gate of the Conservatory a dozen times in the half-hour that he waited for her, wet to the knees with the cold slant of rain that blew under his umbrella, chilled with loitering and downcast with disappointment. He returned to his room, as miserable as if he had missed his dinner, and sat down in his wet clothes, wondering what had happened to her, and unable to get his mind away from the gap which her absence had left in his day. It was not until he had had his supper and shut himself in with his books, that he regained his usual cheerfulness in the expectation of seeing her on the morrow; and he went to bed early to escape the shivering dampness of his room and to hasten the arrival of their next meeting by sleeping through as much as possible of the interval.
Although he suffered, next day, with a heavy aching in his back and his legs, he went to intercept her earlier than usual, in the fear that he might have been late on the previous afternoon; and in a piercing wind that pricked him as if with tiny needles of ice through his clothes, he watched for her for an hour, until the horrible certainty that she must be ill and unable to send him word hurried him home in a panic of anxiety, resolved to call and inquire for her that night. By this time his head was aching with the fever of influenza and he was half choked with a sore throat. He gulped his supper, unable to taste it, and hurried out to get Conroy to accompany him to the Kimball house.
It was a dripping black night, foggy and cold, with hidden pools in the crossings and feeble street lamps to see them by. He splashed through them in anxious haste, holding—with a bare hand—his overcoat closed on the aperture of a missing button at the neck. He made a short cut across the college campus through the sodden grass, and came to the Residence wing like the midnight caller for a country doctor in a matter of life and death. He saw a light in Conroy's window as he swung under the arch that opened on the "quadrangle." He heard a shout of songs as he sprang up the stairs of the "house" in which Conroy lived; and when he came to his cousin's door, he knocked before he understood that the singing was in Conroy's room.
There was a sudden silence inside. It was followed by a hasty shuffle. In a moment, someone shouted: "Come in!"
He opened the door on a group of students seated at a table, with pipes and cigarettes, in the circle of a lamplight that was so strong in their eyes they could not see him in the shadow. He stood on the threshold. "Who is it?" Conroy asked, peering against the light.
"It's—I want to speak to you a minute, Con."
"Oh, it's you! Come in here, you monk, you old hermit! All right, boys." He put back on the table an ale bottle which he had hidden under his chair, and the others brought out their glasses from between their knees and their playing cards from their pockets. "Come in here and shut the door. Get us another glass, Pittsey. Come in here and shut the door. Come on. Come in here."
Don obeyed from mere irresolution, and his cousin welcomed him with a flushed hilarity which Don, for the moment, attributed to nervousness. "Dry yourself at the fire. Bring another bottle of 'pop,' Pittsey. Whose ante is it?"
Someone replied contemptuously: "Give me three cards. We're all in a week ago."
"All right," Conroy went on, unabashed. "Here goes. They're off in a bunch. Hang your coat on the floor, Don."
But Don, standing before the blaze in the grate, with his back to the table, was facing a smiling photograph of Margaret Richardson on the mantelpiece. It was a picture finished and mounted, and not a mere "proof"; he remembered that, on the afternoon on which he had last seen her, she had said she expected her photographs to come home on the following day; and he understood that Conroy must have seen her since that time. He took down the picture and turned it over to find it dated in her handwriting "March 22." Then she had not been ill.
"Look out there, McLean," one of the boys chaffed, "Gregg's trying to get away with your girl."
The boy who was named Pittsey—a youth of literary pretensions, in a dressing-gown—called out: "Which one? Not the prettiest girl he ever kissed!"
Conroy attempted to silence them with a frantic expression of face. They shouted gleefully, scenting game, and prepared to pursue it with all the barbarism natural to the young collegian.
"Don't be shy now, McLean."
"A kiss and a cuddle, wasn't it?"
"It's the girl that plays the piano with one hand while he holds the other. Give him another pint of pop and hell tell us all about it again."
Don turned, horrified. Conroy was trying to carry an expression of unconscious innocence, but it broke in a befuddled and foolish smile. "Oh, shut up, you clams," he said. "That's not the girl."
They howled. "See him blush!" "Who's a liar?" "Didn't you tell us, when you brought in that picture"
One of the boys rose oratorically. "Gentlemen, this is a question of veracity which, I may say, affects us all. Either the accused did or did not kiss the lady. If he did not, then he is guilty of slander, false witness, breach of truth and attempted oscular embezzlement, and he owes us and the photograph an apology." (In vain Conroy tried to stop him.) "His present manner is the demeanour of guilt. I move that if he did not kiss said maiden lady, he be compelled to go down on his knees before the counterfeit presentment thereof and sing the Doxology."
Conroy attempted to escape, but those nearest caught him before he was free of his chair and forced him down in it and held him there. "Oh, say, fellows," he pleaded, "don't be a lot of d"
The others closed in on him, laughing like a circle of savages about a torture. It was evident from their manner that while they accepted Conroy's hospitality, they were accustomed to make him the butt of their sport. "Guilty or not guilty?"
"None of your business," he gasped.
The orator raised his voice. "The prisoner refuses to plead. This is a case for the thirty-third degree as it is administered to Freshmen. Will someone kindly bring a hair-brush. Remove the prisoner's"
Conroy screamed, "Not guilty!"
Then to an accompaniment of uproarious laughter and in a confusion of voices and above a continual scuffling and crowding for place, the examination continued:
"Did you, or did you not, kiss the same and aforesaid maiden lady?"
"Yes."
"Where?"
"Oh, go to grass."
"On the ear?"
Conroy did not answer. A dozen willing hands attacked the buttons of his waistcoat. "No!" he shouted.
"On the eye?"
"No."
"On the mouth?"
There was no answer. Another attack on his buttons brought out a frantic "Yes!"
The orator reached a "mortar-board," and put it on as if it had been the "black cap" of a hanging judge. "The prisoner is convicted. He has insolently and without warrant impugned the veracity of this august body. He is condemned to be taken from this place to the mantelpiece, and there compelled to go down on his knees and imprint a chaste salute upon the lips of the lady's photograph in our united presence. Pittsey, you will hold the photograph."
But the photograph had disappeared, and Donald had gone with it.
He rang the Kimball bell and faced the arrival of the maid in a tense tremble. "May I—is Miss Richardson in? I have something—a message I wish to give her—if she's not too ill."
The maid held the door open. "She's not so sick. Won't you come in?"
He entered the vestibule. "No. I can't wait. I'm too wet. I'll stay here. Tell her Gregg"
She caught the suppressed excitement of his manner, and hurried away without closing the door, alarmed by the prospect of some bad news for the girl, whom she liked.
He remained staring at a tiny stream of water that had trickled from some wet umbrellas in the rack and shone on the linoleum in a pool as red as blood under the light of the crimson gas-globe overhead.
"Why!—won't you come in?"
He looked up at her slowly and shook his head. "I've been over with Conroy. They had this picture." He held it out shakily, "They were making fun of it"
"I don't . . . understand."
His face was drawn in a white mask that showed like a grotesque in the crimson light. His eyes were glittering. He asked hoarsely: "Did he?"
"Did he what?"
"Did he . . . kiss you?"
She turned over the photograph. Then she looked up with a nervous smile that was a faint attempt to return the whole matter to the frivolous light in which she had seen it. "Well, he—I couldn't help it. He—we were . . . cutting up."
He turned around without a word and started out the open door.
"Wait," she said sharply. "I don't understand Why do you come here with"
He answered, without lifting his head: "He was boasting of it to a lot of boys. I didn't believe it. I didn't believe you would—do that sort of thing."
"Well!" she cried defiantly. "You tried to do it too!"
"Yes," he said. "I tried to do it too. Good-bye."
She followed him out to the darkness of the porch impetuously, and caught him by the sleeve. "Wait," she said. "You can't—I won't have you come here, like this. What is it? How dare you . . . accuse me! I"
He was so overwhelmed with the shame of that scene in Conroy's room that he could not argue with her, he could not look at her. He said, in a low, stifled voice: "You shouldn't have done it. I didn't think you They made fun of you. He was boasting of it." He shuddered with cold and sickness and misery. "I thought you were—above that."
She flung his arm from her. "Go away!" she choked. "Go away! I'll never see you—I'll never speak to you again." He went down the steps. She slammed the door on him. He walked home, stiffly erect, through a cold rain that pelted him with derision and the downfall of his ideals.
It was to him as bitter a disenchantment as personal grossness and infidelity and an open scandal would have been to an older man. He returned to the desecrated solitude of his room—the room that had been the sanctuary of his worship—like a priest to a wrecked and empty altar. Without lighting his lamp, he threw himself on his bed in his clothes, shaking with chills and fever, the pulse beating in his ears, his brain swimming, his mind numb with exhaustion and staggering in the whirl of delirium.
There was the small trickle of blood forming in a pool on the linoleum of the vestibule floor, and he stared at it dully, wondering what she would say when he told her that he had killed his cousin. . . . His father, on the bench, put on a black "mortar-board" solemnly, and having condemned him to death, borrowed a match from the grinning jury and struck a light for his pipe. . . . From the barred window of his prison, he saw his mother in her invalid chair, with little Mary in her arms and Frankie at her side, going to the execution, his father wheeling her, a picnic-basket at her feet; and she looked up at him with a face of grief that set him screaming and sobbing frantically and beating on the floor with his fists. Someone knocked on the door of his cell, and called "Donnie? Donnie?" in Nannie's voice. There was a light in the doorway. He sat up in bed and saw Mrs. Stewart, his boarding-house mistress, with a lamp in her hand, all in white, a shawl over her shoulders, standing at the foot of the bed. He said weakly, "I'm sick."
The rest was a hurry of women in the room—someone taking off his shoes, a steaming glass at his lips, a mustard plaster on his chest—and in the wan light of the morning a man with a black beard saying: "Nothing much yet. A touch of pneumonia, perhaps. Bring me a glass of water. . . . One of these every half-hour for the next four hours. Two of the others every hour until further orders. ... La grippe principally. He'll be all right."