Don-A-Dreams/Part 2/Chapter 9
IX
He lay, for the next few days, dosed with quinine and aconite, his ears ringing, his eyes two balls of pain in his head, his body so sore that he turned himself in bed as carefully as a man just released from the rack. And every aching minute of thought made the situation clearer to him. He had lost her, and he had lost her to Conroy. She had never been more than friendly; the last week had been marked by a growing indifference; she had avoided him, finally, when he went to meet her; and she had received Conroy, had given him her photograph, had allowed him to kiss her, and had turned angrily on him when he came to accuse her of it. How dare he accuse her! What right had he to accuse her! She would never speak to him, she would never see him, again.
The pang of it was not the "pang of disprized love"; he had always known that she did not prize his clumsy devotion. And it was not the sting of wounded vanity—which is so large a portion of a rejected lover's smart—for Don was neither an egotist nor a sentimentalist. It was the pain of a boyish despair, of a lost ideal, of a wrecked hope, of a maimed life. He saw himself living blank days, in aimlessness and regret. He knew that he could never recover from the loss of her; he would bear the scar of it to his lonely grave. He was too old to take root in a new affection. Yes, he was almost twenty, now. It was too late. He was a failure and a castaway in life.
By the time he was convalescent, he was also resigned, though he sat in his room like a life-prisoner in his cell. The familiar walls, in their faded paper streaked with the leak of rains, shut out the world that had persecuted him. He would study here, happy among his books; he would become a university professor, devote his life to learning, and be safe behind grey-stone walls covered with ivy. One room would suffice for him—even a room like this, though it should have a study chair and a desk like his father's and a student's couch, instead of this old oval parlour table, this dining-room chair upholstered in imitation leather and sagging in the seat, and this yellow, boarding-house bed, machine-carved, with a varnish scalded to a milky white where the cleanly housekeeper had used boiling water on it. He would never be happy again, but he would be quiet and contented.
It was in this mood that he received Conroy—sitting with a black bandage over his eyes, for the influenza had weakened them and he was not allowed to use them yet. And Conroy, guiltily silent about the scene in the room at Residence, did not tell him that Margaret had refused to see him, too, as a result of that incident; he contented himself with awkward inquiries about Don's departing pains, and left a bag of oranges as a peace-offering when he went.
Don ate them stolidly. He had seen enough in his cousin's room to understand that Conroy was wasting himself in dissipations, and doing it with that ridiculous bravado of college boys who take to cards and beer-bottles as a schoolboy takes to tobacco. But, after all, that was a part of the life which Conroy had chosen, and it was his own affair. He could fight his own battles. He had her to help him now!
"Well, my young man," the doctor said, "I am leaving you a tonic. Take more exercise with it and less books. You're not within fifteen pounds of your proper weight, and if I'm called in here again, I'll send you home to your parents. The day after to-morrow, if it's bright, you may go out of doors—and stay out." He took Don by the shoulders and shook him playfully. "The man who built this room didn't suppose anyone would be fool enough to try to live in it, do you understand?"
Don laughed.
"Well, if your eyes bother you, come and see me. Good-bye."
He passed through the doorway and out of Don's life, as doctors do.
She did not write. When he went out, he did not try to meet her. He returned to his old round of lectures, library studies, solitary walks and lonely evenings. He underlined, in his volume of Emerson's poems, the verse:
"Though thou loved her as thyself,
As a self of purer clay,
Though her parting dims the day,
Stealing grace from all alive,
Heartily know
When half-gods go,
The gods arrive."
With a robustness of spirit which had once charmed his cousin in their younger days, he set his face to a new future and a new ideal. She had been but a "half-god" after all. Perhaps some day, when he was rich in academic honours and professorially wise, he would meet such a woman as he had thought her to be—a woman tall and dark and pale whose smile would always be somewhat melancholy and who would see life as the mystery which it was to him. Meanwhile, the year's examinations were approaching, and he knew that he was not prepared to meet them. He drank his bitter tonic and studied doggedly.
He met Conroy in the corridors as often as ever, and saw that the young gentleman's eyes were frequently bloodshot, his colour bad and his manner nervous. Coming out of the college grounds, one April morning, he saw Margaret approaching him at a distance, slowly, and he turned back, wincing, and crossed the campus to another gate. He took a volume of Emerson on his walks, and read under the pines, on the side of one of those north-eastern ravines which the heavy snows had made impassable to him since the early winter. And lying on his back under the branches, he shut his eyes on the light and projected himself upward past the sun and the stars and the entire universe as he conceived it, till these were all flying far below him, like a cloud of glittering insects, in an unceasing and meaningless whirl; and then he turned himself around suddenly on the void of space, and tried to imagine where all these tiny creatures had flown from, where they would alight, from what eggs they had been hatched, and in what nest; and finding them afloat without any origin which his imagination could picture—with nothing above them, nothing below them, and on all sides nothing from which they had come or to which they could return—a fear seized him, an almost physical fear of dropping, as if in the darkness of a nightmare, into this unfathomable mystery in the midst of which he lived; and he opened his eyes on the sunlight with a start, his forehead wet with perspiration, taking his breath in a tremor and feeling the round world swimming below him like a great balloon which might, at any moment, burst and fall into the shuddering depths that were below it.
One night, late in April, Conroy came into the room, took off his brown derby and his spring overcoat, sat down on the side of the bed and said: "Well, I've come to stay."
Don looked up at him and closed his text-book. "What do you mean?"
"I've been put out of Residence."
Don raised the shade of his lamp to get the light on his cousin's face, and then quickly dropped the shadow down over him again. One glimpse of the faltering challenge of that twisted smile was sufficient. He reached his pen-knife and began snapping the blade back and forth against the flat of his thumb.
"The Dean's been after me ever since I went in—and he caught me last night—celebrating Pittsey's birthday—with some of the boys—the sneak! And I told him he was, too," he boasted, "and if he'd said much more I'd 've run him out of the room. You'd think we were a lot of girls in a boarding-school. What harm is there in a game of cards?"
"You're not supposed to bring . . . liquor into Residence, are you?"
"And that's another thing! We're old enough to take care of ourselves, and we've as much right to drink what we like as he has. A bottle of champagne isn't going to kill us."
"Haven't you been doing too much of that sort of thing?"
"What sort of thing?"
"Beer, champagne, 'pop' generally."
Conroy stood up. "I didn't come here to be lectured by you, either. If you don't want me here, say so. There are plenty of other rooms."
"Well." Don put down his knife. "You're old enough to know what you're doing. I've said all I intend to say about it. . . . If you sleep with me to-night, I suppose we can get the big front room to-morrow."
Conroy seated himself again sulkily, holding an ankle on his knee and frowning at the floor.
Don asked: "What will your father say?"
"He needn't know—unless you tell him."
Don passed the insult unanswered; he was thinking of Margaret. Conroy added unexpectedly: "You were quick enough to tell her."
"Yes. . . . You needn't be afraid. I'll not tell her."
"A lot I care whether you do or not."
Don took the eyeshade which he had been wearing at work since his illness, and put it on; it covered his face like the peak of a cap drawn down over his eyes. "I only told her because I didn't believe it. If I had supposed it was true, I shouldn't have troubled myself."
Conroy grunted. "You made a deuce of a lot of trouble out of nothing."
"That's all the thanks I got for it. . . . Where's your stuff?"
"In my rooms."
Thereafter, they talked perfunctorily about moving their trunks and making their arrangements with Mrs. Stewart; but the tone in which Don had spoken about the "thanks" he had received for his interference in the affair of the photograph, stuck in Conroy's thought; and when they were undressing for bed together, in a more friendly sympathy, he asked suddenly: "When did you see her last?"
Don replied: "I haven't seen her at all."
"Since when?"
"Since that night—with the photograph."
After a silence, Conroy said: "I met her on the street while you were sick, and told her what was the matter with you. I think she asked because she was wondering why you hadn't been around to call."
"Well, you were mistaken."
"She asked me again, a few weeks ago—at a public lecture."
Don said, to end the discussion: "She told me, that night, that she'd never speak to me again."
Conroy laughed. "Oh, I know. She told me that, too. She got over her 'mad' three weeks ago. You ought to go and look her up."
Don blew out the lamp, abruptly, without replying, and came slowly to bed, where he lay silent with his thoughts.
But Conroy, moved to confidences in the dark, like a schoolgirl in bed with her room-mate, began to confess himself to his cousin with a sort of tentative frankness that seemed always on the point of ending in the silences which interrupted it, but which broke out afresh after every pause. And behind the halting sentences, Don could see how the son of the merchant, come among these "sports" whom he admired and tried to imitate, had never been accepted by them, because of the home training which had left him ignorant of wines and theatres and low talk of women; how he had toadied to them and spent his money on them, and they had despised him for it; how he had brought liquor to his rooms for them, and helped to drink it in a mean ambition to prove himself as much a man of the world as any of them; how he had even made his boast about the photograph with the same aim, and how they had gleefully betrayed him to his cousin as soon as they saw that the betrayal would humiliate him. "They're a lot of cads, Don—that gang. You should hear them talk about the girls they know. And they sponge on you for everything, and try to get you drunk. And when you get into trouble they won't stand by you. Pittsey was the best of the whole crowd, and he hadn't a good word to say for any of them."
Don listened with a divided mind, trying to repress the stirring of a hope which would not be still. . . . She had quarrelled with Conroy, too, about the photograph. She had been asking Conroy about him. She had been thinking of him all these weeks, and expecting to see him. Perhaps she had come to meet him that morning when he had turned back from her at the college gate. . . . He said to Conroy, smiling absent-mindedly in the darkness: "You're well out of there, anyway. If the Dean doesn't write home about it"
"No, he'll not do that. He said he wouldn't. He said he thought I should leave Residence, but that no one need know why. He talked a lot of punky cant—about doing it for my own good. He's a snivelling codfish, anyway. All the boys loathe him."
"Well, we'd better get a sleep now. Good-night."
"Good-night. . . . I'll get even with him some day."
He was breathing in a heavy stupor of sleep when Don was still lying awake, smiling at the blackness, open-eyed.