The Guarded Heights Part 12

George's flush was not pretty.

"I'll not be a servant," he snapped.

"It's no disgrace," Bailly said, mildly.

"It is--for me."

He didn't like Bailly's long, slightly pained scrutiny. There was no use keeping things from him anyway.

"I can trust you, Mr. Bailly," he said, quickly, and in a very low voice, as if the walls might hear: "I know you won't give me away. I--I was too much like a servant until the day I came to Princeton. I've sworn I'd never be again. I can't touch that job. I tell you I'd rather starve."

"To do so," Bailly remarked, drily, "would be a senseless suicide.

You'll appreciate some day, young man, that the world lives by service."

George wondered why he glanced at the untidy table with a smile twitching at the corners of his mouth.

"I'm also sorry to learn your ambition is not altogether unselfish, or altogether worthy."

George longed to make Bailly understand.

"It was forced on me," he said. "I worked in my father's livery business until he failed. Then I had to go to a rich man's stable. I was treated like dirt. n.o.body would have anything to do with me. They won't here, probably, if they find out."

"Never mind," Bailly sighed. "We will seek other means. Let us get on with our primers."

Once or twice, when some knotty problem took George to the house during the early morning, he found the spic-and-span neatness he had observed at his first visit. In Bailly's service clearly someone laboured with a love of labour, without shame or discouragement.

One evening in August the maid who customarily opened the door was replaced by a short, plump-looking woman well over thirty. She greeted George with kindly eyes.

"I daresay you're Mr. Morton. I've heard a great deal about you."

George had never seen a face more unaffected, more friendly, more competent. His voice was respectful.

"Yes, ma'am."

"And I am Mrs. Bailly. We expect much of you."

There rushed over George a feeling that, his own ambition aside, he had to give them a great deal. No wonder Squibs felt as he did if his ideas of service had emerged from such a source.

That portion of his crowded schedule George grew eventually to like. It brought him either unrestrained scolding or else a tempered praise; and he enjoyed his cross-country runs. Sylvia's bulldog usually accompanied him, unleashed, for he could control the animal. With surprised eyes he saw estates as extravagant as Oakmont, and frequently in better taste.

Little by little he picked up the names of the families that owned them.

He told himself that some day he would enter those places as a guest, bowed to by such servants as he had been. It was possible, he promised himself bravely, if only he could win a Yale or a Harvard game.

He enjoyed, too, the hours he spent at the field. He could measure his progress there as well as in Bailly's study. Green was slow with either praise or blame, but sometimes Rogers and his clan would come down, and, sitting in the otherwise empty stands, would audibly marvel at the graceful trajectory of his punts. He soiled himself daily at the tackling dummy. He sprawled after an elusive ball, falling on it or picking it up on the run. Meantime, he had absorbed the elements of the rules. He found them rather more complicated than the cla.s.sics.

The head coach came from the city one day. Like Green, he said nothing in praise or blame, merely criticising pleasantly; but George felt that he was impressed. The great man even tossed the ball about with him for a while, teaching him to throw at a definite mark. After that Rogers and his cronies wanted to be more in evidence than ever, but George had no time for them, or for anything outside his work.

His will to survive the crus.h.i.+ng grind never really faltered, but he resented its necessity, sometimes wistfully, sometimes with turbulence.

He despised himself for regretting certain pleasanter phases of his serfdom at Oakmont. The hot, stuffy room on the top floor of the frame house; the difficult books; the papers streaked with intricate and reluctant figures, contrived frequently to swing his mind to pastoral corners of the Planter estate. He might have held t.i.tle to them, they had been so much his own. He had used them during his free time for the reading of novels, and latterly, he remembered, for formless dreams of Sylvia's beauty. At least his mind had not been put to the torture there. He had had time to listen to a bird's song, to ingratiate himself with a venturesome squirrel, to run his hands through the long gra.s.s, to lie half asleep, brain quite empty save for a temporal content.

Now, running or walking in the country, he found no time for the happier aspects of woods or fields. He had to drive himself physically in order that his mind could respond to Bailly's urgencies. And sometimes, as has been suggested, his revolt was more violent. He paced his room angrily.

Why did he do it? Why did he submit? Eventually his eyes would turn to her photograph, and he would go back to his table.

He was grateful for the chance that had let him pick up that picture.

Without its constant supervision he might not have been able to keep up the struggle. During the worst moments, when some solution mocked him, he would stare at the likeness while his brain fought, while, with a sort of self-hypnosis induced by that pictured face, he willed himself to keep on.

One night, when he had suffered over an elusive equation beyond his scheduled bedtime, he found his eyes, as he stared at the picture, blurring strangely; then the thing was done, the answer proved; but after what an effort! Why did his eyes blur? Because of the intensity of some emotion whose significance he failed all at once to grasp. He continued to stare at Sylvia's beauty, informed even here with a sincere intolerance; at those lips which had released the contempt that had delivered him to this other slavery. Abruptly the emotion, that had seemed to leap upon him from the books and the complicated figures, defined itself with stark, unavoidable brutality. He reached out and with both hands grasped the photograph. He wanted to s.n.a.t.c.h his hands apart, ripping the paper, destroying the tranquil, arrogant features. He replaced the picture, leant back, and continued hypnotically to study it. His hands grasped the table's edge while the blurring of his eyes increased. He spoke aloud in a clear and sullen voice:

"I hate you," he said. "With all my heart and soul and body I hate you."

IV

About this time one partial break in the schedule came like a strong tonic. Bailly at the close of an evening's session spoke, George fancied, with a little embarra.s.sment.

"My wife wants to speak to you before you go."

He raised his voice.

"Martha! The battle's over for to-night."

She came quietly in and perched herself on the arm of a chair.

"I'm having a few people for dinner to-morrow," she explained. "There's one young girl, so I want a young man. Won't you help me out?"

George's elation was shot with doubt of an unexplored territory. This promised an advance if he could find the way. He glanced inquiringly at Bailly.

"Women," the tutor said, "lack a sense of values. I shall be chained anyway to my wife's ill-conceived hospitality, so you might as well come. But we'll dine early so we won't destroy an entire evening."

"Then at seven-thirty, Mr. Morton," Mrs. Bailly said.

"Thank you," George answered. "I shall be very happy to come."

As a matter of fact, he was there before seven-thirty, over-anxious to be socially adequate. He had worried a good deal about the invitation.

Could it be traced to his confession to Bailly? Was it, in any sense, a test? At least it bristled with perplexities. His ordinary suit of clothing, even after an extended pressing and brus.h.i.+ng, was, he felt, out of place. It warned him that of the ritual of a mixed dinner he was blankly ignorant. He established two cardinal principles. He would watch and imitate the others. He wouldn't open his mouth unless he had to.

Bailly, with tact, wore the disgraceful tweeds, but there were two other men, a professor and a resident, George gathered in the rapidity of the introduction which slurred names. These wore evening clothes. Of the two elderly women who accompanied them one was quite dazzling, displaying much jewellery, and projecting an air truly imperial. Side by side with her Mrs. Bailly appeared more than ever a priestess of service; yet to George her serene self-satisfaction seemed ornament enough.

Where, George wondered, was the girl for whom he had been asked?

Mrs. Bailly drew him from these multiple introductions. He turned and saw the girl standing in the doorway, a dazzling portrait in a dingy frame. As he faced her George was aware of a tightening of all his defences. Her clothing, her att.i.tude, proclaimed her as of Sylvia's sort. He ventured to raise his eyes to her face. It was there, too, the habit of the beautiful, the obvious unfamiliarity with life's grayer tones. Yet she did not resemble Sylvia. Her skin was nearly white. Her hair glinted with gold; but she, too, was lovely. George asked himself if she would have lifted the crop, if all these fortunates reacted to a precise and depressing formula. Somehow he couldn't imagine this girl striking to hurt.

Mrs. Bailly presented him. Her name was Alston, Betty

Alston, it developed during the succeeding general conversation. He fixed the stouter of the men in evening clothes as her father and the imperial woman as her mother. He understood then that they were, indeed, of Sylvia's sort, for during his cross-country work he had frequently pa.s.sed their home, an immense Tudor house in the midst of pleasant acres.

It was because of the girl that the pitfalls of dinner were bridged. In the technique of accepting Mrs. Bailly's excellent courses he was always a trifle behind her. She made conversation, moreover, surprisingly easy.

After the first few moments, during which no one troubled to probe his past, the older people left them to themselves. She didn't ask what his prep was, or where he lived, or any other thing to make him stammer.

"You look like a football player," she said, frankly.