The Guarded Heights Part 25

Dalrymple's face became evil. He started to back out.

"Wait a minute," George commanded. "You don't like me because I'm working my way through college. That's what you shot at me last night when you'd drunk enough to give you the nerve, but it's been in your mind all along. I'd pound a little common-sense and decency into you, only I wouldn't feel clean after doing it."

That, to an extent, broke down his severity. It sounded queer, from him.

If Lambert Planter could have heard him say that!

"Let the others think they've done us a good turn," he went on. "We have to live in the same cla.s.s without clawing each other's faces every time we meet, but you can't pull the wool over my eyes, and I won't try to pull it over yours. Now get out, and don't come here alone again."

He felt better and cleaner after that. When Dalrymple had gone he finished his chapter and tumbled into bed.

XVIII

George was glad of the laundry, indeed, as the holidays approached. It gave him a sound excuse for not das.h.i.+ng joyously from Princeton with the rest, but it didn't cure the depression with which he saw the college empty. He wandered about a campus as deserted as a city swept by pestilence, asking himself what he would have done if his father and mother hadn't exiled him as thoroughly as Old Planter had. There was no point thinking about that; it wasn't even a question. He took long walks or stayed in his room, reading, and once or twice answering regretfully invitations that had sprung from encounters at Betty's party. It was nice to have them, but of course he couldn't go to such affairs alone just yet. Besides, he didn't have the money.

Squibs Bailly limped all the way up his stairs one day, scolding him for sulking in his tent.

"I only heard last night that you were in town. I'm not psychic. Why haven't you been around?"

"I didn't want to bother----"

Bailly interrupted him.

"I'm afraid I didn't appreciate you went quite so much alone."

"Altogether alone," George said. "But I don't want anybody to feel sorry for me because of that. It has some advantages."

"You're too young to say such things," Bailly said.

He made George go to the d.i.c.kinson Street house for Christmas dinner.

There was no other guest. The rooms were bright with holly, and a very small but dazzling Christmas tree stood in a corner, bearing a gift for him. Mrs. Bailly, as he entered, touched his cheek with her lips and welcomed him by his first name. She created for him an illusion that made him choke a trifle. She made him feel as if he had come home.

"And," he thought, "Squibs and she know."

He wondered if it was that knowledge that made Squibs go into his social views one evening when he sat with him in the study. It was then that George realized he had no such views apart from his own case. Vaguely he knew that somewhere outside of Princeton strikes multiplied these days, that poor people complained of the cost of food and housing, that communistic propaganda was talked with an increasing freedom, that now and then a bomb burst, destroying more often than not the people it was designed to help. He saw that Squibs sought to interest him, and he gave a close attention while the tutor elaborated his slight knowledge of the growing unrest.

"But it's all so far away, sir," he said. "I've so much of more importance to me to bother about right here."

Bailly relighted his pipe.

"The happy, limited vision of youth!" he sighed. "You'll be through your a, b, c's before you know it. Are you going to face such big issues without any forethought?"

He smoked for a few moments, then commenced to speak doubtfully.

"And in another sense it isn't as far away as you think. It all goes on _in petto_, right here in undergraduate Princeton. The views a man takes away from college should be applicable to the conditions he meets outside."

"I don't quite see what you mean, sir."

Why was Bailly going at it so carefully?

"I mean," Bailly said, "that here you have your poor men, your earnest men, and your lords of the land. I mean there is no real community of interest here. I mean you've made friends because you're bigger and better looking than most, and play football like a demon. You haven't made any friends simply because you are poor and earnest. And the poor students suffer from the cost of things, and the rich men don't know and don't care. And the poor men, and the men without family or a good school behind them, who haven't football or some outstanding usefulness, are as submerged as the workers in a mine. Prospect Street is Fifth Avenue or Park Lane, and the men who can't get in the clubs, because of poverty or lack of prominence, remind me of the ragged ones who cling to the railings, peering through at plenty with evil in their hearts."

"You're advocating communism, sir?"

Bailly shook his head.

"I'm advocating nothing. I'm trying to find out what you advocate."

"I can't help feeling," George said, stubbornly, "that a man has to look after himself."

And as he walked home he confessed freely enough in his own mind:

"I'm advocating George Morton. How can Squibs expect me to bother with any one else when I have so far to go?"

XIX

He thrust Squibs' uncomfortable prods from his brain. He applied himself to his books--useful books. Education and culture were more important to him than the physical reactions of overworked labour or the mental processes of men who advocated violence. Such distracting questions, however, were uncomfortably in the air. Allen, one of the poor men against whom the careful Rogers had warned him long ago, called on him one cold night. The manner of his address made George wonder if Squibs had been talking to him, too.

"Would like a few minutes' chat, Morton. No one worth while's in Princeton. It won't queer you to have me in your room."

No, George decided. That was an opening one might expect from Allen. The man projected an appreciable power from his big, bony figure; his angular face. George had heard vaguely that he had worked in a factory, preparing himself for college. He knew from his own observation that Allen wasn't above waiting at commons, and he had seen the lesser men turn to him as a leader.

"Sit down," George said, "and don't talk like an a.s.s. You can't queer me. What do you want me to do--offer to walk to cla.s.ses with my arm over your shoulder? There's too much of that sensitive talk going around."

"You're a plain speaker," Allen said. "So am I. You'll admit you've seen a lot more of the pretty crowd than you have of me and my friends. I thought it might be useful to ask you why."

"Because," George answered, "I'm in college to get everything I can. You and your crowd don't happen to have the stuff I want."

Allen fingered a book nervously.

"I came," he said, "to see if I couldn't persuade you that we have."

"I'm listening," George said, indifferently.

"Right on the table!" Allen answered, quickly. "You're the biggest poor man in the cla.s.s. You're logically the poor men's Moses. They admire you. You've always been talked of in terms of the varsity. Everybody knows you're Princeton's best football player. The poor men would do anything for you. What will you do for them?"

"I won't have you split the cla.s.s that way," George cried.

"Every cla.s.s," Allen said, "is split along that line, only this cla.s.s is going to let the split be seen. You work your way through college, but you run with a rich crowd, led by the hand of Driggs Wandel."

So even Allen had noticed that and had become curious.

"Wandel," Allen went on, "will use you to hurt us--the poor men; and when he's had what he wants of you he'll send you back to the muck heap."

George shook his head, smiling.

"No, because you've said yourself that whatever power I have comes from football and not from an empty pocket-book."