The Guarded Heights Part 36

"Have I got to submit myself to a trouncing more than once a year?"

Sylvia shrugged her shoulders.

"No," she said, impatiently. "You say it's forgotten. All right."

George knew it would never be forgotten now by either of them. Lambert's unruffled att.i.tude made him uneasy. Her brother's scoffing response to her accusation suggested that Lambert saw, since they would be more or less thrown together, a beneficial side to such encounters as the one just ended. For George didn't dream that Lambert had forgotten, either, those old boasts.

Another depressing thought made him bad company for Blodgett after the callers had driven away. It came from a survey, following his glimpse of Sylvia's beauty, of all the blatant magnificence with which Blodgett had surrounded himself. Blodgett after dinner, a little flushed with wine, and the triumph of having had in his house on the same day two Sinclairs and two Planters, attempted an explanation.

"I didn't build this, Morton, or my place in town, just for Josiah Blodgett."

George wasn't in a mood for subtleties of expression.

"I've often wondered why you haven't married. With your money you ought to have a big choice."

Blodgett sipped a liqueur. He smiled in a self-satisfied way.

"Money will buy about anything--even the kind of a wife you want. I'm in no hurry. When I marry, young man, it will be the right kind."

And George understood that he meant by the right kind some popular and well-bred girl who would make the Blodgett family hit a social average.

He carried that terrifying thought of marriage back to Princeton. He had no fear Sylvia would ever look seriously in Blodgett's direction. Money could scarcely bribe her. This, however, was her second season. Of course she would marry someone of her own immediate circle. She could take her choice. When that happened what would become of his determination and his boasts? Frequently he clenched her riding crop and swore:

"Nothing--not even that--can keep me from accomplis.h.i.+ng what I've set out to do. I'll have my way with her."

He shrank, nevertheless, from the thought of her adopting such a defence. It was intolerable. He read the New York papers with growing suspense. As an antidote he attacked harder than ever his study of cause and effect in the Street. With football out of the way he could give a good deal of time to that, and Blodgett now and then enclosed a hint in Mundy's letters. It was possible to send a fair amount of money to his parents; but his mother's letters never varied from their formality of thanks and solicitations as to his health. His father didn't write at all. Of course, they couldn't understand what he was doing. The shadow of the great Planter remained perpetually over their little home.

Another doubt troubled George. With the club matter out of the way, and the presidency of the cla.s.s his, and a full football garland resting on his head, was he wasting his time at Princeton? The remembrance of Blodgett steadied him. He needed all that Princeton and its companions.h.i.+ps could give.

Purposefully he avoided Betty. Was she, indeed, responsible for that softness he had yielded to in the infirmary and during the final game?

In his life, he kept telling himself, there was no room for sentiment.

Sentiment was childish, a hindrance. Hadn't he decided at the start that nothing should turn him from his attempt for the summit? Still he couldn't avoid seeing Betty now and then in Princeton, or at the dances in New York to which he went with Goodhue. The less he saw of Betty, moreover, the stronger grew his feeling of something essential lacking from his life; and it bothered that, after a long separation, she was invariably friendly instead of reproachful. He found that he couldn't look at her eyes without hungrily trying to picture them wet with tears for him.

To some extent other demands took his mind from such problems. The rumpus Goodhue had foreseen developed. Important men came or wrote from New York or Philadelphia in Dalrymple's cause, but at the meetings of the section George sat obdurate, and, when the struggle approached a crisis, Goodhue came out openly on the side of his room-mate.

"You can have Dalrymple in the club," was George's ultimatum, "or you can have me, but you can't have us both."

If George resigned, Goodhue announced, he would follow. Dalrymple was doomed. The important men went back or ceased writing. Then Wandel slipped Rogers into the charmed circle--the payment of a debt; and George laughed and left the meeting, saying:

"You can elect anybody you please now."

Cynically, he was tempted to try to force Allen in.

"You're not honest even with your own group," he said afterward to Wandel.

The club lost its value as a marker of progress. Besides, he didn't look forward to eating with that little sn.o.b, Rogers, for two years. Nor did he quite care for Wandel's reply.

"You've enough cla.s.s-consciousness for both of us, heroic and puissant Apollo."

For the first time George let himself go with Wandel.

"You'll find Apollo Nemesis, little man, unless you learn to say what you mean in words of one syllable."

And the discussion of the clubs went on, breeding enmities but determining no radical reform.

The struggle at Princeton was over. George looked often at the younger men, who didn't have to prepare themselves minutely for the greater struggle just ahead, envying them their careless play, their p.r.o.neness to over-indulgence in beer and syncopated song. While he worked with high and low prices and variations in exchange he heard them calling cheerily across the campus, gathering parties for poker or bridge or a session at the Na.s.sau. Goodhue, even Wandel, found some time for frivolity. George strangled his instinct to join them. He had too much to do. In every diversion he took he wanted to feel there was a phase personally valuable to him.

He counted the days between his glimpses of Sylvia, and tried not to measure the hours dividing his meetings with Betty. If only he dared let himself go, dared cease battle for a little, dared justify Sylvia's att.i.tude! Even Goodhue noticed his avoidance of Betty.

He encountered Sylvia in New York; asked her to dance with him; was refused; cut in when she was, in a sense, helpless; and glided around the room with a sullen, brilliant body that fairly palpitated with distaste.

Even during the summer he ran into her once on Long Island. Then he was always missing her. Perhaps she had learned to avoid him. He shrank each morning from his paper, from any bit of rumour connecting her with a man; and Blodgett, he noticed, was still making money for a bachelor bank account.

He came to conceive a liking for his flabby employer, although he was quite sure Blodgett wouldn't have bothered with him a moment if he hadn't been a prominent college man with such ties among the great as Blodgett hadn't been able to knot himself. What was more to the point, the stout man admired George's ambition. He was more generous with his surrept.i.tious advice. He paid a larger salary which he admitted was less than George earned during that summer. George, therefore, went back to Princeton with fuller pockets. Again Mundy was loath to let him depart.

"You know more about this game than men who've worked at it for years."

His face of a parson grimaced.

"You'd soon be able to hire me, if you'd stick on the job instead of going back to college to get smashed up at football."

George, however, didn't suffer much damage that year. He played brilliantly through a season that without him would have been far more disastrous than it was.

When it was all over Squibs sat one night silently for a long time. At last he stirred, lighted his pipe, and spoke.

"I ought to say to you, George, that I was as satisfied with you in defeat as I was in victory."

"I outplayed Planter, anyway, didn't I?"

Bailly studied him.

"Did that mean more to you than having Princeton beaten?"

"It kept Princeton from being beaten worse than it was."

"Yes," Bailly admitted, "and, perhaps, you are right to find a personal victory somewhere in a general defeat."

"But you really think it selfish," George said.

"I wish," Bailly answered, "I could graft on your brain some of Allen's mental processes, even his dissatisfactions."

"You can't," George said, bluntly. "I'm tired of Allen's smash talk.

Most people like him could be bought with the very conditions they attack."

Bailly arose and limped up and down. When he spoke his voice vibrated with an unaccustomed pa.s.sion:

"I don't know. I don't think so. But I want you to realize that prostrate wors.h.i.+p of the fat old G.o.d success is as wicked as any other idolatry. I want you to understand that Allen and his kind may be sincere and right, that a vision unblinded by the bull's-eye may see the target all awry. My fear goes back to your first days here. You are still ashamed of service."