The Guarded Heights Part 39

The last thing George did before leaving his dismantled room, which for so long had sheltered Sylvia's riding crop and her photograph, was to write this little note to Betty:

DEAR BETTY:

It's simpler to go without saying good-bye.

G. M.

Then he was hustled through the window of the railroad train, out of Princeton, and definitely into the market-place.

After the sentiment of the final days the crowding, unyielding buildings, and the men that shared astonis.h.i.+ngly their qualities, offered him a useful restorative. He found he could approximate their essential hardness again.

The Street at times resembled the campus--it held so many of the men he had learned to know at Princeton. Lambert was installed in his father's marble temple. He caught George one day on the sidewalk and hustled him to a luncheon club.

"I suppose I really ought to put you up here."

"Why?" George asked.

"Because I'm always sure of a good sc.r.a.p with you. I missed not playing against you in the Princeton game last fall. Now there's no more football for either of us. I like sc.r.a.ps."

Blodgett, he chanced to mention later, had spent the previous week-end at Oakmont. Blodgett had already bragged of that in George's presence.

He forgot the excellent dishes Lambert had had placed before him.

"Have you put Blodgett up here, too?" he asked in his bluntest manner.

Lambert shook his head.

"That's different."

"Not very honestly different," George said, attempting a smile.

"You mean," Lambert laughed, "because I've never asked you to Oakmont?

Under the circ.u.mstances----"

"I don't mean that," George said. "I mean Blodgett."

"I can only arrange my own likes and dislikes," Lambert answered, still amused.

Then who at Oakmont liked the fat financier?

Rogers was in the street, too, selling bonds with his old att.i.tude toward the serious side of life, striving earnestly only to spy out the right crowd and to run with it.

"Buy my bonds! Buy my bonds!" he would cry, coming into George's office.

"They're each and every one a bargain. Remember, what's a bargain to-day may be a dead loss to-morrow, so buy before it's too late."

Goodhue planned to enter a stock exchange firm in the fall, and a lot of other men from the cla.s.s would come down then after a long rest between college and tackling the world on twenty dollars a month. Wandel alone of George's intimates rested irresolute. George, since he had taken two rooms and a bath in the apartment house in which Wandel lived, saw him frequently. He could easily afford that luxury, for each summer his balance had grown, and Blodgett, now that he had George for as long as he could keep him, was paying him handsomely, and flattering him by drawing on the store of special knowledge his extended and difficult application had h.o.a.rded.

To live in such a house, moreover, was necessary to his campaign, which, he admitted, had lagged alarmingly. Sylvia had continued to avoid him.

She seemed to possess a special sense for the houses and the parties where he would be, and when, in spite of this, they did meet, she tried to impress him with a thorough indifference; or, if she couldn't avoid a dance, with a rigid repulsion that failed to harmonize with her warm colouring and her exquisite femininity.

Through some means he had to get on. His restless apprehension had grown. Her departure for Europe with her mother fed the rumours that from time to time had connected her name with eligible men. It was even hinted now that her mother's eyesight, which reached to social greatness across the Atlantic, was responsible for her celibacy.

"There'll be an announcement before she comes back," the gossip ran.

"They'll land a museum piece of a t.i.tle."

George didn't know about that, but he did realize that unless he could progress, one day a rumour would take body. He resented bitterly her absence this summer, but if things would carry on until the fall he would manage, he promised himself, to get ahead with Sylvia.

Wandel seemed to enjoy having George near, for, irresolute as he was, he spent practically the entire summer in town. George, one night when they had returned from two hours' suffering of a summer show, asked him the reason. They smoked in Wandel's library.

"I can look around better here," was all Wandel would say.

"But Driggs! Those precious talents!"

Wandel stretched himself in an easy chair.

"What would you suggest, great man?"

George laughed.

"Do you write poetry in secret--the big, wicked, and suffering city, seen from a tenth-story window overlooking a pretty park?"

Vehemently Wandel shook his head.

"You know what most of our modern American jinglers are up to--talking socialism or anarchy to get themselves talked about. If only they wouldn't apply such insincere and half-digested theories to their art!

It's a little like modern popular music--criminal intervals and measures against all the rules. But crime, you see, is invariably arresting. My apologies to the fox-trot geniuses. They pretend to be nothing more than clever mutilators; but the jinglers! They are great reformers. Bah! They remind me of a naughty child who proudly displays the picture he has torn into grotesque pieces, saying: 'Come quick, mother, and see what smart little Aleck has done.' You'll have to try again, George."

George glanced up. His face was serious.

"Don't laugh at me. I mean it. Politics."

"At Princeton I wasn't bad at that," Wandel admitted, smiling reminiscently. "But politics mixes a man with an unlovely crowd--uncouth provincials, a lot of them, and some who are to all purposes foreigners.

Do you know, my dear George, that ability to read and write is essential to occupying a seat in the United States Senate? I was amazed the other day to hear it was so. You see how simple it is to misjudge."

"Then there's room," George laughed, "for more honest, well-educated, well-bred Americans."

"Seems to me," Wandel drawled, "that a little broad-minded practicality in our politics would be more useful than bovine honesty. I could furnish that. How should I begin?"

"You might get a start in the State Department," George suggested, "diplomacy, a secretarys.h.i.+p----"

"For once you're wrong," Wandel objected. "In this country diplomacy is a destination rather than a route. The good jobs are frequently given for services rendered, or men pay enormous sums for the privilege of being taken for waiters at their own functions. To start at the bottom----Oh, no. I don't possess the cerebral vacuity, and you can only climb out of the service."

"Just the same," George laughed, "you'd make a tricky politician."

Wandel puffed thoughtfully.

"You're a far-seeing, a far-going person," he said. "You are bound to be a very rich man. You'll want a few practical politicians. Isn't it so?

Never mind, but it's understood if I ever run for President or coroner you'll back me with your money bags."

George glanced about the room, as striking and costly in its French fas.h.i.+on as the green study had been.