The Second Generation Part 4

"Not so stupid as it used to be, when everybody said and thought it was as good as possible," replied he. "You see, it's the people in the world that make it stupid. For instance, do you suppose you and I, or anybody, would care for idling about and doing all sorts of things our better judgment tells us are inane, if it weren't that most of our fellow-beings are stupid enough to admire and envy that sort of thing, and that we are stupid enough to want to be admired and envied by stupid people?"

"Did you notice the Sandys's English butler?" asked Adelaide.

"_Did_ I? I'll bet he keeps every one in the Sandys family up to the mark."

"That's it," continued Adelaide. "He's a poor creature, dumb and ignorant. He knows only one thing--sn.o.bbishness. Yet every one of us was in terror of his opinion. No doubt kings feel the same way about the people around them. Always what's expected of us--and by whom? Why, by people who have little sense and less knowledge. They run the world, don't they?"

"As Dory Hargrave says," said her brother, "the only scheme for making things better that's worth talking about is raising the standards of the ma.s.ses because their standards are ours. We'll be fools and unjust as long as they'll let us. And they'll let us as long as they're ignorant."

By inheritance Arthur and Adelaide had excellent minds, shrewd and with that cast of humor which makes for justice of judgment by mocking at the solemn frauds of interest and prejudice. But, as is often the case with the children of the rich and the well-to-do, there had been no necessity for either to use intellect; their parents and hirelings of various degrees, paid with their father's generously given money, had done their thinking for them. The whole of animate creation is as lazy as it dares be, and man is no exception. Thus, the Ranger children, like all other normal children of luxury, rarely made what would have been, for their fallow minds, the arduous exertion of real thinking. When their minds were not on pastimes or personalities they were either rattling round in their heads or exchanging the ideas, real and reputed, that happened to be drifting about, at the moment, in their "set." Those ideas they and their friends received, and stored up or pa.s.sed on with never a thought as to whether they were true or false, much as they used coins or notes they took in and paid out. Arthur and Adelaide soon wearied of their groping about in the mystery of human society--how little direct interest it had for them then! They drove on; the vision which had stimulated them to think vanished; they took up again those personalities about friends, acquaintances and social life that are to thinking somewhat as ma.s.sage is to exercise--all the motions of real activity, but none of its spirit.

They stopped for two calls and tea on the fas.h.i.+onable Bluffs.

When they reached home, content with tandem, drive, themselves, their friends, and life in general, they found Hiram Ranger returned from work, though it was only half-past five, and stretched on the sofa in the sitting room, with his eyes shut. At this unprecedented spectacle of inactivity they looked at each other in vague alarm; they were stealing away, when he called: "I'm not asleep."

His expression made Adelaide impulsively kneel beside him and gaze anxiously into his face. He smiled, roused himself to a sitting posture, well concealing the effort the exertion cost him.

"Your father's getting old," he said, hiding his tragedy of aching body and aching heart and impending doom in a hypocrisy of cheerfulness that would have pa.s.sed muster even had he not been above suspicion. "I'm not up to the mark of the last generation. Your grandfather was fifty when I was born, and he didn't die till I was fifty."

His face shadowed; Adelaide, glancing round for the cause, saw Simeon, half-sitting, half-standing in the doorway, humble apology on his weazened, whiskered face. He looked so like her memory-picture of her grandfather that she burst out laughing. "Don't be hard on the poor old gentleman, father," she cried. "How can you resist that appeal? Tell him to come in and make himself at home."

As her father did not answer, she glanced at him. He had not heard her; he was staring straight ahead with an expression of fathomless melancholy. The smile faded from her face, from her heart, as the light fades before the oncoming shadow of night. Presently he was absent-mindedly but tenderly stroking her hair, as if he were thinking of her so intensely that he had become unconscious of her physical presence.

The apparition of Simeon had set him to gathering in gloomy a.s.sembly a vast number of circ.u.mstances about his two children; each circ.u.mstance was so trivial in itself that by itself it seemed foolishly inconsequential; yet, in the ma.s.s, they bore upon his heart, upon his conscience, so heavily that his very shoulders stooped with the weight.

"Put your house in order," the newcomer within him was solemnly warning; and Hiram was puzzling over his meaning, was dreading what that meaning might presently reveal itself to be. "Put my house in order?" muttered Hiram, an inquiring echo of that voice within.

"What did you say, father?" asked Adelaide, timidly laying her hand on his arm. Though she knew he was simple, she felt the vastness in him that was awe-inspiring--just as a mountain or an ocean, a mere aggregation of simple matter, is in the total majestic and incomprehensible. Beside him, the complex little individualities among her acquaintances seemed like the acrostics of a children's puzzle column.

"Leave me with your brother awhile," he said.

She glanced quickly, furtively at Arthur and admired his self-possession--for she knew his heart must be heavier than her own. She rose from her knees, laid her hand lingeringly, appealingly upon her father's broad shoulder, then slowly left the room. Simeon, forgotten, looked up at her and scratched his head; he turned in behind her, caught the edge of her skirt and bore it like a queen's page.

The son watched the father, whose powerful features were set in an expression that seemed stern only because his eyes were hid, gazing steadily at the floor. It was the father who broke the silence. "What do you calculate to do--now?"

"Tutor this summer and have another go at those exams in September. I'll have no trouble in rejoining my cla.s.s. I sailed just a little too close to the wind--that's all."

"What does that mean?" inquired the father. College was a mystery to him, a deeply respected mystery. He had been the youngest of four sons.

Their mother's dream was the dream of all the mothers of those pioneer and frontier days--to send her sons to college. Each son in turn had, with her a.s.sistance, tried to get together the sum--so small, yet so hugely large--necessary to make the start. But fate, now as sickness, now as crop failure, now as flood, and again as war, had been too strong for them. Hiram had come nearest, and his defeat had broken his mother's heart and almost broken his own. It was therefore with a sense of prying into hallowed mysteries that he began to investigate his son's college career.

"Well, you know," Arthur proceeded to explain; "there are five grades--A, B, C, D, and E. I aimed for C, but several things came up--interfered--and I--just missed D."

"Is C the highest?"

Arthur smiled faintly. "Well--not in one sense. It's what's called the gentleman's grade. All the fellows that are the right sort are in it--or in D."

"And what did _you_ get?"

"I got E. That means I have to try again."

Hiram began to understand. So _this_ was the hallowed mystery of higher education. He was sitting motionless, his elbows on his knees, his big chest and shoulders inclined forward, his gaze fixed upon a wreath of red roses in the pattern of the moquette carpet--that carpet upon which Adelaide, backed by Arthur, had waged vain war as the worst of the many, to cultured nerves, trying exhibitions of "primitive taste" in Ellen's best rooms. When Hiram spoke his lips barely opened and his voice had no expression. His next question was: "What does A mean?"

"The A men are those that keep their noses in their books. They're a narrow set--have no ideas--think the book side is the only side of a college education."

"Then you don't go to college to learn what's in the books?"

"Oh, of course, the books are part of it. But the real thing is a.s.sociation--the friends.h.i.+ps one makes, the knowledge of human nature and of--of life."

"What does that mean?"

Arthur had been answering Hiram's questions in a flurry, though he had been glib enough. He had had no fear that his father would appreciate that he was getting half-truths, or, rather, truths prepared skillfully for paternal consumption; his flurry had come from a sense that he was himself not doing quite the manly, the courageous thing. Now, however, something in the tone of the last question, or, perhaps, some element that was lacking, roused in him a suspicion of depth in his simple unworldly father; and swift upon this awakening came a realization that he was floundering in that depth--and in grave danger of submersion. He s.h.i.+fted nervously when his father, without looking up and without putting any expression into his voice, repeated: "What do you mean by a.s.sociations--and life--and--all that?"

"I can't explain exactly," replied Arthur. "It would take a long time."

"I haven't asked you to be brief."

"I can't put it into words."

"Why not?"

"You would misunderstand."

"Why?"

Arthur made no reply.

"Then you can't tell me what you go to college for?"

Again the young man looked perplexedly at his father. There was no anger in that tone--no emotion of any kind. But what was the meaning of the _look_, the look of a sorrow that was tragic?

"I know you think I've disgraced you, father, and myself," said Arthur.

"But it isn't so--really, it isn't. No one, not even the faculty, thinks the less of me. This sort of thing often occurs in our set."

"Your 'set'?"

"Among the fellows I travel with. They're the nicest men in Harvard.

They're in all the best clubs--and lead in supporting the athletics and--and--their fathers are among the richest, the most distinguished men in the country. There are only about twenty or thirty of us, and we make the pace for the whole show--the whole university, I mean. Everybody admires and envies us--wants to be in our set. Even the grinds look up to us, and imitate us as far as they can. We give the tone to the university!"

"What is 'the tone'?"

Again Arthur s.h.i.+fted uneasily. "It's hard to explain that sort of thing. It's a sort of--of manner. It's knowing how to do the--the right sort of thing."

"What is the right sort of thing?"

"I can't put it into words. It's what makes you look at one man and say, 'He's a gentleman'; and look at another and see that he isn't."

"What is a 'gentleman'--at Harvard?"

"Just what it is anywhere."

"What is it anywhere?"