Chapter Four

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_ "A puffic' fibbous!" the monthly nurse had announced triumphantly, when she had presented Mrs. Opdyke's first-born son to his mother for her inspection. The phrase, and the smile which invariably accompanied it, were the main stock in trade of the monthly nurse. Upon these two items, she had based her popularity which now had endured for more than a dozen years of escorting over the threshold of this world the sons and daughters of "first families only," as her professional card insisted. To be sure, the constant employment of the phrase had robbed it of all critical significance. Indeed, it is very doubtful whether, even at the start of her career, the nurse had ever linked it in her mind with the great god Apollo. From some one of her predecessors, she had picked it up and found that it fitted well upon her tongue. Later, the "fibbouses" abounded more and more plenteously, as her clientage increased, and she applied the term indiscriminately, regardless whether the recipient were an Apollo, or a mere Diana. However, from the start, Reed Opdyke certainly deserved the phrase. Long generations of clean, high-minded living cannot fail to produce an effect upon their offspring. Reed's father had branched off from a line of lawyers to hold the chair of chemistry in one of the great colleges for girls. Reed's mother was of Pilgrim stock, well-nigh untainted by the blood of later, lesser arrivals on the Massachusetts shore. On either side of the house, it had been a matter of simple creed to hold one's body and one's mind equally aloof from possibilities of disease. Reed Opdyke's make-up showed the value of this creed. Not that he thought very much about it, however. He accepted as a matter of course his sanity, very much as he accepted most other things that came in his way. His loosely curled fists within his pockets, his head erect and his lips smiling, he went striding along through life, taking the best of it as his natural right, and letting the rest of it alone. From kindergarten into school and from school into college, the old, old road trodden by all his ancestors, he journeyed quite as a matter of course. In fact, it never struck him that any fellow could do otherwise; never, that is, until he met Scott Brenton. For Scott, in time, had also come to college. His mother had insisted upon that; had worked for it that it might in time be possible; had scrimped and toiled and saved, the while she had been training her only child to a strict economy which, however galling, he must accept as well worth the while for the sake of all that it was going to put within his grasp. Accordingly, Scott had been sent to school throughout the termtimes, sent well or ill, in good days and in bad. He had been goaded into an ambition which held him at the top of his small classes in the village school. When the top of the top class was reached, and college was still inaccessible, Mrs. Brenton had stiffened her sinews for yet greater toil and scrimping, and had sent her son up to Andover where the Wheeler name was a tradition, where the knowledge of Scott's ancestry would help him to find the employment that he needed. Scott's education was to be by no means easy of achievement. To gain his school diploma and his later degrees at college, he too must work, not alone at books, but, in his off-hours, at any task that offered. And Scott did work, too. Around him, other boys were going in for football, making records on the track team, getting occasional leaves to run in to Boston for an odd half-holiday. Then they came back, hilarious and triumphant, to discuss their experience at mealtimes, boasting, chaffing, wrangling merrily in the intimacy known to boyhood, the world over. They never thought to pay any especial attention to the other boy who brought them things to eat, a boy with luminous gray eyes and clothes which were in sore need of pressing. He was just "that waiter chap" and not a human being like themselves. They talked about their secret plans before him, with no more thought of his personality than as if he had been a concrete post. And, after listening to their chatter throughout a protracted mealtime, after seeing, as he could not fail to do, how he counted to them for absolutely nothing at all, Scott Brenton had his hours when he too doubted the fact of his own humanity. An active brain and an almost automatic body trained to supple service: these by themselves, he realized, do not go far towards making a human thing of life. Contacts are necessary for that, not total isolation; and contact was the one thing denied him. Now and then he had his hours of wishing that those other boys, boys whose talk was full of reference to unfamiliar ways of life: of wishing that they would treat him a little bit unkindly. Anything would be better than this absolute ignoring of his individuality. In his intervals of waiting on the table, he washed up the dishes. His meals he took, standing by the sink, a plate on the shelf before him, while he washed and chewed simultaneously. There were other tasks besides, tasks all of them more or less menial, all of them adding to the general drain upon his nerves and body. The rest of the time, his studies kept him busy. Indeed, it was no small wonder that he was able to maintain a decent footing in his class, so fagged out and weary was he by the time he had a moment's leisure to prepare his next-day's lessons. But prepare them he did, and well, although his eyes grew heavy over the task and ached with the strain of working by the one dim light with which his shabby garret room was equipped. It was a single room, unhappily. Even there, all contact was denied him. Saint Simon, sitting alone upon his pillar and gazing down upon his fellow men, was no more solitary than was Scott Brenton. Moreover, Saint Simon had the final consolation of being quite aware that he was looking down, a consolation which, to Scott Brenton, was permanently refused. And then, Andover done, there came college, not one of the small colleges where individual idiosyncrasies count so much in making up the estimate of the student's character; but a great university, so great that it can stop to measure no man by any one trait or any several traits, so busy that it must grasp him in the round, or not at all. There lay the fact of Scott Brenton's ultimate salvation. He would have been downed completely, judged by the finical standards of the little college. It was in his choice of college that, for the first time in his life, Scott Brenton's will had become dominant. His mother would fain have had it otherwise. The Wheelers, one and all, had been little-college men. The tradition was in their blood, and she had inherited it to the full: the strange belief that the smaller college offers less temptation to go astray; the equally strange belief that the closer contact with a few professors can quite atone for the lack of friction against a great crowd of fellow students, alien to one another in habits of mind and body, yet all of them, swiftly or sluggishly as may be, moving towards the selfsame goal. It had seemed to Mrs. Brenton something bordering on the blasphemous when Scott had endeavoured to put this latter phase of the question before her. Realizing his own futility upon that score, he finally had changed his tactics and assured her that, as far as money-earning work went, there were ten chances in the great college to one in the small. And Scott was right, albeit his argument was wholly superficial. The truth of the matter was that his Andover experience had left him sore and downhearted; that he knew, in the bottom of his boyish soul, that he must plunge beyond his depth and swim into a wider sea, or else go down entirely, pushed out of sight beneath the overlapping circles of the little cliques, all too self-centred to admit of any common focus. Mrs. Brenton did not care at all about any common focus. The phrase "college spirit" sounded intemperate, and she would have been the last person in the world to agree to the belief that Scott could gain any education from contact with boys of his own age. To her mind, one fusty old professor out-valued one hundred eager undergraduates, as source of inspiration to the young. Education, to her mind, lay in the desk-end of the classroom; it was unthinkable to her that Scott had lost the best of Andover, by reason of his solitary life there. As for college, the students, all but Scott, were bound to be full of the wiles of the devil. Scott's safety lay in his books, and in his keeping too busy in his off-hours to have time to get into mischief. Moreover, the purely practical end of the keeping busy was beginning to loom large upon Mrs. Brenton's horizon. More and more she was coming to realize that it is no small undertaking for any widow with an almost imperceptible income to put a son through college. Valiantly she toiled and scrimped; but it was becoming increasingly necessary for Scott to help her out in both the toiling and the scrimping. Accordingly, the creases deepened, both vertically about the corners of Scott's lips and horizontally across his shiny knees and shoulder blades. His eyes, though, grew more luminous, as time went on, perhaps because they were surrounded by ever deepening hollows. It was those eyes that first caught the attention of Reed Opdyke. Midway in his sophomore year, Opdyke, with a dozen others of his kind, had revolted from the monotony of the commons table, and had set up a so-called joint of their own, an eating-club presided over by a gaunt and self-helping senior, and served by a quartette of cadaverous and self-helping sophomores among whom was Scott Brenton. Reed Opdyke was a busy youngster, full of the countless interests that cram the college days of a popular, easy-going student. Also he was a potential leader of men, who gave himself leisure to study the people with whom he came into any kind of contact, to sort them out and classify them according to their possibilities as they unveiled themselves to his boyish eyes. Three of the cadaverous sophomores he dismissed with a glance. They were impossible. They lacked all spiritual yeast and, to the end of time, they would be waiters in one sense or another. Scott Brenton was different. A fellow with those eyes must have it in him to count for something, some day. Lounging in his seat at table, Opdyke kept his eye on Scott, talked at him, then talked to him; and then, obedient to some boyish whim or other, a few days later, the meal ended, he took him by the elbow and walked him off to Mory's for a second supper. Mrs. Brenton, on her knees beside her bed, that night, prayed long and fervently and with full particulars concerning the education of her son. Her heart would have frozen with horror, had she seen the smoke-filled room where her son was sitting, with Reed Opdyke across the table from him. Her hopes for his future would have shrivelled into naught, could she have realized that, over that very table, her son, her Scott, was to receive a lesson, new and quite unforgettable. One hour of jovial human comradeship had opened Scott Brenton's eyes to more things than he ever yet had dreamed of. It had taught him once for all that irresponsible, carefree youth is not, of necessity, vicious. As the days and the weeks ran on, the comradeship increased. Measured by the days of Opdyke, overflowing full of interests, it took the smallest possible share of time: a look of comprehension, a word of casual greeting, and, on rare occasions, a bit of a walk together when their ways chanced to coincide. Still more occasionally, a stray hour was spent at Mory's, or in Opdyke's room in Lawrence. As yet, a boyish delicacy had kept Opdyke from seeking to invade what he knew could not fail to be the barrenness of Scott Brenton's quarters. Slight as was their intercourse, viewed in Opdyke's eyes, to Scott it filled the whole horizon, the one near and vital fact which broke in upon its emptiness and cut away the barren wastes about him. He lived alternately upon the memory of Opdyke as he had seen him last, and upon the anticipations of their next meeting. His hours of table service, ceasing to be wearisome, had become veritable social functions, for was there not always the chance of a random word and smile? Those failing, there was always the pleasure of watching Opdyke, now lounging lazily in his seat and mocking at his fellows, now bending forward above the table, heedless of his cooling plate, the while he harangued his companions with a facility which seemed to Scott the acme of brilliant eloquence. At Reed's elbow, Scott followed each inflection of the persuasive voice, his lean face glowing with appreciation at every point his idol scored. For the time being, awkwardness was lost and all self-consciousness. Why think about himself, when he could have the chance to watch Reed Opdyke and to listen to him? Scott's nature thrilled in answer to the alien touch, unconsciously as that touch was given. It never once would have struck Opdyke that he was becoming an object of idolatry to this gaunt starveling to whom, as he expressed it, he had tried to be a little decent. It was quite within the limits of his comprehension that he could step down now and then to Scott. It never would have occurred to him, at that epoch of his experience, that Scott could try to clamber up to him. Save for the minutes when he consciously gave his attention to the ungainly young waiter, he disregarded him completely. The other boys, however, were quick to take in the situation and to comment on it. "Reed's parson" they called Scott, and they chaffed Opdyke mercilessly, when Scott's back was turned. Scott, had he heard the chaff, would have been wounded to the death, a death he would have met far, far inside his shell, regretful that ever he had come out of it. Opdyke, however, merely laughed and stuck to his original position. "A fellow with such eyes is bound to have it in him. He's never had a chance," he said to his chaffing mates. "Wait till he finds himself, and then see what happens." "Nothing," came the prompt reply. "He won't ever find himself, Reed. He has found you, and that's as much as such a fellow as he is, can ever assimilate." And the reply was by no means wide of the mark. For the present, Scott Brenton was finding it all he could do to assimilate Reed Opdyke. Indeed, it was only in the very end of all things that fulness of assimilation came. As the time went on, partly in defiance of the chaffing of his chronies, partly on account of it, Opdyke lent himself more and more to the assimilating process. He sought out Scott more often, had him in his room, taught him to fill a pipe and smoke it after the fashion of a gentleman, dropped into his ears specious hints regarding manners, and about the efficiency of one's mattress as frugal substitute for a tailor's pressboard. To be sure, upon that latter count Scott took him with unforeseen literalness; and, in his zeal to carry out his teacher's dictum, subjected his coat to the mattress treatment, as well as his more simply-outlined nether garments. Moreover, it should be set down as distinctly to Opdyke's credit that he suppressed his merriment, the next time he saw the coat upon Scott Brenton's shoulders. Just at this epoch, some waggish member of the eating club employed his camera at their expense. The resultant film, in after weeks, became one of the most popular assets of the class. True, the needful haste had caused the camera to tip a little. None the less, what the picture lacked in composition, it made up in clearness and in vitality. Taken solely as a study of contrasting types, it was of no small sociological value, since it proved past all gainsaying that the absolute democracy of a great college can bring into close relationship the most impossibly divergent natures. Scott, at this time, was thin and lean. His shoulders were bowed a little with the strain of unceasing work and worry; in his more self-conscious moments, he shambled when he walked. Only moderately tall, clothed in ill-cut garments which he wore as uneasily as possible, his immature young figure was not one to call out much admiration on the score of its virility. Indeed, the one really virile thing about Scott Brenton was his hair, which sprang out strongly from his scalp, fine, but thick and just a little wavy where it lay across his crown. His head was well-shaped, only that it was a bit too high above the ears, the brow a bit too salient; the eyes alone, though, at that time, redeemed from hopeless mediocrity his worn, ill-nourished face. Beside his hips, his hands dangled limply, showing a stretch of unclothed wrist sticking out below the shrunken coat sleeves. Beside him in the picture, Reed Opdyke strode lightly, still, to all seeming, the "puffic' fibbous" that his nurse had dubbed him. Six feet tall, lean and supple as a deerhound and as totally unconscious of his long, slim body, it was impossible to fancy him as ever being betrayed into an awkward motion. Above his straight, slim shoulders, his curly brown head rose proudly, his thin lips smiled a greeting to all the world around him, his brown eyes looked straight and true into the eyes of every man he chanced to meet. Only his sense of humour and his comfortable smattering of original sin could have saved Reed Opdyke from being insupportable. Beauty like his, albeit manly, is bound to be a certain handicap. _

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