§ 16
Sylvia had said that she would go motoring with van Tuiver the following afternoon. He came in a cab, explaining that he had been to dinner in Cambridge, and that his car had run out of fuel. “I’ve a chauffeur who is troubled with absent-mindedness,” he remarked, with what Sylvia soon realized was enforced good-nature. For the car was longer in coming than he expected, and when at last it arrived, she was given an exhibition of his system of manners as applied to servants.
The chauffeur tried to make some explanation. There had been an accident, which he wanted to tell of; but the other would not give him a chance. “I’ve not the least desire to listen to you,” he said. “I do not employ you to make excuses. I told you when you came to me that I required promptness from my servants. You have had your opportunity, and you are not equal to it. You may consider yourself under notice.”
“Very good, sir,” said the man; and Sylvia stepped into the car and sat thinking, not hearing what van Tuiver said to her.
It was not the words he had used; he had a right to give his chauffeur notice, she told herself. It was his tone which had struck her like a knife—a tone of insolence, of deliberate provocativeness. Yet he, apparently, had no idea that she would notice it; doubtless he would think it meant a lack of breeding in her to notice it.
She wished to do justice to him; and she knew that it was partly her Southern shrinking from the idea of white servants. She was used to negroes, about whose feelings one did not bother.
If Aunt Nannie discovered one of the chambermaids trying on her mistress’ ball-gown, it would be, “Get out of here, you bob-tailed monkey!” Or if Uncle Mandeville’s boy forgot to feed a favorite horse, the rascal would be dragged out by one ear and soundly caned—and would expect it, knowing that if it was never done the horse would never be fed. But to talk so to a white man—and not in a blaze of anger, but with cold and concentrated malevolence!
The purpose of this ride was a definite one—that van Tuiver might find out the meaning of Sylvia’s change of mind at the dance. He propounded the question very soon; and the girl had to try to explain the state of mind in which she found herself. She would begin, she said, with the situation she had found at Harvard. Here were two groups of men, working for different ends, one desiring democracy in college life, and the other wishing to preserve the old spirit of caste. The conflict between them had become intense, and Sylvia’s sympathies were with van Tuiver’s opponents.
“Tell me,” she said, “what has Harvard meant to you? What has it given you that you couldn’t have got elsewhere? Here are men from all over America, but you’ve only met one little set. All the others—whom you’re probably too refined to call ‘rough-necks’—could none of them have taught you anything?”
“Perhaps they could,” he answered, “but it’s not easy to know them. If I met people promiscuously, they’d presume upon the acquaintance. I’d have no time to myself, no privacy——”
He saw the scorn in Sylvia’s face. “That’s all very well,” he cried, “but you simply don’t realize! Take your own case—do you meet anybody who comes along?”
“I am a girl,” said Sylvia. “People seem to think it’s necessary to protect girls. But even so, I remember experiences that you might profit by. I went last year to our State University, where one of my cousins was graduating. At one of the dances I was accidentally introduced to a man, a decent fellow, whom I liked. ‘I won’t ask you to dance with me, Miss Castleman,’ he said. I asked, ‘Why not?’ and he said, ‘I’m a “goat”.’ I said, ‘I’ll dance with a goat, if he’s a good dancer,’ and so we danced. And then came my cousin. ‘Sylvia, don’t you know who the man is you were dancing with? He’s a “goat”!’ ‘I like him,’ I said, ‘and he dances as well as any of you. I shall dance with him.’ ‘But, Miss Castleman,’ they all said, ‘you’ll break up the fraternity system in the college.’ ‘What strange fraternity!’ I answered. ‘I think it needs breaking up. I’ll dance with him, and if anybody doesn’t like it, I won’t dance with him.’ So I had my way.”
“That’s all right,” said the other. “If a pretty girl chooses to have her whim, everybody can allow for it. But if you set to work to run a college on that basis, you’d abolish social life there. Men of a certain class would simply not go where they had undesirable companionship forced upon them. Is that what you want to bring about?”
Sylvia thought for a moment, and then countered, “Is the only way you can think of to avoid undesirable companionship to have a private house?”
“A house?” replied van Tuiver. “Lots of people live in houses. Doesn’t your father?”
“My father has a family,” said Sylvia. “You have no one but yourself—and you don’t have the house because you need it, but simply for ostentation.”
He was very patient. “My dear Miss Castleman,” he said, “it happens that I was raised in a house, and I’m used to it. And I happen to have the money—why shouldn’t I spend it?”
“You might spend it for the good of others.”
“You mean in charity? Haven’t you learned that charity never does any good?”
“Sometimes I wish that I were a man, so that I could understand these things,” exclaimed Sylvia. “But surely you might find some way of doing good with your money, instead of only harm, as at present.”
“Only harm, Miss Castleman?”
“You are spending your money setting up false ideals in your college. You are doing all in your power to make everyone who meets you, or sees you, or even knows of you, a toady or else an Anarchist. And at the same time you are killing the best things in the college.”
“What, for instance?”
“There is Memorial Hall—a building that stands for something. I can see that, even if all my people were on the other side in the war. There you find the democracy of the college, the spirit of real comradeship. But did you ever eat a meal in Memorial Hall?”
“No,” said he, “I never did.”
Sylvia thought for a moment. “Do ladies eat there?” she asked; and when he answered in the negative, she laughed. “Of course, that was only a ‘pretty girl’s whim’—as you call it. But if you, Douglas van Tuiver, would go there, as a matter of course—right along, I mean——”
“Eat at Memorial Hall!” he exclaimed. “My dear Miss Castleman, I wouldn’t eat—I’d be eaten!”
“In other words,” said she, coldly, “you admit that you can’t take care of yourself as a man among men.”
It was amusing to perceive his dismay over her idea. He came back to it, after a minute. He wanted to know if that was the sort of thing he’d have to do to win her regard; and he repeated the phrase with a sort of fascinated horror. “Eat at Memorial Hall!”
Until at last Sylvia declared with asperity, “Mr. van Tuiver, I don’t care whether you eat at all, until you’ve found something better to do with your life.”