XXVII
Very slowly the excitement of the game cleared from Squibs' brain. That night he could talk of nothing else, begging George for an opinion of each player and his probable value against Yale the following Saturday. George, to cover his confusion, generalized.
"We'll beat Yale," he said, "as we ought to have beaten Harvard, because this team isn't afraid of colours and symbols. Most of these youngsters have been in the bigger game, so final football matches no longer appeal to them as matters of life and death and even of one's chances in the hereafter."
Bailly looked slightly sheepish.
"I'm afraid, George, I'm going to New Haven to look at a struggle of life and death, but then I was only in the Y. M. C. A. I'd feel many times better if you were sound and available."
"You might speak to the dean about me," George laughed.
By the next evening, however, the crowd had departed, and with Princeton's return to normal Squibs for the time overcame his anxieties. That night George and he sat in a corner of the lounge of the Nassau Club, waiting for Lambert and Wandel to drive in from the Alstons. George grew a trifle uncomfortable, because he suspected Squibs was staring at him with yesterday's curious scrutiny. Abruptly the tutor asked:
"What did you say to Allen after the game?"
"Offered him another job," George answered, shortly.
Bailly frowned.
"See here, George. What are you up to? Is that fair and decent? Allen is struggling—for the right."
"Allen," George answered, "has put some of his views to the test, and the results have made him discouraged and uneasy. He's been tainted by the very men he's tried to help. I've no idea of debauching him. Quite the reverse. Please listen."
And he entered upon a sort of penitence, speaking, while the tutor's wrinkled face flushed with pleasure, of his recent efforts to understand the industrial situation and its probable effects on society.
"I have to acknowledge," he said, softly, "that pure material success has completely altered its meaning for me. I'd like to use my share of it, and what small brains I have, to help set things straight; but I'm not so sure this generation won't have too sticky feet to drag itself out of the swamp of its own making."
Lambert and Wandel arrived just then, talking cheerfully about football.
"What do you mean to do?" Bailly asked George as the others sat down.
George smiled at Wandel.
"I'm not sure, Driggs, that the hour hasn't struck for you."
Wandel raised his hands.
"You mean politics!"
"I used to fancy," George said, "that I'd need you for my selfish interests. Now my idea is quite different."
He turned to Squibs.
"See here, sir. You've got to admit that the soul of the whole thing is education. I don't mean education in the narrow sense that we know it here or in any other university. I mean the opening of eyes to real communal efficiency; the comprehension of the necessity of building instead of tearing down; the birth of the desire to climb one's self rather than to try to make stronger men descend."
Bailly's eyes sparkled.
"I don't say you're not right, George. You may be right."
A fire blazed comfortably in front of them. The chairs were deep. Through a window the Holder tower, for all its evening lack of definition, seemed an indestructible pointer of George's thoughts. For a long time he talked earnestly.
"I climbed," he ended. "So others can, and less selfishly and more usefully, if they're only told how; if they'll only really try."
"You're always right, great man," Wandel drawled, "but we mustn't forget you climbed from fundamentals. That's education—the teaching of the fundamentals."
"It means an equal chance for everybody," George said, "and then, by gad, we won't have the world held back by those who refuse to take their chance. We won't permit the congenitally unsound to set the pace for the healthy. We'll take care of the congenitally unsound."
He turned to Bailly.
"And you and your excitable socialists have got to realize that you can't make the world sane through makeshifts, or all at once, but with foresight it can be done. You've raised the devil with me ever since I was a sub-Freshman about service and the unsound and the virtue of soiled clothing. Now raise the devil with somebody else about the virtue of sound service and clean clothes. This education must start in the schools. We may be able to force it into public schools through the legislatures; but in Princeton and the other great universities it has to come from within, and that's hard; that, in a way, is up to you and other gentle sectarians like you. And your clubs have got to stand in some form—everywhere, if only as objectives of physical and intellectual content. Nothing good torn from the world! Only the evil——"
He tapped Wandel's arm.
"Driggs! If you want to go among the time-servers, to stand alone for the people; perhaps for people yet unborn——"
"For a long time," Wandel said, "I've been looking for something I could really want to do. I rather fancy you've found it for me, George. I want to climb, too, always have—not to the heights we once talked about at your unhealthy picnic, but to the furtherest heights of all, which are guarded by selfishness, servility, sin—past which people have to be led."
Squibs cried out enthusiastically.
"And from which you can look down with a clear conscience on the climbers to whom you will have pointed out the path."
"I see now," Lambert put in, "that that is the only way in which one with self-respect can look down on lesser men."
George laughed aloud.
"An ally that can't escape! Driggs is a witness. We'll hold that fine democracy of the Argonne over your head forever."
"You see," Wandel drawled, "that was bound to fail, because it was based on the ridiculous assumption that every man that fought was good and great."
"I fancy," George said, "we're commencing to find out why we went to war—To appreciate the world's and our own astigmatism."
As they walked back to the little house in Dickinson Street, Bailly tried to express something.
"I guess," he managed, "that I'll have to call it square, George."
"I'm glad," George said, quickly, "but you must give some of the credit to Lambert Planter's sister."
He smiled happily, wistfully.
"You know she's the most useful socialist of you all."
After a time he said under his breath:
"There are some things I never dreamed of being able to repay you, sir. For instance this—this feeling that one is walking home."
"That debt," Bailly said, brightly, "cancels itself."
His mood changed. He spoke with a stern personal regret.
"You young men! You young men! How much farther you see! How much more you can do!"