Two men who have been comrades and classmates at the Alma Mater of John Harkless and Tom Meredith; two who have belonged to the same dub and roomed in the same entry; who have pooled their clothes and money in a common stock for either to draw on; who have shared the fortunes of athletic war, triumphing together, sometimes with an intense triumphancy; two men who were once boys getting hazed together, hazing in no unkindly fashion in their turn, always helping each other to stuff brains the night before an examination and to blow away the suffocating statistics like foam the night after; singing, wrestling, dancing, laughing, succeeding together, through the four kindest years of life; two such brave companions, meeting in the after years, are touchingly tender and caressive of each other, but the tenderness takes the shy, United States form of insulting epithets, and the caresses are blows. If John Harkless had been in health, uninjured and prosperous, Tom Meredith could no more have thrown himself on his knees beside him and called him “old friend” than he could have danced on the slack-wire.
One day they thought the patient sleeping; the nurse fanned him softly, and Meredith had stolen in and was sitting by the cot. One of Harkless's eyes had been freed of the bandage, and, when Tom came in, it was closed; but, by and by, Meredith became aware that the unbandaged eye had opened and that it was suffused with a pathetic moisture; yet it twinkled with a comprehending light, and John knew that it was his old Tom Meredith who was sitting beside him, with the air of having sat there very often before. But this bald, middle-aged young man, not without elegance, yet a prosperous burgher for all that—was this the slim, rollicking broth of a boy whose thick auburn hair used to make one streak of flame as he spun around the bases on a home run? Without doubt it was the stupendous fact, wrought by the alchemy of seven years.
For, though seven years be a mere breath in the memories of the old, it is a long transfiguration to him whose first youth is passing, and who finds unsolicited additions accruing to some parts of his being and strange deprivations in others, and upon whom the unhappy realization begins to be borne in, that his is no particular case, and that he of all the world is not to be spared, but, like his forbears, must inevitably wriggle in the disguising crucible of time. And, though men accept it with apparently patient humor, the first realization that people do grow old, and that they do it before they have had time to be young, is apt to come like a shock.
Perhaps not even in the interminable months of Carlow had Harkless realized the length of seven years so keenly as he did when he beheld his old friend at his bedside. How men may be warped apart in seven years, especially in the seven years between twenty-three and thirty! At the latter age you may return to the inseparable of seven years before and speak not the same language; you find no heartiness to carry on with each other after half an hour. Not so these classmates, who had known each other to the bone.
Ah, yes, it was Tom Meredith, the same lad, in spite of his masquerade of flesh; and Helen was right: Tom had not forgotten.
“It's the old horse-thief!” John murmured, tremulously.
“You go plumb to thunder,” answered Meredith between gulps.
When he was well enough, they had long talks; and at other times Harkless lay by the window, and breathed deep of the fresh air, while Meredith attended to his correspondence for him, and read the papers to him. But there was one phenomenon of literature the convalescent insisted upon observing for himself, and which he went over again and again, to the detriment of his single unswathed eye, and this was the Carlow “Herald.”
The first letter he had read to him was one from Fisbee stating that the crippled forces left in charge had found themselves almost distraught in their efforts to carry on the paper (as their chief might conclude for himself on perusal of the issues of the first fortnight of his absence), and they had made bold to avail themselves of the services of a young relative of the writer's from a distant city—a capable journalist, who had no other employment for the present, and who had accepted the responsibilities of the “Herald” temporarily. There followed a note from Parker, announcing that Mr. Fisbee's relative was a bird, and was the kind to make the “Herald” hum. They hoped Mr. Harkless would approve of their bespeaking the new hand on the sheet; the paper must have suspended otherwise. Harkless, almost overcome by his surprise that Fisbee possessed a relative, dictated a hearty and grateful indorsement of their action, and, soon after, received a typewritten rejoinder, somewhat complicated in the reading, because of the numerous type errors and their corrections. The missive was signed “H. Fisbee,” in a strapping masculine hand that suggested six feet of enterprise and muscle spattering ink on its shirt sleeves.
John groaned and fretted over the writhings of the “Herald's” headless fortnight, but, perusing the issues produced under the domination of H. Fisbee, he started now and then, and chuckled at some shrewd felicities of management, or stared, puzzled, over an oddity, but came to a feeling of vast relief; and, when the question of H. Fisbee's salary was settled and the tenancy assured, he sank into a repose of mind. H. Fisbee might be an eccentric fellow, but he knew his business, and, apparently, he knew something of other business as well, for he wrote at length concerning the Carlow oil fields, urging Harkless to take shares in Mr. Watts's company while the stock was very low, two wells having been sunk without satisfactory results. H. Fisbee explained with exceeding technicality his reasons for believing that the third well would strike oil.