“Perhaps you’d better get some writing materials and take down the main headings,” he suggested. “It’s an aid to the memory.” He looked fixedly out of the window into a mist of young green, while Sears rummaged all over the room. It was some time before he could find paper of any kind; his desk was heavy with a variety of silver topped Christmas presents, but lacking in any of the essentials for study. He succeeded, finally, in producing from a drawer some undersized note-paper, with the number of his room stamped in blue at the top. McGaw furnished the pencil. Then began a travesty on education that was, no doubt, being enacted in any number of rooms at Harvard, at that identical hour. The keen-faced, hectic-looking tutor, with his exhaustive notes, nervously outlined a period of the world’s history, the importance of which both he and Wolcott considered only in its relation to the final examinations. Charlemagne’s reign, looked at as something of a stride in the march of progress, would have bored Sears and frittered away McGaw’s time. Had popes and kings been for an instant regarded as more than names with a postscript of Roman numerals and dates, Wolcott’s brain would have struck, and the tutor’s imagination would have creaked, in the exercise of a disused function. Queens, treaties, battles, diets, bulls, crownings, and decapitations—for two stifling hours, McGaw shovelled them into Wolcott, until he sweat like a stoker. And Sears, phlegmatic, colossal, consumed them all like an ogre at his dinner. From time to time, he changed his seat and began afresh; it was as if he were setting his teeth to keep the mess down until he could disgorge it—the facts of five hundred years—on his blue book. Only once did he interrupt, and show, by asking a child’s question about the unfortunate emperor forced to stand barefooted in the snow all night, that any of these facts were attached in his mind to human beings. Since he had come to Harvard, Wolcott had done this sort of thing before every midyear and final examination period. He intended to keep on doing it until, at the end of four years, the President and Faculty would say to him, in a communication that crackled deliciously when its pink ribbons were untied:—“Sears (or perhaps “Searolus”) Wolcott, 2nd, alumnum ad gradum Baccalaurei in Artibus admisimus, eique dedimus et concessimus omnia insignia et jura ad hunc honorem spectantia.”
After two hours, McGaw closed his book, Sears dropped his notes and pencil on the floor, and leaned back with his arms above his head. The soft spring air, enervating with the smell of damp earth and new leaves, was finding its way up through the open windows. The tutor rubbed his strained eyes wearily; he had something more to say connected with the examination, but for the moment he couldn’t recall it.
“Oh, yes,” he said abruptly; “we’d better leave the Latin documents until the end. Most of them are translated in Van Witz’s ‘Mediæval Records.’ I advise you to buy the volume and begin to look it over by yourself.”
“I wish you’d get it for me,” Wolcott answered, after a moment in which he decided that the effort of picking up his pencil and paper and writing down the title was too great.
“I suppose I could,” said McGaw, slowly. He knew very well that he couldn’t; he didn’t have the necessary dollar.
“Yes, bring it round next time you come; there’s plenty of time,” added Sears.
To almost any one else, McGaw would have had no difficulty in saying, “I wish you would get it yourself.” But he shrank from what he imagined would be Wolcott’s reception of such a request. For from the time he had come into the room, and found his big pupil sprawling unconcernedly in the middle of it, the tutor had been in a whirl of uneasiness and resentment. Wolcott’s study was a very masculine, almost an austere apartment. But it was simple with the simplicity that costs a great deal of money. Its plain hard woods and dull green leather overpowered McGaw; the solid aggressiveness of Wolcott himself angered him. Both the tutor’s environment and his audience repelled an admission of poverty. In his embarrassment at having to say anything, he said it all, nervously blurting out:
“I’m afraid you’ll have to get it yourself. It’s an expensive book; I can’t afford it.”
“Why, that’s all right,” said Sears, heartily; “what’s the name of the thing?” He was as ill at ease as McGaw himself, now, and his abrupt note of sincerity was decidedly awkward. The tutor, of course, immediately discovered the intent to patronise, that, as a matter of fact, was not there. His hatred of Wolcott dated itself from that instant.
After McGaw was well out of the building, Sears would have strolled aimlessly down into the sunshine—he never stayed in his room any more than was necessary—had he not come across the Secretary’s letter when he went to his desk to put away the notes he had just taken. He reread this document, with what is conveniently known as “mingled emotions.” That is to say, his impatience at the Secretary’s “nerve” diffused itself, as he read, in a vague inclination to know exactly what Barrows wanted him to do. He would not for anything have acknowledged, even to himself, that his two hours with McGaw had brought about this frame of mind, which in Sears was almost equivalent to mellowness. He preferred to think that Haydock’s opinions were worth respecting. But, nevertheless, it was McGaw with his pinched, hectic, angular, hunted personality, all sticking out of a scant, tightly-buttoned cutaway coat, that had induced Sears, by some curiously indirect mental process, to reread the letter in the first place. For, after all, Wolcott was a gentleman, if an extremely young one, and when he hurt people’s feelings, as he very often did, he always felt uncomfortable about it afterwards. Not that his discomfort brought him to the point of an apology,—some day, perhaps, it might. But then, if he ever became softened to that extent he probably wouldn’t offend any one in the first place. He read the Secretary’s business-like statements about the man whose breakfasts and luncheons and dinners were oatmeal, oatmeal, and oatmeal, and a little milk—condensed milk. But it was McGaw himself who managed to put the breath of life into the written pages, and make the man they told about seem any more vital than Charlemagne or Martin Luther; words alone rarely told Wolcott much. McGaw’s glowing cheek-bones, his drawn, sensitive mouth, and stringy clothes were pleading his own cause, unknown to himself, to Wolcott, or to the Secretary.