Sears put down the letter and drew a sheet of the little note-paper to him. Then, after beating a preliminary tattoo, that sounded like the clicking of a telegraph instrument, with his pen, he wrote to Barrows: “I shall be glad to do what I can for your man; but you must tell me what it is you want me to do. Can I see you some time and talk it over?” On his way out to post the note, he met Haydock.
“I bet you’d like to know what’s inside this, Haystack,” he said, thrusting the envelope into his friend’s face and chuckling inscrutably. Haydock looked at the address.
“You’ll tell me some day,” he answered confidently. Wolcott jerked his note away. His reply was:—
“I’ll be damned if I do!” He meant what he said at the time because he knew Haydock was interested and thought he could tease him. As a rule, he found it impossible to tease Haydock, unless he pulled his hair or knocked him down.
III
“AFTER one has been out of college long enough to reckon time by a calendar, instead of by the college catalogue, May and June are sprightly preludes to all one’s operas unsung. But when the year counts nine months, instead of twelve, spring is a climax. At Harvard, it comes in a misty veil of young elm leaves and apple blossoms that floats, for a time, with the sweetest deception in the world, between you and every other disagreeable fact. It envelops you, permeates you, seduces you, and makes you drunk; yet, as hour after hour (and lecture after lecture) drifts past your open window, or your canoe, or the sun-flecked lawn under the trees in the Yard, where you lie and watch the industrious robins rip elastic angle-worms from the sod, you believe that you have awakened for the first time,—that the problem has at last solved itself. You are as blind as a poet, and you laugh and wonder why you never saw before. Had not the only verse been written, you would write it: “Come ... sit by my side and let the world slip; we shall ne’er be younger.”
But in spite of all this, these first spring days, that incline one to look upon the immoral sense as a sort of hibernating beast, are not beginnings but the end. A feeling as of many things happening at once comes over you. There is much to do, and no time whatever in which to do it. The College is in a hurry. It crashes along toward the Finals and Class Day, carrying you with it in spite of you. No single activity in which you may engage seems in itself of utmost importance. But the sum total crowds your days and nights with the interests of rowing and base-ball, and the First Ten, and the perennial squabbles of the three clubs in their efforts to pledge the most attractive of the neophytes to join their respective institutions (which, unless the neophytes are very sensible young men, doesn’t tend to make them any more attractive), and the great Spring Dinners, when the graduates come back and meet all the new men and sing songs and drink drinks (or is it the other way?), and forget that they have ever been away from Harvard at all, and the dinners of the college papers,—“The Monthly” (roistering blades), at some modest tavern; and “The Advocate,” at Marliave’s, perhaps, with nothing in particular to eat, but with all that easy indifference to the fragility of crockery by which the artistic temperament makes itself heard; “The Crimson” (typographical remonstrance), enjoying itself somewhere in its strange, reproachful way; and the “Only Successful,” “The Lampoon,” at The Empire or The Tuileries, laughing all night regardless of expense. Then there is Strawberry Night at the Signet, when the First Seven, from the Sophomore Class is taken in,—Haydock and Ellis were on the First Seven,—and the O. K. dinner (Hush-h-h-h-h!), when the First Eight from the Junior Class is initiated, and Strawberry Night at the Pudding, and the “Pop” Concerts, and Riverside, and a thousand other delightful happenings. None of them are of supreme importance, I suppose. But they combine to whirl certain men through May and part of June on a strong, swift current of Harvard life that deposits them, after Class Day and Commencement, somewhere high and dry and—although they may not know it themselves—homesick for Cambridge.
Even the mildest, farthest-meandering eddies of this current do not reach the type of student to which McGaw belonged; McGaw knew nothing of them. He had not gone to college to drift with the stream. He was there, primarily, to acquire information along certain lines laid out in the curriculum, incidentally to fight hunger and cold and darkness. If he could be “sandy” and healthy and lucky enough to stick it out for four years, he would have, at the end, concealed somewhere about his person, that distinction (of many differences),—a college education. “Sand” he had,—an incredible amount of it. But the trait had bid fair to destroy his health before it discovered his luck. For to stay where he was at all, and slave with his mind, often obliged him first to exhaust and stultify himself with the manual labour of a lout. He had taken care of furnace fires, cleaned cellars and backyards, shovelled snow, and cut grass, until these varied avocations, together with the remarkable work he did in his studies, and the farcical meals he cooked himself, broke him down and sent him in a semi-hysterical, wholly pitiful state to the kindly Barrows. And Barrows, convinced that he did not belong to the many “grinds,”—of such admirable purpose and tragic mediocrity,—who made the Secretary’s office one of constant anguish, hit upon an inspiration. Of late, it had seemed positively Heaven-sent. Wolcott had come to him, and said, in a manner that combined a child’s shyness with the omnipotence of a crowned head who believes in the divine right of kings, “I wish you would tell me just what I’m to do for this man you wrote me about.” Barrows was gratified, amused, and, perhaps, a trifle worried. His half hour with Sears, like a good deal of the time spent in The Magnificent One’s company, rather baffled the Secretary. Wolcott’s method of doing charity was in itself extraordinary. Furthermore, as far as Barrows could see,—and he was keen,—there was no particular motive for the act. Compassion was lacking; what little Sears said was impersonal, almost cold. Vanity, smug self-appreciation, there was none; the fellow neither enjoined theatrical conditions of secrecy, nor showed ill-concealed eagerness to shine his light before men. The personal equation was eliminated. Wolcott indicated nothing but a princely willingness to undertake and carry out whatever the situation required. As a matter of temporary convenience, he told Barrows he preferred sending the man a monthly allowance, to giving any particular sum at the start.
“Tell him to spend his money and—and eat things,” was perhaps his most specific suggestion.
Haydock, of course, was deeply interested in his quiet fashion. Sears told him the bald facts in a casual, indifferent way one afternoon when he was changing his clothes to row. The interview with the Secretary, Haydock was forced to reconstruct as best he could.