Haydock worked hard a few moments in silence. Then he stood up, hot and dishevelled, but amiable, as he always was, and said, laughing:—
“That light grey suit, these shirts, those neckties, and this hat, in fact the best of this out-fit, is going this afternoon to Barrows, with a note from you. They will subsequently be presented to ‘It, Croœsus, Esquire.’” It amused Wolcott every now and then to have Haydock “boss” him. The clothes went, of course.
Two days later they returned. That is to say, the best of them did,—the grey suit, the coloured shirt, the straw hat, and one of the quieter neckties. Ernest McGaw, unspeakably jaunty, almost handsome, was inside of them.
Even before Wolcott’s bundle had enabled McGaw to blossom, like the season, into fine raiment, his whole appearance had undergone a subtle, indescribable change. Perhaps it was a recently acquired firmness of gait as he swung through the Yard to a lecture, or up the steps of Claverly to Sears’s room. Hitherto he had hated the approach to Claverly; there usually were men going in or coming out, who looked at him as they passed. Once he had found a whole group of them seated on the steps, and had walked twice round the block, rather than brush through to the door. Or it may have been the spiritual radiance that comes of good food and plenty of it, money in your pocket, and peace in your mind. At any rate, McGaw’s expression, whether it walked at you, or looked at you, or smiled at you, had, of late, become the outward and visible sign of a great inward happiness. Almost every minute of his day was dedicated to his work; yet he felt as if he were having for the first time leisure in which to breathe. By no means the least exquisite of his satisfactions was his first purchase of something unnecessary, a luxury, an extravagance; he bought one evening, in a dim musty corner of a Brattle Square bookstall, a second-hand copy of some Latin hymns for twenty cents. The demi-god who had caused such things to be—Barrows had spoken vaguely of “a friend”—had become to McGaw the occasion of the sun’s rising and the stars’ shining; through him, the earth revolved, and the college endured. McGaw was very religious; every night he prayed fervently for the man who was befriending him. To-day, when he left his room to walk down to Claverly, he had the uplifting glow of self-respect and good-will to men whose secret only barbers and tailors seem to know. Perhaps, just at first, he felt even more like a white elephant than one ordinarily does on getting into a fresh suit of grey, after wearing black for many months. But the sensation, coming as it did from the knowledge that he was conspicuously better, rather than worse dressed than most people, was not altogether an unpleasant one to McGaw.
Wolcott’s back was turned when he arrived. This fact made what followed even more unfortunate than it would have been had the somewhat astounding truth burst on Sears at the moment the tutor came into the room. For it enabled Wolcott to say, in his natural, off-hand tones, without looking away from his desk:
“Is that you, McGaw? Just sit down and wait a minute.” When his revolving chair finally did swing round, the transition was something very awful. Sears, in spite of his birth, and his bringing up, and his money, was, at times, to put it kindly, exceedingly “near to nature;” just now he behaved as one might fancy a naked Zulu behaving were an electric car or a steam-roller to dart suddenly across his path in the depths of an African jungle. He jerked back as if somebody had made a lunge at him, and held on to the arms of his chair. Then he looked quickly from side to side, at the door and windows, with his mouth open stupidly. His eyes, round, rounder, helpless, turned again and again to that dapper butterfly in the chair opposite, who got redder and redder until all the blood in his body boiled through his face and away, leaving him white, rigid, terrible. And Sears could make no sound, only a gasping effort, until all at once the entire situation seemed to gather fresh force and smite him anew. He stumbled from his chair, through the door, down the long hall, down the stairs, laughing, shrieking, cursing like a maniac, out into the street.
IV
“SEARS found Haydock studying at the club, and dragged him out of his chair, upstairs to a vacant room, and shut the door. Then he paced the floor like a caged lion, holding his hands to his head and exclaiming, whenever he could stop laughing long enough, that he had lost his mind. Every now and then, when words refused to come, he expressed himself by leaning against the wall, with his back to Haydock, and kicking the air behind him. Sometimes he pounded the door with his clenched fist. Haydock waited.
“I’ll never get over this,” Sears declared, “not if I live to be a hundred.”
“Well, don’t tell it backwards,” objected Haydock; “begin at the beginning.”