The Magnificent One’s laugh, when exerted upon certain temperaments, was indeed a terrifically effective engine. Wolcott’s sense of ridicule was not fine; it was powerless to discover the one vulnerable spot and stab neatly. But if it couldn’t dissect, it could crush like a boulder toppling from a precipice. “Remember poor little Bemis!” Wolcott coloured; he had once bet that he could make little Bemis cry inside of fifteen minutes, without touching him. That he had won the bet in eleven minutes and six seconds was a success of which he was not very proud. “This isn’t as bad as that time,” Haydock went on; “because you didn’t do it on purpose.”
“It was beastly, though,—wasn’t it?” said Wolcott, slowly, after a moment. He got up and looked out of the window, while Haydock sat and smoked in silence. “Well, for heaven’s sake, let’s not talk about it any more,” he said at length, turning around. “If you can think of anything that I ought to go and do about it, tell me, and I’ll do it.” He left the room, and, in a minute or two, Haydock heard the front door slam behind him.
“What to do?” thought Haydock. The occasions that would have made his interference in the matter anything but an elaborate bit of patronising, were lacking. Haydock never saw McGaw in the ordinary course of events. To explain things, he would have had to seek him out, and begin in a way that would have sounded to the tutor like: “See here, my good man,”—that of course would hardly do. Besides, if amends were in order, Sears was the proper person to make them. The conception of Sears apologising to McGaw was sublime; Sears actually apologising,—Haydock imagined him setting his teeth, and blurting out the fewest possible words in which he could frame a perfunctory sentence of regret. That wouldn’t do, either. Haydock, usually full of resource when it came to rectifying other people’s mistakes—he made very few himself—was quite at a loss in this instance. He ended by telling himself that what he cared most about, after all, was that Wolcott should feel genuinely uncomfortable; for the good of his soul he oughtn’t to be allowed to jeer at a man and then abandon him to his bitter reflections, without being talked to by some one. Wolcott had shown that he was “sorry,” as plainly as he ever condescended to express that state of mind. The sensible course, perhaps, was to forget the rest as soon as possible. This Haydock attempted to do.
But it was far from easy. He and Wolcott went abroad together that year. Wolcott wanted to divide the summer between Dinard and Paris. Haydock had long wished to take a bicycle trip among a lot of Italian towns that, as Wolcott told him, no one but he “and another know-it-all who wrote a guide-book about them ever heard of before.” They compromised on the Italian towns. All through the long vacation McGaw, and what Haydock believed to be the type he represented, intruded upon Haydock’s meditations at the oddest hours and in the most unlikely places. For the first time he understood something a man had said to him the summer before:—
“Why on earth are you going to spend your vacation in central Siberia?” Haydock had asked him.
“Because I want to find out what I really think about Harvard,” the man had answered, laughing. It wasn’t exactly necessary for Haydock to go to Italy in order to think; but when, in August, he found himself loafing with Wolcott through a chain of dead little towns that some one had strewn along the hills and forgotten, he was able to discuss with himself,—and occasionally with his companion,—as he never had been before, more than one aspect of life in another little town that, had he known it, is quite as dead in August as any mediæval hamlet of the Apennines. The discussions were intensely serious, unsatisfactory, and in no way markworthy, except that they concerned themselves with Ernest McGaw in particular, and a background of shadowy strugglers Haydock and Wolcott didn’t know much about, that they referred to conveniently as “McGaws in general.” They were unable to dismiss the tutor from their minds; and when college opened again, McGaw was dazed one fine morning in November on seeing his own name on the first page of the “Crimson” among six other names—some of them well known—that, together with his, the “Crimson” announced, composed the Second Seven of the Signet.
It had been Wolcott’s suggestion entirely. He wasn’t a Signet man himself; but Haydock was, “which is practically the same thing,” as Wolcott said when he asked him to do what he could for McGaw. The plan of electing McGaw to the Signet had been such a simple matter for Haydock to carry out, that he couldn’t scare up a suspicion of the smug satisfaction he had always believed was the reward of having gone out of one’s way to do some one a good turn. Even when Wolcott came to him with the “Crimson” in one hand, and patted him on the head with the other, saying: “You—are—a—good—boy,” he didn’t have any of the nice priggish sensations he had been looking forward to investigating.
“No, I’m not,” he said to Wolcott. “It was too easy.”
“How did you manage it?”
“There wasn’t much need of management,” answered Haydock. “The First Seven is so dazzled by its own general brilliancy that it firmly believes that when it was elected, the list of really interesting men in the class was exhausted. So it goes in for proposing its personal friends who are congenial, without being ‘clever’ and ‘literary;’ and as nobody will vote for anybody else’s friends, they all get tired of black-balling people after a while, and compromise on some obscure and very deserving person none of them know at all. It was when everybody was tired of fighting, that I bucked in McGaw. I said he was a scholar,—he must be if he’s able to make you pass examinations; and I said that we would be keeping up the Signet’s tradition of electing representative men, if we got him in; and that the Faculty would like it; and that McGaw would give just the necessary tone of seriousness to the Signet that I feared we of the First Seven lacked. I said that, because people are always tickled to death to think they belong to something very serious, without being serious themselves. It was the speech of my life, I assure you. McGaw was elected, on the second ballot, without a murmur.”