“You’ll have to make him an honorary member, won’t you? Can he pay his initiation fee?” Wolcott asked, with elaborate innocence. Haydock answered by unbuttoning Wolcott’s coat and finding ten dollars in his card-case.
“Now sit down and enclose it in a nice little note to Barrows, so that Crœsus can have the satisfaction of paying it himself.” He led Sears by the coat to a desk, and dipped a pen in the ink.
“This highway robbery game is a perfect damned outrage!” said The Magnificent One, as he took the pen and began to write.
McGaw was bewildered and charmed at his election, for it is a great honour to belong to the Signet, although no one—especially the twenty-one members of the distinguished junior society—knows just why. He was also considerably upset by his unexpected translation; it demolished an entire system of dreary philosophy that he had built out of the struggles and bitterness of his freshman and sophomore years. He couldn’t, logically, go on thinking himself an obscure outcast, shut off from human interests, since he had become so pleasantly conspicuous in the public eye. Some unseen, unknown power had wished him well, and had done much for him; McGaw was happy, grateful, and, at first, mystified. But when the extra ten dollars for his initiation fee came through Barrows, he considered the mystery solved. He prayed enthusiastically that night—a great deal more than ten dollars’ worth—for the hallowed being whose goodness was unfathomable. He also laid awake an hour thinking up a suitable subject for his initiation “part.” Nothing that occurred to him seemed deep enough for so intellectual an institution as the Signet.
On the evening the Second Seven was initiated, Haydock—who developed an oppressive sense of responsibility for McGaw five or ten minutes before the fellow stood up to read his part—felt rather proud of him. McGaw’s turn came between a humourous effort in feeble rhyme, and a narrative that the writer sought to disinfect,—when he became aware that there were several instructors among his audience,—by explaining apologetically, that it was “from the French.” McGaw’s part was a dissertation on “The Vocabulary of Æschylus.”
“I was glad he did it,” Haydock said to Wolcott, when telling him about the initiation later in the evening at the club; “because I’d blathered so much about his being serious and a scholar. Why it was wonderful—monumental! Nobody understood a word of it, after the first page, and there were twenty-three pages. I counted them; I had to look interested in something. If there’s a solitary iota subscript in Athens this night that didn’t get ripped up the back and disembowelled, I’d like to shake hands with it, and ask it how it escaped. Professor Tenny went over to him afterwards; they had a lemonade orgy together and made Greek puns. McGaw had the grey suit on; he’s really a rather fine-looking sort of a chap; he doesn’t seem peaked and sticky out at the sleeves the way he used to be. All the fellows wooded up in great style; I’d given Ellis a long talk to death beforehand, and told him the whole thing,”—Wolcott made a face. “Oh, you don’t mind! Ellis is just the kind to think it sort of nice and Godsome. In fact, Ellis told me he was afraid he’d always misjudged you, and asked me what he’d better do about it.” They both laughed. “It’s funny,” Haydock went on, “the way fellows are willing to accept a man here if only you can get the right people to hustle around and say that he’s ‘somebody.’ I was thinking that to-night. Not one of those fellows had ever heard of McGaw until I sprung him on them; and Ellis went around telling everybody he had ‘a future before him,’—whatever that means. Ellis is perfectly happy, you know, when he can persuade himself that some one he has just met has a future before him. He thought I had, for about two weeks once. Well, what I began to say was that, in a small way, McGaw is right in the thick of things now. There’s no reason why those fellows shouldn’t like him; he seems really human in spite of Æschylus; and if they do take to him, he’ll probably make the O. K. and the Pudding, and wind up by being Class Day Orator. When I left, he was talking to that detestable snob, Baxford. Heaven only knows what they found to talk about; but Baxford was cackling his mindless cackle. They seemed to have plenty to say to each other; I didn’t disturb them. Isn’t it funny?”
It was “funny” to Haydock and Wolcott, although Wolcott, perhaps, wouldn’t have found it out by himself. When, a short time afterwards, the Editor-in-chief of the “Monthly” begged permission to print “The Vocabulary of Æschylus,” and the “Crimson” called it “a remarkably distinguished bit of research,” and the Signet remarked that real merit always found its level, Haydock and Wolcott got together and laughed, and were “just too cynical for anything,” as Ellis said, reprovingly. They laughed, too, when they met McGaw in the Yard or the Square,—somehow he had become a more familiar figure in the college scene,—and spoke to him. McGaw always had a cordial “hello” for Haydock alone. To Haydock and Wolcott together, he gave a somewhat stiff nod. Wolcott, unaccompanied, he ignored.
“That young man will succeed,” said Wolcott, one morning after he had been given—as he explained to Haydock—“the frozen eye twice, in front of Foster’s.”
“Any one who can afford to make a point of cutting you has succeeded,” laughed Haydock. McGaw’s independence and “cheek” pleased them both exceedingly.
Haydock had some foundation for his remark. McGaw was prosperous; he was happy; to many of his classmates, he had become something of a personage. He followed “The Vocabulary of Æschylus” in the “Monthly” by “Life and the Classics,” and “Hellas and the Athletic Question” in the “Advocate,”—two intelligent essays that were happy in creating varied opinions among the readers of the college papers, and in causing his name to be added very soon to the list of the “Monthly’s” editors. There are few institutions in college through which one’s tether, so to speak, can be more indefinitely extended than through the Signet and the college press. McGaw’s acquaintance became large and eclectic. It brought him work,—tutoring of all kinds,—more than he could undertake. It gave him an interest in college activities, and an intimate knowledge of them that enabled him to supply several Sunday newspapers with columns of unimportant but lucrative information and journalistic rigmarole. It made it possible for him at length to return to Barrows one of the periodical remittances and something additional, in payment of what he preferred to consider his debt. Barrows gave Wolcott, and Wolcott gave Haydock, and Haydock gave Wolcott’s sister the note that went with it. Between the lines they all read the fine feeling that McGaw, with even finer feeling, had delicately suggested. McGaw was nearing the crest of the wave. The grinds of the class, in discussing him, conceded to him a dubious facility for getting high marks in his studies, and a somewhat frivolous knack of impressing people favourably. But they agreed that, at last analysis, he lacked the instincts of a true scholar. The other men told one another that he was “a terrible grind, but a darned nice fellow!”—which was another way of saying he was “really human, in spite of Æschylus.”