It took an hour and a half to elect the next four men,—an hour and a half of eulogy, discussion, diplomacy, compromise,—although, as time went on, the increasing indifference of the majority of the fellows as to who got in tended to reduce the election here and there, among those who really cared, to the process of voting “for your man, if you’ll vote for mine.” Not that the arrangement did away with animated electioneering in different corners of the room, and vehement arguments that might never have ended had not some weary outsider called attention to the fact that they had long since ceased to have any bearing on anything. But it gave a coercive publicity to pigheadedness in various quarters that made a Third Seven possible. At midnight, five men had been elected, two places remained unfilled, and the list of candidates numbered four. Then, by a curious revulsion of feeling no one sought to explain, three of the names that had hung on with a fair chance of success until that late hour, were unmercifully black-balled in rapid succession and thrown out. This left but one candidate—a man named Leonard—and two vacancies. The hat went around again bringing back to the desk, among twelve other cards, the ace of spades and the queen of clubs. Two black-balls, if persisted in, kept a man out of the Signet.
“Now we’ll have to think up some one else. Oh, Lord!” yawned Haviland. “Leonard has had two black for hours; I think he’s hopeless. Somebody suggest somebody else.”
Ellis glanced at Haydock as much as to say, “Now’s your time.” He had been doing that, off and on, all evening, until Haydock at last refused to look in his direction. Haydock was on the point of attempting something rather impossible, and he didn’t propose to ruin his chance of success at the outset, merely by being ill-timed. He had decided a week before,—as soon as the postal cards calling for an election were sent out,—that he wanted Sears Wolcott on the Signet. His reasons for getting Sears there were not obvious, and Haydock appreciated the difficulties that lay in the way of making them appear so, or of giving any reasons at all other than that he wanted him. His best motives for wishing to “buck” Sears in were hardly formulated in his own mind; he couldn’t very well undertake to make them clear to others, even if they would have carried with them any weight,—which they wouldn’t have. He was influenced wholly by the same feeling for Wolcott—a mixture of admiration and fond disapproval—that had led him the year before to do what he could to interest The Magnificent One in Barrows’s unfortunate. The little experiment had done something for Wolcott,—a good that perhaps only Haydock and Wolcott’s sister appreciated as yet, but something that was, nevertheless, worth while. Wolcott’s horizon had given a little here and there; Wolcott himself was somewhat less intolerant; he had ceased noticeably, to Haydock at least, to be actuated in everything he said and did by a kind of American adaptation of the ante-French Revolutionary opinion, that human beings began with barons. He was still a selfish high-handed youth,—no one knew it better than Haydock. But his friend found him neither as egoistic nor as arrogant as he had been; and he drew his own inferences. As for getting Wolcott into the Signet—Haydock wished to go on with what he had begun. The junior society seemed made to his hand. He not only looked forward to throwing Wolcott and McGaw together again,—on a basis of equality, this time,—he wished to put Wolcott in the way of having to see something of fellows who had a variety of interests strikingly different from his own, and who came together now and then to talk and read about them. Wolcott came in contact with men of many tastes at his clubs; but the club ideal was, after all, the placid, unimaginative ideal of fifteen or twenty pleasant young men with plenty of money, it was only too easy to live up to. Haydock had no misguided veneration for the Signet as a learned or even a very clever institution; an undergraduate literary society could hardly be one or the other. He did appreciate, however, the curiously diverse character of its components, and the semi-serious intellectual friction that went on there. For the good of Wolcott alone, he hoped to get him on the Third Seven. The attitude was quixotic, inasmuch as it was rather sentimental and as absurd as only a thoroughly fine attitude can be. Haydock had talked several men into promising to vote for Wolcott, should his name come up; and Ellis, from a variety of strange Christian motives, had done the same. Ellis had become enthusiastic over Wolcott since he had learned of the McGaw affair; whereas, formerly, he had denounced him as a selfish beast, he now called him a “temperament.”
“Do propose somebody—anybody,” repeated Haviland. “I’m so sleepy!” Two of the men had stretched themselves on the sofas, with the request that they be waked in time to vote.
“Let’s only have six on the Third Seven; it would be so quaint,” suggested Tommy.
“I think I’d even vote for Baxford’s room-mate if he were put up again,” said Dickey Dawson.
It was just this apparent willingness to elect any one and get away, that Haydock had been waiting for. He stood up.
“I can’t think of any one who seems exactly cut out for the Signet, any more than the rest of you can,” he said; “but I don’t see why that ought to make so much difference on the Third Seven. Why not get on somebody like Tony Wilson or Jack Linzee or Sears Wolcott,—not necessarily any of those three, but some one like that. They’re athletes, you know, and people outside will think we’re trying to be representative,—that always sounds well, and, besides, they’re all good fellows. Any one of those men would be surprised and pleased to be elected, I feel sure.”
“Yes,—they did that last year,” added Ellis. “Martin was a Signet man, and he used to go to all the meetings and everything, and he was nothing but an athloot. People laughed at first, but they thought it rather nice. I’ll vote for any of those fellows.”
“Well, I nominate Sears Wolcott,” called some one from the sofa,—one of the men who had pledged himself to Haydock. “I know him pretty well, and shouldn’t mind seeing him in.”