“Heavens, no!” answered Philip. “Nobody knew Wellington, except a few of us,—after he got pneumonia and died, which he did last February. He was in our class, and he must have been a nice fellow; his mother was very nice. But I’d never heard of him. It had just happened that way,—the way it does here.”
“Where did you know his mother?” asked Mrs. Haydock.
“Why, I thought I’d written you all that. It must have been too long, or too dreary, or something,” said Philip.
“No, you never told me.”
“Well, the first thing that I knew about Hugh Wellington was that he came from Chicago, or Cleveland, or some place; that ‘his pleasant disposition was appreciated by all who knew him;’ and that, incidentally, he was dead. I read that in the ‘Crimson’ one morning in bed, and I knew exactly what it meant; because when the ‘Crimson’ is reduced to the ‘pleasant disposition’ stage, there’s a good reason why.”
Mrs. Haydock looked up inquiringly.
“I mean, they can’t find out anything; there’s nothing to find out. He went his way quietly,—decently, I suppose,—without knowing any one in particular. No one seemed to know him, not even well enough to say that his disposition wasn’t pleasant; so the ‘Crimson’ gave him the benefit of the doubt.”
“It’s the least it could do for any dead man,” said Mrs. Haydock.
“And the most that could be done for poor Wellington, I suppose,” added Philip, thoughtfully. “After that, I didn’t think of him again—you don’t, you know; among so many it’s bound to happen pretty often—until somebody asked who he was, at luncheon. There were ten of us at the table, and Billy Fields was the only one who knew anything about him. He said that he sat next to a man named H. Wellington in some big history course, and liked the clothes he wore. I think he and Billy used to nod to each other in the Yard. Well, in the natural course of events, that would have been the end of him, as far as I was concerned, if Nate Lawrence—he’s the president of the class—hadn’t dashed round to my room that afternoon to ask me what he’d better do. Nate’s a bully chap,—a great, big clean sort of a child who breathes hard whenever he has to think of anything. He always wants to do the proper thing by the class and the college, and we help him out a good deal with resolutions and committees and impromptu speeches for athlete dinners, and all that. He wanted me to sit right down and help him draw up some resolutions of sympathy and ‘get it over with,’ he said. After that he could call a class meeting, to which no one would come of course, and send the thing home immediately. I couldn’t see any particular necessity for rushing the matter, except that Nate had it very much on his mind. It wasn’t as if the man were alive and might die at any moment. So I told him he’d better wait awhile, and asked him if he knew anything about Wellington in the first place. He said, why, yes, of course—he remembered the name quite distinctly; Wellington had come out for the foot ball in October, but had hurt his knee—no, come to think of it, it might have been his collar-bone—and had dropped out pretty soon. He was either the tall lad with the shoulders, or that wiry little man who might have made a good quarter-back if he’d stayed on. You see, Wellington must have been a mighty quiet sort of fellow, because Nate is a tremendously conscientious president. He can tell almost everybody apart.
“I said, ‘You simply have to get more details, if you want me to write the letter.’ I’m pretty good at that kind of thing, but I like to have something to go by, naturally; it makes them easier—more spontaneous. Nate had been up to the Office; but I didn’t find anything very available in what he’d got there, so we looked up Wellington’s address in the Index, and went round to his room that afternoon. He lived in a little house on Kirkland Street.