David Malcolm

by Nelson Lloyd

I realized that this Miss Todd was the doctor's daughter, of whom I had heard Boller speak in the most extravagant terms, and now it seemed to me that his praise had quite failed to convey an adequate idea of her charms. She was very fair, very pink and white, with a Psyche knot of shimmering hair; a tall, slender girl, clad in clinging, gauzy blue. To my mind came the picture of Penelope Blight, the only girl to whom I had ever given a thought; I remembered her tanned cheeks, her brown arms, and hard little hands, and it seemed to me that even she could never grow to such loveliness as this.

I loved Miss Todd. Had she offered herself to me at that moment, I should have married her on the spot, and now there was shattered my boyish contempt for all that was weak and gentle, however beautiful. The ideas which composed my mind rattled and tumbled about like the bits of colored glass in a kaleidoscope, and in a flash they formed a softer and more harmonious design. The world was something more to me than a happy hunting-ground, life more than an exciting adventure. The world was the home of Gladys Todd; life was to win her love; happiness was to sit at her side.

And now I was sitting at her side in a seventh heaven; in one of the silent places of the seventh heaven, for we had little to say to each other. We were tyros in the art of conversing, and our promising ideas born of long mental struggles were stilled with bludgeons of assent and dissent. We knew not how to nourish and embellish them, and yet, though there were long stretches of embarrassed silence, we were not unhappy. Even Boller found his subterfuges to drag me away quite futile, and Miss Todd herself seemed content, for she met a dozen like efforts with a quiet and unpenetrable smile.

So Gladys Todd and I sat the evening through as on a calm cloud, looking down to earth and the antics of little men. They crowded close to us, laughing and talking; they called up to us and we did not hear them; they jostled one another and they jostled us, but they could not entice us into their restless social game. They offered us coffee, sandwiches and cake, and we brushed them away. The very thought of food was repulsive to me, and this was not because I had reached that point where the immeasurable yearning of the heart dwarfs all mean desire. I was really hungry, but I had no mind to spoil the impression which it was evident I had made; I had no mind to let Miss Todd see me with a half-eaten sandwich poised in one hand and scattering crumbs untidily, and in the other a cup of muddy, steaming fluid. She seemed to have a like conception of the undignity of eating, for when she declined the proffered feast it was with the air of one who never ate at all, who never knew the pangs of appetite, but lived on something infinitely higher. She even spurned the cake, and I was glad to let her deceive me. I liked to coddle myself with the belief that she never ate. I knew that she did not want me to see her eating, for then I must have classed her with the mass of women—with Mrs. Ruffle, whom I heard choking on a bit of nutshell; with her mother, who was standing near us talking in a voice muffled in food; I must have slipped off the cloud to earth.

But Gladys Todd was wise, with that innate wisdom of her sex in matters of appearance when appearance is to be considered, and we held in silence, loftily on our cloud. And looking back on that evening, my recollection is of misty, nebulous things; not of a passing flow of incident, but of a welling up of new thoughts as I sat awkwardly pulling at my fingers and caressing my collar. Yet there were incidents, too, of high importance to McGraw. Doctor Todd declared that the evening was historical. Standing in the centre of a hushed company, he announced that the year had broken all records for matriculation; McGraw was growing; McGraw could not long be contained within her present walls, and the world must soon realize that in simple justice something must be done for her. The doctor was not cast down by the fact that nothing had been done and that there was no sign of anything being done. Hope was his watchword, and so hopefully did he speak of the future that the collegiate Gothic quadrangles began to rise in the imaginations of the company as dreams almost accomplished, and so infectious was his confidence that his hearers caught the high pitch of his enthusiasm, and when he had finished Boller sprang to a chair, and, waving a coffee-cup, struck the first deep tones of "Here's to old McGraw, drink her down!" and everybody joined in as fervently as though it were a hymn. They were not satisfied with it once, but Doctor Todd himself cried, "Again," and, waving an imaginary cup, led us off once more into the bibulous and inspiring song.

I remember joining in the first bars, but not because I was unduly stirred by the love of my alma mater. It was rather to give Gladys Todd a hint of the rich depths of my voice. To make an impression on Gladys Todd had become the business of my life. I was glad that I had come to McGraw, because here I had met her. McGraw's past and future were of no moment to me; her growth was nothing. She might shrivel up until I was the only student, yet I should still be happy in my nearness to Gladys Todd. And what of Penelope? I did think of Penelope that night as I sat alone in my room, cocked on two legs of my chair, gazing blankly at the ceiling. I remembered the foolish, childish promises which I had made to her that I should never forget her. Of course I should never forget her, no more than I should forget the moon because I had beheld the sun's dazzling splendor.

But a man's ideas change, I said; his view broadens. And I remembered Penelope as I first saw her, in her tattered frock and with the faded ribbon tossing in her hair. I liked Penelope. I thought of her with brotherly affection. But I said to myself that she could never grow to the wonderful beauty of this Miss Todd.

CHAPTER IX

I was not long at McGraw University before I had attained my ambition to be like Boller of '89. I draped my legs in wide folds of shepherd's plaid; the corners of a purple silk handkerchief protruded from my top pocket; and as long as the "smoky city" was the proper form I crowned myself with one of them, and as promptly discarded it for the newer tourist's helmet, and that in turn for a yachting cap. Must I confess it?—before Boller left McGraw I had quite surpassed him as a model of fashion. But my ambition did not end here. The very conceit which had made me such an insufferable youth in my last days at home was the spur which drove me to win every honor that could come to an undergraduate. As Boller stepped out of offices I stepped into them—in presidencies and secretaryships almost innumerable, into editorships, and even captaincies. Physically timid, I endured much pain in winning these last honors. The stretch of rolling turf which we called the foot-ball field became the arena in which I suffered martyrdom daily. I hated the game. When I donned my padded toggery it was with the secret spirit I should have felt in preparing for the rack, yet I played recklessly for the éclat it gave me. To-day I have an occasional reminder of those struggles in a weak knee, which has a way of twisting unexpectedly and causing excruciating pain, but I consider that these twinges are fair payment for the pleasure with which I contemplated my picture years ago in the Harlansburg Sentinel, showing me in my foot-ball clothes, poised on a photographer's fence. The subject, the Sentinel explained, was Captain Malcolm of McGraw, who had made the winning touch-down in the Thanksgiving-Day game with the Northern University of Pennsylvania. The photographer's fence, you might think, was the summit of my career at McGraw, reached as it was in my last year there. To the admiring eyes of my fellows it was, but the McLaurins of Tuckapo and the Malcolms of Windy Valley were above all a practical people and to them I am indebted for a little common-sense, which told me that I could not play foot-ball all my life, nor would the heavy bass voice, so effective in the glee club, support a family, and deep in my heart I admitted the possibilities of a family. I might strive to keep that thought in the background, but it would rise when I dreamed of a home. That home was not a plain stone farm-house, hidden among giant trees. My view had broadened. I dreamed of a Queen Anne cottage, with many gables, and a flat clipped lawn, with a cement walk leading over it to an iron gate. I looked back with affectionate contempt to the art I had known in my youth, to the Rogers group, Lady Washington's ball, Lincoln and his cabinet, the lambrequin and the worsted motto. On my walls there would be a Colosseum, Rembrandt's portrait of himself, a smattering of Madonnas, a Winged Victory, and a Venus de Milo. To preside with me over such a house, to sit at the piano of an evening and play accompaniments while I sang sentimental songs, to fly with me over the country in a side-bar buggy, behind a fleet trotter, I thought only of Gladys Todd. She was accomplished, highly trained, it seemed to me, in all the finer arts of life. In our valley the women never rose above their petty household problems. They could talk, but only of recipes and church affairs, and if they left this narrow environment at all it was to fare far—to India and China, the foreign mission field. My view had broadened. Gladys Todd had her being in higher airs. She painted. Pastels of flowers and plaques adorned with ideal heads covered the walls of the Todd parlor. She wrote. Doctor Todd assured me, speaking without prejudice, that his daughter's essay on "The Immortality of the Soul," which she had written out of pure love of the labor, equalled, if it did not surpass, the best work of the senior class. She sang. Perhaps I see her now in the same wizard lights of distance that glorified the mountains in my boyhood, but I always recall her as a charming old-fashioned picture, sitting at her piano and babbling her little songs in French and German. Of the quality of her French and German I had no means of judging, but that she could use them at all was to me surpassingly enchanting.

So Gladys Todd had her part in completing the wreck of my worthy ambition. What Boller had begun, she unconsciously finished. Yesterday I had planned to make self-sacrifice the key-note of my life. To-day I could not picture her contented to move in the narrow sphere of a Mrs. Pound, cramping her talents in the little circle of the Sunday-school and the Ladies' Aid. Her influence for good must be a subtler one than this. To wield it, she must have her being in higher airs, in an atmosphere of Colosseums, of Rembrandts, and Madonnas. Remember, she was no longer the shy girl whom I had met on the first night of my university life. Then she was only in her fifteenth year. I was a junior when she produced her lauded essay on "The Immortality of the Soul," and it revealed to me the profundity of her mind. To match her, I must sit many a night driving my way through difficult pages of the classics, and often when my heart was in some smoky den with a few choice spirits, my body bent over my table and my brain wearied itself with abstruse equations.