“Because he was the man who saved your life.”
III
When Dr. Levin returned later that day to change the dressing, he found Hamilton still asleep. He was also asleep the next day; but the third time, Dr. Levin found him awake, his dark eyes fluttering restlessly about the ward, like caged birds.
Hamilton, Dr. Levin decided, might be twenty-five or twenty-six, an athlete and a person of social position—analyzing people who came under his observation was one of the surgeon’s hobbies. Weeks of unconsciousness had left Hamilton pale and weak, but there was an appearance of strength in his restless eyes and firm, ambitious lips. His nose was slightly arched and the bridge at the highest point a trifle thick as though it had once been broken; his jaws broad, but tapering to a pointed cynical chin; his brow high and narrow; his eyebrows thick without being shaggy—one of them was scarred. A compromise between the intellectual and the physical, Levin thought. He might have made the Harvard football team or Phi Beta Kappa, depending on his inclinations.
As a matter of fact, Hamilton had not made Phi Beta Kappa, although he had come comfortably near it, and had made the football team—trying out for it only on the insistence of a physical training instructor after he had watched Hamilton for a few minutes on the wrestling mat.
Hamilton believed thoroughly in the old Greek ideal of a sound mind in a sound body, but he held no exaggerated idea of the importance of his ability to tuck a leather ball under his arm and hammer his way through a line of opposing men. He burned no incense at the altar of his egoism as he had seen so many other football heroes do and he expected no tribute. He enjoyed the game for its own sake—the nervous expectation, the united purpose to win, the quick strategy, the unexpected opposition, the physical clash, the tug and strain of muscles, the smell of keen autumn air and of blood and leather. But football was only a game—only part of his carefully planned scheme of education. It helped provide the sound body.
His studies were the studies that a gentleman of leisure of the old school might select for his son, with a few allowances for modern standards. He had pursued the study of Greek, for instance, only through Homer and of Latin through Horace. He had taken the minimum science requirement, a single year of physics, and had then gone in for contemporary literature and history. He had chosen French for his foreign language. These studies he had sprinkled with a few courses here and there in fine arts, psychology and philosophy. Some were admittedly cinch courses. He applied himself to these with reasonable zeal, without, at the same time, endangering his social position by being mistaken for a grind. He was giving himself a foundation not so much for the establishment of a career, but for the enjoyment of life.
As the son and heir of Robert E. Hamilton, owner of extensive cotton plantations, cotton mills and hardwood forests in Georgia, Robert, jr., had no particular need to establish a career, and, although literature attracted him, he preferred to enjoy rather than to try to produce it.
“There are too many writers already,” Hamilton would say. “What we need are more persons who can distinguish between good and bad writing. We need a larger dilettante class, for the sake of the writers themselves, and as I have no real inspiration I might as well belong to the dilettantes.”
This might have been either a streak of laziness or of candor. Or again it might have been only the result of his peculiar conception of aristocracy.