The Guarded Heights
"By no means. Expediency, my dear friend, and the general welfare.
Hercules for little Bacchus."
He couldn't refuse. Wandel and Goodhue, and, for that matter all of
Dalrymple's friends, those girls in there, depended on him; yet he knew
it was a bad business for him and for Dalrymple; and he wanted above all
other things to pass for a moment through that brilliant screen that
moved perpetually between him and Sylvia.
He waited in the shadows of the cab until Dalrymple and Wandel left the
building. Wandel motioned the other into the cab. Dalrymple obeyed,
willingly enough, swinging his stick, and humming off the key. Probably
Wandel's diplomacy. Wandel jumped in, called an address to the driver,
and slammed the door.
"Where are you taking him?" George asked.
For the first time Dalrymple seemed to realize who the silent man in the
shadows was.
"I'm not going on any party with Morton," he said, sullenly.
"You can go to the devil," Wandel said, pleasantly, "as long as you keep
away from decent people until you're decent yourself."
"No," George said. "He's going home or I have nothing more to do with
it."
"Perhaps you're right," Wandel agreed, "but you can fancy I had to offer
him something better than that to get him out."
He tapped on the pane and gave the driver the new address. Dalrymple
started to rise.
"Won't go home--you keep your dirty hands off me, Morton. You----"
"Hercules!" softly from Wandel.
George grasped Dalrymple's arms, pulled him down, held him as in a
vise. Dalrymple raved. Wandel laughed pleasantly.
"Dirty hands," flashed through George's brain. Did Dalrymple know
anything, or was it an instinctive suspicion, or merely the explosion of
helpless temper and dislike?
The ride was brief, and the block in which Dalrymple lived was,
fortunately, at that moment free of pedestrians. Wandel descended and
rang the bell. When the door was opened George relaxed his grasp.
Dalrymple tried to spring from the opposite side of the cab. George
caught him, lifted him, carried him like a child across the sidewalk,
and set him down in the twilight of a hall where a flunky gaped.
"There's your precious friend," he accused Wandel.
He returned to the cab, rubbing his hands as if they needed cleansing.
"There's no one like you, great man," Wandel said when he had come back
to the cab. "You've done Dolly and everyone he would have seen to-night
a good turn."
But George felt he had done himself a bad one. During the rest of his
time at Princeton, and afterward in New York, he would have a dangerous
enemy. Dirty hands! Trust Dalrymple to do his best to give that
qualification its real meaning. And these people! You could trust them,
too, to stand by Dalrymple against the man who had done them a good
turn. It had been rotten of Wandel to ask it, to take him away at that
vital moment. Anyway, it was done. He forgot Dalrymple in his present
anxiety. The ride seemed endless. The ascent in the elevator was a
unique torture. The cloak-room attendants had an air of utter
indifference. When he could, George plunged into the ballroom, escaping
Wandel, threading the hurrying maze to the other end of the room where
earlier in the evening he had seen Sylvia's mother sitting with Mrs.
Alston. George passed close, every muscle taut. Mrs. Planter gave no
sign. Mrs. Alston reached over and tapped his arm with her fan. He
paused, holding his breath.
"Betty asked me to look for you," she said. "Where have you been? She
was afraid you had found her party tiresome. You haven't been dancing
much."
He answered her politely, and walked on. He braced himself against the
wall, the strain completely broken. She hadn't told. She hadn't demanded
that her mother take her home. She hadn't said: "Betty, what kind of men
do you ask to your dances?" Why hadn't she? Again he saw his big,
well-clothed figure in a glass, and he smiled. Was it because he was
already transformed?
Here she came, dancing with Goodhue, and Goodhue seemed trying to lead
her close. George didn't understand at first that he silently asked for
news of Dalrymple. His own eyes studied Sylvia. Her face held too much
colour. She gave him back his challenge, but the contempt in her eyes
broadened his smile. He managed a reassuring nod to Goodhue, but
Dalrymple, for the time, was of no importance. Sylvia was going to
fight, and not like a spoiled child. He must have impressed her as being
worthy of a real fight.
He faced the rest of the evening with new confidence. He forgot to be
over-careful with these people whose actions were unstudied. He dodged
across the floor and took Betty from Lambert Planter while Lambert
raised his eyebrows, relinquished her with pronounced reluctance, and
watched George guide her swiftly away. Maybe Lambert was right, and he
ought to tell Betty, but not now. To-night, against all his
expectations, he found himself having a good time, enjoying more than
anything else this intimate and exhilarating progress with Betty. Always
he hated to give her up, but he danced with other girls, and found they
liked to dance with him because he was big, and danced well, and was
Dicky Goodhue's friend and Betty's, and played football; but, since he
couldn't very well ask Sylvia, he only really cared to dance with Betty.
He was at Betty's table for supper. He didn't like to hear these pretty
girls laughing about Dalrymple, but then with them Dalrymple must have
exercised a good deal of restraint. It ought to be possible to make them
see the ugly side, to bare the man's instinct to go from this party to
another. Then they wouldn't laugh.
Lambert sat down for awhile.
"Where's Sylvia?" Betty asked.
Lambert shrugged his shoulders.
"It's hard enough to keep track of you, Betty. Sylvia's a sister."
George gathered that Sylvia's absence from that table had impressed them
both. He knew very well where she was, across the room, focus for as
large a gathering as Betty's, chiefly of young men, eager for her
brilliancy. Lambert went on, glancing at George his questions of the
smoking-room.
It wasn't long before the dawn when George said polite things with
Goodhue and Wandel, and after their pattern. In the lower hall he
noticed that all these pleasure seekers, a while ago flushed and happy,
had undergone a devastating change. Faces were white. Gowns looked
rumpled and old. The laughter and chatter were no longer impulsive.
"The way one feels after a hard game," he thought.
Goodhue offered to take Wandel in and drop him. The little man alone
seemed as fresh and neat as at the start of the evening.
"Had a good time, great person?" he asked as they drove off. "But then
why shouldn't great men always have good times?"
Wandel's manner suggested that he had seen to George's good time. What
he had actually done was to involve him in an open hostility with
Dalrymple. The others didn't mention that youth. Was there a tactful
thought for him in their restraint?
They left Wandel at an expensive bachelor apartment house overlooking
the park. George gathered from Goodhue, as they drove on, that Wandel's
attitude toward his family was that of an old and confidential friend.
"You see Driggs always has to be his own master," he said.
XVII
Because of the restless contrast of that trip George brought back to
Princeton a new appreciation; yet beneath the outer beauty there, he
knew, a man's desires and ambitions lost none of their ugliness. He
stared at Sylvia's portrait, but it made him want the living body that
he had touched, that was going to give him a decent fight. Already he
planned for other opportunities to meet her, although with her attitude
what it was he didn't see how he could use them to advance his cause;
and always there was the possibility of her resenting his persistence to
the point of changing her mind about telling.
He had decided to avoid Dalrymple as far as possible, but that first
night, as he drowsed over a book, he heard a knock at his door, not
loud, and suggestive of reluctance and indecision. He hid the photograph
and the riding crop, and called:
"Come in!"
The door opened slowly. Dalrymple stood on the threshold, his weak face
white and perverse. George waited, watching him conquer a bitter
disinclination. He knew what was coming and how much worse it would make
matters between them.
"It seems," the tortured man said, "that I was beastly rude to you last
night. I've come to say I didn't mean it and am sorry."
"You've come," George said, quietly, "because Goodhue and Wandel have
made you, through threats, I daresay. If you hadn't meant it you
wouldn't have been rude in just that way. I'm grateful to Goodhue and
Wandel, but I won't have your apologies, because they don't mean a damn
thing."
Dalrymple's face became evil. He started to back out.
"Wait a minute," George commanded. "You don't like me because I'm
working my way through college. That's what you shot at me last night
when you'd drunk enough to give you the nerve, but it's been in your
mind all along. I'd pound a little common-sense and decency into you,
only I wouldn't feel clean after doing it."
That, to an extent, broke down his severity. It sounded queer, from him.
If Lambert Planter could have heard him say that!
"Let the others think they've done us a good turn," he went on. "We have
to live in the same class without clawing each other's faces every time
we meet, but you can't pull the wool over my eyes, and I won't try to
pull it over yours. Now get out, and don't come here alone again."
He felt better and cleaner after that. When Dalrymple had gone he
finished his chapter and tumbled into bed.
XVIII
George was glad of the laundry, indeed, as the holidays approached. It
gave him a sound excuse for not dashing joyously from Princeton with the
rest, but it didn't cure the depression with which he saw the college
empty. He wandered about a campus as deserted as a city swept by
pestilence, asking himself what he would have done if his father and
mother hadn't exiled him as thoroughly as Old Planter had. There was no
point thinking about that; it wasn't even a question. He took long walks
or stayed in his room, reading, and once or twice answering regretfully
invitations that had sprung from encounters at Betty's party. It was
nice to have them, but of course he couldn't go to such affairs alone
just yet. Besides, he didn't have the money.
Squibs Bailly limped all the way up his stairs one day, scolding him for
sulking in his tent.
"I only heard last night that you were in town. I'm not psychic. Why
haven't you been around?"
"I didn't want to bother----"
Bailly interrupted him.
"I'm afraid I didn't appreciate you went quite so much alone."
"Altogether alone," George said. "But I don't want anybody to feel sorry
for me because of that. It has some advantages."
"You're too young to say such things," Bailly said.
He made George go to the Dickinson Street house for Christmas dinner.
There was no other guest. The rooms were bright with holly, and a very
small but dazzling Christmas tree stood in a corner, bearing a gift for
him. Mrs. Bailly, as he entered, touched his cheek with her lips and
welcomed him by his first name. She created for him an illusion that
made him choke a trifle. She made him feel as if he had come home.
"And," he thought, "Squibs and she know."
He wondered if it was that knowledge that made Squibs go into his social
views one evening when he sat with him in the study. It was then that
George realized he had no such views apart from his own case. Vaguely he
knew that somewhere outside of Princeton strikes multiplied these days,
that poor people complained of the cost of food and housing, that