The Guarded Heights
George wasn't in a mood for subtleties of expression.
"I've often wondered why you haven't married. With your money you ought
to have a big choice."
Blodgett sipped a liqueur. He smiled in a self-satisfied way.
"Money will buy about anything--even the kind of a wife you want. I'm in
no hurry. When I marry, young man, it will be the right kind."
And George understood that he meant by the right kind some popular and
well-bred girl who would make the Blodgett family hit a social average.
He carried that terrifying thought of marriage back to Princeton. He had
no fear Sylvia would ever look seriously in Blodgett's direction. Money
could scarcely bribe her. This, however, was her second season. Of
course she would marry someone of her own immediate circle. She could
take her choice. When that happened what would become of his
determination and his boasts? Frequently he clenched her riding crop and
swore:
"Nothing--not even that--can keep me from accomplishing what I've set
out to do. I'll have my way with her."
He shrank, nevertheless, from the thought of her adopting such a
defence. It was intolerable. He read the New York papers with growing
suspense. As an antidote he attacked harder than ever his study of cause
and effect in the Street. With football out of the way he could give a
good deal of time to that, and Blodgett now and then enclosed a hint in
Mundy's letters. It was possible to send a fair amount of money to his
parents; but his mother's letters never varied from their formality of
thanks and solicitations as to his health. His father didn't write at
all. Of course, they couldn't understand what he was doing. The shadow
of the great Planter remained perpetually over their little home.
Another doubt troubled George. With the club matter out of the way, and
the presidency of the class his, and a full football garland resting on
his head, was he wasting his time at Princeton? The remembrance of
Blodgett steadied him. He needed all that Princeton and its
companionships could give.
Purposefully he avoided Betty. Was she, indeed, responsible for that
softness he had yielded to in the infirmary and during the final game?
In his life, he kept telling himself, there was no room for sentiment.
Sentiment was childish, a hindrance. Hadn't he decided at the start that
nothing should turn him from his attempt for the summit? Still he
couldn't avoid seeing Betty now and then in Princeton, or at the dances
in New York to which he went with Goodhue. The less he saw of Betty,
moreover, the stronger grew his feeling of something essential lacking
from his life; and it bothered that, after a long separation, she was
invariably friendly instead of reproachful. He found that he couldn't
look at her eyes without hungrily trying to picture them wet with tears
for him.
To some extent other demands took his mind from such problems. The
rumpus Goodhue had foreseen developed. Important men came or wrote from
New York or Philadelphia in Dalrymple's cause, but at the meetings of
the section George sat obdurate, and, when the struggle approached a
crisis, Goodhue came out openly on the side of his room-mate.
"You can have Dalrymple in the club," was George's ultimatum, "or you
can have me, but you can't have us both."
If George resigned, Goodhue announced, he would follow. Dalrymple was
doomed. The important men went back or ceased writing. Then Wandel
slipped Rogers into the charmed circle--the payment of a debt; and
George laughed and left the meeting, saying:
"You can elect anybody you please now."
Cynically, he was tempted to try to force Allen in.
"You're not honest even with your own group," he said afterward to
Wandel.
The club lost its value as a marker of progress. Besides, he didn't
look forward to eating with that little snob, Rogers, for two years. Nor
did he quite care for Wandel's reply.
"You've enough class-consciousness for both of us, heroic and puissant
Apollo."
For the first time George let himself go with Wandel.
"You'll find Apollo Nemesis, little man, unless you learn to say what
you mean in words of one syllable."
And the discussion of the clubs went on, breeding enmities but
determining no radical reform.
The struggle at Princeton was over. George looked often at the younger
men, who didn't have to prepare themselves minutely for the greater
struggle just ahead, envying them their careless play, their proneness
to over-indulgence in beer and syncopated song. While he worked with
high and low prices and variations in exchange he heard them calling
cheerily across the campus, gathering parties for poker or bridge or a
session at the Nassau. Goodhue, even Wandel, found some time for
frivolity. George strangled his instinct to join them. He had too much
to do. In every diversion he took he wanted to feel there was a phase
personally valuable to him.
He counted the days between his glimpses of Sylvia, and tried not to
measure the hours dividing his meetings with Betty. If only he dared let
himself go, dared cease battle for a little, dared justify Sylvia's
attitude! Even Goodhue noticed his avoidance of Betty.
He encountered Sylvia in New York; asked her to dance with him; was
refused; cut in when she was, in a sense, helpless; and glided around
the room with a sullen, brilliant body that fairly palpitated with
distaste.
Even during the summer he ran into her once on Long Island. Then he was
always missing her. Perhaps she had learned to avoid him. He shrank each
morning from his paper, from any bit of rumour connecting her with a
man; and Blodgett, he noticed, was still making money for a bachelor
bank account.
He came to conceive a liking for his flabby employer, although he was
quite sure Blodgett wouldn't have bothered with him a moment if he
hadn't been a prominent college man with such ties among the great as
Blodgett hadn't been able to knot himself. What was more to the point,
the stout man admired George's ambition. He was more generous with his
surreptitious advice. He paid a larger salary which he admitted was less
than George earned during that summer. George, therefore, went back to
Princeton with fuller pockets. Again Mundy was loath to let him depart.
"You know more about this game than men who've worked at it for years."
His face of a parson grimaced.
"You'd soon be able to hire me, if you'd stick on the job instead of
going back to college to get smashed up at football."
George, however, didn't suffer much damage that year. He played
brilliantly through a season that without him would have been far more
disastrous than it was.
When it was all over Squibs sat one night silently for a long time. At
last he stirred, lighted his pipe, and spoke.
"I ought to say to you, George, that I was as satisfied with you in
defeat as I was in victory."
"I outplayed Planter, anyway, didn't I?"
Bailly studied him.
"Did that mean more to you than having Princeton beaten?"
"It kept Princeton from being beaten worse than it was."
"Yes," Bailly admitted, "and, perhaps, you are right to find a personal
victory somewhere in a general defeat."
"But you really think it selfish," George said.
"I wish," Bailly answered, "I could graft on your brain some of Allen's
mental processes, even his dissatisfactions."
"You can't," George said, bluntly. "I'm tired of Allen's smash talk.
Most people like him could be bought with the very conditions they
attack."
Bailly arose and limped up and down. When he spoke his voice vibrated
with an unaccustomed passion:
"I don't know. I don't think so. But I want you to realize that
prostrate worship of the fat old god success is as wicked as any other
idolatry. I want you to understand that Allen and his kind may be
sincere and right, that a vision unblinded by the bull's-eye may see
the target all awry. My fear goes back to your first days here. You are
still ashamed of service."
"I've served," George said, hotly.
"Was it real service," Bailly asked gently, "or a shot at the
bull's-eye?"
Almost involuntarily George clapped his fingers to his head.
"You're wrong, sir," he cried. "I've served when nothing but the thought
of service brought me through."
Mrs. Bailly hurried in. She put one hand on George's shoulder. With the
other she patted his hair.
"What's he scolding my boy for?"
George grinned at Bailly.
"Don't you see, sir, if I were as bad as you think she couldn't do
that?"
Bailly nodded thoughtfully.
"If you've served as you say you must be merely hiding the good."
XXX
To himself at times George acknowledged his badness, in Bailly's terms
at least. He sometimes sympathized with Allen's point of view, even
while he heckled that angular man who often sat with him and Goodhue,
talking about strikes, and violence, and drunkenness as the quickest
recreation for men who had no time for play. He longed to tell Allen in
justification that he had walked out of the working class himself.
Later, staring at Sylvia's portrait, he would grow hard again. Men, he
would repeat, wanted to smash down obstacles only because they didn't
have the strength to scramble over. He had the strength. But Bailly
would intrude again. What about the congenitally unsound?
"I'm not unsound," he would say to himself, studying the picture.
And he suspected that it was because he didn't want to be good that he
was afraid of seeing too much of Betty Alston and her kindliness and the
reminiscence of tears in her eyes. If Squibs only knew how blessedly
easy it would be to turn good, to let ambition and Sylvia slip into a
remote and ugly memory! More frequently now he stared at her portrait,
forcing into his heart the thought of hatred and into her face the
expression of it; for the more hatred there was between them, the
smaller was the chance of his growing weak.
He longed for the approaching escape from his gravest temptation. When
he was through college and definitely in New York he would find it
simpler to be hard. For that matter, why should he grow weak? He had
achieved a success far beyond the common. He would graduate president of
his class, captain of the football team, although he had tried to throw
both honours to Goodhue; member of the club that had drawn the best men
of his year, a power in the Senior Council; the man who had done most
for Princeton; a high-stand scholar; and, most important of all, one who
had acquired with his education a certain amount of culture and an ease
of manner in any company. Allen was still angular, as were most of those
other men who had come here, like George, with nothing behind them.
In his success he saw no miracle, no luck beyond Squibs' early interest.
What he had won he had applied himself to get with hardness, cold
calculation, an indomitable will. He had kept his eyes open. He had used
everybody, everything, to help him climb toward Sylvia out of the valley
of humiliation. The qualities that had brought him all that were good
qualities, worth clinging to. As he had climbed he would continue in
spite of Bailly or Allen or Betty. But when he thought of Betty he had
to fight the tears from his own eyes.
A little while before his graduation he went to her, knowing he must do
something to make her less kind, to destroy the impression she gave him
of one who, like Mrs. Bailly, always thought of him at his best.
He walked alone through a bland moonlight scented with honeysuckle from
the hedges. His heart beat as it had that day four years ago when he had
unintentionally let Sylvia know his presumptuous craving.
Two white figures strolled in front of the house. He went up, striving
to overcome the absurd reluctance in his heart. It wasn't simple to
destroy a thing as beautiful as this friendship. Betty paused and