The Guarded Heights
when it would impress most. Skill at games, he hazarded, would make it
easier than he had thought to work his way through.
Whatever distaste such cold calculation brought he destroyed by staring
at Sylvia's remote beauty. If he was to reach such a goal he would have
to use every possible short cut, no matter how unlovely.
He found that evening a radical alteration in Squibs Bailly's study. The
blotter was spattered with ink. Papers littered the desk and drifted
about the floor. Everything within reach of the tutor's hands was
disarranged and disreputably untidy. Bailly appeared incomparably more
comfortable.
The course opened with a small lecture, delivered while the attenuated
man limped up and down the cluttered room.
"Don't fancy," he began, "that you have found in football a key to the
scholastic labyrinth."
His wrinkled face assumed a violent disapproval. His youthful eyes
flashed resentfully.
"Mr. Morton, if I suffered the divine Delphic frenzy and went to the
Dean and assured him you were destined to be one of our very best
undergraduates and at the same time would make fifteen touchdowns
against Yale, and roughly an equal number against Harvard, do you know
what he would reply?"
George gathered that an answer wasn't necessary.
"You might think," the tutor resumed, limping faster than ever, "that he
would run his fingers through his hair, if he had sufficient; would
figuratively flame with pleasure; would say: 'Miraculous, Mr. Bailly.
You are a great benefactor. We must get this extraordinary youth in the
university even if he can't parse "the cat caught the rat."'"
Bailly paused. He clashed his hands together.
"Now I'll tell you what he'd actually reply. 'Interesting if true, Mr.
Bailly. But what are his scholastic attainments? Can he solve a
quadratic equation in his head? Has he committed to memory my favourite
passages of the "Iliad" of Homer and the "Aeneid" of Virgil? Can he name
the architect of the Parthenon or the sculptor of the Aegean pediments?
No? Horrible! Then off with his head!'"
Bailly draped himself across his chair.
"Therefore it behooves us to get to work."
III
That was the first of sixty-odd toilsome, torturing evenings, for Bailly
failed to honour the Sabbath; and, after that first lecture, drab
business alone coloured those hours. The multiplicity of subjects was
confusing; but, although Bailly seldom told him so, George progressed
rapidly, and Bailly knew just where to stress for the examinations.
If it had ended there it would have been bad enough. When he studied the
schedule Bailly gave him that first night he had a despairing feeling
that either he or it must break down. Everything was accounted for even
to the food he was to eat. That last, in fact, created a little
difficulty with the landlady, who seemed to have no manner of
appreciation of the world-moving importance of football. Rogers wanted
to help out there, too. He had found George's lodging. It was when
Green's interest was popular knowledge, when from the Nassau Club had
slipped the belief that Squibs Bailly had turned his eyes on another
star. George made it dispassionately clear to Rogers that Bailly had not
allowed in his schedule for calls. Rogers was visibly disappointed.
"Where do you eat, then?"
"Here--with Mrs. Michin."
"Now look, Morton. That's no way. Half a dozen of us are eating at Joe's
restaurant. They're the best of the sub-Freshmen that are here. Come
along with us."
The manner of the invitation didn't make George at all reluctant to tell
the truth.
"I can't afford to be eating around in restaurants."
"That needn't figure," Rogers said, quickly. "Green's probably only
letting you eat certain things. I'll guarantee Joe'll take you on for
just what you're paying Mrs. Michin."
George thought rapidly. He could see through Rogers now. The boy wanted,
even as he did, to run with the best, but for a vastly different cause.
That was why his manner had altered that first morning when he had sized
George up as the unfinished product of a public school, why it had
altered again when he had sensed in him a football star. George's heart
warmed, but not to Rogers. Because he rioted around for a period each
afternoon in an odorous football suit he was already, in the careful
Rogers' eyes, one of the most prominent of the students in town. For the
same reason he was in a position to wait and make sure that Rogers
himself was the useful sort. George possessed no standard by which to
judge, and it would be a mistake to knot ropes that he might want to
break later; nor did he care for that sort of charity, no matter how
well disguised, so he shook his head.
"Green and Squibs wouldn't put up with it."
He wheedled his landlady, instead, into a better humour, paying her
reluctantly a little more.
The problem of expenses was still troublesome, but it became evident
that there, too, Bailly would be a useful guide.
"I have actually bearded the dean about you," he said one evening.
"There are a few scholarships not yet disposed of. If I can prove to him
that you live by syntax alone you may get one. As for the rest, there's
the commons. Impecunious students profitably wait on table there."
George's flush was not pretty.
"I'll not be a servant," he snapped.
"It's no disgrace," Bailly said, mildly.
"It is--for me."
He didn't like Bailly's long, slightly pained scrutiny. There was no use
keeping things from him anyway.
"I can trust you, Mr. Bailly," he said, quickly, and in a very low
voice, as if the walls might hear: "I know you won't give me away. I--I
was too much like a servant until the day I came to Princeton. I've
sworn I'd never be again. I can't touch that job. I tell you I'd rather
starve."
"To do so," Bailly remarked, drily, "would be a senseless suicide.
You'll appreciate some day, young man, that the world lives by service."
George wondered why he glanced at the untidy table with a smile
twitching at the corners of his mouth.
"I'm also sorry to learn your ambition is not altogether unselfish, or
altogether worthy."
George longed to make Bailly understand.
"It was forced on me," he said. "I worked in my father's livery business
until he failed. Then I had to go to a rich man's stable. I was treated
like dirt. Nobody would have anything to do with me. They won't here,
probably, if they find out."
"Never mind," Bailly sighed. "We will seek other means. Let us get on
with our primers."
Once or twice, when some knotty problem took George to the house during
the early morning, he found the spic-and-span neatness he had observed
at his first visit. In Bailly's service clearly someone laboured with a
love of labour, without shame or discouragement.
One evening in August the maid who customarily opened the door was
replaced by a short, plump-looking woman well over thirty. She greeted
George with kindly eyes.
"I daresay you're Mr. Morton. I've heard a great deal about you."
George had never seen a face more unaffected, more friendly, more
competent. His voice was respectful.
"Yes, ma'am."
"And I am Mrs. Bailly. We expect much of you."
There rushed over George a feeling that, his own ambition aside, he had
to give them a great deal. No wonder Squibs felt as he did if his ideas
of service had emerged from such a source.
That portion of his crowded schedule George grew eventually to like. It
brought him either unrestrained scolding or else a tempered praise; and
he enjoyed his cross-country runs. Sylvia's bulldog usually accompanied
him, unleashed, for he could control the animal. With surprised eyes he
saw estates as extravagant as Oakmont, and frequently in better taste.
Little by little he picked up the names of the families that owned them.
He told himself that some day he would enter those places as a guest,
bowed to by such servants as he had been. It was possible, he promised
himself bravely, if only he could win a Yale or a Harvard game.
He enjoyed, too, the hours he spent at the field. He could measure his
progress there as well as in Bailly's study. Green was slow with either
praise or blame, but sometimes Rogers and his clan would come down, and,
sitting in the otherwise empty stands, would audibly marvel at the
graceful trajectory of his punts. He soiled himself daily at the
tackling dummy. He sprawled after an elusive ball, falling on it or
picking it up on the run. Meantime, he had absorbed the elements of the
rules. He found them rather more complicated than the classics.
The head coach came from the city one day. Like Green, he said nothing
in praise or blame, merely criticising pleasantly; but George felt that
he was impressed. The great man even tossed the ball about with him for
a while, teaching him to throw at a definite mark. After that Rogers and
his cronies wanted to be more in evidence than ever, but George had no
time for them, or for anything outside his work.
His will to survive the crushing grind never really faltered, but he
resented its necessity, sometimes wistfully, sometimes with turbulence.
He despised himself for regretting certain pleasanter phases of his
serfdom at Oakmont. The hot, stuffy room on the top floor of the frame
house; the difficult books; the papers streaked with intricate and
reluctant figures, contrived frequently to swing his mind to pastoral
corners of the Planter estate. He might have held title to them, they
had been so much his own. He had used them during his free time for the
reading of novels, and latterly, he remembered, for formless dreams of
Sylvia's beauty. At least his mind had not been put to the torture
there. He had had time to listen to a bird's song, to ingratiate himself
with a venturesome squirrel, to run his hands through the long grass, to
lie half asleep, brain quite empty save for a temporal content.
Now, running or walking in the country, he found no time for the happier
aspects of woods or fields. He had to drive himself physically in order
that his mind could respond to Bailly's urgencies. And sometimes, as has
been suggested, his revolt was more violent. He paced his room angrily.
Why did he do it? Why did he submit? Eventually his eyes would turn to
her photograph, and he would go back to his table.
He was grateful for the chance that had let him pick up that picture.
Without its constant supervision he might not have been able to keep up
the struggle. During the worst moments, when some solution mocked him,
he would stare at the likeness while his brain fought, while, with a
sort of self-hypnosis induced by that pictured face, he willed himself
to keep on.
One night, when he had suffered over an elusive equation beyond his
scheduled bedtime, he found his eyes, as he stared at the picture,
blurring strangely; then the thing was done, the answer proved; but
after what an effort! Why did his eyes blur? Because of the intensity of
some emotion whose significance he failed all at once to grasp. He
continued to stare at Sylvia's beauty, informed even here with a sincere
intolerance; at those lips which had released the contempt that had
delivered him to this other slavery. Abruptly the emotion, that had
seemed to leap upon him from the books and the complicated figures,
defined itself with stark, unavoidable brutality. He reached out and
with both hands grasped the photograph. He wanted to snatch his hands
apart, ripping the paper, destroying the tranquil, arrogant features. He
replaced the picture, leant back, and continued hypnotically to study
it. His hands grasped the table's edge while the blurring of his eyes
increased. He spoke aloud in a clear and sullen voice:
"I hate you," he said. "With all my heart and soul and body I hate you."
IV
About this time one partial break in the schedule came like a strong