Still Jim Part 6

Jim shook his head. "I can support myself."

Mrs. Manning sniffed. "How can you be a good engineer out in that awful rough country unless you have the best kind of a physical foundation?

Use sense, Jimmy."

This was a master stroke. Jim wavered, then caught his left ankle in his hand and hopped about like a happy frog.

"Gee whiz!" he cried. "I'll enter the try-out squad the first thing. I bet I can make school quarter back."

Mr. Dennis cut in neatly. "It might just as well take place tomorrow and the three of us can take a month at the seash.o.r.e. I'll bet Jim has sighed for the old swimming hole lately."

The little widow looked at Mr. Dennis long and keenly, then she rose and held out her hand while she said very deliberately:

"You are a good man, Michael Dennis. I thank you for me and mine and I'll be a comfort to you as you are being to me. I'm not going to pretend I'd do this if it wasn't for Jim. I can't love you, but you love Jim and that's enough for me."

And so Jim was given his chance.

He spent the rest of the summer at the sh.o.r.e and entered school in the fall with a new interest. With the unexpected lift of the money burden from his shoulders, Jim began to make up for his lost play. Football and track work, debating societies and glee-clubs straightened his round shoulders and found him friends. Most important of all, he ceased to brood for a time over his Exham problems.

Jim's stepfather, whom the boy called Uncle Denny, took a pride and interest in the boy that sometimes brought the tears to his mother's eyes. It seemed to her that the warm-hearted Irishman gave to Jim all the love that the death of his family had left unsatisfied. And Jim, in his undemonstrative way, returned Mr. Dennis' affection. He shared with his Uncle Denny his growing ideals on engineering. He rehea.r.s.ed his debating society speeches on his Uncle Denny, who endured them with enthusiasm. He and his Uncle Denny worked out some marvelous football tactics when Jim as a senior in the high school became captain of the school team. Often of an evening Jim's mother would come upon the two in the library, flat on their backs before the grate in a companionship that needed and found no words.

At such times she would say, "Michael, you didn't marry me. You married Jim."

And Dennis would look up at her with a smile of understanding that she returned.

When Jim was a freshman in Columbia, he acquired a chum. It was not a chum who took the place of Phil Chadwick. Nothing in after life ever fills the hollow left by the first friendship of childhood and Phil was hallowed in Jim's memory along with all the beauties of the swimming hole and the quiet elms around the old Exham mansions.

But Jim's new chum gave him his first opportunity at hero-worship, which is an essential step in a boy's growth. The young man's name was George Saradokis. His mates called him Sara. His mother was a Franco-American, his father was a Greek, a real estate man in the Greek section of New York. Sara confided to Jim, early in their acquaintance, that his father was the disinherited son of a n.o.bleman and that he, the grandson, would be his grandfather's heir. The glamour of this possible inheritance did not detract at all from the romance of the new friendship in Jim's credulous young eyes.

Sara was halfback on the freshman football team, while Jim played quarterback. The two were of a height, six feet, but Jim still was slender. Sara was broad and heavy. He was very Greek--that is, modern Greek, which has little racially or temperamentally in common with the ancient Greek. He was a brilliant student, yet of a commerciality of mind that equalled that of any Jewish student in the cla.s.s.

Both the boys were good trackmen. Both were good students. Both were planning to be engineers. But, temperamentally, they were as far apart as the two countries whence came their father's stock.

Uncle Denny did not approve fully of Saradokis, but finally he decided that it was good for Jim to overcome some of his New England prejudice against the immigrant cla.s.s and he encouraged the young Greek to come to the house.

It was when Jim was a freshman, too, that Penelope came from Colorado to live with her Uncle Denny. Her father, Uncle Denny's brother, had married a little Scotch girl and they had made a bare living from a small mine, up in the mountains, until a fatal attack of pneumonia claimed them both in a single month. Penelope stayed on at a girl's school in Denver for a year. Then, Jim's mother urging it, Mr. Dennis sent for her. Jim, absorbed in the intricate business of being a freshman, did not give much heed to the preparations for her coming.

One spring evening he sauntered into the library to wait for the dinner bell. As he strolled over to the fireplace, he saw a slender young girl sitting in the Morris chair.

"Oh, h.e.l.lo!" said Jim.

"h.e.l.lo!" said the young girl, rising.

The two calmly eyed each other. Jim saw a graceful girl, three or four years younger than himself, with a great braid of chestnut hair hanging over one shoulder. She had a round face that ended in a pointed chin, a generous mouth, a straight little nose and a rich glow of color in her cheeks. These details Jim noted only casually, for his attention was focused almost immediately on her eyes. For years after, whenever Jim thought of Penelope, he thought of a halo of chestnut hair about eyes of a deep hazel; eyes that were large, almost too large, for the little round face; eyes that were steady and clear and black sometimes with feeling or with a fleeting shadow of melancholy that did not belong to her happy youth.

Penelope saw a tall lad in a carefully dressed Norfolk suit. He had a long, thin, tanned face, with a thick mop of soft hair falling across his forehead, a clear gaze and a flashing, wistful, fascinatingly sweet smile as he repeated:

"h.e.l.lo, Penelope!"

"h.e.l.lo, Still Jim!" replied the girl, while her round cheeks showed dimples that for a moment made Jim forget her eyes.

"Uncle Denny's been busy, I see," said Jim.

Then he was speechless. He had not reached the "girl stage" as yet.

Penelope was not disturbed. She continued to look Jim over, almost unblinkingly. Then Jim, to his own astonishment, suddenly found his tongue.

"I'm glad you've come," he said abruptly. "I'm going to think a lot of you, I can see that."

He held out his hand and Penelope slipped her slender fingers into his hard young fists. Jim did not let the little hand go for a minute. The two looked at each other clearly.

"I'm glad I'm here," said Penelope. Then she dimpled. "And I'm glad you're nice, because Uncle Denny told me that if I didn't like you I'd show myself no judge of boys. When I giggled, I know he wanted to slap me."

Jim's smile flashed and Penelope wondered what she liked best about it, his white teeth, his merriness or his wistfulness.

"There's the dinner bell!" exclaimed Jim. "As Uncle Denny says, I'm so hungry me soul is hanging by a string. Come on, Penelope."

Penelope entered Jim's life as simply and as easily as Saradokis did.

Sara charmed both Jim and Penelope. His physical beauty alone was a thing to fascinate far harsher critics than these two who grew to be his special friends. His hair was tawny and thick and wavy. His eyes were black and bright. His mouth was small and perfectly cut. His cleft chin was square and so was his powerful jaw. He carried himself like an Indian and his strength was like that of the lover in Solomon's song.

Added to this was the romance of his grandfather. This story enthralled little Pen, who at fourteen was almost bowled over by the thought that some day Sara might be a duke.

Sara's keen mind, his commercial cleverness had a strong hold on Jim, who lacked the money-making instinct. Jim quoted Sara a good deal at first to Uncle Denny, whose usual comment was a grunt.

"Sara says it's a commercial age. If you don't get out and rustle money you might as well get off the earth."

A grunt from Uncle Denny.

"Well, but Uncle Denny, you can't deny he's right."

The Irishman's reply was indirect. "Remember, me boy, that the chief value of a college education is to set your standards, to make your ideals. These four years are the high-water mark of your life's idealism. You never'll get higher. Anything else you are taught in college you'll have to learn over another way after you get out to buck real life."

Jim thought this over for a time, then he said: "Do you ever talk to Pen like you do to me? It would do her good."

Uncle Denny sniffed. "Don't you worry about Pen's ideas. She's got the best mind I ever found in a girl. When she gets past the giggling age, you'll learn a few things from her, me boy."

Penelope chummed with the two boys impartially as far as Dennis or Jim's mother could perceive. The girl with her common sense and her foolishness and her youthfulness was an inexpressible joy to Jim's mother, who always had longed for a daughter. She had dreams about Jim and Pen that she confided to no one and she looked on Penelope's impartiality with a jealous eye.

Until Pen was sixteen the boys were content to share her equally. They were finishing their junior year when Pen's sixteenth birthday arrived.

It fell on a Sat.u.r.day, and Jim and Sara cut Sat.u.r.day morning cla.s.ses and invited Penelope to a day at Coney Island. Uncle Denny and Jim's mother were to meet the trio for supper and return with them.

It was a June morning fit to commemorate, Sara said, even Pen's birthday. The three, carrying their bathing suits, caught the 8 o'clock boat at 129th street, prepared to do the weather and the occasion full justice. The crowd was not great on this early boat until the Battery was reached. Then all the world rushed up the gang plank; Jew and Gentile crowded for the best places. Italian women, with babies, dragged after husbands with lunch baskets. Stout Irish matrons looked with scorn on the "foreigners" and did great devastation in claiming camp stools.

Very young Jewish girls and boys were the most conspicuous element in the crowd, but there were groups of gentle Armenians, of Syrians, of Chinese and parties of tourists with field gla.s.ses and cameras.

"And every one of them claims to be an American," said Jim.

Penelope nudged Sara. "Look at Jim's New England nose," she chuckled. "I don't see how he can see anything but the sky."

Jim did not heed Pen's remarks. Pen and Sara laughed. They were thrilled by the very cosmopolitan aspect of the crowd. They responded to a sense of world citizenship to which Jim was an utter alien.