The Guarded Heights Part 93

Lambert and Wandel arrived just then, talking cheerfully about football.

"What do you mean to do?" Bailly asked George as the others sat down.

George smiled at Wandel.

"I'm not sure, Driggs, that the hour hasn't struck for you."

Wandel raised his hands.

"You mean politics!"

"I used to fancy," George said, "that I'd need you for my selfish interests. Now my idea is quite different."

He turned to Squibs.

"See here, sir. You've got to admit that the soul of the whole thing is education. I don't mean education in the narrow sense that we know it here or in any other university. I mean the opening of eyes to real communal efficiency; the comprehension of the necessity of building instead of tearing down; the birth of the desire to climb one's self rather than to try to make stronger men descend."

Bailly's eyes sparkled.

"I don't say you're not right, George. You may be right."

A fire blazed comfortably in front of them. The chairs were deep.

Through a window the Holder tower, for all its evening lack of definition, seemed an indestructible pointer of George's thoughts. For a long time he talked earnestly.

"I climbed," he ended. "So others can, and less selfishly and more usefully, if they're only told how; if they'll only really try."

"You're always right, great man," Wandel drawled, "but we mustn't forget you climbed from fundamentals. That's education--the teaching of the fundamentals."

"It means an equal chance for everybody," George said, "and then, by gad, we won't have the world held back by those who refuse to take their chance. We won't permit the congenitally unsound to set the pace for the healthy. We'll take care of the congenitally unsound."

He turned to Bailly.

"And you and your excitable socialists have got to realize that you can't make the world sane through makeshifts, or all at once, but with foresight it can be done. You've raised the devil with me ever since I was a sub-Freshman about service and the unsound and the virtue of soiled clothing. Now raise the devil with somebody else about the virtue of sound service and clean clothes. This education must start in the schools. We may be able to force it into public schools through the legislatures; but in Princeton and the other great universities it has to come from within, and that's hard; that, in a way, is up to you and other gentle sectarians like you. And your clubs have got to stand in some form--everywhere, if only as objectives of physical and intellectual content. Nothing good torn from the world! Only the evil----"

He tapped Wandel's arm.

"Driggs! If you want to go among the time-servers, to stand alone for the people; perhaps for people yet unborn----"

"For a long time," Wandel said, "I've been looking for something I could really want to do. I rather fancy you've found it for me, George. I want to climb, too, always have--not to the heights we once talked about at your unhealthy picnic, but to the furtherest heights of all, which are guarded by selfishness, servility, sin--past which people have to be led."

Squibs cried out enthusiastically.

"And from which you can look down with a clear conscience on the climbers to whom you will have pointed out the path."

"I see now," Lambert put in, "that that is the only way in which one with self-respect can look down on lesser men."

George laughed aloud.

"An ally that can't escape! Driggs is a witness. We'll hold that fine democracy of the Argonne over your head forever."

"You see," Wandel drawled, "that was bound to fail, because it was based on the ridiculous a.s.sumption that every man that fought was good and great."

"I fancy," George said, "we're commencing to find out why we went to war--To appreciate the world's and our own astigmatism."

As they walked back to the little house in d.i.c.kinson Street, Bailly tried to express something.

"I guess," he managed, "that I'll have to call it square, George."

"I'm glad," George said, quickly, "but you must give some of the credit to Lambert Planter's sister."

He smiled happily, wistfully.

"You know she's the most useful socialist of you all."

After a time he said under his breath:

"There are some things I never dreamed of being able to repay you, sir.

For instance this--this feeling that one is walking home."

"That debt," Bailly said, brightly, "cancels itself."

His mood changed. He spoke with a stern personal regret.

"You young men! You young men! How much farther you see! How much more you can do!"

XXVIII

George returned to New York happy in his memory of his intimate hour on a crowded stand with Sylvia. Dalrymple had given him that, too. It amazed him that so much beauty could spring from so ugly a source.

He heard that Dalrymple was back from Canada, then that he had wandered away, pockets full, on another journey, pandering to his twisted conception of pleasure. One day George took his notes from the safe-deposit box and gave them to Lambert.

"Get them back to him," he said.

And Lambert must have understood that George would never let the Planters' money redeem them.

"It's pretty decent, George."

"It's nothing of the kind. They make my hands feel dirty, and I've lots of money, and I'm making more every day; yet I wonder if it's going to be enough, even with Driggs' and Blodgett's and yours, old Argonne democrat."

For he had spoken of his plans to Blodgett, and had been a little surprised to learn how much thought Blodgett had given the puzzle himself, although most of his searching had been for makeshifts, for anything to tide over immediate emergencies.

"I don't know," Blodgett roared, "whether this cleaning out the sore and getting to the bottom of it will work or not; but I'm inclined to look to the future with you for a permanent cure. Anyway, I'd help you finance a scheme to make the ocean dry, because you usually get what you're after. So we'll send Wandel and Allen and some more as a little leaven to Albany and to that quilting party in Washington. I don't envy them, though."

George realized that his content could be traced to this new interest, as that went back to Sylvia. He had at last consciously set out to explore the road of service. For the first time in his life, with his eyes open, he was working for others, yet he never got rid of the sense of a great personal need unfulfilled; always in his heart vibrated the cry for Sylvia, but he knew he mustn't try to see her, for Betty would have let him know, and Betty hadn't sent for him again.

After the holidays, at the urging of Wandel and Lambert, he showed himself here and there, received at first curious glances, fancied some people slightly self-conscious, then all at once found himself welcomed on the old frank and pleasant basis. Yes, the talk had pretty well died, and men and women were inclined to like Sylvia Planter and George Morton better than they did Dalrymple.

He saw Dalrymple in the club one stormy January evening. He hadn't heard he was in town, and examined him curiously as he sat alone in a corner, making a pretence of reading a newspaper, but really looking across the room at the fire with restless eyes. George, prepared as he had been, was surprised by the haggard, flushed countenance, and the neurotic symptoms, nearly uncontrollable.