The Plastic Age Part 28

Hugh put his arms around her and drew her to him. Then he bent his head and kissed her gently. There was no pa.s.sion in his embrace, but there was infinite tenderness. He felt spiritually and physically weak, as if all his emotional resources had been quite spent.

"I think that I love you more than I ever did before," he whispered.

If he had shown any pa.s.sion, if there had been any warmth in his kiss, Cynthia might have believed him, but she was aware only of his gentleness. She pushed him back and drew out of his arms.

"No," she said sharply; "you don't love me. You're just sorry for me.... You're just kind."

Hugh had read "Marpessa" many times, and a line from it came to make her att.i.tude clear:

"thou wouldst grow kind; Most bitter to a woman that was loved."

"Oh, I don't know; I don't know," he said miserably. "Let's not call everything off now, Cynthia. Let's wait a while."

"No!" She stood up decisively. "No. I hate loose ends." She glanced at her tiny wrist-watch. "If I'm going to make that train, I've got to hurry. We've got barely half an hour. Come, Hugh. Be a sport."

He stood up, his face white and weary, his blue eyes dull and sad.

"Just as you say, Cynthia," he said slowly. "But I'm going to miss you like h.e.l.l."

She did not reply but started silently for the path. He followed her, and they walked back to the fraternity house without saying a word, both busy with unhappy thoughts.

When they reached the fraternity, she got her suit-case, handed it to him, declined his offer of a taxi, and walked unhappily by his side down the hill that they had climbed so gaily two days before. Hugh had just time to get her ticket before the train started.

She paused a moment at the car steps and held out her hand. "Good-by, Hugh," she said softly, her lips trembling, her eyes full of tears.

"Good-by, Cynthia," he whispered. And then, foolishly, "Thanks for coming."

She did not smile but drew her hand from his and mounted the steps. An instant later she was inside the car and the train was moving.

Numbed and miserable, Hugh slowly climbed the hill and wandered back to Norry Parker's room. He was glad that Norry wasn't there. He paced up and down the room a few minutes trying to think. Then he threw himself despairingly on a couch, face down. He wanted to cry; he had never wanted so much to cry--and he couldn't. There were no tears--and he had lost something very precious. He thought it was love; it was only his dreams.

CHAPTER XXIII

For several days Hugh was tortured by doubt and indecision: there were times when he thought that he loved Cynthia, times when he was sure that he didn't; when he had just about made up his mind that he hated her, he found himself planning to follow her to New Roch.e.l.le; he tried to persuade himself that his conduct was no more reprehensible than that of his comrades, but shame invariably overwhelmed his arguments; there were hours when he ached for Cynthia, and hours when he loathed her for smashing something that had been beautiful. Most of all, he wanted comfort, advice, but he knew no one to whom he was willing to give his confidence. Somehow, he couldn't admit his drunkenness to any one whose advice he valued. He called on Professor Henley twice, intending to make a clean breast of his transgressions. Henley, he knew, would not lecture him, but when he found himself facing him, he could not bring himself to confession; he was afraid of losing Henley's respect.

Finally, in desperation, he talked to Norry, not because he thought Norry could help him but because he had to talk to somebody and Norry already knew the worst. They went walking far out into the country, idly discussing campus gossip or pausing to revel in the beauty of the night, the clear, clean sky, the pale moon, the fireflies sparkling suddenly over the meadows or even to the tree-tops. Weary from their long walk, they sat down on a stump, and Hugh let the dam of his emotion break.

"Norry," he began intensely, "I'm in h.e.l.l--in h.e.l.l. It's a week since Prom, and I haven't had a line from Cynthia. I haven't dared write to her."

"Why not?"

"She--she--oh, d.a.m.n it!--she told me before she left that everything was all off. That's why she left early. She said that we didn't love each other, that all we felt was s.e.x attraction. I don't know whether she's right or not, but I miss her like the devil. I--I feel empty, sort of hollow inside, as if everything had suddenly been poured out of me--and there's nothing to take its place. I was full of Cynthia, you see, and now there's no Cynthia. There's nothing left but--oh, G.o.d, Norry, I'm ashamed of myself. I feel--dirty." The last word was hardly audible.

Norry touched his arm. "I know, Hugh, and I'm awfully sorry. I think, though, that Cynthia was right. I know her better than you do. She's an awfully good kid but not your kind at all; I think I feel as badly almost as you do about it." He paused a moment and then said simply, "I was so proud of you, Hugh."

"Don't!" Hugh exclaimed. "I want to kill myself when you say things like that."

"You don't understand. I know that you don't understand. I've been doing a lot of thinking since Prom, too. I've thought over a lot of things that you've said to me--about me, I mean. Why, Hugh, you think I'm not human. I don't believe you think I have pa.s.sions like the rest of you.

Well, I do, and sometimes it's--it's awful. I'm telling you that so you'll understand that I know how you feel. But love's beautiful to me, Hugh, the most wonderful thing in the world. I was in love with a girl once--and I know. She didn't give a hang for me; she thought I was a baby. I suffered awfully; but I know that my love was beautiful, as beautiful as--" He looked around for a simile--"as to-night. I think it's because of that that I hate mugging and petting and that sort of thing. I don't want beauty debased. I want to fight when orchestras jazz famous arias. Well, petting is jazzing love; and I hate it. Do you see what I mean?"

Hugh looked at him wonderingly. He didn't know this Norry at all. "Yes,"

he said slowly; "yes, I see what you mean; I think I do, anyway. But what has it to do with me?"

"Well, I know most of the fellows pet and all that sort of thing, and they don't think anything about it. But you're different; you love beautiful things as much as I do. You told me yourself that Jimmie Henley said last year that you were gifted. You can write and sing and run, but I've just realized that you aren't proud of those things at all; you just take them for granted. And you're ashamed that you write poetry. Some of your poems are good, but you haven't sent any of them to the poetry magazine. You don't want anybody to know that you write poetry. You're trying to make yourself like fellows that are inferior to you." Norry was piteously in earnest. His hero had crumbled into clay before his eyes, and he was trying to patch him together again preparatory to boosting him back upon his pedestal.

"Oh, cripes, Norry," Hugh said a little impatiently, "you exaggerate all my virtues; you always have. I'm not half the fellow you think I am. I do love beautiful things, but I don't believe my poetry is any good." He paused a moment and then confessed mournfully: "I'll admit, though, that I have been going downhill. I'm going to do better from now on. You watch me."

They talked for hours, Norry embarra.s.sing Hugh with the frankness of his admiration. Norry's hero-worship had always embarra.s.sed him, but he didn't like it when the worshiper began to criticize. He admitted the justness of the criticism, but it hurt him just the same. Perching on a pedestal had been uncomfortable but a little thrilling; sitting on the ground and gazing up at his perch was rather humiliating. The fall had bruised him; and Norry, with the best intentions in the world, was kicking the bruises.

Nevertheless, he felt better after the talk, determined to win back Norry's esteem and his own. He swore off smoking and drinking and stuck to his oath. He told Vinton that if he brought any more liquor to their room one of them was going to be carried out, and that he had a hunch that it would be Vinton. Vinton gazed at him with round eyes and believed him. After that he did his drinking elsewhere, confiding to his cronies that Carver was on the wagon and that he had got as religious as holy h.e.l.l. "He won't let me drink in my own room," he wailed dolorously.

And then with a sudden burst of clairvoyance, he added, "I guess his girl has given him the gate."

For weeks the campus buzzed with talk about the Prom. A dozen men who had been detected _flagrante delicto_ were summarily expelled. Many others who had been equally guilty were in a constant state of mental goose-flesh. Would the next mail bring a summons from the dean?

President Culver spoke sternly in chapel and hinted that there would be no Prom the coming year. Most of the men said that the Prom had been an "awful brawl," but there were some who insisted that it was no worse than the Proms held at other colleges, and recited startling tales in support of their argument.

Leonard Gates finally settled the whole matter for Hugh. There had been many discussions in the Nu Delta living-room about the Prom, and in one of them Gates ended the argument with a sane and thoughtful statement.

"The Prom was a brawl," he said seriously, "a drunken brawl. We all admit that. The fact that Proms at other colleges are brawls, too, doesn't make ours any more respectable. If a Yale man happens to commit murder and gets away with it, that is no reason that a Harvard man or a Sanford man should commit murder, too. Some of you are arguing like babies. But some of you are going to the other extreme.

"You talk as if everybody at the Prom was lit. Well, I wasn't lit, and as a matter of fact most of them weren't lit. Just use a little common sense. There were three hundred and fifty couples at the Prom. Now, not half of them even had a drink. Say that half did. That makes one hundred and seventy-five fellows. If fifty of those fellows were really soused, I'll eat my hat, but we'll say that there were fifty. Fifty were quite enough to make the whole Prom look like a longsh.o.r.eman's ball. You've got to take the music into consideration, too. That orchestra could certainly play jazz; it could play it too d.a.m.n well. Why, that music was enough to make a saint shed his halo and shake a shimmy.

"What I'm getting to is this: there are over a thousand fellows in college, and out of that thousand not more than fifty were really soused at the Prom, and not more than a hundred and seventy-five were even a little teed. To go around saying that Sanford men are a lot of muckers just because a small fraction of them acted like gutter-pups is sheer bunk. The Prom was a drunken brawl, but all Sanford men aren't drunkards--not by a d.a.m.n sight."

Hugh had to admit the force of Gates's reasoning, and he found comfort in it. He had been just about ready to believe that all college men and Sanford men in particular were hardly better than common muckers. But in the end the comfort that he got was small: he realized bitterly that he was one of the minority that had disgraced his college; he was one of the gutter-pups. The recognition of that undeniable fact cut deep.

He was determined to redeem himself; he _had_ to, somehow. Living a life of perfect rect.i.tude was not enough; he had to do something that would win back his own respect and the respect of his fellows, which he thought, quite absurdly, that he had forfeited. So far as he could see, there was only one way that he could justify his existence at Sanford; that was to win one of the dashes in the Sanford-Raleigh meet. He clung to that idea with the tenacity of a fanatic.

He had nearly a month in which to train, and train he did as he never had before. His diet became a matter of the utmost importance; a rub-down was a holy rite, and the words of Jansen, the coach, divine gospel. He placed in both of the preliminary meets, but he knew that he could do better; he wasn't yet in condition.

When the day for the Raleigh-Sanford meet finally came, he did not feel any of the nervousness that had spelled defeat for him in his freshman year. He was stonily calm, silently determined. He was going to place in the hundred and win the two-twenty or die in the attempt. No golden dreams of breaking records excited him. Calvert of Raleigh was running the hundred consistently in ten seconds and had been credited with better time. Hugh had no hopes of defeating him in the hundred, but there was a chance in the two-twenty. Calvert was a short-distance man, the shorter the better. Two hundred and twenty yards was a little too far for him.

Calvert did not look like a runner. He was a good two inches shorter than Hugh, who lacked nearly that much of six feet. Calvert was heavily built--a dark, brawny chap, both quick and powerful. Hugh looked at him and for a moment hated him. Although he did not phrase it so--in fact, he did not phrase it at all--Calvert was his obstacle in his race for redemption.

Calvert won the hundred-yard dash in ten seconds flat, breaking the Sanford-Raleigh record. Hugh, running faster than he ever had in his life, barely managed to come in second ahead of his team-mate Murphy.

The Sanford men cheered him l.u.s.tily, but he hardly listened. He _had_ to win the two-twenty.

At last the runners were called to the starting-line. They danced up and down the track flexing their muscles. Hugh was tense but more determined than nervous. Calvert pranced around easily; he seemed entirely recovered from his great effort in the hundred. Finally the starter called them to their marks. They tried their spikes in the starting-holes, sc.r.a.ped them out a bit more, made a few trial dashes, and finally knelt in line at the command of the starter.

Hugh expected Calvert to lead for the first hundred yards; but the last hundred, that was where Calvert would weaken. Calvert was sure to be ahead at the beginning--but after that!

"On your marks.

"Set."