The Red Cross Girl Part 7

What Hallowell senior was willing to believe of what the chancellor told him, and his opinion of the matter as expressed to Peter, differed materially.

"They tell me," he concluded, "that in the fall they will give you another examination, and if you pa.s.s then, you will get your degree. No one will know you've got it. They'll slip it to you out of the side-door like a cold potato to a tramp. The only thing people will know is that when your cla.s.smates stood up and got their parchments--the thing they'd been working for four years, the only reason for their going to college at all--YOU were not among those present. That's your fault; but if you don't get your degree next fall that will be my fault. I've supported you through college and you've failed to deliver the goods. Now you deliver them next fall, or you can support yourself."

"That will be all right," said Peter humbly; "I'll pa.s.s next fall."

"I'm going to make sure of that," said Hallowell senior. "To-morrow you will take those history books that you did not open, especially Gilman's 'Rise and Fall,' which it seems you have not even purchased, and you will travel for the entire summer with a private tutor...."

Peter, who had personally conducted the foot-ball and base-ball teams over half of the Middle States and daily bullied and browbeat them, protested with indignation. "WON'T travel with a private tutor!"

"If I say so," returned Hallowell senior grimly, "you'll travel with a governess and a trained nurse, and wear a strait jacket. And you'll continue to wear it until you can recite the history of Turkey backward.

And in order that you may know it backward--and forward you will spend this summer in Turkey--in Constantinople--until I send you permission to come home."

"Constantinople!" yelled Peter. "In August! Are you serious?"

"Do I look it?" asked Peter's father. He did.

"In Constantinople," explained Mr. Hallowell senior, "there will be nothing to distract you from your studies, and in spite of yourself every minute you will be imbibing history and local color."

"I'll be imbibing fever,", returned Peter, "and sunstroke and sudden death. If you want to get rid of me, why don't you send me to the island where they sent Dreyfus? It's quicker. You don't have to go to Turkey to study about Turkey."

"You do!" said his father.

Peter did not wait for the festivities of commencement week. All day he hid in his room, packing his belongings or giving them away to the members of his cla.s.s, who came to tell him what a rotten shame it was, and to bid him good-by. They loved Peter for himself alone, and at losing him were loyally enraged. They sired publicly to express their sentiments, and to that end they planned a mock trial of the "Rise and Fall," at which a packed jury would sentence it to cremation. They planned also to hang Doctor Gilman in effigy. The effigy with a rope round its neck was even then awaiting mob violence. It was complete to the silver-white beard and the gold spectacles. But Peter squashed both demonstrations.

He did not know Doctor Gilman had been forced to resign, but he protested that the horse-play of his friends would make him appear a bad loser. "It would look, boys," he said, "as though I couldn't take my medicine. Looks like kicking against the umpire's decision. Old Gilman fought fair. He gave me just what was coming to me. I think a darn sight more of him than do of that bunch of boot-lickers that had the colossal nerve to pretend I scored fifty!"

Doctor Gilman sat in his cottage that stood the edge of the campus, gazing at a plaster bust of Socrates which he did not see. Since that morning he had ceased to sit in the chair of history at Stillwater College. They were retrenching, the chancellor had told him curtly, cutting down unnecessary expenses, for even in his anger Doctor Black was too intelligent to hint at his real motive, and the professor was far too innocent of evil, far too detached from college politics to suspect. He would remain a professor emeritus on half pay, but he no longer would teach. The college he had served for thirty years-since it consisted of two brick buildings and a faculty of ten young men--no longer needed him. Even his ivy-covered cottage, in which his wife and he had lived for twenty years, in which their one child had died, would at the beginning of the next term be required of him. But the college would allow him those six months in which to "look round." So, just outside the circle of light from his student lamp, he sat in his study, and stared with unseeing eyes at the bust of Socrates. He was not considering ways and means. They must be faced later. He was considering how he could possibly break the blow to his wife. What eviction from that house would mean to her no one but he understood. Since the day their little girl had died, nothing in the room that had been her playroom, bedroom, and nursery had been altered, nothing had been touched. To his wife, somewhere in the house that wonderful, G.o.d-given child was still with them. Not as a memory but as a real and living presence. When at night the professor and his wife sat at either end of the study table, reading by the same lamp, he would see her suddenly lift her head, alert and eager, as though from the nursery floor a step had sounded, as though from the darkness a sleepy voice had called her.

And when they would be forced to move to lodgings in the town, to some students' boarding-house, though they could take with them their books, their furniture, their mutual love and comradeship, they must leave behind them the haunting presence of the child, the colored pictures she had cut from the Christmas numbers and plastered over the nursery walls, the rambler roses that with her own hands she had planted and that now climbed to her window and each summer peered into her empty room.

Outside Doctor Gilman's cottage, among the trees of the campus, paper lanterns like oranges aglow were swaying in the evening breeze. In front of Hallowell the flame of a bonfire shot to the top of the tallest elms, and gathered in a circle round it the glee club sang, and cheer succeeded cheer-cheers for the heroes of the cinder track, for the heroes of the diamond and the gridiron, cheers for the men who had flunked especially for one man who had flunked. But for that man who for thirty years in the cla.s.s room had served the college there were no cheers. No one remembered him, except the one student who had best reason to remember him. But this recollection Peter had no rancor or bitterness and, still anxious lest he should be considered a bad loser, he wished Doctor Gilman a every one else to know that. So when the celebration was at its height and just before train was due to carry him from Stillwater, ran across the campus to the Gilman cottage say good-by. But he did not enter the cottage He went so far only as half-way up the garden walk. In the window of the study which opened upon the veranda he saw through frame of honeysuckles the professor and wife standing beside the study table. They were clinging to each other, the woman weep silently with her cheek on his shoulder, thin, delicate, well-bred hands clasping arms, while the man comforted her awkward unhappily, with hopeless, futile caresses.

Peter, shocked and miserable at what he had seen, backed steadily away.

What disaster had befallen the old couple he could not imagine. The idea that he himself might in any way connected with their grief never entered mind. He was certain only that, whatever the trouble was, it was something so intimate and personal that no mere outsider might dare to offer his sympathy. So on tiptoe he retreated down the garden walk and, avoiding the celebration at the bonfire, returned to his rooms. An hour later the entire college escorted him to the railroad station, and with "He's a jolly good fellow" and "He's off to Philippopolis in the morn--ing" ringing in his ears, he sank back his seat in the smoking-car and gazed at the lights of Stillwater disappearing out of his life.

And he was surprised to find that what lingered his mind was not the students, dancing like Indians round the bonfire, or at the steps of the smoking-car fighting to shake his hand, but the man and woman alone in the cottage stricken with sudden sorrow, standing like two children lost in the streets, who cling to each other for comfort and at the same moment whisper words of courage.

Two months Later, at Constantinople, Peter, was suffering from remorse over neglected opportunities, from p.r.i.c.kly heat, and from fleas. And it not been for the moving-picture man, and the poker and baccarat at the Cercle Oriental, he would have flung himself into the Bosphorus. In the mornings with the tutor he read ancient history, which he promptly forgot; and for the rest of the hot, dreary day with the moving-picture man through the bazaars and along the water-front he stalked suspects for the camera.

The name of the moving-picture man was Harry Stetson. He had been a newspaper reporter, a press-agent, and an actor in vaudeville and in a moving-picture company. Now on his own account he was preparing an ill.u.s.trated lecture on the East, adapted to churches and Sunday-schools.

Peter and he wrote it in collaboration, and in the evenings rehea.r.s.ed it with lantern slides before an audience of the hotel clerk, the tutor, and the German soldier of fortune who was trying to sell the young Turks very old battleships. Every other foreigner had fled the city, and the entire diplomatic corps had removed itself to the summer capital at Therapia.

There Stimson, the first secretary of the emba.s.sy and, in the absence of the amba.s.sador, CHARGE D'AFFAIRES, invited Peter to become his guest.

Stimson was most anxious to be polite to Peter, for Hallowell senior was a power in the party then in office, and a word from him at Washington in favor of a rising young diplomat would do no harm. But Peter was afraid his father would consider Therapia "out of bounds."

"He sent me to Constantinople," explained Peter, "and if he thinks I'm not playing the game the Lord only knows where he might send me next-and he might cut off my allowance."

In the matter of allowance Peter's father had been most generous. This was fortunate, for poker, as the pashas and princes played it at he Cercle, was no game for cripples or children. But, owing to his letter-of-credit and his illspent life, Peter was able to hold his own against men three times his age and of fortunes nearly equal to that of his father. Only they disposed of their wealth differently. On many hot evening Peter saw as much of their money scattered over the green table as his father had spent over the Hallowell athletic field.

In this fashion Peter spent his first month of exile--in the morning trying to fill his brain with names of great men who had been a long time dead, and in his leisure hours with local color. To a youth of his active spirit it was a full life without joy or recompense. A Letter from Charley Hines, a cla.s.smate who lived at Stillwater, which arrived after Peter had endured six weeks of Constantinople, released him from boredom and gave life a real interest. It was a letter full of gossip intended to amuse. One paragraph failed of its purpose. It read: "Old man Gilman has got the sack. The chancellor offered him up as a sacrifice to your father, and because he was unwise enough to flunk you.

He is to move out in September. I ran across them last week when I was looking for rooms for a Freshman cousin. They were reserving one in the same boarding-house. It's a shame, and I know you'll agree. They are a fine old couple, and I don't like to think of them herding with Freshmen in a shine boardinghouse. Black always was a swine."

Peter spent fully ten minutes getting to the cable office.

"Just learned," he cabled his father, "Gilman dismissed because flunked me consider this outrageous please see he is reinstated."

The answer, which arrived the next day, did not satisfy Peter. It read: "Informed Gilman acted through spite have no authority as you know to interfere any act of black."

Since Peter had learned of the disaster that through his laziness had befallen the Gilmans, his indignation at the injustice had been hourly increasing. Nor had his banishment to Constantinople strengthened his filial piety. On the contrary, it had rendered him independent and but little inclined to kiss the paternal rod. In consequence his next cable was not conciliatory.

"Dismissing Gilman Looks more Like we acted through spite makes me appear contemptible Black is a toady will do as you direct please reinstate."

To this somewhat peremptory message his father answered:

"If your position unpleasant yourself to blame not Black incident is closed."

"Is it?" said the son of his father. He called Stetson to his aid and explained. Stetson reminded him of the famous cablegram of his distinguished contemporary: "Perdicaris alive and Raisuli dead!"

Peter's paraphrase of this ran: "Gilman returns to Stillwater or I will not try for degree."

The reply was equally emphatic:

"You earn your degree or you earn your own living."

This alarmed Stetson, but caused Peter to deliver his ultimatum: "Choose to earn my own living am leaving Constantinople."

Within a few days Stetson was also leaving Constantinople by steamer via Naples. Peter, who had come to like him very much, would have accompanied him had he not preferred to return home more leisurely by way of Paris and London.

"You'll get there long before I do," said Peter, "and as soon as you arrive I want you to go to Stillwater and give Doctor Gilman some souvenir of Turkey from me. Just to show him I've no hard feelings. He wouldn't accept money, but he can't refuse a present. I want it to be something characteristic of the country, Like a prayer rug, or a scimitar, or an illuminated Koran, or..."

Somewhat doubtfully, somewhat sheepishly, Stetson drew from his pocket a flat morocco case and opened it. "What's the matter with one of these?"

he asked.

In a velvet-lined jewel case was a star of green enamel and silver gilt.

To it was attached a ribbon of red and green.

"That's the Star of the Crescent," said Peter. "Where did you buy it?"

"Buy it!" exclaimed Stetson. "You don't buy them. The Sultan bestows them."

"I'll bet the Sultan didn't bestow that one," said Peter.

"I'll bet," returned Stetson, "I've got something in my pocket that says he did."

He unfolded an imposing doc.u.ment covered with slanting lines of curving Arabic letters in gold. Peter was impressed but still skeptical.

"What does that say when it says it in English?" he asked.

"It says," translated Stetson, "that his Imperial Majesty, the Sultan, bestows upon Henry Stetson, educator, author, lecturer, the Star of the Order of the Crescent, of the fifth cla.s.s, for services rendered to Turkey."