The Second Generation Part 5

Again Arthur was silent.

"Then there are only twenty or thirty gentlemen at Harvard? And the catalogue says there are three thousand or more students."

"Oh--of course," began Arthur. But he stopped short.

How could he make his father, ignorant of "the world" and dominated by primitive ideas, understand the Harvard ideal? So subtle and evanescent, so much a matter of the most delicate shadings was this ideal that he himself often found the distinction quite hazy between it and that which looked disquietingly like "tommy rot."

"And these gentlemen--these here friends of yours--your 'set,' as you call 'em--what are they aiming for?"

Arthur did not answer. It would be hopeless to try to make Hiram Ranger understand, still less tolerate, an ideal of life that was elegant leisure, the patronage of literature and art, music, the drama, the turf, and the pursuit of culture and polite extravagance, wholly aloof from the frenzied and vulgar jostling of the market place.

With a mighty heave of the shoulders which, if it had found outward relief, would have been a sigh, Hiram Ranger advanced to the hard part of the first task which the mandate, "Put your house in order," had set for him. He took from the inside pocket of his coat a small bundle of papers, the records of Arthur's college expenses. The idea of accounts with his children had been abhorrent to him. The absolute necessity of business method had forced him to make some records, and these he had expected to destroy without anyone but himself knowing of their existence. But in the new circ.u.mstances he felt he must not let his own false shame push the young man still farther from the right course. Arthur watched him open each paper in the bundle slowly, spread it out and, to put off the hateful moment for speech, pretend to peruse it deliberately before laying it on his knee; and, dim though the boy's conception of his father was, he did not misjudge the feelings behind that painful reluctance.

Hiram held the last paper in a hand that trembled. He coughed, made several attempts to speak, finally began: "Your first year at Harvard, you spent seventeen hundred dollars. Your second year, you spent fifty-three hundred. Last year--Are all your bills in?"

"There are a few--" murmured Arthur.

"How much?"

He flushed hotly.

"Don't you know?" With this question his father lifted his eyes without lifting his s.h.a.ggy eyebrows.

"About four or five thousand--in all--including the tailors and other tradespeople."

A pink spot appeared in the left cheek of the old man--very bright against the gray-white of his skin. Somehow, he did not like that word "tradespeople," though it seemed harmless enough. "This last year, the total was," said he, still monotonously, "ninety-eight hundred odd--if the bills I haven't got yet ain't more than five thousand."

"A dozen men spend several times that much," protested Arthur.

"What for?" inquired Hiram.

"Not for dissipation, father," replied the young man, eagerly.

"Dissipation is considered bad form in our set."

"What do you mean by dissipation?"

"Drinking--and--all that sort of thing," Arthur replied. "It's considered ungentlemanly, nowadays--drinking to excess, I mean."

"What do you spend the money for?"

"For good quarters and pictures, and patronizing the sports, and club dues, and entertainments, and things to drive in--for living as a man should."

"You've spent a thousand, three hundred dollars for tutoring since you've been there."

"Everybody has to do tutoring--more or less."

"What did you do with the money you made?"

"What money, father?"

"The money you made tutoring. You said everybody had to do tutoring. I suppose you did your share."

Arthur did not smile at this "ignorance of the world"; he grew red, and stammered: "Oh, I meant everybody in our set employs tutors."

"Then who does the tutoring? Who're the n.o.bodies that tutor the everybodies?"

Arthur grew cold, then hot. He was cornered, therefore roused. He stood, leaned against the table, faced his father defiantly. "I see what you're driving at, father," he said. "You feel I've wasted time and money at college, because I haven't lived like a dog and grubbed in books day in and day out, and filled my head with musty stuff; because I've tried to get what I believe to be the broadest knowledge and experience; because I've a.s.sociated with the best men, the fellows that come from the good families. You accept the bluff the faculty puts up of pretending the A fellows are really the A fellows, when, in fact, everybody there and all the graduates and everyone everywhere who knows the world knows that the fellows in our set are the ones the university is proud of--the fellows with manners and appearance and--"

"The gentlemen," interjected the father, who had not changed either his position or his expression.

"Yes--the gentlemen!" exclaimed Arthur. "There are other ideals of life besides buying and selling."

"And working?" suggested Hiram.

"Yes--and what you call working," retorted Arthur, angry through and through. "You sent me East to college to get the education of a man in my position."

"What is your position?" inquired Hiram--simply an inquiry.

"Your son," replied the young man; "trying to make the best use of the opportunities you've worked so hard to get for me. I'm not you, father.

You'd despise me if I didn't have a character, an individuality, of my own. Yet, because I can't see life as you see it, you are angry with me."

For answer Hiram only heaved his great shoulders in another suppressed sigh. He _knew_ profoundly that he was right, yet his son's plausibilities--they could only be plausibilities--put him clearly in the wrong. "We'll see," he said; "we'll see. You're wrong in thinking I'm angry, boy." He was looking at his son now, and his eyes made his son's pa.s.sion vanish. He got up and went to the young man and laid his hand on his shoulder in a gesture of affection that moved the son the more profoundly because it was unprecedented. "If there's been any wrong done," said the old man--and he looked very, very old now--"I've done it.

I'm to blame--not you."

A moment after Hiram left the room, Adelaide hurried in. A glance at her brother rea.s.sured her. They stood at the window watching their father as he walked up and down the garden, his hands behind his back, his shoulders stooped, his powerful head bent.

"Was he very angry?" asked Del.

"He wasn't angry at all," her brother replied. "I'd much rather he had been." Then, after a pause, he added: "I thought the trouble between us was that, while I understood him, he didn't understand me. Now I know that he has understood me but that I don't understand him"--and, after a pause--"or myself."

CHAPTER III

MRS. WHITNEY INTERVENES

As Hiram had always been silent and seemingly abstracted, no one but Ellen noted the radical change in him. She had brought up her children in the old-fashioned way--her thoughts, and usually her eyes, upon them all day, and one ear open all night. When she no longer had them to guard, she turned all this energy of solicitude to her husband; thus the pa.s.sionate love of her youth was having a healthy, beautiful old age. The years of circ.u.mventing the easily roused restiveness of her spirited boy and girl had taught her craft; without seeming to be watching Hiram, no detail of his appearance or actions escaped her.

"There's mighty little your pa don't see," had been one of her stock observations to the children from their earliest days. "And you needn't flatter yourselves he don't care because he don't speak." Now she noted that from under his heavy brows his eyes were looking stealthily out, more minutely observant than ever before, and that what he saw either added to his sadness or took a color of sadness from his mood. She guessed that the actions of Adelaide and Arthur, so utterly different from the actions of the children of her and Hiram's young days--except those regarded by all worth-while people as "trifling and trashy"--had something to do with Hiram's gloom. She decided that Arthur's failure and his lightness of manner in face of it were the chief trouble--this until Hiram's shoulders began to stoop and hollows to appear in his cheeks and under his ears, and a waxlike pallor to overspread his face. Then she knew that he was not well physically; and, being a practical woman, she dismissed the mental causes of the change. "People talk a lot about their mental troubles," she said to herself, "but it's usually three-fourths stomach and liver."

As Hiram and illness, real illness, could not be a.s.sociated in her mind, she gave the matter no importance until she heard him sigh heavily one night, after they had been in bed several hours. "What is it, father?"

she asked.

There was no answer, but a return to an imitation of the regular breathing of a sleeper.

"Hiram," she insisted, "what is it?"

"Nothing, Ellen, nothing," he answered; "I must have ate something that don't sit quite right."