The Whirligig of Time Part 18

"Trotty," said Harry mournfully that evening; "I don't think you'd better room with me again next year. You can't afford to, Trotty. I'm a pariah, an outcast. Half the decent people in the cla.s.s don't speak to me any more. You simply can't afford to know me. It'll ruin your chances."

"I wish you'd shut up," said Trotwood. "I'm trying to study."

"I mean it, Trotty. Don't pretend you don't hear, or understand. I'm giving you warning."

"Rot," said Trotty, beginning to blush. "d.a.m.ned, infernal rot."

Harry sighed. "You're a good soul, Trotty. But it's true. You'll be known as the only man in the cla.s.s that speaks to me, if you keep it up."

"Will you shut up, you infernal idiot?"

"No. I tell you, I'm going straight to the devil."

Trotty rose from his chair and went to where Harry stood. He gently pushed him back to the wall, and pinning him to it looked him straight in the eyes. Harry was surprised to see that his face was set and serious.

"Now," said Trotwood, "I'm going to talk about this business this once, and if you ever mention the subject again I'll break your d.a.m.ned head open. I'm going to room with you next year. I'm going to room with you the year after that, if you'll have me. If we ever split up, it'll have to be because you're tired of me--not afraid I'm tired of you, but actually tired of me. You're not going to the devil. If you do, I don't give a d.a.m.n. What does friendship mean, anyway? Answer me that, d.a.m.n you!--d.a.m.n you!--d.a.m.n you--" His voice failed, but his eyes still spoke.

"All right, Trotty, we won't say any more about it, if you feel like that." Harry smiled as he spoke the words, but he felt more like crying.

CHAPTER XI

AUNT SELINA'S BEAUX YEUX

As Harry had antic.i.p.ated, an issue arose between himself and the powers in the track world concerning the Easter vacation. The edict went forth that members of the 'varsity squad were to remain in New Haven, in strict training, through the holidays, and it was a.s.sumed that he was to be of their number. None of the powers asked him what he was going to do, and he did not think it worth while to inform them of his plans.

One day, about a week before the vacation began, he did mention the subject casually to Judy Dimmock, the captain, as they walked in from practice together. Dimmock's consternation, as Harry said afterward, was pitiful to see.

"But do you think you can get Macgrath's permission?" he asked, stupefied.

"Why in the world should I bother about asking Macgrath's permission?"

answered Harry. "Of course he wouldn't give it to me."

"Do you mean to say that you're going without it?"

"Of course I'm going without it."

Dimmock was bewildered rather than irritated, though Harry's course of action defied his authority quite as much as the coach's. "You'll have to be dropped from the squad, then, I'm afraid."

"So I supposed."

"Harry, do you mean to say this work means no more to you than that?"

stammered Dimmock, all his convictions seething in his brain. "Haven't you got any more respect for your college and traditions than that?

Don't you see what good discipline it is to buckle down to work and keep at it, whether you like it or not?"

Harry waited a moment before replying, wondering how he could silence Dimmock without angering him.

"That would all sound very well, if it were the dean and not the track captain that said it," he ventured.

"I'm afraid I don't understand you, Harry." There was such a complete absence of anger in the other's tone that Harry felt a momentary outburst of sympathy for this honest, good-tempered creature.

"I'm sorry, Judy," he said. "The fact is, you take track deadly seriously, and I don't. That's all there is to it. So we're bound to disagree."

So Harry went to the North Carolina mountains and shot quail and rode horseback and played bridge and carried on generally with James and Beatrice and Trotty and eight or ten others of his age. When he returned to New Haven he went out to the track field and jumped and ran about as before, but n.o.body paid any attention to him. Nor was he asked to rejoin the training table.

"It'll do him good to let his heels cool for a while," observed Dimmock to Macgrath.

"That's all very well, but you'd better not let them cool too long, if you want to get a place in the hurdles with Harvard," granted the coach.

"I was afraid all along we'd have to take him on again," said the other.

"He gets better and better on the track all the time, and queerer and queerer every other way. I don't trust him."

"He's a second Popham," said Macgrath.

About a week before the Harvard meet Dimmock approached the second Popham and with very commendable absence of anything like false pride asked him if he would please put himself under Macgrath's orders for the next few days and run in the meet. Harry graciously consented. He hurdled abominably badly for a week, showing neither form nor speed; then he hurdled against Harvard and beat their best men by a safe margin. He won a first place, and his Y.

But that did not make him any more popular in the track world.

Later in the spring Beatrice came on for a visit, anxious to see the university that Harry had preferred to Oxford. She and Lady Fletcher stayed with Aunt Selina; presently Aunt Miriam went on and left Beatrice alone there. She and Aunt Selina struck up one of those unaccountable intimacies that occasionally arise between people of widely different ages.

"I do like your relations," she once told Harry; "I like your country and your university and your friends well enough, but I like your people even better. I like your Uncle James, though I'm scared to death of him, and Aunt Cecilia of course is a dear; but I like Aunt Selina best. I never saw such a person! I didn't know you had her type in America. She makes Aunt Miriam look like a vulgar, blatant little upstart!"

"I know," said Harry, laughing. "Did you tell Aunt Miriam that?"

"Something to that effect, yes. She laughed, and said that she had always felt that way in her presence, too.--There's more about Aunt Selina than that, though; there's something wonderfully human about her, at bottom. I have an idea she could get nearer to me, if she wanted to, than almost any one else, just because her true self is so rare and remote."

Both Harry and James saw a good deal of Beatrice during her visit. Harry was supposed to be in training again, and it was his interesting custom to dine discreetly at the training table at six o'clock and then dash out to his aunt's and eat another and much more sumptuous meal at seven.

James was scandalized when he heard of this proceeding, but he carefully refrained from saying anything to Harry about it; he merely smiled non-committally when Harry, with a desire of drawing him out, rather flauntingly referred to it.

"A few weeks ago he would have cursed me out," he thought; "lectured me up and down about it. Now he won't say anything because he's afraid it would bring on another sc.r.a.p." The thought made him feel lonely and miserable.

James was greatly taken with Beatrice; that was quite clear from the first. He was attracted by her beauty, and still more by her apparent indifference to it. He found her more frank and sensible than American girls, whose debutante conventionalities and mannerisms bored and irritated him. He could not conceive of Beatrice "guying" or "kidding him along" on slight acquaintance, as most of his American friends did, or of Beatrice openly dazzling him with her beauty, or using her prerogative of s.e.x by making him "stand around" before other people.

One evening after dinner Beatrice, accompanied by both the brothers, was walking down one drive and up the other, as the family were in the habit of doing on warm spring evenings.

"Are you both prepared to hear something funny?" she asked.

"Fire away," they answered, and she continued:

"Well, I'm probably going to come back here next winter and live with Aunt Selina!"

Harry gave a long whistle.

"This from you! Are you actually going to turn Yankee, too?"