Читать книгу The Brentons - Anna Chapin Ray - Страница 7

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"A puffic' fibbous!" the monthly nurse had announced triumphantly, when she had presented Mrs. Opdyke's first-born son to his mother for her inspection.

The phrase, and the smile which invariably accompanied it, were the main stock in trade of the monthly nurse. Upon these two items, she had based her popularity which now had endured for more than a dozen years of escorting over the threshold of this world the sons and daughters of "first families only," as her professional card insisted. To be sure, the constant employment of the phrase had robbed it of all critical significance. Indeed, it is very doubtful whether, even at the start of her career, the nurse had ever linked it in her mind with the great god Apollo. From some one of her predecessors, she had picked it up and found that it fitted well upon her tongue. Later, the "fibbouses" abounded more and more plenteously, as her clientage increased, and she applied the term indiscriminately, regardless whether the recipient were an Apollo, or a mere Diana.

However, from the start, Reed Opdyke certainly deserved the phrase. Long generations of clean, high-minded living cannot fail to produce an effect upon their offspring. Reed's father had branched off from a line of lawyers to hold the chair of chemistry in one of the great colleges for girls. Reed's mother was of Pilgrim stock, well-nigh untainted by the blood of later, lesser arrivals on the Massachusetts shore. On either side of the house, it had been a matter of simple creed to hold one's body and one's mind equally aloof from possibilities of disease. Reed Opdyke's make-up showed the value of this creed.

Not that he thought very much about it, however. He accepted as a matter of course his sanity, very much as he accepted most other things that came in his way. His loosely curled fists within his pockets, his head erect and his lips smiling, he went striding along through life, taking the best of it as his natural right, and letting the rest of it alone. From kindergarten into school and from school into college, the old, old road trodden by all his ancestors, he journeyed quite as a matter of course. In fact, it never struck him that any fellow could do otherwise; never, that is, until he met Scott Brenton.

For Scott, in time, had also come to college. His mother had insisted upon that; had worked for it that it might in time be possible; had scrimped and toiled and saved, the while she had been training her only child to a strict economy which, however galling, he must accept as well worth the while for the sake of all that it was going to put within his grasp. Accordingly, Scott had been sent to school throughout the termtimes, sent well or ill, in good days and in bad. He had been goaded into an ambition which held him at the top of his small classes in the village school. When the top of the top class was reached, and college was still inaccessible, Mrs. Brenton had stiffened her sinews for yet greater toil and scrimping, and had sent her son up to Andover where the Wheeler name was a tradition, where the knowledge of Scott's ancestry would help him to find the employment that he needed. Scott's education was to be by no means easy of achievement. To gain his school diploma and his later degrees at college, he too must work, not alone at books, but, in his off-hours, at any task that offered.

And Scott did work, too. Around him, other boys were going in for football, making records on the track team, getting occasional leaves to run in to Boston for an odd half-holiday. Then they came back, hilarious and triumphant, to discuss their experience at mealtimes, boasting, chaffing, wrangling merrily in the intimacy known to boyhood, the world over. They never thought to pay any especial attention to the other boy who brought them things to eat, a boy with luminous gray eyes and clothes which were in sore need of pressing. He was just "that waiter chap" and not a human being like themselves. They talked about their secret plans before him, with no more thought of his personality than as if he had been a concrete post. And, after listening to their chatter throughout a protracted mealtime, after seeing, as he could not fail to do, how he counted to them for absolutely nothing at all, Scott Brenton had his hours when he too doubted the fact of his own humanity. An active brain and an almost automatic body trained to supple service: these by themselves, he realized, do not go far towards making a human thing of life. Contacts are necessary for that, not total isolation; and contact was the one thing denied him. Now and then he had his hours of wishing that those other boys, boys whose talk was full of reference to unfamiliar ways of life: of wishing that they would treat him a little bit unkindly. Anything would be better than this absolute ignoring of his individuality.

In his intervals of waiting on the table, he washed up the dishes. His meals he took, standing by the sink, a plate on the shelf before him, while he washed and chewed simultaneously. There were other tasks besides, tasks all of them more or less menial, all of them adding to the general drain upon his nerves and body. The rest of the time, his studies kept him busy. Indeed, it was no small wonder that he was able to maintain a decent footing in his class, so fagged out and weary was he by the time he had a moment's leisure to prepare his next-day's lessons. But prepare them he did, and well, although his eyes grew heavy over the task and ached with the strain of working by the one dim light with which his shabby garret room was equipped. It was a single room, unhappily. Even there, all contact was denied him. Saint Simon, sitting alone upon his pillar and gazing down upon his fellow men, was no more solitary than was Scott Brenton. Moreover, Saint Simon had the final consolation of being quite aware that he was looking down, a consolation which, to Scott Brenton, was permanently refused.

And then, Andover done, there came college, not one of the small colleges where individual idiosyncrasies count so much in making up the estimate of the student's character; but a great university, so great that it can stop to measure no man by any one trait or any several traits, so busy that it must grasp him in the round, or not at all. There lay the fact of Scott Brenton's ultimate salvation. He would have been downed completely, judged by the finical standards of the little college.

It was in his choice of college that, for the first time in his life, Scott Brenton's will had become dominant. His mother would fain have had it otherwise. The Wheelers, one and all, had been little-college men. The tradition was in their blood, and she had inherited it to the full: the strange belief that the smaller college offers less temptation to go astray; the equally strange belief that the closer contact with a few professors can quite atone for the lack of friction against a great crowd of fellow students, alien to one another in habits of mind and body, yet all of them, swiftly or sluggishly as may be, moving towards the selfsame goal. It had seemed to Mrs. Brenton something bordering on the blasphemous when Scott had endeavoured to put this latter phase of the question before her. Realizing his own futility upon that score, he finally had changed his tactics and assured her that, as far as money-earning work went, there were ten chances in the great college to one in the small.

And Scott was right, albeit his argument was wholly superficial. The truth of the matter was that his Andover experience had left him sore and downhearted; that he knew, in the bottom of his boyish soul, that he must plunge beyond his depth and swim into a wider sea, or else go down entirely, pushed out of sight beneath the overlapping circles of the little cliques, all too self-centred to admit of any common focus.

Mrs. Brenton did not care at all about any common focus. The phrase "college spirit" sounded intemperate, and she would have been the last person in the world to agree to the belief that Scott could gain any education from contact with boys of his own age. To her mind, one fusty old professor out-valued one hundred eager undergraduates, as source of inspiration to the young. Education, to her mind, lay in the desk-end of the classroom; it was unthinkable to her that Scott had lost the best of Andover, by reason of his solitary life there. As for college, the students, all but Scott, were bound to be full of the wiles of the devil. Scott's safety lay in his books, and in his keeping too busy in his off-hours to have time to get into mischief.

Moreover, the purely practical end of the keeping busy was beginning to loom large upon Mrs. Brenton's horizon. More and more she was coming to realize that it is no small undertaking for any widow with an almost imperceptible income to put a son through college. Valiantly she toiled and scrimped; but it was becoming increasingly necessary for Scott to help her out in both the toiling and the scrimping. Accordingly, the creases deepened, both vertically about the corners of Scott's lips and horizontally across his shiny knees and shoulder blades. His eyes, though, grew more luminous, as time went on, perhaps because they were surrounded by ever deepening hollows.

It was those eyes that first caught the attention of Reed Opdyke. Midway in his sophomore year, Opdyke, with a dozen others of his kind, had revolted from the monotony of the commons table, and had set up a so-called joint of their own, an eating-club presided over by a gaunt and self-helping senior, and served by a quartette of cadaverous and self-helping sophomores among whom was Scott Brenton.