Читать книгу The High Way - Caroline Atwater Mason - Страница 4

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Peterboro, a University town par excellence for a century, is now by way of transformation into a commercial centre. This by reason of two industries which, springing up within its quiet precincts, in a score of years have become of far-reaching importance. The industries provide, the one buttons, the other, electricity.

The University, of ancient and honorable foundation, once on the town’s frontier, is now not far from the heart of its business life. The Divinity School on a low hill above a quiet stream, placed outside the city limits, as suited to contemplation and scholastic pursuits, is now not only in the heart of a close-built residence quarter, but is separated only by the stream from the vast electrical works, beyond which again lies the huddle of cheap tenement houses for operatives. Nevertheless, within the Divinity Quadrangle, defended as it is by massive walls and an iron gate, there lingers still an atmosphere of academic seclusion and repose.

Opposite this pillared gate of entrance, at the far end of the enclosure formed by tall, brick buildings, stands the chapel, not conspicuously taller than they except for the clock tower which rises above Gothic doors. Grass, with small hawthorn and hemlock trees, fills the central spaces of the Quadrangle. In the midst of these a forgotten sun-dial rusts in disuse, the chapel clock having proved more immediately opportune.

On an afternoon of late September in the year 1916 the chapel clock, striking with slow impressiveness, announced five, and upon the stroke the body of students, assembled for devotional exercises, breaking up, streamed out into the Quadrangle. The stream was not deep, nor was its flow rapid or copious, being in numbers composed of little more than sixty men. As it subsided a student, coming out alone, stood for a moment looking about him with keenly measuring eyes,—a tall, personable youth of twenty-one or two, whose clothes sat well upon him, and whose eyes held the buoyant challenge of one who expects nothing ill of the world or of his fellows.

However, some sense of being cabined and confined in the Divinity entourage seemed now to stir in him for, when overtaken by another straggler, following in his wake as he moved forward down the flagged walk, the young man turned with a quick motion and smile, and said:

“I beg your pardon. Do you suppose there is anything in the way of an athletic field around here?”

“Shannon, isn’t it?” asked the other, holding out his hand with a smile which warmed the stranger’s heart. “I have met your father, heard you were coming. Oh, yes, indeed! But I hope you haven’t come here with the idea in your head that this is a cloister or a young ladies’ boarding-school. We are quite up on athletics in these days at Peterboro.”

“Oh, then, you are not a Junior! Why should you be? I was stupid enough to feel as if this was first day in Peterboro for everybody because it was for me. You are——?”

“I am Conrad, Barton Conrad. This is my last year. Glad to meet you, Shannon. If you have time I can take you now out through Arnold Hall and show you our perfectly good field. It lies along the river. Therefore it has the advantage of an unbroken view of the Electrical Works!”

While Conrad spoke, walking on by his side, the newcomer observed that he was lame, also of frail physique. Thus he was smitten with compunction at his overhaste in the quest for athletic facilities.

As they returned to the Quadrangle, the field surveyed, Conrad now under promise to accompany the other to his room, they met and passed an elderly man of strongly marked appearance. He was tall, very lean, very erect, very distinguished, very austere of aspect. Yet as, turning, he saluted them with formal courtesy a smile strikingly illuminated his face, as a sudden breaking out of the sun sometimes transforms a gray and wintry landscape.

“Glad to see you back, Mr. Conrad.” The speaker’s moderation of manner and word was touched with a kindliness beyond question. “You are looking fairly well, I think. But slow down this term. You overworked a little last year I remember. And this is——?”

“This is Mr. Shannon—of Melrose, I believe.” Conrad turned a glance of whimsical question then towards the chapel clock. “We have been acquainted for precisely seven minutes. I charged him with being Shannon on a guess, and he did not deny it.”

“He seems then to rest under the suspicion,” responded the old man. “A good name to bear,” he added as he took the student’s hand. “We all know of your father. I am glad to welcome you to Peterboro.” With which he resumed his walk towards the Quadrangle gate, leaving the two younger men to hasten on their way to the brick building confronting them, Palfrey Hall, in which Shannon was quartered.

“But do tell me the gentleman’s name!” that youth exclaimed as they went. “You were named. I was named. I am of no consequence whatever. You probably are. But I am willing to say that he is of immensely more consequence than either of us at present has ever dreamed of being. I take it he is a professor?”

“Is it possible that I did not introduce you properly? Oh, yes,” Conrad added pensively; “perfectly possible. I always do the wrong thing. Still I really think you ought to have known by intuition. Who could that man be——”

“But Douglas Gregg? Is he really Douglas Gregg?” Shannon was opening a numbered door in a long, dusky corridor now.

“Why, of course,” murmured Conrad. Obedient to the other’s gesture he had entered and now threw himself into a leather-covered armchair, the only object in the long narrow room suggesting physical relaxation. “Gregg, of course! You see, Shannon, he is such a lion here in Peterboro that we take it for granted nobody can fail to know him. I guess that is my best way out of it,” he added despondently.

“Oh, cheer up!” cried Shannon. “You’re all right. I might have known if I had been intuitive. He’s the man whose reputation brought me to Peterboro. I ought to have been on the lookout for him.”

Conrad made no reply. Vaguely Shannon felt that some shadow had fallen upon them. A drear look met him in the other’s eyes which turned then quickly and rested as if for refuge on the narrow mantel along which a few photographs had been placed.

“Did you only come this morning?” he asked. “You have given your cell a touch of livableness already.”

Rising, Conrad crossed the narrow room and examined the photographs. Shannon came to his side.

“This will be your father, I take it?”

Conrad studied with some intentness the profile presentment of a man in mid-life. “And this your mother,” he declared rather than asked.

This picture occupied him longer than the first.

“A lovely face,” he said as he returned it to its place. “Some way it reminds one of that phrase, she ‘kept all these things and pondered them in her heart.’”

Conrad spoke shyly, with obvious hesitation, but Shannon welcomed his words with a frankly responsive smile.

“You have read her all right. I think all things in the universe with my mother are ‘interpreted by love.’”

There was a little silence while Conrad stood with yet another photograph in his hand. Shannon went back to his place in the desk-chair and began rearranging his books.

“And who is this, if I may ask?” came Conrad’s question.

“Oh, that is my sister,—that is, I always call her my sister.”

“Dangerous, calling anything as pretty as that your sister if she isn’t your sister,” commented Conrad dryly. “A raving, tearing beauty, you know.”

“Yes, Amy is good-looking,” replied Shannon carelessly. “We have been brought up together. Her mother was a very intimate cousin of my mother’s and deposited her in Mother’s keeping when she died, I forget how many years ago. But Amy is just a schoolgirl. That photograph looks older than she does.”

Conrad returned to his armchair without further comment. With a shade of relief that personalities were concluded Shannon began to ask him various questions concerning the religious service from which they had just come. Conrad assured him that this was of a wholly special character, “chapel” being usually extremely simple.

“This is the annual extra service of welcome, you see, for you newcomers. Then you will get your welcome again next week when we are all entertained at President Loring’s house. In some grandeur too, I assure you. He has one of the sumptuous houses on Grafton Avenue and lives in pretty good style.”

“Grafton Avenue?”

“Oh, I forgot you were a tenderfoot. Excuse me, Shannon. It is our tophole residential street. Way over beyond the ’Varsity. Prexy shepherds us in a Rolls-Royce.”

“And Professor Gregg.... Does he live in splendour, too?”

“Perish the thought! Plain living and high thinking in his narrow brown frame house on Locust Street. Linoleum on the front hall, strip of linen on the front stairs to save wear. Carpets coming clear to the edges as they used to when Victoria ascended the throne. Marble-topped tables. All that sort of thing. Why, he has only three thousand dollars a year and an invalid wife, invalid all her life, and, even so, bent on giving every cent she can to ‘causes.’ Not much outward splendour there, believe me.”

“But President Loring,—is his salary so very large?”

“No, no, no, my dear Shannon! You have much to learn of Peterboro. They have here a very influential and rather large class whom I should be sorry to call nouveaux riches because of invidious associations with that term. All is understood if you say, ‘They have Electric.’”

Seeing Shannon’s puzzled expression Conrad continued:

“Peterboro’s great Electrical Works yonder are making money at a positively astounding rate. Half a dozen men, old residents here, are on the inside. Years ago they gave the signal, at the right moment, to their personal friends: Buy Electric Now. ‘Rollo accordingly did so.’ Thus Grafton Avenue has arisen. Extremely elegant houses.”

“And President Loring has ‘Electric’?”

“He has. And a number of other good and great men. Dr. Chance for instance.”

“Oh, yes, Dr. Chance. He was the speaker this afternoon. He is pastor of All Souls’ Church, isn’t he? My father often speaks of him and of his great success.”

“Yes, Chance is a very effective man. Shannon, will you excuse me if I ask you a very personal question? I am consumed with curiosity.”

“Ask what you like. I will answer or not as I like. That’s fair.”

“Well, you simply can’t imagine how utterly different you are from the average man who comes, a Junior, to Peterboro. I understand, to be sure, that you are a minister’s son. But that is no reason why you should ever go in for the ministry. They usually don’t. You haven’t the cut of the jib, though I can’t tell why. It may be in your college. Where did you graduate?”

“I haven’t graduated. Should have this year if I hadn’t decided to come to Peterboro. I have been a student in Stevens Technology Institute for three years,—specialized in hydraulics.”

Conrad drew a long breath.

“That seems to get us no nearer,” he remarked, shaking his head musingly. “They seldom come into the ministry that way.”

Shannon laughed.

“I haven’t the smallest objection, Conrad,” he said, “to telling you all there is to my ‘call’ if they still talk about a ‘call to the ministry.’ I had no idea of it for myself, don’t think I ever considered it,—until last year. I had gone in for an engineering course at Stevens, you see, had been there a year when the war broke out. Well, the war is at the bottom of it. Last Spring I simply was bowled over by a sense of the awful blight of the new paganism,—materialism,—whatever you choose to call it. I saw how all the fellows, practically all I knew or used to know in High School, were going in for technical preparation of some kind, all bent on increasing wealth or methods of physical development like myself. Who was going in for Christian work? I hardly knew a man, although I was brought up in a minister’s family. Suddenly in those dreadful first months it came to me that the spiritual end of this civilization of ours had got to be kept up or a reversion to paganism was fairly on. Perhaps I was wrong, but I was impressed that material science, in all its thousand and one lines, was shoving God, the sense of God, the practice of the presence of God, out of His universe. That it was as if Christ had not lived, had not died. If I could do anything it was up to me.... That is all.”

There was a long silence between them. Conrad broke it at last.

“And so you came to Peterboro for spiritual preparation to fight the fight for faith?” He spoke hurriedly, under his breath, emphasis on the last word. Plainly he spoke in stress of feeling.

“Yes,” answered Shannon simply, but with a certain unconscious solemnity.

Suddenly then Conrad rose, took his hat, crossed the room with extended hand to Shannon and murmured a brief word of thanks. In another moment he was gone.

“Quaint chap, all right,” was Shannon’s mental comment, “but I like him.”