Читать книгу Old-Dad - Eleanor Hallowell Abbott - Страница 8

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39

THE scene that Daphne had left behind her two thousand miles or more, though more academic of course, was none the less poignant to the one most concerned.

Deflected by a more or less erudite lecture-obligation to a town at least gossip-distance away, no faintest rumor of any college chaos whatsoever had reached John Burnarde's ears till the evening after the dance, when just recrossing the well-worn threshold of his beautiful, austere study, the shrill harsh clang of his telephone bell rang down the curtain on what had been the most exquisitely perfect episode of even his fastidious life.

Yet even then no whisper prepared him for what the alarm was all about. Poor John Burnarde!

Whatever else an academic training may teach an undergraduate it has certainly never taught a member of the faculty what to do 40 when summoned post-haste to the President's office to consult with various other members of the faculty on what has been pronounced "a most flagrant breach of moral as well as of academic standards" he finds the case to be the exceedingly delicate one of a girl-student caught entertaining a man in her room late at night—and the girl herself—his fiancée!

That the betrothal at that moment was known only to himself and the girl gave John Burnarde the last long breath, he felt, that he should ever draw again.

Still a bit flushed, a bit breezy, with his brisk sprint across the chill November campus, he was just slipping out of his overcoat in the doorway of the President's office when the name "Daphne Bretton" first struck across his startled senses. Half hampered by a balky overshoe, half pinioned by a ripped sleeve- lining he thrust his head alone into the conference.

"What?" he demanded.

"This will hit Burnarde rather roughly, I'm afraid," whispered the History Man to the Biology Woman. "She's quite his star English pupil, I imagine. Has done one little bit of lyric verse 41 already, they say, that is really rather remarkable. Very young of course, very ingenuous, but quite remarkably knowing."

"Maybe now we can guess where she gets her 'knowingness,'" murmured the new Bible Instructor behind her pure white ringers.

"What?" demanded John Burnarde all over again. The winter wind seemed to have faded oddly from one cheek but was still spotting hecticly in the other. "What?" he persisted bewilderedly, still struggling with his overshoes.

"Why it's the Bretton girl!" prompted a sharp voice from some dark seat in the corner.

"That pretty little Bretton girl," regretted a gentler tone.

"Yes—I—I—know who you mean," stammered Burnarde. "But—but——"

"Always made me think of apple-blossoms—somehow," confided the old Mathematics professor a bit surreptitiously.

"Apple-blossoms?" mumbled poor Burnarde.

"So sort of pink and white and fresh and—and fragrant. 'Pon my 42 soul when she comes into my class and takes a front seat it makes me feel a little queer. It's like being a boy again! Young grass, May morning, and a wind through the apple orchard! Fragrancy? Yes, that's it!"

"Yes, it's just exactly the flagrancy of it that makes the scandal so complete!" interposed the President's keenly incisive feminine voice.

Instantly every eye except Burnarde's reverted to the unquestionable dominance of the President's ash-blond personality.

Burnarde alone, looming lean, keen, tense, on the edge of the group, with five generations of poise and reticence masking the precipitant horror in his mind, stood staring blankly from one face to another of his cruder-birthed associates.

"I—protest!" he said.

"Protest?" questioned the President's coolly inflected voice. "Protest what?" With a graceful if somewhat studied gesture of patience Miss Claudia Merriwayne laid down her jotting pencil and narrowed her cold gray eyes to the eyes of her youngest 43 professor. "You were a little late getting here I think, Mr. Burnarde," she admonished him perfectly courteously, "but the general circumstances of the case you have gleaned quite sufficiently, I think, even in this last brief moment or so? Surely in a case so—so distressing," she flushed, "it will not be necessary for us to—to revive the details in all their entirety? In the half hour that we have been discussing the matter. It is a half hour, isn't it?" she turned sharply and asked of her nearest neighbor.

"Fully a half hour!" gloated the nearest neighbor.

"Miss Bretton, of course, will have to leave college," resumed the President succinctly. "Definitely—positive expulsion is, of course, the only path open to us!"

"I protest!" said John Burnarde.

From some half-shadowed corner directly in front of him a distinctly Continental smile flared up on a French instructor's face. Close at his elbow the phrase "little sly, pink-faced minx" hissed plainly from one gossip to another. The blood was surging in his ears! His heart was pounding like an engine! 44 Shock, bewilderment, nausea itself, racked chaotically through all his senses! Yet neither love nor loyalty, a girl's honor or a man's dignity, seemed to him at that moment to be essentially served by capping sensationalism with sensationalism. Sophisticated as he was in all the finer knowledges that book or life could offer, afraid of nothing on earth except the vulgarity of publicity, shy of nothing on earth except his great, grown-man desire for this little, young, exquisite girl, no power in the world could have forced him then and there to take the sweetest news he had ever known, or ever was to know, it would seem, and slop it down like so much kerosene to feed a flame already quite noxious enough. Still fighting desperately for time, still parrying for enlightenment, he kept his mask-like face turned blankly towards his companions.

"I protest!" he repeated tenaciously. "There is some mistake—some misunderstanding! Even in the two short months Miss Bretton has been with us she has certainly—Certainly——" In a voice as low as a nun's but particularly and peculiarly enunciative he 45 focused suddenly on the President. "The charge is absurd," he said. "It's outrageous! Someone has lied of course! And lied very badly."

With an ill-concealed gesture of exasperation the President straightened up in her chair and glared at her youngest professor.

"I—am the only person—who could have 'lied,'" she affirmed with some hauteur. Slowly into her cold strong-featured face a hot flush ebbed and waned again through lips that crisped a bit round the edges of her words. "If you insist on knowing every detail, Mr. Burnarde," she said, "it was I myself who discovered Miss Bretton! And she was barefooted at the time—and in her nightdress—and clasped most emphatically in the young man's arms."

"What?" cried Burnarde. His very heart seemed to wrench itself loose at the word, but his tight lips bit back the agony into a mere raspishness of astonishment. "What?" Then quite as unexpectedly to himself as to any of the others an amazing little laugh slipped through where even agony could not pass. Oh 46 ye god of Rhetoric! Ye subtlety of Satire! Ye psychology of Climax! Was this the moment when a Master of Arts should fling his tenderest morsel to the dogs? "Betrothal?" Red as blood, white as a lily, the word flashed through his stricken senses! "Betrothal?" Oh ye gods of everything! A betrothal so new, so shy, so sacred, so reverential, that he had not yet even so much as affrighted the cool, unawakened, little-girl finger tips with the thrill of his grown-man lips! A betrothal so new, so shy, so precious, he had not yet even so much as shared the secret with his adorable, patrician mother! Announce it now? Proclaim it now? Merciful God! Was there anything left to proclaim? Yes, that was just exactly the question! Was there anything left to proclaim? Even for loyalty, even in defense of the Beloved who had chosen so garishly—elsewhere, would it greatly enhance a substance as tender as a young girl's honor to scream out now? "I also claimed her—once?" Starkly his fine, clear-cut lips opened and shut again. "I—I protest!" he mumbled. Vaguely in a chaotic blur he sensed a restless exchange of glances, the soft, 47 clothy shifting and stir of busy people impatient to be off. Cleanly and concisely through the blur cut the President's persistent purpose.

"Expulsion, of course," said the President, "must always seem a drastic measure. But in the safety and protection of the greater number rests now as always the greater mercy. This Bretton girl, I understand, has grown up with practically no home surroundings, being shifted about from one boarding school to another ever since her earliest childhood, and knowing apparently very little more about her people than even I have been able to glean. The circumstances are very sad, of course, very unfortunate, but our duty at the moment, of course, concerns itself with results, not causes. Looking back now to her first appearance among us two months ago I realize that there has always been something about her that was vaguely disquieting, vaguely suggestive of lawlessness. Her eyes, perhaps, her hair, some odd little trick of manner. Certainly," quickened the President, "I would not be doing my duty by the hundreds of innocent young girls committed to my care if——"

As though all life reverted then to the mere pursuit of hats and 48 coats and rubbers, the Faculty Meeting dissolved into individual interests again and dispersed as such along the gloomy corridor and down the creaking stairs.

It was winter-cold on the stairs.

Shuffling a little in his overshoes, jerking his coat-collar just a bit tighter around his throat, John Burnarde felt suddenly very old. "Old? Merciful Heavens!" he winced. He was only thirty-five! Did Age come like that to a man in just the time it took him to go up and down the same gray, creaky, familiar stairs? "Apple Blossoms was it that the old Mathematics Professor had said she looked like? But God knew it wasn't just her little face that was Apple Blossomy, but her little mind also, and the little glad gay heart of her! So fresh, so new, so virgin-sweet! By what foul chance, by what incalculable circumstance, had she blundered into this?"

Stripped of passion, stripped even of protest, stripped indeed of every human emotion except his dignity and his pain he pushed 49 his way blindly out through interminable heavy doors and breasted the winter night.

Then quite suddenly, stripped of every emotion except pain, he swung around in his tracks, remounted the stairs, re-entered the President's office, and slamming the door be hind him, flung down even his dignity on the altar of his love.

"Miss Merriwayne!" he said. "This thing that you propose doing—cannot be done! I am engaged to Miss Bretton!"

For a single instant only, every knowledge, manner, poise, that John Burnarde had been born with, defied every knowledge, manner, poise, that Claudia Merriwayne had worked forty years to acquire.

Then reverting suddenly to the identical accent with which Claudia Merriwayne's mother was still lashing Claudia Merriwayne's father, doubtless, in the little far away North Kansas home, the College President opened her thin lips to speak.

"The thing—is already done—Mr. Burnarde," she said. "Miss Bretton left town an hour ago—and with her paramour, I am told!"

"With her—what?" cried John Burnarde. 50

"With her 'paramour,'" repeated the President coolly.

"The word is unfortunate," frowned Burnarde.

"So—is the episode," said the President.

With a little sharp catch of his breath John Burnarde stepped forward to the edge of the desk.

"You understand that I am going to marry Miss Bretton?" he affirmed with some incisiveness.

"Not in my college!" said the President. "Nor in any other college if I even so much as remotely gauge either the professional or the social exigencies of the situation." Emphatically, but by no means extravagantly, she drove her meaning home. "Do you dream for one single moment, Mr. Burnarde," she quizzed, "that any reputable college in the land would accept, or maintain on its faculty," she added significantly, "a man whose wife for reasons of moral obliquity had not been considered a safe associate for——"

"You mean——" interrupted John Burnarde.

"Everything that I say," acquiesced the President, "and 51 everything that I imply."

"That is your ultimatum?" questioned John Burnarde.

"That is my ultimatum!" said the President.

With the slightest perceptible tightening of his lips John Burnarde began to put on his gloves.

"Very fortunately," he said, "there are other professions in the world besides the teaching of English."

"Very fortunately," conceded the President. One side of her mouth lifted very faintly with the concession. "Yet somehow, Mr. Burnarde," she added hastily, "I do not seem to picture you as a—as an automobile salesman, for instance. Nor yet visualize that frail, lovely mother of yours relinquishing very easily her life-long ambitions for your deanship—which up to now, of course, has by no means seemed the improbable fruition of your distinguished services with us. Your mother," mused the President, "has doubtless made some sacrifices for you—in her time?"

"Most mothers have!" snapped John Burnarde. 52

Roused snap for snap to his tone the President leaned forward suddenly.

"You're not the only man," she cried, "who has been both flouted and betrayed by Frivolity! Next time you choose——" Her cheeks flushed scarlet. "Next time you choose, perhaps you will choose more wisely, more consistently with your age and attainments! This mad infatuation is surely but the mood of a moment, the——" Recovering her self-control as quickly almost as she had lost it she sank back with typical statuesqueness into her throne- like Jacobean chair. "Surely, Mr. Burnarde," she asked in all sincerity, "you must admit that the—that the warning I have given you is at least—reasonable?"

"Absolutely reasonable!" said John Burnarde. "And absolutely damnable!" And turning on his heel he stalked from the room.

But even the winter night could not cool his cheeks now, nor the great pile of unread themes and forensics that he found awaiting him in his room, divert his tortured mind for one single second 53 from the problems of a lover to the problems of a professor. Somewhere indeed, he reasoned, among that white flare of papers a fresh stab of pain undoubtedly awaited him, a familiar handwriting strangely poignant, some little brand new bud of an idea forging valiantly upward through the clotted sod of academic tradition into the sunshine of acknowledged success, a purely prosy rhetorical question, perhaps, thrilled to its very interrogation mark by the sweet new secret hidden behind its formality!

With an irresistible impulse he began suddenly to rummage through the themes. Yes, here was the handwriting! With fingers that trembled he unfolded the page. Dated the very night before this dreadful thing had happened, surely somehow—somewhere on this very page the dreadful thing must be disproved!

"Dear Mr. Burnarde," ran the little note pinned to the page. "Dear Mr. Burnarde" (Oh, the delicious camouflage of the formality). Please, I beg of you do not be angry with me because I am submitting no prose theme this week! I just can't, somehow! I'm all verse these days! What do you think about this one? 54 There are oodles and oodles more lines to it of course, but this is to be the recurrent refrain: