THE SADDEST TALE

With the beginning of the next term Harry embarked on the task of setting himself right with the world. He found it on the whole easier than he had expected. He had only to make a few formal apologies, as in the cases of Shep McGee and Junius LeGrand, and let it become generally known that he had definitely given up drinking, et cetera, to make the cohorts of the commonplace glad to receive him in their ranks once more.

Reinstatement in the social life of New Haven followed quite easily—almost as a matter of course, for he had not actively offended any members of what might be described as the entertaining classes. The female element, practically all of whom knew him, or at least of him, through his family connection, had evolved a mythical but interesting conception of him as "rather a fast young man"; and that, alas! served to endear him to their hearts rather than otherwise.

So the last months of his college course passed in a sort of sunset haze of enjoyment, marred only by one thing, indecision as to his subsequent career. His friends were inclined to look rather askance at this; one or two, in a tactful way, pointed out to him the danger of "drifting." In reality there was small danger of this; although his inherited income would make him independent of his own efforts for livelihood during the rest of his natural life, Harry would never "drift" very far. His brain was too active, his ambition too lively, his sense of the seriousness of life too deep to allow that. He could never be content doing nothing. He wanted, in turn, to do very nearly everything; the professions of lawyer, doctor, "business man," engineer, clergyman, soldier, sailor—tinker and tailor, even were considered and rejected in turn.

"It's not that I don't want to do all these things," he explained to Trotty, who sometimes showed impatience at his vagueness; "the trouble is that I can't do any of them. I'm not fitted for them—I'm not worthy of them, if you like to put it that way. If I were a conscienceless wretch, now, it would be different!"

One Sunday afternoon in June, rather saddened by the feeling of his apparent uselessness in the world, he went to call on Madge Elliston.

"Well, what are you going to do this summer?" she began. "That seems to be the one topic of conversation at this time of year."

"This summer? Oh, I'm going to walk, with the rest of my class, in the more mountainous portions of Europe. At present I am under engagement to walk through the hilly parts of England, Scotland and Wales, the Black Forest, the Alps, the Tyrol, the Dolomites and some of the cooler portions of the Apennines; but the CÉvennes and the Caucasus are still open, if you care to engage them.... In between times I expect to roister, shamelessly, in some of the livelier resorts of the Continent. That's all quite simple; what I'm worrying about is what I'm going to do next winter."

"Why don't you write, if I may be pardoned for asking so obvious a question?" asked Madge.

"One simple but sufficient reason—I haven't got anything to write about," answered Harry, smiling. "That's what everybody asks, and the answer is always the same. This prevalent belief in my literary ability is flattering, but unfortunately it's wholly unfounded."

"I shouldn't say so. I've read most of what you've written in college, and it seems to me extremely clever."

"Clever—that's just it! Nothing more! The awful truth is, there's nothing more in me. I have rather a high regard for literature, you see, and on that very account I'm less willing to inflict myself on it. I wouldn't care, though, if there was anything else I appeared to be cut out for. If I felt that I could sweep crossings better than other people, I assure you I would go into the profession with the greatest cheerfulness!"

Madge laughed. "I know very much how you feel—I've been going through much the same thing myself, though you might not have guessed it. Only as it happens I have received a call for something very like the profession you speak of."

"Crossing-sweeping?"

"The next thing to it—teaching in a dame's school in town—Miss Snellgrove's. I think it's rather a pretty idea, don't you? Society flower, withered and faint with gaiety, seeking refreshment in the cloistral, the academic!—You don't approve?"

"Woman's sphere is the home," said Harry doubtfully.

"Not when the home is a two-by-four box; you couldn't call that a sphere, could you? Of course," she went on, more seriously, "of course the real, immediate reason why I'm doing it is financial. These are times of—well, stringency.... Not but what we could scrape along; but it seems rather absurd to be earning nothing when one could just as well be earning something, doesn't it? And the only alternative is playing about eternally with college boys younger than myself."

"Yes, I think you're very sensible, if that's the case. Not that it is, of course; you'll find plenty of people coming back to the graduate and professional schools to console you. Also my brother James at week-ends, if that's any comfort to you!"

"James? Is he in this part of the country?"

"Yes, in New York. He's going to be in McClellan's branch there next winter—assistant manager, or something of the sort—something important and successful sounding. We are all very much set up over it. And it's so near that he can come up for Sunday quite regularly, if he wants.—It does give me quite a solemn and humble feeling, though, to think that you have found a profession before me."

"Oh, yes; teaching at Miss Snellgrove's is more than a profession—it's a career!—I refuse to believe, though," she continued with a change of manner, "that you have not found your profession already, even though you may not care to adopt it yet. For after all, you know, you have the creative ability. Every one says that. All that's wanting in you, as you say, is having something to write about, and nothing but time and development will bring that. Meanwhile I think it's very nice and high-minded of you not to go ahead and write nothing, with great ease and fluency! That's what most people in your position do."

"Thank you; that's very encouraging," said Harry. He looked thoughtfully at her for a moment and continued: "Has it ever occurred to you, Madge, that you are quite a remarkable young woman?"

"Heavens yes, hundreds of times!"

"That's a denial, I suppose. However, it's true. Look at the way you've just been talking to me!... You have what I've come to admire very much during the past few months—perfect balance of viewpoint. You have what one might call a sense of ultimacy—is there such a word? It's like a number of children, each playing about in his own little backyard, surrounded by a high fence that he can't see over, suspecting the existence of a lot of other backyards, with children in them wondering what lay beyond in just the same way. Then occasionally there is born a happy being to whom is given the privilege of looking down on the whole lot of them from the church steeple, and being able to see each backyard in its exact relation to all the other backyards. That's you.... It's a rare gift!"

Madge was at first amused by this elaborate compliment, but she ended by being rather touched by it.

"It's very nice of you to say that," she replied after a moment, "no matter how little foundation there may be for it. It proves one thing, at any rate—I have no monopoly of the quality of ultimacy! You wouldn't be able to think I was ultimate, would you, unless you were a wee bit ultimate yourself? And that goes to prove what I said about your attitude toward your profession."

"I'm afraid you can't make me believe in my own ultimacy, no matter how hard you try," said Harry. "In fact I pursue the rival study of propinquity—the art of never seeing beyond one's own nose!"

"Well, you must at least let me believe in the ultimacy of your finding your profession," insisted Madge. But Harry only shook his head.

Commencement arrived at last, and Aunt Cecilia, attended by a representative delegation of her progeny, flopped down upon Aunt Selina, prepared to do as much by Harry as she had by his brother two years earlier. Aunt Cecilia belonged to the important class of American women who regard a graduation as a family event second in importance only to a wedding or a funeral, ranking slightly higher than a "coming out." The occasion was a particularly joyous one to her because of Harry's being able to celebrate it in a full blaze of righteousness and truth, and because of the consequent opportunities for motherly fluttering.

"Dear Harry," she said, as she kissed, him on his arrival; "I am so glad to be here to see you graduate, and so glad that—that everything has gone so splendidly. It is so much, much nicer—that is, it is so nice to think that—"

"Yes, dear; you mean, isn't it nice that I'm respectable again," said Harry, with a flippancy made gentle by the sight of her kind blue eyes. "I am respectable now, you know, so you needn't be afraid to talk about it. We can all be respectable together; you're respectable, and I'm respectable, and Ruth is respectable and Lucy is respectable, and Aunt Selina is respectable—we hope; how about that, Aunt Selina?—and altogether we're an eminently respectable family. All except Beatrice, that is, who is far, far too nobly born, being related, in fact, to a marquis. No one in the peerage, Aunt C. dear, likes to be called respectable—it's considered insulting. No one, that is, above the rank of baron; the barons are now all reformed brewers, who get their peerages by being so respectable that people forget all about the brewing, and that is English democracy, and isn't it a splendid thing, dear? When you marry Ruth to an English peer, you must be sure to have him a baron, because none of the others are respectable."

"Harry, what nonsense you do talk!" said his aunt. "Before these girls—!"

"I imagine these girls know Harry by this time," remarked Aunt Selina. "If they don't, it's time they did. You're a hundred times more innocent than they, Cecilia, and always will be."

"Exactly always what I tell Mama," put in Ruth, the eldest of Aunt Cecilia's brood. "Besides, what Harry said is all quite true, I'm sure. Except about me; I shan't marry a foreigner at all, but if I do, I certainly shan't marry a brewer. Mama is far too rich for me to take anything less than a duke."

This was literally, almost painfully true. A succession of deaths in Aunt Cecilia's family, accompanied by a scarcity of male heirs, had placed her in possession of almost untold wealth—"more than I bargained for when I took you," as Uncle James jocularly put it, for the pleasure of seeing her bridle and blush. Aunt C. was one of the richest women in the country, but it never changed her a particle. Not all her wealth, not all her social prominence, not all the refining influences that several generations' enjoyment of these brings, could ever make her even appear to be anything but the simple, warm-hearted, motherly creature she was.

Harry, realizing all this as well as any one, exerted himself to make Aunt C. glad she had made the effort to come to see him graduate, and he manfully escorted her and the girls to the play, the baccalaureate service, his class-day exercises, the baseball game and various other entertainments, where, as Ruth rather aptly put it, "we can sit around and watch somebody else do something." He also did his full duty by his cousin, and danced away a long and perspiring evening with her at the senior promenade. He found Ruth very good company, in spite of her active tongue, or rather, perhaps, because of it.

The final Wednesday, pregnant with fate, arrived at length, and after an immense deal of watching other people receive degrees, some earned and some accorded by the pure generosity of the University, Harry became entitled to write the magic initials "B.A." after his name. Being one of the leaders of his class in point of scholarship, he was one of the twenty or so who mounted the platform and received the diplomas for the rest. This was too much for Aunt Cecilia, who occupied a prominent place in the front row of the balcony.

"Oh, dear," she sighed, wiping away a furtive tear, "there he goes, and no mother to see him do it! No one to be proud of him! And the brightest of all the family—I shall never live to see a son of mine do as well, never, never!"

"I'm not so sure," said her eldest daughter, comfortingly; "the doctrine of chances is in your favor. You have four boys—four chances to Aunt—what was her name?—Aunt Edith's two. Harry's not so fearfully bright, anyway—only sixteenth out of three hundred."

"My dear, how can you talk so? you ought to be ashamed, after his being so nice to you all this week!"

"Yes, he's been very sweet, indeed," replied the maiden, magnanimously. "Though I don't know, on looking back at it, that he's been any nicer to me than I've been to him!"

Harry himself was rather impressed by the long ceremony in which he found the qualities of dignity and simplicity nicely blended. He was impressed particularly by the giving of the honorary degrees; it seemed to him a very fine thing that these ten or fifteen people, all of them leaders in widely different spheres of activity, should make so much of receiving a bit of parchment from a university which most of them had not even attended, and equally fine of the university to do them honor; the whole giving proof of the triumph of the academic ideal in an age of materialism.

The same thought occurred to him even more vividly at the great alumni luncheon that followed; the last and in some ways the most impressive of all the Commencement ceremonies. The great Renaissance dining hall filled from end to end with graduates, upwards of a thousand strong, ranging between the hoary-headed veteran and the hour-old Bachelor, all of them gathered for the single purpose of doing honor to their alma mater, all of them thrilled by the same feeling of affection for her—all this awakened a responsive note in the mind of Harry, always ready to render honor where honor was due, or to show love when he felt it. It was pleasant to sit and eat among one's classmates and in the presence of those other, older, more exalted beings stretching away to the other end of the hall and think that they were all, in a way, on terms of equal footing—all graduates together.

At one end of the hall, on a great raised dais, sat the highest officers of the University, in company with the guests of honor of the day, the recipients of the honorary degrees. After the meal was over, certain of these were called upon to speak. Harry thought he had never heard such speeches. The men who made them were big men, foremost in the country's service and in the work of the world; one was a Cabinet minister, another a great explorer, another a scientist, another a missionary. The ultimate message of each one of them was the high mission of Yale, given in no spirit of boastful, flag-waving "almamatriotism," but with strong emphasis on the theme of service. One got from them the idea that Yale men, like all men of their station and responsibility the world over, were born to serve humanity. The mission of Yale in this scheme was one of preparation; she acted as a recruiting-station and clearing-house, developing the special powers of each of her sons, equipping them with knowledge of books, other men and themselves, and at last sending them into the field where they were calculated to make the best use of themselves. One revered and loved Yale, of course, for what she had given one; to her every man owed a full measure of gratitude and affection for what he had become. But one was never to forget where Yale stood in the scheme of things; one must always bear in mind that she was not an end in herself, but a means—one of many other means—to an infinitely greater end. Only by considering her in her place in the vast order of world-service could one do justice to her true power, her true greatness.

The impression ultimately conveyed was not that of a smaller Yale but of a larger world. Harry had never considered the relation between universe and university in this illuminating light. He suddenly realized that his idea of his college had been that of a particularly reputable and agreeable finishing-school for young men; a treasury of social knowledge and the home of sport. He had mistaken the side-shows for the main exhibition; he had admired and criticized them without regard to the whole of which they were but small parts. In a flash he looked back and realized the vanity and recklessness of his earlier revolt against college institutions and traditions. Who was he that he should criticize them? What had he to offer as substitute for them except an attitude of idle receptivity and irresponsible dalliance? He had recovered from that first foolishness, to be sure, and thank Heaven for that slight evidence of sanity; but what had he done since his recovery except sit back and watch the days slide by? Had he ever made the slightest attempt toward serious thinking, toward placing himself, his college and the world in their proper relations to each other? Had he succeeded in learning a single important lesson from the many that had been offered to him? Was it possible that he had completely wasted these four precious years of golden youth?

Suddenly he felt tears of humiliation and self-contempt burn behind his eyes. It would be absurd to shed them. He shifted his position and lit a cigarette. He inhaled the comforting smoke deeply and listened with meticulous attention to the speech from which his mind had wandered into introspection, trying not to think any more of himself. Gradually, however, there penetrated into his inner consciousness the comforting thought that he had been hysterical, had judged himself too harshly in his anxiety to be sufficiently hard on himself. Those years were not wholly wasted—he had learned something in them. He was ahead of where he was when he entered college, if only a little. The thought of James occurred to him; James would be an inspiration in the future as he had been a help in the past. No, there was yet hope for him, though he must be very careful how he acted in the future. He had been a fool, but he hoped now that he had been merely a young fool, and that his mistakes could be at least partly rectified by age and effort. He would try hard, at least; he would be receptive, industrious, thorough, tolerant, unbiased and humble—above all, humble. He glanced up at the speaker's table and reflected that the men who had the most reason to be proud were in fact the humblest.

The last speaker sat down amid a round of applause. The men on the floor of the hall stood up to sing before departing. Harry, looking at his watch, was surprised at the lateness of the hour; he had promised to see Aunt Cecilia and her daughters off at the station and must hurry away at once if he were to catch them.

He laboriously made his way through the ranks of singing graduates toward the door, listening to the familiar words of the song as he had never before listened.