The Guarded Heights

Lambert was painstakingly considerate, catching him for luncheon from time to time, or calling at unexpected moments at his office, and always he said something about Sylvia. She was well. Naturally she was keeping to herself. Betty and she were at Princeton, and Sylvia was going to stay on with the Alstons for a time. Once he let slip a sincere admiration, a real regret.

"It's extraordinary, George. You've very nearly made every word good."

George took the opening to ask a question that had been in his mind for many days.

"Where is he? What's he up to? I haven't seen him, but, naturally, I keep to myself, too, and Dicky, bless him, mentions nothing."

Lambert frowned.

"He hasn't been around the office much since. He's taking his own sweet will with himself now. He's gone away – to Canada. It's cold there, but it's also fairly wet."

"If one could only be sure he had the virtue of loving her!" George mused.

"He hasn't," Lambert said, impatiently. "Since I talked with him that hectic night I've admitted that Dolly's never had the capacity to love any one except himself. So he's probably happy in his own unpleasant way."

A thought came to George. He smiled a little.

"I've been wondering if Sylvia is going in harder than ever on the side of the downtrodden."

Lambert laughed.

"As far as I know, hasn't mentioned a cossack since that night; and I have to confess, hard-headed reactionary, the ranks are making me see too many bad qualities among the good."

"Perhaps," George suggested, "the ranks are saying something of the sort about us. Besides, I don't see why you call me reactionary."

"Would you have minded it a while back?" Lambert asked.

"Just the same," George answered, "I'd like to get their point of view."

What would Squibs say to that from him? Squibs, undoubtedly, would be pleased. After Lambert had gone he sat for a long time thinking. He was glad Lambert had come, for the other had suggested that in endeavouring to capture such a point of view, in pleasing Squibs, he might at last find a real interest, and one of use to somebody besides himself. If the men on the heights didn't get at it pretty soon, a different kind of climber would appear, with black hands, inflamed eyes, and a mind stripped, by passion, of all logic. Gladly he found it possible to bring to this new task the energy with which he had attacked the narrower puzzles of the university and Wall Street.

Sylvia had called him the most selfish person she had ever met, and, as he tried to strip from the facts of the world's disease the perpetual, clinging propaganda, he applied her charge to his soul. From the first he had been infected, yet his selfishness had been neither inefficient nor dangerous. This increasing pestilence was. Lambert guessed what he was at, and George jeered at him for his war madness, but Lambert had found again an absorbing interest. Because of his missing leg it was rather pitiful to watch his enthusiasm for a reawakened activity.

"You've got to see Harvard swallow your old Tiger, George," he said one Friday. "After all, why not? You don't need to come out to the Alstons, although I'm not sure there would be any harm in that. Talk's about done, I fancy."

George flushed.

"Do you know I'd love to spill you again, Lambert? I'd like to bring you down so hard the seismographs would make a record."

"Too bad we can't try to kill each other," Lambert said, regretfully. "Why not watch younger brutes?"

"I've wanted it for days," George acknowledged. "I'll wire Squibs."

George was perfectly sure that Squibs knew nothing, for he wasn't socially curious, and Betty would have hesitated to talk about what had happened even to Mrs. Squibs, yet he was conscious, after the first moment of meeting, of a continued scrutiny from Squibs, of a hesitancy of manner, of an unusually careful choice of words.

He had small opportunity to test this impression, for it was noon when he reached the house in Dickinson Street, and there were many of the tutor's products in the dining-room, snatching a cold bite while they roared confused pessimism about the game.

"You're going to the side-lines," Squibs said when they had climbed the ramp to their section of the stadium.

"I'd be in the way," George objected.

Bailly stared at him.

"George Morton on a football field could only be in the way of Harvard and Yale."

George experienced a quick, ardent wish for thick turf underfoot, for a seat on the bench among players exhaling a thick atmosphere of eager and absorbed excitement. So he let the tutor lead him down the steps. Squibs called to Green, who was distrait.

"What is it, Mr. Bailly?"

"I've got Morton."

Green sprang to life.

"Mr. Stringham! An omen! An omen!"

He met George at the gate and threw his arms around him. Stringham hurried up. Green crowed.

"I believe we'll lick these fellows or come mighty close to it."

"Of course you'll lick them, Green. Hello, Stringham! May I sit down?"

"The stadium's yours," Stringham said, simply.

As he walked along the line of eager players, smothered in blankets or sweaters, George caught snatches of the curiosity of youth, because of nervousness, too audibly expressed.

"Who's the big fellow?"

"That? Longest kicker, fastest man for his weight ever played the game. George Morton – the great Morton."

"He never played with that leg! What's the matter with his leg? Football?"

George caught no answer. He sat down among the respectful youths, thinking whimsically:

"The war's so soon over, but thank God they can't forget football!"

XXV

At the very end of the first half, when the Princeton sections experienced the unforeseen glow of a possible victory, George caught a glimpse of Lambert and Wandel close to the barrier, as if they had left their places to catch someone with the calling of time. Just then the horn scrunched its anxious message. George called.

"Lambert Planter!"

Stringham paused, grinning.

"Come over here, you biting bulldog."

Lambert made his way through the barrier and grasped Stringham's hand.

"Come along to the dressing-room," Stringham suggested, cordially. "Nice bulldog, although once I loved to see Morton chew you up."

Lambert glanced down.

"Thanks. I'd better stay here. One of my runners is off, Stringham."

"Then sit with the boys next half," Stringham said. "Coming, Morton?"

George shook his head, and urged the anxious coach away, for Wandel had caught his eye.

"Tell them to keep their heads," George called after Stringham. "If they keep their heads they've got Harvard beaten."

He glanced inquiringly at Wandel.

"Why not cease," Wandel said, "imagining yourself a giddy, heroic cub? Come up and sit with mature people the last half."

The invitation startled George. Then Sylvia wasn't there?

"Is Sylvia all right?" he asked Lambert under his breath.

Lambert was a trifle ill at ease.

"Oh, quite. Betty asked us to get you. Wants to see you. Have my place. I'm going to accept Stringham's fine invitation, and sit here with the young – a possible Yale scout on the Princeton side-lines."

"Stringham's no fool," George laughed. "Anyway, he has you fellows beaten right now."

Lambert thrust his hand in his pocket.

"How much you got?"

Wandel grasped George's arm.

"Come with me before you get in a college brawl."

"Plenty when we're not chaperoned, Lambert," George called, and followed Wandel through the restless crowd and up the concrete steps.

Was Sylvia really there? Was he going to see her? The idea of finding him had sprung from Betty, and Lambert had been ill at ease.

He saw Betty and her father and mother, then beyond them, a vacant place between, Sylvia to whom the open air and its chill had given back all her dark, flushed brilliancy. Wandel slid through first, and made himself comfortable at Sylvia's farther side. George followed, stopping to speak to the Alstons, to accept Betty's approving glance.

"Conspirator!" he whispered, and went on, and sat down close to Sylvia, and yielded himself to the delight of her proximity. She glanced at him, her colour deepening.

"Betty said it was all right, and I must. So many people – "

The air was sharp enough to make rugs comfortable. He couldn't see her hands because they were beneath the rug across her knees, a covering she shared with Wandel and him.

As he drew the rug up one of his hands touched hers, and his fingers, beyond his control, groped for her fingers. He detected a quick, nervous movement away; then it was stopped, and their hands met, clasped, and clung together.

For a moment they looked at each other, and knew they mustn't, since there were so many people; but the content of their clasped hands continued because it couldn't be observed.

The supreme football player sat there staring at a blur of autumn colour between the lake and the generous mouth of the stadium; and, when the second half commenced, saw, as if from an immeasurable distance, pygmy figures booting a football, or carrying it here and there, or throwing each other about; and he didn't know which were Harvard's men or which were Princeton's, and he didn't seem to care —

Vaguely he heard people suffering. A voice cut through a throaty and grieving murmur.

"Somebody's lost his head!"

"What's the matter?" he asked Sylvia.

"George! You're destroying my hand."

Momentarily he remembered, and relaxed his grasp, while she added quickly:

"But I don't mind at all, dear."

XXVI

Lambert stood in front of them, glancing down doubtfully. Evidently the game was over, for people were leaving, talking universally and discontentedly.

"Betty and I," Lambert said, dryly, "fancied we'd invented and patented that rug trick."

Sylvia stood up.

"Don't scold, Lambert."

She turned to George, trying to smile.

"I shall be happy as long as my hand hurts. Good-bye, George."

"You'd better go," Betty whispered as he lingered helplessly.

So he drifted aimlessly through the crowd, hearing only a confused murmur, seeing nothing beyond the backs directly in front of him, until he found the Baillys waiting at the ramp opening.

"If you'd only been there, George! Although this morning we'd have been glad enough to think of a tie score."

He submitted then to Bailly's wonder at each miracle; to his grief for each mistake; and little by little, as the complaining voice hurried on, the world assumed its familiar proportions and movements. He caught a glimpse of Allen walking slowly ahead. The angular man was alone, and projected even to George an air of profound dissatisfaction. Bailly caught his arm and shook hands with him.

"Whither away?" George asked.

"To the specials."

He fell in beside George, and for a time kept pace with him.

"What's bothering you, Allen?"

With a haggard air Allen turned his head from side to side, gazing at the hastening people.

"Lords of the land!" he muttered. "Lords of the land!"

"Why?" George asked. "Because they have an education? Well, so have you."

Allen nodded toward the emptying stadium.

"Lords of the land!" he repeated. "I've been sitting up there with them, but all alone. I wish I hadn't liked being with them. I wish I hadn't been sorry for myself because I was alone."

Allen's words, his manner of expressing them, defined a good deal for George, urged him to form a quick resolution.

"Catch your special," he said, "but come to my office Tuesday morning. I may have work for you that you can do with a clear conscience. If you must get, get something worth while."

Allen glanced at him quickly.

"Morton, you've changed," he said. "I'll come."

XXVII

Very slowly the excitement of the game cleared from Squibs' brain. That night he could talk of nothing else, begging George for an opinion of each player and his probable value against Yale the following Saturday. George, to cover his confusion, generalized.

"We'll beat Yale," he said, "as we ought to have beaten Harvard, because this team isn't afraid of colours and symbols. Most of these youngsters have been in the bigger game, so final football matches no longer appeal to them as matters of life and death and even of one's chances in the hereafter."

Bailly looked slightly sheepish.

"I'm afraid, George, I'm going to New Haven to look at a struggle of life and death, but then I was only in the Y. M. C. A. I'd feel many times better if you were sound and available."

"You might speak to the dean about me," George laughed.

By the next evening, however, the crowd had departed, and with Princeton's return to normal Squibs for the time overcame his anxieties. That night George and he sat in a corner of the lounge of the Nassau Club, waiting for Lambert and Wandel to drive in from the Alstons. George grew a trifle uncomfortable, because he suspected Squibs was staring at him with yesterday's curious scrutiny. Abruptly the tutor asked:

"What did you say to Allen after the game?"

"Offered him another job," George answered, shortly.

Bailly frowned.

"See here, George. What are you up to? Is that fair and decent? Allen is struggling – for the right."

"Allen," George answered, "has put some of his views to the test, and the results have made him discouraged and uneasy. He's been tainted by the very men he's tried to help. I've no idea of debauching him. Quite the reverse. Please listen."

And he entered upon a sort of penitence, speaking, while the tutor's wrinkled face flushed with pleasure, of his recent efforts to understand the industrial situation and its probable effects on society.

"I have to acknowledge," he said, softly, "that pure material success has completely altered its meaning for me. I'd like to use my share of it, and what small brains I have, to help set things straight; but I'm not so sure this generation won't have too sticky feet to drag itself out of the swamp of its own making."

Lambert and Wandel arrived just then, talking cheerfully about football.

"What do you mean to do?" Bailly asked George as the others sat down.

George smiled at Wandel.

"I'm not sure, Driggs, that the hour hasn't struck for you."

Wandel raised his hands.

"You mean politics!"

"I used to fancy," George said, "that I'd need you for my selfish interests. Now my idea is quite different."

He turned to Squibs.

"See here, sir. You've got to admit that the soul of the whole thing is education. I don't mean education in the narrow sense that we know it here or in any other university. I mean the opening of eyes to real communal efficiency; the comprehension of the necessity of building instead of tearing down; the birth of the desire to climb one's self rather than to try to make stronger men descend."

Bailly's eyes sparkled.

"I don't say you're not right, George. You may be right."

A fire blazed comfortably in front of them. The chairs were deep. Through a window the Holder tower, for all its evening lack of definition, seemed an indestructible pointer of George's thoughts. For a long time he talked earnestly.

"I climbed," he ended. "So others can, and less selfishly and more usefully, if they're only told how; if they'll only really try."

"You're always right, great man," Wandel drawled, "but we mustn't forget you climbed from fundamentals. That's education – the teaching of the fundamentals."

"It means an equal chance for everybody," George said, "and then, by gad, we won't have the world held back by those who refuse to take their chance. We won't permit the congenitally unsound to set the pace for the healthy. We'll take care of the congenitally unsound."

He turned to Bailly.

"And you and your excitable socialists have got to realize that you can't make the world sane through makeshifts, or all at once, but with foresight it can be done. You've raised the devil with me ever since I was a sub-Freshman about service and the unsound and the virtue of soiled clothing. Now raise the devil with somebody else about the virtue of sound service and clean clothes. This education must start in the schools. We may be able to force it into public schools through the legislatures; but in Princeton and the other great universities it has to come from within, and that's hard; that, in a way, is up to you and other gentle sectarians like you. And your clubs have got to stand in some form – everywhere, if only as objectives of physical and intellectual content. Nothing good torn from the world! Only the evil – "

He tapped Wandel's arm.

"Driggs! If you want to go among the time-servers, to stand alone for the people; perhaps for people yet unborn – "

"For a long time," Wandel said, "I've been looking for something I could really want to do. I rather fancy you've found it for me, George. I want to climb, too, always have – not to the heights we once talked about at your unhealthy picnic, but to the furtherest heights of all, which are guarded by selfishness, servility, sin – past which people have to be led."

Squibs cried out enthusiastically.

"And from which you can look down with a clear conscience on the climbers to whom you will have pointed out the path."

"I see now," Lambert put in, "that that is the only way in which one with self-respect can look down on lesser men."

George laughed aloud.

"An ally that can't escape! Driggs is a witness. We'll hold that fine democracy of the Argonne over your head forever."

"You see," Wandel drawled, "that was bound to fail, because it was based on the ridiculous assumption that every man that fought was good and great."

"I fancy," George said, "we're commencing to find out why we went to war – To appreciate the world's and our own astigmatism."

As they walked back to the little house in Dickinson Street, Bailly tried to express something.

"I guess," he managed, "that I'll have to call it square, George."

"I'm glad," George said, quickly, "but you must give some of the credit to Lambert Planter's sister."

He smiled happily, wistfully.

"You know she's the most useful socialist of you all."

After a time he said under his breath:

"There are some things I never dreamed of being able to repay you, sir. For instance this – this feeling that one is walking home."

"That debt," Bailly said, brightly, "cancels itself."

His mood changed. He spoke with a stern personal regret.

"You young men! You young men! How much farther you see! How much more you can do!"

XXVIII

George returned to New York happy in his memory of his intimate hour on a crowded stand with Sylvia. Dalrymple had given him that, too. It amazed him that so much beauty could spring from so ugly a source.

He heard that Dalrymple was back from Canada, then that he had wandered away, pockets full, on another journey, pandering to his twisted conception of pleasure. One day George took his notes from the safe-deposit box and gave them to Lambert.

"Get them back to him," he said.

And Lambert must have understood that George would never let the Planters' money redeem them.

"It's pretty decent, George."

"It's nothing of the kind. They make my hands feel dirty, and I've lots of money, and I'm making more every day; yet I wonder if it's going to be enough, even with Driggs' and Blodgett's and yours, old Argonne democrat."

For he had spoken of his plans to Blodgett, and had been a little surprised to learn how much thought Blodgett had given the puzzle himself, although most of his searching had been for makeshifts, for anything to tide over immediate emergencies.

"I don't know," Blodgett roared, "whether this cleaning out the sore and getting to the bottom of it will work or not; but I'm inclined to look to the future with you for a permanent cure. Anyway, I'd help you finance a scheme to make the ocean dry, because you usually get what you're after. So we'll send Wandel and Allen and some more as a little leaven to Albany and to that quilting party in Washington. I don't envy them, though."

George realized that his content could be traced to this new interest, as that went back to Sylvia. He had at last consciously set out to explore the road of service. For the first time in his life, with his eyes open, he was working for others, yet he never got rid of the sense of a great personal need unfulfilled; always in his heart vibrated the cry for Sylvia, but he knew he mustn't try to see her, for Betty would have let him know, and Betty hadn't sent for him again.

After the holidays, at the urging of Wandel and Lambert, he showed himself here and there, received at first curious glances, fancied some people slightly self-conscious, then all at once found himself welcomed on the old frank and pleasant basis. Yes, the talk had pretty well died, and men and women were inclined to like Sylvia Planter and George Morton better than they did Dalrymple.

He saw Dalrymple in the club one stormy January evening. He hadn't heard he was in town, and examined him curiously as he sat alone in a corner, making a pretence of reading a newspaper, but really looking across the room at the fire with restless eyes. George, prepared as he had been, was surprised by the haggard, flushed countenance, and the neurotic symptoms, nearly uncontrollable.

Beyond question Dalrymple saw him, and pretended that he didn't. Heartily glad of that, George joined a group about the fireplace, and after a few minutes saw Dalrymple rise and wander unevenly from the room.

George met him several times afterward under similar circumstances, and always Dalrymple shortly disappeared, because, George thought, of his arrival; but other people tactfully put him straight. Dalrymple, it seemed, remained in no public place for long, as if there was something evilly secretive to call him perpetually away.

Wandel told him toward the end of the month that Dalrymple was about to make a trip to Havana for the remainder of the winter.

"Where there's horse-racing, gambling, and unlimited alcohol – where one may sin in public. Why talk about it? Although he doesn't mean to, George, he's in a fair way of doing you a favour."

But George didn't dream how close Dalrymple's offering was. His first thought, indeed, was for Sylvia when the influenza epidemic of January and February promised for a time to equal its previous ugly record. Lambert tried to laugh his worry away.

"She's going south with father and mother very soon. Anyway, she hasn't the habit of catching things."

And it was Lambert a day or two later who brought him the first indication of the only way out, and he tried to tell himself he mustn't want it. Even though he had always despised Dalrymple and his weakness, even though Dalrymple stood between him and his only possible happiness, he experienced a disagreeable and reluctant sense of danger in such a solution.

"All his life," Lambert was saying, "Dolly's done everything he could to make himself a victim."

"Where is he?" George asked.

"At his home. It's fortunate he hadn't started south."

"Or," George said, "he should have started sooner."

"I've an uncomfortable feeling," Lambert mused, "that he was planning to run away from this very chance. Put it off a little too long. Seems he went to bed four days ago. I didn't know until to-day because you see he's been a little outcast since that scene in the club. He sent for me this afternoon, and, curiously enough, asked for you. Will you go up? I really think you'd better."

But George shrank from the thought.

"I don't want to be scolded by a man who is possibly dying."

"Let's hope not," Lambert said. "You'll go. Around five o'clock."

George hesitated.

"Did he ask for Sylvia?"

"He didn't ask me, but I telephoned her."

"Why?" George asked, sharply.

"Every card on the table now, George!" Lambert warned. "We have to think of the future, in case – "

"Of course, you're right," George answered. "I'm sorry, and I'll go."

When he entered the Dalrymple house at five o'clock he came face to face with Sylvia in the hall. He had never seen her so controlled, and her quiet tensity frightened him.

"Lambert told me," she whispered, "you were coming now. Dolly hasn't asked for me, but I'd feel so much better – if things should turn out badly, for I'm thinking with all my heart of the boy I used to be so fond of, and it's, perhaps, my fault – "