luckily the questions raised that day died out like a false alarm. with no further mention of the whitelaw baby, he graduated from the latin school, passed his exams at harvard, and spent the summer as second in command of a boys' camp in a part of new hampshire remote from the inn-club and the ansleys. october found him a freshman. the new life was beginning.
he had slept his first night in his bedroom in gore hall, where his quarters had been appointed. he had met the three fellow-freshmen with whom he was to share a sitting room. the sitting room was on the ground floor in a corner, looking out on the embankment and the charles. never having had, since he left the quidmores, a place in which to work better than the narrow squalid room at the end of a narrow squalid hall, his joy in this new decency of living was naïve to the point of childishness. he spent in that retreat, during the first twenty-four hours, every minute not occupied with duties. because he was glad of the task, his colleagues had left to him as much of the job of arranging the furniture as he would assume.
on the second day of his residence he was on his knees, behind his desk, pulling at a rug that had been wrinkled up. his zeal could bear nothing not neat, straight, adjusted. the desk was heavy, the rug
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stubborn. when a rap sounded on the door he called out, "come in!" looking up above the edge of the desk only when the door had been opened and closed.
a lady, dignified, a little portly, was stepping into the room, with the brisk air of one who had a right there. as she had been motoring, she was wreathed in a dark green veil, which partially hid her features. peeling off a gauntlet, she glanced round the room, after a first glance at tom.
"i'm sorry to be late, tad. that stupid patterson lost his way. he's a very good driver, but he's no sense of direction. why, where's the picture? you said you had had it hung."
her tone was crisp and staccato. in her breath there was the syncopated halt which he afterward came to associate with the actress, mrs. fiske. she might be nervous; or she might suffer from the heart.
for the first few seconds he was too agitated to know exactly what to do. he had been looked at and called tad again, this time probably by tad's mother. he rose to his height of six feet two. the lady started back.
"why, what have you been doing to yourself? what are you standing on? what makes you so tall?"
"i'm afraid there's some mistake, ma'am."
she broke in with a kind of petulance. "oh, tad, no nonsense! i'm tired. i'm not in the mood for it."
both gauntlets peeled off, she flung them on the desk. with a motion as rapid as her speech she stepped toward a window and looked out over the embankment.
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"it's going to be noisy and dusty for you here. the stream of cars is incessant."
being now beyond the desk, she caught the fullness of his stature. her left hand went up with a startled movement. she gave a little gasp.
"oh! you frightened me. you're not standing on anything."
"no, ma'am, i...."
"i asked for mr. whitelaw's room. they told me to come to number twenty-eight."
making her way out, she kept looking back at him in terror. when he hurried to open the door for her, she waved him away. everything she did and said was rapid, staccato, and peremptory.
"you've forgotten your gloves, ma'am."
he reached them with a stretch of his arm. taking them from him, she still kept her eyes on his face.
"no! you don't look like him. i thought you did. i was wrong. it's only the—the eyes—and the eyebrows."
she was gone. he closed the door upon her. dropping into an armchair by the window, he stared out on a wide low landscape, with a double procession of motor cars in the foreground, and a river in the middle distance.
so this was the woman who had lived through the agony of a stolen child! he tried to recall what honey had told him of the tragedy. he remembered the house which five years earlier honey had taken him to see; he remembered the dell with the benches and the lilacs. this woman's child had been wheeled out there one morning—and had vanished. she had
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had to bear being told of the fact. she had gone through the minutes when the mind couldn't credit it. she had known fear, frenzy, hope, suspense, disappointment, discouragement, despair, and lassitude. in self-defense, in sheer inability of the human spirit to endure more than it has endured, she had thrown round her a hard little shell of refusal to hear of it again. she resented the reminder. she was pricked to a frantic excitement by a mere chance resemblance to the image of what the lost little boy might have become.
a chance resemblance! he underscored the words. it was all there was. he himself was the son of theodore and lucy whitelaw. at least he thought her name was lucy. not till he had been required to give the names of his parents for some school record did it occur to him that he didn't positively know. she had always been "mudda." he hadn't needed another name. after she had gone there had been no one to supply him with the facts he had not learned before. even the theodore would have escaped him had it not been for that last poignant scene, when she stood before the officer and gave a name—mrs. theodore whitelaw! why not? there were more whitelaws than one. there was no monopoly of the name in the family that had lost the child.
he didn't often consciously think of her nowadays. the memory was not merely too painful; it was too destructive of the things he was trying to cherish. he had impulses rather than ideals, in that impulses form themselves more spontaneously; and all his im
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pulses were toward rectitude. it was not a chosen standard; neither was it imposed upon him from without, unless it was in some vague general direction of the spirit received while at the tollivants. he didn't really think of it. he took it as a matter of course. he couldn't be anything but what he was, and there was an end of it. but all his attempts to get a working concept of himself led him back to this beginning, where the fountain of life was befouled.
so he rarely went back that far. he would go back to the quidmores, to the tollivants, to mrs. crewdson; but he stopped there. there he hung up a great curtain, soft and dim and pitiful, the veil of an immense tenderness. rarely, very rarely, did he go behind it. he would not have done it on this afternoon had not the woman who had just gone out—dressed, as anyone could see, with the expensive easy-going roughness which only rich women can afford—neurotic, imperious, unhappy—had not this woman sent him there. she was a great lady whose tragic story haunted him; but she turned his mind backward, as it hardly ever turned, to the foolish and misguided soul who had loved him. no one since that time, no one whatever in the life he could remember, had loved him at all, unless it were honey, and honey denied that he did. how could he forsake ...? and then it came to him what it was that pleaded within him not to be forsaken.
the lecture was over. it was one of the first tom had attended. the men, some hundred odd in number, were shuffling their papers, preparatory to getting up.
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seated in an amphitheater, they filled the first seven or eight semicircles outward from the stage. the arrangement being alphabetical, tom, as a w, was in the most distant row.
the lecturer, who was also putting his papers together as they lay on a table beside him, looked up casually to call out,
"if mr. whitelaw is here i should like to speak to him."
tom shot from his seat and stood up. the man on his left did the same. occupied with taking notes on the little table attached to the right arm—the only arm—of his chair, tom had not turned to the left at all. he was surprised now at the ripple of laughter that ran among the men beginning to get up from their seats or to file out into the corridor. the professor smiled too.
"you're brothers?"
tom looked at his neighbor; his neighbor looked at tom. except for the difference in height the resemblance was startling or amusing, as you chose to take it. to the men going by it was amusing.
it was the neighbor, however, who called out, in a shocked voice: "oh, no, no! no connection."
"then it's to mr. theodore whitelaw that i wish to speak."
mr. theodore whitelaw made his way toward the platform, taking no further notice of tom.
for this lack of the friendly freemasonry general among young men, general among freshmen especially, tom thought he saw a reason. the outward appearance which enabled him to "place" tad would
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enable tad to "place" him. on the one there was the stamp of wealth; on the other there must be that of poverty. he might have met tad whitelaw anywhere in the world, and he would have known him at a glance as a fellow nursed on money since he first lay in a cradle. it wasn't merely a matter of dress, though dress counted for something. it was a matter of the personality. it was in the eyes, in the skin, in the look, in the carriage, in the voice. it was not in refinement, or cultivation, or cleverness, or use of opportunity; it was in something subtler than these, a cast of mind, a habit of thought, an acceptance, a self-confidence, which seeped through every outlet of expression. tad whitelaw embodied wealth, position, the easy use of whatever was best in whatever was material. you couldn't help seeing it.
on the other hand, he, tom whitelaw, probably bore the other kind of stamp. he had not thought of that before. in as far as he had thought of it, it was to suppose that the stamp could be rubbed off, or covered up. clothes would do something toward that, and in clothes he had been extravagant. he had come to harvard with two new suits, made to his order by the jew tailor next door to mrs. danker's. but in contrast with the young new yorker his extravagance had been futile. he found for himself the most opprobrious word in all the american language—cheap.
very well! he probably couldn't help looking cheap. but if cheap he would be big. he wouldn't resent. he would keep his mouth shut and live. things would right themselves by and by.
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they righted themselves soon. the three men with whom he shared the sitting room, having passed him as "a good scout," admitted him to full and easy comradeship. in the common-room, in the classroom, he held his own, and made a few friends. guy ansley, urged in part by a real liking, and in part by the glory of having this big handsome fellow in tow, was generous of recognition. he was standing one day with a group of his peers from doolittle and pray's when tom chanced to pass at a distance. guy called out to him.
"hello, you old sinner! where you been this ever so long?" with a word to his friends, he puffed after tom, and dragged him toward the group. "this is the guy they call the whitelaw baby. see how much he looks like tad?"
"tad'll give you whitelaw baby," came from one of the group. "hates the name of it. don't blame him, do you, when he's heard everyone gassing about the kid all through his life?"
but that he was going in harvard by this nickname disturbed tom not a little. considering the legend in the whitelaw family, and the resemblance between himself and tad, it was natural enough. but should tad hear of it....
with tad he had no acquaintance. as the weeks passed by he came to understand that with certain freshmen acquaintance would be difficult. they themselves didn't want it. it was a discovery to tom that it didn't follow that you knew a man, or that a man knew you, because you had been introduced to him. guy ansley had introduced him that day to the little
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group from doolittle and pray's; but when he ran into them again none of them remembered him.
so tad whitelaw did not remember him after having met him accidentally at guy's. the meeting had been casual, hurried, but it was a meeting. the two had been named to each other. each had made an inarticulate grunt. but when later that same afternoon they passed in a corridor tad went by as if he had never seen him.
he continued to live and keep his mouth shut. if he was hurt there was nothing to be gained by saying so. then an incident occurred which threw them together in a manner which couldn't be ignored inwardly, even if outward conditions remained the same.
little by little the harvard student, following the general sobering down which makes it harder for people in the twentieth century to laugh than it was to those who lived fifty years ago, was becoming less frolicsome. pranks were still played, especially by freshmen, but neither so many nor so wild. the humor had gone out of them.
but in every large company of young men there are a few whose high spirits carry them away. where they have money to spend and no cares as to the future on their minds, the new sense of freedom naturally runs to roistering. in passing tad whitelaw's rooms, which were also in gore hall, tom often heard the banging of the piano, and those shouts of song and laughter which are likely to disturb the proctor. guy, who was often the one at the piano, now and then gave him a report of a party, telling him who was at it, and what they had had to drink.
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in the course of the winter his relations with guy took on a somewhat different tinge. in guy's circle, commonly called a gang or a bunch, he was guy's eccentricity. the doolittle and pray spirit allowed of an eccentricity, if it wasn't paraded too much. guy knew, too, that it helped to make him popular, which was not an easy task, to be known as loyal to a boyhood's chum, when he might be expected to desert him.
but behind this patronage the fat boy found in tom what he had always found, a source of strength. not much more than at school did he escape at harvard his destiny as a butt.
"same old spiel, damn it," he lamented to tom, "just because i'm fat. what difference does that make, when you're a sport all right? doesn't keep me from going with the gang, not any more than tad whitelaw's big eyebrows, or spit castle's long nose."
on occasions when he was left out of "good things" which he would gladly have been in he made tom come round to his room in the evening for confidence and comfort. tom never made game of him. there was no one else to whom he could turn with the certainty of being understood. having an apartment to himself, he could be free in his complaints without fear of interruption.
it was late at night. the two young men had been "yarning," as they called it, and smoking for the past two hours. tom was getting up to go back to his room, when a sound of running along the corridor caught their attention.
"what in blazes is that?"
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by the time the footsteps reached guy's door smothered explosions of laughter could be heard outside. with a first preliminary pound on the panels the door was flung open, spit castle and tad whitelaw hurling themselves in. though they would have passed as sober, some of their excess of merriment might have been due to a few drinks.
tad carried a big iron door-key which he threw with a rattle on the table. his hat had been knocked to the back of his head; his necktie was an inch off-center; his person in general disordered by flight. spit castle, a weedy youth with a nose like a tapir's, was in much the same state. neither could tell what the joke was, because the joke choked them. guy, flattered that they should come first of all to him, stood in the middle of the floor, grinning expectantly. tom, quietly smoking, kept in the background, sitting on the arm of the chair from which he had just been getting up. as each of the newcomers tried to tell the tale he was broken in on by the other.
"came out from town by subway...."
"walking through brattle square...."
"not so much as a damn cat about...."
"saw little old johnny come abreast of little old bootstore...."
"took out a key—opened the door—went into the shop in the dark—left the key in the keyhole to lock up when he comes outside again—just in for something he'd forgot."
"and damned if tad didn't turn the key—quick as that—and lock the old beggar in."
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"last we heard of him he was poundin' and squealin' to beat all blazes."
yellin', 'pull-ice!—pull-ice!'—whacking his leg, spit gave an imitation of the prisoner—"and he's in there yet."
to guy the situation was as droll as it was to his two friends. an old fellow trapped in his own shop! he was a dago, spit thought, which made the situation funnier. they laughed till, wearied with laughter, they threw themselves into armchairs, and lit their cigarettes.
tom, who had laughed a little not at their joke but at them, felt obliged, in his own phrase, to butt in. he waited till a few puffs of tobacco had soothed them.
"say, boys, don't you think the fun's gone far enough?"
the two guests turned and stared as if he had been a talking piece of furniture. tad took his cigarette from his lips.
"what the hell business is it of yours?"
tom kept his seat on the arm of the chair, speaking peaceably. "i suppose it isn't my business—except for the old man."
"what have you got to do with him? is he your father?"
"he's probably somebody's father, and somebody's husband. you can't leave him there all night."
spit challenged this. "why can't we?"
"because you can't. fellows like you don't do that sort of thing."
it looked as if tad whitelaw had some special
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animosity against him, when he sprang from his chair to say insolently, "and fellows like you don't hang round where they're not wanted."
"oh, tom didn't mean anything—" guy began to interpose.
"then let him keep his mouth shut, or—" he nodded toward the door—"or get out."
tom kept his temper, waiting till tad dropped back into his chair again. "you see, it's this way. the old chap has a home, and if he doesn't come back to it in the course of, let us say, half an hour his family'll get scared. if they hunt him up at the shop, and find he's been locked in, they'll make a row at the police station just across the street. if the police get in on the business they're sure to find out who did it."
"well, it won't be you, will it?" tad sneered again.
"no, it won't be me, but even you don't want to be...."
tad turned languidly to guy. "say, guy! awful pity isn't it about little jennie halligan! cutest little dancer in the show, and she's fallen and broken her leg."
tom got up, walked quietly to the table, picked up the key, and at the same even pace was making for the door, when tad sprang in front of him.
"damn you! where do you think you're going?"
"i'm going to let the old fellow out."
"drop that key."
"get out of my way."
"like hell i'll get out of your way."
"don't let us make a row here."
"drop that key. do you hear me?"
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the rage in tad's face was at being disobeyed. he was not afraid of this fellow two inches taller than himself. he hated him. ever since coming to harvard the swine had had the impertinence to be called by the same name, and to look like him. he knew as well as anyone else the nickname by which the bounder was going, and knew that he, the bounder, encouraged it. it advertised him. it made him feel big. he, the brother of the whitelaw baby, had been longing to get at the fellow and give him a whack on the jaw. he would never have a better opportunity.
the lift of his hand and the grasp with which tom caught the wrist were simultaneous. slipping the key into his pocket, tom brought his other hand into play, throwing the lighter-built fellow out of his path with a toss which sent him back against the desk. maddened by this insult to his person, tad picked up the inkstand on the desk, hurling it at tom's head. the inkstand grazed his ear, but went smash against the wall, spattering the new wallpaper with a great blob of ink. guy groaned, with some wild objurgation. to escape from the room tom had turned his back, when a blow from an uplifted chair caught him between the shoulders. wheeling, he wrenched the chair from the hands of spit castle, chucked it aside and dealt the young man a stinger that brought the blood from the tapir nose. all blind rage by this time, he caught the weedy youth's head under his right arm, pounding the face with his left fist till he felt the body sagging from his hold. he let it go. spit fell on the sofa, which was spattered with blood,
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as the wallpaper with ink. startled at the sight of the limp form, he stood for a second looking down at it, when his skull seemed crashed from behind. staggering back, he thought he was going to faint, but the sight of tad aiming another thump at him, straight between the eyes, revived him to berserker fury. he sprang like a lion on an antelope.
strong and agile on his side, tad was stiff to resistance. before the sheer weight of tom's body he yielded an inch or two, but not more. freeing his left hand, as he bent backward, he dealt tom a bruising blow on the temple. tom disregarded it, pinning tad's left arm as he had already pinned the right. his object now was to get the boy down, to force him to his knees. it was a contest of brutal strength. when it came to brutal strength the advantage was with the bigger frame, the muscles toughened by work. the fight was silent now, nearly motionless. slowly, slowly, as iron gives way to the man with the force to bend it, tad was coming down. his feet were twisted under him, with no power to right themselves. two pairs of eyes, strangely alike, glared at each other, like the eyes of frenzied wild animals. tad gave a quick little groan.
"o god, my leg's breaking."
tom was not touched. "damn you, let it break!"
pressed, pressed, pressed downward, tad was sinking by a fraction of an inch each minute. the strength above him was pitiless. except for the running of water in the bathroom, where guy had dragged spit castle to wash his nose, there was no sound in the room but the long hard pantings, now
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from tad's side, now from tom's. in the intervals neither seemed to breathe.
"get up, i tell you"
suddenly tad collapsed, and went down. tom came on top of him. the heavier having the lighter fastened by arms and legs, the two lay like two stones. the faces were so near together that they could have kissed. their long protruding eyebrows brushed each other's foreheads. the weight of tom's bulk squeezed the breath from his foe, as a bear squeezes it with a hug. nothing was left to tad but resistance of the will. of that, too, tom meant to get the better.
the words were whispered from one mouth into the other. "do you know what i'm going to do with you?"
there was no answer.
"i'm going to take you back with me to let that old man out of his shop."
there was still no answer. tom sprang suddenly off tad's body, but with his fingers under the collar.
"get up!"
he pulled with all his might. the collar gave way. tad fell back. "damned if i will," was all he could say by way of defiance.
tom gave him a kick. "get up, i tell you. if you don't i'll kick the stuffing out of you."
the kick hurt nothing but tad's pride; but it hurt that badly. it hurt it so badly that he got up, with no further show of opposition. he dusted his clothes mechanically with his hands; he tried to adjust his torn collar. his tone was almost commonplace.
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"this has got to be settled some other time. what do you want me to do?"
tom pointed to the door. "what i want you to do is to march. keep ahead of me. and mind you if you try to bolt i'll wring your neck as if you were a cur. you—you—" he sought a word which would hit where blows had not carried—"you—coward!"
the flash of tad's eyes was like that of tom's own. "we'll see."
he went out the door, tom close behind him.
it was a march night, with snow on the ground, but thawing. they were without overcoats, and bare-headed. a few motor cars were passing, but not many pedestrians.
"run," tom commanded.
he ran. they both ran. the distance being short, they were soon in brattle square. tad stopped at a little shop, showing a faint light. there was too much in the way of window display to allow of the passer-by, who didn't give himself some trouble, to see anything within.
at first they heard nothing. then came a whimpering, like that of a little dog, shut in and lonely, tired out with yelping. putting his ear to the door, tom heard a desolate, "tam! tam!" it was the only utterance.
"here's the key! unlock the door."
tad did as he was bidden. inside the "tam! tam!" ceased.
"now go in, and say you're sorry."
as tad hesitated tom gave him a push. the door
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being now ajar the culprit went sprawling into the presence of his victim.
there was a spring like that of a cat. there was also a snarl like a cat's snarl. "you tam harvard student!"
feeling he had done and said enough, tom took to his heels; but as someone else was taking to his heels, and running close behind him, he judged that tad had escaped.
back in his room, tom felt spent. in his bed he was in emotional revolt against his victory. he loathed it. he loathed everything that had led up to it. the eyes that had stared into his, when the two had lain together on the floor, were like those of something he had murdered. what was it? what was the thing that deep down within him, rooted in the primal impulses that must have been there before there was a world—what was the thing that had been devastated, outraged? once more, he didn't know.
