Harvey J. O'Higgins

“ The glazed eyes of Conroy's hatred stared at him like the dull eyes of the dead. He shuddered at the thought that some day Margaret's face might join that company of malevolence and accuse him of the wreck of her life.
Above all, he saw himself moving like a blind fool through this unregarded misery, the execrated cause of it, ruthless and hateful. The elder Miss Morris's cold smile changed into Mrs. McGahn's large-mouthed and voluble exasperation. "Walter Pittsey's Don Quixote" echoed from some forgotten record of his memory with a contemptuous accent. Kidder lectured him. ”

“ It was an experience of life for which Don's books had not prepared him. It was a lesson from life itself, and not the colourless argument of a theory of life. And confused by the thousand changing incidents that repeated the question incessantly around him, touched in his sympathies and revolted in his ideals, he went about his "boosting" as if bewildered by the noises of the street, staring and distracted.
Tower did not come on that second afternoon to see him "started," and he worked alone, without any smiling companionship to disguise from him the hypocrisy of his employment. ”

“ Conroy knew the place, but he did not often come with Don—except on a Sunday afternoon when there were no football games to play and his home was depressingly Sabbatical. And this was a Saturday, and Don did not expect to be disturbed. He had made himself comfortable on a little knoll of grass, with the stream at his feet and the slim white stem of a silver birch at his back; Dexter had curled himself in a patch of sunlight near by, his nose between his paws, blinking sleepily; some wood sparrows twittered and quarrelled among the evergreens. ”

“ With the complexity of a brain that was trained to cheat itself with its own make-believes but still was never ignorant that it was being cheated, Don was aware that his relations with her were not to be simply those of blind worship and accepted love. Her frightened confusion, when his voice had betrayed him, warned him, now, that mere ecstasy and ardour would only drive her from him; that he must be politic; that she was a human being judging him in accordance with the conventions of human society, and not as clairvoyant as a goddess or as untrammelled as an ideal. ”

“ Nevertheless, it lived in the heart of a pollution which slowly—as Don slowly realized it—repelled and saddened while it puzzled him. Here was life reduced to its lowest terms of bestiality: vice without its disguising glitter, suffering that had no illusion to make it noble, and crime miserable in its own hell. Where did this inferno find its place in the scientific universe that gave to crime the joy of its plunder as it gave the wild beast the joy of its prey? And if Man were merely a higher animal, why were these animals not brutally happy in their dens? ”

“ Miss Kimball had been watching the changes of his face. She asked, "Do you like Chopin?"
He looked up at the piano, transparently pale, his eyes burning; and he replied—without altogether understanding what she had asked—"I don't . . . know him."
The whole evening was a repetition in variations of that situation. Although he did not watch Conroy and Margaret, his mind was secretly with them. He listened to Miss Kimball and replied to her without betraying more than a heavy simplicity; and he remained impenetrable to her curiosity in a way that first piqued and then bored her. ”

“ It was all very innocent and friendly—though Don had some bewildering moments when his heart seemed to swell with a choked longing in his chest. Then, two days of wind and rain kept her in the house, where he could only speak with her under conditions of strained formality—for he was at the age when the usages of indoors are an oppression on the spirits—and their return to their haunts gave him the feeling for her which a bright-coloured toy had used to raise in him, a desire to fondle it and rub it against his cheek. ”

“ The machine shot forward into an opening between, the two streams of carriages; the man, still staring, disappeared with a backward jerk of the head that brought his hand up to the brim of his hat. Don said: "He thought he knew me!" But as soon as he had said it, he saw that it had been she at whom the stare had been directed; and he saw, too, that the recognition had not been welcome. He scrutinized the memory of the man's face—a clean-shaven plump face with protruding eyeballs that were round under skinny eyelids, like a bird's. ”

“ Sitting in his room of an evening, he pictured her, in the midst of light and company, charming everybody with her piano-playing and accepting their congratulations with an unembarrassed smile. Working at his studies in the college library, worried by the uncertain prospect of his future, she seemed one of those happy aristocrats of art and leisure whose duty it is to adorn life, to give pleasure, and to be happy that they may make others so. Sullied with his own disbeliefs, he thought of her innocent faith as something sweet and pure. ”

“ Then he drew his cap down to his ears, and with an unvoiced shout of high spirits he ran down the porch steps and waded in.
The sunshine blinded him, breaking into prismatic colours on the lashes of his half-closed eyes. The snow silenced his footsteps. There was not even a stir of wind to make life around him. He walked in an enchanted world, through the stillness of a Sunday morning, his thought singing ecstatically, in a croon of pleasure, like a child at play. ”

“ Down among the tenements the streets were brimful of muddy slush; the trestles of the elevated railroad dripped a fluid grime; the street lights struggled against the fog with the feebleness of guttered candles; the damp air freshened the evil odours of the quarter to a pungency that seemed to Don to reach his palate. He shivered, with his collar to his ears, hugging his bundle of Christmas papers under his arm, trying to convince himself that all this doubled ugliness of wet filth and poverty would aid him in his attack on Conroy. ”

“ If, an hour earlier, he could have foreseen the perfunctory conversation of that walk, it would have depressed him like a disillusionment; but in the agonized moments of his panic in the boarding-house parlour, he had consented to the mutilation of his hope, he had himself used the knife on it, and he had met her, at the doorway again, aware that she—like Miss Morris, like his father, like all the other agents of opposing circumstance—was an enemy of his philosophy of life; that he must love her without the thought of any reward from her. ”

“ He missed his cousin from the room.
He rose from his chair and began to pace up and down with a frightened restlessness. He halted, staring at the cheerful glow of his "student" lamp, and finding it, in some strange way, a tragically small light in the vast darkness of the night. He turned with a quiver, struck cold again by the thought that was crouching, like a terror, in his brain. If it were true that death——?
Suddenly, he smiled—the ghastly smile of a man trying to deride his fear. ”

“ They were finally sold at such a loss that Don felt too poor to pay his street-car fare to the ticket office, and he walked, ruefully fingering the few silver coins in the pocket of his trousers and despising the commercial world that made second-hand book-dealers what they were. Half way to their rendezvous, Conroy hailed him from the rear platform of a passing street-car, beckoning him warningly to turn back, his face as ghastly as if he were waving a red flag to save a railway train from destruction. ”

“ She laughed. A blind memory groped and moved in his brain, and a rush of blood flamed over his face. The dog was barking among the trees. She turned and called in that direction: "He doesn't remember me!"
He knew then. It was "Miss Margaret!"
He started to get up, catching at his books as they slipped from his knees, and fumbling for his pocket as he tried to put away his lead pencil. Remember her? The realization that this smiling young woman was his "Miss Margaret" had come on him with such a shock that he did not know what he was about. ”

“ Don backed up against the geraniums. "Keep away from me."
Conroy raised a derisive shout. "Do you want to fight?"
The young David swallowed slowly and shut his teeth on the pale-lipped mutter of a prayer. His cousin crept in on him, grinning, and crouched—intending to wrestle him and roll him on the grass—playfully. Don caught him in the mouth with a blow that knocked him off his balance. He jumped to his feet, white; and Don was waiting for him.
They fought in a boyish fury, wrestling, kicking and scratching; Don even bit his cousin's hand. ”

“ With a robustness of spirit which had once charmed his cousin in their younger days, he set his face to a new future and a new ideal. She had been but a "half-god" after all. Perhaps some day, when he was rich in academic honours and professorially wise, he would meet such a woman as he had thought her to be—a woman tall and dark and pale whose smile would always be somewhat melancholy and who would see life as the mystery which it was to him. ”

“ Now the streets were crowded with the rich in spirit, who passed him by as a street beggar asking, for her, only the alms of a little happiness. And now, the houses and the people, and all the activities of the world, were the background and the unregarded chorus for a life that was to hold, with her, the glaring centre of the stage.
It was a brisk, chill morning. He wore a spring overcoat of which the collar was so soiled that he had turned it up to conceal its condition from anyone who might walk behind him. ”

“ She was younger than Miss Arden, who was a woman of thirty-five, at least, and already puffy under the eyes and hollow in the cheeks where she might have been, at some time, dimpled. And yet Miss Arden seemed younger in heart, chattered more spiritedly and laughed with less reserve. When they made an excursion in the street-car to Fort George, on a Sunday afternoon, she was gaily juvenile beside Miss Morris's staid sobriety; and, with Walter Pittsey, she made the life of the party, while Don and Miss Morris listened, watched and smiled. ”

“ She asked him about his studies, about Conroy, about the life at college; and her questions were as unexpected as the conversation which one carries on in dreams. He saw her downward smile, the eyelash on her cheek, the quick side glance which she raised to him, rather shyly because of their long separation; and he looked down to see whether she wore her rubbers in the snow, and, while he replied to her, he watched her little feet appearing and disappearing below the hem of her skirt. ”

“ And when Don had seen the last of the supers' costumes on the hooks, the room deserted, and the lights out—lingering over his duties as if he thought in that way to postpone the fact of his dismissal—he met her at the stage entrance with such a look of guilt and apology and broken appeal against her blame that it went to her heart like the sight of tears. "Oh, Don," she cried, "why, why did you bother with me? Why didn't you let me go home? I—I've only made trouble. I——"
"Wait," he said, hurrying her out to the refuge of the darker street. "Don't. . . . It's nothing. We're all right." ”

“ She liked him, and she knew it. On her way out with Conroy she had been wondering whether she would like him. She was glad that she did.
As for Don, he had no feminine introspection, and his happiness held him in a dazed silence. He was conscious only that a young divinity—for she was already more than a girl to him—had come glowing and beautiful out of dreamland, and sat beside him in an odour of violets, and talked to him with a musical, soft voice. ”

“ He would study here, happy among his books; he would become a university professor, devote his life to learning, and be safe behind grey-stone walls covered with ivy. One room would suffice for him—even a room like this, though it should have a study chair and a desk like his father's and a student's couch, instead of this old oval parlour table, this dining-room chair upholstered in imitation leather and sagging in the seat, and this yellow, boarding-house bed, machine-carved, with a varnish scalded to a milky white where the cleanly housekeeper had used boiling water on it. ”