The Guarded Heights

Maybe it was because they wanted to humour the hero, or perhaps they caught his own hysteria, realizing what Bailly had done for him. They stopped in front of the stands to which Bailly's bad foot had condemned him during this triumphant march. They commenced a high-pitched, frantic chant.

"We want Squibs Bailly! We want Squibs Bailly! We want Squibs Bailly!"

George waved his hands, holding the column until the slender figure, urged by the spectators remaining in the stands, came down with difficulty and embarrassment to be caught and lifted tenderly up beside George.

Then, with these two aloft in the very front, the wild march was resumed through the Yale goal posts while Squibs' wrinkled face twitched, while in his young eyes burned the unsurpassable light of a hopeless wish miraculously come true.

XXVII

Green rescued George when his head was drooping and his eyes blurred. He got him to the gymnasium and stretched him out there and set the doctors to work on his head.

A voice got into George's brain. Who was talking? Was it Goodhue, or Stringham?

"I guess you can see him, but he's pretty vague. Played the whole game with a broken head. Lied to the doctors."

George forced his eyes open. Lambert Planter, still in his stained football clothes, bent over him.

"Hello, Planter!"

Lambert grasped the black hand.

"Hello, George Morton!"

That was all. Lambert went away, but George knew that what he had really said was:

"It's only what you've made of yourself that counts."

XXVIII

At Princeton they kept him in the infirmary for a few days, but he didn't like it. It filled him with a growing fear. Since it made no particular difference now how long he was ill, they let him see too many callers. He distrusted hero worship. Most of all was he afraid when such devotion came from Betty.

"Being a vicarious hero," Mrs. Bailly said, "has made my husband the happiest man in Princeton."

After that she didn't enter the conversation much, and again George sensed, with a reluctant thrill, a maternal caring in her heart for him.

"You never ought to have gone back in the second half," Betty said.

"If I hadn't," he laughed, "who would have taken care of Lambert Planter for you?"

"Squibs says you might have been killed."

"He's a great romancer," George exploded.

"Just the same, it was splendid of you to play at all."

She touched the white bandage about his head.

"Does it hurt a great deal?"

"No," he said, nearly honestly. "I only let them keep me here to cut some dull lectures."

He glanced at Betty wistfully.

"Did I take care of Lambert Planter as you wanted?"

She glanced away.

"Are you punishing me? Haven't you read the papers? You outplayed him and every man on the field."

"That was what you wished?"

She turned back with an assumption of impatience.

"What do you mean?"

He couldn't tell her. He couldn't probe further into her feelings for Lambert, her attitude toward himself. He had to get his mind in hand again.

Betty brought her mother one day. Mrs. Alston was full of praise, but she exuded an imperial distaste for his sick-room. Both times he had to overcome an impulse to beg Betty not to go so soon. That more than anything else made him afraid of himself. It was, he felt, an excellent change to escape to an active life.

Blodgett's place gave him a massive, tasteless welcome. It was one of those houses with high, sloping roofs, numerous chimneys, and much sculptured stone, slightly reminiscent of Mansart, and enormously suggestive of that greatest architect of all, the big round dollar. In its grounds it fitted like a huge diamond on a flowered shirt-front. There were terraces; and a sunken garden, a little self-conscious with coy replicas of regency sculpture; and formal walks between carefully barbered trees and hedges. It convinced George that his original choice of three necessities had been wise. Blodgett had the money, but he didn't have Squibs Bailly and Goodhue or the things they personified. And how Blodgett coveted The Goodhue Quality! George told himself that was why he had been asked, because he was so close to Goodhue. But Blodgett let him see that there was another motive. After those games George was temporarily one of the nation's famous men.

It wasn't until he had arrived that George understood how near Blodgett's place was to Oakmont – not more than fifteen miles. He was interested, but he had no idea, even if the Planters were there for Thanksgiving, that he would see any of them.

At Blodgett's bachelor enormity people came and went. At times the huge, over-decorated rooms were filled, yet to George they seemed depressingly empty because he knew they didn't enclose the men and the women Blodgett wanted. Mr. and Mrs. Sinclair, indeed, motored out for Thanksgiving dinner – a reluctant concession, George gathered, to a profitable partnership. Blodgett brought him forth as a specimen, and the specimen impressed, for it isn't given to everyone to sit down at the close of the season with the year's most famous football player. It puzzled George that in the precious qualities he craved he knew himself superior to everyone in the house except these two who made him feel depressingly inferior. Would he some day reach the point where he would react unconsciously, as they did, to every social emergency?

When the dinner party had scattered, Blodgett and he walked alone on the terrace in an ashen twilight. There the surprise was sprung. It was clearly no surprise to his host, who beamed at George, pointing to the drive.

"I 'phoned him he would find an old football friend here if he'd take the trouble to drive over."

"But you didn't tell him my name?" George gasped.

"No, but why – "

Blodgett broke off and hurried his heavy body to the terrace edge to greet these important arrivals.

Lambert sprang from the runabout he had driven up and helped Sylvia down. She was bundled in becoming furs. The sharp air had heightened her rich colouring. How beautiful she was – lovelier than George had remembered! Here was the tonic to kill the distracting doubts raised by Betty. Here was the very spring of his wilful ambition. Glancing at Sylvia, Betty's tranquil influence lost its power.

At her first recognition of him she stopped abruptly, but Lambert ran across and grasped his hand.

"How do, Morton. Never guessed Blodgett's message referred to you."

George disapproved of Blodgett's methods. Why had the man made him a mystery at the very moment he used him as a bait to attract Lambert and Sylvia? Wasn't he important enough, or was it only because he was a Princeton man and Blodgett had feared some enmity might linger?

Lambert's manner, at least, was proof that he had, indeed, meant to give George a message that night in the dressing-room at New Haven. George appreciated that "How do, Morton" – greeting at last of a man for a man instead of a man for a servant or a former servant; nor was Lambert's call to his sister without a significance nearly sharp enough to hurt.

"Sylvia! Didn't you meet this strong-armed Princetonian at Betty's dance a year ago?"

George understood that she had no such motives as Lambert's for altering her attitude, so much more uncompromising from the beginning than his. There had been no contact or shared pain. Only what she might have observed from a remote stand that Saturday could have affected her. How would she respond now?

She advanced slowly, at first bewildered, then angry. But Blodgett had nothing but his money to recommend him to her. She wouldn't, George was certain, bare any intimacies of emotion before him.

"I rather think I did."

In her eyes George recognized the challenge he had last seen there.

"Thanks for remembering me," he said rather in Wandel's manner.

"A week ago Saturday – " she began, uncertainly, as though her remembering needed an apology.

"Who could forget the great Morton?" Lambert laughed. "With a broken head he beat Yale. That was a hard game to lose."

"I'd heard," she said, indifferently, "that you had been hurt."

George would have preferred words as ugly and unforgettable as those she had attacked him with the day of her accident. She turned to Blodgett. George had an instinct to shake her as she chatted easily and casually, glancing at him from time to time. He could have borne it better if she hadn't included him at all.

He was glad her brother occupied him. Lambert was for dissecting each play of the game, and he made no attempt to hide the admiration for George it had aroused. He gave the impression that he knew very well men didn't do such things – particularly that little trick with Goodhue – unless they were the right sort.

Blodgett said something about tea. They strolled into the house. A fire burned in the great hall. That was the only light. George came last, directly after Sylvia.

"So you're a friend of Mr. Blodgett's!" she said with an intonation intended to hurt.

"I wouldn't have expected," he answered, easily, "to find you a caller here."

She paused and faced him. Lights from the distant fire got as far as her face, disclosing her contempt. He wouldn't let her speak.

"I won't have you think I had anything to do with bringing you. I never guessed until I saw your brother drive up."

She didn't believe him, or she tried to impress him with that affront. Blodgett and Lambert had gone on into the library. They remained quite alone in the huge, dusky hall, whose shadow masses shifted as the fire blazed and fell. For the first time since their ancient rides he could talk to her undisturbed. He wouldn't let that fact tie his tongue. She couldn't call him "stable boy" now, although she did try to say "beast" in another way. This solitude in the dusk, shared with her, stripped every distracting thought from his mind. He was as hard as steel and happy in his inflexibility.

"You believe me," he said.

She shook her head and turned for the door.

"Let me say one thing," he urged. "It's rather important."

She came back through the shadows, her attitude reminiscent of the one she had assumed long ago when she had sought to hurt him. He caught his breath, waiting.

"There is nothing," she said, shivering a little in spite of the hall's warmth and the furs she still wore, "that you would think of saying to me if you had changed at all from the impertinent groom I had to have discharged."

He laughed.

"Oh! Call me anything you please, only I've always wanted to thank you for not making a scene at Miss Alston's dance a year ago."

He would be disappointed if that failed to hurt back. The thought of Sylvia Planter making a scene! At least it fanned her temper.

"What is there," she threatened, defensively, "to prevent my telling Mr. Blodgett, any one I please, now?"

"Nothing, except that I'm a trifle more on my feet," he answered. "I'm not sure your scandal would blow me over. We're going to meet again frequently. It can't he helped."

"I never want," she said, as if speaking of something unclean and revolting, "to see you again."

His chance had come.

"You're unfair, because it was you yourself, Miss Planter, who warned me I shouldn't forget. I haven't. I won't. Will you? Can't we shake hands on that understanding?"

With a hurried movement she hid her hands.

"I couldn't touch you – "

"You will when we dance."

He thought her lips trembled a little, but the light was uncertain.

"I will never dance with you again."

"I'm afraid you'll have to," he said with a confident smile, "unless you care to make a scene."

She drew away, unfastening her cloak, her eyes full of that old challenge.

"You're impossible," she whispered. "Can't you understand that I dislike you?"

His heart leapt, for didn't he hate her?

XXIX

Lambert appeared in the doorway.

"Blodgett's rung for tea – "

He glanced curiously from one to the other. The broken shadows disclosed little, but the fact that she had lingered at all was arresting.

"What's up, Sylvia?"

She went close to her brother.

"This – this old servant has been impertinent again."

Lambert smiled.

"He's rather more than that now, sis. That's over – forgotten. Still if the Princeton fellow Morton's been impertinent – "

He spread his arms, smiling.

"Have I got to submit myself to a trouncing more than once a year?"

Sylvia shrugged her shoulders.

"No," she said, impatiently. "You say it's forgotten. All right."

George knew it would never be forgotten now by either of them. Lambert's unruffled attitude made him uneasy. Her brother's scoffing response to her accusation suggested that Lambert saw, since they would be more or less thrown together, a beneficial side to such encounters as the one just ended. For George didn't dream that Lambert had forgotten, either, those old boasts.

Another depressing thought made him bad company for Blodgett after the callers had driven away. It came from a survey, following his glimpse of Sylvia's beauty, of all the blatant magnificence with which Blodgett had surrounded himself. Blodgett after dinner, a little flushed with wine, and the triumph of having had in his house on the same day two Sinclairs and two Planters, attempted an explanation.

"I didn't build this, Morton, or my place in town, just for Josiah Blodgett."

George wasn't in a mood for subtleties of expression.

"I've often wondered why you haven't married. With your money you ought to have a big choice."

Blodgett sipped a liqueur. He smiled in a self-satisfied way.

"Money will buy about anything – even the kind of a wife you want. I'm in no hurry. When I marry, young man, it will be the right kind."

And George understood that he meant by the right kind some popular and well-bred girl who would make the Blodgett family hit a social average.

He carried that terrifying thought of marriage back to Princeton. He had no fear Sylvia would ever look seriously in Blodgett's direction. Money could scarcely bribe her. This, however, was her second season. Of course she would marry someone of her own immediate circle. She could take her choice. When that happened what would become of his determination and his boasts? Frequently he clenched her riding crop and swore:

"Nothing – not even that – can keep me from accomplishing what I've set out to do. I'll have my way with her."

He shrank, nevertheless, from the thought of her adopting such a defence. It was intolerable. He read the New York papers with growing suspense. As an antidote he attacked harder than ever his study of cause and effect in the Street. With football out of the way he could give a good deal of time to that, and Blodgett now and then enclosed a hint in Mundy's letters. It was possible to send a fair amount of money to his parents; but his mother's letters never varied from their formality of thanks and solicitations as to his health. His father didn't write at all. Of course, they couldn't understand what he was doing. The shadow of the great Planter remained perpetually over their little home.

Another doubt troubled George. With the club matter out of the way, and the presidency of the class his, and a full football garland resting on his head, was he wasting his time at Princeton? The remembrance of Blodgett steadied him. He needed all that Princeton and its companionships could give.

Purposefully he avoided Betty. Was she, indeed, responsible for that softness he had yielded to in the infirmary and during the final game? In his life, he kept telling himself, there was no room for sentiment. Sentiment was childish, a hindrance. Hadn't he decided at the start that nothing should turn him from his attempt for the summit? Still he couldn't avoid seeing Betty now and then in Princeton, or at the dances in New York to which he went with Goodhue. The less he saw of Betty, moreover, the stronger grew his feeling of something essential lacking from his life; and it bothered that, after a long separation, she was invariably friendly instead of reproachful. He found that he couldn't look at her eyes without hungrily trying to picture them wet with tears for him.

To some extent other demands took his mind from such problems. The rumpus Goodhue had foreseen developed. Important men came or wrote from New York or Philadelphia in Dalrymple's cause, but at the meetings of the section George sat obdurate, and, when the struggle approached a crisis, Goodhue came out openly on the side of his room-mate.

"You can have Dalrymple in the club," was George's ultimatum, "or you can have me, but you can't have us both."

If George resigned, Goodhue announced, he would follow. Dalrymple was doomed. The important men went back or ceased writing. Then Wandel slipped Rogers into the charmed circle – the payment of a debt; and George laughed and left the meeting, saying:

"You can elect anybody you please now."

Cynically, he was tempted to try to force Allen in.

"You're not honest even with your own group," he said afterward to Wandel.

The club lost its value as a marker of progress. Besides, he didn't look forward to eating with that little snob, Rogers, for two years. Nor did he quite care for Wandel's reply.

"You've enough class-consciousness for both of us, heroic and puissant Apollo."

For the first time George let himself go with Wandel.

"You'll find Apollo Nemesis, little man, unless you learn to say what you mean in words of one syllable."

And the discussion of the clubs went on, breeding enmities but determining no radical reform.

The struggle at Princeton was over. George looked often at the younger men, who didn't have to prepare themselves minutely for the greater struggle just ahead, envying them their careless play, their proneness to over-indulgence in beer and syncopated song. While he worked with high and low prices and variations in exchange he heard them calling cheerily across the campus, gathering parties for poker or bridge or a session at the Nassau. Goodhue, even Wandel, found some time for frivolity. George strangled his instinct to join them. He had too much to do. In every diversion he took he wanted to feel there was a phase personally valuable to him.

He counted the days between his glimpses of Sylvia, and tried not to measure the hours dividing his meetings with Betty. If only he dared let himself go, dared cease battle for a little, dared justify Sylvia's attitude! Even Goodhue noticed his avoidance of Betty.

He encountered Sylvia in New York; asked her to dance with him; was refused; cut in when she was, in a sense, helpless; and glided around the room with a sullen, brilliant body that fairly palpitated with distaste.

Even during the summer he ran into her once on Long Island. Then he was always missing her. Perhaps she had learned to avoid him. He shrank each morning from his paper, from any bit of rumour connecting her with a man; and Blodgett, he noticed, was still making money for a bachelor bank account.

He came to conceive a liking for his flabby employer, although he was quite sure Blodgett wouldn't have bothered with him a moment if he hadn't been a prominent college man with such ties among the great as Blodgett hadn't been able to knot himself. What was more to the point, the stout man admired George's ambition. He was more generous with his surreptitious advice. He paid a larger salary which he admitted was less than George earned during that summer. George, therefore, went back to Princeton with fuller pockets. Again Mundy was loath to let him depart.

"You know more about this game than men who've worked at it for years."

His face of a parson grimaced.

"You'd soon be able to hire me, if you'd stick on the job instead of going back to college to get smashed up at football."

George, however, didn't suffer much damage that year. He played brilliantly through a season that without him would have been far more disastrous than it was.

When it was all over Squibs sat one night silently for a long time. At last he stirred, lighted his pipe, and spoke.

"I ought to say to you, George, that I was as satisfied with you in defeat as I was in victory."

"I outplayed Planter, anyway, didn't I?"

Bailly studied him.

"Did that mean more to you than having Princeton beaten?"

"It kept Princeton from being beaten worse than it was."

"Yes," Bailly admitted, "and, perhaps, you are right to find a personal victory somewhere in a general defeat."

"But you really think it selfish," George said.

"I wish," Bailly answered, "I could graft on your brain some of Allen's mental processes, even his dissatisfactions."

"You can't," George said, bluntly. "I'm tired of Allen's smash talk. Most people like him could be bought with the very conditions they attack."

Bailly arose and limped up and down. When he spoke his voice vibrated with an unaccustomed passion:

"I don't know. I don't think so. But I want you to realize that prostrate worship of the fat old god success is as wicked as any other idolatry. I want you to understand that Allen and his kind may be sincere and right, that a vision unblinded by the bull's-eye may see the target all awry. My fear goes back to your first days here. You are still ashamed of service."

"I've served," George said, hotly.

"Was it real service," Bailly asked gently, "or a shot at the bull's-eye?"

Almost involuntarily George clapped his fingers to his head.

"You're wrong, sir," he cried. "I've served when nothing but the thought of service brought me through."

Mrs. Bailly hurried in. She put one hand on George's shoulder. With the other she patted his hair.

"What's he scolding my boy for?"

George grinned at Bailly.

"Don't you see, sir, if I were as bad as you think she couldn't do that?"

Bailly nodded thoughtfully.

"If you've served as you say you must be merely hiding the good."

XXX

To himself at times George acknowledged his badness, in Bailly's terms at least. He sometimes sympathized with Allen's point of view, even while he heckled that angular man who often sat with him and Goodhue, talking about strikes, and violence, and drunkenness as the quickest recreation for men who had no time for play. He longed to tell Allen in justification that he had walked out of the working class himself. Later, staring at Sylvia's portrait, he would grow hard again. Men, he would repeat, wanted to smash down obstacles only because they didn't have the strength to scramble over. He had the strength. But Bailly would intrude again. What about the congenitally unsound?

"I'm not unsound," he would say to himself, studying the picture.

And he suspected that it was because he didn't want to be good that he was afraid of seeing too much of Betty Alston and her kindliness and the reminiscence of tears in her eyes. If Squibs only knew how blessedly easy it would be to turn good, to let ambition and Sylvia slip into a remote and ugly memory! More frequently now he stared at her portrait, forcing into his heart the thought of hatred and into her face the expression of it; for the more hatred there was between them, the smaller was the chance of his growing weak.

He longed for the approaching escape from his gravest temptation. When he was through college and definitely in New York he would find it simpler to be hard. For that matter, why should he grow weak? He had achieved a success far beyond the common. He would graduate president of his class, captain of the football team, although he had tried to throw both honours to Goodhue; member of the club that had drawn the best men of his year, a power in the Senior Council; the man who had done most for Princeton; a high-stand scholar; and, most important of all, one who had acquired with his education a certain amount of culture and an ease of manner in any company. Allen was still angular, as were most of those other men who had come here, like George, with nothing behind them.

In his success he saw no miracle, no luck beyond Squibs' early interest. What he had won he had applied himself to get with hardness, cold calculation, an indomitable will. He had kept his eyes open. He had used everybody, everything, to help him climb toward Sylvia out of the valley of humiliation. The qualities that had brought him all that were good qualities, worth clinging to. As he had climbed he would continue in spite of Bailly or Allen or Betty. But when he thought of Betty he had to fight the tears from his own eyes.