whether they weren’t very “worldly” people, and was apprehensive
about their influence on him. The evening was rather a failure,
and he went to bed early.
Claude had gone through a painful time of doubt and fear when he
thought a great deal about religion. For several years, from
fourteen to eighteen, he believed that he would be lost if he did
not repent and undergo that mysterious change called conversion.
But there was something stubborn in him that would not let him
avail himself of the pardon offered. He felt condemned, but he
did not want to renounce a world he as yet knew nothing of. He
would like to go into life with all his vigour, with all his
faculties free. He didn’t want to be like the young men who said
in prayer-meeting that they leaned on their Saviour. He hated
their way of meekly accepting permitted pleasures.
In those days Claude had a sharp physical fear of death. A
funeral, the sight of a neighbour lying rigid in his black
coffin, overwhelmed him with terror. He used to lie awake in the
dark, plotting against death, trying to devise some plan of
escaping it, angrily wishing he had never been born. Was there no
way out of the world but this? When he thought of the millions of
lonely creatures rotting away under ground, life seemed nothing
but a trap that caught people for one horrible end. There had
never been a man so strong or so good that he had escaped. And
yet he sometimes felt sure that he, Claude Wheeler, would escape;
that he would actually invent some clever shift to save himself
from dissolution. When he found it, he would tell nobody; he
would be crafty and secret. Putrefaction, decay…. He could
not give his pleasant, warm body over to that filthiness! What
did it mean, that verse in the Bible, “He shall not suffer His
holy one to see corruption”?
If anything could cure an intelligent boy of morbid religious
fears, it was a denominational school like that to which Claude
had been sent. Now he dismissed all Christian theology as
something too full of evasions and sophistries to be reasoned
about. The men who made it, he felt sure, were like the men who
taught it. The noblest could be damned, according to their
theory, while almost any mean-spirited parasite could be saved by
faith. “Faith,” as he saw it exemplified in the faculty of the
Temple school, was a substitute for most of the manly qualities
he admired. Young men went into the ministry because they were
timid or lazy and wanted society to take care of them; because
they wanted to be pampered by kind, trusting women like his
mother.
Though he wanted little to do with theology and theologians,
Claude would have said that he was a Christian. He believed in
God, and in the spirit of the four Gospels, and in the Sermon on
the Mount. He used to halt and stumble at “Blessed are the meek,”
until one day he happened to think that this verse was meant
exactly for people like Mahailey; and surely she was blessed!
VIII
On the Sunday after Christmas Claude and Ernest were walking
along the banks of Lovely Creek. They had been as far as Mr.
Wheeler’s timber claim and back. It was like an autumn afternoon,
so warm that they left their overcoats on the limb of a crooked
elm by the pasture fence. The fields and the bare tree-tops
seemed to be swimming in light. A few brown leaves still clung to
the bushy trees along the creek. In the upper pasture, more than
a mile from the house, the boys found a bittersweet vine that
wound about a little dogwood and covered it with scarlet berries.
It was like finding a Christmas tree growing wild out of doors.
They had just been talking about some of the books Claude had
brought home, and his history course. He was not able to tell
Ernest as much about the lectures as he had meant to, and he felt
that this was more Ernest’s fault than his own; Ernest was such a
literal-minded fellow. When they came upon the bittersweet, they
forgot their discussion and scrambled down the bank to admire the
red clusters on the woody, smoke-coloured vine, and its pale gold
leaves, ready to fall at a touch. The vine and the little tree it
honoured, hidden away in the cleft of a ravine, had escaped the
stripping winds, and the eyes of schoolchildren who sometimes
took a short cut home through the pasture. At its roots, the
creek trickled thinly along, black between two jagged crusts of
melting ice.
When they left the spot and climbed back to the level, Claude
again felt an itching to prod Ernest out of his mild and
reasonable mood.
“What are you going to do after a while, Ernest? Do you mean to
farm all your life?”
“Naturally. If I were going to learn a trade, I’d be at it before
now. What makes you ask that?”
“Oh, I don’t know! I suppose people must think about the future
sometime. And you’re so practical.”
“The future, eh?” Ernest shut one eye and smiled. “That’s a big
word. After I get a place of my own and have a good start, I’m
going home to see my old folks some winter. Maybe I’ll marry a
nice girl and bring her back.”
“Is that all?”
“That’s enough, if it turns out right, isn’t it?”
“Perhaps. It wouldn’t be for me. I don’t believe I can ever
settle down to anything. Don’t you feel that at this rate there
isn’t much in it?”
“In what?”
“In living at all, going on as we do. What do we get out of it?
Take a day like this: you waken up in the morning and you’re glad
to be alive; it’s a good enough day for anything, and you feel
sure something will happen. Well, whether it’s a workday or a
holiday, it’s all the same in the end. At night you go to
bed—nothing has happened.”
“But what do you expect? What can happen to you, except in your
own mind? If I get through my work, and get an afternoon off to
see my friends like this, it’s enough for me.”
“Is it? Well, if we’ve only got once to live, it seems like there
ought to be something—well, something splendid about life,
sometimes.”
Ernest was sympathetic now. He drew nearer to Claude as they
walked along and looked at him sidewise with concern. “You
Americans are always looking for something outside yourselves to
warm you up, and it is no way to do. In old countries, where not
very much can happen to us, we know that,—and we learn to make
the most of little things.”
“The martyrs must have found something outside themselves.
Otherwise they could have made themselves comfortable with little
things.”
“Why, I should say they were the ones who had nothing but their
idea! It would be ridiculous to get burned at the stake for the
sensation. Sometimes I think the martyrs had a good deal of
vanity to help them along, too.”
Claude thought Ernest had never been so tiresome. He squi
nted at
a bright object across the fields and said cuttingly, “The fact
is, Ernest, you think a man ought to be satisfied with his board
and clothes and Sundays off, don’t you?”
Ernest laughed rather mournfully. “It doesn’t matter much what I
think about it; things are as they are. Nothing is going to reach
down from the sky and pick a man up, I guess.”
Claude muttered something to himself, twisting his chin about
over his collar as if he had a bridle-bit in his mouth.
The sun had dropped low, and the two boys, as Mrs. Wheeler
watched them from the kitchen window, seemed to be walking beside
a prairie fire. She smiled as she saw their black figures moving
along on the crest of the hill against the golden sky; even at
that distance the one looked so adaptable, and the other so
unyielding. They were arguing, probably, and probably Claude was
on the wrong side.
IX
After the vacation Claude again settled down to his reading in
the University Library. He worked at a table next the alcove
where the books on painting and sculpture were kept. The art
students, all of whom were girls, read and whispered together in
this enclosure, and he could enjoy their company without having
to talk to them. They were lively and friendly; they often asked
him to lift heavy books and portfolios from the shelves, and
greeted him gaily when he met them in the street or on the
campus, and talked to him with the easy cordiality usual between
boys and girls in a co-educational school. One of these girls,
Miss Peachy Millmore, was different from the others,—different
from any girl Claude had ever known. She came from Georgia, and
was spending the winter with her aunt on B street.
Although she was short and plump, Miss Millmore moved with what
might be called a “carriage,” and she had altogether more manner
and more reserve than the Western girls. Her hair was yellow and
curly,—the short ringlets about her ears were just the colour of
a new chicken. Her vivid blue eyes were a trifle too prominent,
and a generous blush of colour mantled her cheeks. It seemed to
pulsate there,-one had a desire to touch her cheeks to see if
they were hot. The Erlich brothers and their friends called her
“the Georgia peach.” She was considered very pretty, and the
University boys had rushed her when she first came to town. Since
then her vogue had somewhat declined.
Miss Millmore often lingered about the campus to walk down town
with Claude. However he tried to adapt his long stride to her
tripping gait, she was sure to get out of breath. She was always
dropping her gloves or her sketchbook or her purse, and he liked
to pick them up for her, and to pull on her rubbers, which kept
slipping off at the heel. She was very kind to single him out and
be so gracious to him, he thought. She even coaxed him to pose in
his track clothes for the life class on Saturday morning, telling
him that he had “a magnificent physique,” a compliment which
covered him with confusion. But he posed, of course.
Claude looked forward to seeing Peachy Millmore, missed her if
she were not in the alcove, found it quite natural that she
should explain her absences to him,—tell him how often she
washed her hair and how long it was when she uncoiled it.
One Friday in February Julius Erlich overtook Claude on the
campus and proposed that they should try the skating tomorrow.
“Yes, I’m going out,” Claude replied. “I’ve promised to teach
Miss Millmore to skate. Won’t you come along and help me?”
Julius laughed indulgently. “Oh, no! Some other time. I don’t
want to break in on that.”
“Nonsense! You could teach her better than I.”
“Oh, I haven’t the courage!”
“What do you mean?”
“You know what I mean.”
“No, I don’t. Why do you always laugh about that girl, anyhow?”
Julius made a little grimace. “She wrote some awfully slushy
letters to Phil Bowen, and he read them aloud at the frat house
one night.”
“Didn’t you slap him?” Claude demanded, turning red.
“Well, I would have thought I would,” said Julius smiling, “but I
didn’t. They were too silly to make a fuss about. I’ve been wary
of the Georgia peach ever since. If you touched that sort of
peach ever so lightly, it might remain in your hand.”
“I don’t think so,” replied Claude haughtily. “She’s only
kind-hearted.”
“Perhaps you’re right. But I’m terribly afraid of girls who are
too kindhearted,” Julius confessed. He had wanted to drop Claude
a word of warning for some time.
Claude kept his engagement with Miss Millmore. He took her out to
the skating pond several times, indeed, though in the beginning
he told her he feared her ankles were too weak. Their last
excursion was made by moonlight, and after that evening Claude
avoided Miss Millmore when he could do so without being rude. She
was attractive to him no more. It was her way to subdue by
clinging contact. One could scarcely call it design; it was a
degree less subtle than that. She had already thus subdued a pale
cousin in Atlanta, and it was on this account that she had been
sent North. She had, Claude angrily admitted, no reserve,—though
when one first met her she seemed to have so much. Her eager
susceptibility presented not the slightest temptation to him. He
was a boy with strong impulses, and he detested the idea of
trifling with them. The talk of the disreputable men his father
kept about the place at home, instead of corrupting him, had
given him a sharp disgust for sensuality. He had an almost
Hippolytean pride in candour.
X
The Erlich family loved anniversaries, birthdays, occasions. That
spring Mrs. Erlich’s first cousin, Wilhelmina Schroeder-Schatz,
who sang with the Chicago Opera Company, came to Lincoln as
soloist for the May Festival. As the date of her engagement
approached, her relatives began planning to entertain her. The
Matinee Musical was to give a formal reception for the singer, so
the Erlichs decided upon a dinner. Each member of the family
invited one guest, and they had great difficulty in deciding
which of their friends would be most appreciative of the honour.
There were to be more men than women, because Mrs. Erlich
remembered that cousin Wilhelmina had never been partial to the
society of her own sex.
One evening when her sons were revising their list, Mrs. Erlich
reminded them that she had not as yet named her guest. “For me,”
she said with decision, “you may put down Claude Wheeler.”
This announcement was met with groans and laughter.
“You don’t mean it, Mother,” the oldest son protested. “Poor old
Claude wouldn’t know what it was all about,—and one stick can
spoil a dinner party.”
Mrs. Erlich shook her finger at him with conviction. “You will
see; your cousi
n Wilhelmina will be more interested in that boy
than in any of the others!”
Julius thought if she were not too strongly opposed she might
still yield her point. “For one thing, Mother, Claude hasn’t any
dinner clothes,” he murmured. She nodded to him. “That has been
attended to, Herr Julius. He is having some made. When I sounded
him, he told me he could easily afford it.”
The boys said if things had gone as far as that, they supposed
they would have to make the best of it, and the eldest wrote down
“Claude Wheeler” with a flourish.
If the Erlich boys were apprehensive, their anxiety was nothing
to Claude’s. He was to take Mrs. Erlich to Madame
Schroeder-Schatz’s recital, and on the evening of the concert,
when he appeared at the door, the boys dragged him in to look him
over. Otto turned on all the lights, and Mrs. Erlich, in her new
black lace over white satin, fluttered into the parlour to see
what figure her escort cut.
Claude pulled off his overcoat as he was bid, and presented
himself in the sooty blackness of fresh broadcloth. Mrs. Erlich’s
eyes swept his long black legs, his smooth shoulders, and lastly
his square red head, affectionately inclined toward her. She
laughed and clapped her hands.
“Now all the girls will turn round in their seats to look, and
wonder where I got him!”
Claude began to bestow her belongings in his overcoat pockets;
opera glasses in one, fan in another. She put a lorgnette into
her little bag, along with her powder-box, handkerchief and
smelling salts,—there was even a little silver box of peppermint
drops, in case she might begin to cough. She drew on her long
gloves, arranged a lace scarf over her hair, and at last was
ready to have the evening cloak which Claude held wound about
her. When she reached up and took his arm, bowing to her sons,
they laughed and liked Claude better. His steady, protecting air
was a frame for the gay little picture she made.
The dinner party came off the next evening. The guest of honour,
Madame Wilhelmina Schroeder-Schatz, was some years younger than
her cousin, Augusta Erlich. She was short, stalwart, with an
enormous chest, a fine head, and a commanding presence. Her great
contralto voice, which she used without much discretion, was a
really superb organ and gave people a pleasure as substantial as
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