H. M. Pulham, Esquire

by John P. Marquand

  “Here, Rough,” she called, “here, Tipsy.” Kay always took her dogs whenever she went walking and most of the time her mind was on the dogs.

  “I asked Bill King up this week end,” she said, “but he was too busy. He’s always awfully busy, isn’t he?”

  “Yes,” I said, “he always has a lot to do.”

  “Tipsy,” she called, “come on. He’s always so alive, isn’t he?”

  “Who?” I asked. “Tipsy?”

  “No,” she said. “Bill King.”

  “Yes,” I said, “he has a new idea every minute.”

  “He knows a lot about everything,” Kay said. “He thinks that girls are people. Here, Tip.”

  We were walking in snow through the woods, and the air was damp and cold, just the way it had been that afternoon at Westwood. I tried to keep my mind on what she was saying about Bill and not to think about Marvin Myles.

  “When you talk to him, he seems to know all about you.”

  “He does when he puts his mind on it,” I said, “but most of the time his mind is on himself.” She had been walking fast with her head up and her shoulders back, but now she stopped and the dogs stopped too. I thought again that she was meant for winter. I wondered if she knew how well her brown tweed coat and skirt looked.

  “Harry—” and then she had to call to the dogs, “you don’t think that Bill’s angry at me about anything, do you? I asked him to the Assembly and he couldn’t come, and then, when I went to New York, I wrote him and he didn’t answer.”

  “Bill’s always that way,” I said. “He hardly ever answers letters, but when you see him he’s always just the same.”

  “We’d better go back,” she said. “Here, Rough, here, Tipsy. The dogs have had a good run now.”

  Somehow she made me wonder why it was that a girl who had broken her engagement should be more interesting than she had been before.

  That night when I got home I wrote to Bill King—I had been meaning to for quite a while. In one way I did not want to see him, because he might talk about Marvin Myles, but again, I wanted to hear about her.

  “I’ve just been in Concord,” I wrote. “Kay says she asked you out there. Maybe you’re right that she’s pretty. If you can come up here we’ll have her over.”

  It was quite a while before Bill wrote back. He said that he was too busy to go anywhere, and he did not mention Kay.

  Looking back upon it now, that winter of 1920, when I was trying not to think about Marvin Myles, begins to take the form of other winters. There were a few little difficulties about the house—some sort of trouble with the chore-man either about the furnace or the sidewalk, and a frozen pipe in Mary’s bathroom one night when she left the window open. Then Mary had another caller instead of Roger Priest, and Mother was asked to join a new reading club, which she refused. It seems absurd that I should recall events such as these in the light of my own sorrow.

  What helped me most was seeing Joe Bingham. We began playing squash together nearly every afternoon and usually he would stop a while at the house before he went on home. I was fascinated by the frank openness of his suffering and at the ease with which he spoke of it, for he made it sound like an operation or a railroad accident when he discussed his symptoms. What seemed to hurt him most was that any girl who had cared for him should have stopped before he had stopped caring for her.

  “Do you know what I think?” Joe said. “I don’t think Kay has any real balance. I’m beginning to think that maybe I’m just as well out of it.”

  “Of course you are,” I said.

  “Now, look here,” said Joe. “I’m only talking like this to you, Harry. I’m telling everyone else that Kay’s wonderful, but just between you and me, she could have made it come gradually, couldn’t she, instead of just socking it at me all at once?”

  “You must have seen it coming, Joe,” I said.

  “I tell you I didn’t,” Joe answered. “Everything was fine. Why, look at the time we all went coasting. Everything was fine then—except Kay had a headache that night.”

  “There’s no use going over it, Joe,” I said.

  It was a comfort to see the way his mind was working, but what amazed me most was his resilience. After a month or two I saw him walking with Madeline Bush on the Esplanade.

  “Well,” he said, when I asked him about it, “why shouldn’t I? You don’t know Madeline well, do you?”

  I didn’t know her very well.

  “You can’t tell anything about a girl,” Joe said, “until you know her. Now, I know what you think when you see her. You just think, ‘Oh, hell, there’s Madeline Bush.’ I used to think that myself—‘Oh, hell, there’s Madeline Bush.’ Now, you wouldn’t know from looking at her how much Madeline knows.”

  “About what?” I asked.

  “About life,” Joe said. “We’ve had some pretty serious talks about it. Do you know what happened to her when she was ten?”

  I certainly did not know.

  “When Madeline was ten she was making fudge in the kitchen and she got her sleeve caught in the saucepan and it went all over her arm, and she had to go to the hospital. That’s how she knows what pain is—real pain. You wouldn’t think to look at her that she could talk that way, would you? Frankly, Madeline Bush has made me think.”

  “About what?” I said.

  “That’s right,” Joe said. “Go ahead and laugh at it. The trouble with us, Harry, is we take life as it comes without thinking. Now, when I got engaged to Kay I simply wasn’t thinking. Madeline made me see that.”

  “Maybe she’s right,” I said.

  “You see,” Joe said, “it isn’t that I really like Madeline Bush—not that way, I mean. When anybody’s been through what I have you can’t get over it, but it makes me feel better when I do nice things for Madeline—taking her to the movies—that sort of thing. I don’t suppose you realize that you can like a girl simply for her mind. She understands all about Kay. She’s made me see Kay the way she really is for the first time. Madeline’s got a wonderful mind.”

  Not long after that—it must have been April—the Motfords asked me to dinner. They had all been very kind to me after Father died. Just a family dinner, and I was so early that Mr. and Mrs. Motford had not come downstairs and Kay was alone in the parlor, sitting looking at the fire. Her arms were bare and her dress was cut lower than usual.

  “Kay,” I said, “that’s an awfully pretty dress.”

  “There isn’t much to it,” Kay said. “I keep thinking it’s going to fall off.”

  “Well, it’s awfully pretty while it’s on,” I said.

  I was afraid that I might have gone a little too far about the dress, but Kay was smiling. It was a queer sort of smile, which made me think that she was practising before a mirror.

  “I suppose you’ve heard the news,” she said.

  “No,” I said. “What news?”

  “About Madeline and Joe. They’re engaged.”

  “They can’t be,” I said. “Joe never told me.”

  Kay laughed.

  “Maybe Joe doesn’t know it yet,” she said, “but Madeline does. She called me up at six. It’s still a secret, but she wanted me to be the first to know.”

  “That wasn’t nice of her,” I said.

  “That’s all right,” said Kay. “That’s fair. I’m awfully glad, really. Harry, have you heard anything from Bill King?”

  “No,” I answered, “not for quite a while.”

  “Oh,” Kay said, “well. I’m awfully glad you like my dress.”

  It may have been true that Joe Bingham had not known it, and perhaps girls always know beforehand when such a thing is going to happen, because when Joe told me the news a few days later he looked shy and bewildered.

  “You know, Harry,” he told me, “I just don’t see how it happened. I just went to call on Madeline to kill time around five o’clock, and there we were engaged. Do you know what Madeline has done? She’s saved me from myself. Do you know what
I think? I think I’ve loved Madeline for years without knowing it. That business about Kay Motford—Madeline says it didn’t really mean anything, and it doesn’t. It’s funny about women, isn’t it? And it’s funny about love. I tell you, Harry, the trouble with you is you’ve never been in love. You’ll know what I mean some day.” Fond as I was of Joe Bingham, I could not listen to him talk about love. It was the last thing I wanted to think or hear about at the end of that winter. That must be why I went up to School for a night in the spring.

  As the weather began to be warmer I kept thinking about the Skipper, but Sam Green was the one who suggested that we ought to go out to look the old place over. Although Sam was working downtown in the cotton business, somehow we had not seen each other much. Then one day we found ourselves side by side on two stools at one of those four-sided lunch counters on Washington Street, where a girl stands in the center, serving coffee and pie and cake out of the dumbwaiter to a circle of eating men. It was a pleasant arrangement to be able to stop eating and to look up at a pretty girl.

  “You’re looking fine, Sam,” I said.

  “I didn’t know you ate with Tillie,” Sam said.

  “When I come here,” I told him, “I always eat with Tillie.”

  “Well, how have you been anyway?” Sam asked. “Have you been out to School?”

  When I told him that I had not, Sam looked serious.

  “Well, you ought to go. The Skipper’s been asking for you. It hurts him when the old boys lose interest. You’re not losing interest, are you?”

  “Why, of course not, Sam,” I said.

  “That’s right,” Sam said. “Look here. The Skipper wants to see me Saturday. I’ve got my car. Why don’t you come out with me?”

  No matter what has happened to you, it is always a little better in the spring. It was the middle of April and the sun was out and the day was almost warm. Sam said that it was great to be outdoors and that once we got through Worcester it smelled like School already. He kept going back to all the things we had done there, which I had almost forgotten, and when he wasn’t talking about School he was talking about Harvard. I asked him how he liked the cotton business and he said it was perfectly all right, as good as any business.

  “All that’s wrong,” said Sam, “is that there are so many nickel-plated muckers in it. Haven’t you ever noticed how many of them there are? I guess I’m not made for business.”

  “I know what you mean,” I said.

  “It’s great to be getting away from it,” Sam said, “to be getting back to something worth while.” I knew how he felt. Back at School and in college, Sam had been an important man. It must have been an anticlimax, trying to learn about cotton. When we saw the buildings on the hill, with the grass around them just turning green, Sam stopped the car.

  “Look at it,” Sam said. “There it is. I wish to God we both were back.”

  “It doesn’t do any good wishing, Sam,” I said. “It wasn’t meant for that.”

  “The trouble with you,” Sam said, “is you never made a team.”

  They were knocking out flies down in the lower field. You could hear the sharp crack of the bats long before we stopped to watch. Sam got out of the car and took off his overcoat.

  “Hey!” Sam called. “Give me a bat.” Everyone knew who he was—he was Green, Sam Green.

  Then a few minutes later, while I stood there watching, the study bell began to ring. In spite of all the time that had passed the bell made me want to hurry. When the Skipper asked me into his study before dinner it did not seem to me that a picture or a book had been moved.

  “All that changes is the boys,” the Skipper said, “and they don’t change much either—not even when they’re grown up.”

  We had supper at the high table. I sat on the Skipper’s right and Mr. Folansbee, who used to teach me mathematics, was beside me. The dessert was rice pudding and the Skipper tapped his glass after we had finished eating.

  “Two old boys are back with us tonight,” he said. “You have seen Sam Green here before, but you have not seen Harry Pulham, only his name on the war tablet in the great hall—our boy who won a medal.”

  I had not known that my name was on any tablet.

  “But he comes back here,” the Skipper went on, “as one of us.”

  Then that strong, sonorous voice of his stopped, and he put his hand on my shoulder.

  “Get up,” he said, “and speak to them, Harry.”

  I found myself on my feet, looking into their faces. Never in my wildest thoughts had it occurred to me that I might address the School.

  “I’m not good at speaking,” I said. “All I can say is this: It’s pretty hard to forget anything you have learned here. It all keeps coming back to you. You’ll see—you won’t forget.”

  The Skipper there beside me might have been holding a book ready to tell me to sit down and to walk twelve times around the track if I did badly. The faces of big boys and little boys made me feel that I was speaking to myself, somewhere in the past. Then as I started to go on with it, I had the queerest thought that Marvin Myles was listening. It seemed to me that I had come back there on account of her, just to get everything straight.

  “I’m not referring to the books,” I said. “I never was much good at them, was I, sir? But outside—” I stopped, not very well contented with the word. “When you get out of here, you’ll find that other people have different standards. It’s puzzling sometimes. Now when I was in the war,”—I had not meant to speak about the war,—“there was one time when I was afraid to go ahead, because I thought that I’d be killed.” I gripped the edge of the table, and it still seemed to me that Marvin Myles was listening. “I went on because it was the right thing to do. I guess it was something that was kicked into me here. That’s what I mean by things you learn that you can’t forget.”

  I sat down and listened to them clapping and when I took a drink of water I saw that my hand was shaking. I was never good at speaking, and I had not intended for a minute to show off in front of everyone.

  “Harry,” the Skipper said, when I was leaving in the morning, “that was a great speech last night.”

  “I’m sorry it wasn’t better, sir,” I said. “If I had been prepared—”

  “You were prepared,” the Skipper said. “It shows that I’ve turned another boy into a man, and that’s what I’m here for.”

  I’m glad that Bill King did not hear him say that. I wished that the Skipper did not sometimes sound that way.

  “It’s made me feel better to come here, sir,” I said.

  “Harry,” the Skipper said, “if you ever need any help and advice, you know where to come.”

  I wished that he had not said that either, because it made me feel that I should have asked his advice and I knew exactly what he would have answered without my asking.

  “That’s awfully kind of you, sir,” I said. “I’ll certainly remember.”

  When we left the school grounds I had the feeling of being outside, and I wished again I had not used that word the night before. All the part of it that was simple and easy was disappearing.

  “It never fails,” Sam said. “I’m always better when I go there.”

  “He’s just the same,” I said.

  “That’s exactly it, he’s just the same.”

  When I came home that evening Kay Motford called me up.

  “Harry,” she asked me, “where have you been? Would you like to go for a walk in the country tomorrow afternoon? The dogs ought to have a run.”

  I told her that I was busy, that there was a lot of work at the office.

  “You’re just like Bill King,” she said. “You’re always busy.”

  When spring came I thought about Marvin Myles just as much, but there was a lot to do at Westwood—the trees and garden had suffered badly from the ice storm and the walls had begun to leak, and I was the one to whom everyone came for decisions. When I found that the days were long enough and when the tennis court
was in shape, Mary and I began asking friends out for the night so that we could play doubles. One of them, Cecilia Leverett, played a beautiful game of tennis and we played mixed doubles in the spring tournament that year. It never occurred to me that Cecilia was around much until Mary asked me if I wanted Cecilia for over Sunday.

  “She’s your friend,” I said, “not mine.”

  “But you like her, don’t you?” Mary said.

  “Yes,” I said, “of course I like her. I like all your friends.”

  “Oh, Harry,” Mary said, “I’m awfully glad.”

  “What are you glad about?” I asked.

  “Well,” Mary said, “I wasn’t sure that you really liked her, and I was just thinking this Sunday I was going to ask a boy out and I wouldn’t have so much time for Cecilia.”

  “What boy?” I asked.

  “Don’t worry,” Mary said. “He’s perfectly all right. He went to Harvard three classes below you—Harrison, Jim Harrison.”

  “Harrison?” I said. “He didn’t go to School, did he?”

  “Everybody can’t go to your damned old School,” Mary said.

  “I was just asking about him,” I said. “Have him out. That’s fine.”

  “Then you’ll look out for Cecilia, will you?” Mary said.

  I had never heard about Harrison, but he sounded better than Roger Priest. He did not look so well when he came out on Saturday night. He was a rather heavy, dumpy-looking boy, with a dinosaur on his watch chain, and after dinner he did a trick of making an egg drop into a milk bottle. He was selling bonds for one of the big houses, so we were able to talk about the market, but most of the time he played little jokes on Mary that made her laugh. The next morning she took him riding and I took Cecilia up to the Purcells’ for tennis. Then after lunch Mary took Jim Harrison somewhere else and Cecilia and I were left alone. It was quite different, now that I had her on my hands—just as though we were getting to know each other for the first time. I remember her saying that my eyes were sad.