“By George, Swazey, I envy you!”
“Well, it’s taught me to size men up pretty sharply,” said Swazey, continuing. “I’ve seen them in the raw, I’ve seen them in all sorts of tests. I’ve sort of got a pretty guess what they’ll do or not do. Then, of course, I’ve had a knack of making money out of what I touch—it’s a gift.”
“Are you working your way through here?” said Stover. All feeling of patronage was gone; he felt as if a torrent had cleared away the dust and cobwebs of tradition.
“Lord, no,” said Swazey, smiling. “Why, boy, I’ve got a business that’s bringing me in between four and five thousand a year—running itself, too.”
Stover sat up.
“What!”
“I’ve got an advertising agency, specialties of all sorts, seven men working under one. I keep in touch every day. Course I could make more if I was right there. But I know what I’m going to do in this world. I’ve got my ideas for what’s coming—big ideas. I’m going to make money hand over fist. That’s easy. Now I’m getting an education. Here’s the answer to it all.”
He drew out of his pocketbook a photograph and passed it over to Stover.
“That’s the best in the world; that’s the girl that started me and that’s the girl I’m going to marry.”
Dink took the funny little photograph and gazed at it with a certain reverence. It was the face of a girl pretty enough, with a straight, proud, reliant look in her eyes that he saw despite the oddity of the clothes and the artificiality of the pose. He handed back the photograph.
“I like her,” he said.
“Here we are,” said Swazey, handing him a tintype.
It was grotesque, as all such pictures are, with its mingled sentimentality and self-consciousness, but Stover did not smile.
“That’s the girl I’ve been working forever since,” said Swazey. “The bravest little person I ever struck, and the squarest. She was waiting in a restaurant when I happened to drop in, standing on her own feet, asking no favor. She’s out of that now, thank God! I’ve sent her off to school.”
Dink turned to him with a start, amazed at the matter-of-fact way in which Swazey announced it.
“To school—” he stammered. “You’ve sent her.”
“Sure. Up to a convent in Montreal. She’ll finish there when I finish here.”
“Why?” said Stover, too amazed to choose his methods of inquiry.
“Because, my boy, I’m going out to succeed, and I want my wife to know as much as I do and go with me where I go.”
The two sat silently, Swazey staring at the tintype with a strange, proud smile, utterly unconscious of the story he had told, Stover overwhelmed as if the doors in a great drama had suddenly swung open to his intruding gaze.
“She’s the real student,” said Swazey fondly. “She gets it all—all the romance of the big things that have gone on in the past. By George, the time’ll come when we’ll get over to Greece and Egypt and Rome and see something of it ourselves.” He put the photographs in his pocketbook and rose, standing, legs spread before the fire, talking to himself. “By George, Dink, money isn’t what I’m after. I’m going to have that, but the big thing is to know something about everything that’s real, and to keep on learning. I’ve never had anything like these evenings here, browsing around in the good old books, chatting it over with old Pike—he’s got imagination. Give me history and biography—that inspires you. Say, I’ve talked a lot, but you led me on. What’s your story?”
“My story?” said Stover solemnly. He thought a moment and then said: “Nothing. It’s a blank and I’m a blank. I say, Swazey, give me your hand. I’m proud to know you. And, if you’ll let me, I’d like to come over here oftener.”
He went from the room, with a sort of empty rage, transformed. Before him all at once had spread out the vision of the nation, of the democracy of lives of striving and of hope. He had listened as a child listens. He went out bewildered and humble. For the first time since he had come to Yale, he had felt something real. His mind and his imagination had been stirred, awakened, hungry, rebellious.
He turned back, glancing from the lights on the campus to the room he had left—a little splotch of mellow meaning on the somber cold walls of Divinity, and then turned into the emblazoned quadrangle of the campus, with its tinkling sounds and feverish, childish ambitions.
“Great heavens! and I went there as a favor,” he said. “What under the sky do I know about anything—little conceited ass!”
He went towards his entry and, seeing a light in Bob Story’s room, suddenly hallooed.
“Oh, Bob Story, stick out your head.”
“Hello, yourself. Who is it?”
“It’s me. Dink.”
“Come on up.”
“No, not tonight.”
“What then?”
“Say, Bob, I just wanted you to know one thing.”
“What?”
“I’m just a plain damn fool; do you get that?”
“What the deuce?”
“Just a plain damn fool—good night!”
And he went to his room, locked the door to all visitors, pulled an armchair before the fire, and sat staring into it, as solemn as the wide-eyed owls on the casters.
XVI
The hours that Dink Stover sat puffing his pipe before the yellow-eyed owls that blinked to him from the crackling fireplace were hours of revolution. His imagination, stirred by the recital of Swazey’s life, returned to him like some long-lost friend. Sunk back in his familiar armchair, his legs extended almost to the reddening logs, his arms braced, he seemed to see through the conjuring clouds of smoke that rose from his pipe the figures of a strange self, the Dink Stover who had fought his way to manhood in the rough tests of boarding-school life, the Dink Stover who had arrived so eagerly, whose imagination had leaped to
