第17章 GRAND CROSS OF THE CRESCENT(3)

The only thing people will know is that when your classmates stood up and got their parchments--the thing they'd been working for four years, the only reason for their going to college at all--YOU were not among those present.That's your fault; but if you don't get your degree next fall that will be my fault.I've supported you through college and you've failed to deliver the goods.Now you deliver them next fall, or you can support yourself.""That will be all right," said Peter humbly; "I'll pass next fall.""I'm going to make sure of that," said Hallowell senior."To-morrow you will take those history books that you did not open, especially Gilman's 'Rise and Fall,' which it seems you have not even purchased, and you will travel for the entire summer with a private tutor...."Peter, who had personally conducted the foot-ball and base-ball teams over half of the Middle States and daily bullied and browbeat them, protested with indignation."WON'T travel with a private tutor!""If I say so," returned Hallowell senior grimly, "you'll travel with a governess and a trained nurse, and wear a strait jacket.And you'll continue to wear it until you can recite the history of Turkey backward.And in order that you may know it backward--and forward you will spend this summer in Turkey--in Constantinople--until I send you permission to come home.""Constantinople!" yelled Peter."In August! Are you serious?"" Do I look it?" asked Peter's father.He did.

"In Constantinople," explained Mr.Hallowell senior, "there will be nothing to distract you from your studies, and in spite of yourself every minute you will be imbibing history and local color.""I'll be imbibing fever,", returned Peter, "and sunstroke and sudden death.If you want to get rid of me, why don't you send me to the island where they sent Dreyfus? It's quicker.

You don't have to go to Turkey to study about Turkey.""You do!" said his father.

Peter did not wait for the festivities of commencement week.

All day he hid in his room, packing his belongings or giving them away to e members of his class, who came to tell him what a rotten shame it was, and to bid him good-by.They loved Peter for himself alone, and at losing him were loyally enraged.They sired publicly to express their sentiments, and to that end they planned a mock trial of the Rise and Fall,"at which a packed jury would sentence it to cremation.They planned also to hang Doctor Gilman in effigy.The effigy with a rope round its neck was even then awaiting mob violence.It was complete to the silver-white beard and the gold spectacles.But Peter squashed both demonstrations.He did not know Doctor Gilman had been forced to resign, but he protested that the horse-play of his friends would make him appear a bad loser."It would look, boys," he said, "as though I couldn't take my medicine.Looks like kicking against the umpire's decision.Old Gilman fought fair.He gave me just what was coming to me.I think a darn sight more of him than do of that bunch of boot-lickers that had the colossal nerve to pretend I scored fifty!"Doctor Gilman sat in his cottage that stood the edge of the campus, gazing at a plaster bust of Socrates which he did not see.Since that morning he had ceased to sit in the chair of history at Stillwater College.They were retrenching, the chancellor had told him curtly, cutting down unnecessary expenses, for even in his anger Doctor Black was too intelligent to hint at his real motive, and the professor was far too innocent of evil, far too detached from college politics to suspect.He would remain a professor emeritus on half pay, but he no longer would teach.The college he had served for thirty years-since it consisted of two brick buildings and a faculty of ten young men--no longer needed him.Even his ivy-covered cottage, in which his wife and he had lived for twenty years, in which their one child had died, would at the beginning of the next term be required of him.But the college would allow him those six months in which to "look round." So, just outside the circle of light from his student lamp, he sat in his study, and stared with unseeing eyes at the bust of Socrates.He was not considering ways and means.They must be faced later.He was considering how he could possibly break the blow to his wife.What eviction from that house would mean to her no one but he understood.Since the day their little girl had died, nothing in the room that had been her playroom, bedroom, and nursery had been altered, nothing had been touched.To his wife, somewhere in the house that wonderful, God-given child was still with them.Not as a memory but as a real and living presence.When at night the professor and his wife sat at either end of the study table, reading by the same lamp, he would see her suddenly lift her head, alert and eager, as though from the nursery floor a step had sounded, as though from the darkness a sleepy voice had called her.And when they would be forced to move to lodgings in the town, to some students' boarding-house, though they could take with them their books, their furniture, their mutual love and comradeship, they must leave behind them the haunting presence of the child, the colored pictures she had cut from the Christmas numbers and plastered over the nursery walls, the rambler roses that with her own hands she had planted and that now climbed to her window and each summer peered into her empty room.