made young Mr. Weldon so comfortable that he remained under her
roof for several weeks, occupying the spare room, where he spent
the mornings in study and meditation. He appeared regularly at
mealtime to ask a blessing upon the food and to sit with devout,
downcast eyes while the chicken was being dismembered. His
top-shaped head hung a little to one side, the thin hair was
parted precisely over his high forehead and brushed in little
ripples. He was soft spoken and apologetic in manner and took up
as little room as possible. His meekness amused Mr. Wheeler, who
liked to ply him with food and never failed to ask him gravely
“what part of the chicken he would prefer,” in order to hear him
murmur, “A little of the white meat, if you please,” while he
drew his elbows close, as if he were adroitly sliding over a
dangerous place. In the afternoon Brother Weldon usually put on
a fresh lawn necktie and a hard, glistening straw hat which left a
red streak across his forehead, tucked his Bible under his arm,
and went out to make calls. If he went far, Ralph took him in the
automobile.
Claude disliked this young man from the moment he first met him,
and could scarcely answer him civilly. Mrs. Wheeler, always
absent-minded, and now absorbed in her cherishing care of the
visitor, did not notice Claude’s scornful silences until
Mahailey, whom such things never escaped, whispered to her over
the stove one day: “Mr. Claude, he don’t like the preacher. He
just ain’t got no use fur him, but don’t you let on.”
As a result of Brother Weldon’s sojourn at the farm, Claude was
sent to the Temple College. Claude had come to believe that the
things and people he most disliked were the ones that were to
shape his destiny.
When the second week of September came round, he threw a few
clothes and books into his trunk and said good-bye to his mother
and Mahailey. Ralph took him into Frankfort to catch the train
for Lincoln. After settling himself in the dirty day-coach,
Claude fell to meditating upon his prospects. There was a Pullman
car on the train, but to take a Pullman for a daylight journey
was one of the things a Wheeler did not do.
Claude knew that he was going back to the wrong school, that he
was wasting both time and money. He sneered at himself for his
lack of spirit. If he had to do with strangers, he told himself,
he could take up his case and fight for it. He could not assert
himself against his father or mother, but he could be bold enough
with the rest of the world. Yet, if this were true, why did he
continue to live with the tiresome Chapins? The Chapin household
consisted of a brother and sister. Edward Chapin was a man of
twenty-six, with an old, wasted face,—and he was still going to
school, studying for the ministry. His sister Annabelle kept
house for him; that is to say, she did whatever housework was
done. The brother supported himself and his sister by getting odd
jobs from churches and religious societies; he “supplied” the
pulpit when a minister was ill, did secretarial work for the
college and the Young Men’s Christian Association. Claude’s
weekly payment for room and board, though a small sum, was very
necessary to their comfort.
Chapin had been going to the Temple College for four years, and
it would probably take him two years more to complete the course.
He conned his book on trolley-cars, or while he waited by the
track on windy corners, and studied far into the night. His
natural stupidity must have been something quite out of the
ordinary; after years of reverential study, he could not read the
Greek Testament without a lexicon and grammar at his elbow. He
gave a great deal of time to the practice of elocution and
oratory. At certain hours their frail domicile—it had been
thinly built for the academic poor and sat upon concrete blocks
in lieu of a foundation—re-echoed with his hoarse, overstrained
voice, declaiming his own orations or those of Wendell Phillips.
Annabelle Chapin was one of Claude’s classmates. She was not as
dull as her brother; she could learn a conjugation and recognize
the forms when she met with them again. But she was a gushing,
silly girl, who found almost everything in their grubby life too
good to be true; and she was, unfortunately, sentimental about
Claude. Annabelle chanted her lessons over and over to herself
while she cooked and scrubbed. She was one of those people who
can make the finest things seem tame and flat merely by alluding
to them. Last winter she had recited the odes of Horace about the
house—it was exactly her notion of the student-like thing to
do—until Claude feared he would always associate that poet with
the heaviness of hurriedly prepared luncheons.
Mrs. Wheeler liked to feel that Claude was assisting this worthy
pair in their struggle for an education; but he had long ago
decided that since neither of the Chapins got anything out of
their efforts but a kind of messy inefficiency, the struggle
might better have been relinquished in the beginning. He took
care of his own room; kept it bare and habitable, free from
Annabelle’s attentions and decorations. But the flimsy pretences
of light-housekeeping were very distasteful to him. He was born
with a love of order, just as he was born with red hair. It was a
personal attribute.
The boy felt bitterly about the way in which he had been brought
up, and about his hair and his freckles and his awkwardness. When
he went to the theatre in Lincoln, he took a seat in the gallery,
because he knew that he looked like a green country boy. His
clothes were never right. He bought collars that were too high
and neckties that were too bright, and hid them away in his
trunk. His one experiment with a tailor was unsuccessful. The
tailor saw at once that his stammering client didn’t know what he
wanted, so he persuaded him that as the season was spring he
needed light checked trousers and a blue serge coat and vest.
When Claude wore his new clothes to St. Paul’s church on Sunday
morning, the eyes of every one he met followed his smart legs
down the street. For the next week he observed the legs of old
men and young, and decided there wasn’t another pair of checked
pants in Lincoln. He hung his new clothes up in his closet and
never put them on again, though Annabelle Chapin watched for them
wistfully. Nevertheless, Claude thought he could recognize a
well-dressed man when he saw one. He even thought he could
recognize a well-dressed woman. If an attractive woman got into
the street car when he was on his way to or from Temple Place, he
was distracted between the desire to look at her and the wish to
seem indifferent.
Claude is on his way back to Lincoln, with a fairly liberal
allowance which does not contribute much to his comfort or
pleasure. He has no friends or instructors whom he can regard
; with admiration, though the need to admire is just now uppermost
in his nature. He is convinced that the people who might mean
something to him will always misjudge him and pass him by. He is
not so much afraid of loneliness as he is of accepting cheap
substitutes; of making excuses to himself for a teacher who
flatters him, of waking up some morning to find himself admiring
a girl merely because she is accessible. He has a dread of easy
compromises, and he is terribly afraid of being fooled.
VI
Three months later, on a grey December day, Claude was seated in
the passenger coach of an accommodation freight train, going home
for the holidays. He had a pile of books on the seat beside him
and was reading, when the train stopped with a jerk that sent the
volumes tumbling to the floor. He picked them up and looked at
his watch. It was noon. The freight would lie here for an hour or
more, until the east-bound passenger went by. Claude left the car
and walked slowly up the platform toward the station. A bundle of
little spruce trees had been flung off near the freight office,
and sent a smell of Christmas into the cold air. A few drays
stood about, the horses blanketed. The steam from the locomotive
made a spreading, deep-violet stain as it curled up against the
grey sky.
Claude went into a restaurant across the street and ordered an
oyster stew. The proprietress, a plump little German woman with a
frizzed bang, always remembered him from trip to trip. While he
was eating his oysters she told him that she had just finished
roasting a chicken with sweet potatoes, and if he liked he could
have the first brown cut off the breast before the train-men came
in for dinner. Asking her to bring it along, he waited, sitting
on a stool, his boots on the lead-pipe foot-rest, his elbows on
the shiny brown counter, staring at a pyramid of tough looking
bun-sandwiches under a glass globe.
“I been lookin’ for you every day,” said Mrs. Voigt when she
brought his plate. “I put plenty good gravy on dem sweet
pertaters, ja.”
“Thank you. You must be popular with your boarders.”
She giggled. “Ja, all de train men is friends mit me. Sometimes
dey bring me a liddle Schweizerkase from one of dem big saloons
in Omaha what de Cherman beobles batronize. I ain’t got no boys
mein own self, so I got to fix up liddle tings for dem boys, eh?”
She stood nursing her stumpy hands under her apron, watching
every mouthful he ate so eagerly that she might have been tasting
it herself. The train crew trooped in, shouting to her and asking
what there was for dinner, and she ran about like an excited
little hen, chuckling and cackling. Claude wondered whether
working-men were as nice as that to old women the world over. He
didn’t believe so. He liked to think that such geniality was
common only in what he broadly called “the West.” He bought a big
cigar, and strolled up and down the platform, enjoying the fresh
air until the passenger whistled in.
After his freight train got under steam he did not open his books
again, but sat looking out at the grey homesteads as they
unrolled before him, with their stripped, dry cornfields, and the
great ploughed stretches where the winter wheat was asleep. A
starry sprinkling of snow lay like hoar-frost along the crumbly
ridges between the furrows.
Claude believed he knew almost every farm between Frankfort and
Lincoln, he had made the journey so often, on fast trains and
slow. He went home for all the holidays, and had been again and
again called back on various pretexts; when his mother was sick,
when Ralph overturned the car and broke his shoulder, when his
father was kicked by a vicious stallion. It was not a Wheeler
custom to employ a nurse; if any one in the household was ill, it
was understood that some member of the family would act in that
capacity.
Claude was reflecting upon the fact that he had never gone home
before in such good spirits. Two fortunate things had happened to
him since he went over this road three months ago.
As soon as he reached Lincoln in September, he had matriculated
at the State University for special work in European History. The
year before he had heard the head of the department lecture for
some charity, and resolved that even if he were not allowed to
change his college, he would manage to study under that man. The
course Claude selected was one upon which a student could put as
much time as he chose. It was based upon the reading of
historical sources, and the Professor was notoriously greedy for
full notebooks. Claude’s were of the fullest. He worked early and
late at the University Library, often got his supper in town and
went back to read until closing hour. For the first time he was
studying a subject which seemed to him vital, which had to do
with events and ideas, instead of with lexicons and grammars. How
often he had wished for Ernest during the lectures! He could see
Ernest drinking them up, agreeing or dissenting in his
independent way. The class was very large, and the Professor
spoke without notes,—he talked rapidly, as if he were addressing
his equals, with none of the coaxing persuasiveness to which
Temple students were accustomed. His lectures were condensed like
a legal brief, but there was a kind of dry fervour in his voice,
and when he occasionally interrupted his exposition with purely
personal comment, it seemed valuable and important.
Claude usually came out from these lectures with the feeling that
the world was full of stimulating things, and that one was
fortunate to be alive and to be able to find out about them. His
reading that autumn actually made the future look brighter to
him; seemed to promise him something. One of his chief
difficulties had always been that he could not make himself
believe in the importance of making money or spending it. If that
were all, then life was not worth the trouble.
The second good thing that had befallen him was that he had got
to know some people he liked. This came about accidentally, after
a football game between the Temple eleven and the State
University team—merely a practice game for the latter. Claude
was playing half-back with the Temple. Toward the close of the
first quarter, he followed his interference safely around the
right end, dodged a tackle which threatened to end the play, and
broke loose for a ninety yard run down the field for a touchdown.
He brought his eleven off with a good showing. The State men
congratulated him warmly, and their coach went so far as to hint
that if he ever wanted to make a change, there would be a place
for him on the University team.
Claude had a proud moment, but even while Coach Ballinger was
talking to him, the Temple students rushed howling from the
grandstand, and Annabelle Chapin, ridiculous in a sport suit of
her own construction, bedecked with the Tem
ple colours and
blowing a child’s horn, positively threw herself upon his neck.
He disengaged himself, not very gently, and stalked grimly away
to the dressing shed…. What was the use, if you were always
with the wrong crowd?
Julius Erlich, who played quarter on the State team, took him
aside and said affably: “Come home to supper with me tonight,
Wheeler, and meet my mother. Come along with us and dress in the
Armory. You have your clothes in your suitcase, haven’t you?”
“They’re hardly clothes to go visiting in,” Claude replied
doubtfully.
“Oh, that doesn’t matter! We’re all boys at home. Mother wouldn’t
mind if you came in your track things.”
Claude consented before he had time to frighten himself by
imagining difficulties. The Erlich boy often sat next him in the
history class, and they had several times talked together.
Hitherto Claude had felt that he “couldn’t make Erlich out,” but
this afternoon, while they dressed after their shower, they
became good friends, all in a few minutes. Claude was perhaps
less tied-up in mind and body than usual. He was so astonished at
finding himself on easy, confidential terms with Erlich that he
scarcely gave a thought to his second-day shirt and his collar
with a broken edge,—wretched economies he had been trained to
observe.
They had not walked more than two blocks from the Armory when
Julius turned in at a rambling wooden house with an unfenced,
terraced lawn. He led Claude around to the wing, and through a
glass door into a big room that was all windows on three sides,
above the wainscoting. The room was full of boys and young men,
seated on long divans or perched on the arms of easy chairs, and
they were all talking at once. On one of the couches a young man
in a smoking jacket lay reading as composedly as if he were
alone.
“Five of these are my brothers,” said his host, “and the rest are
friends.”
The company recognized Claude and included him in their talk
about the game. When the visitors had gone, Julius introduced his
brothers. They were all nice boys, Claude thought, and had easy,
agreeable manners. The three older ones were in business, but
they too had been to the game that afternoon. Claude had never
before seen brothers who were so outspoken and frank with one
One of Ours Page 4
