"Do you LIKE to read that?" she asked.
"Yes, Auntie. I"ve read four already and, counting this one, there are five more to read."
Now Aunt Clarissa had never read Ancient Nineveh herself. Her bookseller had a.s.sured her that it was a very remarkable set, quite rare and complete. "We seldom pick one up nowadays, Mrs. Bute. You should buy it." So Aunt Clarissa bought it, but she had never thought of reading it.
She looked down over her nephew"s shoulder at the broad page with its diagram of an ancient temple and its drawings of human-headed bulls in bas-relief.
"Why do you find it so interesting?" she asked.
Galusha looked up at her. His eyes were alight with excitement.
"They dig those things up over there," he said, pointing to one of the bulls. "It"s all sand and rocks--and everything, but they send an expedition and the people in it figure out where the city or the temple or whatever it is ought to be, and then they dig and--and find it. And you can"t tell WHAT you"ll find, exactly. And sometimes you don"t find much of anything."
"After all the digging and work?"
"Yes, but that"s where the fun comes in. Then you figure all over again and keep on trying and trying. And when you DO find "em there are sculptures like this--oh, yards and yards of "em--and all sort of queer, funny old inscriptions to be studied out. Gee, it must be great! Don"t you think so, Auntie?"
Aunt Clarissa"s reply was noncommittal. That evening she wrote a letter to Augustus Cabot in Boston. "He is a good boy," she wrote, referring to Galusha, "but queer--oh, dreadfully queer. It"s his father"s queerness cropping out, of course, but it shouldn"t be permitted to develop. I have set my heart on his becoming a financier like the other Galushas in our line. Of course he will always be a Bangs--more"s the pity--but his middle name is Cabot and his first IS Galusha. I think he had best continue his schooling in or near Boston where you can influence him, Augustus. I wish him well grounded in mathematics and--oh, you understand, the financial branches. Select a school, the right sort of school, for him, to oblige me, will you, Gus?"
Augustus Cabot chose a school, a select, aristocratic and expensive school near the "Hub of the Universe." Thither, in the fall, went Galusha and there he remained until he was eighteen, when he entered Harvard. At college, as at school, he plugged away at his studies, and he managed to win sufficiently high marks in mathematics. But his mathematical genius was of a queer twist. In the practical dollars and cents sort of figuring he was almost worthless. Money did not interest him at all. What interested him was to estimate how many bricks there were in "Mem" and how many more there might have been if it had been built a story higher.
"This room," he said to a cla.s.smate, referring to his study in old Thayer, "was built in ----" naming the year. "Now allowing that a different fellow lived in it each year, which is fair enough because they almost always change, that means that at least so many fellows,"
giving the number, "have occupied this room since the beginning. That is, provided there was but one fellow living in the room at a time. Now we know that, for part of the time, this was a double room, so--"
"Oh, for the love of Mike, Loosh!" exclaimed the cla.s.smate, "cut it out.
What do you waste your time doing crazy stunts like that for?"
"But it"s fun. Say, if they had all cut their initials around on the door frames and the--ah--mop boards it would be great stuff to puzzle "em out and make a list of "em, wouldn"t it? I wish they had."
"Well, I don"t. It would make the old rat hole look like blazes and it is bad enough as it is. Come on down and watch the practice."
One of young Bangs" peculiar enjoyments, developed during his senior year, was to visit every old cemetery in or about the city and examine and copy the ancient epitaphs and inscriptions. Pleasant spring afternoons, when normal-minded Harvard men were busy with baseball or track or tennis, or the hundred and one activities which help to keep young America employed in a great university, Galusha might have been, and was, seen hopping about some gra.s.s-grown graveyard, like a bespectacled ghoul, making tracings of winged death"s-heads or lugubrious tombstone poetry. When they guyed him he merely grinned, blushed, and was silent. To the few--the very few--in whom he confided he made explanations which were as curious as their cause.
"It"s great fun," he declared. "It keeps you guessing, that"s it. Now, for instance, here"s one of those skull jiggers with wings on it. See?
I traced this over at Copp"s Hill last spring, a year ago. But there are dozens of "em all about, in all the old graveyards. n.o.body ever saw a skull with wings; it"s a--a--ah--convention, of course. But who made the first one? And why did it become a convention? And--and--why do some of "em have wings like this, and some of "em crossbones like a pirate"s flag, and some of "em no wings or bones, and why--"
"Oh, good Lord! I don"t know. Forget it. You make a noise like a hea.r.s.e, Loosh."
"Of course you don"t know. _I_ don"t know. I don"t suppose anybody knows, exactly. But isn"t it great fun to study "em up, and see the different kinds, and think about the old chaps who carved "em, and wonder about "em and--"
"No, I"ll be banged if it is! It"s crazy nonsense. You"ve got pigeons in your loft, Loosh. Come on out and give the birds an airing."
This was the general opinion of the cla.s.s of 19--, that old "Loosh had pigeons in his loft." However, it was agreed that they were harmless fowl and that Galusha himself was a good old scout, in spite of his aviary.
He graduated with high honors in the mathematical branches and in languages. Then the no less firm because feminine hand of Aunt Clarissa grasped him, so to speak, by the collar and guided him to the portals of the banking house of Cabot, Bancroft and Cabot, where "Cousin Gussie"
took him in charge with the instructions to make a financier of him.
"Cousin Gussie," junior member of the firm, then in his early thirties, thrust his hands into the pockets of his smart tweed trousers, tilted from heels to toes of his stylish and very shiny shoes and whistled beneath his trim mustache. He had met Galusha often before, but that fact did not make him more optimistic, rather the contrary.
"So you want to be a banker, do you, Loosh?" he asked.
Galusha regarded him sadly through the spectacles.
"Auntie wants me to be one," he said.
The experiment lasted a trifle over six months. At the end of that time the junior partner of Cabot, Bancroft and Cabot had another interview with his firm"s most recent addition to its list of employees.
"You"re simply no good at the job, that"s the plain truth," said the banker, with the candor of exasperation. "You"ve cost us a thousand dollars more than your salary already by mistakes and forgetfulness and all the rest of it. You"ll never make your salt at this game in a million years. Don"t you know it, yourself?"
Galusha nodded.
"Yes," he said, simply.
"Eh? Oh, you do! Well, that"s something."
"I knew it when I came here."
"Knew you would be no good at the job?"
"At this job, yes."
"Then for heaven"s sake why did you take it?"
"I told you. Aunt Clarissa wanted me to."
"Well, you can"t stay here, that"s all. I"m sorry."
"So am I, for Auntie"s sake and yours. I realize I have made you a lot of--ah--trouble."
"Oh, that"s all right, that"s all right. Hang it all, I feel like a beast to chuck you out this way, but I have partners, you know. What will you do now?"
"I don"t know."
Cousin Gussie reflected. "I think perhaps you"d better go back to Aunt Clarissa," he said. "Possibly she will tell you what to do. Don"t you think she will?"
"Yes."
"Humph! You seem to be mighty sure of it. How do you know she will?"
For the first time a gleam, a very slight and almost pathetic gleam, of humor shone behind Galusha"s spectacles.
"Because she always does," he said. And thus ended his connection with the banking profession.
Aunt Clarissa was disgusted and disappointed, of course. She expressed her feelings without reservation. However, she laid most of the blame upon heredity.
"You got it from that impractical librarian," she declared. "Why did Dorothy marry him? She might have known what the result would be."
Galusha was more downcast even than his relative.