Even apparent success in life does not save Mr. Sims"s friends.
"I see," I said one day, "that they have just made Arthur Stewart a Chief Justice out west."
"Poor old Artie," murmured Mr. Sims. "He"ll have a hard time holding it down. I imagine he"s pretty well tanked up all the time these days."
When Mr. Sims has not heard of any of his a.s.sociates for a certain lapse of years, he decides to himself that they are down and out. It is a form of writing them off. There is a melancholy satisfaction in it. As the years go by Mr. Sims is coming to regard himself and a few others as the lonely survivors of a great flood. All the rest, brilliant as they once were, are presumed to be "boozed," "tanked," "burnt out," "bust-up," and otherwise consumed.
After having heard for so many years the reminiscences of my good friend about the old gang, it seemed almost incredible that one of them should step into actual living being before my eyes. Yet so it happened.
I found Mr. Sims at the club one day, about to lunch there, a thing contrary to his wont. And with him was a friend, a sallow, insignificant man in the middle fifties, with ragged, sandy hair, wearing thin.
"Shake hands with Tommy Vidal," said Mr. Sims proudly.
If he had said, "Shake hands with Aristotle," he couldn"t have spoken with greater pride.
This then was Tommy Vidal, the intellectual giant of whom I had heard a hundred times. Tommy had, at college, so Mr. Sims had often a.s.sured me, the brightest mind known since the age of Pericles. He took the prize in Latin poetry absolutely "without opening a book." Latin to Tommy Vidal had been, by a kind of natural gift, born in him. In Latin he was "a whale." Indeed in everything. He had pa.s.sed his graduation examination with first cla.s.s honours; "plastered." He had to be held in his seat, so it was recorded, while he wrote.
Tommy, it seemed, had just "blown in" to town that morning. It was characteristic of Mr. Sims"s idea of the old gang that the only way in which any of them were supposed to enter a town was to "blow in."
"When did you say you "blew in," Tommy?" he asked about half a dozen times during our lunch. In reality, the reckless, devil-may-care fellow Vidal had "blown in" to bring his second daughter to a boarding school-a thing no doubt contemplated months ahead. But Mr. Sims insisted in regarding Tommy"s movements as purely fortuitous, the sport of chance. He varied his question by asking "When do you expect to "blow out" Tommy?" Tommy"s answers he forgot at once.
We sat and talked after lunch, and it pained me to notice that Tommy Vidal was restless and anxious to get away. Mr. Sims offered him cigars, thick as ropes and black as night, but he refused them. It appeared that he had long since given up smoking. It affected his eyes, he said. The deferential waiter brought brandy and curacoa in long thin gla.s.ses. But Mr. Vidal shook his head. He hadn"t had a drink, he said, for twenty years. He found it affected his hearing. Coffee, too, he refused. It affected, so it seemed, his sense of smell. He sat beside us, ill at ease, and anxious, as I could see, to get back to his second daughter and her schoolmistresses. Mr. Sims, who is geniality itself in his heart, but has no great powers in conversation, would ask Tommy if he remembered how he acted as Antigone in the college play, and was "plastered" from the second act on. Mr. Vidal had no recollection of it, but wondered if there was any good book-store in town where he could buy his daughter an Algebra. He rose when he decently could and left us. As Mr. Sims saw it, he "blew out."
Mr. Sims is kindliness itself in his judgments. He pa.s.sed no word of censure on his departed friend. But a week or so later he mentioned to me in conversation that Tommy Vidal had "turned into a kind of stiff." The vocabulary of Mr. Sims holds no term of deeper condemnation than the word "stiff." To be a "stiff" is the last form of degradation.
It is strange that when a thing happens once, it forthwith happens twice or even more. For years no member of the "old gang" had come in touch with Mr. Sims. Yet the visit of Tommy Vidal was followed at no great distance of time by the "blowing in" of Ned Purvis.
"Well, well!" said Mr. Sims, as he opened one afternoon a telegram that the deferential waiter brought upon a tray. "This beats all! Old Ned Purvis wires that he"s, going to blow in to town to-night at seven."
Forthwith Mr. Sims fell to ordering dinner for the three of us in a private room, with enough of an a.s.sortment of gin c.o.c.ktails and Scotch highb.a.l.l.s to run a distillery, and enough Vichy water and imported soda for a bath. "I know old Ned!" he said as he added item after item to the list.
At seven o"clock the waiter whispered, as in deep confidence, that there was a gentleman below for Mr. Sims.
It so happened that on that evening my friend"s foot was in bad shape, and rested on a chair. At his request I went from the lounge room of the club downstairs to welcome the new arrival.
Purvis I knew all about. My friend had spoken of him a thousand times. He had played half-back on the football team-a big hulking brute of a fellow. In fact, he was, as pictured by Mr. Sims, a perfect colossus. And he played football-as did all Mr. Sims"s college chums-"plastered." "Old Ned," so Mr. Sims would relate, "was pretty well "soused" when the game started: but we put a hose at him at half-time and got him into pretty good shape." All men in any keen athletic contest, as remembered by Mr. Sims, were pretty well "tanked up." For the lighter, nimbler games such as tennis, they were reported "spifflocated" and in that shape performed prodigies of agility.
"You"ll know Ned," said Mr. Sims, "by his big shoulders."
I went downstairs.
The reception room below was empty, except for one man, a little, gentle-looking man with spectacles. He wore black clothes with a waistcoat reaching to the throat, a white tie and a collar b.u.t.toned on backwards. Ned Purvis was a clergyman! His great hulking shoulders had gone the way of all my good friend"s reminiscences.
I brought him upstairs.
For a moment, in the half light of the room, Mr. Sims was still deceived.
"Well, Ned!" he began heartily, with a struggle to rise from his chair-then he saw the collar and tie of the Rev. Mr. Purvis, and the full horror of the thing dawned upon him. Nor did the three gin c.o.c.ktails, which Mr. Sims had had stationed ready for the reunion, greatly help its geniality. Yet it had been a maxim, in the recollections of Mr. Sims, that when any of the boys blew in anywhere the bringing of drinks must be instantaneous and uproarious.
Our dinner that night was very quiet.
Mr. Purvis drank only water. That, with a little salad, made his meal. He had a meeting to address that evening at eight, a meeting of women-"dear women" he called them-who had recently affiliated their society with the work that some of the dear women in Mr. Purvis"s own town were carrying on. The work, as described, boded no good for breweries. Mr. Purvis"s wife, so it seemed, was with him and would also "take the platform."
As best we could we made conversation.
"I didn"t know that you were married," said Mr. Sims.
"Yes," said Mr. Purvis, "married, and with five dear boys and three dear girls." The eight of them, he told us, were a great blessing. So, too, was his wife-a great social worker, it seemed, in the cause of women"s rights and a marvellous platform speaker in the temperance crusade.
"By the way, Mr. Sims," said Mr. Purvis (they had called one another "Mr." after the first five minutes), "you may remember my wife. I think perhaps you knew her in our college days. She was a Miss Dashaway."
Mr. Sims bowed his head over his plate, as another of his lost illusions vanished into thin air.
After Mr. Purvis had gone, my friend spoke out his mind-once and once only, and more in regret than anger.
"I"m afraid," he said, "that old Ned has turned into a SISSY."
It was only to be expected that the visits of later friends-the "boys" who happened to "blow in"-were disappointments. Art Hamilton, who came next, and who had been one of the most brilliant men of the Cla.s.s of "86 had turned somehow into a "complete mutt." Jake Todd, who used to write so brilliantly in the college paper, as recollected by Mr. Sims, was now the editor of a big New York daily. Good things might have been expected of him, but it transpired that he had undergone "wizening of the brain." In fact, a number of Mr. Sims"s former friends had suffered from this cruel disease, consisting apparently of a shrinkage or contraction of the cerebellum.
Mr. Sims spoke little of his disappointments. But I knew that he thought much about them. They set him wondering. There were changes here that to the thoughtful mind called for investigation.
So I was not surprised when he informed me that it was his intention to visit "the old place" and have a look at it. The "old place," called also the "old shop," indicated, as I knew, Mr. Sims"s college, the original scene of the exploits of the old gang. In the thirty years since he had graduated, though separated from it only by two hundred miles, Mr. Sims had never revisited it. So is it always with the most faithful of the sons of learning. The illumination of the inner eye is better than the crude light of reality. College reunions are but for the noisy lip service of the shallow and the interested. The deeper affection glows in the absent heart.
My friend invited me to "come along." We would, he said, "blow in" upon the place and have a look at it.
It was in the fullness of the spring time that we went, when the leaves are out on the college campus, and when Commencement draws near, and when all the college, even the students, are busy.
Mr. Sims, I noted when I joined him at the train, was dressed as for the occasion. He wore a round straw hat with a coloured ribbon, and light grey suit, and a necktie with the garish colours of the college itself. Thus dressed, he leaned as lightly as his foot allowed him upon a yellow stick, and dreamed himself again an undergraduate.
I had thought the purpose of his visit a mere curiosity bred in his disappointment. It appeared that I was wrong. On the train Mr. Sims unfolded to me that his idea in "blowing in" upon his college was one of benefaction. He had it in his mind, he said, to do something for the "old place," no less a thing than to endow a chair. He explained to me, modestly as was his wont, the origin of his idea. The brewing business, it appeared, was rapidly reaching a stage when it would have to be wound up. The movement of prohibition would necessitate, said Mr. Sims, the closing of the plant. The prospect, in the financial sense, occasioned my friend but little excitement. I was given to understand that prohibition, in the case of Mr. Sims"s brewery, had long since been "written off" or "written up" or at least written somewhere where it didn"t matter. And the movement itself Mr. Sims does not regard as permanent. Prohibition, he says, is bound to be washed out by a "turn of the tide"; in fact, he speaks of this returning wave of moral regeneration much as Martin Luther might have spoken of the Protestant Reformation. But for the time being the brewery will close. Mr. Sims had thought deeply, it seemed, about putting his surplus funds into the manufacture of commercial alcohol, itself a n.o.ble profession. For some time his mind has wavered between that and endowing a chair of philosophy. There is, and always has been, a sort of natural connection between the drinking of beer and deep quiet thought. Mr. Sims, as a brewer, felt that philosophy was the proper thing.
We left the train, walked through the little town and entered the university gates.
"Gee!" said Mr. Sims, pausing a moment and leaning on his stick, "were the gates only as big as that?"
We began to walk up the avenue.
"I thought there were more trees to it than these," said Mr. Sims.
"Yes," I answered. "You often said that the avenue was a quarter of a mile long."
"So the thing used to be," he murmured.
Then Mr. Sims looked at the campus. "A d.i.n.ky looking little spot," he said.
"Didn"t you say," I asked, "that the Arts Building was built of white marble?"
"Always thought it was," he answered. "Looks like rough cast from here, doesn"t it."
"We"ll have to go in and see the President, I suppose," continued Mr. Sims. He said it with regret. Something of his undergraduate soul had returned to his body. Although he had never seen the President (this one) in his life, and had only read of his appointment some five years before in the newspapers, Mr. Sims was afraid of him.
"Now, I tell you," he went on. "We"ll just make a break in and then a quick get-away. Don"t let"s get anch.o.r.ed in there, see? If the old fellow gets talking, he"ll go on for ever. I remember the way it used to be when a fellow had to go in to see Prexy in my time. The old guy would start mooning away and quoting Latin and keep us there half the morning."