“Sssssh!” the other customers warned in irritation.
“We mustn’t talk!” the Russian whispered hoarsely.
“Please sit down!” a woman begged. With a massive hand Tschilczynski pushed David into a seat.
The movie ended and a brassy orchestra started to play extremely rapidly. The professor clapped his hands like a child and whispered, “Good, eh?” The curtains opened and a chorus of ten pretty girls danced out in ballet costumes. “Wery nice!” Tschilczynski beamed.
An hour later the show reached a noisy climax with all performers onstage. They bowed flashily and the orchestra ripped into a vigorous march. “We go now,” the professor said, dragging David after him. But as David struggled through the aisle he suddenly stopped so that Tschilczynski was caught between two women. They muttered at the clumsy man and the Russian pulled David’s arm again; but David was staring at the screen, where brilliant letters proclaimed: “NEXT WEEK. TELL YOUR FRIENDS. AMERICA’S FAVORITE SONGSTRESS. MARY MEIGS.” David gasped and would not move while the beautiful pink and white slide remained on the screen, showing Mary Meigs in a daring evening gown. Her hair was more blonde than ever, and she wore a string of pearls about her white neck. In the picture her eyes were an exaggerated blue, and she had her head raised in that insolent, attractive way she had practiced so long at Paradise, “TELL YOUR FRIENDS!” a new slide commanded, and Professor Tschilczynski finally dragged David loose.
So on the trip back to Dedham the professor and his student were each in a state of mild exhilaration. Tschilczynski hummed snatches of old songs he had learned in the music halls of St. Petersburg. “When I was a student,” he began, but interrupted himself to sing Gaudeamus Igitur. Then he told David of the manner in which he had practiced duplicity in order to visit the theatre, which his parents could not approve. He grew increasingly agitated, and when the train reached Dedham he insisted that David have dinner with him that night. The blowsy landlady produced a tableful of smelly and delicious food. “Like an angel she makes food, that one!” Tschilczynski said approvingly as the heavy woman disappeared.
When dinner ended the big Russian still wanted to talk. He clasped his huge hands about his knees and laughed. “Everybody wants to know who I am. I tellink you.” He was the son of a wealthy Russian merchant. He left home for some reason and became a student. He had been to the Universities of St. Petersburg, Utrecht, Uppsala and Berlin. On his return to Russia he taught at the University in Moscow. His father, seeing him at last respectable, gave him a great deal of money. He married the daughter of a minor government official who was also wealthy. In the Revolution this woman became one of the most violent supporters of Lenin. He himself had no interest in the Revolution. Not understanding what it was about, he slipped out of the country, to Paris.
“But what about your wife?” David asked.
“I don’t know. I guess she’s dead.”
David looked at his professor. He was the first great man David had known, greater even than Sousa, and as he talked David learned that neither a man’s greatness nor his goodness can be measured by the happiness he has attained. This disturbed David, and he felt drawn toward the towering Russian. He remembered his own surging bitterness in the poorhouse when Hector was debased, and in the intervening years he had come to think that there ought to be a true correlation between happiness and goodness; but now he saw his professor, as kind as a man could be, and he was not happy. He was an outcast from home, a wanderer, a man who did not even know if his wife lived or was dead.
In the dark and messy room David brooded silently upon this unwelcome discovery. Evil men prosper, and good men die in the poorhouse. Other evil men are caught and executed. There was no mathematical certainty in life. Right now Max Volo was one of the richest men in Philadelphia with all kinds of corruption under his control. His name appeared in the papers: “Max Volo says it’s time for a change in City Hall!” “Max Volo returns from Florida.” Even though the warmth of spring was already in the air, David shivered.
He was not prepared for what happened next. Immanuel Tschilczynski, trembling like a boy, was over him blurting out, “I got to tell somebody.” Then, expansively, he kicked open the door into the kitchen. “You gome in now!” he ordered. Bashfully, the giggling widow joined the two men. Tschilczynski held out his big hand and she stood awkwardly beside him. “Three days ago we were married, yet,” the professor announced, like a child confessing a petty guilt.
David did not want to share this secret. He did not want to be dragged back into the vast messiness of life, and he hated thinking of his great, brilliant professor married to a clumsy peasant. Awkwardly, and in shame, he congratulated the two middle-aged people and hurried to his own rooms.
“Why would he do that?” he muttered. “A man like him! Why, he could marry the best …” He stopped short. “Suppose his other wife is alive!” And the whole turgid tumult of living swarmed back upon him. He lay down on his bed and felt weak. Then he began to chuckle at something Tschilczynski had said: “She gan gook like an angel, that one.” He wondered if that’s what men wanted, the buxom warmth of a good cook.
Each day that week David bought copies of the Inquirer, Bulletin, Ledger and Record. As Saturday approached, both the advertisements and stories about the new vaudeville at the Earle made more mention of Mary Meigs. She was, it seemed, a brilliant singer whom Philadelphia would take to its heart. On Friday a group of pictures and a long story appeared, and it was with difficulty that he restrained himself from running to all the rooms on his hall shouting, “I know this girl!” It was warm and good to know a person who was successful.
At the same time David was deeply worried about Professor Tschilczynski. What would the college authorities say if they knew that he had married his peasant housekeeper? And what would they do—or the law, for that matter—if it was discovered that his Russian wife were actually living? Suddenly Tschilczynski seemed like Nora; they were the wanderers. They had no homes, no families, nothing to tie them into one place. And David felt agitated and sorrowful for them.
Yet he continued to be angry with Tschilczynski. He felt that his huge professor should not have placed on him the burden of the secret wedding; and he adopted the trick of mentioning the Russian’s name at frequent intervals, to see if the story had yet become common knowledge. He avoided Tschilczynski’s office for fear the towering man might want to indulge in further confidences.
Then his vague excitement about Mary Meigs and his irritation with Tschilczynski were each knocked out of him. Through Joe Vaux’s intervention he was drawn forcibly into the very vortex of college life, and the days of his isolation were ended. They were beaten out of him with clubs.
The strange events began on Friday afternoon, just after he finished reading about Mary Meigs’ gala opening next day at the Earle. Joe burst into the room, his pointed, hungry face livid with rage. “God Almighty!” he shouted. “Did you hear who’s going to be May Queen?”
“No,” David replied, shivering with an uncontrolled fear that was not really a part of him. “Did they pick me?”
“No!” Vaux shouted, and again against his will David relaxed. “It’s worse! If you thought all night you couldn’t pick a worse Queen.”
“Who is it?” David asked, needled with excitement.
“Dave?” Joe asked in deep seriousness. “Are you willing to risk your neck?”
“It depends,” David replied. “I don’t want to get mixed up …”
“But this isn’t getting mixed up, Dave. This is where you either stand for a decent college or you don’t.” Vaux paused and looked at his friend. “They’re going to choose Porterfield for Queen.” David gasped. “And it’s Askleton for Prince!”
David felt sick and ashamed. “They wouldn’t dare to do that,” he protested.
“They’re doing it,” Vaux yelled.
“What do you think we ought to do?” David asked.
“I have a letter here,” the Bostonian said. ??
?I want you to sign it with me. I’ll take the worst end. But I want someone like you with me.”
David picked up the typed page and read the flaming words. “Stupid and Disgusting Committee of Self-appointed Gods, Clowns and Damned Fools:” He took a deep breath. “That’s some beginning,” he said.
“Wait till you get farther down,” Vaux replied.
David read the words he was expected to sign: “The practice of electing from among the freshmen men a May Queen and a Prince of Wails to be hauled through the streets of Dedham and held up to ridicule is a barbarous custom which only utter jackasses like you would dare to perpetuate. But for you to select Porterfield and Askleton is indecent and inhuman. The undersigned therefore volunteer to be Queen and Prince respectively and furthermore offer to fight your whole, lousy, rotten committee one by one.”
“I don’t like the fighting part,” David said.
“No!” Vaux protested. “In a thing like this you either go whole-hog or not at all.” With a great flourish he signed his name. It looked as big as John Hancock’s. Then he thrust the pen at David, who signed in smaller letters.
Joe grabbed the paper and marched across the quadrangle to the room where the big men of the freshman class were meeting to make official the choice of Porterfield and Askleton. Vaux burst into the conclave, looked at each of the self-appointed senators, and threw his epistle at the captain of the freshman basketball team. “There! You lousy bastards!” he cried and left the room.
But the big men of the freshman class did not accept Joe and David for the golden chariot. No, as in all previous years, they selected two of the most inoffensive men on the campus. Porterfield had glandular trouble. This made him very fat, prevented a beard, and caused him to speak in a high voice. Secretly he wanted to play football, but his glands made him different and therefore a thing to be despised. His fellow students called him Poet Porterfield, and he was Queen. Askleton was a quiet boy from a small town in Delaware. He got A in every class and had a furious complexion that burst into eruption at regular intervals each month. The girls of Dedham used to say: “I’m so lonesome for a date I’d even go out with Askleton.” He was different, so he was the Prince.
At dusk the golden chariot was hauled into the quadrangle and decked with old vegetables and toilet paper. Ridiculous and funny signs were posted on it. Upon the seats of honor were placed the poet and the pimply one. Before they had time even to hide their faces, tomatoes and eggs struck them.
The leading men of the freshman class directed others to haul the chariot and its agonized cargo about the town. As dusk fell the grotesque fat boy sat bitterly erect and refused to duck any longer when old fruit was thrown at him. Askleton, on the other hand, was so terrified at the raging roar about him that he could not keep from crying, and his tears mixed with the rotten vegetables and the sour eggs.
The lights of the town came on, and the weird procession started to chant, “On to Belle Forest!” A sense of keen excitement gripped the crowd. New men stepped forward to haul the golden chariot to the exclusive girls’ school on the edge of town. “On to Belle Forest!” rose the ever more exciting cry. “The proposal! The proposal!”
At the entrance to the girls’ school the chariot almost upset. Eager hands from the freshman football team reached out to hold it up. The fat Queen, thrown off balance, slipped from the seat and slid to the floor. Again eager men helped the Queen back to the throne. The men who helped in this way stopped to wipe their hands on the spring grass, and as they did so, they made ugly faces, for the sticky mess on their fingers was repugnant.
At Belle Forest the girls were waiting. Each year they looked forward to this serenade. Now all the lights in the fashionable school were extinguished. In nightgowns and pyjamas girls huddled in the windows. There was a strange hush upon the crowd. A man’s voice, deep and clear, began to sing the beautiful songs of college. The hidden girls sighed. Finally the singer began the rich, sweet song: “Fair Dedham, in that distant day …!” It rang out magnificently through the still spring night; but the flashlights that played upon the Queen showed that his fat lips were not moving.
The serenade ended, and from the girls’ windows began the cry: “Now the proposal I” In the courtyard the men roared back: “Yes! The proposal!”
All lights focused upon the Queen, who looked straight ahead. The last few eggs and fruit were thrown. The girls shrieked with delight when an egg actually struck the pimply Prince on the forehead. He looked funny and ridiculous.
“Silence!” the president of the freshman class commanded. “Queen! You look at the Prince! Prince! You propose!”
“The proposal!” cried the excited girls in their high voices.
But at that moment from a lower window came a girl’s piercing scream. “Oh God!” she cried. “How terrible!”
And it was this unknown girl’s cry that finally broke the spell of horror that had enveloped Joe Vaux and David Harper. That solitary voice was their conscience, returning to their bodies. All that pale and sorry evening the two freshmen had been thinking: “Well, we offered to be up there. I’m glad they didn’t take us.” But that girl’s wild cry drove thoughts of self-safety from their minds.
With a vigorous leap Joe sprang forward and knocked an especially offensive man who carried the special eggs for the coronation. He grabbed the bag and started throwing eggs wildly at the darkened windows. Horrified screams told the crowd that some of the eggs had hit the mark.
“Why, that dirty swine!” the big freshmen shouted. “That’s that Joe Vaux! Get that guy!”
But Joe and David were already streaking across the fields back to the dormitories. They arrived there breathless, and in a dumb rage they took the remaining eggs and broke them in the bureau drawers of the president of the student body. Then they ranged through the upper-class dormitories pulling furniture down, mixing hair tonic and shaving cream in piles of fresh shirts, smearing shoe polish across clean laundry.
They were caught before they had wrecked more than a half dozen rooms. From an upper window two chairs were tossed into the quadrangle, and across them Joe and David were stretched and beaten until David thought he must either faint or scream for mercy. But he was like the fat Queen. He would not open his lips.
Vaux, on the other hand, cursed and reviled his tormentors. In his pain he dug up old scurrilities from Boston gutters and flung them at the men with the paddles. Since he was thinner than David, the wicked wood cut deeper toward his bones. He understood the frenzy in which the ashamed men of Dedham were caught, and he tormented them with words which hurt more than the paddle strokes.
Finally the head of the YMCA threatened to hit the paddlers with a chair if they didn’t stop. The YMCA man wanted to take Dave and Joe to the infirmary, but now that the beating was over David was crying and he said, “You go to hell!” And Vaux was about to say something much viler when he saw, limping across the quadrangle, the fat Queen sneaking home to his college room. “Attaboy, Porterfield!” Joe shouted. “Keep your chin up, Porterfield! You’re my man!”
A cheer went up. And then another. The quadrangle filled with students. Vaux kept on shouting, “You’re a real man, Porterfield!” Then a senior man grabbed the fat boy by the hand. Another cheer filled the darkness.
It had been Porterfield’s intention to look at no one and to go straight to bed as if nothing had happened. But the sudden cheering was too much for him. He turned and waved to the men of Dedham. He had eggs and fruit all over him and a certain proud nobility which David had helped put there.
But no one ever saw Askleton again. He did not even come back to college for his clothes.
Early the next morning there was a meeting of student government. The hall was crowded when the grim-faced chairman took his seat. The gavel hit once before Joe Vaux leaped to his feet. “Want to make a motion …”
Before he could say more the president of the senior class cried, “Second the motion!”
“Moved and seconded,” beg
an the chairman, but before he finished there was a shout of “Aye!”
The chairman banged his gavel. “Motion carried.” He banged the table again. “Meeting adjourned.” And there was never another May Queen at Dedham.
In his room Joe said, “Think of it, Dave! They’ve been doing that for years. And see how easy it was to stop it.”
But David was thinking: “Joe and I stood there and watched until that girl couldn’t stand it any longer. We took it, all right. But she wouldn’t.” Then the thought of this girl made him jump to his feet, and the pain in his legs was great.
“Where you going?” Vaux asked.
“I almost forgot a vaudeville show!” David replied.
It was four o’clock before David reached the theatre. He had to stand in line, and his bruised legs hurt. When he finally got to his seat he fidgeted to find a comfortable way to sit. When the orchestra struck up an abbreviated Tannhäuser Overture he felt an indescribable excitement. He waited nervously for the curtains to part, and then fidgeted through four interminable acts.
But finally the orchestra burst into a lively potpourri of Victor Herbert’s melodies. The lights turned from pale blue to rich gold. Only the violins played, and onto the stage stepped Mary Meigs. She was twenty-four years old, tall and thin with up-swept blonde hair that made her seem extremely fragile. David leaned back into a little ball, his elbows against his ribs, his chin on his fists. “Boy!” he muttered. “Look at that!”
He saw once more the thin line of her jawbone lending a sense of brittleness. He noticed that she started singing with her hands pressed close against her sides, raising them to her bosom as she climbed effortlessly to higher and higher notes. But most of all he marked the manner in which she sang directly to him, and to every other man in the audience. “She’s breathtaking!” he said happily. “That’s what she is. And can she sing!”