The Brentons. Anna Chapin Ray
he came into any kind of contact, to sort them out and classify them according to their possibilities as they unveiled themselves to his boyish eyes. Three of the cadaverous sophomores he dismissed with a glance. They were impossible. They lacked all spiritual yeast and, to the end of time, they would be waiters in one sense or another. Scott Brenton was different. A fellow with those eyes must have it in him to count for something, some day. Lounging in his seat at table, Opdyke kept his eye on Scott, talked at him, then talked to him; and then, obedient to some boyish whim or other, a few days later, the meal ended, he took him by the elbow and walked him off to Mory's for a second supper.
Mrs. Brenton, on her knees beside her bed, that night, prayed long and fervently and with full particulars concerning the education of her son. Her heart would have frozen with horror, had she seen the smoke-filled room where her son was sitting, with Reed Opdyke across the table from him. Her hopes for his future would have shrivelled into naught, could she have realized that, over that very table, her son, her Scott, was to receive a lesson, new and quite unforgettable. One hour of jovial human comradeship had opened Scott Brenton's eyes to more things than he ever yet had dreamed of. It had taught him once for all that irresponsible, carefree youth is not, of necessity, vicious.
As the days and the weeks ran on, the comradeship increased. Measured by the days of Opdyke, overflowing full of interests, it took the smallest possible share of time: a look of comprehension, a word of casual greeting, and, on rare occasions, a bit of a walk together when their ways chanced to coincide. Still more occasionally, a stray hour was spent at Mory's, or in Opdyke's room in Lawrence. As yet, a boyish delicacy had kept Opdyke from seeking to invade what he knew could not fail to be the barrenness of Scott Brenton's quarters.
Slight as was their intercourse, viewed in Opdyke's eyes, to Scott it filled the whole horizon, the one near and vital fact which broke in upon its emptiness and cut away the barren wastes about him. He lived alternately upon the memory of Opdyke as he had seen him last, and upon the anticipations of their next meeting. His hours of table service, ceasing to be wearisome, had become veritable social functions, for was there not always the chance of a random word and smile? Those failing, there was always the pleasure of watching Opdyke, now lounging lazily in his seat and mocking at his fellows, now bending forward above the table, heedless of his cooling plate, the while he harangued his companions with a facility which seemed to Scott the acme of brilliant eloquence.
At Reed's elbow, Scott followed each inflection of the persuasive voice, his lean face glowing with appreciation at every point his idol scored. For the time being, awkwardness was lost and all self-consciousness. Why think about himself, when he could have the chance to watch Reed Opdyke and to listen to him? Scott's nature thrilled in answer to the alien touch, unconsciously as that touch was given. It never once would have struck Opdyke that he was becoming an object of idolatry to this gaunt starveling to whom, as he expressed it, he had tried to be a little decent. It was quite within the limits of his comprehension that he could step down now and then to Scott. It never would have occurred to him, at that epoch of his experience, that Scott could try to clamber up to him. Save for the minutes when he consciously gave his attention to the ungainly young waiter, he disregarded him completely.
The other boys, however, were quick to take in the situation and to comment on it. "Reed's parson" they called Scott, and they chaffed Opdyke mercilessly, when Scott's back was turned. Scott, had he heard the chaff, would have been wounded to the death, a death he would have met far, far inside his shell, regretful that ever he had come out of it. Opdyke, however, merely laughed and stuck to his original position.
"A fellow with such eyes is bound to have it in him. He's never had a chance," he said to his chaffing mates. "Wait till he finds himself, and then see what happens."
"Nothing," came the prompt reply. "He won't ever find himself, Reed. He has found you, and that's as much as such a fellow as he is, can ever assimilate."
And the reply was by no means wide of the mark. For the present, Scott Brenton was finding it all he could do to assimilate Reed Opdyke. Indeed, it was only in the very end of all things that fulness of assimilation came.
As the time went on, partly in defiance of the chaffing of his chronies, partly on account of it, Opdyke lent himself more and more to the assimilating process. He sought out Scott more often, had him in his room, taught him to fill a pipe and smoke it after the fashion of a gentleman, dropped into his ears specious hints regarding manners, and about the efficiency of one's mattress as frugal substitute for a tailor's pressboard. To be sure, upon that latter count Scott took him with unforeseen literalness; and, in his zeal to carry out his teacher's dictum, subjected his coat to the mattress treatment, as well as his more simply-outlined nether garments. Moreover, it should be set down as distinctly to Opdyke's credit that he suppressed his merriment, the next time he saw the coat upon Scott Brenton's shoulders.
Just at this epoch, some waggish member of the eating club employed his camera at their expense. The resultant film, in after weeks, became one of the most popular assets of the class. True, the needful haste had caused the camera to tip a little. None the less, what the picture lacked in composition, it made up in clearness and in vitality. Taken solely as a study of contrasting types, it was of no small sociological value, since it proved past all gainsaying that the absolute democracy of a great college can bring into close relationship the most impossibly divergent natures.
Scott, at this time, was thin and lean. His shoulders were bowed a little with the strain of unceasing work and worry; in his more self-conscious moments, he shambled when he walked. Only moderately tall, clothed in ill-cut garments which he wore as uneasily as possible, his immature young figure was not one to call out much admiration on the score of its virility. Indeed, the one really virile thing about Scott Brenton was his hair, which sprang out strongly from his scalp, fine, but thick and just a little wavy where it lay across his crown. His head was well-shaped, only that it was a bit too high above the ears, the brow a bit too salient; the eyes alone, though, at that time, redeemed from hopeless mediocrity his worn, ill-nourished face. Beside his hips, his hands dangled limply, showing a stretch of unclothed wrist sticking out below the shrunken coat sleeves.
Beside him in the picture, Reed Opdyke strode lightly, still, to all seeming, the "puffic' fibbous" that his nurse had dubbed him. Six feet tall, lean and supple as a deerhound and as totally unconscious of his long, slim body, it was impossible to fancy him as ever being betrayed into an awkward motion. Above his straight, slim shoulders, his curly brown head rose proudly, his thin lips smiled a greeting to all the world around him, his brown eyes looked straight and true into the eyes of every man he chanced to meet. Only his sense of humour and his comfortable smattering of original sin could have saved Reed Opdyke from being insupportable. Beauty like his, albeit manly, is bound to be a certain handicap.
CHAPTER FIVE
It was to Reed Opdyke's influence that Scott owed the encouraging plaudits of his chemistry professor.
In an elective system which, at that time, was still left quite unmodified, Scott had happened upon the chemistry class by way of filling up his courses for his sophomore year. He had been going on with it indifferently for some months, when Opdyke had been transferred to his division. Up to that time, Scott had liked the class but temperately; that is, although it had seemed to him a useless frill upon the garment of his education, he did not dislike it in the least, and he had made a fair showing in his recitations.
Opdyke's coming into his division had changed all that. At first, Scott merely had been possessed by a fury of desire to shine before his idol's eyes. A little later on, Opdyke's manifest, albeit rather casual, interest in the subject had led Scott to revise his earlier notions carefully, to decide that there might be something in it, after all. By the beginning of his junior year, Scott had won the tardy attention of the head of the department. By the beginning of the Christmas holidays of that junior year, the head of the department had felt it his plain duty to explain to Scott that the road ahead of him was likely to be an open one and easy. If he kept on as he had begun, in time he might be head of a department on his own