Certainly there was neither childishness nor spirituality in the plain businesslike paper and strong, blunt handwriting that went to the composition of the letter. An almost breathless immediacy 25 seemed also a distinctly actuating factor in the task. As fast ever as hand could reach pen and pen could reach ink and ink could reach paper again the writer drove to his mark.
To Miss Claudia Merriwayne,
President———— College (said the letter).
So it is you, dear Clytie Merriwayne, who have so peremptorily thus become the arbitrator of my family fame and fortunes?
God Almighty! How Time flies! You, old enough to have a college. And I, old enough to have a daughter expelled from the same! Why did you do it, Clytie? Not have a college, I mean, but expel my daughter? Truly she seems to me like rather a nice little kid. And now I suppose in the cackle and comment of all concerned she stands forth "ruined" before the world. Yet when all's said and done, Clytie Merriwayne, who did the "ruining?" Not the little girl certainly. Most emphatically not that splendid boy! Who else then except yourself? Personally it would seem to me somehow at the moment as though you had bungled your college 26 just about as badly as I have bungled my daughter. My only conceivable excuse is that I've been a damned Ignoramus! What's yours?
Here I had a fine, frank, clean, prankish little girl who didn't know a man from a woman, and you have changed her into a cowering, tortured, and altogether bewildered young recreant who never again, as long as time lasts, perhaps, will ever be able to tell a saint from a devil, or a lark from a lust, or a college president from any other traducer of youth and innocence. Yet you are considered to be something of a Specialist in girls, I should suppose. As well as once having been a girl yourself.
How ever did you happen to do it, I say? How ever in the world did you happen to do it?
"For discipline," of course you will most instantly affirm. "A necessary if drastic example to all the young lives in your charge. Youth being," as you will undoubtedly emphasize, "the formative period of character." It certainly is, Clytie! The simplest garden catalogue will tell you the same. 'Young things 27 grow on the morning sun!' That's the phrase—everywhere. But don't ever forget, Clytie, that they blight just as easily on that selfsame sun! And if you have blighted my little girl instead of 'grown' her I shall not easily forgive you.
"What?" I can hear you demand in hectic righteousness. "Do I claim for one minute that my little daughter has committed a Propriety instead of an Impropriety?" (Oh, Clytie, haven't you learned even yet that Youth is almost never proper but, oh, so seldom vicious?) Admitting perfectly frankly to all the world that my daughter has committed a very grave Impropriety I must still contend that she has by no means committed a Viciousness! And even God Almighty, that shrewdest of Accountants, exacts such little toll for Improprieties. It's these sharkish overhead charges of middlemen like you that strain Youth's reputational resources so.
Far be it from me, alas, to deny that there undoubtedly is a hideous amount of evil in the world. But more and more I stand astonished before the extraordinarily small amount of it that smoulders in young people's bodies compared with the undue 28 proportion of it that flames so frankly in older people's minds! In this case in point for instance, it's your whole moral premises that are wrong! It isn't just that the boy wouldn't have hurt her if he could. But that he couldn't have hurt her if he would! Both equally "pure in heart!" Both romping equally impishly through a moment's impulsive adventure! My God! I'd hate to be the first evil thought that had ever butted into a youngster's mind!
But enough! What you need in your college, perhaps, is a little less French and a little more Biology! Quite a bit more mercy certainly! This setting steel traps for Vice and catching Innocence instead is getting to be an altogether too common human experience. And some of us who have watched the writhings of an accidentally incarcerated household pet have decided long since that even a varmint doesn't quite deserve a steel trap!
But all this, Clytie, being neither here nor there, I come now to the real point of my letter which is to ask a favor.
My little daughter is pretty sick, Clytie—sick mentally, I mean—sex-scared, socially and emotionally disorganized. On the 29 particular trip I am planning for the winter into the more or less primitive and lawless wild-lands of the far South I am hoping that she will find plentiful opportunity to reconstruct her courage from the inherent principles alone of Right and Wrong. But failing this hope by the time the Northern summer is due——?
Have you no memories, Clytie, of another college room? And another indiscretion? Which beginning soberly with a most worthy desire to exchange Philosophy note books ended——if my memory serves right——with a certain amount of kissing. Yet will you contend for one single instant, Clytie, that your thoughts that night were one whit less clean than my daughter's? That there were four "improper" youngsters in that episode, instead of two as now, does not greatly in my mind refute the similarity. Nor the fortuitous chance by which one boy had just vanished over the window-sill and you into another room when that blow fell! Do you remember the things that were said then, Clytie Merriwayne? To your room-mate, I mean? Poor little frightened 30 baby! Seventeen, wasn't she? And cut her throat at dawn rather than meet what had to be met? Pretty little white throat it was too as I remember it. With a rather specially tender and lilting little contralto voice that would have been singing lullabys in another four or five years. And the boy? The boy who was caught, I mean? Not a bad sort at all! Was rather intending to make something fairly decent of himself—up to then! But after the blood-red things the girl's father and mother said to him? He went a bit "batty" after that, some people said! A bit wild anyway! Eighteen or nineteen he must have been? Oh, ye gods, what a waste! Babies all! And to make them suffer so! Just by the thickness of a door you escaped it, Clytie! Just by the whish of a skirt! Except for that——?
Well this is the favor, Clytie. If by Summer my little girl is still staggering under the nervous and moral burden of feeling herself the only "improper" person in the world, I shall ask your permission to tell her the incident here noted, assuring you of course in all fairness and decency—if I am any judge of 31 young character—that she will never tell on you as you have told on her!
As for the rest if I have written over-garrulously I crave your pardon. This turning the hands of the clock backwards is slower work than turning them ahead.
For old time's sake believe me at least
Sincerely yours,
JAFFREY BRETTON.
With a sigh of relief then he rose from his desk, lit another cigarette, and started down the hall, with Creep-Mouse, the blue hound, skulking close behind him.
As he crossed the threshold of his own room and glanced incidentally towards his bed a gasp of purely optical astonishment escaped him. All hunched up in a pale blue puffy-quilt his lovely little daughter lay ensconced among his snow-white pillows. Across her knees innumerable sheets of paper fluttered. Close at her elbow a discarded box of pencils lay tossed like a handful of jack-straws. And the great blue eyes that peered out at him from the cloud of bright gold hair were all brimmed up again with terror and tears.
"I'm—I'm writing to John," she said. 32
"John?" queried her father.
"Why—yes—the English professor—at college—don't you remember?" faltered the girl. "Don't—don't you want to know about John?"
"No, I don't!" said the man. "There's nothing important about 'John' that 'John' won't have a chance to show for himself—in this immediate situation."
"Isn't
