no attraction for him.
Yet he was happy this afternoon. Perhaps because the bus on which he rode was resplendent in its shining new coat of green paint, and the stick-of-candy glamor of it had gone into his disposition. He lit a cigarette and made himself rather comfortable until he arrived at his destination. There were only certain sections of the museum that he visited. Statuary never attracted him, and the Italian madonnas and Dutch gentlemen with inconsequent gloves and books in the foreground rather bored him. It was only here and there in an old picture tucked away in the corner that his eye caught the glare of light on snow in a simple landscape or the bright colors and multiple figures of a battle painting, and he was drawn into long and detailed fits of contemplation and frequent revisits.
On this particular afternoon he was wandering rather aimlessly from one room to another when he suddenly noticed a small man in overshoes, his face latticed with enormous spectacles, thumbing a catalogue in front of a Flemish group. He started, and with a sense of recollection walked by him several times. Suddenly he realized that here was that one-time instrument of his fate, the gargoyle, the little preceptor who had flunked him in his crucial examination.
Oddly enough his first sensation was one of pleased reminiscence and a desire for conversation. Following that he had a curious feeling of shyness, untinged by any bitterness. He paused, staring heavily, and instantly the huge glasses glimmered suspiciously in his eyes.
“Pardon me, sir, but do you remember me?” he asked eagerly.
The preceptor blinked feverishly.
“Ah—no.”
He mentioned the college and the blinks became more optimistic. He wisely decided to let the connection rest there. The preceptor couldn’t, couldn’t possibly remember all the men who had passed before his two “Mirrors of Shalott” so why bring up old, accusing facts—besides—he felt a great desire to chat.
“Yes—no doubt—your face is familiar, you’ll pardon my—my chilliness a moment since—a public place.” He looked around depreciatingly. “You see, I’ve left the university myself.”
“So you’ve gone up in the game?” He instantly regretted this remark for the little man answered rather quickly:
“I’m teaching in a high school in Brooklyn.” Rather embarrassed, the younger man tried to change the subject by looking at the painting before them, but the gargoyle grimly continued:
“I have—a—rather a large family, and much as I regretted leaving the university, the salary was unfortunately very much of a factor.”
There was a pause during which both regarded the picture steadily. Then the gargoyle asked a question:
“How long since you’ve graduated?”
“Oh, I never graduated. I was there for only a short while.” He was sure now that the gargoyle had not the slightest conception of his identity; he might rather enjoy this, however, and he had a pleasant notion that the other was not averse to his company.
“Are you staying here much longer?” The gargoyle was not, and together they moved to a restaurant two blocks down where they indulged in milk, tea and jam and discussed the university. When six o’clock pushed itself into the crowded hours it was with real regret that they shook hands, and the little man, manipulating his short legs in mad expostulation, raced after a Brooklyn car. Yes, it had been distinctly exhilarating. They had talked of academic atmospheres, of hopes that lay in the ivied walls, of little things that could only have counted after the mystic hand of the separation had made them akin. The gargoyle had touched lightly upon his own story, of the work he was doing, of his own tepid, stuffy environment. It was his hope some day to get back, but now there were young appetites to satisfy (the other thought grotesquely of the young gargoyles)—if he could see his way clear in the next few years,—so it went, but through all his hopeful talk there was a kind of inevitability that he would teach in a Brooklyn high school till the last bell called him to his last class. Yes, he went back occasionally. He had a younger brother who was an instructor there.
So they had talked, knit together by the toast and the sense of exile. That night the shrivelled spinster on his left at table asked him what college he thought would be worthy of ushering her promising nephew into the outer world. He became voluble and discoursive. He spoke of ties that bind, of old associations, and remarked carelessly, as he left her, that he was running back himself for a day the next week. But afterwards he lay awake and thought until the chairs and bedposts of his room became grey ghosts in the dawn.
III.
The car was hot and stuffy with most of the smells of the state’s alien population. The red plush seats radiated dust in layers and strata. The smoking car had been even more impossible with filthy floor and heavy air. So the man sat next to a partly open window in the coach and shivered against the cutting cloud of fog that streamed in over him. Lights sped by, vaguely blurred and spreading, marking towns and farmhouses with the democratic indiscrimination of the mist. As the conductor heralded each station the man felt a certain thrill at the familiarity of the names. The times and conditions under which he had heard them revolved in a medley of memories of his one year. One station particularly near the university had a peculiar significance for him because of the different ways it had affected him while he had been in college. He had noted it at the time. September of his entrance year, it had been the point where he grew acutely nervous and fidgety. Returning that November from a football defeat, it had stood for all that seemed gloomy in the gloomy college he was then going back to. In February it had meant the place to wake and pull oneself together, and as he had passed it for the last time that June, he had wondered with a sudden sinking of his heart if it was to be the last time. Now as the train shook and trembled there for a moment, he stared out the window and tried to get an impression. Oddly enough his first one came back to him; he felt rather nervous and uncertain.
He had discovered a few minutes ago that the little preceptor sat ahead of him three seats, but the younger man had not joined him or even addressed him. He wanted to draw to himself every impression he could from this ride.
They drew in. Grip in hand, he swung off the train, and from force of habit turned toward the broad steps that led to the campus. Then he stopped and, dropping his suitcase, looked before him. The night was typical of the place. It was very like the night on which he had taken his last examination, yet somehow less full and less poignant. Inevitability became a reality and assumed an atmosphere of compelling and wearing down. Where before the spirit of spires and towers had thrilled him and had made him dreamily content and acquiescent, it now overawed him. Where before he had realized only his own inconsequence, he now realized his own impotence and insufficiency. The towers in faint outlines and the battlemented walls of vague buildings fronted him. The engine from the train he had just left wheezed and clanged and backed; a hack drove off; a few pale self-effacing town boys strode away voicelessly, swallowed up in the night. And in front of him the college dreamed on—awake. He felt a nervous excitement that might have been the very throb of its slow heart.
A figure brushed violently into him, almost knocking him off his feet. He turned and his eyes pierced the trembling darkness of the arc-light to find the little preceptor blinking apprehensively at him from his gargoyle’s eyes.
“Good evening.”
He was hesitatingly recognized.
“Ah—how do you do? How do you do? Foggy evening, hope I didn’t jar you.”
“Not at all. I was just admiring the serenity.” He paused and almost felt presumptuous.
