The Red Cross Girl

R >> Richard Harding Davis >> The Red Cross Girl

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Anita Flagg's eyes left his quickly; and, with her head bent,
she stared at the bass drum in the orchestra.

"I don't know," she said, "but that sounds just as good."

When the curtain was about to rise she told him to take her
back to her box, so that he could meet her friends and go on
with them to supper; but when they reached the rear of the
house she halted.

"We can see this act," she said, "or--my car's in front of
the theatre--we might go to the park and take a turn or two
or three. Which would you prefer?"

"Don't make me laugh!" said Sam.

As they sat all together at supper with those of the box
party, but paying no attention to them whatsoever, Anita
Flagg sighed contentedly.

"There's only one thing," she said to Sam, "that is making me
unhappy; and because it is such sad news I haven't told you.

It is this: I am leaving America. I am going to spend the
winter in London. I sail next Wednesday."

"My business is to gather news," said Sam, but in all my life
I never gathered such good news as that."

"Good news!" exclaimed Anita.

"Because," explained Sam, "I am leaving, America--am
spending the winter in England. I am sailing on Wednesday.
No; I also am unhappy; but that is not what makes me
unhappy."

"Tell me," begged Anita.

"Some day," said Sam.

The day he chose to tell her was the first day they were at
sea--as they leaned upon the rail, watching Fire Island
disappear.

"This is my unhappiness," said Sam--and he pointed to a name
on the passenger list. It was: "The Earl of Deptford, and
valet." "And because he is on board!"

Anita Flagg gazed with interest at a pursuing sea-gull.

"He is not on board," she said. "He changed to another boat."

Sam felt that by a word from her a great weight might be
lifted from his soul. He looked at her appealingly--hungrily.

"Why did he change?" he begged.

Anita Flagg shook her head in wonder. She smiled at him with
amused despair.

"Is that all that is worrying you?" she said.

Chapter 2. THE GRAND CROSS OF THE CRESCENT

Of some college students it has been said that, in order to
pass their examinations, they will deceive and cheat their
kind professors. This may or may not be true. One only can
shudder and pass hurriedly on. But whatever others may have
done, when young Peter Hallowell in his senior year came up
for those final examinations which, should he pass them even
by a nose, would gain him his degree, he did not cheat. He
may have been too honest, too confident, too lazy, but Peter
did not cheat. It was the professors who cheated.

At Stillwater College, on each subject on which you are
examined you can score a possible hundred. That means
perfection, and in, the brief history of Stillwater, which
is a very, new college, only one man has attained it. After
graduating he "accepted a position" in an asylum for the
insane, from which he was, promoted later to the poor-house,
where he died. Many Stillwater undergraduates studied his
career and, lest they also should attain perfection, were
afraid to study anything else. Among these Peter was by far
the most afraid.

The marking system at Stillwater is as follows: If in all the
subjects in which you have been examined your marks added
together give you an average of ninety, you are passed "with
honors"; if of seventy-five, you pass "with distinction"; if
Of fifty, You just "pass." It is not unlike the grocer's
nice adjustment of fresh eggs, good eggs, and eggs. The
whole college knew that if Peter got in among the eggs he
would be lucky, but the professors and instructors of
Stillwater 'were determined that, no matter what young
Hallowell might do to prevent it, they would see that he
passed his examinations. And they constituted the jury of
awards. Their interest in Peter was not because they loved
him so much, but because each loved his own vine-covered
cottage, his salary, and his dignified title the more. And
each knew that that one of the faculty who dared to flunk
the son of old man Hallowell, who had endowed Stillwater, who
supported Stillwater, and who might be expected to go on
supporting Stillwater indefinitely, might also at the same
time hand in his official resignation.

Chancellor Black, the head of Stillwater, was an up-to-date
college president. If he did not actually run after money he
went where money was, and it was not his habit to be
downright rude to those who possessed it. And if any three-
thousand-dollar-a-year professor, through a too strict
respect for Stillwater's standards of learning, should lose
to that institution a half-million-dollar observatory,
swimming-pool, or gymnasium, he was the sort of college
president, who would see to it that the college lost also the
services of that too conscientious instructor.

He did not put this in writing or in words, but just before
the June examinations, when on, the campus he met one of the
faculty, he would inquire with kindly interest as to the
standing of young Hallowell.

"That is too bad!" he would exclaim, but, more in sorrow than
in anger. "Still, I hope the boy can pull through. He is his
dear father's pride, and his father's heart is set upon his
son's obtaining his degree. Let us hope he will pull
through." For four years every professor had been pulling
Peter through, and the conscience of each had become
calloused. They had only once more to shove him through and
they would be free of him forever. And so, although they did
not conspire together, each knew that of the firing squad
that was to aim its rifles at, Peter, HIS rifle would hold
the blank cartridge.

The only one of them who did not know this was Doctor Henry
Gilman. Doctor Gilman was the professor of ancient and modern
history at Stillwater, and greatly respected and loved. He
also was the author of those well-known text-books, "The
Founders of Islam," and "The Rise and Fall of the Turkish
Empire." This latter work, in five volumes, had been not
unfavorably compared to Gibbon's "Decline and Fall of the
Roman Empire." The original newspaper comment, dated some
thirty years back, the doctor had preserved, and would
produce it, now somewhat frayed and worn, and read it to
visitors. He knew it by heart, but to him it always possessed
a contemporary and news interest.

"Here is a review of the history," he would say--he always
referred to it as "the" history--"that I came across in my
TRANSCRIPT."

In the eyes of Doctor Gilman thirty years was so brief a
period that it was as though the clipping had been printed
the previous after-noon.

The members of his class who were examined on the "Rise and
Fall," and who invariably came to grief over it, referred to
it briefly as the Fall," sometimes feelingly as "the. . . .
Fall." The" history began when Constantinople was Byzantium,
skipped lightly over six centuries to Constantine, and in the
last two Volumes finished up the Mohammeds with the downfall
of the fourth one and the coming of Suleiman. Since Suleiman,
Doctor Gilman did not recognize Turkey as being on the map.
When his history said the Turkish Empire had fallen, then the
Turkish Empire fell. Once Chancellor Black suggested that he
add a sixth volume that would cover the last three centuries.

"In a history of Turkey issued as a text-book," said the
chancellor, "I think the Russian-Turkish War should be
included."

Doctor Gilman, from behind his gold-rimmed spectacles, gazed
at him in mild reproach. "The war in the Crimea!" he
exclaimed. "Why, I was alive at the time. I know about it.
That is not history."

Accordingly, it followed that to a man who since the
seventeenth century knew of no event, of interest, Cyrus
Hallowell, of the meat-packers' trust, was not an imposing
figure. And such a man the son of Cyrus Hallowell was but an
ignorant young savage, to whom "the" history certainly had
been a closed book. And so when Peter returned his
examination paper in a condition almost as spotless as that
in which he had received it, Doctor Gilman carefully and
conscientiously, with malice toward none and, with no thought
of the morrow, marked" five."

Each of the other professors and instructors had marked Peter
fifty. In their fear of Chancellor Black they dared not give
the boy less, but they refused to be slaves to the extent of
crediting him with a single point higher than was necessary
to pass him. But Doctor Gilman's five completely knocked out
the required average of fifty, and young Peter was "found"
and could not graduate. It was an awful business! The only
son of the only Hallowell refused a degree in his father's
own private college--the son of the man who had built the
Hallowell Memorial, the new Laboratory, the Anna Hallowell
Chapel, the Hallowell Dormitory, and the Hallowell Athletic
Field. When on the bulletin board of the dim hall of the
Memorial to his departed grandfather Peter read of his own
disgrace and downfall, the light the stained-glass window
cast upon his nose was of no sicklier a green than was the
nose itself. Not that Peter wanted an A.M. or an A.B., not
that he desired laurels he had not won, but because the young
man was afraid of his father. And he had cause to be. Father
arrived at Stillwater the next morning. The interviews that
followed made Stillwater history.

"My son is not an ass!" is what Hallowell senior is said to
have said to Doctor Black. "And if in four years you and your
faculty cannot give him the rudiments of an education, I will
send him to a college that can. And I'll send my money where
I send Peter."

In reply Chancellor Black could have said that it was the
fault of the son and not of the college; he could have said
that where three men had failed to graduate one hundred and
eighty had not. But did he say that? Oh, no, he did not say
that! He was not that sort of, a college president. Instead,
he remained calm and sympathetic, and like a conspirator in a
comic opera glanced apprehensively round his, study. He
lowered his voice.

"There has been contemptible work here, "he whispered--"spite
and a mean spirit of reprisal. I have been making a secret
investigation, and I find that this blow at your son and you,
and at the good name of our college was struck by one man, a
man with a grievance--Doctor Gilman. Doctor Gilman has
repeatedly desired me to raise his salary." This did not
happen to be true, but in such a crisis Dotor Black could not
afford to be too particular.

"I have seen no reason for raising his salary--and there you
have the explanation. In revenge he has made this attack. But
he overshot his mark. In causing us temporary embarrassment
he has brought about his own downfall. I have already asked
for his resignation."

Every day in the week Hallowell was a fair, sane man, but on
this particular day he was wounded, his spirit was hurt, his
self-esteem humiliated. He was in a state of mind to believe
anything rather than that his son was an idiot.

"I don't want the man discharged," he protested, "just
because Peter is lazy. But if Doctor Gilman was moved by
personal considerations, if he sacrificed my Peter in order
to get even . . . ."

"That," exclaimed Black in a horrified whisper, "is exactly
what he did! Your generosity to the college is well known.
You are recognized all over America as its patron. And he
believed that when I refused him an increase in salary it was
really you who refused it--and he struck at you through your
son. Everybody thinks so. The college is on fire with
indignation. And look at the mark he gave Peter! Five! That
in itself shows the malice. Five is not a mark, it is an
insult! No one, certainly not your brilliant son--look how
brilliantly he managed the glee-club and foot-ball tour--is
stupid enough to deserve five. No, Doctor Gilman went too
far. And he has been justly punished!"

What Hallowell senior was willing to believe of what the
chancellor told him, and his opinion of the matter as
expressed to Peter, differed materially.

"They tell me," he concluded, "that in the fall they will
give you another examination, and if you pass then, you will
get your degree. No one will know you've got it. They'll slip
it to you out of the side-door like a cold potato to a tramp.
The only thing people will know is that when your classmates
stood up and got their parchments--the thing they'd been
working for four years, the only reason for their going to
college at all--YOU were not among those present. That's your
fault; but if you don't get your degree next fall that will
be my fault. I've supported you through college and you've
failed to deliver the goods. Now you deliver them next fall,
or you can support yourself."

"That will be all right," said Peter humbly; "I'll pass next
fall."

"I'm going to make sure of that," said Hallowell senior. "To-
morrow you will take those history books that you did not
open, especially Gilman's 'Rise and Fall,' which it seems you
have not even purchased, and you will travel for the entire
summer with a private tutor . . . ."

Peter, who had personally conducted the foot-ball and base-
ball teams over half of the Middle States and daily bullied
and browbeat them, protested with indignation. "WON'T travel
with a private tutor!"

"If I say so," returned Hallowell senior grimly, "you'll
travel with a governess and a trained nurse, and wear a
strait jacket. And you'll continue to wear it until you can
recite the history of Turkey backward. And in order that you
may know it backward--and forward you will spend this summer
in Turkey--in Constantinople--until I send you permission to
come home."

"Constantinople!" yelled Peter. "In August! Are you serious?"

" Do I look it?" asked Peter's father. He did.

"In Constantinople," explained Mr. Hallowell senior, "there
will be nothing to distract you from your studies, and in
spite of yourself every minute you will be imbibing history
and local color."

"I'll be imbibing fever,", returned Peter, "and sunstroke and
sudden death. If you want to get rid of me, why don't you
send me to the island where they sent Dreyfus? It's quicker.
You don't have to go to Turkey to study about Turkey."

"You do!" said his father.

Peter did not wait for the festivities of commencement week.
All day he hid in his room, packing his belongings or giving
them away to e members of his class, who came to tell him
what a rotten shame it was, and to bid him good-by. They
loved Peter for himself alone, and at losing him were loyally
enraged. They sired publicly to express their sentiments, and
to that end they planned a mock trial of the Rise and Fall,"
at which a packed jury would sentence it to cremation. They
planned also to hang Doctor Gilman in effigy. The effigy with
a rope round its neck was even then awaiting mob violence. It
was complete to the silver-white beard and the gold
spectacles. But Peter squashed both demonstrations. He did
not know Doctor Gilman had been forced to resign, but he
protested that the horse-play of his friends would make him
appear a bad loser. "It would look, boys," he said, "as
though I couldn't take my medicine. Looks like kicking
against the umpire's decision. Old Gilman fought fair. He
gave me just what was coming to me. I think a darn sight more
of him than do of that bunch of boot-lickers that had the
colossal nerve to pretend I scored fifty!"

Doctor Gilman sat in his cottage that stood the edge of the
campus, gazing at a plaster bust of Socrates which he did not
see. Since that morning he had ceased to sit in the chair of
history at Stillwater College. They were retrenching, the
chancellor had told him curtly, cutting down unnecessary
expenses, for even in his anger Doctor Black was too
intelligent to hint at his real motive, and the professor was
far too innocent of evil, far too detached from college
politics to suspect. He would remain a professor emeritus on
half pay, but he no longer would teach. The college he had
served for thirty years-since it consisted of two brick
buildings and a faculty of ten young men--no longer needed
him. Even his ivy-covered cottage, in which his wife and he
had lived for twenty years, in which their one child had
died, would at the beginning of the next term be required of
him. But the college would allow him those six months in
which to "look round." So, just outside the circle of light
from his student lamp, he sat in his study, and stared with
unseeing eyes at the bust of Socrates. He was not considering
ways and means. They must be faced later. He was considering
how he could possibly break the blow to his wife. What
eviction from that house would mean to her no one but he
understood. Since the day their little girl had died, nothing
in the room that had been her playroom, bedroom, and nursery
had been altered, nothing had been touched. To his wife,
somewhere in the house that wonderful, God-given child was
still with them. Not as a memory but as a real and living
presence. When at night the professor and his wife sat at
either end of the study table, reading by the same lamp, he
would see her suddenly lift her head, alert and eager, as
though from the nursery floor a step had sounded, as though
from the darkness a sleepy voice had called her. And when
they would be forced to move to lodgings in the town, to some
students' boarding-house, though they could take with them
their books, their furniture, their mutual love and
comradeship, they must leave behind them the haunting
presence of the child, the colored pictures she had cut from
the Christmas numbers and plastered over the nursery walls,
the rambler roses that with her own hands she had planted and
that now climbed to her window and each summer peered into
her empty room.

Outside Doctor Gilman's cottage, among the trees of the
campus, paper lanterns like oranges aglow were swaying in the
evening breeze. In front of Hallowell the flame of a bonfire
shot to the top of the tallest elms, and gathered in a circle
round it the glee club sang, and cheer succeeded cheer-cheers
for the heroes of the cinder track, for the heroes of the
diamond and the gridiron , cheers for the men who had flunked
especially for one man who had flunked. But for that man who
for thirty years in the class room had served the college
there were no cheers. No one remembered him, except the one
student who had best reason to remember him. But this
recollection Peter had no rancor or bitterness and, still
anxious lest he should be considered a bad loser, he wished
Doctor Gilman a every one else to know that. So when the
celebration was at its height and just before train was due
to carry him from Stillwater, ran across the campus to the
Gilman cottage say good-by. But he did not enter the cottage
He went so far only as half-way up the garden walk. In the
window of the study which opened upon the veranda he saw
through frame of honeysuckles the professor and wife standing
beside the study table. They were clinging to each other, the
woman weep silently with her cheek on his shoulder, thin,
delicate, well-bred hands clasping arms, while the man
comforted her awkward unhappily, with hopeless, futile
caresses.

Peter, shocked and miserable at what he had seen, backed
steadily away. What disaster had befallen the old couple he
could not imagine. The idea that he himself might in any way
connected with their grief never entered mind. He was certain
only that, whatever the trouble was, it was something so
intimate and personal that no mere outsider might dare to
offer his sympathy. So on tiptoe he retreated down the garden
walk and, avoiding the celebration at the bonfire, returned
to his rooms. An hour later the entire college escorted him
to the railroad station, and with "He's a jolly good fellow"
and "He's off to Philippopolis in the morn--ing" ringing in
his ears, he sank back his seat in the smoking-car and gazed
at the lights of Stillwater disappearing out of his life. And
he was surprised to find that what lingered his mind was not
the students, dancing like Indians round the bonfire, or at
the steps of the smoking-car fighting to shake his hand, but
the man and woman alone in the cottage stricken with sudden
sorrow, standing like two children lost in the streets, who
cling to each other for comfort and at the same moment
whisper words of courage.

Two months Later, at Constantinople, Peter, was suffering
from remorse over neglected opportunities, from prickly heat,
and from fleas. And it not been for the moving-picture man,
and the poker and baccarat at the Cercle Oriental, he would
have flung himself into the Bosphorus. In the mornings with
the tutor he read ancient history, which he promptly forgot;
and for the rest of the hot, dreary day with the moving-
picture man through the bazaars and along the water-front he
stalked suspects for the camera.

The name of the moving-picture man was Harry Stetson. He had
been a newspaper reporter, a press-agent, and an actor in
vaudeville and in a moving-picture company. Now on his own
account he was preparing an illustrated lecture on the East,
adapted to churches and Sunday-schools. Peter and he wrote it
in collaboration, and in the evenings rehearsed it with
lantern slides before an audience of the hotel clerk, the
tutor, and the German soldier of fortune who was trying to
sell the young Turks very old battleships. Every other
foreigner had fled the city, and the entire diplomatic corps
had removed itself to the summer capital at Therapia.

There Stimson, the first secretary of the embassy and, in the
absence of the ambassador, CHARGE D'AFFAIRES, invited Peter
to become his guest. Stimson was most anxious to be polite to
Peter, for Hallowell senior was a power in the party then in
office, and a word from him at Washington in favor of a
rising young diplomat would do no harm. But Peter was afraid
his father would consider Therapia "out of bounds."

"He sent me to Constantinople," explained Peter, "and if he
thinks I'm not playing the game the Lord only knows where he
might send me next-and he might cut off my allowance."

In the matter of allowance Peter's father had been most
generous. This was fortunate, for poker, as the pashas and
princes played it at he Cercle, was no game for cripples or
children. But, owing to his letter-of-credit and his illspent
life, Peter was able to hold his own against men three times
his age and of fortunes nearly equal to that of his father.
Only they disposed of their wealth differently. On many
hot evening Peter saw as much of their money scattered over
the green table as his father had spent over the Hallowell
athletic field.

In this fashion Peter spent his first month of exile--in the
morning trying to fill his brain with names of great men who
had been a long time dead, and in his leisure hours with
local color. To a youth of his active spirit it was a full
life without joy or recompense. A Letter from Charley Hines,
a classmate who lived at Stillwater, which arrived after
Peter had endured six weeks of Constantinople, released him
from boredom and gave life a real interest. It was a letter
full of gossip intended to amuse. One paragraph failed of its
purpose. It read: "Old man Gilman has got the sack. The
chancellor offered him up as a sacrifice to your father, and
because he was unwise enough to flunk you. He is to move out
in September. I ran across them last week when I was looking
for rooms for a Freshman cousin. They were reserving one in
the same boarding-house. It's a shame, and I know you'll
agree. They are a fine old couple, and I don't like to think
of them herding with Freshmen in a shine boardinghouse. Black
always was a swine."

Peter spent fully ten minutes getting to the cable office.

"Just learned," he cabled his father, "Gilman dismissed
because flunked me consider this outrageous please see he
is reinstated."

The answer, which arrived the next day, did not satisfy
Peter. It read: "Informed Gilman acted through spite have no
authority as you know to interfere any act of black."

Since Peter had learned of the disaster that through his
laziness had befallen the Gilmans, his indignation at the
injustice had been hourly increasing. Nor had his banishment
to Constantinople strengthened his filial piety. On the
contrary, it had rendered him independent and but little
inclined to kiss the paternal rod. In consequence his next
cable was not conciliatory.

"Dismissing Gilman Looks more Like we acted through spite
makes me appear contemptible Black is a toady will do as
you direct please reinstate."

To this somewhat peremptory message his father answered:

"If your position unpleasant yourself to blame not Black
incident is closed."

"Is it?" said the son of his father. He called Stetson to his
aid and explained. Stetson reminded him of the famous
cablegram of his distinguished contemporary: "Perdicaris
alive and Raisuli dead!"

Peter's paraphrase of this ran: "Gilman returns to Stillwater
or I will not try for degree."

The reply was equally emphatic:

"You earn your degree or you earn your own living."

This alarmed Stetson, but caused Peter to deliver his
ultimatum: "Choose to earn my own living am leaving
Constantinople."

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