The last choice was the most difficult. The remaining boys were mediocrities, or at any rate they had so far displayed no qualities that set them apart. For a time Barnes, thinking patriotically of his old university, considered the football captain, a virtuosic halfback who would have been welcome on any Eastern squad; but that would have destroyed the integrity of the idea.
He finally chose a younger boy, Gordon Vandervere, of a rather higher standing than the others. Vandervere was the handsomest and one of the most popular boys in school. He had been intended for college, but his father, a harassed minister, was glad to see the way made easy.
Barnes was content with himself; he felt godlike in being able to step in to mold these various destinies. He felt as if they were his own sons, and he telegraphed Schofield in Minneapolis:
HAVE CHOSEN HALF A DOZEN OF THE OTHER, AND AM BACKING THEM AGAINST THE WORLD.
And now, after all this biography, the story begins. . . .
The continuity of the frieze is broken. Young Charley Schofield had been expelled from Hotchkiss. It was a small but painful tragedy—he and four other boys, nice boys, popular boys, broke the honor system as to smoking. Charley’s father felt the matter deeply, varying between disappointment about Charley and anger at the school. Charley came home to Minneapolis in a desperate humor and went to the country day-school while it was decided what he was to do.
It was still undecided in midsummer. When school was over, he spent his time playing golf, or dancing at the Minnekada Club—he was a handsome boy of eighteen, older than his age, with charming manners, with no serious vices, but with a tendency to be easily influenced by his admirations. His principal admiration at the time was Gladys Irving, a young married woman scarcely two years older than himself. He rushed her at the club dances, and felt sentimentally about her, though Gladys on her part was in love with her husband and asked from Charley only the confirmation of her own youth and charm that a belle often needs after her first baby.
Sitting out with her one night on the veranda of the Lafayette Club, Charley felt a necessity to boast to her, to pretend to be more experienced, and so more potentially protective.
“I’ve seen a lot of life for my age,” he said. “I’ve done things I couldn’t even tell you about.”
Gladys didn’t answer.
“In fact last week—” he began, and thought better of it. “In any case I don’t think I’ll go to Yale next year—I’d have to go East right away, and tutor all summer. If I don’t go, there’s a job open in Father’s office; and after Wister goes back to college in the fall, I’ll have the roadster to myself.”
“I thought you were going to college,” Gladys said coldly.
“I was. But I’ve thought things over, and now I don’t know. I’ve usually gone with older boys, and I feel older than boys my age. I like older girls, for instance.” When Charley looked at her then suddenly, he seemed unusually attractive to her—it would be very pleasant to have him here, to cut in on her at dances all summer. But Gladys said:
“You’d be a fool to stay here.”
“Why?”
“You started something—you ought to go through with it. A few years running around town, and you won’t be good for anything.”
“You think so,” he said indulgently.
Gladys didn’t want to hurt him or to drive him away from her; yet she wanted to say something stronger.
“Do you think I’m thrilled when you tell me you’ve had a lot of dissipated experience? I don’t see how anybody could claim to be your friend and encourage you in that. If I were you, I’d at least pass your examinations for college. Then they can’t say you just lay down after you were expelled from school.”
“You think so?” Charley said, unruffled, and in his grave, precocious manner, as though he were talking to a child. But she had convinced him, because he was in love with her and the moon was around her. “Oh me, oh my, oh you,” was the last music they had danced to on the Wednesday before, and so it was one of those times.
Had Gladys let him brag to her, concealing her curiosity under a mask of companionship, if she had accepted his own estimate of himself as a man formed, no urging of his father’s would have mattered. As it was, Charley passed into college that fall, thanks to a girl’s tender reminiscences and her own memories of the sweetness of youth’s success in young fields.
And it was well for his father that he did. If he had not, the catastrophe of his older brother Wister that autumn would have broken Schofield’s heart. The morning after the Harvard game the New York papers carried a headline:
YALE BOYS AND FOLLIES GIRLS IN MOTOR CRASH NEAR RYE
IRENE DALEY IN GREENWICH HOSPITAL THREATENS BEAUTY SUIT
MILLIONAIRE’S SON INVOLVED
The four boys came up before the dean a fortnight later. Wister Schofield, who had driven the car, was called first.
“It was not your car, Mr. Schofield,” the dean said. “It was Mr. Kavenaugh’s car, wasn’t it?”
“Yes sir.”
“How did you happen to be driving?”
“The girls wanted me to. They didn’t feel safe.”
“But you’d been drinking too, hadn’t you?”
“Yes, but not so much.”
“Tell me this,” asked the dean: “Haven’t you ever driven a car when you’d been drinking—perhaps drinking even more than you were that night?”
“Why—perhaps once or twice, but I never had any accidents. And this was so clearly unavoidable—”
“Possibly,” the dean agreed; “but we’ll have to look at it this way: Up to this time you had no accidents even when you deserved to have them. Now you’ve had one when you didn’t deserve it. I don’t want you to go out of here feeling that life or the University or I myself haven’t given you a square deal, Mr. Schofield. But the newspapers have given this a great deal of prominence, and I’m afraid that the University will have to dispense with your presence.”
Moving along the frieze to Howard Kavenaugh, the dean’s remarks to him were substantially the same.
“I am particularly sorry in your case, Mr. Kavenaugh. Your father has made substantial gifts to the University, and I took pleasure in watching you play hockey with your usual brilliance last winter.”
Howard Kavenaugh left the office with uncontrollable tears running down his cheeks.
Since Irene Daley’s suit for her ruined livelihood, her ruined beauty, was directed against the owner and the driver of the automobile, there were lighter sentences for the other two occupants of the car. Beau Lebaume came into the dean’s office with his arm in a sling and his handsome head swathed in bandages and was suspended for the remainder of the current year. He took it jauntily and said good-by to the dean with as cheerful a smile as could show through the bandages. The last case, however, was the most difficult. George Winfield, who had entered high-school late because work in the world had taught him the value of an education, came in looking at the floor.
“I can’t understand your participation in this affair,” said the dean. “I know your benefactor, Mr. Barnes, personally. He told me how you left school to go to work, and how you came back to it four years later to continue your education, and he felt that your attitude toward life was essentially serious. Up to this point you have a good record here at New Haven, but it struck me several months ago that you were running with a rather gay crowd, boys with a great deal of money to spend. You are old enough to realize that they couldn’t possibly give you as much in material ways as they took away from you in others. I’ve got to give you a year’s suspension. If you come back, I have every hope you’ll justify the confidence that Mr. Barnes reposed in you.”
“I won’t come back,” said Winfield. “I couldn’t face Mr. Barnes after this. I’m not going home.”
At the suit brought by Irene Daley, all four of them lied loyally for Wister Schofield. They said that before they hit the gasoline pump they had seen Miss Daley grab the wheel. But Miss Daley was in court, with her face, familiar to the tabloids, permanently scarred; and her counsel exhibited a letter canceling her recent moving-picture contract. The students’ case looked bad; so in the intermission, on their lawyer’s advice, they settled for forty thousand dollars. Wister Schofield and Howard Kavenaugh were snapped by a dozen photographers leaving the courtroom, and served up in flaming notoriety next day.
That night, Wister, the three Minneapolis boys, Howard and Beau Lebaume started for home. George Winfield said good-by to them in the Pennsylvania station; and having no home to go to, walked out into New York to start life over.
Of all Barnes’ protйgйs, Jack Stubbs with his one arm was the favorite. He was the first to achieve fame—when he played on the tennis team at Princeton, the rotogravure section carried pictures showing how he threw the ball from his racket in serving. When he was graduated, Barnes took him into his own office—he was often spoken of as an adopted son. Stubbs, together with Schlach, now a prominent consulting engineer, were the most satisfactory of his experiments, although James Matsko at twenty-seven had just been made
