TED SEIZES THE DAY

The next morning Ted strolled into his uncle’s office to ask if the latter had any objections to his accepting an invitation to a house-party from Hal Underwood, a college classmate, at the latter’s home near Springfield.

The doctor considered a moment before answering. He knew all about the Underwoods and knew that his erratic nephew could not be in a safer, pleasanter place. Also his quick wit saw a chance to put the screws on the lad in connection with the tutoring business.

“I suppose your June allowance is able to float your traveling expenses,” he remarked less guilelessly than the remark sounded.

The June allowance was, it seemed, the missing link.

“I thought maybe you would be willing to allow me a little extra this month on account of commencement stunts. It is darned expensive sending nosegays to sweet girl graduates. I couldn’t help going broke. Honest I couldn’t, Uncle Phil.” Then as his uncle did not leap at the suggestion offered, the speaker changed his tack. “Anyway, you would be willing to let me have my July money ahead of time, wouldn’t you?” he ingratiated. “It is only ten days to the first.”

But Doctor Holiday still chose to be inconveniently irrelevant.

“Have you any idea how much my bill was for repairing the car?” he asked.

Ted shook his head shamefacedly, and bent to examine a picture in a magazine which lay on the desk. He wasn’t anxious to have the car incident resurrected. He had thought it decently buried by this time, having heard no more about it.

“It was a little over a hundred dollars,” continued the doctor.

The boy looked up, genuinely distressed.

“Gee, Uncle Phil! It’s highway robbery.”

“Scarcely. All things considered, it was a very fair bill. A hundred dollars is a good deal to pay for the pleasure of nearly getting yourself and somebody else killed, Ted.”

Ted pulled his forelock and had nothing to say.

“Were you in earnest about paying up for that particular bit of folly, son?”

“Why, yes. At least I didn’t think it would be any such sum as that,” Ted hedged. “I’ll be swamped if I try to pay it out of my allowance. I can’t come out even, as it is. Couldn’t you take it out of my own money what’s coming to me when I’m of age?”

“I could, if getting myself paid were the chief consideration. As it happens, it isn’t. I’m sorry if I seem to be hard on you, but I am going to hold you to your promise, even if it pinches a bit. I think you know why. How about it, son?”

“I suppose it has to go that way if you say so,” said Ted a little sulkily. “Can I pay it in small amounts?”

“How small? Dollar a year? I’d hate to wait until I was a hundred and forty or so to get my money back.”

The boy grinned reluctantly, answering the friendly twinkle in his uncle’s eyes. He was relieved that a joke had penetrated what had begun to appear to be an unpleasantly jestless interview. He hated to be called to account. Like many another older sinner he liked dancing, but found paying the piper an irksome business.

“Nonsense, Uncle Phil! I meant real paying. Will ten dollars a month do?”

“It will, provided you don’t try to borrow ahead each month from the next one.”

“I won’t,” glibly. “If you will ” The boy broke off and had the grace to look confused, realizing he had been about to do the very thing he had promised in the same breath not to do. “Then that means I can’t go to Hal’s,” he added soberly.

He felt sober. There was more than Hal and the house-party involved, though the latter had fallen in peculiarly fortuitous with his other plans. He had rashly written Madeline he would be in Holyoke next week as she desired, and the first of July and his allowance would still be just out of reach next week. It was a confounded nuisance, to say the least, being broke just now, with Uncle Phil turned stuffy.

“No, I don’t want you to give up your house-party, though that rests with you. I’ll make a bargain with you. I’ll advance your whole July allowance minus ten dollars Saturday morning.”

Ted’s face cleared, beamed like sudden sunshine on a cloudy March day.

“You will! Uncle Phil, you certainly are a peach!” And in his exuberance he tossed his cap to the ceiling, catching it deftly on his nose as it descended.

“Hold on. Don’t rejoice too soon. It was to be a bargain, you know. You have heard only one side.”

“Oh h!” The exclamation was slightly crestfallen.

“I understand that you fell down on most of your college work this spring. Is that correct?”

This was a new complication and just as he had thought he was safely out of the woods, too. Ted hung his head, gave consent to his uncle’s question by silence and braced himself for a lecture, though he was a little relieved that he need not bring up the subject of that inconvenient flunking of his, himself; that his uncle was already prepared, whoever it was that had told tales. The lecture did not come, however.

“Here is the bargain. I will advance the money as I said, provided that as soon as you get back from Hal’s you will make arrangements to tutor with Mr. Caldwell this summer, in all the subjects you failed in and promise to put in two months of good, solid cramming, no half way about it.”

“Gee, Uncle Phil! It’s vacation.”

“You don’t need a vacation. If all I hear of you is true, or even half of it, you made your whole college year one grand, sweet vacation. What is the answer? Want time to think the proposition over?”

“No o. I guess I’ll take you up. I suppose I’ll have to tutor anyway if I don’t want to drop back a class, and I sure don’t,” Ted admitted honestly. “Unless you’ll let me quit and you won’t. It is awfully tough, though. You never made Tony or Larry kill themselves studying in vacations. I don’t see ”

“Neither Tony or Larry ever flunked a college course. It remained for you to be the first Holiday to wear a dunce cap.”

Ted flushed angrily at that. The shot went home, as the doctor intended it should. He knew when to hit and how to do it hard, as Larry had testified.

“Fool’s cap if you like, Uncle Phil. I am not a dunce.”

“I rather think that is true. Anyway, prove it to us this summer and there is no one who will be gladder than I to take back the aspersion. Is it understood then? You have your house-party and when you come back you are pledged to honest work, no shirking, no requests for time off, no complaints. Have I your word?”

Ted considered. He thought he was paying a stiff price for his house-party and his lark with Madeline. He could give up the first, though a fellow always had a topping time at Hal’s; but he couldn’t quite see himself owning ignominiously to Madeline that he couldn’t keep his promise to her because of empty pockets. Moreover, as he had admitted, he would have to tutor anyway, probably, and he might as well get some gain out of the pain.

“I promise, Uncle Phil.”

“Good. Then that is settled. I am not going to say anything more about the flunking. You know how we all feel about it. I think you have sense enough and conscience enough to see it about the way the rest of us do.”

Ted’s eyes were down again now. Somehow Uncle Phil always made him feel worse by what he didn’t say than a million sermons from other people would have done. He would have gladly have given up the projected journey and anything else he possessed this moment if he could have had a clean slate to show. But it was too late for that now. He had to take the consequences of his own folly.

“I see it all right, Uncle Phil,” he said looking up. “Trouble is I never seem to have the sense to look until afterward. You are awfully decent about it and letting me go to Hal’s and everything. I I’ll be gone about a week, do you mind?”

“No. Stay as long as you like. I am satisfied with your promise to make good when you do come.”

Ted slipped away quickly then. He was ashamed to meet his uncle’s kind eyes. He knew he was playing a crooked game with stacked cards. He hadn’t exactly lied hadn’t said a word that wasn’t strictly true, indeed. He was going to Hal’s, but he had let his uncle think he was going to stay there the whole week whereas in reality he meant to spend the greater part of the time in Madeline Taylor’s society, which was not in the bargain at all. Well he would make up later by keeping his promise about the studying. He would show them Larry wasn’t the only Holiday who could make good. The dunce cap jibe rankled.

And so, having satisfied his sufficiently elastic conscience, he departed on Saturday for Springfield and adjacent points.

He had the usual “topping” time at Hal’s and tore himself away with the utmost reluctance from the house-party, had half a mind, indeed, to wire Madeline he couldn’t come to Holyoke. But after all that seemed rather a mean thing to do after having treated her so rough before, and in the end he had gone, only one day later than he had promised.

It was characteristic that, arrived at his destination, he straightway forgot the pleasures he was foregoing at Hal’s and plunged whole-heartedly into amusing himself to the utmost with Madeline Taylor. Carpe Diem was Ted Holiday’s motto.

Madeline had indeed proved unexpectedly pretty and attractive when she opened the door to him on Cousin Emma’s little box of a front porch, clad all in white and wearing no extraneous ornament of any sort, blushing delightfully and obviously more than glad of his coming. He would not have been Ted Holiday if he hadn’t risen to the occasion. The last girl in sight was usually the only girl for him so long as she was in sight and sufficiently jolly and good to look upon.

A little later Madeline donned a trim tailored black sailor hat and a pretty and becoming pale green sweater and the two went down the steps together, bound for an excursion to the park. As they descended Ted’s hand slipped gallantly under the girl’s elbow and she leaned on it ever so little, reveling in the ceremony and prolonging it as much as possible. Well she knew that Cousin Emma and the children were peering out from behind the curtains of the front bedroom upstairs, and that Mrs. Bascom and her stuck up daughter Lily had their faces glued to the pane next door. They would all see that this was no ordinary beau, but a real swell like the magnificent young men in the movies. Perhaps as she descended Cousin Emma’s steps and went down the path between the tiger lilies and peonies that flanked the graveled path with Ted Holiday beside her, Madeline Taylor had her one perfect moment.

Only the “ordinary” Fred, on hearing his wife’s voluble descriptions later of Madeline’s “grand” young man failed to be suitably impressed. “Them swells don’t mean no girl no good no time,” he had summed up his views with sententious accumulation of negatives.

But little enough did either Ted or Madeline reck of Fred’s or any other opinion as they fared their blithe and care-free way that gala week. The rest of the world was supremely unimportant as they went canoeing and motoring and trolley riding and mountain climbing and “movieing” together. Madeline strove with all her might to dress and act and be as nearly like those other girls after whom she was modeling herself as possible, to do nothing, which could jar on Ted in any way or remind him that she was “different.” In her happiness and sincere desire to please she succeeded remarkably well in making herself superficially at least very much like Ted’s own “kind of girl” and though with true masculine obtuseness he was entirely unaware of the conscious effort she was putting into the performance nevertheless he enjoyed the results in full and played up to her undeniable charms with his usual debonair and heedless grace and gallantry.

The one thing that had been left out of the program for lack of suitable opportunity was dancing, an omission not to be tolerated by two strenuous and modern young persons who would rather fox trot than eat any day. Accordingly on Thursday it was agreed that they should repair to the White Swan, a resort down the river, famous for its excellent cuisine, its perfect dance floor and its “snappy” negro orchestra. Both Ted and Madeline knew that the Swan had also a reputation of another less desirable sort, but both were willing to ignore the fact for the sake of enjoying the “jolliest jazz on the river” as the advertisement read. The dance was the thing.

It was, indeed. The evening was decidedly the best yet, as both averred, pirouetting and spinning and romping through one fox trot and one step after another. The excitement of the music, the general air of exhilaration about the place and their own high-pitched mood made the occasion different from the other gaieties of the week, merrier, madder, a little more reckless.

Once, seeing a painted, over-dressed or rather under-dressed, girl in the arms of a pasty-faced, protruding-eyed roue, both obviously under the spell of too much liquid inspiration, Ted suffered a momentary revulsion and qualm of conscience. He shouldn’t have brought Madeline here. It wasn’t the sort of place to bring a girl, no matter how good the music was. Oh, well! What did it matter just this once? They were there now and they might as well get all the fun they could out of it. The music started up, he held out his hand to Madeline and they wheeled into the maze of dancers, the girl’s pliant body yielding to his arms, her eyes brilliant with excitement. They danced on and on and it was amazingly and imprudently late when they finally left the Swan and went home to Cousin Emma’s house.

Ted had meant to leave Madeline at the gate, but somehow he lingered and followed the girl out into the yard behind the house where they seated themselves in the hammock in the shade of the lilac bushes. And suddenly, without any warning, he had her in his arms and was kissing her tempestuously.

It was only for a moment, however. He pulled himself together, hot cheeked and ashamed and flung himself out of the hammock. Madeline sat very still, not saying a word, as she watched him march to and fro between the beds of verbena and love-lies-bleeding and portulaca. Presently he paused beside the hammock, looking down at the girl.

“I am going home to-morrow,” he said a little huskily.

Madeline threw out one hand and clutched one of the boy’s in a feverish clasp.

“No! No!” she cried. “You mustn’t go. Please don’t, Ted.”

“I’ve got to,” stolidly.

“Why?”

“You know why.”

“You mean what you did just now?”

He nodded miserably.

“That doesn’t matter. I’m not angry. I I liked it.”

“I am afraid it does matter. It makes a mess of everything, and it’s all my fault. I spoiled things. I’ve got to go.”

“But you will come back?” she pleaded.

He shook his head.

“It is better not, Madeline. I’m sorry.”

She snatched her hand away from his, her eyes shooting sparks of anger.

“I hate you, Ted Holiday. You make me care and then you go away and leave me. You are cruel selfish. I hate you hate you.”

Ted stared down at her, helpless, miserable, ashamed. No man knows what to do with a scene, especially one which his own folly has precipitated.

“Willis Hubbard is coming down to-morrow night and if you don’t stay as you promised I’ll go to the Swan with him. He has been teasing me to go for ages and I wouldn’t, but I will now, if you leave me. I’ll I’ll do anything.”

Ted was worried. He did not like the sound of the girl’s threats though he wasn’t moved from his own purpose.

“Don’t go to the Swan with Hubbard, Madeline. You mustn’t.”

“Why not? You took me.”

“I know I did, but that is different,” he finished lamely.

“I don’t see anything very different,” she retorted hotly.

Ted bit his lip. Remembering his own recent aberration, he did not see as much difference as he would have liked to see himself.

“I suppose you wouldn’t have taken your kind of girl to the Swan,” taunted Madeline.

“No, I ”

It was a fatal admission. Ted hadn’t meant to make it so bluntly, but it was out. The damage was done.

A demon of rage possessed the girl. Beside herself with anger she sprang to her feet and delivered a stinging blow straight in the boy’s face. Then, her mood changing, she fell back into the hammock sobbing bitterly.

For a moment Ted was too much astonished by this fish-wife exhibition of temper even to be angry with himself. Then a hot wave of wrath and shame surged over him. He put up his hand to his cheek as if to brush away the indignity of the blow. But he was honest enough to realize that maybe he had deserved the punishment, though not for the reason the girl had dealt it.

Looking down at her in her racked misery, his resentment vanished and an odd impersonal kind of pity for her possessed him instead, though her attraction was gone forever. He could see the scar on her forehead, and it troubled and reproached him vaguely, seemed a symbol of a deeper wound he had dealt her, though never meaning any harm. He bent over her, gently.

“Forgive me, Madeline,” he said. “I am sorry sorry for everything. Goodby.”

In a moment he was gone, past the portulaca and love-lies-bleeding, past Cousin Emma’s unlit parlor windows, down the walk between the tiger lilies and peonies, out into the street. And Madeline, suddenly realizing that she was alone, rushed after him, calling his name softly into the dark. But only the echo of his firm, buoyant young feet came back to her straining ears. She fled back to the garden and, throwing herself, face down, on the dew drenched grass, surrendered to a passion of tearless grief.

Ted astonished his uncle, first by coming home a whole day earlier than he had been expected and second, by announcing his intention of seeing Robert Caldwell and making arrangements about the tutoring that very day. He was more than usually uncommunicative about his house-party experiences the Doctor thought and fancied too that just at first after his return the boy did not meet his eyes quite frankly. But this soon passed away and he was delighted and it must be confessed considerably astounded too to perceive that Ted really meant to keep his word about the studying and settled down to genuine hard work for perhaps the first time, in his idle, irresponsible young life. He had been prepared to put on the screws if necessary. There had been no need. Ted had applied his own screws and kept at his uncongenial task with such grim determination that it almost alarmed his family, so contrary was his conduct to his usual light-hearted shedding of all obligations which he could, by hook or crook, evade.

Among other things to be noted with relief the doctor counted the fact that there were no more letters from Florence. Apparently that flame which had blazed up rather brightly at first had died down as a good many others had. Doctor Holiday was particularly glad in this case. He had not liked the idea of his nephew’s running around with a girl who would be willing to go “joy-riding” with him after midnight, and still less had he liked the idea of his nephew’s issuing such invitations to any kind of girl. Youth was youth and he had never kept a very tight rein on any of Ned’s children, believing he could trust them to run straight in the main. Still there were things one drew the line at for a Holiday.