had finished, he thought for a while.
"I daresay most of my colleagues would regard your request as outrageous, Mr. Prime. But it happens that I don't. I like friends who do things for each other. My trouble is simply this. I have already read Mr. Geer's paper and been impressed with it. If I read the others now, will not your sad tale have prejudiced me?"
"I shouldn't think you were so easily prejudiced, sir."
"Nor would I. But people talk. What assurance have I that this matter will be a secret between the three of us?"
"My word of honor, sir!"
And indeed Professor Henderson did not rely in vain upon it. Only as I write now has our secret been communicated, three decades after his demise.
The professor sent for me in two days and told me that Rex's paper was the winning one. My difficulty was in making Rex believe it. He thought at first that it was some hideous practical joke, and we came very near to having a fist fight. But when at last I took a Bible from his bookcase and solemnly swore on it, he was convinced. He threw his arms about me and let out a shout of joy. It was my first inkling of how much emotion this sober young man was capable of.
Celebration was my field, and I took him on the town, where I made another discovery. Rex was one of those men who find it impossible to stop doing anything they have started. If he was working or taking physical exercise, or arguing or playing cards or even drinking, his enormous energy and momentum would not allow of cessation. Rex was actually a man of great violence, if of great self-control. I remember him in the early hours of that next morning, as we finished off a fourth bottle of champagne, fixing me, still sober, with glittering eyes.
"Frankly, Guy, you amaze me. I thought I had you all figured out. The kind of plush New York snob who feels he has to booze his way through four years of Harvard and make an acceptable club before settling down in a brokerage house and waiting for his old man to kick the bucket. But, damn it all, you have a heart. As big as a mountain! Shall we have another bottle of champagne? Are you sure you can afford it? Are you rich? Oh, yes, you told meâthe poor branch of a rich tree. Yet in
your
poverty you can buy champagne. Do you know this is the first time I've ever tasted it? But I won't boast about that. I mustn't be that kind of prig. Damn it all, Guy, shall we be friends?"
Basically, he needed a friend as much as I did. He had been too busy and too poor for college social life. From that evening on we saw each other daily. I induced him to relax, to go on hikes, to have a few drinks on Saturday night, even to go to an occasional party. He kept me from cutting classes and from going to New York on too many weekends. What it boiled down to was that he helped me to work and I him to play. There was always a grasshopper and cricket aspect to our relationship.
But I was a good deal more than a grasshopper. I planned for the future quite as intensely as he did, probably more so, for Rex was engrossed in the toil of his present. As spring approached, I opened a campaign to make him promise a summer visit to my family in Bar Harbor. He protested violently that he had neither the right clothes nor the right manners for such a swank resort, that he could not play the right sports or even dance, that my parents would be ashamed of him and, finally, that he could not afford the railway ticket. All was in vain; I tore down each excuse as he put it up. I had enough summer clothes for both of us; I exempted him from social life and promised that we would not play tennis or golf, but simply walk, swim and fish; Mother herself wrote to invite him; Father procured a railway pass. What could my poor friend do in the end but submit?
6.
M Y WHOLE small Machiavellian scheme was simply to install Rex in the good graces of Mr. de Grasse. The great man had already offered me a job in his firm after graduation, and I intended that he should do the
"I daresay most of my colleagues would regard your request as outrageous, Mr. Prime. But it happens that I don't. I like friends who do things for each other. My trouble is simply this. I have already read Mr. Geer's paper and been impressed with it. If I read the others now, will not your sad tale have prejudiced me?"
"I shouldn't think you were so easily prejudiced, sir."
"Nor would I. But people talk. What assurance have I that this matter will be a secret between the three of us?"
"My word of honor, sir!"
And indeed Professor Henderson did not rely in vain upon it. Only as I write now has our secret been communicated, three decades after his demise.
The professor sent for me in two days and told me that Rex's paper was the winning one. My difficulty was in making Rex believe it. He thought at first that it was some hideous practical joke, and we came very near to having a fist fight. But when at last I took a Bible from his bookcase and solemnly swore on it, he was convinced. He threw his arms about me and let out a shout of joy. It was my first inkling of how much emotion this sober young man was capable of.
Celebration was my field, and I took him on the town, where I made another discovery. Rex was one of those men who find it impossible to stop doing anything they have started. If he was working or taking physical exercise, or arguing or playing cards or even drinking, his enormous energy and momentum would not allow of cessation. Rex was actually a man of great violence, if of great self-control. I remember him in the early hours of that next morning, as we finished off a fourth bottle of champagne, fixing me, still sober, with glittering eyes.
"Frankly, Guy, you amaze me. I thought I had you all figured out. The kind of plush New York snob who feels he has to booze his way through four years of Harvard and make an acceptable club before settling down in a brokerage house and waiting for his old man to kick the bucket. But, damn it all, you have a heart. As big as a mountain! Shall we have another bottle of champagne? Are you sure you can afford it? Are you rich? Oh, yes, you told meâthe poor branch of a rich tree. Yet in
your
poverty you can buy champagne. Do you know this is the first time I've ever tasted it? But I won't boast about that. I mustn't be that kind of prig. Damn it all, Guy, shall we be friends?"
Basically, he needed a friend as much as I did. He had been too busy and too poor for college social life. From that evening on we saw each other daily. I induced him to relax, to go on hikes, to have a few drinks on Saturday night, even to go to an occasional party. He kept me from cutting classes and from going to New York on too many weekends. What it boiled down to was that he helped me to work and I him to play. There was always a grasshopper and cricket aspect to our relationship.
But I was a good deal more than a grasshopper. I planned for the future quite as intensely as he did, probably more so, for Rex was engrossed in the toil of his present. As spring approached, I opened a campaign to make him promise a summer visit to my family in Bar Harbor. He protested violently that he had neither the right clothes nor the right manners for such a swank resort, that he could not play the right sports or even dance, that my parents would be ashamed of him and, finally, that he could not afford the railway ticket. All was in vain; I tore down each excuse as he put it up. I had enough summer clothes for both of us; I exempted him from social life and promised that we would not play tennis or golf, but simply walk, swim and fish; Mother herself wrote to invite him; Father procured a railway pass. What could my poor friend do in the end but submit?
6.
M Y WHOLE small Machiavellian scheme was simply to install Rex in the good graces of Mr. de Grasse. The great man had already offered me a job in his firm after graduation, and I intended that he should do the
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