It was the happiest of those last irresponsible days before he struck into
his work in the world and became a failure. To-night he saw the picture as
plainly as if it were yesterday; no reminiscence had risen so keenly
before his eyes for years: pretty Mrs. Van Skuyt sitting beside him--
pretty Mrs. Van Skuyt and her roses! What had become of her? He saw the
crowd of friends waiting on the pier for their arrival, and the dozen or
so emblazoned classmates (it was in the time of brilliant flannels) who
suddenly sent up a volley of college cheers in his honor--how plainly the
dear, old, young faces rose up before him to-night, the men from whose
lives he had slipped! Dearest and jolliest of the faces was that of Tom
Meredith, clubmate, classmate, his closest friend, the thin, red-headed
third baseman; he could see Tom's mouth opened at least a yard, it seemed,
such was his frantic vociferousness. Again and again the cheers rang out,
"Harkless! Harkless!" on the end of them. In those days everybody
(particularly his classmates) thought he would be minister to England in a
few years, and the orchestra on the Casino porch was playing "The
Conquering Hero," in his honor, and at the behest of Tom Meredith, he
knew.
There were other pretty ladies besides Mrs. Van Skuyt in the launch-load
from the yacht, but, as they touched the pier, pretty girls, or pretty
women, or jovial gentlemen, all were overlooked in the wild scramble the
college men made for their hero. They haled him forth, set him on high,
bore him on their shoulders, shouting "Skal to the Viking!" and carried
him up the wooded bluff to the Casino. He heard Mrs. Van Skuyt say, "Oh,
we're used to it; we've put in at several other places where he had
friends!" He struggled manfully to be set down, but his triumphal
procession swept on. He heard bystanders telling each other, "It's that
young Harkless, 'the Great Harkless,' they're all so mad about"; and while
it pleased him a little to hear such things, they always made him laugh a
great deal. He had never understood his popularity: he had been chief
editor of the university daily, and he had done a little in athletics, and
the rest of his distinction lay in college offices his mates had heaped
upon him without his being able to comprehend why they did it. And yet,
somehow, and in spite of himself, they had convinced him that the world
was his oyster; that it would open for him at a touch. He could not help
seeing how the Freshmen looked at him, how the Sophomores jumped off the
narrow campus walks to let him pass; he could not help knowing that he was
the great man of his time, so that "The Great Harkless" came to be one of
the traditions of the university. He remembered the wild progress they
made for him up the slope that morning at Winter Harbor, how the people
baked on, and laughed, and clapped their hands. But at the veranda edge he
had noticed a little form disappearing around a corner of the building; a
young girl running away as fast as she could.