Active Service | Page 3

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ACTIVE SERVICE
by Stephen Crane
CHAPTER I.
MARJORY walked pensively along the hall. In the cool shadows made
by the palms on the window ledge, her face wore the expression of
thoughtful melancholy expected on the faces of the devotees who pace
in cloistered gloom. She halted before a door at the end of the hall and
laid her hand on the knob. She stood hesitating, her head bowed. It was
evident that this mission was to require great fortitude.
At last she opened the door. " Father," she began at once. There was
disclosed an elderly, narrow-faced man seated at a large table and
surrounded by manuscripts and books. The sunlight flowing through
curtains of Turkey red fell sanguinely upon the bust of dead-eyed
Pericles on the mantle. A little clock was ticking, hidden somewhere
among the countless leaves of writing, the maps and broad heavy tomes
that swarmed upon the table.
Her father looked up quickly with an ogreish scowl.
Go away! " he cried in a rage. " Go away. Go away. Get out " " He
seemed on the point of arising to eject the visitor. It was plain to her
that he had been interrupted in the writing of one of his sentences,
ponderous, solemn and endless, in which wandered multitudes of
homeless and friendless prepositions, adjectives looking for a parent,
and quarrelling nouns, sentences which no longer symbolised the
languageform of thought but which had about them a quaint aroma
from the dens of long-dead scholars. " Get out," snarled the professor.
Father," faltered the girl. Either because his formulated thought was
now completely knocked out of his mind by his own emphasis in
defending it, or because he detected something of portent in her
expression, his manner suddenly changed, and with a petulant glance at
his writing he laid down his pen and sank back in his chair to listen. "
Well, what is it, my child ? "

The girl took a chair near the window and gazed out upon the
snow-stricken campus, where at the moment a group of students
returning from a class room were festively hurling snow-balls. " I've
got something important to tell you, father," said she, but i don't quite
know how to say it."
"Something important ? " repeated the professor. He was not habitually
interested in the affairs of his family, but this proclamation that
something important could be connected with them, filled his mind
with a capricious interest. "Well, what is it, Marjory ? "
She replied calmly: " Rufus Coleman wants to marry me."
"What?" demanded the professor loudly. "Rufus Coleman. What do
you mean? "
The girl glanced furtively at him. She did not seem to be able to frame
a suitable sentence.
As for the professor, he had, like all men both thoughtless and
thoughtful, told himself that one day his daughter would come to him
with a tale of this