Captain Macklin | Page 7

performing a feat of horsemanship or a difficult trick on
the parallel bars, which same feat, when I repeated it immediately after
them, and even a little better than they had done it, would be received
in silence. I could not see the reason for this, and the fact itself hurt me
much more than anyone guessed. Then as they would not signify by
their approbation that I was the best athlete in the class, I took to telling
them that I was, which did not help matters. I find it is the same in the
world as it is at the Academy--that if one wants recognition, he must
pretend not to see that he deserves it. If he shows he does see it,
everyone else will grow blind, holding, I suppose, that a conceited man
carries his own comfort with him, and is his own reward. I soon saw
that the cadet who was modest received more praise than the cadet who
was his superior, but who, through repeated success, had acquired a
self-confident, or, as some people call it, a conceited manner; and so,
for a time, I pretended to be modest, too, and I never spoke of my
athletic successes. But I was never very good at pretending, and soon
gave it up. Then I grew morbid over my inability to make friends, and
moped by myself, having as little to do with my classmates as possible.
In my loneliness I began to think that I was a much misunderstood
individual. My solitary state bred in me a most unhealthy disgust for
myself, and, as it always is with those who are at times exuberantly
light-hearted and self-assertive, I had terrible fits of depression and lack
of self-confidence, during which spells I hated myself and all of those
about me. Once, during one of these moods, a First-Class man, who
had been a sneak in his plebe year and a bully ever since, asked me,
sneeringly, how "Napoleon on the Isle of St. Helena "was feeling that

morning, and I told him promptly to go to the devil, and added that if
he addressed me again, except in the line of his duty, I would thrash
him until he could not stand or see. Of course he sent me his second,
and one of my classmates acted for me. We went out that same evening
after supper behind Fort Clinton, and I thrashed him so badly that he
was laid up in the hospital for several days. After that I took a much
more cheerful view of life, and as it seemed hardly fair to make one
cadet bear the whole brunt of my displeasure toward the entire battalion,
I began picking quarrels with anyone who made pretensions of being a
fighter, and who chanced to be bigger than myself.
Sometimes I got badly beaten, and sometimes I thrashed the other man,
but whichever way it went, those battles in the soft twilight evenings
behind the grass-grown ramparts of the old fort, in the shadow of the
Kosciusko Monument, will always be the brightest and pleasantest
memories of my life at this place.
My grandfather had one other daughter besides my mother, my Aunt
Mary, who had married a Harvard professor, Dr. Endicott, and who had
lived in Cambridge ever since they married.
In my second year here, Dr. Endicott died and my grandfather at once
went to Cambridge to bring Aunt Mary and her daughter Beatrice back
with him, installing them in our little home, which thereafter was to be
theirs as well. He wrote me saying he knew I would not disapprove of
this invasion of my place by my young cousin and assured me that no
one, girl or boy, could ever take the place in his heart that I had held.
As a matter of fact I was secretly pleased to hear of this addition to our
little household. I knew that as soon as I was graduated I would be sent
to some army post in the West, and that the occasional visit I was now
able to pay to Dobbs Ferry would be discontinued. I hated to think that
in his old age my grandfather would be quite alone. On the other hand,
when, after the arrival of my cousin, I received his first letter and found
it filled with enthusiastic descriptions of her, and of how anxious she
was to make him happy, I felt a little thrill of jealousy. It gave me some
sharp pangs of remorse, and I asked myself searchingly if I had always
done my utmost to please my grandfather and to give him pride and
pleasure in me. I determined for the future I would think only of how to
make him happy.
A few weeks