The Spread Eagle, and Other Stories | Page 9

that absurd baby camel.
"You may call her an absurd baby camel," said his mother, "but it's my opinion that she is going to be a very great beauty."
"She!" exclaimed Fitz, thinking that the ugliness of Eve might have unhinged his mother's beauty-loving mind.
"Oh," said his mother, "she's at an age now--poor child! But don't you remember how the bones of her face--"
"I am trying to forget," said Fitz with a tremendous shudder for the occasion.

IV
Fitz did not take a degree at Oxford. He left in the middle of his last term, leaving many friends behind. He stood well, and had been in no especial difficulty of mischief, and why he left was a mystery. The truth of the matter is that he had been planning for ten years to leave Oxford in the very middle of his last term. For upon that date fell his twenty-first birthday, when he was to be his own man. He spent a few hours in his mother's house in London. And, of course, she tried to make him go back and finish, and was very much upset, for her. But Fitz was obdurate.
"If it were Yale, or Princeton, or Harvard, or Berkeley, or Squedunk," he said, "I would stick it out. But a degree from Oxford isn't worth six weeks of home."
"But aren't you going to wait till I can go with you?"
"If you'll go with me to-night you shall have my state-room, and I'll sleep on the coal. But if you can't go till to-morrow, mother mine, I will not wait. I have cabled my father," said he, "to meet me at quarantine."
"Your poor, busy father," she said, "will hardly feel like running on from Cleveland to meet a boy who is coming home without a degree."
"My father," said Fitz, "will be at quarantine. He will come out in a tug. And he will arrange to take me off and put me ashore before the others. If the ship is anywhere near on schedule my father and I will be in time to see a ball game at the Polo Grounds."
Something in the young man's honest face and voice aroused an answering enthusiasm in his mother's heart.
"Oh, Fitz," she said, "if I could possibly manage it I would go with you. Tell your father that I am sailing next week. I won't cable. Perhaps he'll be surprised and pleased."
"I know he will," said Fitz, and he folded his mother in his arms and rumpled her hair on one side and then on the other.
* * * * *
Those who beheld, and who, because of the wealth of the principal personages, took notice of the meeting between Fitz and his father, say that Fitz touched his father's cheek with his lips as naturally and unaffectedly as if he had been three years old, that a handshake between the two men accompanied this salute, and that Williams senior was heard to remark that it had looked like rain early in the morning, but that now it didn't, and that he had a couple of seats for the ball game. What he really said was inside, neither audible nor visible upon his smooth-shaven, care-wrinkled face. It was an outcry of the heart, so joyous as to resemble grief.
There was a young and pretty widow on that ship who had made much of Fitz on the way out and had pretended that she understood him. She thought that she had made an impression, and that, whatever happened, he would not forget her. But when he rushed up, his face all joyous, to say good-by, her heart sank. And she told her friends afterward that there was a certain irresistible, orphan-like appeal about that young Williams, and that she had felt like a mother toward him. But this was not till very much later. At first she used to shut herself up in her room and cry her eyes out.
They lunched at an uptown hotel and afterward, smoking big cigars, they drove to a hatter's and bought straw hats, being very critical of each other's fit and choice.
Then they hurried up to the Polo Grounds, and when it began to get exciting in the fifth inning, Fitz felt his father pressing something into his hand. Without taking his eyes from Wagsniff, who was at the bat, Fitz put that something into his mouth and began to chew. The two brothers--for that is the high relationship achieved sometimes in America, and in America alone, between father and son--thrust their new straw hats upon the backs of their round heads, humped themselves forward, and rested with their elbows on their knees and watched--no, that is your foreigner's attitude toward a contest--they played the game.
I cannot leave them thus without telling the reader that they survived the almost fatal ninth, when,