Chapter 1

I had not known Tom Randolph a week before I was aware that life was not real to him. All his world was a stage, with himself as chief player. He dramatized everything—actions, emotions, income. Thus he made poverty picturesque, love a thing of the stars, the day's work a tragedy, or, if the professors proved kind, a comedy. He ate and drank, as it were, to music, combed his hair and blacked his boots in the glare of footlights; made exits and entrances of a kind unknown to men like myself who lacked his sense of the histrionic.

He was Southern and chivalric. His traditions had to do with the doffed hat and the bent knee. He put woman on a pedestal and kept her there. No man, he contended, was worthy of her—what she gave was by the grace of her own sweet charity!

It will be seen that in all this he missed the modern note. As a boy he had been fed upon Scott, and his later reading had not robbed him of his sense of life as a flamboyant spectacle.

He came to us in college with a beggarly allowance from an impoverished estate owned by his grandfather, a colonel of the Confederacy, who after the war had withdrawn with his widowed daughter to his worthless acres. In due time the daughter had died, and her child had grown up in a world of shadows. On nothing a year the colonel had managed, in some miraculous fashion, to preserve certain hospitable old customs. Distinguished guests still sat at his table and ate ducks cooked to the proper state of rareness, and terrapin in a chafing-dish, with a dash of old sherry. If between these feasts there was famine the world never knew.

It was perhaps from the colonel that Randolph had learned to make poverty picturesque. His clothes were old and his shoes were shabby. But his strength lay in the fact that he did not think of himself as poor. He had so much, you see, that the rest of us lacked. He was a Randolph. He had name, position, ancestry. He was, in short, a gentleman!

I do not think he looked upon any of us as gentlemen, not in the Old Dominion sense. He had come to our small Middle-Western college because it was cheap and his finances would not compass education anywhere else.

In an older man his prejudices would have been insufferable, but his youth and charm made us lenient. We contented ourselves with calling him "Your Highness," and were always flattered when he asked us to his rooms.

His strong suit was hospitality. It was in his blood, of course. When his allowance came he spent it in giving the rest of us a good time. His room was as shabby as himself—a table, an ink-spotted desk, a couch with a disreputable cover, a picture of Washington, a half-dozen books, and a chafing-dish.

The chafing-dish was the hump and the hoof of his festivities. He made rarebits and deviled things with an air that had been handed down from generations of epicures. I can see him now with his black hair in a waving lock on his forehead, in worn slippers and faded corduroy coat, sitting on the edge of the table smoking a long pipe, visualizing himself as the lord of a castle—the rest of us as vassals of a rather agreeable and intelligent sort!

It was perfectly natural that he should stage his first love-affair, and when he was jilted that he should dramatize his despair. For days after Madge Ballou had declared her preference for Dicky Carson, Randolph walked with melancholy. He came to my rooms and sat, a very young and handsome Hamlet, on my fire-bench, with his chin in his hand.

"Why should she like Dicky best?"

"She has no imagination."

"But Dicky's a—beast—"

"With a fat bank-account."

"Money wouldn't count with Madge."

"I'm not so sure—"

"Women are not like that, MacDonald."

I saw, as he went on with his arguments, that she had become to him an Ophelia, weakly led. Women in his lexicon of romance might be weak but never mercenary. I think he finally overthrew her in his mind with "Get thee to a nunnery!" I know that he burned her picture; he showed me the ashes in a silver stamp-box.

He had, of course, his heroes—there were moments when unconsciously he aped them. It was after a debate that the boys began to call him "Bonaparte." He had defended the Little Corporal, and in defending him had personified him. With that dark lock over his forehead, his arms folded, he had flung defiance to the deputies, and for that moment he had been not Tom Randolph but the Emperor himself.

He won the debate, amid much acclaim, and when he came down to us I will confess to a feeling, which I think the others shared, of a soul within his body which did not belong there. Tom Randolph was, of course, Tom Randolph, but the voice which had spoken to us had rung with the power of that other voice which had been stilled at St. Helena!

The days that followed dispelled the illusion, but the name clung to him. I think he liked it, and emphasized the resemblance. He let his hair grow long, sunk his head between his shoulders, was quick and imperious in his speech.

Then came the war. Belgium devastated, France invaded. Randolph was fired at once.

"I'm going over."

"But, my dear fellow—"

"There's our debt to Lafayette."

With his mind made up there was no moving him. The rest of us held back. Our imaginations did not grasp at once the world's need of us.

But Randolph saw himself a Henry of Navarre—white plumes; a Richard of the Lion Heart—crusades and red crosses; a Cyrano without the nose—"These be cadets of Gascony—"

"You see, MacDonald," he said, flaming, "we Randolphs have always done it."

"Done what?"

"Fought. There's been a Randolph in every war over here, and before that in a long line of battles—"

He told me a great deal about the ancient Randolphs, and the way they had fought on caparisoned steeds with lances.

"War to-day is different," I warned him. "Not so pictorial."

But I knew even then that he would make it pictorial. He would wear his khaki like chain armor.

He gave us a farewell feast in his room. It was the season for young squirrels, and he made us a Brunswick stew. It was the best thing I had ever tasted, with red peppers in it and onions, and he served it with an old silver ladle which he had brought from home.

While we ate he talked of war, of why men should fight—"for your own honor and your country's."

There were pacifists among us and they challenged him. He flung them off; their protests died before his passion.

"We are men, not varlets!"

Nobody laughed at him. It showed his power over us that none of us laughed. We simply sat there and listened while he told us what he thought of us.

At last one who was braver than the rest cried out: "Go to it, Bonaparte!"

In a sudden flashing change Randolph hunched his shoulders, set his slouched hat sidewise low on his brows, wrapped the couch-cover like a cloak about him. His glance swept the room. There was no anger in it, just a sort of triumphant mockery as he gave the famous speech to Berthier.

"They send us a challenge in which our honor is at stake—a thing a Frenchman has never refused—and since a beautiful queen wishes to be a witness to the combat, let us be courteous, and in order not to keep her waiting, let us march without sleeping as far as Saxony—!"

I can't tell you of the effect it had on us. We were gripped by the throats, and the room was so still that we heard ourselves breathe. Four of the fellows left next day with Randolph. I think he might have taken us all if we had not been advised and held back by the protests of our professors, who spoke of war with abhorrence.