Chapter 10: Waterloo

It was not until three years had passed and Sandy had reached his junior year that his real achievement was put to the test.

After that harrowing experience in the Hollis driveway, he had seen Ruth Nelson but twice. She had spent the winters at boarding-school, and in the summers she traveled with her aunt. She was still the divinity for whom he shaped his end, the compass that always brought him back to the straight course. He looked upon her possible recognition and friendship as a man looks upon his reward in heaven. In the meantime he suffered himself to be consoled by less distant joys.

The greatest spur he had to study was Martha Meech. She thought he was a genius; and while he found it a bit irksome to live up to his reputation, he made an honest effort to deserve it.

One spring afternoon the two were under the apple-trees, with their books before them. The years that had lifted Sandy forward toward vigor and strength and manhood had swept over Martha relentlessly, beating out her frail strength, and leaving her weaker to combat each incoming tide. Her straight, straw-colored hair lay smooth about her delicate face, and in her eyes was the strained look of one who seeks but is destined never to attain.

“Let’s go over the Latin once more,” she was saying patiently, “just to make sure you understand.”

“Devil a bit more!” cried Sandy, jumping up from where he lay in the grass and tossing the book lightly from her hand; “it’s the sin and the shame to keep you poking in books, now the spring is here. Martha, do you mind the sound of the wind in the tree-tops?”

She nodded, and he went on:

“Does it put strange words in your heart that you can’t even think out in your head? If I could be translating the wind and the river, I’d never be minding the Latin again.”

Martha looked at him half timidly.

“Sometimes, do you know, I almost think you are a poet, Sandy; you are always thinking the things the poets write about.”

“Do you, now, true?” he asked seriously, dropping down on the grass beside her. Then he laughed. “You’ll be having me writing rhymes, now, in a minute.”

“Why not?” she urged.

“I must stick to my course,” he said. “I’d never be a real one. They work for the work’s sake, and I work for the praise. If I win the scholarship, it’ll be because you want me to, Martha; if I come to be a lawyer, it’s because it’s the wish of the judge’s heart; and if I win out in the end, it will be for the love of some one some one who cares more for that than for anything else in the world.”

She dropped her eyes, while he watched the flight of a song-bird as it wheeled about overhead. Presently she opened an old portfolio and took from it a little sketch.