When he looked up, having finished his oysters, he found he had seated himself far away from the speakers and at another table, but he could see, by looking down the length of the room, that Drowson and Crane were chatting together.
Clews was lonely. His neighbors on either side were engaged in an exchange of pleasantries with others across the table. Of the men who sat near him he remembered only two as acquaintances of undergraduate days, and the old associations recalled by their faces were so hazy that he was convinced that he had never known either of them well. One of them, a slight, wrinkled little man with eyeglasses, might have been the coxswain of his dormitory crew, but he was not sure. They certainly did not recognize him. No one singled him out for a pleasant word. Once a broad-shouldered, beaming, red-haired stranger across the table, being unengaged for the moment, and seeing the expression on Clews’s face, raised his glass and nodded an invitation to drink with him. Clews returned a good-natured smile. But it was too plain that the other had seen that he was lonely and unhappy; the act was obviously one of charity. There was no comfort in it. He reflected that there had been no necessity of giving himself the pain of sitting unrecognized and unknown among friends of old days, like Crane and the others who had never bothered to find him in his obscurity. It was to be expected that they should care nothing; human nature does not permit men to be interested in so commonplace a thing as failure. He determined grimly never to suffer another experience like this. “The world likes success and sunlight,” he said to himself. “I’ll fight it out alone after this, and in my own little corner.” Bitterness of thought alternated with contempt for himself for being capable of bitter thinking. A waiter finally thrust a demi-tasse of coffee deftly over Clews’s elbow; it surprised him to note how swiftly the dinner had passed. Crane had introduced Drowson with an accompaniment of cheers and hand-clapping, and Drowson had made a speech which impressed every one, and Colingwood had been cajoled into singing “I’m a Lonely Lubber on the Briny Deep,” and had yielded with the same embarrassed excuses he put forth when the song was already famous in undergraduate days. Chairs were gradually moved back a little from the table, the room became foggy with the smoke that curled from the cigars. It was warm; shirt-bosoms lost their stiffness, and hands were reaching out for glasses of cool, sparkling wine, which seemed to taste too good to be harmful; a contented fulness and laughter tugged at nearly a hundred waistcoats. To Clews, straining to enter with the rest into the enjoyment, the hazy room, the mumble of voices and speeches, and the wilting roses beside his plate, all seemed to be the clearer details of an incoherent unreality.
Crane, the toastmaster, was rapping for silence. A group of men had gathered at the end of one of the tables, and were vainly and without harmony endeavoring to revive an old song they had once sung together in past years with some proficiency; when they had been suppressed by shouts of derision from the majority Crane spoke slowly and clearly.
“Before we break up,” he said, “I want you to drink one more toast with me. We have toasted ourselves and each other, but this toast is to a man who is not here.”
The interest and curiosity of every one was aroused; a few flares of matches to light fresh cigars made the only stir in the room. Even Clews, who had been looking at the bottom of his coffee-cup, leaned back in his chair to listen; it was plainly going to be a eulogy of some classman who had died.
“Twenty-five years ago, after our last college dinner,” began Crane, quietly, “there were six men in our class sitting together under a tree in the yard and talking about what we would do. We said we would all be successful at forty-five. If not, we were going to jump into the river. I was one of those men —”
“Why didn’t you jump?” laughed a man who had just begun to listen.
“Billy Drowson was another,” Crane went on, smiling, because he could afford to smile. ”Wright was there — he died the next year. Then there was Lapham and Riggs. But there was another. He was a prominent figure in our class — a fine fellow — the smartest one of the six — very honorable and good-hearted. I will not name him. He is not here.”
Clews gulped down the contents of his glass and shut his teeth hard.
