No More Learning

But would he--could he--make the next draft a little more
elastic? " Here followed a list of baby's kit, as long as a Parsee's
bill. Then Dicky, whose heart yearned to his wife and the little son
he had never seen--which, again, is a feeling no boy is entitled
to--enlarged the draft and wrote queer half-boy, half-man letters,
saying that life was not so enjoyable after all and would the little
wife wait yet a little longer? But the little wife, however much she
approved of money, objected to waiting, and there was a strange, hard
sort of ring in her letters that Dicky didn't understand. How could he,
poor boy?

Later on still--just as Dicky had been told--apropos of another
youngster who had "made a fool of himself," as the saying is--that
matrimony would not only ruin his further chances of advancement, but
would lose him his present appointment--came the news that the baby, his
own little, little son, had died, and, behind this, forty lines of
an angry woman's scrawl, saying that death might have been averted if
certain things, all costing money, had been done, or if the mother and
the baby had been with Dicky. The letter struck at Dicky's naked heart;
but, not being officially entitled to a baby, he could show no sign of
trouble.

How Dicky won through the next four months, and what hope he kept
alight to force him into his work, no one dare say. He pounded on, the
seven-hundred-rupee passage as far away as ever, and his style of living
unchanged, except when he launched into a new filter.

There was the strain of his office-work, and the strain of his
remittances, and the knowledge of his boy's death, which touched the boy
more, perhaps, than it would have touched a man; and, beyond all, the
enduring strain of his daily life. Gray-headed seniors, who approved
of his thrift and his fashion of denying himself everything pleasant,
reminded him of the old saw that says:

"If a youth would be distinguished in his art, art, art,
He must keep the girls away from his heart, heart, heart. "

And Dicky, who fancied he had been through every trouble that a man is
permitted to know, had to laugh and agree; with the last line of his
balanced Bank-book jingling in his head day and night.

But he had one more sorrow to digest before the end. There arrived a
letter from the little wife--the natural sequence of the others if
Dicky had only known it--and the burden of that letter was "gone with
a handsomer man than you. " It was a rather curious production, without
stops, something like this:--"She was not going to wait forever and the
baby was dead and Dicky was only a boy and he would never set eyes on
her again and why hadn't he waved his handkerchief to her when he left
Gravesend and God was her judge she was a wicked woman but Dicky was
worse enjoying himself in India and this other man loved the ground she
trod on and would Dicky ever forgive her for she would never forgive
Dicky; and there was no address to write to.
"

Instead of thanking his lucky stars that he was free, Dicky discovered
exactly how an injured husband feels--again, not at all the knowledge
to which a boy is entitled--for his mind went back to his wife as he
remembered her in the thirty-shilling "suite" in Montpelier Square, when
the dawn of his last morning in England was breaking, and she was crying
in the bed. Whereat he rolled about on his bed and bit his fingers. He
never stopped to think whether, if he had met Mrs. Hatt after those
two years, he would have discovered that he and she had grown quite
different and new persons. This, theoretically, he ought to have done.
He spent the night after the English Mail came in rather severe pain.

Next morning, Dicky Hatt felt disinclined to work. He argued that he had
missed the pleasure of youth. He was tired, and he had tasted all the
sorrow in life before three-and-twenty. His Honor was gone--that was the
man; and now he, too, would go to the Devil--that was the boy in him. So
he put his head down on the green oil-cloth table-cover, and wept before
resigning his post, and all it offered.

But the reward of his services came. He was given three days to
reconsider himself, and the Head of the establishment, after some
telegraphings, said that it was a most unusual step, but, in view of the
ability that Mr. Hatt had displayed at such and such a time, at such and
such junctures, he was in a position to offer him an infinitely superior
post--first on probation, and later, in the natural course of things,
on confirmation. "And how much does the post carry? " said Dicky.