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Title: Harvard episodes
Author: Charles Macomb Flandrau
Release Date: April 29, 2023 [eBook #70671]
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HARVARD EPISODES ***
HARVARD EPISODES
BY
CHARLES MACOMB FLANDRAU
[Illustration: colophon]
BOSTON
COPELAND AND DAY
MDCCCXCVII
First edition (3500 copies) November, 1897
Second edition (5000 copies) December, 1897
COPYRIGHT BY COPELAND AND DAY, 1897
To W. A.
DEAR W. A. I have written about a very little corner of a very great
place; but one that we knew well, and together.
C. M. F.
CONTENTS
PAGE
THE CHANCE 1
THE SERPENT’S TOOTH 57
WOLCOTT THE MAGNIFICENT 77
WELLINGTON 179
BUTTERFLIES 201
A DEAD ISSUE 249
THE CLASS DAY IDYL 297
Harvard Episodes
THE CHANCE
Two men were talking in a room in Claverly Hall. Horace Hewitt, the
sophomore who owned the apartment, had passed, during the hour with his
visitor, from the state in which conversation is merely a sort of
listless chaffing to where it becomes eager, earnest, and perplexing.
The other, a carefully dressed, somewhat older young man, across whose
impassive, intellectual profile a pair of eyeglasses straddled gingerly,
was not, perhaps, monopolising more than his share of the discussion,
for Robinson Curtiss was the kind of person to whom a large
conversational portion was universally conceded; but he was, without
doubt, talking with a continuance and an air of authority that
unconsciously had become relentless. Both men were smoking: Hewitt, a
sallow meerschaum pipe, with his class in raised letters on the bowl;
Curtiss, a cigarette he had taken from the metal case he still held
meditatively in his hand. He smoked exceedingly good cigarettes, and
practised the thrifty art of always discovering just one in his case.
“So you think my college life from an undergraduate’s standpoint, and
it’s the only standpoint I give that for,”--Hewitt snapped his fingers
impatiently,--“will always be as much of a fizzle as it has so far?” He
had jumped up from the big chair in which he had all along been
sprawling and stood before Robinson in an attitude that was at once
incredulous and despairing. The momentary embarrassment that Curtiss
felt at this unexpected show of feeling on the part of his young friend,
took the form of extreme deliberation in returning his cigarette-case to
his pocket, and in repeating the performance of lighting his cigarette
that had not gone out.
He had not been a graduate quite three years in all, but that had been
ample time--particularly as it had been spent far from Cambridge--for
the readjustment of certain views of his,--views in which four eventful
years at college had been grotesquely prominent. He found, on returning
to the university town, that his absence rendered him frequently
indifferent to the genuineness and importance, not merely of the more
delicate problems of the undergraduate world,--it was one of these on
which he was at the present moment indiscreetly touching,--but even to
the obvious and common incidents of the academic experience: to the
outcome of examinations, to the degree of Bachelor of Arts. It was not
until Hewitt stood troubled and expectant before him that Curtiss
appreciated how tactless the disparity in their knowledge of things
collegiate had made him appear to his young friend. A sudden reminiscent
intuition, that flashed him back to his own sophomore year, caused him
to feel that what he was saying to Hewitt was almost brutal; in his
capacity of a young graduate he had indulged in a cold-blooded lecture
(it could hardly be called a discussion) on questions that very properly
were not questions to a fellow in Hewitt’s situation, but warm,
operative realities. Hewitt was in many ways such a mature young
person, his valuation of other people and their actions had always
seemed so temperate, so just, that Curtiss, without knowing it, had
simply ignored the fellow’s healthy undergraduate attitude. He had
failed to assume how eager the sophomore was to be some active part of
the new and fascinating life going on everywhere about him; how
completely he was possessed by the indefinable, disquieting, stimulative
spirit that so triumphantly inhibits Harvard from becoming a mere place
of learning. Curtiss had spent the evening in throwing what he sincerely
believed was a searching light on some aspects of Harvard life; he was
beginning to wish he had allowed Hewitt to perform the office for
himself.
“Be honest with me, Curtiss.” Hewitt spoke in the distinct, simple tones
that as a rule accompany words one hesitates to trifle with. “You’ve
gone through the whole damn thing yourself, and got more out of it--not
more than you deserve, of course, but more than most men get; you knew
everybody and belonged to--to--” Hewitt hesitated a moment; any single
college institution--social, athletic, or intellectual--did not in
itself forcibly appeal to him; there was something petty in
particularising. “You belonged to--to everything, when you were in
college,” he finally said; “how was it done--how is it done every day? I
see it going on around me all the time; but I can’t touch it in any
way,--it never comes near enough, if you know what I mean; and what I
can’t explain to myself is that I don’t see why it should come any
nearer to me,--only, I want it to.” The manner in which Horace blurted
out the last few words was an epitome of the situation; their confession
of keen longing to know and be known in his class had gathered intensity
with the growing suspicion that certain conditions of the
place--conditions he felt rather than understood--were every day making
the realisation of his desire for activity, acquaintances, friendship,
more impossible. His great common sense--in Hewitt the quality amounted
to a sort of prosaic talent--would always preclude his degenerating into
one of the impotently rebellious; it had kept him free from the
slightest tinge of bitterness toward any one, but it had not made his
interminable, solitary walks up Brattle Street (there was apparently no
other walk to take in Cambridge) less interminable; it had enlivened
none of the stolid evenings in his rooms which, with a necessary amount
of study, a chapter or two from some book he did not much care about,
and a bottle of beer, always came to an end somehow or other in spite of
themselves; it had not invested stupid theatres with interest, nor
mediocre athletics with excitement. Common sense, the prevailing trait
of Hewitt’s character, that induced the middle-aged to consider him
“singularly well balanced for a young man,” was quite powerless to
dispel the desperate loneliness of his sophomore year. His common sense
was a coat of mail that defied sabre thrusts, perhaps, but let in the
rain.
“You know everything, Rob,” Hewitt smiled; he had after all no wish to
appear emotional. “Is there something the matter with me, or with
Harvard, that has kept me what you very well know I am--an isolated
nonentity who has rather begun to lose hope? Are there other fellows in
college who are gentlemen, and used to all the word implies, but who
might be in any one of the fifteen leading universities of Kansas, for
all the good they are getting out of this place? If I had only been
given a chance--” he broke out with sudden vehemence,--“a good, square
chance, the kind a man has a right to expect when he enters college--to
meet my equals equally--to make myself felt and liked if I had the power
to, why I shouldn’t mind failing, you know, not in the least; a man who
isn’t an ass accepts chronic unpopularity as he does chronic red hair,
or any other personal calamity.” Hewitt’s own locks had sufficient
colour to lend authority to his statement. “It isn’t that--it’s the
utter impossibility, as far as I can see, of a boy who came here as I
did, getting a fair trial. Every day I am more and more convinced that
my prospects for the broad, enlightening sort of existence I expected to
find on entering Harvard were about as definite and as brilliant as the
prospects of a stillborn child on entering the world. What’s the matter?
What’s wrong? Who’s to blame?”
There was an admirable force to Hewitt’s manner when he was thoroughly
in earnest that, as a rule, roused even in Curtiss a vague apprehension
that sincerity was, somehow, obligatory. It did not restrain him,
however, from assuming an expression of mock helplessness and
murmuring,--
“It’s so long--so intricate.”
“If people only knew what they were in for before they came,” Hewitt
continued.
“Maybe they wouldn’t come,” suggested the other.
“Of course they’d come,--the place is too great,--they couldn’t afford
to stay away.” Horace passed over the axioms with the impatience of one
who has problems to solve. “Of course they would come,” he repeated;
“but they would come with their eyes opened--they would know what not to
expect; that’s the important thing.”
“Ah, but who could do it? Who would do it? It would be like assisting a
new kitten to see by means of a pin. We must all work out our own
salvations,” Curtiss added sententiously.
“That brings it right round to my point again,” exclaimed Hewitt. “Of
course every man wants to ‘work out his own salvation,’ as you put it;
but at Harvard I don’t think it’s every man who is given the opportunity
to. He doesn’t know that before he comes, he doesn’t find it out for
some time after he gets here; but it’s true, and it’s precisely what I
want you to tell me about--to explain.” There was but a faint note of
triumph in Hewitt’s voice; he realised that he had Curtiss in a corner,
but he had not been conscious of manœuvring to get him there. “Tell me
this: Do you think that Harvard--and by that I don’t mean the Officers
of Instruction and Government, they’re the least of it--do you think
that Harvard is fair, and do you think that it is American?”
There was something so general, so meaningless, so senatorial in the
application of Hewitt’s final word that Curtiss was surprised into a
shout of laughter.
“Whether it’s fair or not, depends on who’s telling you about it,” he
said gravely enough; “but there’s no question as to its nationality,” he
laughed again; “of course it’s American, horribly American, deliciously
American!”
Hewitt puckered his forehead and waited for more; he did not in the
least understand.
“When I say American, I don’t mean what you mean; because--pardon me for
saying it--you don’t mean anything.” Curtiss found it suddenly easy to
rattle on as he had been doing earlier in the evening; his laugh had
cleared the atmosphere. “My dear fellow,” he said, “Harvard University
possesses its labouring class, its middle class, and its aristocracy, as
sharply, as inevitably, as--as--” he was about to draw a rather
over-emphatic comparison between Harvard and the social orders of Sparta
in the days of Lycurgus, when Hewitt, still puzzled, broke in with,--
“But if that’s the case, it isn’t American at all--you contradict
yourself in the same breath.”
“I assumed that you knew more about your own country,” Curtiss remarked
with dry superiority; “I sha’n’t undertake to discuss the social system
of the United States; it would simply necessitate my going over a lot of
platitudes that would bore us both. It’s only when we apply to our
college, what we all know to be so undeniable of the country at large,
that the situation at once becomes novel and preposterous to so many
people. The conventional idea of an American college--you know this
because the idea was yours before you came here--is that it consists of
a multitude of lusty young men linked together by the indissoluble bonds
of class and college, all striving, shoulder to shoulder, for the same
ends, in a general way,--just what the ends are I don’t think the public
cares very much, but they’re presumably charmingly unpractical and
fine,--and living in an intoxicating atmosphere of intimacy, a robust
sense of loyalty that is supposed to pervade the academic groves and
render them the temporary home of a great, light-hearted, impulsive,
congenial brotherhood. Well, I don’t know whether other American
institutions of learning answer the description, because I’ve never been
to them; but Harvard doesn’t, not in the slightest particular.”
“Then I wish it wouldn’t attempt to,” murmured Hewitt.
“There is no attempt,” answered Curtiss; “there is merely a
pretence,--a pretence that, strangely enough, isn’t meant to deceive any
one. We find it in the naïve untruthfulness of the college papers, in
the eloquent conventionality of the Class Day Orators; the college press
prattles about ‘class feeling’ and all the other feelings that none of
us, since the place has grown so large, has ever felt; the orator’s
sentiments bear about the same relation to real life that his gestures
do: he has a lot to say about everybody’s sitting together at the feet
of the Alma Mater; but he doesn’t dwell at all on those of us who have
been cuddled in her lap. That’s what I mean when I say the place is
consistently ‘American.’” Curtiss got up and took a meditative turn
about the room. “The undergraduate body faithfully reproduces, in
little, the social orders of the whole country, and not only never
formally recognises their existence, but takes occasion, every now and
then, somewhat elaborately, to deny it,--a proceeding that of course
doesn’t change any one’s position or make any one happier. ‘Fine words,’
indeed, never ‘buttered the parsnips’ of so sophisticated a crowd as
you discover at Harvard; but if an American community finds it
impossible, by reason of all the thousand and one artificial conditions
that make such things impossible, to be ‘free and equal,’ what is left
for the distracted concern to do, but flaunt its freedom and its
equality, from time to time, in theory?”
“It’s all wrong then--frightfully wrong,” declared Hewitt, with
considerable heat. He had been increasingly irritated through the calm
progress of Curtiss’s discourse, and now stood with his back to the
fire-place, staring fixedly before him,--a spirited figure of protest.
“We’re too young at college for that kind of rot,” he went on
emphatically; “where, in the name of Heaven, can a fellow expect square
treatment, if it isn’t right here among what, just now, you scornfully
called ‘a multitude of lusty young men’? They ought to be too young and
too lusty and too good fellows to care--even to know about--about--all
that.” His words tumbled out noisily, and had the effect of noticeably
increasing Robinson’s deliberateness.
“The situation would be in no way remarkable, if it were not for just
that fact,--our extreme youth.” Curtiss spoke as if he were still in
college. “It’s taken rather for granted that young men, who are
delightful in so many ways, are the complete embodiment, when chance
herds them together, of the ‘hale-fellow-well-met-God-bless-everybody’
ideal a lot of people seem to have of them. The plain truth of the
matter is, that at Harvard, at least, they aren’t at all. Wander a
moment from the one royal road we all try to prance along in common
here, and you’ll find most of us picking our way in very much the same
varied paths we are destined to follow later on. The only wonder is that
we should have found them so soon. What makes people’s hair stand on end
is that young America should begin to classify himself so
instinctively--the crystallisation of the social idea seems, to put it
mildly, a trifle premature. But”--Curtiss’s shrug comprehended many
things--“what are you going to do about it?”
The question was perfectly general in intention, and might have ended
the discussion had not Hewitt regarded it as the natural expression of
Curtiss’s interest in his ambitions for a more diverting existence.
“And yet, after all, I am a gentleman as well as they,” he said simply.
There was something exquisitely intelligible to the graduate in the very
vagueness of the boy’s pronoun. “They,”--he too, in the early
forlornness of his college life, had been eagerly aware of them,--the
great creatures, who, for some reason or other (not always a transparent
one), seemed to emerge with such enviable distinction from the vast
mediocrity of the crowd; “They” who put on astonishing black coats and
spent Sunday afternoon in town; “They” who so frequently wore little
crimson usher’s badges at the games, and bowed to so many of the
attractive people they showed to their seats; “They” who, fine
shouldered and brown from rowing on the crews, seemed to endure their
education with such splendid listlessness; “They” whom he had so often
heard rattling into the suburban stillness of Cambridge just before
dawn, from some fine dance in town. How unmistakable they were in the
class-room, at a football game, the theatre,--everywhere; how
instinctively they seemed to know one another, and how inevitably they
came to be felt in every class as something, if not exactly apart, at
least aloof. Curtiss stared musingly at the fire a moment, and smiled as
he recalled the various trivial circumstances that, in his own case,
gradually, and with none of the excitement of a conscious transition,
had brought about the substitution of a perfectly natural,
matter-of-fact “We,” for the once tacitly understood but exasperating
“They.” For a moment he thought of asking Hewitt to explain himself; he
had a freakish desire to see the fellow flounder in the effort to be
clear, without becoming pitifully transparent; however, he thought
better of it, and only answered with some impatience,--
“Of course you’re as much of a gentleman as any one; but that--except
very, very superficially--isn’t the question.” Curtiss was beginning to
feel like a hoary old oracle. “There’s nothing strange or tragic in your
situation; it’s shared by lots of other fellows in college,” he went on;
“you slipped into Harvard as soon as your tutor thought you were ready
to, and, as you came from a rather obscure place, you slipped in quite
alone. A year and a half have dragged themselves through the vagaries of
the Cambridge climate; you are still, broadly speaking, quite alone. Yet
all this time you have been sensitive--keenly so--to the life that is
being lived everywhere around you, and you begin to feel about as
essential to the drama as a freshman does when he puts on a somewhat
soiled court costume and assists Sir Henry Irving in one of his
interesting productions. The trouble with you and every one like you is
simply this: you didn’t come to Harvard from a preparatory school with a
lot of acquaintances and some friends; you didn’t come from any of the
few big towns that annually send a number of fellows who know, or who at
least have heard, of one another; you are athletic, perhaps, but
scarcely what one would call an athlete--although I confess, that isn’t
of much consequence; we don’t, as a rule, reward athletes for being
athletes. If they perform well, we applaud them. At Harvard, athletics
are occasionally a means to a man’s becoming identified with the sort
of people he wishes to be one of; but I have never known them to be an
end. Finally, you are not a Bostonian, and when I say ‘a
Bostonian,’”--Curtiss removed his glasses and softly polished them with
his handkerchief,--“when I say ‘a Bostonian,’” he repeated with the
gentlest of satire, “I mean of course a Bostonian that one knows.”
“Now, although you are doubtless a great many interesting and attractive
things, you do not happen to be any one of those I have just named; and
it is from the men who are, that the crowd destined to be of importance
in college--the fellows who are going to lead, who are going to be
felt--whatever you choose to call it--will generally originate. Think of
your own class for a moment, and, nine times out of ten, the men that
you feel would be congenial as well as interesting, if you knew them,
are taken from the sort of men I’ve specified.”
“Nine times out of ten!” Hewitt laughed hopelessly, “who the devil is
the tenth man?”
“Why, you are, of course,--or you will be,” said Curtiss, gaily. “I was
myself, once upon a time. It’s good fun too; my little ‘boom’ was a
trifle belated--the tenth man’s usually is; but it only seems to make
the more noise for going off all by itself; while it lasts you almost
feel as if people were being superlatively nice to you in order to make
up for lost time. Nine times out of ten though”--the sweeping phrase was
beginning to assume the dignity of a formula--“it’s the other way. The
‘tenth man’ at Harvard would never have escaped from his obscurity and
comparative isolation to become the ‘tenth man,’ if it were not for
something that seems very much like chance.”
“How is a fellow going to find his chance in a place like this?” Hewitt
exclaimed scornfully. “Do you suppose, if I knew where to look for it,
that I wouldn’t run out to meet it more than half way?”
“Unfortunately it’s the chances that usually seek the introduction,”
answered Robinson, oracularly.
“You mean to say then, in all seriousness, that a man--a gentleman--who
comes here as I did, has no reason to expect that, as a matter of
course, his friends will be the kind of people he’s been used to at
home; that instead of at once finding his own level, he has to sit
twirling his thumbs and waiting for the improbable to happen--which it
perhaps doesn’t do in the course of four years?” Hewitt was scornful,
incredulous, defiant.
“He is at perfect liberty to hope,” said the graduate, quietly; “but I
can’t see that he has the slightest reason to expect. As for ‘twirling
his thumbs,’ I think he might be better employed if he spent his spare
time in going in for foot-ball and glee clubs and the ‘Lampoon’ and the
hundred yards’ dash, and all that sort of thing; they bring your name
before the college public--make you known and definite, and in that way
widen the possibilities.”
“Then I can’t see that college is very different from any place
else--from the outside world,” said Hewitt, disappointedly. Curtiss had
taken considerable pains to tell him as much some time before; but with
Hewitt mere information frequently failed in its mission; he was the
sort of person whom to convince, one was first obliged to ensnare into
believing that he had arrived at conviction unaided.
“No, it isn’t different; that is to say, Harvard isn’t,” assented
Curtiss; “except that it is smaller, younger and possesses its
distinctly local atmosphere.”
“Then coming here, under certain circumstances, may be like going to a
strange town and living in a hotel.”
“Both ventures have been known to resemble each other.”
“And it’s about as sensible to suppose that your fellow students are
going to take any notice of you, as it would be to expect people you had
never met to lean out of their front windows and ask you to dinner if
you were to stroll down the Avenue some fine evening.” Hewitt’s manner
had become grim and facetious.
“You seem to have grasped the elements of the situation,” said Curtiss.
“The system is certainly unique,” mused Hewitt.
“Yes,” answered Robinson, “other colleges have societies; whereas
Harvard unquestionably has Society.”
“Do you consider the place snobbish then?” asked Horace.
The graduate thought a moment before answering. “I object to the word,”
he said at last; “it’s as easy to say, as vague and denunciatory, as
‘vulgar’ or ‘selfish’ or any of those hardworked terms we apply to other
people; you can only say that, making some necessary allowances for a
few purely local customs, Harvard society is influenced, or guided, or
governed, as you please to express it, by about the same conventions
that obtain in other civilised communities. Lots of people who have only
a newspaper acquaintance with the place think that wealth is the only
requisite here. They have an affection for the phrase ‘a rich man’s
college,’--whatever that may mean. But of course all that is absurd to
any one who has spent four years in the place, and has known all the
fellows with no allowances to speak of who are welcome in pretty much
everything; and has seen all the bemillioned nonentities who languish
through college in a sort of richly upholstered isolation. ‘Birth’ is
certainly not the open sesame; a superficial inquiry into the shop and
inn keeping antecedents of some of our most prominent and altogether
charming brothers, smashes that little illusion. I’m not a sociologist,
and I don’t pretend to know what constitutes society with a big S--to
put it vulgarly--here or any place else. But there is such a thing here
more than in any other college. An outsider, hearing me talk this way,
would say I was making an unnecessarily large mountain out of a very
ordinary molehill. But that’s because he wouldn’t understand that
Society at Harvard is really the most important issue in undergraduate
life. The comparatively few men who compose it, have it in their power
to take hold of anything they choose to be interested in, and run it
according to their own ideas--which shows the value of even a rather
vague form of organisation. Fortunately, their ideas are good
ones,--clean and manly. You all find out the truth of this, sooner or
later. Then if you haven’t a good time, I suppose you can go away and
call the place snobbish--lots of people do.”
“I don’t think that’s my style exactly, and I wish you wouldn’t take
that tone about it. I want to know fellows, of course: fellows like
Philip Haydock and Endicott Davis and Philip Irving and ‘Peter’ Bradley
and Sherman and Prescott,” said Hewitt, frankly, naming six of the most
prominent men in his class; “but I can’t imagine myself thinking worse
of any of them if--if--”
“If you never do get to know them,” Curtiss broke in; “if your chance
fails to materialise--if, after all, you are not the ‘tenth man.’” He
got up as if to leave.
“I wish you wouldn’t go,” said the other, earnestly; “there ’re lots of
things I want to ask you about. What have men like Bradley and Davis
ever done here to be what they are?” he went on hurriedly.
“Ask me something hard,” laughed Curtiss, giving Hewitt his overcoat to
hold for him. “They haven’t ‘done’ anything,” he continued, struggling
into his sleeves; “I don’t suppose they would know how to. Fellows like
Bradley and Davis simply arrive at Harvard when they are due, to fill,
in their characteristic way, the various pleasant places that have been
waiting the last two hundred and fifty years for them. From the little
I’ve seen of them, I should say that these particular two happen to be
the kind it would be a pleasure to know anywhere, which isn’t always the
case with the ‘Bradleys’ and the ‘Davises’ of college. So, of course,
you want to know them,” he ended, emphatically. “What we’ve been calling
your ‘chance’ literally consists in fellows like these holding out their
hands and saying simply, ‘Come and see me.’” As Curtiss said this, he
impressively extended his own hand; Hewitt shook it, absently, and began
with some abruptness to talk of other things.
He was, all at once, exceedingly glad that his guest was saying
good-night. It was a positive relief to hear his footsteps resounding in
the long corridor outside, and to feel the slight tremor of the building
as the massive front door closed with a thump; for Curtiss had become,
although perhaps unwillingly, that most objectionable person, the
recipient of one’s impulsive confidence.
After he had gone, Hewitt stood a moment, looking undecidedly at the
glass clock on his mantelpiece. It was long after midnight, and he was
in the state of mind when even the oblivion of bed is numbered among
sweet but unattainable ambitions. He was tired of his own room; the good
taste that had been expended on it had, of late, begun to strike him as
inexpressibly futile. Yet there was scarcely any one on whom he could
drop in, even at a reasonable time of night, with the objectless
familiarity of college intercourse, to say nothing of calling out under
a lighted window in the small hours of the morning. He, of course,
belonged to no college club, so his evening expeditions were of
necessity limited by the theatres in town, or the listless thoroughfares
of Cambridge. He often took long, aimless strolls through streets he
barely looked at, and whose names he didn’t know. It was with the
intention of walking now, that he put on a cap, turned out the lights,
and left his room.
The season was that which precedes the first atmospheric intimations of
spring. The snow had gone, and the ground was dry, and everything that
was shabby and stark and colourless in Cambridge was admitting its
inestimable obligation in the past to the loveliness of foliage. There
was little of the sympathetic mystery of night in the long street in
which Hewitt found himself on leaving his building; its lines of
irregular wooden houses, aggressive with painty reflections of the
dazzling arc-lights swung at intervals overhead, stretched away in
distinct and uninviting perspective. Except where the gaslit sidestreets
yawned murkily down to the river, Cambridge was hideous in the
rectilinear nakedness of March. The university town is, as a rule, so
very still after twelve o’clock that its occasional sounds come to have
an individuality to one who prowls about, that the sounds of day do not
possess. Intent as he was in pondering over the disheartening things
Curtiss had been saying to him, Hewitt’s ears were keen, as he sauntered
up the street with his hands in his pockets, to all the night noises he
had learned to know so well. A student in a ground-floor room ablaze
with light was reading aloud. Horace stopped a moment, and laughed at
the sleepy voice droning wearily through the open window,--some one was
taking his education hard. A policeman, half a block ahead of him, was
advancing slowly down the street by a series of stealthy disappearances
into shadowed doorways; Hewitt could hear him rattle the doorknobs
before he emerged again to glitter a moment under the electric light; a
car that had left town at half-past twelve was thumping faintly along
somewhere between Boston and the Square--it might have been a great
distance away, so intensely still was the intervening suburb; and
through all the flat, silent streets the night air, cool and pungent
with the damp of salt marshes, blew gently up from the Charles and
intensified the atmosphere of emptiness.
Naturally enough, Hewitt’s sense of isolation was far less on these
solitary rambles of his, than when he jostled elbows in crowded
class-rooms with fellows who, he felt, were potentially his friends, at
the same time that he was realising how utterly excluded he was from
their schemes of life. Morbidness was foreign to a nature like his; and
yet, as time went on, he had been forced to regard Cambridge as most
satisfactory when deserted and asleep. It was only then that the forlorn
feeling of being no essential part of his surroundings often left him;
and although he recognised the weakness of strolling away from
unpleasant truths, the altogether unlooked-for state of affairs at
college had cowed him into temporary helplessness. That this furtive
condition was temporary, even he himself was in a measure aware; one
cannot but feel at college that after a certain time has passed, one’s
fellows, in spite of the plasticity of youth, become, if not solid, at
least viscous, in the moulds that have received them. There is an uneasy
period of ebullition in which boys try very hard to enjoy the things
that they do, in the absence of the self-poise that enables them to do
what they eventually find they enjoy. Intimacies are formed and broken;
habits are acquired and not broken; there is a weighing and a levelling,
and at last, toward the end of one’s sophomore year, almost everybody
has been made or marred or overlooked.
It was an intuition of something of this kind that led Hewitt, in his
more thoughtful moods, to realise that he was having his worst time now.
The great, ill-assorted crowd that technically composed his “class”
would shift and change and finally become, not satisfied, perhaps, with
the various combinations it had evolved, but certainly used to them.
After that, life at Harvard, Hewitt told himself, would be simplified
for him; the time for identifying one’s self with the companions of
one’s choice would have come and gone; he would find himself standing
alone. His future development would not be just what he had expected;
but there was peace in the thought that his position would be definite,
unalterable, and then, after all, he would be standing, and not running
away, as in the past year he had been so often tempted to do. Although
anything but a student, he could even fancy himself ploughing doggedly
in self-defence through an incredible number of courses in history, or
some such subject, and at the end pleasing his family with two or three
Latin words of a laudatory nature on his degree. Hewitt was too thinking
and too just a person not to have frequently contrasted his own
condition with that of fellows one occasionally heard about, who starved
their way through college on sums that would have made scarcely an
impression on his room-rent; their persistent “sandiness” compelled his
admiration; more than once he had given substantial expression to it.
But it was at best a very theoretical sort of consolation that came from
a knowledge of the depressing fact that many of his most deserving
classmates neither ate nor bathed. His unhappiness differed in kind, but
not in reality.
Although he appreciated how easy and foolish it was to assume the
“chance” the graduate had dwelt on with such apparent authority, and
then let loose an imagination that had been nourished for so long on
nothing more satisfying than itself, he, nevertheless, could not help
projecting himself into some of the delightful possibilities of that
chance. As he loafed through sleeping Cambridge, he pictured himself
under a variety of circumstances playing parts neither fanciful nor
egoistic, but strikingly unlike the one he had been cast for. The
common-place incident of being joined in the College Yard by two or
three friends on their way to the same lecture, made his heart beat
faster to think of; the thought of starting off for an evening in town
with a crowd of fellows--like those talkative groups he so often saw
after dinner, waiting impatiently on the corner for a bridge
car--stirred him to a mild, pleasant sort of excitement. He even held
imaginary conversations with Haydock and Davis and Bradley and the rest
of them, in which he modestly refrained from saying all the good
things,--conversations in which these classmates of his emerged, became
individuals, and for an hour seemed glad to be numbered among Hewitt’s
acquaintance. With his exhaustive knowledge of what might happen to a
boy at college, he liked to imagine himself in the position where
friends and influence are synonymous, constantly keeping fresh the
memory of his own dreary experience, and taking infinite joy in quietly
extricating others from a similar one.
When Hewitt returned to Claverly by a circuitous way through the College
Yard, and out again into the empty triangular Square, he found a dumpy,
patient-looking herdic cab drawn up to the curbstone. The driver had
tucked away his money somewhere in the region of his portly waist, and
was pulling his coat over the spot, preparatory to mounting the box.
But the tall young man in evening dress, who apparently had just paid
him, had not yet turned to pass through the brightly lighted doorway.
Hewitt, noting the overcoat that lay limp and unheeded on the sidewalk,
and the almost imperceptible uncertainty of the young fellow’s neat,
boyish back in its conscious equilibrium, stopped to give that second
and more searching look one always gives a drunken man, however usual
the spectacle of drunkenness. They both stood there a moment: Hewitt
half way up the stone steps of the building, the other with his back
turned, swaying gently on the walk below, as if listening to the
diminishing clatter of the shabby little cab. Horace scarcely knew why
he himself lingered over an affair so personal and so manifestly not his
own. He found justification for his curiosity, however,--although it was
characteristic neither of his college nor himself,--when the object of
it started slowly and aimlessly down the street, leaving his overcoat on
the bricks, where it had dropped.
The garment was a light, slender thing, and as Horace hung it over his
arm and smoothed its soft lining with his fingers, he wondered more what
its wearer was like, than what he should do with it. It was easy enough
to keep the coat in his room until--as was sure to happen--an
advertisement, somewhat vague as to where the article had been lost,
appeared in the “Harvard Crimson,” or he might restore it at once to its
owner, who by this time had stopped undecidedly in the black shadow on
the nearest street-corner. There was something companionable in the way
the coat clung to his arm, that made him wish to keep it a little
longer; but he ended by doing the simpler thing.
“Isn’t this your overcoat?” he said, walking up to the sharp line of
shadow on the other side of which the shirt bosom and face of the
drunken student showed faintly. Hewitt broke the pause that followed by
repeating his question.
“Oh, how good of you! I had half decided to go after it,” came from the
darkness in an astonishingly clear, fresh voice, whose convincing
mastery of the first letter of the alphabet left little doubt as to its
possessor’s birthplace. Had not the words been said with a formality
that, under the circumstances, was absurd, Hewitt would have felt that
he misjudged the man’s condition.
“Don’t mind me, really, I’m very, very tight.” It was impossible to
misconstrue this statement, or the wild, exultant over-emphasis with
which the final word was declaimed. Hewitt laughed.
“Oh, are you?” he answered, adding, “well, here’s your overcoat,” as if
these two facts existed only in conjunction.
The man in the shadow veered suddenly from the wall he had been leaning
against into the light; and Horace--seeing him distinctly for the first
time--realised that it was his classmate, Bradley. Coming immediately
after the talk with Curtiss, this meeting was startling to Horace. It
seemed almost prearranged. He gently forced Bradley to take the
overcoat, said good-night, and turned to walk away.
“Don’t go to bed! Oh, don’t go to bed!” pleaded Bradley, in a sort of
engaging whimper. His clutch at Hewitt’s shoulder might have been either
a gesture of entreaty or a measure of safety. “It’s early--awf’ly
early. The longer you stay up in Cambridge the earlier it gets; and the
sparrows walk all over Mount Auburn Street in the morning and
sing,--corking big ones, like ostriches,--seen them lots of times. Don’t
go to bed!”
“I’m afraid I must,” said Horace, looking gravely into his classmate’s
large, kindly eyes, that swam helplessly, and focussed nothing. Bradley
took possession of Hewitt’s other shoulder; then, in the intimate
confidential tone that for so long had ceased to exist for Horace, he
said, “I don’t want to go to bed--come on!”
The invitation, though as to form rather indefinite, was most sincere.
There was distinctly some sort of an intention in Bradley’s wish to have
the other man “Come on;” he spoke as if he already had expressed it.
Hewitt, scanning his drawn face, and then lowering his glance to the
snowy shirt-bosom, tried hard to find out, without asking, exactly where
“on” was. Of course, any proposition from the fellow just then might be,
in a general way, safely interpreted, “More drinks;” instinct told
Horace that. But beyond this broad point of departure, along what lines
did the amiable tipsy young person intend to proceed? He was becoming
every moment more demonstrative, more insistent, and by reason of his
condition, rather than in spite of it, more irresistible. Was he going
back to town? Did he have some stuff in his own room? Or had he,
perhaps, reached the stage that plans nothing more elaborate than the
primitive, genial pastime of lurching, arm in arm, along the streets and
making a noise? Bradley suddenly answered the unput questions by
suggesting ways and means.
“We can wait until somebody comes out in a cab, and go back in it; done
it lots of times.” He gave Hewitt a little urging shake.
“Why, you’ve just come from town about a minute ago!” Horace’s attempt
to back gently from under his friend’s nervous hands was a failure.
Bradley gave him the long, wise look of one whose mind is blank, until a
slow sort of inspiration enabled him to exclaim,--
“Well, you can’t stay in there all alone, can you? “--a very telling bit
of argument. “I came out here to get you; that’s why I came out.”
Hewitt burst into honest laughter. This tall child struck him as
indescribably funny and young and drunk. Then, with a quick downward
wriggle, he broke away, still laughing, and made a dash for the steps.
Hatless, wild-eyed Bradley, screaming curses into the night, had him
round the knees, as he stumbled across the top step to the door.
Together they rolled and slid, scuffling, gasping, to the brick
sidewalk.
“You would try to get away from me, would you? What a hell of a dirty
trick to play a man! You would, would you?”
“Get off my stomach, Bradley, you hurt me.”
“You would break away, would you?” The robust emphasis of the remark
pounded a painful staccato grunt out of Hewitt’s vitals.
“Please let me up!” It took a good deal of self-control to put it just
that way; Hewitt had bumped his head, and was beginning to feel the cool
bricks against his back.
“Oh, I don’t know,” mused Bradley, airily; “‘you’re not the only pebble
on the beach.’” Then, after a silence, in which the man under him tried
to rest his head more comfortably, “Will you be good? Do you know--I
don’t think I can trust you! If I let you up, will you do what I want
you to?”
“We’ll talk it over,” the other conceded.
They scrambled to their feet; Hewitt brushed himself off with his cap.
Had both men been sober, they would have looked at each other a moment,
and laughed. Under the circumstances, the situation was grotesque enough
to seem quite natural to Bradley.
“Come on,” he said; “now we’ll go to town. Oh, my hat! where’s my
hat--and my coat!” He cursed, as he looked about him,--an amiable,
ingenuous ripple of blasphemy, as harmless in intention and as
cheerfully spoken as a bit of verse.
A returning cab swung round the corner. Bradley sauntered into the
middle of the street to stop it. The manner in which all idea of hat and
coat passed from his mind made Hewitt think of a round-eyed baby
absently letting drop the toy that has been thrust into its convulsive
little fist. To Horace the cab was an unwelcome intrusion. He thought it
foretold complications, and perhaps a scene. For he had decided, beyond
the probability of changing his mind, that he would not spend the rest
of the night in Boston with his exhilarated classmate. A nicer reticence
than the simple one of moral scruples kept him from carousing with his
new acquaintance. He shrank from taking advantage of this chance--so
accidental, so far-fetched--of impressing himself on the one fellow in
his class whose friendship, more than any other, he coveted. The
proceeding, he felt, would be a somewhat thick-skinned one. There was
something in the idea, not quite like winning a drunken man’s money at
cards, but suggestive of it. “Peter” Bradley symbolised to Hewitt an
entire chapter of Harvard life. To-night, Horace felt, in coming so
unexpectedly on one with whom he existed in all the intimacy of the
imagination, as if he had been caught surreptitiously reading the
chapter in manuscript.
He went out where Bradley was talking earnestly to the cab-driver.
“Let’s not go to town, Bradley,” he said, yawning. “It’s so far and
chilly and everything.” Quickly, as if inspired by a new and daring
thought, he grasped the boy by the wrist, and exclaimed
enthusiastically, “I’ll tell you what we’ll do--we’ll stay in
Cambridge!”
“By Heaven, I’ll go you! Eh-h-h-h-h-h--we’ll stay in Cambridge! we’ll
stay in Cambridge!” He danced all over the street in a frenzy of mirth
and movement, singing again and again, “We’ll _stay_ in Cambridge! we’ll
_stay_ in Cambridge! we’ll _stay_ in Cambridge!” while Hewitt said,
“Good-night--sorry he troubled you,” to the cabman. A voice from one of
the small wooden houses that basks in the shadow of Claverly, yelled,
“Oh, shut tup!” very peevishly, just as Bradley threw himself at Horace
with a prolonged meaningless scream.
“What do you think you’d like to do now?” asked Hewitt, after a moment,
bracing himself to support his burden.
“Wait till I get my breath, and we’ll do--everything,” panted the
burden. It laughed hysterical, extremely silly little laughs. Then
solemnly, soberly, Bradley led the way to the curbstone. “Come over
here--I want to talk to you; sit down,” he said. “Will you wait here and
not let a sparrow get by--not a single one--while I dash across and find
something to drink?”
“It’s getting cold, Bradley; how long will you be?”
“You won’t know I’ve been gone, I’ll be so quick.” He was off,--half way
across the street like a skittish young animal,--then tip-toeing back,
stealthy, furtive, mysterious. He crouched by the man on the curbstone,
and with his mouth close to Hewitt’s ear whispered earnestly:--
“If I tell you something, will you promise not to tell? It’s a secret,
you know.”
“I don’t think you’d better,” gravely.
“I must,--it’s killing me.”
Horace looked to see if the fellow was crying.
“I’ll never repeat it to any one,” he promised.
“It’s awful,--horrible,” moaned Bradley, drawing closer to Hewitt, and
putting his arms round him. “It’s this,” he sobbed; “I don’t believe in
either Space or Time.” He was gone again, with a backward spring that
sent the other sprawling. Horace sat up and watched the boy dart across
to an opposite house, fumble a moment at the door, and disappear with a
slam. Instantly every window upstairs and down glowed yellow. The noise
of a piano, slapped pettishly from bass to treble by an open palm, came
over to the young man who sat thinking on the curbstone.
What he thought was just about what any other normal person, under the
same circumstances, would have thought. He wondered how long it would be
before Peter came back; what they would do when he did come back; and
where that night was leading. It might take him, Horace, far,--almost
anywhere,--away from himself, to a troop of friends, to the club across
the street. Or it might leave him at night’s ordinary destination. But
whatever the end, the beginning was his opening, his chance. It had
pranced at him in the guise of a crazy, faunlike, drunken thing; thanks
to Curtiss, he had recognised it.
He tried to picture to himself the inside of the club house, over whose
charmed threshold his friend had just plunged. He also marvelled a
moment at the vagaries of inebriety; it was curious, for instance, that
any one so far gone--so driven by every whimsical, erratic impulse as
Bradley--should give heed to the etiquette that did not permit him to
take into the club a man who had no club of his own. How artful the
youth must have thought himself, when he left Horace behind, ostensibly
to detain any large imaginary sparrows that might pass that way. Hewitt
had begun to hope that the drink Bradley brought back might be beer,
when the windows opposite blackened, the door slammed, and the boy came
toward him once more. His expedition had not been in vain; in one hand
he carried a pompous looking bottle, in the other some glasses that
clinked cheerfully as he walked. From under one of his arms a second
bottle aimed at Hewitt like a small piece of artillery.
“Unload me. That one’s burgundy; look out, don’t spill it, I pulled the
cork. The other’s fizz. These are glasses. Got a knife?--cut the wires.”
Bradley sat down on the curbstone.
“This looks as if we were going to see the sunrise,” said Hewitt,
opening his penknife.
“I’d rather wait till hell freezes over; seen the other thing lots of
times.” He filled a long glass more than half full of burgundy, and
guzzled it. “Ugh--what belly wash--hot as tea.”
“That’s what you get for looking on the wine when it’s red. Here--try
this.” Hewitt handed the other glass. It foamed at the edges.
“I could die drinking this stuff,” said Bradley, fervently.
“You probably will--here, give me some.” Horace with difficulty got
possession of the glass, and held it to his lips. Bradley amused himself
by wiping his wet hands in his friend’s hair.
They sat there until Peter had managed to drink and spill the contents
of both bottles. He refused to tell where his room was, so Hewitt
attempted to take him to Claverly. The task called for an infinite
amount of patience and tact as well as time. For Peter’s manner, though
all at once excessively polite, was firm.
“It’s ever so good of you to take all this trouble for me,” he asserted,
in worried tones. Then he would lie down in the street, saying he was a
dead horse, and refuse to get up. The affair became almost annoying
when, on reaching the inside of Claverly by a great number of almost
imperceptible advances, Bradley tore the fire apparatus from its red
cage on the wall in one of the long corridors, and screamed “Fire!” like
a maniac. If anything in the situation admitted of being called
fortunate, it was the proximity of Horace’s room at that particular
moment.
The proctors in Claverly are supposed to sleep in the attitude of one
whose ears are tense with listening. And it has been said that during
the hours in which convention prescribes pyjamas, their costume is of
blanket wrappers and felt slippers. Their appearance upon a “scene of
disturbance” has been estimated, variously, as simultaneous with the
disturbance, or anywhere from one to ten seconds after it. Horace had
just time enough to thrust Peter into his room, lock the door, and begin
to gather up the hose, when Mr. Tush--arriving silently from
nowhere--was there. The dishevelled Mr. Tush was absurd or sublime,
according to the mood of the one who apperceived him. To the
dispassionate onlooker, he merely gave an impression of hair and
responsibility.
“The janitor will arrange the fire apparatus, Mr. Hewitt,” he said,
drily. “By the way, would you mind explaining why it happens to be on
the floor?”
Hewitt did explain. He was very sorry; a friend of his had come out from
town; the friend was not quite himself; he was noisy and unmanageable;
it would not happen again.
“There has been a great deal of disturbance in the building recently,
Mr. Hewitt.”
Horace could think of no answer in which impertinence did not lurk.
“Where is your friend?”
“In my room.”
“Is he a student in Harvard University?”
“No.”
“Good-night, Mr. Hewitt.”
“Good-night, Mr. Tush.”
Afterward, whenever Hewitt thought over his meeting with Peter Bradley,
the monosyllable loomed up big and disconcerting. What preceded and
followed it were nothing. He had not minded Bradley’s drunken tyranny;
the experience was novel. He had not objected to undressing the boy and
putting him to bed; it was inevitable. But the lie meant something, and
the memory of it hurt; although he believed it to be the simplest, most
effective way of disposing of Tush.
Hewitt spent what was left of the night on his divan, and got up in time
for a nine o’clock. He would have much rather slept until noon; but he
did not want to be in his room when Bradley woke; he felt it might be
rather trying for Bradley. So he hung clean towels over the edge of the
bathtub, and pinned a note to the back of the chair on which he had laid
his guest’s clothes, saying: “Sorry I have to run away. Hope you’ll find
everything you want.” It was after eleven o’clock when he came back;
but the fellow was still sleeping. Horace stood in the doorway a moment
and watched the flushed, childish face on the pillow; it seemed
incredible that Peter should be curled up there in bed. Then he tiptoed
away and had luncheon at a hotel in town, and spent the afternoon
looking at shop-windows.
Three days afterwards, while Hewitt was waiting in his room for Curtiss,
who was coming round for a walk, Bradley came to see him. It was
probably not a very easy thing to do; but Bradley did it adequately. His
manner--sober--was the kind that a stranger attributes to shyness, an
intimate friend to simplicity.
“I wasn’t nice at all the other night, was I?” he said, after a moment
of awkwardness, during which they both laughed. “I’m awfully sorry about
it really; it must have bored you like anything.”
“It didn’t at all,” declared Horace. He held out a package of
cigarettes.
“Well, tell me what happened; I think I must have been a great deal
tighter than you thought I was.”
“No, I don’t think that--” began Hewitt, at which they laughed some
more. “Why, nothing very much happened; you merely--do you remember
getting the champagne and burgundy?”
“Oh, perfectly.”
“Well, do you remember lying down in the street and refusing to get up?”
“No-o-o--” very doubtfully. (After all, I suppose one doesn’t remember
such things.)
“Well, you did, and I had a time getting you here; and don’t you
remember anything at all about the hose and the proctor and--”
So it was lived over again from beginning to end, with a great deal of
detail and laughing and remorse of a cheerful and unconvincing kind.
Bradley looked serious when he heard the part about the proctor; but on
learning that Mr. Tush had not seen him, and that Hewitt’s lie had made
the chance of a more careful inquiry quite improbable, he found the
whole thing immensely amusing.
“I have a lot to thank you for,” he said, staring about the room. Hewitt
made the inevitable protest, and then there was a pause. These two
persons, who were Harvard men, classmates, and about the same age,
suddenly had nothing to talk about. The single point at which their
lives touched was the tiniest dot on the page of their experience,--the
sort of dot, too, that both were willing to ignore as quickly as
possible. They no doubt listened to the same lectures from time to time.
But one does not, apropos of nothing at all, discuss the Malthusian
Doctrine or the importance of the semicolon in literature.
You can’t talk to a college man about himself, when his career is a
pleasanter one than your own, because--well, because you mustn’t. And
you can’t talk to a man who is to you an unknown quantity,--a nonentity,
a cipher,--simply because you can’t. It’s all very distressing, and you
talk about athletics. But in the month of March the effort is
transparent and a bore. Neither football nor base-ball is
contemporaneous; the crew is still rather vague; and when you plunge
recklessly into track athletics, it occurs to you, all at once, that you
haven’t taken the trouble to go near any since your freshman year. It’s
impossible, therefore, to recall whether Spavins is the person who ran
the hurdles in sixteen, or reached incredible heights in the pole vault;
it is even likely that Spavins did neither, and was all the time behind
the bleachers absorbed in putting the shot. To tell the truth, you don’t
know Spavins; you have never met him; you never will, and you always
skip the column in the “Crimson” that records his exploits.
This was the basis on which Hewitt and Bradley finished their talk. The
peculiar occasion of their being in the same room together was at an
end. Bradley lingered merely because an innate sense of proportion kept
him there; to leave the minute you say the only thing you came to say,
is like running out of church before the people all round you are done
confiding things to the backs of the pews in front of them. Your
devotions only properly cease when the subdued spontaneous exertion of
stout women regaining the perpendicular gives you the signal. Bradley
was waiting for the signal. The bell on Harvard Hall, calling students
to the last lecture of the day, sounded it.
“There goes the bell; I must hurry along,” he said, fingering the
note-book he had brought with him.
“Oh, cut your lecture!” came from Horace rather eagerly. Bradley looked
up in surprise. His face was not well fashioned for concealing what went
on in his head. Just now it distinctly said, “How extraordinary! Why
should I cut my lecture?” His words, however, were, “Oh, no, thank you;
I must run along!” He took another cigarette to smoke on the way over to
the Yard, and sauntered round the room, although he mentioned more than
once his fear of being late. At the door, he turned to say, “Well,
good-bye; I hope you know how much obliged I am to you for all that.”
“There isn’t anything really. Good-bye.” Horace assisted at the opening
and shutting of the door, in the unnecessary way one does with
strangers. Then he walked slowly up and down his study, with his hands
in his pockets, whistling energetically under his breath, and stopping
every now and then to stare out of the window. Curtiss came in almost
immediately.
“I met that good-looking classmate of yours, Bradley, at the door,” he
said. Curtiss walked straight up to Hewitt,--he had a dramatic way of
doing almost everything,--and grasped his friend’s hand. “Has he been
here?” he asked, smiling a pleased smile.
“Yes; he’s just left.”
A pause.
“Did he ask you to go see him?”
“No,” very simply.
“Will he come back?”
“No.”
“The pig!”
“I beg your pardon, he’s nothing of the kind.”
“I’m afraid I don’t understand, then.”
“Oh, yes, you do, better than anybody, except possibly myself.”
Another silence.
“Well, go on; I’m waiting.”
“Why should the man ask me to go see him?” asked Hewitt, passionately.
“He--”
“But, my dear boy!” protested Curtiss.
“Don’t! don’t!” Horace drew away pettishly. “When you bluff like that,
you make me sick. Bradley has done everything he ought to have done,
and more too,” he went on quietly. “If I expect more, I’m a fool; if you
do, you’re a hypocrite! Bradley might have written me a polite note, and
considered the thing square. Instead of that he took the trouble to
climb up here to apologise and thank me. He was well-bred and polite and
unget-at-able,--the way gentlemen ought to be. And that’s all; that’s
the end of it. We’ll never see each other again; why should we? I
suppose if I’d gone to any other college in the country, and this had
happened, Bradley would have put his paws on my shoulders and lapped my
face; and we’d have roomed together next year, and proposed to each
other’s sisters on Class Day. But I didn’t go to any other college; I’m
damned glad I didn’t,--everybody always is. I don’t know why, but I am.
Between you and Bradley, I’ve learned more about this place than I ever
knew there was to know. If I could write, I’d knock the spots out of any
magazine article on Harvard that’s ever been printed.” Horace stopped
and looked out of the window. What he had been saying was a curious
mixture of bitterness and indifference.
“Come, let’s take a walk,” he exclaimed briskly, in another tone.
“Yes, let’s,” answered Curtiss; “that’s what I came for,” and he began
to hum, while Horace was looking for a hat,--
“Oh, Harvard was old Harvard
When--”
THE SERPENT’S TOOTH
“College life,” murmur old men, as they pause a moment, before getting
into bed, and listen to the singing of some drunken cabmen in the street
below.
“College life,” whisper the Cambridge unsought, as they cut out
preposterous baby clothes at the Social Union and discuss somebody or
other’s ungraceful departure from the University.
“College life,” shudder apprehensive mothers, diagnosing the athletic
column for dislocations.
“College life,” mutters the father of the man who got sixteen A’s and
brain fever.
“College life”--but Dickey Dawson and the three fellows who had stopped
in to see him that afternoon, rather prided themselves on not being
typical of any recognised phase of that comprehensive platitude. They
had all, thus far, in their college life, ingeniously escaped going in
for anything in particular and were in the habit of regarding themselves
as a nucleus for a future society, to be composed of unrepresentative
Harvard men. Little Dickey Dawson even went so far as to be almost
ashamed of his own undeniable popularity; but, as he remarked
apologetically, “It is not always possible to avert success.”
He was not well that afternoon. The college physician had come, caused
Dickey to throw back his head, open wide his mouth and say “ah-h-h,
ah-h-h,” while he peered in with a sort of deprecatory craftiness and
found, “no white spots, but a state of congestion.”
Generally speaking, your acquaintances at college do not realise that
you have been sick until they meet you in the Yard and are given an
opportunity to express their belated sympathy. The men, however, who
were gossiping in Dickey Dawson’s room that day, were the men who had
missed him at breakfast and luncheon and had come to hunt him up--the
men, in short, whom he knew best and enjoyed most.
There was Tommy, with the profile and the glasses. He was the sort of
person who occasionally writes wordy little book reviews for an obscure
literary magazine, and refers to himself, now and then, as “a driven
penny-a-liner.” Then there was Charlie Bolo who was not popularly
credited with much sense beyond his exceedingly deformed sense of
humour. There was also Bigelow--a bore with an accomplishment. All three
of them had a kind of verbal agility that passed, among themselves, for
cleverness.
“What means this ghastly pomp and circumstance?” asked Dickey Dawson
from the sofa, as he reached out and clutched at the voluminous tails of
Tommy’s frock coat.
“It means, my dear, that I have been to see two women whom I never met
before,” answered Tommy, daintily gathering his skirts about him and
sitting down. “One of them lived in a suburb and was perfectly
horrible.”
“The other,” put in Charlie Bolo, who possessed the disagreeable gift of
conversational prophecy, “lived in a dungeon on a proper street, and
was merely horribly perfect.”
“Yes, you are right,” assented Tommy, complacently. “She was a Bodkin,
and--well--you know--Bodkins are Bodkins.” He submitted to the _sui
generical_ fashion in which one is obliged to refer to certain Boston
families.
“Ah, you know a Bodkin, you know the kind of woman I mean,” he went on
dramatically. “She’s the woman who lies awake at night--dreading your
arrival, for her only clew to your identity is a perfunctory letter of
introduction informing her that you are from a place of which she never
heard. She is the woman who, when you call, roosts discreetly at the
extreme end of a long sofa and extends a series of well-worn social
‘feelers,’ while her daughter makes tea in a masterly, unemotional way,
and supposes, from time to time, ‘that you graduate this year,’ or ‘that
you must find Cambridge dull after--after--’”
“Those are some of the local formulae for tact,” broke in Charlie Bolo.
“The other one--the suburban--was truly a most loathely creature,”
continued Tommy in the harsh incisive voice that made what he said so
difficult to forget. “She didn’t even give me tea; and you know how many
clever things I can say about tea.” His smile was an impertinent
challenge. “My Aunt got me into it,” he half yawned; “there was, I
believe, some reason why I ought to go, and as it wasn’t a very urgent
one--I went. The thing actually seemed glad to see me.”
“Imagine,” laughed Dickey Dawson cautiously, for he was learning how to
regulate his spontaneity when talking to fellows like Tommy and Charlie
Bolo and Bigelow, and had come to believe that he laughs best who laughs
least.
“Yes, and she’d been abroad and seen the Passion Play, or the Lakes of
Killarney, or some such thing, and was altogether a most impossible sort
of a person. I fancy she is what they call ‘a superior woman’ in this
country--they don’t exist anywhere else, I believe.”
Dickey Dawson’s throat was too sore to admit of his talking much
himself, and as Tommy was there to entertain him he said:
“Curse her more specifically.”
“Oh, what is the use?” Tommy shrugged his shoulders. “Besides, I
couldn’t very well, as the superior woman is not a human being, but a
type. You’ve certainly seen lots of her--there is no man fortunate
enough not to have. They appeal to the imagination of--”
“Of the unimaginative, who always marry them,” interrupted Charlie Bolo.
“Yes, and aren’t they usually stout, or inclined to be?” asked Bigelow,
abstractedly. He was looking through some music books at the piano.
“Oh dear yes; no thin woman need aspire to superiority, nor no unmarried
one either. They are essentially wives and mothers, but not vulgarly so
necessarily.” It was what he considered accuracy rather than any latent
charity that had induced Tommy to add this detail.
“A woman whose efficiency transcends every emergency, known or unknown,
is in a fair way toward becoming superior,” he continued. “She’s the
abnormally normal--the hope of the race--the oatmeal of
humanity--_Philistia felix_--wow!”
Charlie Bolo had a habit, not uncommon among college men in college
rooms, of carrying on most of his conversation with his back turned, and
at the same time examining minutely every picture in the apartment,
vaguely opening most of the books and putting them down again,
critically peering at a “shingle” here, and striking a meaningless chord
or two on the piano there, and from time to time asking questions about
one’s various belongings, answers to which--if ever rashly
undertaken--involved the short but intricate history of one’s life.
Charlie Bolo, who from an extended practice in doing all these
depressing things had reduced his method of inspecting a room to a sort
of erratic system, was just finishing the third wall and passing on to
the mantelpiece of Dickey Dawson’s study. Here he stopped to admire, for
the hundredth time or more, a picture of Dawson’s mother. Simultaneously
Tommy came to the end of his wordy little diatribe, and glanced up with
what was known to the others as his most “receptive smile.” He, too,
seemed to suspend animation before Mrs. Dawson’s likeness, and during
the second or two of silence that followed, both Bigelow and Dickey
found their attentions fixed on the picture that Charlie Bolo had taken
in his hand.
Mrs. Dawson, a remarkably young-looking woman in evening dress, was
leaning slightly back in one of the massive, richly carved chairs
peculiar to ancient Italy and modern photography.
From the point of view of mere line Mrs. Dawson seemed to be a handsome
woman. However, it was not the manner in which her somewhat haughty head
stood out from the soft, dull grey of its tapestry background, nor yet
the white slope of her shoulders against the dark wood, that most
impressed one. The charm of the picture--for it unquestionably had great
charm--came rather from the perfection of the lady’s equipment, and the
regal ease with which she seemed to ignore it. Charlie Bolo, who had the
wisdom of a man with sisters, always found the photograph of Mrs. Dawson
faultless--from the bit of white ribbon twisted through her hair, and
the fan of ostrich plumes, and the long, limp glove lying lightly across
her lap, to the non-committal exposure of shoe-tip.
There was the briefest possible pause in the talk; but coming at the
exact time it did, it was more than long enough to enlighten every one
as to what every one else was thinking. To Dickey Dawson, who seized the
opportunity of giving all three men a hasty, apprehensive glance, it was
as if some one had in so many words exclaimed, “At least this woman is
not superior!” But, of course, no one could have exclaimed such a thing
with Tommy sitting there, exerting the tacit admonition of inspired
refinement.
This tribute, manifesting itself in spontaneous silence, was fraught
with both pleasure and wretchedness for Dickey Dawson: pleasure, that
these fellows whom he so admired and looked up to, should
unquestioningly accept the splendid picture lady as his mother, together
with all that the relationship implied; wretchedness, because he was
much too intelligent a young person not to be thoroughly aware that the
splendid picture lady was a glorified arrangement of upholstery and
apparel, bearing about as much resemblance to his mother as, for purely
decorative purposes, he chose to have it bear. He was proud of the
portrait, because it was a success of his own conceiving; he loathed it,
because it was forever rubbing in the fact that his relations, though
doubtless admirable in the exercise of their respective domestic
functions, were execrable as a social background. He detested it also,
because it kept unpleasantly vivid in his mind the long diplomatic
struggle that had preceded its taking.
“Other boys have family pictures in their rooms at college,” he had said
to his mother in the vacation that followed his sophomore year; “I want
one of you to take back with me.” Whereupon Mrs. Dawson, with
considerable pleasure and some reminiscent vanity, had produced several
from an album. Dickey had inspected them gravely, from the one in which
his mother was picking shamelessly artificial pond-lilies over the side
of an unseaworthy skiff, to the jauntily posed “cabinet size.”
“I should like to have one that looked more as you do now,” he had said,
affectionately smoothing her hair and wondering if he could manage it.
He had managed it, of course. He was always tactful, and could on
occasions be tender and persuasive. These qualities, added to the
authority he exerted in his capacity of American child, had in time
overcome his mother’s objections to the background, properties, pose,
coiffure, and, most difficult of all, the costume he had insisted
on--had, in fact, even achieved a sublime finishing touch by having,
instead of an ordinary gilt advertisement, the pliable photographer’s
name scrawled carelessly in pencil across the margin of his print. Mrs.
Dawson had been exceedingly shocked at the result, and had, not
unnaturally, failed to recognise herself in the gracious, self-possessed
personage who gave one the impression of having sunk into that
picturesque seat for a moment, until her carriage should be called. She
had speedily regretted, what she from time to time referred to as her
“weakness,” and had hastened to exhibit the strength she still retained
by breaking the negative with her own hands--not, however, before Dickey
had procured some striking proofs of it. The very success of the picture
was what made it such a disturbing addition to Dawson’s room. In the
appreciation of his friends it had furnished him with precisely the
sort of mother to which his eclectic and exotic inclinations seemed to
entitle him. He himself, in his more placid moods, derived an
indefinable satisfaction from the thing, and was in the habit of sitting
before it, musing contentedly on his perfect adaptability to the people
and surroundings he had never been used to at home--an adaptability that
sometimes caused him to wonder whether he were not, after all,
illegitimate or adopted. Ordinarily, however, this fanciful parent of
his appeared to him in the light of a cunningly devised, automatic lie
that kept on telling itself to make him miserable.
Charlie Bolo carefully returned the photograph to its place. His back
had been turned to the room and he was, perhaps, the only one of the
four men who did not realise the direction every one’s thoughts had
taken.
“I think I shall have to get rid of that libel on my mother,” mused
Dawson, brazenly.
“I was so sorry not to find Mrs. Dawson in the afternoon I called,” said
Charlie Bolo, passing on to a silver candlestick. “Is she to be long in
town?”
“So was I,” murmured Bigelow; “Bolo and I went together.”
“You must give her a tea,” suggested Tommy, getting up. When he had on
his frock coat, he sat intermittently.
“I should like to, tremendously,” lied Dawson, with a pleasant smile;
“but you see she’s going away to-morrow. She was awfully cut up about
missing you fellows--I think she was at a luncheon, or some such thing.”
He courageously took the chances of any one’s having seen her naïvely
admiring the Washington Elm and the Longfellow House on the afternoon in
question. “She’s going to be here such a very short time”--this was a
detail, but it seemed just as well to dwell on it--“that you can fancy
how I feel about being laid up like this.”
Bigelow said, “rotten,” or some equally piquant idiom of assent, and
Charlie Bolo, by commenting technically on a Dutch tile he had come
across, was on the point of giving an entirely new turn to the talk,
when something happened.
It has often been told how little Dickey Dawson, once upon a time,
saved somebody or other’s life by coolly dangling himself to the bridle
of a big, runaway horse. The occasion on which he drew red hot poker
sketches where a dog had bitten the calf of his leg, has likewise had
its historians. But no one has ever described what took place when, in
the midst of Charlie Bolo’s exposition of tile painting, Dickey called,
“Come in!” to a doubting knock at the door, and Mrs. Dawson advanced two
steps into the study and then stopped.
For a moment no one, with the exception of Dawson, grasped the
situation. He had grasped it and was wrestling with it as he threw off
the rug that covered him where he lay on the sofa--as he stepped across
the room--as he placed his hands on his mother’s shoulders and kissed
her lightly on the cheek. He had grasped the situation, but he was
utterly at a loss to know what to do with it.
“Didn’t you get my telegram?” his mother was saying; “why, that’s
funny--I sent one from the hotel quite a time ago, ‘Am worried about
sore throat will come to see you’--just ten words exactly.”
Then he found himself introducing his three friends to her: Tommy first,
Charlie Bolo second, and Bigelow last, and as he pronounced their names
slowly and distinctly, he tried to look ahead and discover what he
should do next.
On realising that the impassive Tommy was being presented to her, Mrs.
Dawson began to extend her hand toward him; but her impulse collapsed
for some reason or other and the movement resulted in nothing more
definite than the disclosure of her silk mits.
The three men were so completely outside of any calculations she had
made before knocking on her son’s door, that she had nothing to say to
them just then, so she turned once more to Dickey with frank adoration
and said,--
“I _was_ worried about your throat.”
“I suppose, like the rest of us, Mrs. Dawson, you have found out how
seriously he objects to the serious,” ventured Charlie Bolo airily. The
smile Mrs. Dawson gave him did not lack sweetness, for she had been
looking at Dickey; but it was desperately vague, and Bolo felt that he
had made a false start.
“They are taking pretty good care of me, don’t you think?” There was
something pallid and heroic about Dickey’s playfulness.
“Oh, this college life!” began Mrs. Dawson, forgetfully. She was trying
to recollect a clipping she had once made from a newspaper.
“There’s a lack of woman’s sweeping, without doubt,” grumbled Bigelow
jocosely--the music books he had been examining had dirtied his hands.
“Richard, what was that piece I cut from the ‘Weekly’ and sent you last
year?” Mrs. Dawson sat down in the chair Dickey pushed toward her. It
was a heavy chair of dark wood, and gave Tommy a vicious desire to look
at the picture on the mantelpiece. Dickey elaborated the little anecdote
to which his mother referred and made the most of it--it was nearly
dinner time; the fellows would certainly go soon.
“You have so many books, Richard,” said Mrs. Dawson, looking about the
room for the first time.
“Aren’t his shelves attractive,” assented Tommy with enthusiasm. “I
think you would approve of everything there too, Mrs. Dawson, with the
possible exception of this, which you undoubtedly know enough about to
disapprove of.” He laughingly handed her a volume of “Degeneration” from
the table. Dawson could have slain him had he not realised that all
three fellows must be somewhat bewildered.
“Isn’t it--isn’t it--thick--” faltered Mrs. Dawson.
“What _is_ one to think of a creature like Nordau?” asked Bigelow,
theatrically; “that is to say, of course, beyond his exquisitely
unconscious sense of humour.” He had made this remark on several
previous occasions, and its technique was, in consequence, becoming
quite perfect. Mrs. Dawson looked helplessly at Dickey and said nothing.
She was at least displaying what Charlie Bolo called “admirable _savoir
taire_.”
When she opened the volume and leaned over to examine the title-page,
Tommy gave the photograph on the mantelpiece a surreptitious glance.
There was a more or less grotesque resemblance in it to the almost
portly, middle-aged original, who was dressed with a quiet absence of
taste and answered in a general way Tommy’s description of a superior
woman. It was very embarrassing and inexplicable and altogether
impossible. Tommy did not understand it--he did not understand anything
any more, and only wished to get outside and pinch himself and Charley
Bolo and Bigelow.
Dickey Dawson did most of the talking, and achieved thereby a dismal
sort of success. His mother had introduced--or rather stumbled
on--fallen over--the subject of books, and for a time it was as if
Dawson had said to himself,--
“Books! books! what can I say of the origin, development, history, and
present condition of books?” For he chattered incessantly about
them--his own--Tommy’s--anybody’s. He told funny stories that were not
in the least funny, about book agents, and was in the midst of a
detailed description of a book-case when he realised he was making a
fool of himself and stopped.
“I like reading,” mused Mrs. Dawson, as she mechanically turned the
leaves of “Degeneration.” “I think it cultivates the observation.”
“I feel sometimes that it would be more advisable to cultivate blindness
than observation,” answered Tommy. He was becoming reckless and got up
to go.
Mrs. Dawson’s lips parted to say something, but Dickey broke in with,--
“I wish one of you fellows would kindly stop at the stable and send
round a cab. It is too late for my mother to go back to town in the
car.”
A protest from Mrs. Dawson seemed imminent, but she apparently thought
better of it and returned to the book.
The getting away was difficult, but not nearly so difficult as staying
any longer would have been. They chirped “goodbyes,” and “get well
soons,” and “so glad to have met yous,” galore, and Bigelow felt waxing
within him a new and passionate love for his own family, who were all
decently dead. Then they echoed off through a long corridor. After they
had gone Mrs. Dawson said nothing for several minutes, and Dickey made a
noise with the fire.
“They’re queer young men,” she finally reflected aloud. “Do you like
them very much, Richard?”
“Oh, yes,” answered Dickey, indifferently, “you get to like people you
see a great deal, I imagine.” He sat on the arm of his mother’s chair
and held one of his mother’s hands and kissed it.
“I wonder if you get to _dis_like people you _don’t_ see much of,” said
Mrs. Dawson. She was turning the leaves of her book without stopping to
look at them.
“Not if you ever truly loved them,” answered Dickey, tenderly drawing
nearer to her and laying his cheek against hers. He was almost overdoing
the thing.
“Not if you ever truly loved them, I suppose,” thoughtfully repeated his
mother with more intelligence than Dickey had ever given her credit for.
Then she began to turn the leaves of the book all over again.
WOLCOTT THE MAGNIFICENT
I
In some way or other it came to the notice of Barrows, the Recording
Secretary, that Ernest McGaw was literally starving. The Secretary,
being a person of appreciation, immediately gave the man food.
“I’m a horribly busy creature,” he said to McGaw; “but if you’ll come
round to dinner with me at the Colonial Club this evening, we can talk
about things.” Of course McGaw went and dined--for the first time in
months; for two weeks he had been keeping himself half alive on oatmeal
that he cooked in a shallow tin apparatus, over the lamp he studied by.
The Secretary had ridden a bicycle that afternoon, and seemed half
famished himself, which soothed McGaw’s raw, quivering sensibilities
from the first. Then, besides, Barrows was probably the most genial,
natural, receptive, unacademic person that ever answered to an official
name. So afterwards, when they went into an unoccupied room upstairs,
and the Secretary smoked a cigar, it was more than easy--it was
comforting--for McGaw to tell him the whole squalid little tragedy.
There was nothing particularly new in it to the Secretary, since he was
a gentleman who spent his life in making the struggle easier for men who
tried to go through college with a capital consisting of fourteen cents
and a laudable ambition. Youth and bitterness in combination were some
of the materials he dealt in. Barrows could have told the story of
McGaw’s pinched, colourless existence much better than McGaw could; yet
for an hour or more he listened, questioned, discussed, and was moved.
Later, when he and McGaw parted in the Yard, the Secretary, before going
to bed, wrote a carefully thought-out letter to Sears Wolcott 2nd, of
the sophomore class.
Sears Wolcott got the letter the next evening, when he stopped a moment
in Claverly, on his way from the training table to his club,--that is
to say, to one of his clubs. He was a member of two, besides, naturally,
the Institute, of whose privileges, by the way, he rarely availed
himself. After dining at the training table with his class crew, he
usually dropped in at his nearest club to smoke the one pipeful allowed
him by his captain. To-night, however, Barrows’ letter put him in such a
bad temper that he forgot about his pipe, looked sullen, and spoke to no
one. Wolcott was a very big boy; when he was angry, he seemed to swell
and swell until everything in the vicinity got out of drawing. Nobody
but Haydock had even noticed him come in; the others were too absorbed
in drinking their coffee and chattering about the class races. Haydock’s
greeting, “How is The Magnificent One this evening?” did not meet with
the reception that encourages further pleasantries. Haydock was the only
other man in the club who was not talking as fast and as loud as he knew
how. But his quiet was as different from The Magnificent One’s as the
placid stillness of a summer evening differs from the awful silence in
which one waits for a funnel-shaped cloud to mature. Haydock had a big
cigar in one hand and a little coffee-cup in the other. He was thinking
that a good room in a good club, with its dark walls, and all its
leather chairs and divans and rugs, with its magazines and convenient
lights to read them by, with its absence of personal individuality, was,
especially just after dinner, the most satisfactory spot in the world.
Even the background of cheerful noise was agreeable. “As long as you’re
not called on to help make it,” added Haydock to himself, as one of the
talkers detached himself from the others, and, flourishing a paper in
his face, called out:--
“Who wants to subscribe to the Prospect Union?”
Wolcott reached for the nearest newspaper, and buried himself in it; he
couldn’t endure Ellis.
“Who wants to subscribe to the Prospect Union? Only a dollar,” repeated
Ellis, wiggling his subscription list before Wolcott’s eyes.
“What the devil is the Prospect Union?” growled Wolcott. He crumpled
the “Transcript” and tossed it back on the table.
“Why, don’t you know?” asked Ellis, in genuine surprise. “I’ve taught
geography there for two years.”
Wolcott snapped back a single word. It was neither a pretty word nor a
refined one; the mildest significance one could attach to it was that
Wolcott was scarcely in sympathy with Ellis or anything that was his.
“The Prospect Union,” explained Haydock, in the deliberate way that was
so often taken seriously, “is a most admirable educational institution,
carried on in Cambridgeport by the Harvard undergraduate. It is
elaborately designed to make the lower classes--the labouring
man--dissatisfied with his station in life. I am proud to say, that I
once went there every Friday night for six months to teach two
bricklayers, three dry-goods clerks, and a nigger how to appreciate the
beautiful works of the late Mr. Keats. I spoiled their lives, and they
all love me. Allow me, in my humble way, to help the cause.” He rolled a
silver dollar the length of the table to Ellis. Ellis smiled, and put
the money in his pocket; he considered Haydock a very “unmoral” person
indeed, but liked him, and hoped that some day he would make something
of himself.
“That’s very nice--now who’s the next patron?” the philanthropist went
on, earnestly. “The Prospect Union is really a mighty fine thing. Even
if the men down there don’t learn very much out of books, they can come
there and see us,” he had almost unnoticeably emphasised the “us.”
“My God!” said Wolcott, slowly. The words and the way he sized up Ellis,
from top to toe, were heavy with a sort of thick-headed contempt. “They
can go there and look at _you_, can they?” Wolcott muttered the
unrefined word again. Then he got up with an enormous stretch, yawned,
looked at Ellis once more, and laughed, as he went out of the room.
Of the lesser brutalities, a contemptuous laugh is, perhaps, the most
brutal of all. Ellis’s thin face reddened. There was silence until the
outer door slammed.
“Damn such a man!” declared Ellis, in a loud whisper. This was bold
language for him to speak. Later in the night, he woke up and thought
about it.
“Oh, I wouldn’t,” protested Haydock, mildly. “He’s so magnificent.”
“Well, I can’t see it!” Ellis was smarting; but he couldn’t relieve
himself with the appropriate sharp retort; it didn’t come to him until
later on, in bed. “No one has any right to be such a hog,--especially in
a club. Besides, I wasn’t talking to him in particular. He needn’t have
subscribed, if he didn’t want to; I never expected he would, although
almost every one else has. What’s a dollar anyhow?” he shrugged his
shoulders.
“Yes, what is it?” piped a tiny person, trying to relieve the tension,
from the other side of the table. “I haven’t seen one since the first of
last February.”
“No, but seriously,” demanded Ellis,--he was always demanding something
seriously,--“what do you think of a man who does things like that, not
only once, but every day--all the time?”
“Well, what did he do?” Haydock was never unprepared to take the other
side of any argument in which Ellis engaged. “In the first place, he
came into the club so quietly that no one but me noticed him. He sat
down and read his mail, and didn’t join in the clatter about the class
races, because, knowing something about the subject, what the rest of
you fellows had to say probably didn’t interest him; and he isn’t a
talkative person, ever. Well, then you tried to get him to subscribe to
that foolish night school for æsthetic butchers. I confess his answer
was not--not exactly urbane. But it’s just possible that your request
was ill-timed.”
“Don’t you think that’s one trouble with Sears?” piped the tiny one, who
had become interested. “He always gives you the feeling that everything
you say is ‘ill-timed’!”
“The great, big, angry bull!” added Ellis. “And just the other day,” he
went on, suddenly remembering another of Wolcott’s atrocities, “he took
a letter away from Billy Bemis, held him off with one hand and began to
read it,--right out loud in the club; and when Billy snatched it away,
Wolcott picked him up and threw him clear across the room on to the
divan, and almost broke his back. Now I don’t think that any man who
pretends to be a gentleman--”
“Oh, write a letter to the ‘Crimson’ about it--” yelled some one who,
though trying to read in the next room, apparently could not help
following the discussion.
“He was probably feeling his oats a little that day,” suggested Haydock,
placidly. “Why shouldn’t he? He’s just like a fine stallion snorting
around a ten-acre lot.”
“Feeling his oats, yes,--that’s all right,” sniffed Ellis. “I suppose he
was feeling his oats when he captained his class eleven, and used to
curse the men out until everybody talked about it; that is, he cursed
out the men who were smaller than himself--if it wasn’t worth his while
to keep on the right side of them.”
“For Heaven’s sake shut up!” came from the other room, a trifle
impatiently.
“Aren’t we just a little harsh?” asked some one who had been listening
without joining in.
“Don’t repeat things like that about Sears, Johnny, even if you like to
believe them,” said Haydock, simply. Haydock always seemed a little
older--less haphazard in his words--than his contemporaries, and never
so much so as when repressing what had once been a temper of the most
flaming kind. Ellis--limited, conscientious, uncompromising--created
countless occasions for such repression. He was a pale tissue of all the
virtues. His sobriety was the kind that drove men to the gutter; his
chastity lowered temperatures. Once at a small dinner he inadvertently
got drunk and became so austere that the fellows went home. To-night, in
running down a member of the club at the club, he had more than
irritated Haydock. And then--which in this instance was to the
point--the member had been Wolcott. As a matter of fact, Haydock liked
Wolcott as he liked very few people. But even if one wasn’t fond of The
Magnificent One, he thought, there were so many people all over the
college who spent a generous portion of their time in cursing him,--men
to whom “Sears Wolcott” was the eponym of snob, and purse-proud
arrogance,--that in not sticking up for him, or, at least, in not
knowing what was really fine in him, one missed a rare chance of judging
by standards other than those of Thomas, Richard, and Henry. Wolcott
was a snob, of course; but then he never denied the fact,--he even
volunteered the information at times. And there’s hope for that kind of
a snob, thought Haydock.
The club--which had a characteristic expression for almost every hour of
the day--was beginning to lose what Haydock always thought of as its
“just-after-dinner look.” The men had finished their coffee; some of
them strolled off to their rooms to grind; others hurried in town to the
theatre; two were playing cards rather solemnly in a corner; on the
divan, a worn-out athlete had fallen asleep over a comic paper. Haydock
finished his cigar and went across to his room in Claverly.
At ten o’clock,--Wolcott’s bedtime when in training,--Haydock lit a pipe
and knocked on The Magnificent One’s door at the other end of the long
corridor. His coming at that hour was such a matter of course, that the
door had been left hospitably unlatched as usual.
“How was the rowing to-day?” he asked. The question, also, was a matter
of course.
“Damned hard work!” Wolcott was leisurely undressing and dropping his
clothes wherever he happened to be when they came off. “About ten racing
starts, then down to the Basin and up to the Brighton abattoir and back.
I’m tired.”
“And just a dash peevish, I believe.” Haydock sat down on the floor, and
lit the shavings and kindling wood in the fireplace. Wolcott’s rooms
were always as fresh and cold as the weather permitted.
“Oh, Ellis is such a God awful fool,--I’d break his face if he was
bigger!” Wolcott looked at the fire a moment, and thoughtfully stroked
one of his bare arms. “I got this, to-night.” He took a letter from the
mantelpiece and dropped it into Haydock’s lap. Haydock read it while The
Magnificent One got into his pyjamas before the fire. The letter had
nothing whatever to do with Ellis. Not that Haydock supposed it had;
logical sequence in any two of Wolcott’s remarks always surprised him.
It was a tactfully worded appeal from Barrows, the Recording Secretary,
telling, with simple realism that somehow or other stayed by one after
the letter was back in its envelope, of a fine, keen, scholarly fellow
in the sophomore class who had been found, literally starving, a stone’s
throw from the College Yard.
“What do you think, Boy?” asked Wolcott, indifferently.
“I wonder who it is,” mused Haydock.
The Secretary’s omission of the man’s name hadn’t interested Wolcott in
the least.
“Why didn’t he keep away, damn his soul?” he said.
“Well, he’s here,--that’s the main thing.”
“And Barrows wants me to give him a yacht and some polo ponies, and keep
him in cigars and golf sticks.”
Haydock made an inarticulate sound of assent between puffs. He knew
perfectly well that Wolcott wanted his advice, that in his
characteristic way he was asking it. He also knew, for his liking was an
intelligent one, how to give it.
“Well, I call it pretty nervy,” grumbled Sears.
“Oh, yes--yes--it’s nervy.” One simply had to agree with Wolcott in all
minor points in order to get anywhere.
“I don’t like to have my leg pulled any more than anybody else does.”
“No, I shouldn’t think you would. But I imagine they’d have difficulty
if they tried to play any little games like that with you,” Haydock
added, confidently.
No one objects to being talked to this way by a slightly older person
who is no fool himself.
“I’d like to see them try!” growled the other.
“They know better.”
“What do you call that, then?” Wolcott pointed with his toe to the
letter in Haydock’s lap.
“Oh--that!” Haydock’s manner was most off-hand, “that’s merely the
penalty of prominence and wealth. It’s tiresome, of course, this having
to come up to the scratch all your life. You know--sometimes I’m mighty
glad I’m not so powerful as you are--not in a position to do as much for
people, because I think--of course you never can tell--but I think I’d
be the kind of person to try to do it every now and then.”
“This sort of thing would be perfect fruit for you, wouldn’t it?”
“I’m inclined to think the poor devil would stop starving for a while.”
“How much would you give him, old Haystack, if you weren’t such a dirty
beggar yourself?” After absorbing a certain amount of Haydock’s
flattery, Wolcott always began to radiate a sort of bantering
amiability.
“Who--I? Oh, I don’t know! You can’t very well send fifteen or twenty
dollars, and let it go at that, I suppose; that’s too easy. I’d fix up
some scheme with the Secretary,--he knows all about that kind of
thing,--and keep the creature going; pay on the instalment plan for
thirty or forty years,” he laughed, “you know, the way people do when
they buy a piano or a set of Kipling--or any old thing.”
This was about as far as Haydock dared to go. He often wondered how
Wolcott could be induced to interest himself in something along the
lines suggested by Barrows, the Secretary; it was the incalculable
benefit such an interest would be to Wolcott that made him wish it; and
he had, as often, given the problem up. For Wolcott took the initiative
in nothing; he never had known the necessity that compels one to. The
only effort he was ever called on to make was that of selection. It
seemed as if everything in the world--the Secretary’s letter
included--came tumbling to crave approval at the boy’s feet. And he
approved of so little--least of all, of the people (Ellis was one of
them) who butted their heads against the mighty wall of his prejudices.
Haydock, who, perhaps, knew him better than any one did, was
occasionally nimble enough to clamber over the barrier. When he failed,
he consoled himself with the thought that, unlike Ellis and some others,
his head was still intact. For, in an odd sort of way that suggested the
congeniality of mind and matter, the two were excellent friends.
“Well, ‘I must go to bed and get strong for dear old Harvard,’”
announced Wolcott, abruptly. He had once read that sentence in a college
story, and had quoted it, with intense amusement, every night since.
Haydock leaned against the doorway, while The Magnificent One slid into
bed.
“Bed’s a good place, isn’t it?” said Wolcott, cuddling his sunburnt
face in the pillow. “Oh, Haystack,--I want to get up at seven,--leave a
note on my boots as you go out.”
“Have you found any one yet to tutor you in History 19?” asked Haydock,
from the other room, where he was scribbling a notice for the janitor.
“Yes, I start in to-morrow.”
“I didn’t know anybody was tutoring in that course this year. Who did
you get?”
“I don’t know his name. Oh, yes, I do, too. He’s a freak named McGaw;
wears a black cutaway coat with braid round the edge, and looks nervous.
Good-night, old Haystack. Don’t forget the lights.”
Before Haydock made the room dark, he took the Secretary’s letter from
the mantelpiece, and put it on Wolcott’s desk, where it could not very
well be overlooked.
II
If the primitive custom--in vogue, I believe, at certain colleges--of
choosing by vote “the most popular man,” “the most unpopular man,” “the
handsomest man,” and so on, were numbered among Harvard traditions
(thank Heaven, it isn’t!), Wolcott would never have been elected to
adorn the first of these distinctions. He would have had a large and
enthusiastic backing for the second, and some scattering ballots for the
third. Yet the material perquisites of popularity were his, for Wolcott
presented the thought-compelling spectacle of a disliked person, to whom
every social honour was paid with as much regularity as if he had come
to Cambridge with a pocketful of promissory notes that called for
them--to be drawn out and cashed when due. One never said of Wolcott, as
is said of some fellows, “He _made_ the first ten of the
Dicky”--implying a certain amount of enterprise or discretion. The
assertion that he _was_ a first ten man required no implication;
it was enough, for it was so ordained. Now this fact is one of
significance,--of greater significance than any one, not a Harvard
man, is likely to attach to the sophomore society (and it is a wise
Harvard child that knows the mother of its soul). But just why
Wolcott--arrogant, combative, unresponsive--had been a first ten man, is
for a treatise, not a story. It is sufficient to say that he was one,
and that it never occurred to his numerous acquaintances to question his
individual fitness for that honour, however much they lamented the
system that gave it to him. Wolcott himself never questioned it. Only in
the circumstance of his having been omitted from the chosen first, would
the subject have seemed to him in any way markworthy. His attitude from
babyhood towards anything worth having, that he didn’t already possess,
had been one of imminent proprietorship. Once when his nurse, holding
him up to the window, had asked in the peculiarly imbecile way of
nurses, “Whose moon is that, Searsy?” Searsy had replied, as one
compelled to explain the obvious, “That’s Mr. Langdon Wolcott’s moon.”
The gentleman referred to was his father. This attitude Searsy had
practised through the nursery, and the fitting school, until, by the
time he went to college, it was an exceedingly muscular, well-developed
posture indeed. And that’s partly why he was called Wolcott The
Magnificent. The other reason provoked less difference of opinion; he
really was magnificent. Everybody who knew about arms, and legs, and
chests, and things, agreed that he was. And as the people who don’t know
about such things always have a deep admiration--either frank or
sneaking--for them, Sears’s imperial subtitle was rarely disputed. As
early as the close of his freshman year, the name spread to town. Girls
with opera-glasses used to sit at back dining-room windows on the
water-side of Beacon Street to see him row past with his crew. They took
the same tender interest in the way the April sun and wind tanned his
back, that a freshman takes in colouring a meerschaum pipe. In years
gone by, Wolcott and these young ladies had--in the good Boston
fashion--cemented their acquaintance with the mud that pies are made of.
But wonderful things had happened since then; a lot of little girls,
with piano legs and pigtails, had put their skirts down and their hair
up; a chunky, dictatorial boy had become very magnificent.
Altogether, Sears was not the sort of fellow over whose welfare one
would expect to find many people worrying. There would seem to be but
little cause for anxiety about a man who knew how to spend an enormous
allowance sensibly,--if selfishly,--who, on the whole, preferred to be
in training most of the year rather than out of it, who rarely fell
below what he called a “gentleman’s mark” in any of his studies, and
who, as a matter of course, was given every social distinction in the
power of the undergraduate world to bestow; yet there were several very
intelligent human beings, who, when they thought about Sears--and they
thought a good deal about him every day--did not meditate so much on
what he had, as on what he so abundantly lacked. They wished that
things were different. And Haydock used to say that worrying was merely
wishing two or three times in succession that things were different. One
of these persons was Sears’s eldest sister, another of them was Haydock.
Miss Wolcott was the sort of Boston girl that dresses like a penwiper,
and becomes absorbed in associated charities after a second lugubrious
season. In the patois of her locality, she was called a “pill;” a girl
whom Harvard men carefully avoid until it is rumoured that her family
shortly intends to “give something” in the paternal pill-box. Whereas,
prior to her renunciation, dozens of Harvard men had been part of Miss
Wolcott’s responsibility, her concern was now centred upon one, namely,
her brother Sears. She and Haydock, unknown to each other, had found the
same reason for wishing things different. After making each other’s
acquaintance, they worried congenially in chorus. In their opinion Sears
was not getting out of Harvard College the greatest things Harvard
College had to offer. They did not expect him to see them,--that would
have been demanding too much; the undergraduate who sees them is an
extremely occasional, precocious, and, as a rule, objectionable person.
But they wished earnestly that the boy might, somehow or other, be put
in the way of feeling them--of realising, even dimly, that the world to
which he had lent himself for four years was something besides two small
clubs, a fashionable dormitory, and a class crew. They wanted him to
know, for instance, that the steady, commonplace stream that flowed to
five o’clock dinners in Memorial Hall, the damp, throat-clearing, tired
mobs that packed Lower Massachusetts on wet Monday afternoons and
smelled, the indefinite hundreds that sat at dusk on the grass in front
of Holworthy to hear the Glee Club sing, were as necessary, as real, as
himself. They thought that such a conviction, or even such a suspicion,
would make Sears a bigger and a better man. They believed--knowing, as
they did, how inevitable was the general scheme of his future--that if
the glimmer of these things did not dawn now, when the horizon that
bounded them all ended with the college fence, it never would. And they
were perfectly right.
“Searsy is really such a splendid fellow,” Miss Wolcott would say to
Haydock, with enthusiasm, “I want him to do something.” Haydock, too,
wanted him to do something. But they never got much beyond that,
although they had many satisfactory discussions on the subject on Sunday
afternoons, while Mrs. Wolcott and the younger sisters (who weren’t
failures) made tea and conversation for frock-coated youths in the next
room. It was perplexing to know just where to begin with a person like
Sears. Miss Wolcott laboured under a disadvantage; Sears was not the
person to take suggestions from a failure. Haydock was more to the
point. But he and Wolcott were of an age and a class; and it’s so easy
to be a bore.
The Secretary’s letter struck Haydock as one of the few distinctly
opportune requests for money he had ever heard of. After he had put out
Wolcott’s lights, he walked up and down his own room, smoking his pipe
and thinking it over. There were several possible outcomes to the little
situation. An act of charity may be ignored, it may be performed with
the enthusiasm with which one pays a bill for a suit of clothes long
since worn out, or it may stir up a confusion of fine emotions that have
lain quiescent in one, like the dregs of a comfortable bottle. The
latter kind of charity is the sin-coverer. The chances were that Wolcott
would never think of Barrows and his man again. It was just possible
that he might send them a cheque for fifty dollars, and be unbearable
for the next three days. But as for his being in any way stirred,
awakened, made to know what he was doing, to wonder what he might do,
Haydock felt, away down deep somewhere, that it was quite hopeless. And
for that reason, the mind of man being so contrived, his thoughts dwelt
that night, as they often did, on an apotheosised Wolcott, a Wolcott who
justified himself, who didn’t disappoint, a Wolcott whose sympathies and
judgments were as broad as his shoulders, a Wolcott, in short, whose
inside was brother to his outside.
When Sears got up the next morning, he “puttered among dishes in his
bedroom,”--a thing he usually detested,--instead of going down to the
tank for a swim. He had stopped his morning plunge of late, because,
since he had begun to get up early, he almost always met Ellis in the
tank. Ellis was an offensively clean person; he bathed with much
unnecessary splashing, and changed his shirt with a flourish of
trumpets. His noisy ablutions got on Wolcott’s nerves. To-day the
peacefulness of Sears’s own room, and the indescribable beauty of the
College Yard,--spring in Cambridge comes to the Yard first,--as he
walked to and from breakfast, combined to put him in one of his best
moods,--one which expressed itself in a slow exuberance of spirits, a
persistent, obstinate bantering of everybody and everything that,
although far removed from ill-humour, was not yet mirth. When at nine
o’clock there was a knock on his door, Sears, instead of saying, “Come
in,” called out the long, unspellable “Ay-y-y-y-y,” one hears so many
times a day around college; when he looked up and saw McGaw, the tutor,
standing in the doorway, his manner did not change.
“Hello!--sorry to see you!” he said, without rising. “I don’t feel much
like it this morning.” McGaw fingered his notebook uneasily. “But come
in, anyhow--I suppose I have to,” added Wolcott, noticing with a smile
that the tutor thought he had been dismissed. “Don’t sit there; it’s a
rotten sofa. Sit over by the window and smoke.”
“I don’t smoke, thank you,” said McGaw, sitting down where he had been
told to.
“What’s the matter; are you in training?” Let it be said, to Wolcott’s
credit, that the irony of his question was unconscious, and, to his
discredit, that the chuckle with which he greeted his own words as soon
as their absurdity dawned on him was pointed and uncontrolled. He had
asked McGaw if he was in training, because the question naturally
followed a refusal to drink or smoke; its inappropriateness flashed upon
him afterwards. Nothing short of incongruity, striking, absolute, could
make Sears laugh as he was laughing now. McGaw in training! That
hatchet-faced, slant-shouldered, chestless, leggy, comic valentine whose
neck and wrists and ankles refused to desist where his clothes left
off,--in training! Sears twisted half-way round that he might have a
better look at the tutor, and, throwing his legs over the arm of his
huge leather chair, he shook with amusement. Then a slow, disconcerting
wave of regret for what he had done crept over him; it made him warm,
and pricked painfully among the roots of his hair. It left him all at
once with nothing to say. McGaw opened his note-book and stared at it
blindly. Two brilliant spots of pink tipped his high cheek-bones.
“Let’s begin,” said Wolcott, gruffly.
“How much do you know of the subject?” asked McGaw, in a voice that
might have come from an automaton.
“Nothing.”
“Do you know any Latin?”
“Damned little!”
The tutor drummed thoughtfully with his fingertips on the note-book.
“Perhaps you’d better get some writing materials and take down the main
headings,” he suggested. “It’s an aid to the memory.” He looked fixedly
out of the window into a mist of young green, while Sears rummaged all
over the room. It was some time before he could find paper of any kind;
his desk was heavy with a variety of silver topped Christmas presents,
but lacking in any of the essentials for study. He succeeded, finally,
in producing from a drawer some undersized note-paper, with the number
of his room stamped in blue at the top. McGaw furnished the pencil. Then
began a travesty on education that was, no doubt, being enacted in any
number of rooms at Harvard, at that identical hour. The keen-faced,
hectic-looking tutor, with his exhaustive notes, nervously outlined a
period of the world’s history, the importance of which both he and
Wolcott considered only in its relation to the final examinations.
Charlemagne’s reign, looked at as something of a stride in the march of
progress, would have bored Sears and frittered away McGaw’s time. Had
popes and kings been for an instant regarded as more than names with a
postscript of Roman numerals and dates, Wolcott’s brain would have
struck, and the tutor’s imagination would have creaked, in the exercise
of a disused function. Queens, treaties, battles, diets, bulls,
crownings, and decapitations--for two stifling hours, McGaw shovelled
them into Wolcott, until he sweat like a stoker. And Sears, phlegmatic,
colossal, consumed them all like an ogre at his dinner. From time to
time, he changed his seat and began afresh; it was as if he were setting
his teeth to keep the mess down until he could disgorge it--the facts of
five hundred years--on his blue book. Only once did he interrupt, and
show, by asking a child’s question about the unfortunate emperor forced
to stand barefooted in the snow all night, that any of these facts were
attached in his mind to human beings. Since he had come to Harvard,
Wolcott had done this sort of thing before every midyear and final
examination period. He intended to keep on doing it until, at the end of
four years, the President and Faculty would say to him, in a
communication that crackled deliciously when its pink ribbons were
untied:--“_Sears_ (or perhaps “Searolus”) _Wolcott, 2nd, alumnum ad
gradum Baccalaurei in Artibus admisimus, eique dedimus et concessimus
omnia insignia et jura ad hunc honorem spectantia._”
After two hours, McGaw closed his book, Sears dropped his notes and
pencil on the floor, and leaned back with his arms above his head. The
soft spring air, enervating with the smell of damp earth and new leaves,
was finding its way up through the open windows. The tutor rubbed his
strained eyes wearily; he had something more to say connected with the
examination, but for the moment he couldn’t recall it.
“Oh, yes,” he said abruptly; “we’d better leave the Latin documents
until the end. Most of them are translated in Van Witz’s ‘Mediæval
Records.’ I advise you to buy the volume and begin to look it over by
yourself.”
“I wish you’d get it for me,” Wolcott answered, after a moment in which
he decided that the effort of picking up his pencil and paper and
writing down the title was too great.
“I suppose I could,” said McGaw, slowly. He knew very well that he
couldn’t; he didn’t have the necessary dollar.
“Yes, bring it round next time you come; there’s plenty of time,” added
Sears.
To almost any one else, McGaw would have had no difficulty in saying, “I
wish you would get it yourself.” But he shrank from what he imagined
would be Wolcott’s reception of such a request. For from the time he had
come into the room, and found his big pupil sprawling unconcernedly in
the middle of it, the tutor had been in a whirl of uneasiness and
resentment. Wolcott’s study was a very masculine, almost an austere
apartment. But it was simple with the simplicity that costs a great deal
of money. Its plain hard woods and dull green leather overpowered McGaw;
the solid aggressiveness of Wolcott himself angered him. Both the
tutor’s environment and his audience repelled an admission of poverty.
In his embarrassment at having to say anything, he said it all,
nervously blurting out:
“I’m afraid you’ll have to get it yourself. It’s an expensive book; I
can’t afford it.”
“Why, that’s all right,” said Sears, heartily; “what’s the name of the
thing?” He was as ill at ease as McGaw himself, now, and his abrupt note
of sincerity was decidedly awkward. The tutor, of course, immediately
discovered the intent to patronise, that, as a matter of fact, was not
there. His hatred of Wolcott dated itself from that instant.
After McGaw was well out of the building, Sears would have strolled
aimlessly down into the sunshine--he never stayed in his room any more
than was necessary--had he not come across the Secretary’s letter when
he went to his desk to put away the notes he had just taken. He reread
this document, with what is conveniently known as “mingled emotions.”
That is to say, his impatience at the Secretary’s “nerve” diffused
itself, as he read, in a vague inclination to know exactly what Barrows
wanted him to do. He would not for anything have acknowledged, even to
himself, that his two hours with McGaw had brought about this frame of
mind, which in Sears was almost equivalent to mellowness. He preferred
to think that Haydock’s opinions were worth respecting. But,
nevertheless, it was McGaw with his pinched, hectic, angular, hunted
personality, all sticking out of a scant, tightly-buttoned cutaway coat,
that had induced Sears, by some curiously indirect mental process, to
reread the letter in the first place. For, after all, Wolcott was a
gentleman, if an extremely young one, and when he hurt people’s
feelings, as he very often did, he always felt uncomfortable about it
afterwards. Not that his discomfort brought him to the point of an
apology,--some day, perhaps, it might. But then, if he ever became
softened to that extent he probably wouldn’t offend any one in the first
place. He read the Secretary’s business-like statements about the man
whose breakfasts and luncheons and dinners were oatmeal, oatmeal, and
oatmeal, and a little milk--condensed milk. But it was McGaw himself who
managed to put the breath of life into the written pages, and make the
man they told about seem any more vital than Charlemagne or Martin
Luther; words alone rarely told Wolcott much. McGaw’s glowing
cheek-bones, his drawn, sensitive mouth, and stringy clothes were
pleading his own cause, unknown to himself, to Wolcott, or to the
Secretary.
Sears put down the letter and drew a sheet of the little note-paper to
him. Then, after beating a preliminary tattoo, that sounded like the
clicking of a telegraph instrument, with his pen, he wrote to Barrows:
“I shall be glad to do what I can for your man; but you must tell me
what it is you want me to do. Can I see you some time and talk it over?”
On his way out to post the note, he met Haydock.
“I bet you’d like to know what’s inside this, Haystack,” he said,
thrusting the envelope into his friend’s face and chuckling inscrutably.
Haydock looked at the address.
“You’ll tell me some day,” he answered confidently. Wolcott jerked his
note away. His reply was:--
“I’ll be damned if I do!” He meant what he said at the time because he
knew Haydock was interested and thought he could tease him. As a rule,
he found it impossible to tease Haydock, unless he pulled his hair or
knocked him down.
III
After one has been out of college long enough to reckon time by a
calendar, instead of by the college catalogue, May and June are
sprightly preludes to all one’s operas unsung. But when the year counts
nine months, instead of twelve, spring is a climax. At Harvard, it comes
in a misty veil of young elm leaves and apple blossoms that floats, for
a time, with the sweetest deception in the world, between you and every
other disagreeable fact. It envelops you, permeates you, seduces you,
and makes you drunk; yet, as hour after hour (and lecture after lecture)
drifts past your open window, or your canoe, or the sun-flecked lawn
under the trees in the Yard, where you lie and watch the industrious
robins rip elastic angle-worms from the sod, you believe that you have
awakened for the first time,--that the problem has at last solved
itself. You are as blind as a poet, and you laugh and wonder why you
never saw before. Had not the only verse been written, you would write
it: “Come ... sit by my side and let the world slip; we shall ne’er be
younger.”
But in spite of all this, these first spring days, that incline one to
look upon the immoral sense as a sort of hibernating beast, are not
beginnings but the end. A feeling as of many things happening at once
comes over you. There is much to do, and no time whatever in which to do
it. The College is in a hurry. It crashes along toward the Finals and
Class Day, carrying you with it in spite of you. No single activity in
which you may engage seems in itself of utmost importance. But the sum
total crowds your days and nights with the interests of rowing and
base-ball, and the First Ten, and the perennial squabbles of the three
clubs in their efforts to pledge the most attractive of the neophytes to
join their respective institutions (which, unless the neophytes are very
sensible young men, doesn’t tend to make them any more attractive), and
the great Spring Dinners, when the graduates come back and meet all the
new men and sing songs and drink drinks (or is it the other way?), and
forget that they have ever been away from Harvard at all, and the
dinners of the college papers,--“The Monthly” (roistering blades), at
some modest tavern; and “The Advocate,” at Marliave’s, perhaps, with
nothing in particular to eat, but with all that easy indifference to the
fragility of crockery by which the artistic temperament makes itself
heard; “The Crimson” (typographical remonstrance), enjoying itself
somewhere in its strange, reproachful way; and the “Only Successful,”
“The Lampoon,” at The Empire or The Tuileries, laughing all night
regardless of expense. Then there is Strawberry Night at the Signet,
when the First Seven, from the Sophomore Class is taken in,--Haydock and
Ellis were on the First Seven,--and the O. K. dinner (Hush-h-h-h-h!),
when the First Eight from the Junior Class is initiated, and Strawberry
Night at the Pudding, and the “Pop” Concerts, and Riverside, and a
thousand other delightful happenings. None of them are of supreme
importance, I suppose. But they combine to whirl certain men through May
and part of June on a strong, swift current of Harvard life that
deposits them, after Class Day and Commencement, somewhere high and dry
and--although they may not know it themselves--homesick for Cambridge.
Even the mildest, farthest-meandering eddies of this current do not
reach the type of student to which McGaw belonged; McGaw knew nothing of
them. He had not gone to college to drift with the stream. He was there,
primarily, to acquire information along certain lines laid out in the
curriculum, incidentally to fight hunger and cold and darkness. If he
could be “sandy” and healthy and lucky enough to stick it out for four
years, he would have, at the end, concealed somewhere about his person,
that distinction (of many differences),--a college education. “Sand” he
had,--an incredible amount of it. But the trait had bid fair to destroy
his health before it discovered his luck. For to stay where he was at
all, and slave with his mind, often obliged him first to exhaust and
stultify himself with the manual labour of a lout. He had taken care of
furnace fires, cleaned cellars and backyards, shovelled snow, and cut
grass, until these varied avocations, together with the remarkable work
he did in his studies, and the farcical meals he cooked himself, broke
him down and sent him in a semi-hysterical, wholly pitiful state to the
kindly Barrows. And Barrows, convinced that he did not belong to the
many “grinds,”--of such admirable purpose and tragic mediocrity,--who
made the Secretary’s office one of constant anguish, hit upon an
inspiration. Of late, it had seemed positively Heaven-sent. Wolcott had
come to him, and said, in a manner that combined a child’s shyness with
the omnipotence of a crowned head who believes in the divine right of
kings, “I wish you would tell me just what I’m to do for this man you
wrote me about.” Barrows was gratified, amused, and, perhaps, a trifle
worried. His half hour with Sears, like a good deal of the time spent in
The Magnificent One’s company, rather baffled the Secretary. Wolcott’s
method of doing charity was in itself extraordinary. Furthermore, as far
as Barrows could see,--and he was keen,--there was no particular motive
for the act. Compassion was lacking; what little Sears said was
impersonal, almost cold. Vanity, smug self-appreciation, there was
none; the fellow neither enjoined theatrical conditions of secrecy, nor
showed ill-concealed eagerness to shine his light before men. The
personal equation was eliminated. Wolcott indicated nothing but a
princely willingness to undertake and carry out whatever the situation
required. As a matter of temporary convenience, he told Barrows he
preferred sending the man a monthly allowance, to giving any particular
sum at the start.
“Tell him to spend his money and--and eat things,” was perhaps his most
specific suggestion.
Haydock, of course, was deeply interested in his quiet fashion. Sears
told him the bald facts in a casual, indifferent way one afternoon when
he was changing his clothes to row. The interview with the Secretary,
Haydock was forced to reconstruct as best he could.
“Are you going to keep it up right along?” he asked, sceptically.
“Why not?” Sears’s tone implied the usual chip on his shoulder.
“Well, it’s very good of you,” commented the other, with almost
imperceptible exaggeration.
“Oh, hell!--now you’re giving me the geehee; I can tell that even if I
can’t write anonymous sonnets for the ‘Monthly.’” He gave Haydock one of
his athletic tributes of affection. “You know there’s nothing good about
it. What difference does it make?”
Yet in spite of Wolcott’s characteristic attitude to his indigent
unknown,--it was equivalent, briefly, to a shrug of the shoulders,--the
two dropped into the habit of talking together about him. They referred
to him after a time as “It,” or “Crœsus,” or “The Bloated Bondholder;”
and one of Wolcott’s favourite amusements was to describe in detail,
with an idiotic brilliancy of invention that Haydock had never given him
credit for, what “It” was doing at that particular moment.
“‘It’ must be dressing for dinner, don’t you think?” Sears would ask,
apropos of nothing at all.
“Oh, do you think so,--at six o’clock?” Haydock would take out his
watch, and deliberate seriously, “You see he dines at eight, probably,
and that gives him just time to get away from the Somerset and take in
the last few numbers at the ‘Pop’ Concert.”
“Yes,--he won’t care for long dinners this warm weather,” Sears would
add; “some clams, a clear soup, a bird, a truffle or two, salad perhaps;
all a man really needs of course, but nothing heavy or elaborate.”
Or again: “‘It’ had better hurry up and put that boat of his into
commission if he wants to get to Poughkeepsie for the race.”
“Will he go round with her?” Haydock would consider doubtfully.
“Oh, dear, no; he’ll take his car and meet her there. That sailing
master of his is a capital man,--perfectly invaluable he’s been to
Crœsus. You remember that spring on the Mediterranean?”
“Oh, yes, yes, of course, that time!”
After some such elaborate bit of fooling, Wolcott would roll on the
floor in paroxysms of mirth. And all the while McGaw and Wolcott were
spending several hours a week in the same room, translating from the
same page. Once when Haydock tiptoed in during a seminar to borrow
something, Sears glanced up from the Latin Documents and said:
“Crœsus has had a mighty pretty lot of ponies sent up from Virginia,”
and Haydock had answered, as he rummaged through the desk:--
“Good work,--I’ll have to look them over.”
Long practice had perfected the technique of their little game; its
suggestion of mindless opulence was maddening to McGaw. He had very
bitter feelings sometimes. Of late they had all come to an intense sort
of focus upon Sears. For in him McGaw was able to detect every human
attribute that he especially hated. Sears, on the other hand, though
naturally inclined to regard the tutor as a serviceable, if unsightly,
machine, became used to his high-strung, underfed personality. He would
talk to him now and then, when the effort of concentration became
impossible, ask his opinion of certain instructors and their
courses,--whether this one was a “snap,” and that one a “stinker,”--what
sort of frills he, McGaw, was going to get on his degree, and if he
didn’t think the college was “a good deal of a fake, anyhow?” This sort
of thing was infinitely more galling to McGaw than a business relation,
pure and simple. He remembered that, with other men who interrupted the
study hour from time to time, Wolcott talked rowing or horses or--what
was even more bewildering--nothing at all, but fooled and laughed with
easy intimacy. He resented Sears’s ponderous adaptability to his, the
tutor’s, own special topics.
While these two were seeing so much of each other on this uneven basis,
May came and went, bringing with it the Class Races and all the other
spring novelties. Wolcott’s crew came in second in the race, with seven
men in the boat. Some one had broken an oar, or a leg, or an
outrigger,--some one always does,--and jumped overboard. So the order in
which the four crews splashed over the finish line was, as usual, a
tremendous surprise to the black crowd that stretched along the Harvard
Bridge, and the sea wall, and the stable roofs back of Beacon Street.
Everybody--especially the girls--said the man who jumped was a great,
splendid fellow. He was, of course; but the crews and the man himself
laughed a good deal when they heard it; they thought that the men who
had to stay by a disabled boat and be beaten by half a length showed
their sand.
One sweltering day in June, after the examinations had begun, Haydock
found Sears in his room, staring helplessly at a small mountain of
clothing that reared itself in chaos from his study floor. “What’ll I
do?” he asked, mopping his face dejectedly with the tail of a coloured
shirt.
“Why, what’s the matter with them?” Haydock turned over a gay straw hat
with his foot.
“Oh, everything!” answered Sears; he was warm and cross. “They don’t
fit, and they’re hideous, and no good, and in my way, and they make me
sick.” He gave the pile a kick that spread it the length of the room.
“Why not let Crœsus have a whack at them?” suggested Haydock,
thoughtfully.
“What!” Wolcott looked quizzical, astonished. “Oh, that would never do,
Boy! It would be rotten for one college fellow to offer another one
clothes.”
“I don’t see much difference between that and money.”
“Well, there is a difference, just the same. The money comes through the
Secretary,--a sort of reward offered, and no questions asked. Anyhow,
there’s something about money--something--Oh, you know what it is as
well as I do! As soon as money belongs to you, it’s just as good as
anybody’s.”
“Rather better, I should say.”
“Well, clothes aren’t.”
“Since you press me,” said Haydock, fishing among a heap of crumpled
linen, “I feel obliged to possess myself of this extremely pretty
necktie.” He smoothed a brilliant strip of crimson silk over his knee.
“Go on, Haystack,--what shall I do with them?”
“How many times does a simple statement have to be repeated to you
before it penetrates?” Haydock rapidly began to bring a rough kind of
order into the waste of shirts, neckties, odd gloves, and suits of
clothes.
“Give them to Crœsus? That’s out of the question, me boy!”
Haydock worked hard a few moments in silence. Then he stood up, hot and
dishevelled, but amiable, as he always was, and said, laughing:--
“That light grey suit, these shirts, those neckties, and this hat, in
fact the best of this out-fit, is going this afternoon to Barrows, with
a note from you. They will subsequently be presented to ‘It, Croœsus,
Esquire.’” It amused Wolcott every now and then to have Haydock “boss”
him. The clothes went, of course.
Two days later they returned. That is to say, the best of them did,--the
grey suit, the coloured shirt, the straw hat, and one of the quieter
neckties. Ernest McGaw, unspeakably jaunty, almost handsome, was inside
of them.
Even before Wolcott’s bundle had enabled McGaw to blossom, like the
season, into fine raiment, his whole appearance had undergone a subtle,
indescribable change. Perhaps it was a recently acquired firmness of
gait as he swung through the Yard to a lecture, or up the steps of
Claverly to Sears’s room. Hitherto he had hated the approach to
Claverly; there usually were men going in or coming out, who looked at
him as they passed. Once he had found a whole group of them seated on
the steps, and had walked twice round the block, rather than brush
through to the door. Or it may have been the spiritual radiance that
comes of good food and plenty of it, money in your pocket, and peace in
your mind. At any rate, McGaw’s expression, whether it walked at you, or
looked at you, or smiled at you, had, of late, become the outward and
visible sign of a great inward happiness. Almost every minute of his day
was dedicated to his work; yet he felt as if he were having for the
first time leisure in which to breathe. By no means the least exquisite
of his satisfactions was his first purchase of something unnecessary, a
luxury, an extravagance; he bought one evening, in a dim musty corner of
a Brattle Square bookstall, a second-hand copy of some Latin hymns for
twenty cents. The demi-god who had caused such things to be--Barrows had
spoken vaguely of “a friend”--had become to McGaw the occasion of the
sun’s rising and the stars’ shining; through him, the earth revolved,
and the college endured. McGaw was very religious; every night he prayed
fervently for the man who was befriending him. To-day, when he left his
room to walk down to Claverly, he had the uplifting glow of self-respect
and good-will to men whose secret only barbers and tailors seem to know.
Perhaps, just at first, he felt even more like a white elephant than one
ordinarily does on getting into a fresh suit of grey, after wearing
black for many months. But the sensation, coming as it did from the
knowledge that he was conspicuously better, rather than worse dressed
than most people, was not altogether an unpleasant one to McGaw.
Wolcott’s back was turned when he arrived. This fact made what followed
even more unfortunate than it would have been had the somewhat
astounding truth burst on Sears at the moment the tutor came into the
room. For it enabled Wolcott to say, in his natural, off-hand tones,
without looking away from his desk:
“Is that you, McGaw? Just sit down and wait a minute.” When his
revolving chair finally did swing round, the transition was something
very awful. Sears, in spite of his birth, and his bringing up, and his
money, was, at times, to put it kindly, exceedingly “near to nature;”
just now he behaved as one might fancy a naked Zulu behaving were an
electric car or a steam-roller to dart suddenly across his path in the
depths of an African jungle. He jerked back as if somebody had made a
lunge at him, and held on to the arms of his chair. Then he looked
quickly from side to side, at the door and windows, with his mouth open
stupidly. His eyes, round, rounder, helpless, turned again and again to
that dapper butterfly in the chair opposite, who got redder and redder
until all the blood in his body boiled through his face and away,
leaving him white, rigid, terrible. And Sears could make no sound, only
a gasping effort, until all at once the entire situation seemed to
gather fresh force and smite him anew. He stumbled from his chair,
through the door, down the long hall, down the stairs, laughing,
shrieking, cursing like a maniac, out into the street.
IV
Sears found Haydock studying at the club, and dragged him out of his
chair, upstairs to a vacant room, and shut the door. Then he paced the
floor like a caged lion, holding his hands to his head and exclaiming,
whenever he could stop laughing long enough, that he had lost his mind.
Every now and then, when words refused to come, he expressed himself by
leaning against the wall, with his back to Haydock, and kicking the air
behind him. Sometimes he pounded the door with his clenched fist.
Haydock waited.
“I’ll never get over this,” Sears declared, “not if I live to be a
hundred.”
“Well, don’t tell it backwards,” objected Haydock; “begin at the
beginning.”
“There isn’t any beginning,” roared Sears; “it never began, I just
looked around and found it there; it had been there all the time;
you’ve seen it yourself.” He sat on the floor and rocked to and fro.
“I’m almost inclined to believe that you _have_ lost your mind,”
remarked Haydock.
“Just wait, just wait! You’ll be a gibbering idiot yourself when I tell
you, only you’ll not believe me! You can’t believe me! I don’t believe
it myself! Oh, if you’d only been there!--if you could have seen him! I
was writing a letter at my desk when he came in, and told him to sit
down. I didn’t even notice him, or what he had on, or anything; and when
I turned around--when I turned around--” Wolcott gasped--“when I turned
around, I thought it would be McGaw!”
“Oh, go on, who was it?”
“It _was_ McGaw! I’ll never get over the shock of it.” Haydock wrinkled
his forehead at this clew.
“Can’t you guess? Don’t you know? Doesn’t something tell you? Try, try!
think of the only person in college he could be, if he weren’t himself.
Think of the only way I could have found out, the thing that made the
difference--the--”
“He isn’t--he isn’t?”--Haydock stuffed his fingers in his ears and
shrieked.
“He is, he is!” bellowed Sears. Then they both yelled, and made such a
noise that the fellows downstairs came running up to see what was going
on.
But they didn’t tell them. They couldn’t, in the first place, and the
fellows wouldn’t have understood if they had. The McGaw-Crœsus episode
was one of those little interpolated experiences two people own together
so completely that they can’t share it if they want to. This one
happened to be the kind over which the partners could laugh. When it
happens the other way,--when two people get together and cry,--it isn’t
nearly as valuable a factor in the divine accident of friendship; there
is always one of them who very selfishly does most of the crying. For a
time there was only mirth over McGaw. It was natural enough that Wolcott
should have but a one-sided appreciation of the affair; _he_ had made a
discovery, _he_ had been surprised, _he_ had found it very startling
and absurd. It was not to be expected that he would stop laughing to
consider McGaw’s feelings in the matter. And Haydock, who was usually
thoughtful and considerate, treated the revelation as he did at first,
because it had come to him through Wolcott’s eyes. Only when his
interest in detail prompted him to ask questions, did he begin to
reconstruct the scene in Wolcott’s room, and feel intensely sorry for
McGaw.
“What did you say when you turned around and first saw the clothes?” he
asked Wolcott.
“Say? I didn’t say anything, I just looked, and wondered if the exams
had gone to my brain.”
“Didn’t he do anything?”
“Why, of course not; what did you suppose he’d do? Tell me that he’d
changed his shirt? I could see that for myself; heaven knows I almost
dropped dead!”
“Well, you certainly didn’t just sit there staring at the man, did you?”
“Sit there? If I’d sat there another second, I’d have yelled in his
face. I crashed out of the room and exploded in the hall. I came over
here to find you.”
“Do you mean to say he’s in your room yet, waiting?”
“I’m sure I don’t know,--I wouldn’t go back to look for gold and
precious stones.”
“What do you suppose he thought?”
“Lord, I don’t know,--I don’t care what he thought! What do you suppose
I thought?” Wolcott laughed.
“But if you ran out of your room that way, and laughed in the hall, as
you say you did, he must have known you were laughing at him,” said
Haydock, gravely.
“Why certainly he did! I don’t suppose the creature thought I was
throwing a fit like that just for exercise. What difference does it make
anyhow?” Sears went on indifferently. “I’ll never see him again.
To-day’s the last time he was coming to tutor me,--‘the exam’ is
to-morrow; I’ll send him a cheque for what I owe him, and there you
are.”
“But he must have thought you were laughing at him because he was
dressed up,” persisted Haydock.
“Well, damn it, I was! If he hadn’t come looking as fine as a drunken
shoemaker in my old clothes, I never should have known!” McGaw’s
emotions didn’t contribute in any way to Wolcott’s enjoyment of his
discovery,--why should Haydock branch off and make such a tiresome point
of them!
“It’s too bad you offended him that way,” Haydock reflected; “for of
course he must be frightfully offended. He’s utterly in the dark about
the thing,--he wouldn’t have worn the clothes to your room if he
weren’t; and he just thinks he looks like an overdressed fool in them.
He’ll go home and take them off, and never wear them again.”
“Then he certainly will be a fool,” answered Wolcott, a trifle sulkily.
“He looked extremely nice in them. If I’d known how well they looked on,
I shouldn’t have given them away.” He spoke as if he were perfectly
insensitive to McGaw’s probable anger and mortification; but Haydock
knew that he wasn’t.
“It’s funny, of course; but I’m mighty sorry it happened.” The more
Haydock thought of the way Sears had behaved, the more it worried him.
“You can insult your friends without its making any particular
difference, I suppose; they either refuse to take you seriously, or
insult back, just as they please. But McGaw’s different,--he’s a
defenceless, pathetic sort of a creature, and tremendously sensitive; I
could see that whenever I met him in your room. He’s the kind of fellow
that makes you feel that ‘something ought to be done about it.’”
“I think I have done a little,” suggested Wolcott, embarrassed at
referring to his own good works, yet desirous of defending himself.
“It doesn’t put you in a better light with McGaw though; and his
feelings aren’t any the less hurt on that account. All he thinks is,
that he made a ridiculous exhibition of himself in somebody else’s
clothes, and that you were coarse and heartless about it.”
“I’m afraid you flatter me,” muttered Wolcott.
“Come, now, Searsy, you know, just as well as I do, how people feel when
you laugh at them.”
The Magnificent One’s laugh, when exerted upon certain temperaments,
was indeed a terrifically effective engine. Wolcott’s sense of ridicule
was not fine; it was powerless to discover the one vulnerable spot and
stab neatly. But if it couldn’t dissect, it could crush like a boulder
toppling from a precipice. “Remember poor little Bemis!” Wolcott
coloured; he had once bet that he could make little Bemis cry inside of
fifteen minutes, without touching him. That he had won the bet in eleven
minutes and six seconds was a success of which he was not very proud.
“This isn’t as bad as that time,” Haydock went on; “because you didn’t
do it on purpose.”
“It was beastly, though,--wasn’t it?” said Wolcott, slowly, after a
moment. He got up and looked out of the window, while Haydock sat and
smoked in silence. “Well, for heaven’s sake, let’s not talk about it any
more,” he said at length, turning around. “If you can think of anything
that I ought to go and do about it, tell me, and I’ll do it.” He left
the room, and, in a minute or two, Haydock heard the front door slam
behind him.
“What to do?” thought Haydock. The occasions that would have made his
interference in the matter anything but an elaborate bit of patronising,
were lacking. Haydock never saw McGaw in the ordinary course of events.
To explain things, he would have had to seek him out, and begin in a way
that would have sounded to the tutor like: “See here, my good
man,”--that of course would hardly do. Besides, if amends were in order,
Sears was the proper person to make them. The conception of Sears
apologising to McGaw was sublime; Sears actually apologising,--Haydock
imagined him setting his teeth, and blurting out the fewest possible
words in which he could frame a perfunctory sentence of regret. That
wouldn’t do, either. Haydock, usually full of resource when it came to
rectifying other people’s mistakes--he made very few himself--was quite
at a loss in this instance. He ended by telling himself that what he
cared most about, after all, was that Wolcott should feel genuinely
uncomfortable; for the good of his soul he oughtn’t to be allowed to
jeer at a man and then abandon him to his bitter reflections, without
being talked to by some one. Wolcott had shown that he was “sorry,” as
plainly as he ever condescended to express that state of mind. The
sensible course, perhaps, was to forget the rest as soon as possible.
This Haydock attempted to do.
But it was far from easy. He and Wolcott went abroad together that year.
Wolcott wanted to divide the summer between Dinard and Paris. Haydock
had long wished to take a bicycle trip among a lot of Italian towns
that, as Wolcott told him, no one but he “and another know-it-all who
wrote a guide-book about them ever heard of before.” They compromised on
the Italian towns. All through the long vacation McGaw, and what Haydock
believed to be the type he represented, intruded upon Haydock’s
meditations at the oddest hours and in the most unlikely places. For the
first time he understood something a man had said to him the summer
before:--
“Why on earth are you going to spend your vacation in central Siberia?”
Haydock had asked him.
“Because I want to find out what I really think about Harvard,” the man
had answered, laughing. It wasn’t exactly necessary for Haydock to go to
Italy in order to think; but when, in August, he found himself loafing
with Wolcott through a chain of dead little towns that some one had
strewn along the hills and forgotten, he was able to discuss with
himself,--and occasionally with his companion,--as he never had been
before, more than one aspect of life in another little town that, had he
known it, is quite as dead in August as any mediæval hamlet of the
Apennines. The discussions were intensely serious, unsatisfactory, and
in no way markworthy, except that they concerned themselves with Ernest
McGaw in particular, and a background of shadowy strugglers Haydock and
Wolcott didn’t know much about, that they referred to conveniently as
“McGaws in general.” They were unable to dismiss the tutor from their
minds; and when college opened again, McGaw was dazed one fine morning
in November on seeing his own name on the first page of the “Crimson”
among six other names--some of them well known--that, together with his,
the “Crimson” announced, composed the Second Seven of the Signet.
It had been Wolcott’s suggestion entirely. He wasn’t a Signet man
himself; but Haydock was, “which is practically the same thing,” as
Wolcott said when he asked him to do what he could for McGaw. The plan
of electing McGaw to the Signet had been such a simple matter for
Haydock to carry out, that he couldn’t scare up a suspicion of the smug
satisfaction he had always believed was the reward of having gone out of
one’s way to do some one a good turn. Even when Wolcott came to him with
the “Crimson” in one hand, and patted him on the head with the other,
saying: “You--are--a--good--boy,” he didn’t have any of the nice
priggish sensations he had been looking forward to investigating.
“No, I’m not,” he said to Wolcott. “It was too easy.”
“How did you manage it?”
“There wasn’t much need of management,” answered Haydock. “The First
Seven is so dazzled by its own general brilliancy that it firmly
believes that when it was elected, the list of really interesting men in
the class was exhausted. So it goes in for proposing its personal
friends who are congenial, without being ‘clever’ and ‘literary;’ and
as nobody will vote for anybody else’s friends, they all get tired of
black-balling people after a while, and compromise on some obscure and
very deserving person none of them know at all. It was when everybody
was tired of fighting, that I bucked in McGaw. I said he was a
scholar,--he must be if he’s able to make you pass examinations; and I
said that we would be keeping up the Signet’s tradition of electing
representative men, if we got him in; and that the Faculty would like
it; and that McGaw would give just the necessary tone of seriousness to
the Signet that I feared we of the First Seven lacked. I said that,
because people are always tickled to death to think they belong to
something very serious, without being serious themselves. It was the
speech of my life, I assure you. McGaw was elected, on the second
ballot, without a murmur.”
“You’ll have to make him an honorary member, won’t you? Can he pay his
initiation fee?” Wolcott asked, with elaborate innocence. Haydock
answered by unbuttoning Wolcott’s coat and finding ten dollars in his
card-case.
“Now sit down and enclose it in a nice little note to Barrows, so that
Crœsus can have the satisfaction of paying it himself.” He led Sears by
the coat to a desk, and dipped a pen in the ink.
“This highway robbery game is a perfect damned outrage!” said The
Magnificent One, as he took the pen and began to write.
McGaw was bewildered and charmed at his election, for it is a great
honour to belong to the Signet, although no one--especially the
twenty-one members of the distinguished junior society--knows just why.
He was also considerably upset by his unexpected translation; it
demolished an entire system of dreary philosophy that he had built out
of the struggles and bitterness of his freshman and sophomore years. He
couldn’t, logically, go on thinking himself an obscure outcast, shut off
from human interests, since he had become so pleasantly conspicuous in
the public eye. Some unseen, unknown power had wished him well, and had
done much for him; McGaw was happy, grateful, and, at first, mystified.
But when the extra ten dollars for his initiation fee came through
Barrows, he considered the mystery solved. He prayed enthusiastically
that night--a great deal more than ten dollars’ worth--for the hallowed
being whose goodness was unfathomable. He also laid awake an hour
thinking up a suitable subject for his initiation “part.” Nothing that
occurred to him seemed deep enough for so intellectual an institution as
the Signet.
On the evening the Second Seven was initiated, Haydock--who developed an
oppressive sense of responsibility for McGaw five or ten minutes before
the fellow stood up to read his part--felt rather proud of him. McGaw’s
turn came between a humourous effort in feeble rhyme, and a narrative
that the writer sought to disinfect,--when he became aware that there
were several instructors among his audience,--by explaining
apologetically, that it was “from the French.” McGaw’s part was a
dissertation on “The Vocabulary of Æschylus.”
“I was glad he did it,” Haydock said to Wolcott, when telling him about
the initiation later in the evening at the club; “because I’d blathered
so much about his being serious and a scholar. Why it was
wonderful--monumental! Nobody understood a word of it, after the first
page, and there were twenty-three pages. I counted them; I had to look
interested in something. If there’s a solitary iota subscript in Athens
this night that didn’t get ripped up the back and disembowelled, I’d
like to shake hands with it, and ask it how it escaped. Professor Tenny
went over to him afterwards; they had a lemonade orgy together and made
Greek puns. McGaw had the grey suit on; he’s really a rather
fine-looking sort of a chap; he doesn’t seem peaked and sticky out at
the sleeves the way he used to be. All the fellows wooded up in great
style; I’d given Ellis a long talk to death beforehand, and told him the
whole thing,”--Wolcott made a face. “Oh, you don’t mind! Ellis is just
the kind to think it sort of nice and Godsome. In fact, Ellis told me he
was afraid he’d always misjudged you, and asked me what he’d better do
about it.” They both laughed. “It’s funny,” Haydock went on, “the way
fellows are willing to accept a man here if only you can get the right
people to hustle around and say that he’s ‘somebody.’ I was thinking
that to-night. Not one of those fellows had ever heard of McGaw until I
sprung him on them; and Ellis went around telling everybody he had ‘a
future before him,’--whatever that means. Ellis is perfectly happy, you
know, when he can persuade himself that some one he has just met has a
future before him. He thought I had, for about two weeks once. Well,
what I began to say was that, in a small way, McGaw is right in the
thick of things now. There’s no reason why those fellows shouldn’t like
him; he seems really human in spite of Æschylus; and if they do take to
him, he’ll probably make the O. K. and the Pudding, and wind up by being
Class Day Orator. When I left, he was talking to that detestable snob,
Baxford. Heaven only knows what they found to talk about; but Baxford
was cackling his mindless cackle. They seemed to have plenty to say to
each other; I didn’t disturb them. Isn’t it funny?”
It was “funny” to Haydock and Wolcott, although Wolcott, perhaps,
wouldn’t have found it out by himself. When, a short time afterwards,
the Editor-in-chief of the “Monthly” begged permission to print “The
Vocabulary of Æschylus,” and the “Crimson” called it “a remarkably
distinguished bit of research,” and the Signet remarked that real merit
always found its level, Haydock and Wolcott got together and laughed,
and were “just too cynical for anything,” as Ellis said, reprovingly.
They laughed, too, when they met McGaw in the Yard or the
Square,--somehow he had become a more familiar figure in the college
scene,--and spoke to him. McGaw always had a cordial “hello” for Haydock
alone. To Haydock and Wolcott together, he gave a somewhat stiff nod.
Wolcott, unaccompanied, he ignored.
“That young man will succeed,” said Wolcott, one morning after he had
been given--as he explained to Haydock--“the frozen eye twice, in front
of Foster’s.”
“Any one who can afford to make a point of cutting you has succeeded,”
laughed Haydock. McGaw’s independence and “cheek” pleased them both
exceedingly.
Haydock had some foundation for his remark. McGaw was prosperous; he was
happy; to many of his classmates, he had become something of a
personage. He followed “The Vocabulary of Æschylus” in the “Monthly” by
“Life and the Classics,” and “Hellas and the Athletic Question” in the
“Advocate,”--two intelligent essays that were happy in creating varied
opinions among the readers of the college papers, and in causing his
name to be added very soon to the list of the “Monthly’s” editors. There
are few institutions in college through which one’s tether, so to speak,
can be more indefinitely extended than through the Signet and the
college press. McGaw’s acquaintance became large and eclectic. It
brought him work,--tutoring of all kinds,--more than he could undertake.
It gave him an interest in college activities, and an intimate knowledge
of them that enabled him to supply several Sunday newspapers with
columns of unimportant but lucrative information and journalistic
rigmarole. It made it possible for him at length to return to Barrows
one of the periodical remittances and something additional, in payment
of what he preferred to consider his debt. Barrows gave Wolcott, and
Wolcott gave Haydock, and Haydock gave Wolcott’s sister the note that
went with it. Between the lines they all read the fine feeling that
McGaw, with even finer feeling, had delicately suggested. McGaw was
nearing the crest of the wave. The grinds of the class, in discussing
him, conceded to him a dubious facility for getting high marks in his
studies, and a somewhat frivolous knack of impressing people favourably.
But they agreed that, at last analysis, he lacked the instincts of a
true scholar. The other men told one another that he was “a terrible
grind, but a darned nice fellow!”--which was another way of saying he
was “really human, in spite of Æschylus.”
Haydock had taken the fellow’s measure when he said that of him. The
tutor was thoroughly “human.” He was inclined to like most of the men he
had met at the Signet in a frank, simple way that demanded nothing, and
ended by getting much; with corresponding naturalness, he liked being
liked by them. Moreover, the dreariness of his first two years left no
more permanent effect on him than the horrors of a January passage leave
on a traveller who at length reaches port. McGaw proved himself a normal
young person, by the comfortable manner in which the general
hopelessness of his past situation receded from his memory, and left
behind it one or two sharp details of a purely personal nature. He
didn’t, for instance, recall very vividly how it felt to go more or less
hungry for several days at a time; but, on the other hand, he couldn’t
pass Wolcott on the street without tingling all over with anger and
contempt. The recollection of Wolcott’s treatment of him refused to
soften and fade; the sound of Wolcott’s insolent laughter never grew
faint. McGaw still felt bitterly toward Wolcott. The tutor was human
enough; and he hadn’t begun to show how human he could be. He was
something like the little girl who, on being told that she had big eyes,
answered, “Well, if you think they’re big now, you just ought to see me
open them really wide once.” Whenever McGaw came across Wolcott, he
thought of a remark a certain terrible old man used to make to his
enemies:--
“You’ll all have a chance to get back at me if you live long enough,”
this terrible old man was in the habit of saying encouragingly. “The
only trouble is, so many of you seem to die at seventy.” McGaw often
hoped that he wouldn’t be cut off at that age without having had a slap
of some kind at Wolcott. So, although he didn’t exactly seek an
opportunity, he was by no means blind to it when it presented itself,
which it did with gratifying despatch.
There was the usual delay that year in electing the third and last seven
of the Signet. The first two sevens had met three or four times,
ostensibly for that purpose; but either there wasn’t a quorum, or some
one had always played the piano, or read Kipling, or Maupassant, or
Catulle Mendes aloud, or given a lively rendering of the dramas then
playing at the Bowdoin Square Theatre, or the Grand Opera House, until
no one felt particularly business-like. It was pleasanter to drink beer,
and smoke, and “listen to something,” than to squabble over seven men
far into the night, until you began to yawn, and discovered that you
didn’t care whether they or any one else ever got into the Signet. As
time went on, Ellis and Haviland, the president, made several attempts
to impress upon the society what Ellis called, “the gravity of the
situation.” But almost every one knew the president too well to be in
the least impressed, and Ellis’s gravity was never very infectious; so
the Signet took its own time. When, at last, fourteen men turned up in
the long, dingy room of the society one rainy night in May, and no one
had brought anything to read, and the fellows who played the piano were
disobliging, Haviland called them to order, at the earnest request of
Ellis, secretary and treasurer, and declared that the first business to
come before the meeting was the election of the Third Seven. Ellis
looked conscious and aggrieved; he had written several pages of minutes
in rhyme, and wanted to read them.
“You look rather well behind that desk, Haviland,” drawled a fellow
named Baxford; “but you make a rotten president. The first business is
the reading of the minutes.” Ellis smiled again.
“Not at all, not at all,” answered Haviland, unabashed, glancing at the
secretary’s book; “I am only too well aware that Mr. Ellis has written a
yard and a half of poetry for the occasion. I merely hesitated to
classify so delightful a prospect under the head of business. If Mr.
Ellis will give us the _pleasure_--”
“I move we adjourn,” interrupted Haydock and Dickey Dawson and Bigelow
and a tall man every one called Tommy, all rising at once.
“I’m going to get a cup of chocolate,” announced some one else. “Ellis’s
poetry is always so sensual, I can’t listen to it unless I quaff thick,
sweet, ’lucent syrups tinct with’ granulated sugar.”
“Have the things come?” asked Haviland, abruptly dropping what he
considered his parliamentary manner.
“Yes, and there’s beer,” answered Baxford, who was sitting where he
could lift the faded red portière and look into the other room. The
meeting, led by the president, stampeded, leaving Ellis pounding on the
table, and endeavouring to make himself heard above the uproar. He was
imploring them to “be serious just for a few minutes.” Haydock stuck his
head between the curtains.
“That’s what they call ‘Harvard indifference,’” he said, and
disappeared.
They wasted, according to Ellis, three-quarters of an hour over beer and
chocolate, and wouldn’t have come to order again at all, if he hadn’t
begged them separately to do so as a personal favour to him. Then they
consumed almost as long again in interrupting the reading of the
minutes, to criticise gravely Ellis’s versification, to discuss his
“conception of life,” as based on his doggerel lines, and to call
attention, wherever poor Ellis had indulged in anything that bordered on
“fine” writing, to what Tommy referred to as, “Those subtle obscenities
the author has sought, with ghoulish depravity, to disguise in the
bombastic periods of a Milton or an Alfred Austin.” They moved that
Ellis be “expelled from the aristocracy of intellect, and sent to the
Annex, there to be kissed in the face until dead,” and refused to allow
the meeting to proceed until the motion had been put and lost by a
unanimous vote. Baxford created an inexpensive diversion by throwing a
pack of cards into the air, turning up his coat-collar, and exclaiming,
as they fell on his head:--
“B-r-r-r-r, how the storm rages without! Think, lads, of the poor
sailors on such a night!” Dawson set fire to the portières, because, as
he explained, Ellis had said something in his poem about a “lurid
glare,” and he wanted to see what they were like. The conflagration was
put out with beer, and Ellis was fined three dollars for “perverting
youth.” McGaw enjoyed the noise and fooling as much as any one. He
didn’t quite know how to stir up that sort of thing himself; but he was
no more anxious than the rest to get to the serious business of the
meeting.
It was late when they finally began to nominate the Third Seven. There
were in all sixteen names proposed. An informal vote was taken on
them,--“a sort of preliminary canter,” as Haviland said, “just to find
out what the general feeling was.” The ballots were playing-cards, cast
in Ellis’s hat (when, later in the evening, its brim was torn off
during a playful discussion, Ellis was fined another dollar for the
ensuing delay). Baxford’s room-mate, Anderson, was the first man voted
on.
“Although he isn’t just the sort of a man who would be chosen for the
first two sevens,” said Baxford, in his little speech just before the
hat was passed around, “he’s really a perfect corker. He doesn’t ‘do’
anything in particular; but I’ve known him a long time, and he’s the
most amusing sort of a chap, when he wants to be; and--and I think he’d
be a mighty good sort of a man to have on.”
Of the fourteen votes cast for Anderson, thirteen of them were black.
“As an indication of feeling,” remarked Tommy, “the informal ballot is
easily a success.”
“Not quite ‘in touch’ with the Signet, I’m afraid,” said Baxford,
good-naturedly. Some one moved to drop all names getting six or more
black balls, and this, after the first round, decreased the number of
candidates to nine. McGaw had put up a man named Carver, one of the
editors of the “Monthly.” The nomination was a discreet one, for Carver
was neither obscure nor very well known. He was the kind of person they
almost all dimly remembered having met at one time or another, in the
rooms of fellows they liked. This isn’t knowing much about a man; but,
at least, it isn’t knowing anything against him. Then McGaw’s manner of
indorsing him was distinctly good. He managed to give the impression of
having honestly picked out Carver, not because he was Carver’s friend,
but because he thought the Signet was on the lookout for that kind of
man. He seemed to wish, in a modest way, to please the Signet.
“I can’t say that I’ve known him very long, or well,” said McGaw,
thoughtfully (the others had made a point of having been more or less
born and brought up with their candidates); “but since I’ve been on the
‘Monthly,’ I’ve seen something of him. He’s a pleasant sort of a fellow,
and he writes pretty good stories every now and then; although I don’t
think he’s what you would call ‘literary’ exactly. He isn’t very
prominent; that might be an objection,” he went on, unconscious of the
implied flattery; “but I decided to put him up because I thought he
seemed like a good man, and that some of you who know of him might like
to consider him.”
“I know him,” spoke up Haydock, glad of a chance to help on McGaw’s
candidate. “I thought of him myself. He would fit in very well.” Ellis,
too, had a good word to say. Carver was then voted on.
“Fourteen red and no black,” announced Haviland from the desk. The crowd
clapped; and McGaw felt the little thrill born of an awakened sense of
importance and power in the community.
It took an hour and a half to elect the next four men,--an hour and a
half of eulogy, discussion, diplomacy, compromise,--although, as time
went on, the increasing indifference of the majority of the fellows as
to who got in tended to reduce the election here and there, among those
who really cared, to the process of voting “for your man, if you’ll vote
for mine.” Not that the arrangement did away with animated
electioneering in different corners of the room, and vehement arguments
that might never have ended had not some weary outsider called
attention to the fact that they had long since ceased to have any
bearing on anything. But it gave a coercive publicity to pigheadedness
in various quarters that made a Third Seven possible. At midnight, five
men had been elected, two places remained unfilled, and the list of
candidates numbered four. Then, by a curious revulsion of feeling no one
sought to explain, three of the names that had hung on with a fair
chance of success until that late hour, were unmercifully black-balled
in rapid succession and thrown out. This left but one candidate--a man
named Leonard--and two vacancies. The hat went around again bringing
back to the desk, among twelve other cards, the ace of spades and the
queen of clubs. Two black-balls, if persisted in, kept a man out of the
Signet.
“Now we’ll have to think up some one else. Oh, Lord!” yawned Haviland.
“Leonard has had two black for hours; I think he’s hopeless. Somebody
suggest somebody else.”
Ellis glanced at Haydock as much as to say, “Now’s your time.” He had
been doing that, off and on, all evening, until Haydock at last refused
to look in his direction. Haydock was on the point of attempting
something rather impossible, and he didn’t propose to ruin his chance of
success at the outset, merely by being ill-timed. He had decided a week
before,--as soon as the postal cards calling for an election were sent
out,--that he wanted Sears Wolcott on the Signet. His reasons for
getting Sears there were not obvious, and Haydock appreciated the
difficulties that lay in the way of making them appear so, or of giving
any reasons at all other than that he wanted him. His best motives for
wishing to “buck” Sears in were hardly formulated in his own mind; he
couldn’t very well undertake to make them clear to others, even if they
would have carried with them any weight,--which they wouldn’t have. He
was influenced wholly by the same feeling for Wolcott--a mixture of
admiration and fond disapproval--that had led him the year before to do
what he could to interest The Magnificent One in Barrows’s unfortunate.
The little experiment had done something for Wolcott,--a good that
perhaps only Haydock and Wolcott’s sister appreciated as yet, but
something that was, nevertheless, worth while. Wolcott’s horizon had
given a little here and there; Wolcott himself was somewhat less
intolerant; he had ceased noticeably, to Haydock at least, to be
actuated in everything he said and did by a kind of American adaptation
of the ante-French Revolutionary opinion, that human beings began with
barons. He was still a selfish high-handed youth,--no one knew it better
than Haydock. But his friend found him neither as egoistic nor as
arrogant as he had been; and he drew his own inferences. As for getting
Wolcott into the Signet--Haydock wished to go on with what he had begun.
The junior society seemed made to his hand. He not only looked forward
to throwing Wolcott and McGaw together again,--on a basis of equality,
this time,--he wished to put Wolcott in the way of having to see
something of fellows who had a variety of interests strikingly different
from his own, and who came together now and then to talk and read about
them. Wolcott came in contact with men of many tastes at his clubs; but
the club ideal was, after all, the placid, unimaginative ideal of
fifteen or twenty pleasant young men with plenty of money, it was only
too easy to live up to. Haydock had no misguided veneration for the
Signet as a learned or even a very clever institution; an undergraduate
literary society could hardly be one or the other. He did appreciate,
however, the curiously diverse character of its components, and the
semi-serious intellectual friction that went on there. For the good of
Wolcott alone, he hoped to get him on the Third Seven. The attitude was
quixotic, inasmuch as it was rather sentimental and as absurd as only a
thoroughly fine attitude can be. Haydock had talked several men into
promising to vote for Wolcott, should his name come up; and Ellis, from
a variety of strange Christian motives, had done the same. Ellis had
become enthusiastic over Wolcott since he had learned of the McGaw
affair; whereas, formerly, he had denounced him as a selfish beast, he
now called him a “temperament.”
“Do propose somebody--anybody,” repeated Haviland. “I’m so sleepy!” Two
of the men had stretched themselves on the sofas, with the request that
they be waked in time to vote.
“Let’s only have six on the Third Seven; it would be so quaint,”
suggested Tommy.
“I think I’d even vote for Baxford’s room-mate if he were put up again,”
said Dickey Dawson.
It was just this apparent willingness to elect any one and get away,
that Haydock had been waiting for. He stood up.
“I can’t think of any one who seems exactly cut out for the Signet, any
more than the rest of you can,” he said; “but I don’t see why that ought
to make so much difference on the Third Seven. Why not get on somebody
like Tony Wilson or Jack Linzee or Sears Wolcott,--not necessarily any
of those three, but some one like that. They’re athletes, you know, and
people outside will think we’re trying to be representative,--that
always sounds well, and, besides, they’re all good fellows. Any one of
those men would be surprised and pleased to be elected, I feel sure.”
“Yes,--they did that last year,” added Ellis. “Martin was a Signet man,
and he used to go to all the meetings and everything, and he was nothing
but an athloot. People laughed at first, but they thought it rather
nice. I’ll vote for any of those fellows.”
“Well, I nominate Sears Wolcott,” called some one from the sofa,--one of
the men who had pledged himself to Haydock. “I know him pretty well, and
shouldn’t mind seeing him in.”
“Buck him in,--buck him in!” said two or three others, impatiently.
“And whoever’s been black-balling Leonard all evening, for Heaven’s sake
don’t next time,” added Haviland.
Haydock was relieved that it hadn’t been necessary for him to nominate
Wolcott directly, and that there was but little preliminary discussion
of his fitness for election. One or two men did attempt to agitate his
probable lack of sympathy with everything the Signet stood for, but the
tendency to hurry the meeting along prevailed. A vote was called for.
Haydock involuntarily glanced at McGaw, for he knew where the strongest
opposition would come from. But McGaw’s face was non-committal as to
future intentions. The hat went around. Haviland and Ellis assorted the
cards.
“Ten red and four black,” announced Haviland, with a groan. The result
was better than Haydock had expected. One of those black votes he knew
would never be changed; but the other three might be tired out, as he
and Ellis had combined to hold at bay every other candidate as long as
Wolcott was in the running.
“Now for another go at Leonard,” said Haviland, wearily. “Just what he
had before, twelve red and two black,” he added when the hat came back
to the desk. “Who is doing it? Get up and curse him out like a man; it’s
a shame, when all but two are willing to have him in.” But no one got up
and cursed. Haydock and Ellis were the guilty ones, and they had nothing
against Leonard. No one else was nominated; and Haydock said a few words
about Wolcott before his name was voted on a second time. His manner in
saying them was the artistic bit of hypocrisy he felt the occasion
demanded. Willingness under the circumstances, rather than eagerness,
was what he sought to express. He knew the value of his own conservative
personality.
“Wolcott gets eleven red and three black,” announced Haviland; “one
better than last time.” Another ballot on Leonard’s name brought it no
nearer election than before. Haydock was quietly exultant. The election
was slowly coming to the point to which he had all along looked forward
to bringing it. The fellows who had promised to vote for
Wolcott--indifferent at first as to whether he got in or not--were
beginning now to “root” for him vigorously. Incited solely by a desire
to have their own way, they tried to find out who was black-balling him,
and made speeches urging his election that Haydock wouldn’t have dared
to make. Their eloquence succeeded by the next ballot in reducing the
number of his black-balls to two. One of them, of course, was McGaw’s.
The other, Haydock felt equally sure, had been put in by Bigelow.
Leonard had been Bigelow’s candidate from the first. Bigelow hadn’t
disguised his enthusiasm for him since he had nominated him early in
the evening; he had, in fact, declared good-naturedly that if the worst
came to the worst, he would black-ball his own father in order to get
Leonard in. Once when he didn’t happen to have any black cards in his
hand, he had asked some one to black-ball Wolcott for him. It was
undoubtedly he, thought Haydock, who furnished the second black-ball,
and continued to put one in every time a ballot was taken on Wolcott’s
name. There was no reason why Bigelow shouldn’t withhold it on the next
ballot, Haydock told himself, if he, Haydock, and Ellis showed
themselves willing to vote for Leonard. This would elect Bigelow’s
candidate unanimously, and let Wolcott in with McGaw’s one black. So
just before Leonard’s name was voted on again, Haydock went over to
Bigelow and said frankly:
“Drop in a red card for Wolcott next time, and as far as Ellis and I are
concerned, Leonard will be elected at once. We two have been keeping him
out right along.” Bigelow looked surprised, then laughed and nodded as
if he understood such things, and in a moment Leonard, amid a murmur of
relief from the crowd, was declared elected. Once more the hat was
handed from man to man. They were electing Wolcott now, actually
electing him, thought Haydock. He noticed that Bigelow voted with the
seven of hearts, then he looked in McGaw’s direction to see how the
tutor would take the news of Wolcott’s success when Haviland should
announce it from the desk. It was very late, and the rickety old room
had grown chilly in spite of the two blazing chandeliers. Three or four
of the men had put on their coats and hats; the meeting seemed about to
end.
“Wolcott gets twelve red and two black,” said Haviland, hopelessly.
“What!” exclaimed Ellis. Haydock turned incredulously toward the desk;
he felt as if some one had played him a sneaking trick. He went over to
Bigelow, astonished and rather angry.
“You voted for Wolcott, didn’t you?” he asked.
“Why, yes, of course I did,” answered Bigelow, irritably. Now that his
own candidate was safe, he was anxious to go home. “I’ve been voting
for him ever since he was put up, except just the first round.” Haydock
swore. He had taken it for granted that Bigelow had been keeping Wolcott
out when, as a matter of fact, it had been some one else,--some one who
no doubt was in complete sympathy with McGaw. His jump at the conclusion
struck him now as an incredibly dull proceeding.
“I’m sure I don’t know what to do,” Haviland was saying. “We simply must
have a seventh man. I hate to have the thing drag over until ‘next
time,’ when we’re all here to-night. Nominate Tony Wilson, or Jack
Linzee--somebody--anybody.”
“I nominate Tony Wilson!” drawled Baxford, obediently. Haydock and Ellis
ostentatiously gave the new candidate the only two black-balls he
received. Haviland grasped the situation at once.
“I think we’ll have to come to some sort of an understanding,” he said.
He was tired and annoyed, and so conscious of the fact that he forced
himself to be extraordinarily polite. “Two of us apparently want Wolcott
enough to cause a deadlock,--which I suppose is perfectly
justifiable,--and two of us don’t want him at all. Lots of things have
been said in his favour, and no one has said much of anything against
him. I think it’s only fair for the two fellows who are keeping us here
so late to get up and give us some idea of why they don’t want him. We
can’t very well throw his name out as long as he has only two black. If
the fellows who are keeping him out have a really good reason, we ought
to know it. Such things, I’m sure, won’t go beyond this room.” There was
a pause, while Haviland looked inquiringly from face to face. Then McGaw
stood up. There was just a trace of defiance in his general bearing that
vanished as soon as he saw that every one had turned toward him with
interest.
“I suppose I ought to have objected to Sears Wolcott earlier in the
evening,” he said slowly. He looked quietly, fixedly, at Haydock. “I
have met him in a way that none of you could meet him. I wish I didn’t
know that he was one kind of a fellow with men who have money and
friends and everything, and different with the other kind,--men who
can’t afford such things. I’m very sorry that I’ve seen him laugh at a
man because he was poor and underfed and dressed in somebody else’s
clothes,--clothes that didn’t fit him; because I can’t forget it now,
when I should like to. I can’t think that he has a good heart. I don’t
want to meet him here.” McGaw said this very slowly and regretfully; and
when he sat down he stared at the floor. His little speech left every
one wide-awake and uncomfortable, and so silent that the fellows could
hear the rain slapping in gusts against the window-panes outside. His
words in the mouth of--say Baxford or Dickey Dawson would have been
laughed at. As it was, Tommy murmured audibly, “‘Kind hearts are more
than coronets,’” but the observation fell rather flat. McGaw had been
painfully sincere. He had succeeded, beyond a doubt, in “getting his
effect.” Haydock knew that just that sort of thing said about Wolcott,
by some one who was liked rather than otherwise, and who more or less
represented “the extreme left,” was peculiarly fatal. No one else in the
room would have talked in that way under any circumstances, although
there were several men who didn’t object to hearing it done so
authoritatively. Wolcott, who had seemed to be on the verge of slipping
into the Signet a moment or two before, was now given seven black-balls,
and dropped without comment. Tony Wilson was elected with a feeble burst
of applause; Haydock and Ellis were putting on their overcoats when the
hat went around, and didn’t vote.
Haviland turned out the lights, and the men groped their way--holding on
to one another and striking matches from time to time--down the two
flights of steep, dark stairs to the wet street. No one spoke of the
election on the way down. Had anything been said it would have had to
do, undoubtedly, with McGaw’s speech; and McGaw was there, somewhere in
the dark, with the rest of them. Haviland walked with Ellis and Haydock
as far as the “Crimson” office,--he hoped to get the names of the Third
Seven into the morning paper. But they didn’t talk of the election.
Ellis was boiling with righteous indignation; Haydock was wondering who
had been McGaw’s ally in black-balling Wolcott; and Haviland was too
glad to have it over with, and be out in the fresh air, to think of the
Signet. It was not until Haydock and Ellis threw some fresh wood on the
fire at the club, and sank into two big leathern chairs, that they felt
at liberty to discuss the matter freely.
“I suppose it was hopeless from the first,” mused Haydock.
“It needn’t have been,--that’s what makes me furious,” returned Ellis.
“If McGaw only could have had an inkling of who he was keeping out--”
“Yes, I think he would have been the first to turn right around and work
like a pup to get him in,” agreed Haydock.
“I felt like jumping up and telling everything.”
“How awful,--think of the scene!”
“Well, it wouldn’t have been much more damnable than it was! Nobody knew
where to look. There was just enough truth to what McGaw said--that and
the way he got up and did it--it wasn’t as if anybody else had tried
to--”
“The difference is that McGaw really cared,” broke in Haydock; “there
was feeling behind it. It isn’t given to many of us to have real,
sure-enough feelings around here in college. Nothing ever seems to
happen that makes enough difference one way or the other. McGaw’s one of
the kind that has them. That’s how he got everyone to vote for Carver
the minute he put him up. He just felt all over that Carver was the
right man for the place, and somehow everybody believed him. He
slaughtered poor Searsy by the same method. You see he’s the sort of
fellow who is destined to be listened to by all kinds of people. The
masses like guts, while the upper classes prefer expression. McGaw has
the intensity of a fanatic and the manners of a gentleman; his armament
is formidable. I shouldn’t be a bit surprised to hear some day that he’d
started an entirely new and plausible religion, or written a book that
really proved something, or reorganised the Supreme Court on a less
flippant basis. The creature actually has beliefs; he’s rather
astonishing. I can’t blame him for giving it to Wolcott in the neck,
when he had such a good chance; but I’m darned sorry he was inspired to
do it.”
“I suppose you’ll tell Sears all about it,” said Ellis.
“No, I sha’n’t,” answered Haydock, after a moment. “You see, you never
can tell how he is going to take things--so what’s the use? The Signet’s
nothing to him, and he might be ever so much amused that McGaw could
keep him out of it. But then, again, it’s quite likely that he’d carry
on and swear like a trooper, and never do anything for McGaw again. I
know him better than you do. If I ever do tell him, it’ll be some day
just after he’s won a bet, or beaten me at golf, or taken a prize at the
horse show; not when he’s cooped up in his room with sore throat, the
way he is now, railing at the weather and Cambridge and the college, and
everybody who makes a sound in the hall near his door. I’m devoted to
Searsy, but I don’t think I have many illusions about him.”
“Oh, I wish we could tell McGaw about him! It might make McGaw feel
badly just at first; but I’d be so much more comfortable. Couldn’t
we--just to be just?”
“Certainly not,” yawned Haydock. “One must have the courage to be
unjust.”
And that, no doubt, would have been the end of the McGaw-Wolcott
episode, if tailors didn’t exert such extraordinary influence over human
affairs.
* * * * *
The next afternoon, when Haydock dropped into Wolcott’s room to see how
the sore throat was getting along, he found Wolcott’s mother and sister
had driven out from Boston on the same errand. Haydock’s call was
opportune, for Wolcott, in a few minutes, had another visitor,--a
somewhat agitated, incoherent young man who wished very much to speak to
Wolcott alone. The Magnificent One would have granted the interview
outside in the hall had not Mrs. Wolcott protested on account of
draughts, so he took his guest into his bed-room, and shut the door.
“How very mysterious!” said Miss Wolcott. Her mother examined the
closed door through her glasses. “Who is he?”
“That’s McGaw!” said Haydock, significantly.
“One of Sears’s friends?” asked Mrs. Wolcott. Haydock laughed.
“I never knew that he was,” he answered. Miss Wolcott seemed much
interested; but her interest not nearly as eager as Haydock’s. McGaw’s
visit baffled him. He couldn’t believe that the fellow had come, in a
fit of remorse, to apologise to Wolcott for having kept him out of the
Signet,--the idea was fantastic--ridiculous. Nor could he think it
probable that McGaw had found out what Wolcott had been doing for him;
no one but Barrows and Ellis and Miss Wolcott and Haydock himself knew.
The long interview in Wolcott’s bed-room was indeed mysterious. It was
something of a strain to Haydock to keep his attention from wandering to
the rise and fall of voices on the other side of the door long enough to
talk intelligently to Mrs. Wolcott; and when, after examining everything
in the room, she said that, since she was in Cambridge, she thought she
would improve the opportunity of making a call somewhere on Brattle
Street, Haydock inwardly applauded the intention.
“He’s not nearly as ill as his note led us to believe,” said Mrs.
Wolcott. “He wrote that he was ‘wasted away to a shadow,’ and that if we
had a desire--from idle curiosity or any other motive--to see him alive,
which he doubted, we’d better come out at once.”
“I was reassured,” added Miss Wolcott, “when I got a note by the next
post, saying, ‘Dear Josephine, If you wear that dowdy old felt hat, with
the black satin bow and the brass buckle, out to Cambridge, please sit
downstairs in the vestibule, while I talk to mamma.’ Sears really ill is
quite lamblike.”
“So you see, you mustn’t think me an unnatural parent for running away
to leave a card on old Mrs. Burlap,” said Wolcott’s mother. Haydock saw
her to the carriage, and went back to tell Miss Wolcott about the Signet
meeting, and interest her still more in her brother’s visitor. He
softened the language of McGaw’s speech a little, although he made its
general import clear. His frequent talks with Miss Wolcott about Sears
enabled him to.
“I agree with Mr. Ellis,” she said, when Haydock had finished. “I want
McGaw to know. It does seem unjust to poor Searsy.”
“Maybe he does know,” replied Haydock, listening intently to the voices
in the bed-room. Suddenly they ceased. Wolcott burst into his loud
laugh, and both men began to talk again at once. “I wish they’d hurry
up!” added Haydock, with suppressed excitement. Then the door opened,
and McGaw, looking ill at ease, but smiling wanly, came out, followed by
Wolcott, who went with him as far as the hall.
“And don’t come before ten o’clock,” Wolcott said, shaking hands. “I’m
not often in early in the evening.” Wolcott, chuckling delightfully,
came across the room, and laid a tiny oblong bit of white linen on
Haydock’s knee. On it was printed the name of a Boston tailor, followed
in handwriting by Wolcott’s name and a date and some cabalistic letters
and numerals written in a clear round hand. Wolcott folded his arms and
grinned. Haydock knew where it must have come from, yet he looked
puzzled.
“But I remember distinctly having ripped it out that afternoon before
you sent them around to Barrows,” he said, after a moment.
“Out of the coat,--not the trousers; they sew them under the right-hand
pocket of the trousers sometimes,--so McGaw says,” Wolcott laughed like
a child. “That pressed the button, so to speak, and Barrows, confound
him! did the rest.”
“Well, well, well!” was all Haydock could say; he didn’t like to let
Sears know that he had told Miss Wolcott, and that she was eager for
details.
“Who was that who just went out, Searsy?” asked Miss Wolcott,
innocently.
“That? Oh--a friend of mine,” answered The Magnificent One, winking at
Haydock, as he took back the tailor’s label, and put it in his
card-case.
WELLINGTON
“If I’d only known sooner that you were coming, I could have asked some
of the fellows round to meet you,” said Haydock, politely. No matter how
well you may know a woman, you are always apprehensive when she comes to
Cambridge that she has a thirst for tea.
“I think I like this better,” his mother answered, stopping to look
back. She was a lady of excellent taste, yet almost any one must have
preferred the Yard that Sunday afternoon. The riotous new green of early
spring had matured to an academic sombreness that made the elms, the
stretches of sun-flecked grass, the tremulous ivy, and the simple brick
buildings inseparable in one’s thoughts. The dignity of the great space
between Grays and Holworthy had grown with the late afternoon shadows,
and Haydock and his mother, who had sauntered from path to path,
listening to the leaves, and the robins, and the quiet confidences of
the wise bricks, talked of Harvard. Although the place was large and
deserted at this hour, it was far from lonely.
“Oh, yes, I like this much better,” mused Mrs. Haydock again. Philip
looked pleased.
“It’s always beautiful,” he said; “and there’s so much else,” he added
rather obscurely. But his mother seemed to know, for she looked at him
after a moment and answered,--
“I often wonder if all women can understand it,--the other things, not
just the beauty,--or if it’s only women with sons and brothers who come
here.”
“Especially sons,” smiled Philip, taking her hand and swinging it to and
fro, as they strolled back again toward Holworthy.
“But I never shall find out for sure,” went on Mrs. Haydock; “because
even the ones who do feel the place, just as if they had been here
themselves, can’t express it.”
“It’s so dreadful to try,” said Philip. Then after a moment, “I was
thinking of all the horrible Class Poems and Odes and Baccalaureate
Sermons and ghastly Memorial Day orators that are allowed to go on.”
“Oh, they probably don’t do any harm,” Mrs. Haydock interceded mildly.
“No, not positive harm,” her son admitted; “but neither would a lot of
hurdygurdies in Appleton Chapel.” Once in a while Haydock was somewhat
extreme. Just now his mother took occasion to remark on that fact.
“No, really, I don’t think I am,” Philip protested. “What can they add
to our feeling for Harvard with their trite mouthings about _veritas_
and Memorial Hall? Other places may need that sort of thing; this one
doesn’t. Most of us here recognise that fact, and conduct ourselves
accordingly. And outsiders misunderstand the attitude; Eleanor, for
example.” Eleanor was a cousin with Yale affinities. “I had to snub
Eleanor once for saying, before a lot of people, that whenever she
wanted to flatter a Harvard man, she told him he was blasé, and, if that
didn’t work, she called him a cynic, and if even that wouldn’t bring
him round, she hinted that he didn’t believe in God.”
“Eleanor is a very clever, silly little girl,” laughed Mrs. Haydock.
“Eleanor is excessively cheap at times,” corrected Philip. “We’re not
‘cynical,’ and we’re not ‘blasé,’ and whether or not we believe in God
is nobody’s business. If we don’t drool about the things here we care
for very much, it’s because people who do are indecent; they bore us.”
“They do bore one,” assented Mrs. Haydock.
“Once in a while some one does tear out his heart and drip it around the
stage in Sanders Theatre for the benefit of all the tiresome old women
in Cambridge, and the Glee Club drones Latin hymns to a shiny upright
piano hired for the occasion, while the orator calms himself with
ice-water from the bedroom pitcher that is always prominent on those
occasions. But such performances, thank God, are rare.”
“Why do you go to them?” asked Mrs. Haydock.
“I don’t,” said Philip. “That was when I was a freshman, and didn’t
know any better. Since then I have acquired ‘Harvard indifference,’” he
added, smiling to himself. They left the Yard, lingering a moment for
another look down the leafy vista, and walked slowly across to Memorial.
The beautiful transept was dark at first, after the sunlight outside.
Then it lifted straight and high from the cool dusk into the quiet light
of the stained windows. Except for the faint echo of their footsteps
along the marble floor, the two moved from tablet to tablet in silence.
Somewhere near the south door they stopped, and Philip said simply,--
“This one is Shaw’s.”
When they passed on and out, and sat in the shade on the steps,
Haydock’s mother wiped her eyes. The long, silent roll-call always made
her do that.
“It was a great, great price to pay,” she said at last.
“I never knew how great,” said Philip, “until I came here one day and
tried to live it all over, as if it were happening now. Before then the
war seemed fine, and historic, and all that, but ever so far away. It’s
been real since then. I thought of how all the little groups of fellows
would talk about it in the Yard between lectures, and read the morning
papers while the lectures were going on; and how the instructors would
hate to have to tell them not to. And I thought what it would be like to
have the men I know--Alfred and Peter Bradley, and Sears Wolcott and
Douglas and Billy and Pat, and all of them, getting restless and
excited, and sitting up all night at the club, and then throwing down
their books and marching away to the front to be shot; and how I would
have to go along too, because--well, you couldn’t stay at home while
they were being shot every day, and thrown into trenches. I don’t think
you ever realise it very much until you think about it that way.”
“It seems, now, so terrible that they had to go,” Philip’s mother broke
in earnestly; “such a cruel stamping out of youth and strength and
happiness at the very beginning.”
“But it isn’t as if you felt it were all a hideous waste. It did
something great; it’s doing something now. It can never stop,” Philip
added, gently; “for every year the new ones come,--the ones who don’t
know yet. It’s the fellows who die here at college who always seem to me
so thrown away, so wasted,” he went on. “They don’t seem to get their
show, somehow,--like Wellington, for instance.”
“Did I meet Wellington?” asked Mrs. Haydock, trying to attach a
personality to the name. She usually remembered Philip’s friends.
“Heavens, no!” answered Philip. “Nobody knew Wellington, except a few of
us,--after he got pneumonia and died, which he did last February. He was
in our class, and he must have been a nice fellow; his mother was very
nice. But I’d never heard of him. It had just happened that way,--the
way it does here.”
“Where did you know his mother?” asked Mrs. Haydock.
“Why, I thought I’d written you all that. It must have been too long, or
too dreary, or something,” said Philip.
“No, you never told me.”
“Well, the first thing that I knew about Hugh Wellington was that he
came from Chicago, or Cleveland, or some place; that ‘his pleasant
disposition was appreciated by all who knew him;’ and that,
incidentally, he was dead. I read that in the ‘Crimson’ one morning in
bed, and I knew exactly what it meant; because when the ‘Crimson’ is
reduced to the ‘pleasant disposition’ stage, there’s a good reason why.”
Mrs. Haydock looked up inquiringly.
“I mean, they can’t find out anything; there’s nothing to find out. He
went his way quietly,--decently, I suppose,--without knowing any one in
particular. No one seemed to know him, not even well enough to say that
his disposition wasn’t pleasant; so the ‘Crimson’ gave him the benefit
of the doubt.”
“It’s the least it could do for any dead man,” said Mrs. Haydock.
“And the most that could be done for poor Wellington, I suppose,” added
Philip, thoughtfully. “After that, I didn’t think of him again--you
don’t, you know; among so many it’s bound to happen pretty often--until
somebody asked who he was, at luncheon. There were ten of us at the
table, and Billy Fields was the only one who knew anything about him. He
said that he sat next to a man named H. Wellington in some big history
course, and liked the clothes he wore. I think he and Billy used to nod
to each other in the Yard. Well, in the natural course of events, that
would have been the end of him, as far as I was concerned, if Nate
Lawrence--he’s the president of the class--hadn’t dashed round to my
room that afternoon to ask me what he’d better do. Nate’s a bully
chap,--a great, big clean sort of a child who breathes hard whenever he
has to think of anything. He always wants to do the proper thing by the
class and the college, and we help him out a good deal with resolutions
and committees and impromptu speeches for athlete dinners, and all that.
He wanted me to sit right down and help him draw up some resolutions of
sympathy and ‘get it over with,’ he said. After that he could call a
class meeting, to which no one would come of course, and send the thing
home immediately. I couldn’t see any particular necessity for rushing
the matter, except that Nate had it very much on his mind. It wasn’t as
if the man were alive and might die at any moment. So I told him he’d
better wait awhile, and asked him if he knew anything about Wellington
in the first place. He said, why, yes, of course--he remembered the name
quite distinctly; Wellington had come out for the foot ball in October,
but had hurt his knee--no, come to think of it, it might have been his
collar-bone--and had dropped out pretty soon. He was either the tall lad
with the shoulders, or that wiry little man who might have made a good
quarter-back if he’d stayed on. You see, Wellington must have been a
mighty quiet sort of fellow, because Nate is a tremendously
conscientious president. He can tell almost everybody apart.
“I said, ‘You simply have to get more details, if you want me to write
the letter.’ I’m pretty good at that kind of thing, but I like to have
something to go by, naturally; it makes them easier--more spontaneous.
Nate had been up to the Office; but I didn’t find anything very
available in what he’d got there, so we looked up Wellington’s address
in the Index, and went round to his room that afternoon. He lived in a
little house on Kirkland Street.
“It was a perfectly fiendish day; you’ve never been here in February,
have you? Well, that’s the time to see dear old Cambridge. It snows and
rains most of the day, and then stops to rest and melt a little. There
aren’t any sidewalks to speak of--just dirt paths with curbstones that
keep the mud and stuff from running off into the street, so you have to
walk in it up to your neck, if you want to get anywhere. That’s what did
Wellington up, I guess.
“The front door of his house was latched, and I was fumbling round under
the crape trying to get hold of the bell, when the landlady appeared;
you know--it makes me shudder now sometimes, when I think of that
gruesome old buzzard of a woman. She was a typical Cambridge
landlady,--one of those uncorsetted, iron grey slatterns who lives in a
rancid atmosphere of hot soap-suds and never goes to bed; a room-renting
old spider who manages to break everything you own, in a listless sort
of way, and then writes home to your father that you haven’t paid your
bill. This one belonged to the class that looks on death as a social
opportunity. She was dressed for the occasion, and greeted each of us
with a kind of a soiled smile that made her old face look like a piece
of dish-rag.”
“Philip dear.”
“Well, it did. And then she said in a loud, important whisper,--
“‘He isn’t upstairs; he’s in my parlor,’ and took us in where poor
Wellington was. It was all so dreadful, that part of it, that it didn’t
seem sad. There were three other bleary old funeral coaches,--more
landladies, I suppose,--on a sofa on one side, and a girl with fuzzy,
yellow hair, in a rocking-chair, on the other; she was Mrs. Finley’s
daughter, I think. I’ve seen her round the Square since. There didn’t
seem to be much of anything for us to do; and Nate was awfully
embarrassed and uncomfortable, and seemed to fill up most of the space
in the horrid plushy little room. But I didn’t like to go away exactly,
because it made our coming there at all seem so useless; so I said to
Mrs. Finley,--I couldn’t think of anything else,--
“‘Have many of the fellows been in?’
“‘No,’ she whispered; ‘nobody’s been in but Mis’ Taylor and Mis’ Buckson
and Mis’ Myles. They come at two,’--it was then after five,--‘and the
Regent. Mr. Wellington was a real quiet young man. He didn’t have much
company. He stayed in his room nights--mostly.’ She stuck on ‘mostly’ as
a sort of afterthought, and repeated it; the old fool had a passion for
accuracy of a vague, unimportant kind that almost drove me crazy. I
asked her if any one else roomed in the house. I knew he must have known
them if there did; no matter how objectionable people are at college, if
they room near you, you can’t help borrowing matches from them--I’ve
made lots of acquaintances borrowing matches. But no one lived there
except two law students, ‘real nice gentlemen, _real_ nice,’ they were,
and they weren’t there very much. Nate asked her when the funeral was to
be, which was the most sensible thing he could have done; for she took a
telegram from her pocket, and said,--
“‘His mother’s coming to-night. She was in New York State when he passed
away. They wa’n’t able to get her till this afternoon.’ Then Nate and I
left her, and I don’t know why,--it wasn’t idle curiosity,--but we went
up to Wellington’s rooms.
“They were bully rooms. You can tell a lot about a man from his room
here. Wellington had no end of really good things: rugs and books,--the
Edinburgh Stevenson, and that edition of Balzac we have at home,--and
ever so many Braun photographs--not the every day ones, but portraits
and things that you felt he’d picked up abroad, because he happened to
like them. And on the table--he had a corking big oak table that filled
up one end of the room--his note-books and scratch block were lying
open, just the way he’d left them when he stopped grinding for the
exams. And there was a letter without a stamp, addressed to his mother,
and a little picture of his mother, with ‘For Hugo’ written on the back.
Then I got to thinking of his mother, and got her mixed up with you
somehow or other. I don’t know just how it was, but you seemed to change
places; I couldn’t see you apart for any length of time, and I thought
of you arriving at the Park Square station all alone, and trying to get
a cab in the wet, and having to pay the man anything he asked you, until
I was almost crying, and told Nate that some one ought to be there to
meet you--Mrs. Wellington, I mean. Nate agreed with me, and began to
look panicky, because he knew I meant him. He really ought to have
gone--it was his place. But I knew how he felt. He kept insisting that I
could do the thing much better than he could; and it ended by my getting
a carriage at about eight or nine o’clock, and splashing into town.
“There was a possibility, of course, that she wouldn’t come alone,
although she had been away from home, in New York, when she heard. But
it never occurred to me that I could miss her if she did come alone,
although I’d never seen her, and felt sure she wouldn’t have on black
veils and things. You can’t imagine all the different things I thought
of to say to her while I was walking up and down the platform waiting
for the train to come in. They all sounded so formal and sort of
undertakery, that I knew I shouldn’t say any of them when the time
came. But I couldn’t think of anything else--the one right one, I mean.
“Well, she came on the first train she possibly could have come on after
sending the telegram, and I knew her at once. She was the very last
person to get out of the car. It wasn’t that, or because she looked
different--anybody else would have said she was very, very tired; but I
just knew her, and before I could think of any of those other things, I
took her travelling-bag and said,--
“‘I’m one of Hugh’s friends.’
“I didn’t see her when I said it,--only her hands,--because I was
looking down at the bag.” Haydock paused a moment.
“I think it was the right thing, dear--the only one,” said his mother,
softly.
“It’s a long, long drive to Cambridge, even if you know where you are
all the time. But with the windows all blurred, and nothing to mark the
way except the rumble of the bridge or the car-tracks, or some bright
light you know pretty well, that tells you you haven’t gone nearly so
far as you thought you had, it’s terrible. We didn’t say anything on
the way. She leaned back in the corner; I think she was crying. Mrs.
Finley--the landlady--heard us coming, and had the door open when we got
out; I made _her_ go upstairs with me, and told her not to dare to go
near that room and--and disturb them. She’s just the sort of a woman who
would. It was almost midnight then, and I sat there until after two. I
tried to grind for a Fine Arts’ examination out of one of Wellington’s
books--he must have been taking the same course--until the door
downstairs opened and closed, and I heard Mrs. Wellington come slowly up
the steps. I put the book on the mantelpiece; it seemed heartless to be
reading there by his fire when she came in.
“She was a very brave woman, I think--brave and civilised. She walked
slowly round the room, sort of touching things here and there; and she
stopped a long time at the table, and put her hand on the note-books
gently, as if she were stroking them, and then closed them.”
“Did she find the letter?” asked Mrs. Haydock.
“No, I gave that to her later on--I had it in my pocket then. I didn’t
want her to find it herself; it always makes you jump so to see your own
name written out, when you’re not looking for it. Then she sat down in a
chair near me and stared at the fire. I asked her if she wanted me to go
away; and she said, no, she was glad I was there. We talked a little--I
couldn’t say much; my position was queer you know--not what she thought
it was. But it didn’t seem wrong as long as I stayed just because she
wanted me to, and I hated to spoil it by saying things that couldn’t
ring true. She talked about Hugh in such a quiet wonderful way that
every now and then I found myself wondering if she really knew.
Sometimes she doubted it herself, I think, for she left me twice and
went slowly downstairs as if she wanted to make sure. When daylight
came, she went in and lay down on his bed. I put out the lamps and wrote
a note saying where my room was if she wanted to send for me.
“At breakfast I got hold of Bradley and Sears Wolcott and Billy and four
or five other fellows, and told them they simply had to go round there
at noon, and that some of them would have to go into the station with
me. They didn’t see any particular reason for it at first; most of them
were grinding for the exams, and Sears had an engagement to play court
tennis and lunch at the B. A. A. He said he didn’t see why the man’s
friends weren’t enough without dragging out a lot of heelers who’d never
heard of him, let alone never having met him. He wasn’t ‘going to be any
damned hired crocodile!’ he said. You see, they couldn’t understand that
if they didn’t go, there probably wouldn’t be anybody there but the
preacher and Mrs. Finley, and those horrible men with the black satin
ties and cotton gloves who carry you in and out when there’s no one else
round to do it. But they all came at last--even Sears, grumbling till he
got inside the gate. Nate brought three or four fellows round from his
club, and an armful of red and white roses ‘from the class,’ he told
Mrs. Wellington. It was a nice little lie. I was surprised that Natey
thought of it. The Regent came, and Mr. Barrows, the college secretary,
and poor old Miss Shedd, Wellington’s washwoman. She was awfully cut
up, poor old thing, and made it as bad as possible for everybody. That
was about all, I think. Plummer, the college preacher, was simple and
manly; Heaven knows he couldn’t very well have been anything else under
the circumstances. And then we had that interminable drive again, back
to Boston.
“I was in the carriage with Mrs. Wellington. Any of us could have gone
with her just as well, I suppose, because we were all Hugh’s friends,
although I was the only one who knew that we were. But I wanted to ride
with her somehow, and I’m glad now that I did, for a very queer thing
happened; I’ve never quite understood it. She didn’t say anything for
ever so long, not until we got across the bridge and the carriage began
to go slower. Then she put one of her hands on mine, and said,--
“‘I didn’t know at first that you were Haydock, not until I found your
note. I’m very, very glad to know, because Hugh used to talk more about
you in his letters and when he was at home than he did about any of the
others. I think he looked up to you most of all,’ and she told me some
of the things he had said and written.”
Haydock often wondered if repeating things to your mother that you
wouldn’t repeat to any one else, made up for the things you couldn’t
tell her at all. This passed through his mind now.
“I’m afraid it’s just as well I never met Wellington,” he added. “Well,
there wasn’t much else. When we got to the station, I left Nate and the
others to attend to things, and went into the car with Mrs. Wellington.
She had the stateroom,--I’d got that for her when I went in town in the
morning,--and there wasn’t anything to do but give her her ticket, and
say good-bye. I had a feeling as if I ought to go on with her and see
the thing through; but I’d cut one examination already--I managed to
flunk two more--and she probably wouldn’t have let me anyhow. I did hunt
up the conductor and give him the other ticket,--you have to have two,
you know,--and told him to take care of it, and not let her see it; it
had a grisly word scribbled across it. She smiled when she said
good-bye--oh, so sadly.”
Haydock stood up and stretched himself.
“Did you ever hear from her again?” asked Mrs. Haydock.
“Oh, yes, I had a letter very soon. I had all his books and furniture
and stuff packed up and sent home, you know. She told me to keep
anything I wanted, because--oh, I’ll show you the letter some day. I
kept the picture with ‘For Hugo’ written on the back. It’s over in my
room.” He went down the steps, Mrs. Haydock following. They walked along
the Delta, past John Harvard, and across to one of the paths in the Yard
once more, sprinkled now with men hurrying to Memorial.
“It was such a queer waste, his having lived and come here at all,”
mused Philip. “I suppose that sounds awfully kiddish and tiresome to
you, doesn’t it?” he asked more lightly, looking at his mother.
“No,” she answered; “it sounded very old the way you said it.”
BUTTERFLIES
John Rice--somehow he was never called “Jack”--and Billy Ware roomed
together, it was said, because their mothers were congenial. These
ladies certainly had, in common, the bond of sweet stupidity, or they
never would have put into practice the ideal arrangement of having their
sons share the same apartment. Rice was always, and with justice, spoken
of as “a very fine man.” He was well put together and fine looking. His
sense of duty was fine, also his sense of honour. He possessed a fine
lot of commonplace ideas about many things, and carried with him an air
of fine, if indefinite, purpose. On the whole, Billy considered him
uninteresting.
Billy, on the other hand, was fatally gifted in his ability to please
everybody. Other things being satisfactory, personal appearance doesn’t
weigh heavily in the balance of undergraduate judgment; it was not
Billy’s extremely pretty and well cared for exterior that compelled
fellows to take him into account in their preliminary survey of the
Freshman Class; although that may have helped, just at first. People who
liked the plasticity of his quick smile and the restlessness of his
black eyebrows--there was something very un-Anglo-Saxon in their facial
importance--thought he had “an expressive face.” But what it expressed,
if anything, no man undertook to say. Hemenway, who drew for the
“Lampoon,” said it was a sketch, not a face,--the sketch of a painter
who didn’t take art seriously. Neither was it cleverness that made
fellows who met Ware remember him favourably, if they happened to be
upper classmen, and glad of a subsequent occasion that threw them in his
way, if they were his own classmates. For Billy had none of the talents
of which parlour tricks are made. In the presence of older boys, he
instinctively knew the number and kind of remarks that gain for a
freshman the negative distinction of being “able to talk enough.” With
his contemporaries, he talked a great deal--almost up to the line that
separated him from youths who chatter. But except for a whimsical manner
of attack, and his consistent frivolity of tone in regard to almost
everything, his conversation was unimportant. What he did possess, to a
rather extraordinary degree, was that which, if given the field, is more
magical among one’s fellows at college than brains, manners, looks, or
money,--that which is described only as “the indescribable something.”
And Billy had the field. S. Timothy’s sent fifteen men to Harvard that
year; he knew them all, of course, and roomed with the very fine one.
They all flocked together at first, until the acquaintance of each
equalled the fourteen others plus fourteen times the friends of every
one of them--which is all one knows, and all one needs to know. The
number--it included the nebular hypothesis of the next year’s Institute
and a few more--kept Billy’s head wagging incessantly in and about
Cambridge. Of all this throng Billy was probably interested least in the
man with whom he roomed. John Rice was a constant and living reminder
of S. Timothy’s; Billy detested S. Timothy’s. He used to tell John
pleasantly, that he not only didn’t like the school or anything he had
learned there, but that it had bored him extremely for six years,
although he hadn’t perhaps realised it at the time.
“Spend next Sunday with you up at School?” he would say, airily, to this
frequent suggestion of John’s. “My dear fellow, how foolishness! My
life-work consists just now in forgetting S. Timothy’s.” Then he would
pull John’s hair, or, perhaps, shy harmless missiles at him from across
the room; for he knew that John was abjectly grateful for any
semi-affectionate demonstrations of this nature, and it amused Billy to
be liked by people,--people for whom he didn’t particularly care. He
didn’t care much for John; he found him solicitous rather than
sympathetic. John was too contemplative--too “set”; he refused to accept
freshman standards and go ahead accordingly. Billy, who managed, before
he was through, to spread himself uncommonly thin over a considerable
area, fancied that he thought his room-mate pitifully prudent. For when
Billy entered college, he proceeded from the very first to expand in the
largeness and fulness of his glorious new life. People said, afterwards,
his development had been so slight and so artificial, in the
stained-glass atmosphere of his imitation English “fitting” school, that
it made up for lost time at a most astonishing rate when the boy became
his own master. He was very much like a supersensitive photograph plate
in the hands of a bungler. If you know what _it_ does on being plunged
into the developing solution, you have an idea of Billy’s Freshman year.
He had been such a nice little boy at S. Timothy’s,--piping liquidly in
an angelic “nighty” at Chapel,--that when the inevitable rumours reached
there, the rector and the masters were deeply pained to learn that still
another butterfly had burst from the godly chrysalis. They assumed lank,
pre-Raphaelite expressions, and murmured, “Oh, Harvard--Harvard!” Billy
himself was not left in ignorance of their distress; there was always
John, of course; and from time to time biblical excerpts, skilfully
tortured into the form of letters, came to him through the mails.
Somebody-or-other’s pamphlet on “The Life Beautiful,” and a horrid
looking little thing in white celluloid covers, entitled “Daily Seeds
for Daily Needs,” were also slipped through his letter-slide one
morning--all of which, in turn, caused Billy to murmur, “Oh, S.
Timothy’s--S. Timothy’s!” His attitude toward S. Timothy’s rapidly
became that of one who places his thumb upon his nose and extends the
fingers of his hand.
“‘_Descensus averni facilis est_,’” John, in one of his more playful
moods, had remarked to him one evening. To which Billy had replied, “Ah,
yes--_E pluribus unum nux vomica facile princeps_, as dear old Virgil
used to say.” He was standing before the mirror in his bedroom adjusting
an evening tie. Four crumpled failures already lay on the floor; from
time to time Billy kicked at them as he moved about, or arrested the
progress of his toilet to inhale deeply from the cigarette that had
already burned several holes in the cover of his dressing-table. John
was sitting on the bed, gravely watching the boy dress for the “Friday
Evening.”
“Do you think you’ll come back to-night?” he asked.
“That’s the delightful part of it all--I don’t know,” answered Billy,
with a shrug. He hadn’t told John where he was going after the
dancing-class, because John, by various pathetic little indirect
remarks, had displayed unmistakable interest in his movements. Billy
withheld the satisfaction it would have given his room-mate to know all
about him, partly because he wished to discourage a growing tendency,
and for the reason that John’s--or any one’s--serious concern always
aroused in him pleasant sensations of silliness, accompanied by a desire
to giggle.
“After all--Boston is a busy little place, isn’t it Johnny?” his smile
was radiant with mystery. “Don’t sit up for me, old man--unless you care
for winter sunrises,” he added, imitating the tones he so often heard in
Sanborn’s billiard place, and laughing at the way they sounded. “By the
way, what are _you_ going to do to-night,--something devilish of
course,--but what?” He wasn’t asking for information; he knew that John
usually spent his evenings quietly at home, or went to see one of the S.
Timothy’s boys, and talk foot-ball or the intricacies of English A.
“I? Oh, I was thinking of going over to Claverly to see
Haydock,”--Haydock was a senior. “He asked us to drop in often, you
know,” said John, so casually that, after the manner of absolutely
honest persons who attempt a subtlety, he “gave himself away.”
“Translated, I suppose that means I haven’t been there very often--that
I haven’t been there at all, in fact?” said Billy, sweetly. He was
thinking to himself that when John aimed at “foxiness,” he usually made
a very successful cow of himself.
“I may have been thinking that,” admitted John, blushing a little; “but
you really haven’t been there, you know, and after the way you didn’t
turn up the night he asked us to dine--”
“Turn up? Turn up?” said Billy, with a giggle at an imagined picture of
himself turning up at the Victoria to dine with Haydock and John. “Why,
man, I was dead to the world--I was a corpse! Turn up? I turned up about
two days later, and didn’t know where I was then. If you had any
gratitude in your withered old gizzard, you’d never stop thanking me for
not turning up.”
“It wasn’t the right thing,” was John’s comment. The appearance just
then of Dilly Bancroft, for whom Billy was waiting, averted the
discussion--the one-sided kind Rice and Ware always had--in which Billy
played matadore and picador, with grace and agility, to John’s brave but
ineffectual bull.
“I’m all ready. Let’s dash along; you’re late, Dilly,” said Billy,
slipping into his coat. He had a keen instinct in the matter of personal
antagonisms. He always felt them long before they were expressed, often
before they were even conceived. John had never said much of anything
about Billy’s friend Bancroft--not even when that young man had seen fit
to break training some months before, on the Freshman Eleven. But in
spite of John’s hearty (suspiciously hearty, thought Billy), “Hello,
Dilford, how are you?” Billy knew. Anything of the kind annoyed
him--especially in his own room, where he felt it his right to have whom
he pleased. He escaped with Bancroft as soon as possible. John struck
him just then as a very tiresome person to be saddled with. The two
left, looking so clean and well-bred and young and altogether
inconsequent in their good clothes, that John could not but smile to
himself and think kindly of them for a moment as they clattered down the
stairs and out into the Yard.
Haydock was at home when Rice knocked at his door in Claverly later in
the evening. It was always with a feeling of satisfaction that one went
into Haydock’s study. Haydock himself had none of the disconcerting
habits of most people. He never came to the door with an open book in
one hand and a green shade over his eyes, protesting, with a worried
expression, that you hadn’t stopped his work and spoiled his evening
generally. He never shook you by the hand and seemed unnecessarily glad
to see you. He never began the conversation by asking, after a stupid
pause, the stupider question, “Well, how are you getting along?” It was
impossible to feel that your arrival interrupted him in the least, as
his door was usually unlatched, and he rarely seemed to be engaged in
anything more urgent than filling his pipe, putting a fresh log on the
fire, or perhaps strolling about looking at things,--occupations
suggesting somehow, that Haydock had been trying to kill time until you
should drop in. To-night he was improving the angle at which his various
pictures hung.
“Do you suppose there ever was anything more maddening than a really
conscientious ‘goody’?” he said, as John came in,--“the kind who has a
passion for dusting, a positive lust for it? Just look at these
pictures!” He straightened the photograph of a Florentine saint, whose
asceticism, at a rakish deflection from the perpendicular, had ceased to
impress.
“I don’t think we’re bothered very much by conscientious ‘goodies’ over
in Matthews,” answered John; “one of them broke Billy’s pipe this
morning.”
“Has William taken up smoking?” laughed Haydock.
“Well, rather.”
“Surprising, isn’t it,” mused the other. He really wasn’t surprised a
bit. He and Billy had been born and brought up next door to each other;
he knew the type and the temperament. He also was aware that Billy was
an enthusiastic member of the Polo Club.
Haydock had tried to see something of the child during his first month
or two in college.
“An older boy can do so much for a younger one, Philip,” Mrs. Ware had
said to him, with her hazy maternal trustfulness, just before college
opened. “William is fond of you, I know; and it’s a great comfort to
feel that you will be there, and that he’s going to room with John.” If
the good woman derived tranquillity of mind from the fact that her son
and Haydock chanced to inhabit the same town, Haydock did not consider
it worth while to explain that the coincidence, regarded in the light of
its moral significance, was unimportant. He had called on Billy and John
as soon as they were settled; but Billy had never returned the
compliment, although John did frequently. Once he had asked the
room-mates to dinner; Billy, he learned later, had been too drunk that
evening to recall the engagement for the moment. Since then, the helpful
influence, in the belief of which Mrs. Ware existed placidly, had
perforce exerted itself across a theatre, or from the platform of a
passing electric car.
“Oh, I don’t mind his smoking,” said John, with the faintest emphasis on
the last word.
“No?” Haydock kept his back turned, and continued to touch delicately,
here and there, the corners of his picture frames. As a matter of fact,
he made some of them rather more crooked than they were at first. But he
felt that if he didn’t deter John by turning suddenly and giving him all
attention, he would hear the whole story; John very evidently had
brought one with him.
“Of course, I don’t smoke, myself,” John went on slowly; “it’s just
happened that way, I suppose. But I don’t mind it in Billy. You can
always stop if it begins to hurt you. I think I like to see him do it,”
he ended, with unusual tolerance.
“Yes,” agreed Haydock, deliberately, “if it hurts you, you can always
stop smoking.” He, too, emphasised the last word softly, in a way that
left the tale still untold. Haydock was something of an artist in
assisting confidences where the spirit was willing and the vocabulary
weak.
“Ware is really a bully chap; he was a perfect corker at school.” John’s
remark was a circuitous paraphrase of, “Isn’t it too bad!”
“He certainly is most attractive; I’ve rarely known anybody who was more
so,” Haydock assented, with an enthusiasm he genuinely felt; “but I
don’t see much of him now.” His regret, too, was real.
“That’s it! that’s just it!” John burst out so hotly that the senior,
who was filling his pipe at the table, almost looked up in ill-timed
surprise. “Nobody sees anything of him any more; nobody who ought to,
like you.”
“And you,” added Haydock, to himself. The situation was perennial; he
divined it perfectly.
“Nobody but that damned Dilford Bancroft and that gang,” continued
John. “Billy could know any one in the class that’s worth knowing; he
really does know every one. But you understand what I mean, they’re not
his friends; he doesn’t go to their rooms, and they don’t come to ours.
It’s always Bancroft and just a few sports like that.”
“Cheap sports?” Haydock questioned. He knew no more of Bancroft than
that he was a decorative young person whose somewhat liberal views on
the subject of training for a foot-ball eleven had stirred a ripple of
indignation throughout the college in the autumn, and provoked some
caustic reflections in the editorial columns of the “Harvard Crimson.”
“No, I don’t suppose they’re ‘cheap’ sports,” admitted the honest
John,--“not the way you mean.”
“Expensive sports, then?”
“Well, if you mean that they seem to know how to do the things that
oughtn’t to be done at all, the way they ought to be done, if you do
them--” began John, a trifle obscurely.
“Yes, that’s precisely what I mean.”
“Then they are ‘expensive’ sports, I suppose.”
“And Billy has become absorbed by them?”
“He doesn’t care to see any one else, as far as I know.”
“Perhaps it’s merely a passing phase.”
“I can’t see that that cuts any particular ice, if he is going to be
ruined before it passes,” John objected.
“But he won’t be,” put in Haydock, confidently.
“What can possibly save him?” John was terribly in earnest. “His best
friends are loafers and snobs; they never learn anything, and they all
drink too much. All they want is a good time,--the wrong kind of a good
time. Who is going to make him take a brace? I’ve tried, and I can’t;
the college doesn’t seem to give a--”
“Hold on--hold on--hold on,” broke in Haydock; “give the college a show.
What do you expect the college to do anyhow? Supply wet-nurses for all
the silly little boys who make themselves sick on cocktails at the Adams
House?”
“It could do something.”
“Yes, and doesn’t it,--the very finest thing in the world! Doesn’t it
allow all sorts of men to come here, and give them the chance of their
lives to learn about everybody and everything that was ever good or
great or worth learning about? Isn’t it willing to share the very best
of what it has,--and it has everything,--its traditions and its
knowledge and its beauty? Doesn’t it want to make the fellows here part
of it all, if they only have the guts to keep their heads up, and follow
along the road it has built for them? Is there any place else where you
can live for four years--the four important ones--and know that the
standard of everything held up to you can’t change, like the trivial
little standards of other places, that the aim won’t swerve, no matter
what happens, and that they are the highest, the best? Isn’t that doing
something--everything?”
Haydock was occasionally enthusiastic in a calm, thoughtful sort of way.
“I know what you mean--I’ve thought about it myself; but Billy is going
to hell. What about Billy?” John insisted.
“Oh, as for that--to pass from the sublime to Billy--he simply won’t;
that is to say, he won’t here, at Harvard.”
There was a gleam of hope in John’s eyes.
“Why?” he asked.
“Because he’ll get kicked out,” said Haydock.
“Fire Billy?” John looked terrified.
“That’s what they’ll do. And why not?” the senior went on heartlessly.
“From what you say, he doesn’t seem to be quite ready for the place, as
yet; so put him out.”
“But he isn’t bad, really bad.”
“No, certainly not; merely a damn fool; when he gets over being one, let
him come back. The college understands that sort of thing much better
than you or I do. It’s not only highly intelligent, but extremely
benevolent. I’m sorry about Billy.”
“Won’t you talk to him--warn him in some way; he’ll listen to you,” said
John, earnestly.
“I should be charmed,” answered the other, although he appreciated the
delicacy of the situation, and felt that his words would fall on deaf
ears.
It was later than John’s accustomed hour for going to bed, when he left
Haydock’s room that night. This was his only reason for hurrying over
to Matthews, as he did, when he finally said good-night to the senior.
At the end of the little corridor near John’s door a man who looked like
a messenger of some kind stood peering out of the window at the lights
in the Square. He must have been standing there a long time,--long
enough to become convinced that the continual sound of footsteps in the
entry did not necessarily announce the person for whom he was
waiting,--for he turned to John only when he heard the jingle of his
keys.
“Rice?” he drawled, “J. D. Rice?” He gave John a note, and sauntered
back to the window. The communication was from Billy. John read it there
in the corridor under the gas jet:--
DEAR JOHNNY,--Please, as quickly as possible, procure all the money
you can lay your hands on--two hundred dollars at the very
least--and come bail me out. I have been arrested and compelled to
languish among hostile strangers. The man with this note will guide
you to the scene of my incarceration. Please hurry, because I wish
to go home.
BILLY.
P. S. For Heaven’s sake get a move on.
For a moment this document conveyed but little to John. He was obliged
to read it a second time, and even then he stared appealingly at the
messenger, who had turned and was eyeing him with feeble interest.
“They got pinched, didn’t they?” said the man, sadly.
“But what did he do? What’s happened?” John demanded. He was dazed;
nothing he had ever seen or done in his life had prepared him for this.
“Why, they got run in,” explained the man.
“Here--you wait for me here.” The only thing John could think of just
then was Haydock. “Or no--come into my room;” he unlocked the door and
turned up the gas. “Be sure to wait,” he commanded, as he rushed out.
Claverly was locked for the night; John remembered this after rattling
in vain at the three doors. Then he called under Haydock’s window. The
senior answered from the square of yellow light above. He was on the
point of going out anyhow, he said, and would join John below.
“Billy’s arrested! he’s in jail! What’ll I do?” John gasped
breathlessly. He thrust the note at Haydock. “Read it.”
Haydock struck a match in the shelter of a bay window and read.
“Why, the only thing to do is to bail him out,” he laughed. “It’s
horrid, not to say disgusting, to have to stay all night in a jail. How
much money have you?”
“I don’t know, five dollars, I think,” answered John. The darkness
covered his astonishment at Haydock’s calmness under the circumstances.
“I have thirty or forty myself, and I’ll evolve the rest somewhere.”
“Do you think you can?” To John the idea was incredible.
“Oh, heavens yes! That’s the trouble with Cambridge; you can always
borrow any amount at any hour. It makes every place else seem sordid and
worldly. Is the ‘guide’ in your room? I’ll meet you there in twenty
minutes.” He strolled away whistling. John hurried back to Matthews
faster than before.
For ever so long that night was a hideous memory to Billy’s room-mate.
He and Haydock and the man--a sad, silent person whom Haydock
courteously tried to engage in conversation from time to time--spent
hours in chilly suburban street-cars and bleak waiting stations. Haydock
ignored the topic that to John was of such overwhelming and painful
interest; it was as if he had disposed of the entire subject earlier in
the evening when he had uttered his prophecy: “Because he’ll get kicked
out.” Grey January dawn streaked the sky when the trio, after finding
Billy and Dilford Bancroft chatting pleasantly with the watchmen in the
police station, managed to rout up the gentleman whose function it
seemed to be to determine the amount of a criminal’s bail,--he lived
several miles away,--get a cab, and jog back to Cambridge. Billy talked
most of the way, in spite of the silence with which John received his
reflections, and Haydock’s polite but unenthusiastic attention. Dilford
covered his head with the lap-robe at intervals, and had hysterics; but
no one noticed him at all, except Billy, who occasionally joined him in
these complex emotions.
“It was the surprise--the awful surprise of it that killed me dead,”
Billy would giggle. “I was on the box-seat driving, you
know,--lickety-split, to beat the band, with Harry Hollis beside me,--he
fell off when we went over the car tracks. I’d like to know if he was
hurt; anyhow, the car didn’t run over him, because I looked back and it
never stopped. Had Jimmy fallen out then?” he appealed to Dilford, whose
reply was smothered at its birth. “Then we raced the car until the
horses--oh, they were corkers!--began to run away. I couldn’t hold them.
I tried, upon my soul, I tried! but I was laughing so that my wrists
were all sort of tickly on the inside,--you know how they do,--and I
couldn’t close my fingers very tight over the reins; they just flapped
around in the breeze any old way. So when the policeman ran out and
yelled and waved, what on earth could I do? What _could_ I do? We simply
crashed past him like a chariot race. I looked back again and couldn’t
even see the creature--only Dilly on the floor, white as a sheet,
holding on with everything he had. Oh, it was terrible! perfectly
terrible! I was glad we’d ditched the policeman, though; only we didn’t!
That was the surprise. My dear, _what_ do you suppose that man--that
devil--did? He telephoned--_telephoned_--to the next police station, and
when we got there they received us. Policemen? There were platoons of
them,--as far as the eye could reach in every direction. And they had
fish-nets and lassoes and the most fearful-looking clubs; and one of the
horses fell down, and everybody sat on the poor thing’s head,--people
always rush and do that when a horse falls down. I wonder why?”
No one ventured a theory, and William continued:--
“Well, they took us inside, and asked the most intimate impertinent kind
of questions. I gave my own name, but Dilly didn’t; he had one all ready
that went with the initials on his underclothes, so it wouldn’t be a
give-away even if they had the nerve to go too far. What was it, Dilly?
I’ve forgotten. He asked me what my occupation was, and I didn’t exactly
like to tell him I was a student.”
“Of course not,” assented Haydock, drily.
“So I merely said ‘_rentier_.’”
Haydock groaned softly in his corner.
“He just looked at me,--the great big thing! I don’t think he’d ever
been abroad. Oh, and before I forget it, we have to be in court at nine
o’clock. Now don’t go and oversleep yourself, John, the way you do
sometimes; because I must get up whether I want to or not, I suppose.
Where was I? Oh, yes; after he’d asked all the questions he could think
of, I wrote the note, and we waited a deuce of a while. But it wasn’t so
bad after that, after the ice was broken. Then you both came--I was so
relieved--and here we are ‘just off the yacht!’”
Billy thought it hardly worth while to go to bed when the cab at length
reached the Square. He would have preferred to utilise the short time
that remained before nine o’clock in talking over his little jaunt with
Dilford. He wanted to “shake” John and Haydock, and spend a pleasant
hour or two at Mr. Vosler’s hotel in town, before meeting his judge. But
the plan wasn’t one that he could innocently suggest; and as the senior
stayed with them until they said good-night to him at the entry of
Matthews, he couldn’t very well leave John without a word, as he would
have done, had they been alone. Billy tumbled into bed as soon as he got
upstairs, and giggled himself to sleep, after calling into John’s
room,--
“You did see the sunrise, didn’t you, old man?”
John lay awake until it was time to rouse Billy for his trial. At nine
that morning the two criminals rolled up to the court-room, smoking
cigarettes on the back seat of a victoria. They pleaded guilty to
something,--neither of them quite knew what,--listened with downcast
eyes to a bit of fatherly sarcasm, and drove away again--forty dollars
poorer than when they arrived. That was in January.
The midyear examinations have an unpleasant habit of disturbing the even
academic tenor early in February, as their name suggests. They announce
themselves, in various prominent places, at first, like clouds no bigger
than a man’s hand. The wary and the wise repair to their caves, and
remain there, off and on, for days and days and days. When they finally
emerge, care-worn but preserved after the deluge, they find that many
loved ones are missing. John was among the first to retire to high and
inaccessible altitudes. He pinned the “Crimson’s” supplementary schedule
of examinations and dates to his door. After deliberating long as to
where a similar reminder would most often meet the eyes of his
room-mate, he carefully marked the impending tortures with ominous
crosses and tacked the list to the frame of Billy’s mirror. He might
with just as much effect--to say nothing of the economy of anguish--have
thrown the thing into the fire.
“What the devil does this fly-paper think it’s doing on my
looking-glass?” Billy had remarked on finding the evidence of John’s
thoughtfulness. “Do you realise that you have utterly obliterated Sarah
Bernhardt and Della Fox? I think you must be crazy.” He ripped off the
paper, and let it flutter to the floor. John’s patience was
inexhaustible, but his ingenuity had well defined limits; he was aware,
with something like panic, that he had reached them. For weeks, he had
exercised what art he had at command, in trying to seduce Billy into
opening a book. He had learned that a declaration of his personal ideas
in regard to the examinations--or any work he undertook--was worse than
ineffectual as far as his room-mate went. It not only failed to quicken
in Billy the sense--prevalent at the midyears--of approaching
catastrophe, but drove him away to somebody else’s room, or perhaps to
town. So, much to his own distaste, John had essayed the rôle of the
serio-comic. He made a pretence--with reservations--of adopting Billy’s
point of view; the reservations were meant to bring about the desired
end. He would chat with Billy of the more serious aspects of
college--the courses and instructors and examinations--in an attempt at
something like the same breezy tone in which the boy himself touched on
these subjects. When Billy, for instance, would sit up in bed in the
morning and yawn and shrug and announce that he simply couldn’t go all
the way over to Sever Hall to sit through Professor So-and-so’s
lecture--that the man was ninety-five years old if he was a day, and
slobbered, John would laugh and say,--
“Yes, isn’t he deadly? I hardly ever listen to him. Lots of people live
too long. But I suppose we must go and endure it; we’re in the course,
and we’ll have to worry through it somehow.”
At first Billy was rather shocked. The abrupt change of manner was so
hopelessly out of character; he wouldn’t have been more astounded had he
heard unseemly levity issuing from the pulpit at S. Timothy’s. But he
divined almost at once--who wouldn’t have?--that John’s responsibility
for other people’s affairs, though exhibited in a fashion positively
weird, did not diminish; and Billy frequented 86 Matthews less than
ever. John knew that he himself didn’t possess the qualities that make a
man an inspiration, but he had been brought up at home and at school to
believe that he was something of an influence; that he was “just the
sort of man a fellow like Billy needs.” Apart from the genuine sorrow he
would feel at what the official college gracefully terms the
“separation” of Billy from the University, it was disconcerting to John
to find out that as a kindly light he had proved uncommonly dim. In
despair and disappointment, he impressed Haydock into the labour of
salvation.
Haydock was very amiable about the whole affair. He had, whenever he was
with Billy, the half amused affection an older fellow often feels for
anything so young and pretty and inconsequent. He liked the boy’s mother
too, although the lady’s guilelessness had always been a bar to
conversation of other than a purely theoretical value. So, in response
to John’s eleventh-hour prayers, he did what he could in spite of more
immediate interests. He picked his way, one evening, through the
darkness and the mud, and among the disabled butcher-waggons, by the
black alley that leads to the Polo Club,--once upon a time he too had
belonged to that genial institution,--and beguiled Billy and Dilford
Bancroft to his room. He gave them beer, and things to smoke, and then
wondered how, with two such elusive, mercurial creatures flitting about,
he could ever begin to “talk shop.” Strangely enough Billy himself
provided the opportunity.
“Play something, Dilly,” he said, opening Haydock’s piano. Haydock
glanced at the clock on the mantelpiece, but it was not yet nine; the
proctor couldn’t object, no matter how excruciating Dilly’s performance
might be.
“Dilly, you know, can bang the box in a way that would make you throw
stones at your grandmother,” explained Billy.
“I’m extremely fond of my grandmother,” suggested Haydock.
“What do you want?” asked Dilly, seating himself.
“What do you know?”
“Oh, any old thing.”
Haydock was on the point of discreetly asking for a Sousa march, when
Dilford plunged abruptly into the middle of a sonata, and played it
through with astonishing brilliancy.
“I do play well, don’t I?” he admitted, when he had finished. “It always
surprises me; just think what I could do if I really studied--hard, I
mean,” he added lightly.
“Good heavens! man,” exclaimed Haydock, “aren’t you going to take
highest honours in music? Why, you can do anything!” Haydock considered
his own little thumpings important only in so far as they enabled him
to understand a talent like Bancroft’s.
“Oh, I don’t know,” answered Dilford, with indifference. “My father
wants me to go to work; I don’t suppose I’ll be here long.”
“Won’t you, really? I knew that Billy wasn’t going to stay; but I had an
idea you would.” Haydock alluded to Billy’s probable departure with the
emotion he would have displayed had he been predicting a change in the
weather.
Billy pricked up his ears and his eyebrows at once. “What makes you say
that?” he demanded quickly. Even Dilford dropped his customary
listlessness, and looked interested.
“Why--I thought it was more or less settled.” The senior turned from one
to the other in slow surprise, “If I’ve said anything I ought not to
have--given things away, I mean--I’m awfully sorry. But perhaps they
were mistaken.” Billy’s face, across which flitted a shade of anxiety,
told him that he was perfectly safe in making a “bluff” at changing the
subject.
“No, no!” Billy jerked out, impatiently; “go on! who are you talking
about? You’ve heard something important,” something that didn’t emanate
from John, he was thinking. “What did they say? I insist on knowing.”
“It really wasn’t much; merely that one or two of the instructors--I
know some of the younger ones rather well--seemed to think that you
wouldn’t--that in fact you couldn’t be with us after the midyears.
That’s all. I thought you knew.”
“You’re bitched all right, all right,” laughed Bancroft.
“They said that, did they?” Billy let fall these words portentously; it
was as if he were on the point of framing a great resolution.
“That’s precisely what they said.”
“Well, then--by heaven! I’ll fool them.” He really meant it.
“Oh, I wish you would! It would be easy after all. There’s time yet.
I’ll help you with your English--both courses--and your Latin. You’re
all right in French, of course, and the History won’t be so terrible. Is
it a go?” Haydock held out his hand.
“I’ll fool them,” repeated Billy, solemnly. He gravely let his long,
brown fingers rest in Haydock’s palm. And Haydock had one of those
moments of quiet exultation that are the perquisites of the intelligent.
The next morning Billy and Dilly disappeared from Cambridge, and were
neither seen nor heard of for five days. On the afternoon of the fourth
day John, looking positively thin, turned up in Haydock’s room.
“Get up a search party and explore darkest Boston,” advised the senior,
drumming on the desk with his pencil.
“Oh, I did!” John’s tone was without hope. “Harry Hollis and Jimmy
Fenton took me all over--to the most awful hotels and places. They
seemed to know Billy at all of them; but he wasn’t there. I never had
such a night. I don’t know what to do.”
“How much money did he have?” Haydock continued to drum thoughtfully.
“Twenty dollars. I’m sure, because we both put our allowances in the
bank that morning. Billy kept twenty.”
Now Haydock, who had met a great number of Billys and Dillys in his
short life, knew that this particular Billy was not living anywhere on
the modest sum of five dollars a day. So, after a little more drumming,
he said,--
“Run over to the Charles River Bank, and ask them in just what
metropolis of the United States or Europe, William is signing cheques at
the present moment.”
When John returned, breathless, a few minutes later, he threw himself
into a chair, and groaned,--
“They’re in Providence.”
Haydock gave up a dinner at his club that night, and a dance in town. He
went, instead, to Providence. Late the next evening he deposited
Billy--too much of a wreck to be either resentful or flippant--in 86
Matthews. The next day the Office put Billy “on probation.”
And the midyears were coming.
One night, after the examination period was well under way, Haydock went
up to his room to study. Although the month was February, the night was
heavy and depressing. The senior had much to accomplish before morning.
He was nervous--almost irritable. His curtains floated like ghostly,
beckoning sleeves in and out of the open windows, until he jumped up
and tied them viciously into hard knots. His student lamp radiated the
heat of hell and the unnumbered suns; he found himself waiting, in
nervous suspense, for the periodic bubbling of its rudimentary bowels.
The sound diverted his attention from his book, and wasted the limited
time left him in which to commit to memory several hundred lines of
Paradise Lost. The verse,--
“And, sweet reluctant amourous delay,”
--he came across it in the feverish scramble of learning five lines a
minute by the watch,--suddenly put the situation in a light in which he
had not until then been able to see it. He leaned back in his chair and
laughed aloud. And as he laughed, he heard a light footstep in the hall,
then a knock on his door.
“I heard you laughing and knew you couldn’t be working, so I just
knocked,” said Dilford Bancroft, innocently ignoring the very unusual
fact that Haydock had on neither coat nor waistcoat, that a shaded
student lamp was the only light in the room, and that several open
books and some scattered notes lay on the table. “What’s the joke?” he
asked. Then without waiting for an answer, “Hasn’t Billy come yet?”
“Is Billy coming?” said Haydock, with an interest that sprang solely
from alarm.
“Oh, yes--he’ll be here,” answered Dilly, reassuring any foolish doubts
on that question. He had opened the piano and was striking careful
discords in the bass, “I was sure you were talking to him when I came
in; he said he’d bring round his system.”
“His _what_?”
“Why, his system--the ‘Rhyming Road,’ he calls it. You’re going to give
us a seminar, you know--the exam comes to-morrow; and he’s going to
bring round his notes and the ‘Rhyming Road’ to help out.”
Haydock was hearing of this little arrangement for the first time. He
hadn’t seen Billy since the return from Providence.
“You didn’t tell me you were coming,” he began; “I have no end of work
myself and--”
“Yes, yes, I know,” broke in Dilly, a trifle impatiently, without
turning from the piano; “you see we never thought about it ourselves
until this afternoon, when we found out that the exam comes to-morrow.
We were sure you’d do it,” he wheeled slowly about until he faced
Haydock; “because neither of us know anything, and if you don’t--we’ll
fail.”
Haydock met this plaint with the worried silence of one who dimly
foresees his own end. Dilly couldn’t have made a more persuasive appeal
if he had tried. Its strength lay in the fact that Dilly hadn’t tried;
he had simply laid bare, with an apparently childlike trust in Haydock’s
wisdom, his own and Billy’s hopeless inconsequence. It was rather late
in the day to discuss the matter.
“We were counting on you,” Dilly sighed, and looked at the floor. He
ventured this statement in the hope of keeping the subject alive;
somehow it had seemed to languish.
“I confess I don’t understand you two,” Haydock burst out. Every one who
had the pleasure of knowing Billy and Dilly took refuge in this
exclamation at one time or another. “How the devil have you managed to
hang on here for four months? And why on earth did you come to college
at all?” he shook the boy by the shoulders.
Dilly’s apologia might have been interesting. He had on occasions
attempted--by request--to defend the fact of his being at Harvard; but
as he had always prefaced his few remarks with, “To begin with, I am of
a taciturn disposition,” and as no one was quite willing to believe that
he had a glimmer of the meaning of “taciturn,” he had never been allowed
to proceed from that point. To-night the appearance of Billy with an
armful of note-books made explanation impossible.
“Oh, I’m so glad you’re not working,” said Billy, sweetly, all the
note-books--there were six of them--fell to the floor when he sat down;
“because we couldn’t have disturbed you, and I don’t know what we’d have
done--Dilford’s told you?”
“Yes, Dilford has told me,” answered Haydock. He knew that then was the
time to escort these young gentlemen to the hall, and lock the door in
their faces. But he allowed it to slip by, and it never returned.
“Well, then--I don’t see why we shouldn’t dash right along. What do you
think?” Billy looked from Haydock to Dilford and back again.
“What is it you want--and what are all those books doing?” Haydock asked
wearily.
“Oh, these?” Billy allowed his feet to ramble among the volumes on the
floor. “Oh, they’re just notes--History and French and things; there
were no matches in my room, and I was in a hurry, so I had to bring them
all. The Literature ones are there too; but they’re rather--rather--what
shall I say?” He refrained delicately from saying what was the simple
truth,--that his notes on all subjects were an illegible muddle,
beginning nowhere--arriving nowhere. “Things come to me at such odd
times,” he went on, “I just jot them down. Anyhow you won’t need notes;
we merely want you to give us some idea to go by,” he fluttered his
slender hand comprehensively, “an idea of literature.”
“Yes,” put in Dilly, stirred by the practical common sense of the
suggestion, “the examination, I think, is about literature.”
“You _think_--good God, child, don’t you _know_?” Haydock mopped his
forehead on the back of his arm, and stared at the two incredulously.
“Oh, he’ll catch on all right,” said Billy, easily. “You see the course
only came once a week, and Darnell lectures so fast that, sitting away
in the back of the room as we do--”
“You prefer, on the whole, to stay away entirely, or make the hour pass
as rapidly as possible. Yes, yes, I understand,” interrupted Haydock,
drily. He picked up one of Billy’s books marked “English 28,” and opened
it at random, to a page devoted to the diagrams and scores of the
“Harvard University Tit Tat Too and Cent Matching Association.
Originators and Sole Proprietors, William Prescott Ware and Dilford
Bancroft. Honorary member: President Eliot.” On the page following was a
fragmentary list of the writers whose lives and achievements had been
taken up in the course. After the name of Jane Austen, came the
announcement, in parentheses, that “this woman was a man.” The
startling bit of literary gossip was annotated by: “I was mistaken--it
was George Eliot who was a woman.”
“That almost flunked me at the hour exam,” explained Billy, diffidently.
“They’re so fussy about things here.” He was looking over Haydock’s
shoulder. “It would have, I think, if I hadn’t thrown a new light on the
temperament of Swift.”
“I’ll warrant you did,” said Haydock. “What on earth is this?” The list
was followed by page after page of scrappy-looking verse.
“Oh, that’s the Rhyming Road,” exclaimed Billy, not without pride. “It
sums everything up and helps the memory. See now--I never can forget
about that old Eliot woman as long as I live.” Haydock followed Billy’s
guiding finger, and read a stanza that began:--
“Oh, heavens, oh, heavens,
Miss Mary Ann Evans,
Why did you change your name?
But I’m on to you, Mary,
You wary old fairy--”
“And this one on Matthew Arnold,” continued Billy, “gives the whole man
away at once--”
“Matthew Arnold--he’s all right,
Full of sweetness, full of light.”
“And Richardson--”
“‘Pamela, Pamela, what have you done?’
‘I’ve been shooting the chutes with Sir Charles Grandison.’”
“Do you see? It goes on like that, only I haven’t had time yet to make
the thing complete. Now let’s begin; it’s late.”
Haydock closed the book thoughtfully and went over to the window. He
stood a moment looking out at the thick fog, and wondering what he
should do. He hadn’t the slightest intention any longer of spending the
rest of the night in a futile effort to scrape Billy through an
examination. The child had already cut two, and failed in one, John had
said. But the senior was in doubt as to whether his concern in the mess
young Ware had made of his first few months of college, ought to end
there, with a bland “good-night,” or whether he ought to see the thing
out, in--say, the manner in which he would engineer the calamity, had
Billy happened to be his young brother. A senior feels toward a
freshman, older than he will ever feel toward anything again--older,
probably, than he will feel even when called on to give advice to his
own offspring. Haydock realised so well what was going to happen to
Billy--Billy, whose progress in college from the first, had been the
progress of a flimsy butterfly in a stiff breeze. He knew to an inch the
quantity of perfectly necessary but distressing red tape that would have
to be measured before Mrs. Ware and the college Office could come to
anything like a common understanding. And even then Mrs. Ware wouldn’t
understand much of anything. It always seemed to Haydock that men and
women in becoming parents somehow or other managed to forfeit a great
deal of intelligence. He intended some day to ask a psychologist with
children, if this was a provision or a perversion of nature. Mrs. Ware
was the sort of woman who would take an hour and a half to inform the
Dean that William was a “good boy at heart,”--that his cheerfulness had
always been “a ray of sunshine” in her life; the Dean, all the while,
knowing that the twenty-five young men he had summoned to appear before
him that morning, were waiting apprehensively in the outer office to
“have it over with.” Since there was no question in Haydock’s mind just
then of how to keep Billy in college, he asked himself if it wouldn’t be
less painful to every one concerned to get him out with decency and
despatch.
“It’s late,” repeated Dilly, listlessly.
“Yes, that’s the trouble,” said Haydock, turning away from the window.
He said it kindly, regretfully, but with a seriousness that rather
alarmed Dilford, and could not be ignored by Billy. “It’s too late.
There’s no use in being tiresome and melo-dramatic about the thing, but
that’s the simple fact; you’ve come to the end of your string, and
you’ve got to let go before they slap your hands and take it away from
you. If you don’t know what it means,--probation, and cutting two exams,
and flunking a third--”
“John told you that,” broke in Billy, angrily.
“And flunking again to-morrow, I’m sorry.” He was sorry, very, very
sorry. “Because it prolongs the agony for everybody, your mother in
particular.”
Dilford was sidling about the room, nearing the door by furtive stages.
When Haydock glanced up, he was no longer there.
“I’m the last person in the world to advise running away as long as
there’s any music to face. But there isn’t any more for you just now.
The thing is played out, and you simply have to leave.” Haydock himself
didn’t quite know what he meant by this tuneful figure of speech; but he
thought it sounded rather well, and would impress Billy. “You know
yourself that a smash of some kind is coming--you’ve known it for
weeks.” The senior didn’t attempt to understand the mind in which a keen
knowledge of approaching, but easily averted doom ran in a never
converging parallel with an insatiable lust for the present. He merely
knew that such minds could be, and that Billy’s, if left unmolested, was
one of them. He undertook now to lead these lines to a point. He didn’t
say very much, and his remarks weren’t in the least spiritual; as a
matter of fact they were decidedly worldly. He didn’t remind Billy that
his wickedness might eventually keep him out of the kingdom of Heaven,
but told him,--which is of far more importance to a Harvard
freshman--that if he went on making an ass of himself he would ruin his
chances for the “Dickey.” Haydock played some variations on this
seemingly simple theme, threw in a few merciless truths he had learned
from John, an original reflection or two, and an unanswerable prediction
of a general and depressing character.
“You must get out and go home, and think about it,” he ended.
Billy had probably already begun to act on the last of these
suggestions, for in a minute or two he stuffed his head into the
sofa-cushions and began to cry. Haydock returned to his Milton, and
learned several pages to an accompaniment of smothered sobs, until Billy
at length became quiet.
“Now we’ll go down and have a cool swim in the tank,” said Haydock,
rousing him gently. They undressed in silence. Billy was pathetic and
absurd in a long blanket wrapper, his face still wet with tears,
pattering after Haydock through the halls to the bath.
“Maybe you had better see your ‘adviser,’” Haydock suggested, when they
were back again in his room. Billy hadn’t spoken in the interval.
“I can’t--he hates me!” gulped Billy, turning away. Ordinarily he would
have said that the man was “_affreux_.”
He went to bed and cried some more on the cool pillows. Haydock wrote
out a respectful form of resignation from the college for him to copy in
the morning, composed a letter to Mrs. Ware, tenderly adapted in all
respects to that lady’s intellectual needs, and returned, when the fog
at his windows was white with the morning, to Paradise Lost.
A DEAD ISSUE
Marcus Thorn, instructor in Harvard University, was thirty-two years old
on the twentieth of June. He looked thirty-five, and felt about a
hundred. When he got out of bed on his birthday morning, and pattered
into the vestibule for his mail, the date at the top of the Crimson
recalled the first of these unpleasant truths to him. His mirror--it was
one of those detestable folding mirrors in three sections--enabled him
to examine his bald spot with pitiless ease, reproduced his profile some
forty-five times in quick succession, and made it possible for him to
see all the way round himself several times at once. It was this
devilish invention that revealed fact number two to Mr. Thorn, while he
was brushing his hair and tying his necktie. One plus two equalled
three, as usual, and Thorn felt old and unhappy. But he didn’t linger
over his dressing to philosophise on the evanescence of youth; he
didn’t even murmur,--
“Alas for hourly change! Alas for all
The loves that from his hand proud youth lets fall,
Even as the beads of a told rosary.”
He could do that sort of thing very well; he had been doing it
steadily for five months. But this morning, the reality of the
situation--impressed upon him by the date of his birth--led him to adopt
more practical measures. What he actually did, was to disarrange his
hair a little on top,--fluff it up to make it look more,--and press it
down toward his temples to remove the appearance of having too much
complexion for the size of his head. Then he went out to breakfast.
Thorn’s birthday had fallen, ironically, on one of those rainwashed,
blue-and-gold days when “all nature rejoices.” The whitest of clouds
were drifting across the bluest of skies when the instructor walked out
into the Yard; the elms rustled gently in the delicate June haze, and
the robins hopped across the yellow paths, freshly sanded, and screamed
in the sparkling grass. All nature rejoiced, and in so doing got very
much on Thorn’s nerves. When he reached his club, he was a most
excellent person not to breakfast with.
It was early--half-past eight--and no one except Prescott, a sophomore,
and Wynne, a junior, had dropped in as yet. Wynne, with his spectacles
on, was sitting in the chair he always sat in at that hour, reading the
morning paper. Thorn knew that he would read it through from beginning
to end, carefully put his spectacles back in their case, and then go to
the piano and play the “Blue Danube.” By that time his eggs and coffee
would be served. Wynne did this every morning, and the instructor, who
at the beginning of the year had regarded the boy’s methodical habits at
the club as “quaint,”--suggestive, somehow, of the first chapter of
“Pendennis,”--felt this morning that the “Blue Danube” before breakfast
would be in the nature of a last straw. Prescott, looking as fresh and
clean as the morning, was laughing over an illustrated funny paper. He
merely nodded to Thorn, although the instructor hadn’t breakfasted there
for many months, and called him across to enjoy something. Thorn
glanced at the paper and smiled feebly.
“I don’t see how you can do it at this hour,” he said; “I would as soon
drink flat champagne.” Prescott understood but vaguely what the man was
talking about, yet he didn’t appear disturbed or anxious for
enlightenment.
“I’ll have my breakfast on the piazza,” Thorn said to the steward who
answered his ring. Then he walked nervously out of the room.
From the piazza he could look over a tangled barrier of lilac bushes and
trellised grapevines into an old-fashioned garden. A slim lady in a
white dress and a broad brimmed hat that hid her face was cutting
nasturtiums and humming placidly to herself. Thorn thought she was a
young girl, until she turned and revealed the fact that she was not a
young girl--that she was about his own age. This seemed to annoy him in
much the same way that the robins and Wynne and the funny paper had, for
he threw himself into a low steamer-chair where he wouldn’t have to look
at the woman, and gave himself up to a sort of luxurious melancholy.
In October, nine months before, Thorn had appeared one evening in the
doorway of the club dining-room after a more or less continuous absence
of eight years from Cambridge. It was the night before college opened,
and the dining-room was crowded. For an instant there was an uproar of
confused greetings; then Haydock and Ellis and Sears Wolcott and
Wynne--the only ones Thorn knew--pushed back from the table and went
forward to shake hands with him. Of the nine or ten boys still left at
the table by this proceeding, those whose backs were turned to the new
arrival stopped eating and waited without looking around, to be
introduced to the owner of the unfamiliar voice. Their companions
opposite paused too; some of them laid their napkins on the table. They,
however, could glance up and see that the newcomer was a dark man of
thirty years or more. They supposed, correctly, that he was an “old
graduate” and a member of the club.
“You don’t know any of these people, do you?” said Haydock, taking him
by the arm; “what a devil of a time you’ve been away from this place.”
“I know that that’s a Prescott,” laughed the graduate. In his quick
survey of the table, while the others had been welcoming him back, his
eyes had rested a moment on a big fellow with light hair. Everybody
laughed, because it really was a Prescott and all Prescotts were simply
more or less happy replicas of all other Prescotts. “I know your
brothers,” said the graduate, shaking hands with the boy, who had risen.
“It’s Mr. Thorn.” Haydock made this announcement loud enough to be heard
by the crowd. He introduced every one, prefixing “Mr.” to the names of
the first few, but changing to given and even nicknames before
completing the circuit of the table. The humour of some of these
last,--“Dink,” “Pink,” and “Mary,” for instance,--lost sight of in long
established usage, suggested itself anew; and the fellows laughed again
as they made a place for Thorn at the crowded table.
“It’s six years, isn’t it?” Haydock asked politely. The others had begun
to babble cheerfully again of their own affairs.
“Six! I wish it were; it’s eight,” answered Thorn. “Eight since I left
college. But of course I’ve been here two or three times since,--just
long enough to make me unhappy at having to go back to Europe again.”
“And now you’re a great, haughty Ph. D. person, an ‘Officer of
Instruction and Government,’ announced in the prospectus to teach in two
courses,” mused Ellis, admiringly. “How do you like the idea?”
“It’s very good to be back,” said Thorn. He looked about the familiar
room with a contented smile, while the steward bustled in and out to
supply him with the apparatus of dining.
It was, indeed, good to be back. The satisfaction deepened and broadened
with every moment. It was good to be again in the town, the house, the
room that, during his life abroad, he had grown to look upon more as
“home” than any place in the world; good to come back and find that the
place had changed so little; good, for instance, when he ordered a
bottle of beer, to have it brought to him in his own mug, with his name
and class cut in the pewter,--just as if he had never been away at all.
This was but one of innumerable little things that made Thorn feel that
at last he was where he belonged; that he had stepped into his old
background; that it still fitted. The fellows, of course, were recent
acquisitions--all of them. Even his four acquaintances had entered
college long since his own time. But the crowd, except that it seemed to
him a gathering decidedly younger than his contemporaries had been at
the same age, was in no way strange to him. There were the same general
types of young men up and down the table, and at both ends, that he had
known in his day. They were discussing the same topics, in the same
tones and inflections, that had made the dinner-table lively in the
eighties,--which was not surprising when he considered that certain
families belong to certain clubs at Harvard almost as a matter of
course, and that some of the boys at the table were the brothers and
cousins of his own classmates. He realised, with a glow of sentiment,
that he had returned to his own people after years of absence in foreign
lands; a performance whose emotional value was not decreased for Thorn
by the conviction, just then, that his own people were better bred, and
better looking, and better dressed than any he had met elsewhere. As he
looked about at his civilised surroundings, and took in, from the
general chatter, fragments of talk,--breezy and cosmopolitan with
incidents of the vacation just ended,--he considered his gratification
worth the time he had been spending among the fuzzy young gentlemen of a
German university.
Thorn, like many another college antiquity, might have been the occasion
of a mutual feeling of constraint had he descended upon this
undergraduate meal in the indefinite capacity of “an old graduate.” The
ease with which he filled his place at the table, and the effortless
civility that acknowledged his presence there, were largely due to his
never having allowed his interest in the life of the club to wane during
his years away from it. He knew the sort of men the place had gone in
for, and, in many instances, their names as well. Some of his own
classmates--glad, no doubt, of so congenial an item for their
occasional European letters--had never failed to write him, in diverting
detail, of the great Christmas and spring dinners. And they, in turn,
had often read extracts from Thorn’s letters to them, when called on to
speak at these festivities. More than once the graduate had sent, from
the other side of the world, some doggerel verses, a sketch to be used
as a dinner-card, or a trifling addition to the club’s library or
dining-room. Haydock and Ellis and Wolcott and Wynne he had met at
various times abroad. He had made a point of hunting them up and getting
to know them, with the result that his interest had succeeded in
preserving his identity; he was not unknown to the youngest member of
the club. If they didn’t actually know him, they at least knew of him.
Even this crust is sweet to the returned graduate whose age is just far
enough removed from either end of life’s measure to make it
intrinsically unimportant.
“What courses do you give?” It was the big Prescott, sitting opposite,
who asked this. The effort involved a change of colour.
“You’d better look out, or you’ll have Pink in your class the first
thing you know,” some one called, in a voice of warning, from the other
end of the table.
“Yes; he’s on the lookout for snaps,” said some one else.
“Then he’d better stay away from my lectures,” answered Thorn, smiling
across at Prescott, who blushed some more at this sudden convergence of
attention on himself. “They say that new instructors always mark
hard--just to show off.”
“I had you on my list before I knew who you were,” announced another. “I
thought the course looked interesting; you’ll have to let me through.”
“Swipe! swipe!” came in a chorus from around the table. This bantering
attitude toward his official position pleased Thorn, perhaps, more than
anything else. It flattered and reassured him as to the impression his
personality made on younger--much younger--men. He almost saw in himself
the solution of the perennial problem of “How to bring about a closer
sympathy between instructor and student.”
After dinner Haydock and Ellis took him from room to room, and showed
him the new table, the new rugs, the new books, _ex dono_ this, that,
and the other member. In the library he came across one of his own
sketches, prettily framed. Some of his verses had been carefully pasted
into the club scrap-book. Ellis and Haydock turned to his class
photograph in the album, and laughed. It was not until long afterwards
that he wondered if they had done so because the picture had not yet
begun to lose its hair. When they had seen everything from the kitchen
to the attic, they went back to the big room where the fellows were
drinking their coffee and smoking. Others had come in in the interval;
they were condoling gaily with those already arrived, on the hard luck
of having to be in Cambridge once more. Thorn stood with his back to the
fireplace, and observed them.
It was anything but a representative collection of college men. There
were athletes, it was true,--Prescott was one,--and men who helped edit
the college papers, and men who stood high in their studies, and others
who didn’t stand anywhere, talking and chaffing in that room. But it was
characteristic of the life of the college that these varied
distinctions had in no way served to bring the fellows together there.
That Ellis would, without doubt, graduate with a _magna_, perhaps a
_summa cum laude_, was a matter of interest to no one but Ellis. That
Prescott had played admirable foot-ball on Soldiers’ Field the year
before, and would shortly do it again, made Prescott indispensable to
the Eleven, perhaps, but it didn’t in the least enhance his value to the
club. In fact, it kept him away so much, and sent him to bed so early,
that his skill at the game was, at times, almost deplored. That Haydock
once in a while contributed verses of more than ordinary merit to the
“Monthly” and “Advocate” had nearly kept him out of the club altogether.
It was the one thing against him,--he had to live it down. On the whole,
the club, like all of the five small clubs at Harvard whose influence is
the most powerful, the farthest reaching influence in the undergraduate
life of the place, rather prided itself in not being a reward for either
the meritorious or the energetic. It was composed of young men drawn
from the same station in life, the similarity of whose past
associations and experience, in addition to whatever natural attractions
they possessed, rendered them mutually agreeable. The system was
scarcely broadening, but it was very delightful. And as the graduate
stood there watching the fellows--brown and exuberant after the long
vacation--come and go, discussing, comparing, or simply fooling, but
always frankly absorbed in themselves and one another, he could not help
thinking that however much such institutions had helped to enfeeble the
class spirit of days gone by, they had a rather exquisite, if less
diffusive spirit of their own. He liked the liveliness of the place, the
broad, simple terms of intimacy on which every one seemed to be with
every one else, the freedom of speech and action. Not that he had any
desire to bombard people with sofa-cushions, as Sears Wolcott happened
to be doing at that instant, or even to lie on his back in the middle of
the centre-table with his head under the lamp, and read the
“Transcript,” as some one else had done most of the evening; but he
enjoyed the environment that made such things possible and
unobjectionable.
“I must make a point of coming here a great deal,” reflected Thorn.
The next day college opened. More men enrolled in Thorn’s class that
afternoon than he thought would be attracted by the subject he was
announced to lecture in on that day of the week. Among all the students
who straggled, during the hour, into the bare recitation-room at the top
of Sever, the only ones whose individualities were distinct enough to
impress themselves on Thorn’s unpractised memory, were a negro, a
stained ivory statuette of a creature from Japan, a middle-aged
gentleman with a misplaced trust in the efficacy of a flowing sandy
beard for concealing an absence of collar and necktie, Prescott, and
Haydock. Prescott surprised him. There was a crowd around the desk when
he appeared, and Thorn didn’t get a chance to speak to him; but he was
pleased to have the boy enrol in his course,--more pleased somehow than
if there had been any known intellectual reason for his having done such
a thing; more pleased, for instance, than he was when Haydock strolled
in a moment or two later, although he knew that the senior would get
from his teachings whatever there was in them. Haydock was the last to
arrive before the hour ended. Thorn gathered up his pack of enrolment
cards, and the two left the noisy building together.
“Prescott enrolled just a minute or two before you did,” said Thorn, as
they walked across the Yard. He was a vain man in a quiet way.
“Yes,” answered Haydock drily, “he said your course came at a convenient
hour,” he didn’t add that, from what he knew of Prescott, complications
might, under the circumstances, be looked for.
“Shall I see you at dinner?” Thorn asked before they separated.
“Oh, are you going to eat at the club?” Haydock had wondered the night
before how much the man would frequent the place.
“Why, yes, I thought I would--for a time at least.” No other arrangement
had ever occurred to Thorn.
“That’s good--I’m glad,” said the senior; he asked himself, as he walked
away, why truthful people managed to lie so easily and so often in the
course of a day. As a matter of fact, he was vaguely sorry for what
Thorn had just told him. Haydock didn’t object to the instructor. Had
his opinion been asked, he would have said, with truth, that he liked
the man. For Thorn was intelligent, and what Haydock called “house
broken,” and the two had once spent a pleasant week together in Germany.
It was not inhospitality, but a disturbed sense of the fitness of things
that made Haydock regret Thorn’s apparent intention of becoming so
intimate with his juniors. The instructor’s place, Haydock told himself,
was with his academic colleagues, at the Colonial Club--or wherever it
was that they ate.
Thorn did dine with the undergraduates that night, and on many nights
following. It was a privilege he enjoyed for a time exceedingly. It
amused him, and, after the first few weeks of his new life in Cambridge,
he craved amusement. For in spite of the work he did for the
college--the preparing and delivering of lectures, the reading and
marking of various written tasks, and the enlightening, during
consultation hours, of long haired, long winded seekers after truth,
whose cold, insistent passion for the literal almost crazed him--he was
often profoundly bored. He had not been away from Cambridge long enough
to outlive the conviction, acquired in his Freshman year, that the
residents of that suburb would prove unexhilarating if in a moment of
inadvertence he should ever chance to meet any of them. But he had been
too long an exile to retain a very satisfactory grasp on contemporary
Boston. Of course he hunted up some of his classmates he had known well.
Most of them were men of affairs in a way that was as yet small enough
to make them seem to Thorn aggressively full of purpose. They were all
glad to see him. Some of them asked him to luncheon in town at hours
that proved inconvenient to one living in Cambridge; some of them had
wives, and asked him to call on them. He did so, and found them to be
nice women. But this he had suspected before. Two of his classmates were
rich beyond the dreams of industry. They toiled not, and might have been
diverting if they hadn’t--both of them--happened to be unspeakably dull
men. For one reason or another, he found it impossible to see his
friends often enough to get into any but a very lame sort of step with
their lives. Thorn’s occasional meetings with them left him melancholy,
sceptical as to the depth of their natures and his own, cynical as to
the worth of college friendships--friendships that had depended, for
their warmth, so entirely on propinquity--on the occasion. His most
absorbing topics of conversation with the men he had once known--his
closest ties--were after all issues very trivial and very dead. Dinner
with a classmate he grew to look on as either suicide, or a post mortem.
It was the club with its fifteen or twenty undergraduate members that
went far at first toward satisfying his idle moments. Dead issues, other
than the personal traditions that added colour and atmosphere to the
every day life of the place, were given no welcome there. The thrill of
the fleeting present was enough. The life Thorn saw there was, as far as
he could tell, more than complete with the healthy joy of eating and
drinking, of going to the play, of getting hot and dirty and tired over
athletics, and cool and clean and hungry again afterwards. The
instructor was entranced by its innocence--its unconscious contentment.
It was so unlike his own life of recent years, he told himself; it was
so “physical.” He liked to stop at the club late in the winter
afternoons, after a brisk walk on Brattle Street. There was always a
crowd around the fire at that hour, and no room that he could remember
had ever seemed so full of warmth and sympathy as the big room where the
fellows sat, at five o’clock on a winter’s day, with the curtains drawn
and the light of the fire flickering up the dark walls and across the
ceiling. He often dropped in at midnight, or even later. The place was
rarely quite deserted. Returned “theatre bees” came there to scramble
eggs and drink beer, instead of tarrying with the mob at the Victoria or
the Adams House. In the chill of the small hours, a herdic load of boys
from some dance in town would often stream in to gossip and get warm, or
to give the driver a drink after the long cold drive across the bridge.
And Thorn, who had not been disposed to gather up and cling to the
dropped threads of his old interests, who was not wedded to his work,
who was not sufficient unto himself, enjoyed it all thoroughly,
unreservedly--for a time.
For a time only. For as the winter wore on, the inevitable happened--or
rather the expected didn’t happen, which is pretty much the same thing
after all. Thorn, observant, analytical, and--where he himself was not
concerned--clever, grew to know the fellows better than they knew
themselves. Before he had lived among them three months, he had
appreciated their respective temperaments, he had taken the measure of
their ambitions and limitations, he had catalogued their likes and
dislikes, he had pigeon-holed their weaknesses and illuminated their
virtues. Day after day, night after night, consciously and
unconsciously, he had observed them in what was probably the frankest,
simplest intercourse of their lives. And he knew them.
But they didn’t know him. Nor did it ever occur to them that they wanted
to or could. They were not seeking the maturer companionship Thorn had
to give; they were not seeking much of anything. They took life as they
found it near at hand, and Thorn was far, very far away. For them, the
niche he occupied could have been filled by any gentleman of thirty-two
with a kind interest in them and an affection for the club. To him, they
were everything that made the world, as he knew it just then,
interesting and beautiful. Youth, energy, cleanliness were the trinity
Thorn worshipped. And they were young, strong, and undefiled. Yet, after
the first pleasure at being back had left him, Thorn was not a happy
man, although he had not then begun to tell himself so.
The seemingly unimportant question presented by his own name began to
worry him a little as the weeks passed into months. First names and the
absurd sounds men had answered to from babyhood were naturally in common
use at the club. Thorn dropped into the way of them easily, as a matter
of course. Not to have done so would, in time, have become impossible.
The fellows would have thought it strange--formal. Yet the name of
“Marcus” was rarely heard there. Haydock, once in a while, called him
that, after due premeditation. Sears Wolcott occasionally used it by way
of a joke--as if he were taking an impertinent liberty, and rather
enjoyed doing it. But none of the other men ever did. On no occasion had
any one said “Marcus” absent-mindedly, and then looked embarrassed, as
Thorn had hoped might happen. It hurt him a little always to be called
“Thorn;” to be appealed to in the capacity of “Mr. Thorn,” as he
sometimes was by the younger members, positively annoyed him. Prescott
was the most incorrigible in this respect. He had come from one of those
fitting schools where all speech between master and pupil is carried on
to a monotonous chant of “Yes, sir,” “No, sir,” and “I think so, sir.”
He had ideas, or rather habits,--for Prescott’s ideas were few,--of
deference to those whose mission it was to assist in his education that
Thorn found almost impossible to displace. For a long time--until the
graduate laughed and asked him not to--he prefixed the distasteful “Mr.”
to Thorn’s name. Then, for as long again, he refrained markedly from
calling him anything. One afternoon he came into the club where the
instructor was alone, writing a letter, and after fussing for a time
among the magazines on the table, he managed to say,--
“Thorn, do you know whether Sears has been here since luncheon?”
Thorn didn’t know and he didn’t care, but had Prescott handed him an
appointment to an assistant professor’s chair, instead of having robbed
him a little of what dignity he possessed, he would not have been so
elated by half. Prescott continued to call him “Thorn” after that, but
always with apparent effort,--as if aware that in doing it he was not
living quite up to his principles. This trouble with his name might have
served Thorn as an indication of what his position actually was in the
tiny world he longed so much to be part of once more. But he was not a
clever man where he himself was concerned.
Little things hurt him constantly without opening his eyes. For
instance, it rarely occurred to the fellows that the instructor might
care to join them in any of their hastily planned expeditions to town
after dinner. Not that he was ostracised; he was simply overlooked. When
he did go to the theatre, he bought the tickets himself, and asked
Prescott or Sears, or some of them, to go with him. The occasion
invariably lacked the charm of spontaneity. When he invited any of them
to dine with him in town, as he often did, they went, if they hadn’t
anything else to do, and seemed to enjoy their dinner. But to Thorn
these feasts were a series of disappointments. He always got up from the
table with a sense of having failed in something. What? He didn’t
know--he couldn’t have told. He was like a man who shoots carefully at
nothing, and then feels badly because he hits it. He persisted in
loitering along sunny lanes, and growing melancholy because they led
nowhere. It was Sears Wolcott who took even the zest of anticipation out
of Thorn’s little dinners in town, by saying to the graduate one
evening,--
“What’s the point of going to the Victoria for dinner? It’s less
trouble, and a damned sight livelier, to eat out here.” Sears had what
Haydock called, “that disagreeable habit of hitting promiscuously from
the shoulder.” The reaction on Thorn of all this was at last a dawning
suspicion of his own unimportance. By the time the midyear examinations
came, he felt somehow as if he were “losing ground;” he hadn’t reached
the point yet of realising that he never had had any. He used to throw
down his work in a fit of depression and consult his three-sided mirror
apprehensively.
The big Prescott, however, became the real problem, around which the
others were as mere corollaries. It was he who managed, in his “artless
Japanese way,” as the fellows used to call it, to crystallise the
situation, to bring it to a pass where Thorn’s rather unmanly
sentimentality found itself confronted by something more definite and
disturbing than merely the vanishing point of youth. Prescott
accomplished this very simply, by doing the poorest kind of work--no
work at all, in fact--in the course he was taking from Thorn. Barely,
and by the grace of the instructor, had he scraped through the first
examination in November. Since then he had rested calmly, like a great
monolith, on his laurels. He went to Thorn’s lectures only after
intervals of absence that made his going at all a farce. He ignored the
written work of the course, and the reports on outside reading, with
magnificent completeness. Altogether, he behaved as he wouldn’t have
behaved had he ever for a moment considered Thorn in any light other
than that of an instructor, an officer of the college, a creature to
whom deference--servility, almost--was due when he was compelled to talk
to him, but to whom all obligation ended there. His attitude was not an
unusual one among college “men” who have not outgrown the school idea,
but the attendant circumstances were. For Thorn’s concern over
Prescott’s indifference to the course was aroused by a strong personal
attachment, one in which an ordinary professorial interest had nothing
to do. He smarted at his failure to attract the boy sufficiently to draw
him to his lectures; yet he looked with a sort of panic toward the
approaching day when he should be obliged, in all conscience, to flunk
him in the midyear examination. He admired Prescott, as little,
intelligent men sometimes do admire big, stupid ones. He idealised him,
and even went the length, one afternoon when taking a walk with Haydock,
of telling the senior that under Prescott’s restful, olympic exterior he
thought there lurked a soul. To which Haydock had answered with
asperity, “Well, I hope so, I’m sure,” and let the subject drop. Later
in the walk, Haydock announced, irrelevantly, and with a good deal of
vigour, that if he ever made or inherited millions, he would establish a
chair in the university, call it the “Haydock Professorship of Common
Sense,” and respectfully suggest to the President and Faculty that the
course be made compulsory.
Thorn would have spoken to the soulful Prescott,--told him gently that
he didn’t seem to be quite in sympathy with the work of the course,--if
Prescott had condescended to go to his lectures in the six or seven
weeks between the end of the Christmas recess and the examination
period. But Prescott cut Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, at half-past
two o’clock, with a regularity that, considered as regularity, was
admirable. Toward the last, he did drop in every now and then, sit near
the door, and slip out again before the hour was ended. This was just
after he had been summoned by the Recorder to the Office for “cutting.”
Thorn never got a chance to speak to him. He might have approached the
boy at the club; but the instructor shrank from taking advantage of his
connection with that place to make a delicate official duty possible. He
had all along avoided “shop” there so elaborately,--had made so light of
it when the subject had come up,--that he couldn’t bring himself at that
late day to arise, viper like, from the hearthstone and smite. A note of
warning would have had to be light, facetious, and consequently without
value, in order not to prove a very false and uncalled for note indeed.
The ready coöperation of the Dean, Thorn refrained from calling on; he
was far from wishing to get Prescott into difficulties.
By the time the examination day arrived, the instructor was in a state
of turmoil that in ordinary circumstances would have been excessive and
absurd. In the case of Thorn, it was half pathetic, half contemptible.
He knew that in spite of Prescott’s soul (a superabundance of soul is,
as a matter of fact, a positive hindrance in passing examinations), the
boy would do wretchedly. To give him an E--the lowest possible mark,
always excepting, of course, the jocose and sarcastic F--would be to
bring upon himself Prescott’s everlasting anger and “despision.” Of this
Thorn was sure. Furthermore, the mark would not tend to make the
instructor wildly popular at the club; for although everybody was
willing to concede that Prescott was not a person of brilliant mental
attainments, he was very much beloved. One hears a good deal about the
“rough justice of boys.” Thorn knew that such a thing existed, and did
not doubt but that, in theory, he would be upheld by the members of the
club if he gave Prescott an E, and brought the heavy hand of the Office
down on him. But the justice of boys, he reflected, was, after all,
rough; it would acknowledge his right to flunk Prescott, perhaps, and,
without doubt, hate him cordially for doing it. Thorn’s aversion to
being hated was almost morbid.
If, on the other hand, he let the boy through,--gave him, say, the
undeserved and highly respectable mark of C,--well, that would be
tampering dishonestly with the standards of the college, gross injustice
to the rest of the students, injurious to the self-respect of the
instructor, and a great many other objectionable things, too numerous to
mention. Altogether, Thorn was in a “state of mind.” He began to
understand something of the fine line that separates instructor from
instructed, on whose other side neither may trespass.
When at length the morning of the examination had come and gone, and
Thorn was in his own room at his desk with the neat bundle of
blue-covered books before him, in which the examinations are written, it
was easy enough to make up his mind. He knew that the question of
flunking or passing Prescott admitted of no arguments whatever. The
boy’s work in the course failed to present the tiniest loophole in the
way of “extenuating circumstances,” and Prescott had capped the climax
of his past record that morning by staying in the examination-room just
an hour and a quarter of the three hours he was supposed to be there.
That alone was equivalent to failure in a man of Prescott’s denseness.
Not to give Prescott a simple and unadorned E would be holding the
pettiest of personal interests higher than one’s duty to the college.
There was no other way of looking at it. And Thorn, whose mind was
perfectly clear on this point, deliberately extricated Prescott’s book
from the blue pile on his desk, dropped it carelessly--without opening
it--into the glowing coals of his fireplace, and entered the boy’s
midyear mark in the records as C.
No lectures are given in the college during the midyears. Men who are
fortunate enough to finish their examinations early in the period can
run away to New York, to the country, to Old Point Comfort, to almost
anywhere that isn’t Cambridge, and recuperate. Haydock went South. Ellis
and Wynne tried a walking trip in the Berkshire Hills, and, after two
days’ floundering in the mud, waded to the nearest train for a city.
Boston men went to Boston--except Sears Wolcott and Prescott, who
disappeared to some wild and inaccessible New England hamlet to
snow-shoe or spear fish or shoot rabbits; no one could with authority
say which, as the two had veiled their preparations in mystery. So it
happened that Thorn didn’t see Prescott for more than a week after he
had marked his book. In the mean time he had become used to the idea of
having done it according to a somewhat unconventional system--to put it
charitably. He passed much of the time in which the fellows were away,
alone; for the few who went to the club, went there with note-books
under their arms and preoccupied expressions in their eyes. They kept a
sharp look-out for unexpected manœuvres on the part of the clock, and
had a general air of having to be in some place else very soon. Thorn,
thrown on his own resources, had a mild experience of what Cambridge can
be without a crowd to play with, and came to the conclusion that, for
his own interest and pleasure in life, he had done wisely in not
incurring Prescott’s ill-will and startling the club in the new rôle of
hard-hearted, uncompromising pedagogue. The insignificant part he played
in the lives of the undergraduates was far from satisfying; but it was
the sort of half a loaf one doesn’t willingly throw away. By the time
Prescott came back, Thorn had so wholly accepted his own view of the
case that he was totally unprepared for the way in which the boy took
the news of his mark. He met Prescott in the Yard the morning college
opened again, and stopped to speak to him. He wouldn’t have referred to
the examination--it was enough to know that the little crisis had
passed--had not Prescott, blushing uneasily, and looking over Thorn’s
shoulder at something across the Yard, said,--
“I don’t suppose you were very much surprised at the way I did in the
exam, were you?”
“It might have been better,” answered Thorn, seriously. “I hope you will
do better the second half year. But then, it might have been worse; your
mark was C.”
Prescott looked at him, a quizzical, startled look; and then realising
that Thorn was serious, that there had been nothing of the sarcastic in
his tone or manner, he laughed rudely in the instructor’s face.
“I beg your pardon,” he said, as politely as he could, with his eyes
still full of wonder and laughter; “I had no idea I did so well.” He
turned abruptly and walked away. Thorn would have felt offended, if he
hadn’t all at once been exceedingly scared. Prescott’s manner was
extraordinary for one who, as a rule, took everything as it came,
calmly, unquestioningly. His face and his laugh had expressed anything
but ordinary satisfaction at not having failed. There was something
behind that unwonted astonishment, something more than mere surprise at
having received what was, after all, a mediocre mark. Thorn had mixed
enough with human kind to be aware that no man living is ever very much
surprised in his heart of hearts to have his humble efforts in any
direction given grade C. Men like Prescott, who know but little of the
subjects they are examined in, usually try to compose vague answers that
may, like the oracles, be interpreted according to the mood of him who
reads them. No matter how general or how few Prescott’s answers had
been--Thorn stopped suddenly in the middle of the path. The explanation
that had come to him took hold of him, and like a tightened rein drew
him up short. Prescott had written nothing. The pages of his blue book
had left the examination-room as virgin white as when they had been
brought in and placed on the desk by the proctor. There was no other
explanation possible, and the instructor tingled all over with the
horrid sensation of being an unspeakable fool. He turned quickly to go
to University Hall; he meant to have Prescott’s mark changed at once.
But Prescott, at that moment, was bounding up the steps of University,
two at a time. He was undoubtedly on his way to the Office to verify
what Thorn had just told him. Thorn walked rapidly to his entry in
Holworthy, although he had just come from there. Then, with short,
nervous steps, he turned back again, left the Yard, and hurried in
aimless haste up North Avenue. He had been an ass,--a bungling, awful
ass,--he told himself over and over again. And that was about as
coherent a meditation as Mr. Thorn was able to indulge in for some time.
Once the idea of pretending that he had made a mistake did suggest
itself for a moment; but that struck him as wild, impossible. It would
have merely resulted in forcing the Office to regard him as stupid and
careless, and, should embarrassing questions arise, he no longer had
Prescott’s book with which to clear himself. More than that, it would
give Prescott reason to believe him an underhand trickster. The boy now
knew him to be an example of brazen partiality; there was no point in
incurring even harsher criticism. Thorn tried to convince himself, as he
hurried along the straight, hideous highway, that perhaps he was
wrong,--that Prescott hadn’t handed in a perfectly blank book. If only
he could have been sure of that, he would have risked the bland
assertion that the boy had stumbled on more or less intelligent answers
to the examination questions, without perhaps knowing it himself. This,
practically, was the tone he had meant to adopt all along. But he
couldn’t be sure, and, unfortunately, the only person who could give
information as to what was or wasn’t in the book, was Prescott. But
Prescott had given information of the most direct and convincing kind.
That astounded look and impertinent laugh had as much as said:--
“Well, old swipe, what’s your little game? What do you expect to get by
giving a good mark to a man who wasn’t able to answer a single
question?” And Thorn knew it. At first he was alarmed at what he had
done. He could easily see how such a performance, if known, might stand
in the light of his reappointment to teach in the college, even if it
didn’t eject him at once. But before he returned to his room, after
walking miles, he scarcely knew where, fear had entirely given way to
shame,--an over-powering shame that actually made the man sick at his
stomach. It wasn’t as if he had committed a man’s fault in a world of
men where he would be comfortably judged and damned by a tribunal he
respected about as much as he respected himself. He had turned himself
inside out before the clear eyes of a lot of boys, whose dealings with
themselves and one another were like so many shafts of white light in an
unrefracting medium. He had let them know what a weak, characterless,
poor thing he was, by holding himself open to a bribe, showing himself
willing to exchange, for the leavings of their friendships, something he
was bound in honour to give only when earned, prostituting his
profession that they might continue to like him a little, tolerate his
presence among them. And he was one whom the college had honoured by
judging worthy to stand up before young men and teach them. It was
really very sickening.
Thorn couldn’t bring himself to go near the club for some days. He knew,
however, as well as if he had been present, what had probably happened
there in the meanwhile. Prescott had told Haydock and Wolcott, and very
likely some of the others, the story of his examination. They had
laughed at first, as if it had been a good joke in which Prescott had
come out decidedly ahead; then Haydock had said something--Thorn could
hear him saying it--that put the matter in a pitilessly true light, and
the others had agreed with him. They usually did in the end. It took all
the “nerve” Thorn had to show himself again.
But when he had summoned up enough courage to drop in at the club late
one evening, he found every one’s manner toward him pretty much as it
always had been; yet he could tell instinctively, as he sat there, who
had and who hadn’t heard Prescott’s little anecdote. Wolcott knew; he
called Thorn, “Marcus,” with unnecessary gusto, and once or twice
laughed his peculiarly irritating laugh when there was nothing, as far
as Thorn could see, to laugh at. Haydock knew; Thorn winced under the
cool speculative stare of the senior’s grey eyes. Wynne knew; although
Thorn had no more specific reason for believing so, than that the boy
seemed rather more formidably bespectacled than usual. Several of the
younger fellows also knew; Thorn knew that they knew; he couldn’t stand
it. When the front door slammed after him on his way back to his room,
he told himself that, as far as he was concerned, it had slammed for the
last time.
He was very nearly right. He would have had to be a pachyderm compared
to which the “blood sweating behemoth of Holy Writ” is a mere
satin-skinned invalid, in order to have brazened out the rest of the
year on the old basis. He couldn’t go to the club and converse on
base-ball and the “musical glasses,” knowing that the fellows with whom
he was talking were probably weighing the pros and cons of taking his
courses next year, and getting creditable marks in them, without doing a
stroke of work. He couldn’t face that “rough justice of boys” that would
sanction the fellows making use of him, and considering him a pretty
poor thing, at the same time. So he stayed away; he didn’t go near the
place through March and April and May. When his work didn’t call him
elsewhere, he stayed in his room and attempted to live the life of a
scholar,--an existence for which he was in every conceivable way
unfitted. For a time he studied hard out of books; but the most
profitable knowledge he acquired in his solitude was the great deal he
learned about himself. He tried to write. He had always thought it in
him to “write something,” if he ever should find the necessary leisure.
But the play he began amounted to no more than a harmless pretext for
discoursing in a disillusioned strain on Life and Art in the many
letters he wrote to people he had known abroad,--people, for whom, all
at once, he conceived a feeling of intimacy that no doubt surprised them
when they received his letters. His volume of essays was never actually
written, but the fact that he was hard at work on it served well as an
answer to:--
“Why the devil don’t we ever see you at the club nowadays?”
For the fellows asked him that, of course, when he met them in the Yard
or in the electric cars; and Haydock tarried once or twice after his
lecture and hoped politely that he was coming to the next club dinner.
He wasn’t at the next club dinner, however, nor the next, nor the next.
Haydock stopped reminding him of them. The club had gradually ceased to
have any but a spectacular interest for Thorn. His part at a dinner
there would be--and, since his return, always had been--that of decorous
audience in the stalls, watching a sprightly farce. The club didn’t
insist on an audience, so Thorn’s meetings with its members were few. He
saw Haydock and Prescott, in a purely official way, more than any of
them. Strangely enough, Prescott seemed to be trying to do better in
Thorn’s course. He came to the lectures as regularly as he had avoided
them before the midyears. He handed in written work of such ingenious
unintelligence that there was no question in Thorn’s mind as to the
boy’s having conscientiously evolved it unaided. The instructor liked
the spirit of Prescott’s efforts, although it was a perpetual “rubbing
in,” of the memory of his own indiscretion; it displayed a pretty
understanding of _noblesse oblige_.
The second half year was long and dreary and good for Thorn. It set him
down hard,--so hard that when he collected himself and began to look
about him once more, he knew precisely where he was--which was something
he hadn’t known until then. He was thirty-two years old; he looked
thirty-five, and he felt a hundred, to begin with. He wasn’t an
undergraduate, and he hadn’t been one for a good many years. He still
felt that he loved youth and sympathised with its every phase,--from its
mindless gambolings to its preposterous maturity. But he knew now that
it was with the love and sympathy of one who had lost it. He had
learned, too, that when it goes, it bids one a cavalier adieu, and takes
with it what one has come to regard as one’s rights,--like a saucy
house-maid departing with the spoons. He knew that he had no rights; he
had forfeited them by losing some of his hair. He wouldn’t get any of
them back again until he had lost all of it. He was the merest speck on
the horizon of the fellows whom he had, earlier in the year, tried to
know on a basis of equality,--a speck too far away, too microscopic even
to annoy them. If he had only known it all along, he told himself, how
different his year might have been. He wouldn’t have squandered the
first four months of it, for one thing, in a stupid insistence on a
relation that must of necessity be artificial--unsatisfying. He wouldn’t
have spent the last five of it in coming to his senses. He wouldn’t have
misused all of it in burning--or at least in allowing to fall into a
precarious state of unrepair--the bridges that led back to the friends
of his own age and time.
“I have learned more than I have taught, this year,” thought Thorn.
* * * * *
To-day was Thorn’s birthday. Impelled by a tender, tepid feeling of
self-pity the instructor had come once more to the club to look at it
and say good-bye before leaving Cambridge. He would have liked to
breakfast on the piazza and suffer luxuriously alone. But just at the
moment he was beginning to feel most deeply, Sears Wolcott appeared at
the open French window, and said he was “Going to eat out there in the
landscape too.” So Thorn, in spite of himself, had to revive.
“What did you think of the Pudding show last night?” began Sears. Talk
with him usually meant leading questions and their simplest answers.
“It was very amusing--very well done,” said Thorn. What was the use, he
asked himself, of drawing a cow-eyed stare from Wolcott by saying what
he really thought--that Strawberry Night at the Pudding had been
“exuberant,” “noisy,” “intensely young.”
“I saw you after it was over,” Sears went on; “why didn’t you buck up
with the old grads around the piano? You looked lonely.”
“I was lonely,” answered Thorn, truthfully this time.
“Where were your classmates? There was a big crowd out.”
“My classmates? Oh, they were there, I suppose. I haven’t seen much of
them this year.”
Wolcott’s next question was:--
“Why the devil can’t we have better strawberries at this club, I wonder?
Where’s the granulated sugar? They know I never eat this damned face
powder on anything.” He called loudly for the steward, and Thorn went on
with his breakfast in silence. After Sears had been appeased with
granulated sugar, he asked:--
“Going to be here next year?”
“I’ve been reappointed; but I think I shall live in town. Why do you
ask?”
“Oh, nothing--I was thinking I might take your courses. What mark is
Prescott going to get for the year?”
Thorn looked up to meet Wolcott’s eyes unflinchingly; but the boy was
deeply absorbed in studying the little air bubbles on the surface of
his coffee.
“I don’t know what mark he’ll get. I haven’t looked at his book yet,”
said Thorn. Sears remarked “Oh!” and laughed as he submerged the bubbles
with a spoon. It was unlike him not to have said, “You do go through the
formality of reading his books then?”
Prescott and Wynne joined them. They chattered gaily with Wolcott about
nothing out there on the piazza, and watched the slim lady on the other
side of the nodding lilac bushes cut nasturtiums. Thorn listened to
them, and looked at them, and liked them; but he couldn’t be one of
them, even for the moment. He couldn’t babble unpremeditatedly about
nothing, because he had forgotten how it was done. So, in a little
while, he got up to leave them. He had to mark some examination books
and pack his trunks and go abroad, he told them. He said good-bye to
Prescott and Wolcott and Wynne and some others who had come in while
they were at breakfast, and hoped they would have “a good summer.” They
hoped the same to him.
As he strolled back to his room with the sounds of their voices in his
ears, but with no memory of what they had been saying, he wondered if,
after all, they hadn’t from the very first bored him just a little; if
his unhappiness--his sense of failure when he talked to young
people--didn’t come from the fact that they commended themselves to his
affections rather than to his intellect. Thorn was a vain man in a quiet
way.
Prescott’s final examination book certainly didn’t commend itself to his
intellect. It was long, and conscientious, and quite incorrect from
cover to cover. The instructor left it until the last. He almost missed
his train in deciding upon its mark.
THE CLASS DAY IDYL
Of course there is no such thing as the “typical Harvard man,” although
it interests--or irritates--people who didn’t go to Harvard to believe
every now and then that they have discovered him. If a well-dressed
youth with a broad A, and an abnormal ignorance of the life practical,
appears in a Western town, the business man from whom he seeks
employment, after sounding the profoundest depths of his incapacity,
amuses the family circle at dinner by telling of the call he had from a
“typical Harvard man.” If a girl sits out a dance with a fellow who
doesn’t give her the look of a slightly bewildered cow when she slings a
little Swinburne at him, but who lets fly the tail end of a Rossetti
sonnet in return, closely followed by a gem or two purloined here and
there from Henry James, she thinks she has met another of those “typical
Harvard men.” The young American travelling abroad who displays a
decent reticence when compatriots of whom he never has heard, “put
their paws on his shoulders and lap his face,” is described in many
terms--that of “the typical Harvard man” coming last. This strange,
mythical being is all things to all men--who are not Harvard men; but it
is worthy of note that in the various aspects in which he is
apperceived, he manages to repeat certain distinguished traits that even
the enemy is bound--often secretly--to admire. No one, for instance,
marks as typical of Harvard, a man who is ill-dressed, or ill-bred; he
is usually good looking. So if the typical Harvard man, like the
sea-serpent, continues to agitate the provinces from time to time, one
is thankful that whatever his disguise may be for the moment, he is
always a distinctly presentable young person.
Beverly Beverly of the graduating class was often thought by outsiders
to be of the type to which most Harvard men belonged. He was a very well
arranged young gentleman who wore glasses. He always seemed to have
plenty of money; he lived on the ground floor of Beck Hall, and had a
servant.
He lived in Beck rather than in Claverly, because, for some reason or
other, Beck is not annually overrun by a crowd of sporty freshmen just
released from highchurch fitting-schools. Furthermore, although
surrounded in Beck by fellow-students whom he felt it possible to know,
he didn’t happen to know any of them more intimately than a polite nod
of the head would imply. So when he retired to his own room he was
spared the nocturnal visitations and talk-to-deaths of a more populous
building.
Beverly was intelligent, reserved, and “set in his ways.” He had been in
a great many places, and had met a great many people. By the end of his
senior year he preferred to spend his time in doing nothing at all,
rather than in doing something that didn’t interest him exceedingly. As
he had gone to Harvard, people said he was a typical product of that
institution. They couldn’t have said this if his father had seen fit to
send him to a business college to learn how to audit accounts, and make
an American eagle with a fist full of thunderbolts in two penstrokes.
But Beverly would have been very much the same sort of person after
all, only perhaps not as agreeable as he actually was.
Early in his college career, Beverly had identified himself with the few
fellows he cared to know. Since then, his little circle of intimate
friends had, if anything, become smaller.
When Class Day--his Class Day--began to be talked about, Beverly, as a
matter of course, was asked to spread at Beck. His decision not to
spread there--nor anywhere--was as much a matter of course. He didn’t
enjoy Class Day, he said; it was always unbearably warm; it was
impossible on that day to procure nourishment that wasn’t fluid or
semi-fluid,--punch, chicken-salad, or icecream; and the vast armies of
women, from Heaven knows where, who came early and stayed until they
were put out, managed to kill the sentiment of the day for him, he said,
even as they exterminated the grass in the College Yard.
“I sha’n’t even be in Cambridge,” Beverly declared at breakfast, the
morning before the great day.
“You really ought to have spread, you know,” said Billy Fields. “It’s
the only way we have of being nice to people in town who’ve been nice to
us.”
“You forget that Bevy considers himself perfectly square with everybody.
He went to their entertainments,” said Haydock.
“The truth of the matter is, Bevy’s afraid somebody will propose to him,
and he is too polite to refuse. Those Boston girls are so impulsive!”
suggested Wynne.
“Maybe he wouldn’t look well in a cap and gown,” added another.
“It’s foolish not to go to Class Day,” said Prescott, for whom the
universe was conveniently divided into things that were “foolish” and
things that weren’t.
“He’s afraid that if he stays, he might be bored,” chimed in Haydock,
again. “Somebody might ask him whether college men didn’t have a
‘perfectly lovely time,’ and which building Austin Hall was. Of course
he doesn’t know.”
“I don’t,” admitted Beverly, serenely.
“He’d rather sit in his own room on a dais all day, and have Michael fan
him, while three black slaves at his feet try to guess the secret of his
ennui,” continued Haydock. “Own up, Bevy--aren’t you afraid of being
bored?”
“Why, of course,” answered Beverly. “That’s my constant fear; and you
idiots sometimes make me think that it isn’t an altogether groundless
one.”
“To what do we owe the honour of your presence at breakfast this
morning?” asked Wynne, bowing low. Beverly usually breakfasted at ten.
It was then half-past eight.
“To an examination in pre-Christian Hebrew literature,--nothing else I
assure you.” Beverly didn’t look up from the morning paper he was trying
to read.
“And we’re just a little peevish at having to stay for it, instead of
getting away five days earlier--aren’t we?”
To this Beverly paid no attention whatever, but rang for the steward and
asked him to telephone to Foster to send round Lloyd the cabman at once.
It looked like rain, and Beverly’s examination that morning was over in
the Museum--at least a quarter of a mile away. Billy Fields listened to
the order, and then called out:--
“Oh, I say there, look out for Beverly Beverly; he’s horribly haughty
this morning, ha, ha!” Billy could exaggerate Beverly’s accent, and
sound startlingly like the original. He could also imitate his “Who the
devil are you?” expression and his walk. These things he proceeded to do
around the breakfast-table and out into the hall, until the front door
slammed behind him. He lingered on the street outside in order to stand
in the gutter and salute when Beverly drove away in his cab.
Beverly had watched Billy’s little performance with dispassionate
interest, and remarked before returning to his newspaper:--
“He’s really talented, in a singularly offensive way.” But the words
sounded amiable rather than otherwise, for, on the whole, Beverly liked
to be teased by the fellows. Some of them were clever at it--Billy
especially. It pleased Beverly to think it was the little penalty he
paid for being mature enough to know definitely what did and didn’t
amuse him, and to act accordingly. He was sincere in his dislike of
Class Day, and didn’t intend to go near it. He objected to having the
Yard enclosed in Christmas-trees and festooned with paper lanterns,--to
its “pretending to be a beer garden with Hamlet left out.” He considered
it undignified to throw open the University to a rabble of women, to
invite them to “kick up their heels” in Memorial Hall, and see them
described in the evening papers as “Harvard’s Fair Invaders.” During
breakfast, he enlarged on these views to a scornful audience that
finally arose in its might, tore off his necktie, ruined his coiffure,
threw him out of the club into his cab, and then retreated and locked
itself in. Even this didn’t make Beverly really angry, he was used to
differences of opinion followed by popular uprisings.
He had intended to say good-bye to Cambridge the next morning, and take
the one-o’clock train for New York. But the next morning, after
breakfasting at the Holly Tree,--there is no place else to breakfast on
Class Day except the Oak Grove, and Beverly disliked the high stools of
that place and the condescending services of the dethroned empresses
who wait on one there,--he found it was too late to catch the one
o’clock without more effort than he was able to make on so warm a day.
So, in a moment of tolerance induced perhaps by the realisation that
this was, after all, “good-bye,” he strolled over to the Yard.
The exercises in Sanders Theatre had just ended, and the “fair invaders”
were beginning to invade by the hundreds. They streamed in brilliant
procession along the walks, and swarmed over the shady lawns,--glorified
groups of summer millinery, trailing after them the pale pink odour of
sachet powder and blond hair. They took possession of the parapet of
Matthews, the chairs and benches and doorsteps in front of Hollis and
Stoughton and Holworthy, stretching the length of the Yard in a many
coloured border that resembled the horticultural orgies of the Public
Garden. Celestial companies of maidens in diaphanous drapery floated
past Beverly, in the wake of panting but determined ladies richly
upholstered.
“‘On, on to the Pudding spread,
My daughters must be--shall be fed,’”
the leaders seemed to say, as they elbowed through the crowd at the
exit. Seniors in fluttering gowns and wilted collars, with proud mothers
and satisfied fathers and eager sisters and observant aunts, seniors
with one another, and lonely, unattached seniors Beverly had never seen
before, who looked as if they didn’t quite know whether they were
enjoying themselves or not, sauntered by, mopping their foreheads. The
Yard was alive, not with the customary sprinkling of business-like young
men hastening, note-book in hand, to lectures, but with a riot of
colour, a swishing of skirts, a vague, babbling gaiety that rose in
places to an acute trebleness. And there was the smell of festivity in
the hot air,--a smell of pine branches and Chinese lanterns.
Beverly walked once around the Yard, staring severely at the various
factors of the gigantic picnic, and was passing Matthews on his way out,
when a sudden gust of wind blew a newspaper from the lap of a woman
seated on the steps of the building. He strolled after it until it
stopped flapping over the grass, picked it up, and, hat in hand,
returned it to its owner. He had no difficulty in identifying the lady,
although she was one of many resting on the steps, for she waved the
remaining sheets of the paper at him as he approached, and smiled
largely.
“I never was so embarrassed,” she declared, beaming up at him.
“There is no need to be, I assure you,” said Beverly, with a little bow.
“Oh, but I am--you know I am,” she continued archly. Beverly would have
walked on, had not the strange woman suddenly leaned forward,--still
looking up at him,--with the air of one about to impart a confidence.
The action would have made retreat at that moment rather rude, or at
least abrupt, so the senior hesitated deferentially, and returned her
look by one of inquiry.
She was a stout, middle-aged woman with short, curly, dark hair. Her
upturned face was round, red, unlined, and perspiring. She wore a
black-satin skirt, under which Beverly could see her low shoes of yellow
leather resting firmly, with their toes well turned out, on the step
below. Where black skirt and white linen shirt-waist met, a crimson
belt circumscribed her buxomness as with a band of flame. Under one of
her chins perched a crimson cravat of another shade; and a crimson
ribbon repeated the note in a tiny sailor hat that was almost upside
down with coquetry. On her lap lay a red fan of the circular kind that
appears and disappears at the pull of a silken cord. Beverly considered
her absurd.
“I just know you’re a Harvard man,” she said engagingly. “Now aren’t
you?”
“Yes, I am,” admitted Beverly.
“Oh, I’m so glad!” she clapped her hands with all the glee of a little
girl of fifty. “You can help me--you can explain everything; the
newspapers take so much for granted.” Beverly looked a trifle wild.
“Now here’s a Yard ticket,” she fumbled a moment among black-satin
intricacies, “and here’s a Tree ticket, and here’s one for Memorial
Hall. I have an invitation for Beck Hall, too,” she added, drawing out
some envelopes. “Oh, and this is my ticket to Poughkeepsie!” She
unfolded a long strip of green pasteboard. “I’m going to be at that
race; oh, I’m going to be there! You see--I’m a regular Harvard girl.”
“And what can I do for you?” asked Beverly, politely.
“I hate to trouble you,” she said, almost diffidently; “but I’m so
afraid of missing something. If you would explain the tickets to
me--tell me of the gates to which they are the key; if you would be so
good--and I know you will be. _Ah--je connais mes âmes._” Her eyelids
fluttered up, then down. She pressed the tickets into Beverly’s hand.
The senior, somewhat astonished, explained their respective uses as
rapidly as possible.
“And now the invitation to Beck Hall; you’ve forgotten that,” she said,
with a little side glance of reproach.
“Why, it’s just an invitation to a spread,--a sort of garden party. You
go there any time after the Tree exercises,” explained Beverly.
“Ah--but that’s not all,” said the lady.
“If she only wouldn’t look at me that way,” thought Beverly.
“I have a cousin,” she went on, “the dearest boy in all the world.
Look--this is he.” Beverly, with a slight feeling of apprehension,
followed her stubby finger down the first column of names engraved on
the invitation, until it stopped at “William Paxton Fields.”
“Do you know him?” she asked. Beverly wavered a moment; he felt what was
coming.
“Yes, I know Fields,” he said, restraining a panic-stricken impulse to
dart away in the crowd.
“I felt that you did--something told me. He’s a dear boy, isn’t he?”
“He’s a very good fellow,” replied Beverly.
“Ah, I like that,” she said heartily, straightening her dumpy shoulders
and expanding her chest with enthusiasm. “I love the way you great,
loyal college men stand up for each other. It’s beautiful. Now I must
find him,” she went on rapidly, with a keen sense of opportunity, “and
tell him I’m here--give myself over to him. He lives--where does he
live?” For his own sake, Beverly would have cheerfully told her that he
didn’t know, or that Billy had moved, or that he didn’t have a room at
all; but he hesitated to separate Billy from his family, when a word
might unite them, so he said:--
“He rooms in Claverly Hall; but I doubt if you can find him there now.”
“But we can try,” she exclaimed with eager optimism. “Which is
Claverly?” she looked blandly up and down the Yard.
“It isn’t here; it’s down there on Mt. Auburn Street.” Beverly indicated
the direction.
“Not on the ‘campus’? Oh, dear!” said Billy’s cousin. There was dismay
in her tone and on her broad disc of a face.
“No; but it’s very easy to find. Anybody will show you,” Beverly
answered. He thought it was an excellent moment in which to bow himself
away.
“Anybody?” she said softly, transfixing him with one of her oblique
leers. She was a terribly arch woman.
Her kinship with Fields, and the assumable respectability that went with
it, together with her abandoned trust in Harvard chivalry, didn’t make
her any less awful in Beverly’s eyes. They were merely the complement of
her already well-developed genius for imposition; they made her
impossible to evade,--a something inevitable.
“I’m sure he won’t be there now,” repeated Beverly, helplessly. “We’re
all so busy to-day; we haven’t a moment to ourselves,” he added
furtively.
“Yes, yes, I know,” assented Billy’s cousin; “but it’s my only way to
find him before evening. I can leave my card and arrange a rendezvous. I
wouldn’t interfere with his plans for the world; I have a horror of
being a burden. I’m such a perfectly independent little body!” She arose
and gave Beverly the fan with the gesture of a lady fair bestowing her
colours upon a knight who yearned. “Is it far?” she asked.
“No,” answered Beverly, shortly. “It isn’t far.”
“Then let us saunter--oh, so slowly--and drink it in.” She closed her
eyes and breathed as one overcome by the sensuous beauty of the
surroundings.
“I’m afraid I shall have to hurry,” said the senior, with unmistakable
decision. He looked at his watch ostentatiously. “I’m going away, and I
have to pack.” She ignored the suggestion.
“Which of these mellow, world-old buildings do you live in?” she asked
dreamily, stopping in the path.
“I don’t live in any of them,” said Beverly. He was extremely angry.
“Recluse,” she murmured.
It was irritating enough, Beverly thought, to be inveigled into towing
the fatuous old frump through the public streets; but the thought that
his acquaintance with the lady might not end at Claverly was maddening.
Billy wouldn’t be there, of course; and it was impossible to put an
unattached female cousin into his room and leave her. That particular
quarter of town was not, as a rule, the most decorous on Class Day.
There is always more or less, what is technically known as “trouble” in
Claverly and its vicinity on Class Day afternoon. It takes the harmless
form of young men with wisps of pink mosquito netting in their
buttonholes, to whom the world for the time being is not such a dreary
place after all; or perhaps it merely consists of innocently garbed
swimming parties running foot races down the long corridors on their way
to the tank. But at any rate Beverly hesitated to turn Billy’s cousin
adrift there. It would be difficult to explain his having done so to
Billy. He meant to abandon her somewhere and quickly, but not there.
They passed out of the crowded Yard. In his earnest desire to reach
Claverly without delay, Beverly thoughtlessly turned into Holyoke
Street. It was thronged with carriages and summery looking girls making
for a common objective point, half-way down on the left-hand side. He
didn’t realise his mistake in having chosen that particular route until
it was too late.
“How allegro life is,” remarked his companion.
“It’s very warm,” answered Beverly, increasing his pace.
“Cynic,” was the reply. Beverly stared straight ahead, but he knew the
sort of expression that had accompanied the imputation.
“They all seem to be going in there,” said Billy’s cousin, stopping on
the curbstone opposite the Pudding building. “What is it?”
“That? Oh, somebody’s spread, I suppose.” Beverly went on a step or
two; but his companion didn’t follow him. Just then a lady with two
girls bowed to him from a victoria waiting its turn across the street.
“Aren’t you coming in?” she called. Beverly went over to speak to them.
The girls were exquisite creatures; he would have given his soul at that
moment to be able to leave his burden on the sidewalk opposite and join
them. But he was “catching a train,” he explained. When he turned away,
with the feeling of one about to resume a millstone, Billy’s cousin was
where he had left her. As he approached, she lifted a forefinger to her
lips, raised her eyes mysteriously, and stood for some moments in what
she probably fancied was the attitude of a listening faun.
“Music,” she whispered.
“I shall certainly strangle this woman before we reach Claverly,”
thought Beverly.
“There is an orchestra inside,” he said.
“Oh, I could just die waltzing!” she exclaimed. She crossed the street,
undulating ecstatically to the music that came gaily through the open
doors and windows of the Pudding.
“I really must hurry,” said Beverly, very firmly.
“Just a moment,” she pleaded, resting her hand on his arm and swaying
ponderously from side to side in time to the waltz.
“Could anything have been more odious?” Beverly said to the fellows
afterwards, when trying to explain his presence in Cambridge on Class
Day. “The Pudding steps--the whole street--swarming with people on their
way to the spread; a line of carriages, a block long, full of girls I
knew,--_girls I knew_; and I, standing there, a ridiculous little red
fan in my hand--the thing popped out, and I couldn’t pull it back
again--with a moon-faced tub of a woman I’d never seen before, rigged
out in a crimson harness, hanging on to me as if she’d brought me into
the world, and doing some sort of a can-can on the sidewalk, like a
hypnotised old cobra.”
“Let’s go in,” pleaded Billy’s cousin, impulsively. Beverly drew away
from her.
“It’s simply impossible,” he said sternly. “The spread is a private
one, and I haven’t even my own ticket here; I’ve lost it.”
The note of irritation and despair in his voice was overheard by a
fellow in a cap and gown who had come up behind them just then, on his
way into the Pudding.
“That doesn’t make any difference, Beverly,” he said, touching his cap
to the lady; “you can come in with me all right.” Beverly turned in
anguish. It was Freddy Benson, who was helping to give the spread.
Billy’s cousin became strangely radiant; she darted a glance at Freddy
that impaled him. Beverly, she not only impaled, but crucified.
“I haven’t time to go in,” said Beverly abruptly. He was beginning to
look flushed and obstinate. Freddy opened his eyes in polite
astonishment; he was afraid he had intruded upon a family quarrel. The
Millstone edged half way up the Pudding steps and pouted coyly. They
stood there a moment,--Beverly, dangerous, explosive; Freddy, mystified
and uncomfortable; the Millstone, with her “lady fair” expression once
more, as if waiting expectantly for one of the stalwart males to defeat
the other in mortal combat and claim her for his own. People brushed by
them--people Beverly knew--with glances of concern.
“You might just as well come in, you know,” said Freddy, pacifically.
“You don’t understand,” answered Beverly, angrily.
“Just for a minute,--I promise,” chimed in the Millstone; “we may find
my cousin in here,” she added. That possibility hadn’t occurred to
Beverly; it was quite likely that Billy would be there at that hour. So
he set his teeth and went up the steps. Freddy passed them before the
big, white-gloved policeman at the door, and they pushed through the
crowd in the vestibule. After a parting flutter of the eyelids at
Freddy, Billy’s cousin looked up at Beverly in fond disapproval.
“Naughty, naughty,” she said.
The crush in the theatre of the Pudding was appalling on so warm an
afternoon. But Beverly surveyed it with an exultant smile. Once
separated from Billy’s cousin in that jam of people, escape would be
easy, pursuit impossible.
“Now follow me,” he commanded, dexterously wriggling away from the arm
that sought his. He meant to lead the Millstone to the corner of the
room farthest away from the exit, and there, among the palms surrounding
the orchestra, “wander” her like a cat in a strange wood.
“If you will be so good as to stand here,” he suggested, when they had
fought their way to the other end of the room, “I’ll look for Fields. It
may take me some time, there’s such a crowd.” He almost softened toward
her for an instant, he was so elated at the thought of leaving her there
forever in the exotic bushes,--like Ruth “in tears amid the alien corn.”
Then he returned her red fan, and once more became part of the crowd. He
loved the crowd now as he had hated it before; it was a friendly,
favouring, protecting crowd,--a crowd that rendered his movements
invisible, a crowd through which large, opacous bodies in black satin
could attain no velocity. Beverly made a conscientious search for Billy.
He struggled around the theatre, inspected the piazza and the tent and
the front rooms, and finally went upstairs to the library. But Billy
was chatting in none of the little alcove nooks, made cosey for the
occasion with a prodigal display of Turkish rugs, and Beverly descended
the stairs to the exit with a light heart.
The Millstone, dishevelled, apoplectic, and breathing hard, was waiting
for him at the door.
“I grew faint and sought air,” she explained. “Do you know what to do
when a lady faints?” she went on, fanning nervously.
“Oh, yes,” said Beverly, grimly; “I think I know what I should do if you
fainted.”
“You’re giving me a very happy day,” she murmured.
“It is a memorable one for me,” he answered savagely.
They went out and on toward Claverly. If every man Beverly knew in
college had arranged to meet him on Holyoke Street at that hour, Beverly
would not have had to take off his hat many more times than he did. He
bowed gravely, and had to hang on to himself to keep from calling out
as every new group of wondering faces approached:--
“This woman doesn’t belong to me; I never saw her before, and I hate
her.”
There were little knots of men talking on the piazzas of the clubs on
Mount Auburn Street when he turned the corner. Out of the tail of his
eye, he could see the agitation that seized them as he and the Millstone
came into view. Then he heard windows opening upstairs and down, and
knew, without turning around, that from every window craned a neck or
two. He held his breath, and prayed to Heaven that his companion
wouldn’t take it into her head to stop and rest, or gaze dreamily up and
down the street, or slap him with her fan. Once safely inside Claverly,
he didn’t wait to listen to her exclamations of surprise and admiration,
but left her purring to herself at the foot of the stairs and dashed up
to Billy’s room. Billy wasn’t there, but his door was unlatched and his
room strewn with garments. His cap and gown were hanging over the back
of a chair. Billy was somewhere in the building, probably in the tank,
as unsuspicious of impending catastrophe as a playful dolphin. So
Beverly hurried down the back stairs to the tank. As he opened the door,
Billy, lying on his back on the marble ledge, shot suddenly into view
like a long white projectile.
“I’ve invented a new game,” he gasped; “you make the marble all wet, and
lie on your back with your feet against the wall, and then give yourself
a push and--zip! You could go miles if there wasn’t a partition. But you
have to lift up when you get to this crack, or you’ll tear your
shoulder-blades out by the roots. Now watch me--”
“Shut up, Billy, and listen; your cousin is out here in the hall waiting
for you.” Beverly mopped his forehead.
“My cousin?” Billy struggled to his feet.
“Yes, your cousin,--a lady. Now hurry up and get dry. I’ve got to go.
She’s at the foot of the stairs. No, I’m not fooling, I swear to God I’m
not. It’s the cousin you invited to Beck.”
“Wait, wait, don’t leave me, man. It’ll take me hours to dress,” said
Billy, piteously, dabbing himself with a bath towel. “I haven’t any
cousin; I never invited one to Beck; my family is away--they’re abroad.
I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he went on. But he continued to
dry himself frantically nevertheless.
“I’m simply telling you what I know,” answered Beverly, calmly. “A
person, female, aged--say forty-five; of abundant tonnage and affable
manners, would like to meet blond gentleman named Fields about to
graduate from Harvard; object, a family reunion. Oh, never mind your
hair. Here, put on your wrapper and come on.” He helped Billy, half dry,
with his hair dripping stringily over his eyes, into a striped blanket
covering, and pushed him gently into the hall.
The Millstone, who had been sauntering up and down the corridors in
Beverly’s absence, received them as they emerged.
“Oh,” she said, and peered at them over the rim of her circular fan.
“Allow me to present your cousin,” said Beverly, gravely.
“Cousin Marguerite,” simpered the Millstone. “Can this be the little boy
I used to know?” she continued, holding out her hand. “You used to wear
knickerbockers.” Billy drew the drapery of his striped blanket more
closely about him. Shaking hands was quite out of the question. “Dear
me, how you’ve changed.”
“I’m very glad to see you,” gasped Billy. “I--I wish I had my clothes
on. If you’ll just wait with Mr. Beverly a minute--” he turned to
Beverly. “You’re not in a hurry, are you?”
“Yes, I am,” said the other, frankly. “I have to go to my room and then
catch a train.” Billy gave him the look of an offended water-spaniel.
“If I could rest somewhere until you come,” suggested Cousin Marguerite.
“Couldn’t you take her to your room, if you’re going there anyhow?”
pleaded Billy, with a tragic “I’ll-do-something-for-you-some-day”
expression. “If you’re going there anyhow,” he repeated. And once more
Beverly took up his burden and set out.
He went to Beck by back streets; and he walked as fast as he possibly
could, because it was hot and dusty--there were no sidewalks and no
shade--and he wished to give Cousin Marguerite pain. He didn’t actually
want to kill her, he told himself, and marvelled, as he did so, at his
own sweetness of disposition. But he hoped to succeed in disabling her
in some way, by the time they reached his room, “give her a headache or
break something,” so that she couldn’t go to the Tree, or to the Beck
spread, or to Memorial Hall. For he felt that otherwise she would go to
them all, and he would, for some hideous reason he couldn’t then
foresee, have to escort her. So he tore along, with Cousin Marguerite
panting hoarsely at his elbow, until her shoes became untied, and he had
to kneel in the dust at her feet. He tied them up again--with three
hard, vicious knots in each, and hurried on. Every time she placed a
restraining hand on his arm, he drew out his watch, showed it to her
silently, and then remarked, “my train.” He dragged her past Plympton
Street, around by Bow Street, up the little hill back of Quincy, across
to Beck, up the stairs two at a time and into his room, where she fell
exhausted on his divan.
“Now I am going to leave you,” he announced, triumphantly. She motioned
to him feebly with her hand, and opened her mouth as if to speak.
“You just ought to see my room at home,” she whispered, breathlessly.
“It’s a perfect bower of crimson.” But Beverly didn’t wait to hear about
it. He ran out, slamming the door behind him, and never stopped nor
looked behind until he reached the club, where he called for the
longest, coldest drink the steward could make.
“I shall never, never, see that woman again,” he said. But he did.
The club was deserted except for Lauriston, who didn’t really belong
there. Lauriston was asleep on a divan. He had a wisp of pink mosquito
netting in his button-hole, and when Beverly roused him, he was unable
to tell where every one had gone to so suddenly. He blinked a moment in
the light, as if he didn’t even know where he was himself, and then went
to sleep again. He was, as Beverly said, “unfit for publication.”
Just as Beverly became comfortably settled with a gin fizz on a small
table in front of him, and a palm-leaf fan in his hand, Billy, in cap
and gown, fluttered into the club.
“Awfully good of you to take my cousin down to your room,” he said,
nervously. He knew with what joy Beverly must have escorted her,
although he couldn’t very well allude to it.
“Don’t mention it--charming woman--charming,” murmured Beverly,
politely.
“I’m sure I don’t know who she can be,” went on Billy; “unless she was
on the list of people my mother sent me to invite. I know I never asked
her. Are you walking down that way?” he ventured, casually. Somehow or
other, Cousin Marguerite seemed to him to belong as much to Beverly as
to himself.
“Certainly not,” answered the other, with decision. “I shall sit here
until it’s time to catch the midnight train.”
“And not go to the Tree or Beck or the Yard in the evening?”
“I have spoken,” said Beverly, placidly.
“Well, then, good-bye.” Billy held out his hand, “And don’t forget
you’re coming to us on the tenth.” He looked troubled, and left
reluctantly to find his cousin.
Beverly, true to his word, sat there fanning himself, and listening to
the faint music of the band in the Yard, all the afternoon. From time to
time, men dashed in to leave or get tickets, to eat something, or to
find some one who never was there. They always said:--
“You here on Class Day, Beverly? I thought you weren’t going to stay.”
Then they would rush out into the heat again to find their families and
take them to the Tree. Occasionally fellows brought their fathers in to
see the club and rest awhile. It amused Beverly to watch the “infants”
do the honours. Prescott--six feet two--saying, “What’ll you have,
Papa?” to a nice, little, old bald-headed thing, was almost as
irresistible as Prescott père, when he patted his head with his
handkerchief and replied, apologetically:--
“The day has been so fatiguing, and we have so much more to do later on,
that I think I should like a little, a very little, rye whiskey and
water.”
Sears Wolcott, followed by an astonishingly young-looking gentleman who
might have been Sears’s older brother, if he hadn’t happened to be his
father, was characteristic when he remarked indifferently:--
“I suppose you want something to drink?”
Mr. Wolcott’s answer struck Beverly as being equally in character:--
“Yes,” he said, with a twinkle, “give me some champagne in a long glass
with ice, if you think you can afford it; I can’t.”
No one stayed long, and by six o’clock the club, except for Beverly and
the sleeping Lauriston, was again deserted. When the steward came in to
draw the curtains and turn on the lights, Lauriston awoke and asked
vaguely if it was time to go to Beck.
“I suppose so,” answered Beverly. “Everybody seems to have gone
somewhere.”
“Then I must go too,” mused Lauriston, fumbling sleepily at his
disordered necktie, and making a feeble attempt to smooth his hair.
“Oh, I wouldn’t run away and leave me,” suggested Beverly, “I’m all
alone.” He wasn’t in the least anxious for Lauriston’s society, but for
the public good he was willing to endure it. Lauriston’s nap hadn’t
proved as beneficial as it might have; the fellow was in no condition to
go to Beck and talk to people.
“Sorry, old man. Can’t stay. Got to find my mothers and sisters, and
give them ‘Morial tickets.” He searched his pockets, and drew out an
envelope. Then he arose laboriously from the divan, and, standing before
Beverly, said something that sounded like “Delookawrite.” Beverly
adjusted his glasses:--
“No, candidly, you don’t look all right,” he declared, “and if you’re
going out to hunt for your mother and sisters, I sincerely trust you
won’t find them.” Lauriston stared stupidly at the tickets in his hand.
“Got to havvem. Promised,” he muttered. Beverly gently extracted the
tickets from his fingers.
“I’ll see that they get them,” he said. He had some difficulty in
persuading Lauriston that he knew Mrs. Lauriston intimately, and would
have no trouble in finding her; for the fellow insisted that his mother
was a most reserved woman whom very few people knew intimately.
“She’s a reserved woman without a parasol,” he said by way of
identification, when he finally allowed Beverly to depart with the
tickets.
The crowd on the lawn at Beck was less objectionable to Beverly, only
because it was unhoused. He stopped at the top of the steps leading down
to the little enclosure packed with white frocks and the startling flora
and fauna of summer millinery. It wasn’t easy to recognise any one in
the soft half light of the lanterns swinging in long festoons overhead;
and it took him some time to discover Mrs. Lauriston and the girls
seated around a table very near him at the foot of the steps on which he
was standing. They had seen him the moment he appeared. The Millstone,
sitting just behind them at the next table, with two freshmen,--distant
cousins of Billy’s,--also saw him.
“So you decided not to catch the train,” said Mrs. Lauriston when
Beverly went down to her.
“It’s harder to tear one’s self away from Class Day than I thought,” he
said, feelingly, for he had just caught sight of Cousin Marguerite. But
he made Mrs. Lauriston a nice little bow as he spoke.
“That’s very pretty,” the lady smiled up at him; “but I should remember
it longer if we’d seen anything of you all day.” Beverly was about to
reply with the least inane of the two inanities that came into his mind
when one of Cousin Marguerite’s freshmen stood up and delivered a
message in a low tone.
“Tell her I’m very sorry, but I can’t,” answered Beverly, changing his
position to one that defied the laws of optics to make his eyes meet
those of the Millstone. The freshman, he noticed, passed rapidly on up
the steps and out of Beck. Beverly went on talking to Mrs. Lauriston. He
gave her the tickets, and explained her son’s failure to appear as
glibly as he could; but he was filled with horrid apprehensions,--Cousin
Marguerite’s penetrating voice rose and fell coquettishly behind him
without a pause,--and he became noticeably ill at ease. When, in a very
few minutes, he heard the Millstone call his own name with all the
sickening languor and affectation its three syllables could carry, he
ignored the summons, and felt himself growing rigid with anger. She
called him again, a trifle louder this time--and pronounced the word
“Bevaleh.”
“Some one wishes to speak to you,” said Mrs. Lauriston. Beverly didn’t
turn. “It’s the lady you were with at the Pudding; she’s sitting just
behind you, and has called you twice. Don’t let me keep you.” Beverly
turned and bowed stiffly.
“_Mauvais sujet_,” said Cousin Marguerite. Mrs. Lauriston and the girls
glanced at her involuntarily. Beverly left them abruptly and stood near
the Millstone. If she would insist on talking to him, he preferred her
playful sallies to be inaudible to the whole of Boston and its adjacent
suburbs. As she turned to tap the vacant chair on her left invitingly
with her red fan, the second freshman stole craftily away.
“Are you waiting for Billy?” asked Beverly in a tone that just escaped
being savage.
“I wasn’t waiting for Billy,” she answered. Her voice was liquid with
subtle meaning. “I sent him away,--dear Billy. I’m to meet him at
Memorial Hall in a quarter of an hour. He hesitated to leave me alone
and introduced two cousins of his--sweet boys. Then I drove him off. And
now you come; kismet, I suppose.”
“I came because you called me,” said Beverly, bluntly. “Thank you, no, I
prefer to stand; I can only stay a moment.” He couldn’t bring himself to
the point of being deliberately rude to any woman,--much less to a
cousin of Billy’s. But he was very much annoyed at this fatuous bore,
and couldn’t help showing it. His manner was decidedly icy. Whether the
Millstone realised that he was thoroughly in earnest when he declared he
couldn’t stay, or whether Class Day had really been too much for her,
Beverly couldn’t make up his mind until afterwards; at any rate Cousin
Marguerite suddenly let fall her fan, gave a little gasp, and proceeded
to faint. Beverly sprang forward to prevent the rickety chair on which
she sat from upsetting, and, this done, he looked helplessly about, as
if for suggestions. He had a hazy idea that he ought to do something to
her hands and feet, and pour water down the front of her dress; he had
once seen that done with success. But Cousin Marguerite’s feet were down
in the grass under the table somewhere; her hands too seemed rather
inaccessible,--she had fallen forward and hidden them. If he should
leave her to go for a glass of water, she would undoubtedly slide off
her chair and get walked on. In his distress, Beverly called to Mrs.
Lauriston. Mrs. Lauriston brought some apollinaris from her table, held
it to the Millstone’s lips, and dabbed it on her temples with a
handkerchief.
“Oughtn’t I--oughtn’t you to ‘loosen something’?” asked Beverly, giving
the crimson necktie a wrench. Cousin Marguerite’s eyelids fluttered with
returning life. All she needed was air, she said, looking about her in
bewilderment.
“If Mr. Beverly will kindly take me to the street--to the open--How very
stupid of me; I haven’t done it since I was a girl,” she added. So
Beverly thanked Mrs. Lauriston hastily, and left the Beck spread with
Cousin Marguerite on his arm. Outside she leaned against the great red
letter-box on the corner, gasped a little, arranged her necktie and
dried her temples. Then she passed her arm through Beverly’s again and
started for Memorial--to find Billy. Consciousness had returned, but it
had not brought to the Millstone strength enough to enable her to walk
alone. There was simply no pretext on which Beverly could leave Billy’s
cousin now. For although he was convinced that her indisposition was
what he called “a cheap bluff at dying,” he couldn’t very well act on
that assumption. He accepted the fact that he would have to stay by her,
maddening as she was, until they found Billy.
She was maddening. She insisted on going to Memorial by way of the Yard,
and loitered shamelessly on the way--she said she felt strangely
faint--to enjoy the crowd, the music, and the glow of the lanterns among
the elms. She watched the dancing at Memorial until Beverly wondered
audibly why Billy didn’t come; at which she announced blandly:--
“He said he would meet me at the steps--right near the mandolins and
banjos. I haven’t seen any, have you?”
The mandolins and banjos were, of course, on the steps of the Law
School, as Cousin Marguerite very well knew.
“I wish you had told me that sooner,” said Beverly, controlling himself.
“Billy has probably tired of waiting and gone away.”
“Oh, well--” she sighed. Ever since the two had left Beck, the Millstone
had hovered shrewdly between apoplexy and intense enjoyment of
everything she saw; she relied on the one to disarm criticism of the
other. Billy wasn’t in front of the Law School; but his cousin thought
it best to wait a few minutes longer for him, besides, the Mandolin Club
was just about to play. She closed her eyes when the music began--the
piece was a Spanish something or other through which a tambourine
shivered at intervals--and clung to Beverly’s arm.
“The Italians are so passionate,” she murmured at the end.
“Billy isn’t coming,” said Beverly.
“I’m afraid we’ve missed him,” she assented.
“And the evening is almost over; you’ve seen everything,” Beverly went
on. “It _is_ over,” he added joyously; a drop of rain had fallen on his
hand.
“Class Day is dead; the angels weep,” mused Cousin Marguerite,
sentimentally. “‘I warmed both hands before the fire of life. It
sinks--’”
“And are you ‘ready to depart’?” asked Beverly, eagerly; Cousin
Marguerite had shied at the really vital clause of the quotation.
“‘Come, chaos--I have seen the best,’” was her answer.
But Beverly didn’t consider that he had seen the best, until the bridge
car that was to bear away Cousin Marguerite appeared in Harvard Square.
He would have rushed off--the rain had begun in earnest--as soon as his
companion of the afternoon and evening was seated, had she not extended
her plump hand for a last, lingering pressure.
“Good-bye,” she said, softly. “There are some things one cannot express;
they are here,” she touched her chest lightly with the finger-tips of
her left hand. “Good-bye. Oh,--I forgot to tell you,” she added
abruptly, in another tone; “Billy and I discovered that we don’t spell
our names the same way. We spell ours with an ‘e.’ We found it out just
after he had refreshed me at Beck Hall and introduced those two sweet
boys. So you see, Billy is more than a cousin; he is a friend.”
The Millstone’s good-bye smile was an inscrutable performance, in which
Beverly thought he detected pity, amusement, and a sort of devilish
self-satisfaction. He turned, without a word, to find Billy.
THE END
THIS BOOK IS PRINTED BY JOHN WILSON AND SON CAMBRIDGE MASSACHUSETTS
DURING DECEMBER 1897
Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber:
He was probaby feeling=> He was probably feeling {pg 85}
I was glad we’d bitched=> I was glad we’d ditched {pg 223}
him away to somebody’s else room=> him away to somebody else’s room {pg
228}
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