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.