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.