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.