of a mutual feeling of constraint had he descended upon this
undergraduate meal in the indefinite capacity of “an old graduate.” The
ease with which he filled his place at the table, and the effortless
civility that acknowledged his presence there, were largely due to his
never having allowed his interest in the life of the club to wane during
his years away from it. He knew the sort of men the place had gone in
for, and, in many instances, their names as well. Some of his own
classmates--glad, no doubt, of so congenial an item for their
occasional European letters--had never failed to write him, in diverting
detail, of the great Christmas and spring dinners. And they, in turn,
had often read extracts from Thorn’s letters to them, when called on to
speak at these festivities. More than once the graduate had sent, from
the other side of the world, some doggerel verses, a sketch to be used
as a dinner-card, or a trifling addition to the club’s library or
dining-room. Haydock and Ellis and Wolcott and Wynne he had met at
various times abroad. He had made a point of hunting them up and getting
to know them, with the result that his interest had succeeded in
preserving his identity; he was not unknown to the youngest member of
the club. If they didn’t actually know him, they at least knew of him.
Even this crust is sweet to the returned graduate whose age is just far
enough removed from either end of life’s measure to make it
intrinsically unimportant.
“What courses do you give?” It was the big Prescott, sitting opposite,
who asked this. The effort involved a change of colour.
“You’d better look out, or you’ll have Pink in your class the first
thing you know,” some one called, in a voice of warning, from the other
end of the table.
“Yes; he’s on the lookout for snaps,” said some one else.
“Then he’d better stay away from my lectures,” answered Thorn, smiling
across at Prescott, who blushed some more at this sudden convergence of
attention on himself. “They say that new instructors always mark
hard--just to show off.”
“I had you on my list before I knew who you were,” announced another. “I
thought the course looked interesting; you’ll have to let me through.”
“Swipe! swipe!” came in a chorus from around the table. This bantering
attitude toward his official position pleased Thorn, perhaps, more than
anything else. It flattered and reassured him as to the impression his
personality made on younger--much younger--men. He almost saw in himself
the solution of the perennial problem of “How to bring about a closer
sympathy between instructor and student.”
After dinner Haydock and Ellis took him from room to room, and showed
him the new table, the new rugs, the new books, _ex dono_ this, that,
and the other member. In the library he came across one of his own
sketches, prettily framed. Some of his verses had been carefully pasted
into the club scrap-book. Ellis and Haydock turned to his class
photograph in the album, and laughed. It was not until long afterwards
that he wondered if they had done so because the picture had not yet
begun to lose its hair. When they had seen everything from the kitchen
to the attic, they went back to the big room where the fellows were
drinking their coffee and smoking. Others had come in in the interval;
they were condoling gaily with those already arrived, on the hard luck
of having to be in Cambridge once more. Thorn stood with his back to the
fireplace, and observed them.
It was anything but a representative collection of college men. There
were athletes, it was true,--Prescott was one,--and men who helped edit
the college papers, and men who stood high in their studies, and others
who didn’t stand anywhere, talking and chaffing in that room. But it was
characteristic of the life of the college that these varied
distinctions had in no way served to bring the fellows together there.
That Ellis would, without doubt, graduate with a _magna_, perhaps a
_summa cum laude_, was a matter of interest to no one but Ellis. That
Prescott had played admirable foot-ball on Soldiers’ Field the year
before, and would shortly do it again, made Prescott indispensable to
the Eleven, perhaps, but it didn’t in the least enhance his value to the
club. In fact, it kept him away so much, and sent him to bed so early,
that his skill at the game was, at times, almost deplored. That Haydock
once in a while contributed verses of more than ordinary merit to the
“Monthly” and “Advocate” had nearly kept him out of the club altogether.
It was the one thing against him,--he had to live it down. On the whole,
the club, like all of the five small clubs at Harvard whose influence is
the most powerful, the farthest reaching influence in the undergraduate
life of the place, rather prided itself in not being a reward for either
the meritorious or the energetic. It was composed of young men drawn
from the same station in life, the similarity of whose past
associations and experience, in addition to whatever natural attractions
they possessed, rendered them mutually agreeable. The system was
scarcely broadening, but it was very delightful. And as the graduate
stood there watching the fellows--brown and exuberant after the long
vacation--come and go, discussing, comparing, or simply fooling, but
always frankly absorbed in themselves and one another, he could not help
thinking that however much such institutions had helped to enfeeble the
class spirit of days gone by, they had a rather exquisite, if less
diffusive spirit of their own. He liked the liveliness of the place, the
broad, simple terms of intimacy on which every one seemed to be with
every one else, the freedom of speech and action. Not that he had any
desire to bombard people with sofa-cushions, as Sears Wolcott happened
to be doing at that instant, or even to lie on his back in the middle of
the centre-table with his head under the lamp, and read the
“Transcript,” as some one else had done most of the evening; but he
enjoyed the environment that made such things possible and
unobjectionable.
“I must make a point of coming here a great deal,” reflected Thorn.
The next day college opened. More men enrolled in Thorn’s class that
afternoon than he thought would be attracted by the subject he was
announced to lecture in on that day of the week. Among all the students
who straggled, during the hour, into the bare recitation-room at the top
of Sever, the only ones whose individualities were distinct enough to
impress themselves on Thorn’s unpractised memory, were a negro, a
stained ivory statuette of a creature from Japan, a middle-aged
gentleman with a misplaced trust in the efficacy of a flowing sandy
beard for concealing an absence of collar and necktie, Prescott, and
Haydock. Prescott surprised him. There was a crowd around the desk when
he appeared, and Thorn didn’t get a chance to speak to him; but he was
pleased to have the boy enrol in his course,--more pleased somehow than
if there had been any known intellectual reason for his having done such
a thing; more pleased, for instance, than he was when Haydock strolled
in a moment or two later, although he knew that the senior would get
from his teachings whatever there was in them. Haydock was the last to
arrive before the hour ended. Thorn gathered up his pack of enrolment
cards, and the two left the noisy building together.
“Prescott enrolled just a minute or two before you did,” said Thorn, as
they walked across the Yard. He was a vain man in a quiet way.
“Yes,” answered Haydock drily, “he said your course came at a convenient
hour,” he didn’t add that, from what he knew of Prescott, complications
might, under the circumstances, be looked for.
“Shall I see you at dinner?” Thorn asked before they separated.
“Oh, are you going to eat at the club?” Haydock had wondered the night
before how much the man would frequent the place.
“Why, yes, I thought I would--for a time at least.” No other arrangement
had ever occurred to Thorn.
“That’s good--I’m glad,” said the senior; he asked himself, as he walked
away, why truthful people managed to lie so easily and so often in the
course of a day. As a matter of fact, he was vaguely sorry for what
Thorn had just told him. Haydock didn’t object to the instructor. Had
his opinion been asked, he would have said, with truth, that he liked
the man. For Thorn was intelligent, and what Haydock called “house
broken,” and the two had once spent a pleasant week together in Germany.
It was not inhospitality, but a disturbed sense of the fitness of things
that made Haydock regret Thorn’s apparent intention of becoming so
intimate with his juniors. The instructor’s place, Haydock told himself,
was with his academic colleagues, at the Colonial Club--or wherever it
was that they ate.
Thorn did dine with the undergraduates that night, and on many nights
following. It was a privilege he enjoyed for a time exceedingly. It
amused him, and, after the first few weeks of his new life in Cambridge,
he craved amusement. For in spite of the work he did for the
college--the preparing and delivering of lectures, the reading and
marking of various written tasks, and the enlightening, during
consultation hours, of long haired, long winded seekers after truth,
whose cold, insistent passion for the literal almost crazed him--he was
often profoundly bored. He had not been away from Cambridge long enough
to outlive the conviction, acquired in his Freshman year, that the
residents of that suburb would prove unexhilarating if in a moment of
inadvertence he should ever chance to meet any of them. But he had been
too long an exile to retain a very satisfactory grasp on contemporary
Boston. Of course he hunted up some of his classmates he had known well.
Most of them were men of affairs in a way that was as yet small enough
to make them seem to Thorn aggressively full of purpose. They were all
glad to see him. Some of them asked him to luncheon in town at hours
that proved inconvenient to one living in Cambridge; some of them had
wives, and asked him to call on them. He did so, and found them to be
nice women. But this he had suspected before. Two of his classmates were
rich beyond the dreams of industry. They toiled not, and might have been
diverting if they hadn’t--both of them--happened to be unspeakably dull
men. For one reason or another, he found it impossible to see his
friends often enough to get into any but a very lame sort of step with
their lives. Thorn’s occasional meetings with them left him melancholy,
sceptical as to the depth of their natures and his own, cynical as to
the worth of college friendships--friendships that had depended, for
their warmth, so entirely on propinquity--on the occasion. His most
absorbing topics of conversation with the men he had once known--his
closest ties--were after all issues very trivial and very dead. Dinner
with a classmate he grew to look on as either suicide, or a post mortem.
It was the club with its fifteen or twenty undergraduate members that
went far at first toward satisfying his idle moments. Dead issues, other
than the personal traditions that added colour and atmosphere to the
every day life of the place, were given no welcome there. The thrill of
the fleeting present was enough. The life Thorn saw there was, as far as
he could tell, more than complete with the healthy joy of eating and
drinking, of going to the play, of getting hot and dirty and tired over
athletics, and cool and clean and hungry again afterwards. The
instructor was entranced by its innocence--its unconscious contentment.
It was so unlike his own life of recent years, he told himself; it was
so “physical.” He liked to stop at the club late in the winter
afternoons, after a brisk walk on Brattle Street. There was always a
crowd around the fire at that hour, and no room that he could remember
had ever seemed so full of warmth and sympathy as the big room where the
fellows sat, at five o’clock on a winter’s day, with the curtains drawn
and the light of the fire flickering up the dark walls and across the
ceiling. He often dropped in at midnight, or even later. The place was
rarely quite deserted. Returned “theatre bees” came there to scramble
eggs and drink beer, instead of tarrying with the mob at the Victoria or
the Adams House. In the chill of the small hours, a herdic load of boys
from some dance in town would often stream in to gossip and get warm, or
to give the driver a drink after the long cold drive across the bridge.
And Thorn, who had not been disposed to gather up and cling to the
dropped threads of his old interests, who was not wedded to his work,
who was not sufficient unto himself, enjoyed it all thoroughly,
unreservedly--for a time.
For a time only. For as the winter wore on, the inevitable happened--or
rather the expected didn’t happen, which is pretty much the same thing
after all. Thorn, observant, analytical, and--where he himself was not
concerned--clever, grew to know the fellows better than they knew
themselves. Before he had lived among them three months, he had
appreciated their respective temperaments, he had taken the measure of
their ambitions and limitations, he had catalogued their likes and
dislikes, he had pigeon-holed their weaknesses and illuminated their
virtues. Day after day, night after night, consciously and
unconsciously, he had observed them in what was probably the frankest,
simplest intercourse of their lives. And he knew them.
But they didn’t know him. Nor did it ever occur to them that they wanted
to or could. They were not seeking the maturer companionship Thorn had
to give; they were not seeking much of anything. They took life as they
found it near at hand, and Thorn was far, very far away. For them, the
niche he occupied could have been filled by any gentleman of thirty-two
with a kind interest in them and an affection for the club. To him, they
were everything that made the world, as he knew it just then,
interesting and beautiful. Youth, energy, cleanliness were the trinity
Thorn worshipped. And they were young, strong, and undefiled. Yet, after
the first pleasure at being back had left him, Thorn was not a happy
man, although he had not then begun to tell himself so.
The seemingly unimportant question presented by his own name began to
worry him a little as the weeks passed into months. First names and the
absurd sounds men had answered to from babyhood were naturally in common
use at the club. Thorn dropped into the way of them easily, as a matter
of course. Not to have done so would, in time, have become impossible.
The fellows would have thought it strange--formal. Yet the name of
“Marcus” was rarely heard there. Haydock, once in a while, called him
that, after due premeditation. Sears Wolcott occasionally used it by way
of a joke--as if he were taking an impertinent liberty, and rather
enjoyed doing it. But none of the other men ever did. On no occasion had
any one said “Marcus” absent-mindedly, and then looked embarrassed, as
Thorn had hoped might happen. It hurt him a little always to be called
“Thorn;” to be appealed to in the capacity of “Mr. Thorn,” as he
sometimes was by the younger members, positively annoyed him. Prescott
was the most incorrigible in this respect. He had come from one of those
fitting schools where all speech between master and pupil is carried on
to a monotonous chant of “Yes, sir,” “No, sir,” and “I think so, sir.”
He had ideas, or rather habits,--for Prescott’s ideas were few,--of
deference to those whose mission it was to assist in his education that
Thorn found almost impossible to displace. For a long time--until the
graduate laughed and asked him not to--he prefixed the distasteful “Mr.”
to Thorn’s name. Then, for as long again, he refrained markedly from
calling him anything. One afternoon he came into the club where the
instructor was alone, writing a letter, and after fussing for a time
among the magazines on the table, he managed to say,--
“Thorn, do you know whether Sears has been here since luncheon?”
Thorn didn’t know and he didn’t care, but had Prescott handed him an
appointment to an assistant professor’s chair, instead of having robbed
him a little of what dignity he possessed, he would not have been so
elated by half. Prescott continued to call him “Thorn” after that, but
always with apparent effort,--as if aware that in doing it he was not
living quite up to his principles. This trouble with his name might have
served Thorn as an indication of what his position actually was in the
tiny world he longed so much to be part of once more. But he was not a
clever man where he himself was concerned.
Little things hurt him constantly without opening his eyes. For
instance, it rarely occurred to the fellows that the instructor might
care to join them in any of their hastily planned expeditions to town
after dinner. Not that he was ostracised; he was simply overlooked. When
he did go to the theatre, he bought the tickets himself, and asked
Prescott or Sears, or some of them, to go with him. The occasion
invariably lacked the charm of spontaneity. When he invited any of them
to dine with him in town, as he often did, they went, if they hadn’t
anything else to do, and seemed to enjoy their dinner. But to Thorn
these feasts were a series of disappointments. He always got up from the
table with a sense of having failed in something. What? He didn’t
know--he couldn’t have told. He was like a man who shoots carefully at
nothing, and then feels badly because he hits it. He persisted in
loitering along sunny lanes, and growing melancholy because they led
nowhere. It was Sears Wolcott who took even the zest of anticipation out
of Thorn’s little dinners in town, by saying to the graduate one
evening,--
“What’s the point of going to the Victoria for dinner? It’s less
trouble, and a damned sight livelier, to eat out here.” Sears had what
Haydock called, “that disagreeable habit of hitting promiscuously from
the shoulder.” The reaction on Thorn of all this was at last a dawning
suspicion of his own unimportance. By the time the midyear examinations
came, he felt somehow as if he were “losing ground;” he hadn’t reached
the point yet of realising that he never had had any. He used to throw
down his work in a fit of depression and consult his three-sided mirror
apprehensively.
The big Prescott, however, became the real problem, around which the
others were as mere corollaries. It was he who managed, in his “artless
Japanese way,” as the fellows used to call it, to crystallise the
situation, to bring it to a pass where Thorn’s rather unmanly
sentimentality found itself confronted by something more definite and
disturbing than merely the vanishing point of youth. Prescott
accomplished this very simply, by doing the poorest kind of work--no
work at all, in fact--in the course he was taking from Thorn. Barely,
and by the grace of the instructor, had he scraped through the first
examination in November. Since then he had rested calmly, like a great
monolith, on his laurels. He went to Thorn’s lectures only after
intervals of absence that made his going at all a farce. He ignored the
written work of the course, and the reports on outside reading, with
magnificent completeness. Altogether, he behaved as he wouldn’t have
behaved had he ever for a moment considered Thorn in any light other
than that of an instructor, an officer of the college, a creature to
whom deference--servility, almost--was due when he was compelled to talk
to him, but to whom all obligation ended there. His attitude was not an
unusual one among college “men” who have not outgrown the school idea,
but the attendant circumstances were. For Thorn’s concern over
Prescott’s indifference to the course was aroused by a strong personal
attachment, one in which an ordinary professorial interest had nothing
to do. He smarted at his failure to attract the boy sufficiently to draw
him to his lectures; yet he looked with a sort of panic toward the
approaching day when he should be obliged, in all conscience, to flunk
him in the midyear examination. He admired Prescott, as little,
intelligent men sometimes do admire big, stupid ones. He idealised him,
and even went the length, one afternoon when taking a walk with Haydock,
of telling the senior that under Prescott’s restful, olympic exterior he
thought there lurked a soul. To which Haydock had answered with
asperity, “Well, I hope so, I’m sure,” and let the subject drop. Later
in the walk, Haydock announced, irrelevantly, and with a good deal of
vigour, that if he ever made or inherited millions, he would establish a
chair in the university, call it the “Haydock Professorship of Common
Sense,” and respectfully suggest to the President and Faculty that the
course be made compulsory.
Thorn would have spoken to the soulful Prescott,--told him gently that
he didn’t seem to be quite in sympathy with the work of the course,--if
Prescott had condescended to go to his lectures in the six or seven
weeks between the end of the Christmas recess and the examination
period. But Prescott cut Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, at half-past
two o’clock, with a regularity that, considered as regularity, was
admirable. Toward the last, he did drop in every now and then, sit near
the door, and slip out again before the hour was ended. This was just
after he had been summoned by the Recorder to the Office for “cutting.”
Thorn never got a chance to speak to him. He might have approached the
boy at the club; but the instructor shrank from taking advantage of his
connection with that place to make a delicate official duty possible. He
had all along avoided “shop” there so elaborately,--had made so light of
it when the subject had come up,--that he couldn’t bring himself at that
late day to arise, viper like, from the hearthstone and smite. A note of
warning would have had to be light, facetious, and consequently without
value, in order not to prove a very false and uncalled for note indeed.
The ready coöperation of the Dean, Thorn refrained from calling on; he
was far from wishing to get Prescott into difficulties.
By the time the examination day arrived, the instructor was in a state
of turmoil that in ordinary circumstances would have been excessive and
absurd. In the case of Thorn, it was half pathetic, half contemptible.
He knew that in spite of Prescott’s soul (a superabundance of soul is,
as a matter of fact, a positive hindrance in passing examinations), the
boy would do wretchedly. To give him an E--the lowest possible mark,
always excepting, of course, the jocose and sarcastic F--would be to
bring upon himself Prescott’s everlasting anger and “despision.” Of this
Thorn was sure. Furthermore, the mark would not tend to make the
instructor wildly popular at the club; for although everybody was
willing to concede that Prescott was not a person of brilliant mental
attainments, he was very much beloved. One hears a good deal about the
“rough justice of boys.” Thorn knew that such a thing existed, and did
not doubt but that, in theory, he would be upheld by the members of the
club if he gave Prescott an E, and brought the heavy hand of the Office
down on him. But the justice of boys, he reflected, was, after all,
rough; it would acknowledge his right to flunk Prescott, perhaps, and,
without doubt, hate him cordially for doing it. Thorn’s aversion to
being hated was almost morbid.
If, on the other hand, he let the boy through,--gave him, say, the
undeserved and highly respectable mark of C,--well, that would be
tampering dishonestly with the standards of the college, gross injustice
to the rest of the students, injurious to the self-respect of the
instructor, and a great many other objectionable things, too numerous to
mention. Altogether, Thorn was in a “state of mind.” He began to
understand something of the fine line that separates instructor from
instructed, on whose other side neither may trespass.
When at length the morning of the examination had come and gone, and
Thorn was in his own room at his desk with the neat bundle of
blue-covered books before him, in which the examinations are written, it
was easy enough to make up his mind. He knew that the question of
flunking or passing Prescott admitted of no arguments whatever. The
boy’s work in the course failed to present the tiniest loophole in the
way of “extenuating circumstances,” and Prescott had capped the climax
of his past record that morning by staying in the examination-room just
an hour and a quarter of the three hours he was supposed to be there.
That alone was equivalent to failure in a man of Prescott’s denseness.
Not to give Prescott a simple and unadorned E would be holding the
pettiest of personal interests higher than one’s duty to the college.
There was no other way of looking at it. And Thorn, whose mind was
perfectly clear on this point, deliberately extricated Prescott’s book
from the blue pile on his desk, dropped it carelessly--without opening
it--into the glowing coals of his fireplace, and entered the boy’s
midyear mark in the records as C.