fortunate enough to finish their examinations early in the period can
run away to New York, to the country, to Old Point Comfort, to almost
anywhere that isn’t Cambridge, and recuperate. Haydock went South. Ellis
and Wynne tried a walking trip in the Berkshire Hills, and, after two
days’ floundering in the mud, waded to the nearest train for a city.
Boston men went to Boston--except Sears Wolcott and Prescott, who
disappeared to some wild and inaccessible New England hamlet to
snow-shoe or spear fish or shoot rabbits; no one could with authority
say which, as the two had veiled their preparations in mystery. So it
happened that Thorn didn’t see Prescott for more than a week after he
had marked his book. In the mean time he had become used to the idea of
having done it according to a somewhat unconventional system--to put it
charitably. He passed much of the time in which the fellows were away,
alone; for the few who went to the club, went there with note-books
under their arms and preoccupied expressions in their eyes. They kept a
sharp look-out for unexpected manœuvres on the part of the clock, and
had a general air of having to be in some place else very soon. Thorn,
thrown on his own resources, had a mild experience of what Cambridge can
be without a crowd to play with, and came to the conclusion that, for
his own interest and pleasure in life, he had done wisely in not
incurring Prescott’s ill-will and startling the club in the new rôle of
hard-hearted, uncompromising pedagogue. The insignificant part he played
in the lives of the undergraduates was far from satisfying; but it was
the sort of half a loaf one doesn’t willingly throw away. By the time
Prescott came back, Thorn had so wholly accepted his own view of the
case that he was totally unprepared for the way in which the boy took
the news of his mark. He met Prescott in the Yard the morning college
opened again, and stopped to speak to him. He wouldn’t have referred to
the examination--it was enough to know that the little crisis had
passed--had not Prescott, blushing uneasily, and looking over Thorn’s
shoulder at something across the Yard, said,--
“I don’t suppose you were very much surprised at the way I did in the
exam, were you?”
“It might have been better,” answered Thorn, seriously. “I hope you will
do better the second half year. But then, it might have been worse; your
mark was C.”
Prescott looked at him, a quizzical, startled look; and then realising
that Thorn was serious, that there had been nothing of the sarcastic in
his tone or manner, he laughed rudely in the instructor’s face.
“I beg your pardon,” he said, as politely as he could, with his eyes
still full of wonder and laughter; “I had no idea I did so well.” He
turned abruptly and walked away. Thorn would have felt offended, if he
hadn’t all at once been exceedingly scared. Prescott’s manner was
extraordinary for one who, as a rule, took everything as it came,
calmly, unquestioningly. His face and his laugh had expressed anything
but ordinary satisfaction at not having failed. There was something
behind that unwonted astonishment, something more than mere surprise at
having received what was, after all, a mediocre mark. Thorn had mixed
enough with human kind to be aware that no man living is ever very much
surprised in his heart of hearts to have his humble efforts in any
direction given grade C. Men like Prescott, who know but little of the
subjects they are examined in, usually try to compose vague answers that
may, like the oracles, be interpreted according to the mood of him who
reads them. No matter how general or how few Prescott’s answers had
been--Thorn stopped suddenly in the middle of the path. The explanation
that had come to him took hold of him, and like a tightened rein drew
him up short. Prescott had written nothing. The pages of his blue book
had left the examination-room as virgin white as when they had been
brought in and placed on the desk by the proctor. There was no other
explanation possible, and the instructor tingled all over with the
horrid sensation of being an unspeakable fool. He turned quickly to go
to University Hall; he meant to have Prescott’s mark changed at once.
But Prescott, at that moment, was bounding up the steps of University,
two at a time. He was undoubtedly on his way to the Office to verify
what Thorn had just told him. Thorn walked rapidly to his entry in
Holworthy, although he had just come from there. Then, with short,
nervous steps, he turned back again, left the Yard, and hurried in
aimless haste up North Avenue. He had been an ass,--a bungling, awful
ass,--he told himself over and over again. And that was about as
coherent a meditation as Mr. Thorn was able to indulge in for some time.
Once the idea of pretending that he had made a mistake did suggest
itself for a moment; but that struck him as wild, impossible. It would
have merely resulted in forcing the Office to regard him as stupid and
careless, and, should embarrassing questions arise, he no longer had
Prescott’s book with which to clear himself. More than that, it would
give Prescott reason to believe him an underhand trickster. The boy now
knew him to be an example of brazen partiality; there was no point in
incurring even harsher criticism. Thorn tried to convince himself, as he
hurried along the straight, hideous highway, that perhaps he was
wrong,--that Prescott hadn’t handed in a perfectly blank book. If only
he could have been sure of that, he would have risked the bland
assertion that the boy had stumbled on more or less intelligent answers
to the examination questions, without perhaps knowing it himself. This,
practically, was the tone he had meant to adopt all along. But he
couldn’t be sure, and, unfortunately, the only person who could give
information as to what was or wasn’t in the book, was Prescott. But
Prescott had given information of the most direct and convincing kind.
That astounded look and impertinent laugh had as much as said:--
“Well, old swipe, what’s your little game? What do you expect to get by
giving a good mark to a man who wasn’t able to answer a single
question?” And Thorn knew it. At first he was alarmed at what he had
done. He could easily see how such a performance, if known, might stand
in the light of his reappointment to teach in the college, even if it
didn’t eject him at once. But before he returned to his room, after
walking miles, he scarcely knew where, fear had entirely given way to
shame,--an over-powering shame that actually made the man sick at his
stomach. It wasn’t as if he had committed a man’s fault in a world of
men where he would be comfortably judged and damned by a tribunal he
respected about as much as he respected himself. He had turned himself
inside out before the clear eyes of a lot of boys, whose dealings with
themselves and one another were like so many shafts of white light in an
unrefracting medium. He had let them know what a weak, characterless,
poor thing he was, by holding himself open to a bribe, showing himself
willing to exchange, for the leavings of their friendships, something he
was bound in honour to give only when earned, prostituting his
profession that they might continue to like him a little, tolerate his
presence among them. And he was one whom the college had honoured by
judging worthy to stand up before young men and teach them. It was
really very sickening.
Thorn couldn’t bring himself to go near the club for some days. He knew,
however, as well as if he had been present, what had probably happened
there in the meanwhile. Prescott had told Haydock and Wolcott, and very
likely some of the others, the story of his examination. They had
laughed at first, as if it had been a good joke in which Prescott had
come out decidedly ahead; then Haydock had said something--Thorn could
hear him saying it--that put the matter in a pitilessly true light, and
the others had agreed with him. They usually did in the end. It took all
the “nerve” Thorn had to show himself again.
But when he had summoned up enough courage to drop in at the club late
one evening, he found every one’s manner toward him pretty much as it
always had been; yet he could tell instinctively, as he sat there, who
had and who hadn’t heard Prescott’s little anecdote. Wolcott knew; he
called Thorn, “Marcus,” with unnecessary gusto, and once or twice
laughed his peculiarly irritating laugh when there was nothing, as far
as Thorn could see, to laugh at. Haydock knew; Thorn winced under the
cool speculative stare of the senior’s grey eyes. Wynne knew; although
Thorn had no more specific reason for believing so, than that the boy
seemed rather more formidably bespectacled than usual. Several of the
younger fellows also knew; Thorn knew that they knew; he couldn’t stand
it. When the front door slammed after him on his way back to his room,
he told himself that, as far as he was concerned, it had slammed for the
last time.
He was very nearly right. He would have had to be a pachyderm compared
to which the “blood sweating behemoth of Holy Writ” is a mere
satin-skinned invalid, in order to have brazened out the rest of the
year on the old basis. He couldn’t go to the club and converse on
base-ball and the “musical glasses,” knowing that the fellows with whom
he was talking were probably weighing the pros and cons of taking his
courses next year, and getting creditable marks in them, without doing a
stroke of work. He couldn’t face that “rough justice of boys” that would
sanction the fellows making use of him, and considering him a pretty
poor thing, at the same time. So he stayed away; he didn’t go near the
place through March and April and May. When his work didn’t call him
elsewhere, he stayed in his room and attempted to live the life of a
scholar,--an existence for which he was in every conceivable way
unfitted. For a time he studied hard out of books; but the most
profitable knowledge he acquired in his solitude was the great deal he
learned about himself. He tried to write. He had always thought it in
him to “write something,” if he ever should find the necessary leisure.
But the play he began amounted to no more than a harmless pretext for
discoursing in a disillusioned strain on Life and Art in the many
letters he wrote to people he had known abroad,--people, for whom, all
at once, he conceived a feeling of intimacy that no doubt surprised them
when they received his letters. His volume of essays was never actually
written, but the fact that he was hard at work on it served well as an
answer to:--
“Why the devil don’t we ever see you at the club nowadays?”
For the fellows asked him that, of course, when he met them in the Yard
or in the electric cars; and Haydock tarried once or twice after his
lecture and hoped politely that he was coming to the next club dinner.
He wasn’t at the next club dinner, however, nor the next, nor the next.
Haydock stopped reminding him of them. The club had gradually ceased to
have any but a spectacular interest for Thorn. His part at a dinner
there would be--and, since his return, always had been--that of decorous
audience in the stalls, watching a sprightly farce. The club didn’t
insist on an audience, so Thorn’s meetings with its members were few. He
saw Haydock and Prescott, in a purely official way, more than any of
them. Strangely enough, Prescott seemed to be trying to do better in
Thorn’s course. He came to the lectures as regularly as he had avoided
them before the midyears. He handed in written work of such ingenious
unintelligence that there was no question in Thorn’s mind as to the
boy’s having conscientiously evolved it unaided. The instructor liked
the spirit of Prescott’s efforts, although it was a perpetual “rubbing
in,” of the memory of his own indiscretion; it displayed a pretty
understanding of _noblesse oblige_.
The second half year was long and dreary and good for Thorn. It set him
down hard,--so hard that when he collected himself and began to look
about him once more, he knew precisely where he was--which was something
he hadn’t known until then. He was thirty-two years old; he looked
thirty-five, and he felt a hundred, to begin with. He wasn’t an
undergraduate, and he hadn’t been one for a good many years. He still
felt that he loved youth and sympathised with its every phase,--from its
mindless gambolings to its preposterous maturity. But he knew now that
it was with the love and sympathy of one who had lost it. He had
learned, too, that when it goes, it bids one a cavalier adieu, and takes
with it what one has come to regard as one’s rights,--like a saucy
house-maid departing with the spoons. He knew that he had no rights; he
had forfeited them by losing some of his hair. He wouldn’t get any of
them back again until he had lost all of it. He was the merest speck on
the horizon of the fellows whom he had, earlier in the year, tried to
know on a basis of equality,--a speck too far away, too microscopic even
to annoy them. If he had only known it all along, he told himself, how
different his year might have been. He wouldn’t have squandered the
first four months of it, for one thing, in a stupid insistence on a
relation that must of necessity be artificial--unsatisfying. He wouldn’t
have spent the last five of it in coming to his senses. He wouldn’t have
misused all of it in burning--or at least in allowing to fall into a
precarious state of unrepair--the bridges that led back to the friends
of his own age and time.
“I have learned more than I have taught, this year,” thought Thorn.
* * * * *
To-day was Thorn’s birthday. Impelled by a tender, tepid feeling of
self-pity the instructor had come once more to the club to look at it
and say good-bye before leaving Cambridge. He would have liked to
breakfast on the piazza and suffer luxuriously alone. But just at the
moment he was beginning to feel most deeply, Sears Wolcott appeared at
the open French window, and said he was “Going to eat out there in the
landscape too.” So Thorn, in spite of himself, had to revive.
“What did you think of the Pudding show last night?” began Sears. Talk
with him usually meant leading questions and their simplest answers.
“It was very amusing--very well done,” said Thorn. What was the use, he
asked himself, of drawing a cow-eyed stare from Wolcott by saying what
he really thought--that Strawberry Night at the Pudding had been
“exuberant,” “noisy,” “intensely young.”
“I saw you after it was over,” Sears went on; “why didn’t you buck up
with the old grads around the piano? You looked lonely.”
“I was lonely,” answered Thorn, truthfully this time.
“Where were your classmates? There was a big crowd out.”
“My classmates? Oh, they were there, I suppose. I haven’t seen much of
them this year.”
Wolcott’s next question was:--
“Why the devil can’t we have better strawberries at this club, I wonder?
Where’s the granulated sugar? They know I never eat this damned face
powder on anything.” He called loudly for the steward, and Thorn went on
with his breakfast in silence. After Sears had been appeased with
granulated sugar, he asked:--
“Going to be here next year?”
“I’ve been reappointed; but I think I shall live in town. Why do you
ask?”
“Oh, nothing--I was thinking I might take your courses. What mark is
Prescott going to get for the year?”
Thorn looked up to meet Wolcott’s eyes unflinchingly; but the boy was
deeply absorbed in studying the little air bubbles on the surface of
his coffee.
“I don’t know what mark he’ll get. I haven’t looked at his book yet,”
said Thorn. Sears remarked “Oh!” and laughed as he submerged the bubbles
with a spoon. It was unlike him not to have said, “You do go through the
formality of reading his books then?”
Prescott and Wynne joined them. They chattered gaily with Wolcott about
nothing out there on the piazza, and watched the slim lady on the other
side of the nodding lilac bushes cut nasturtiums. Thorn listened to
them, and looked at them, and liked them; but he couldn’t be one of
them, even for the moment. He couldn’t babble unpremeditatedly about
nothing, because he had forgotten how it was done. So, in a little
while, he got up to leave them. He had to mark some examination books
and pack his trunks and go abroad, he told them. He said good-bye to
Prescott and Wolcott and Wynne and some others who had come in while
they were at breakfast, and hoped they would have “a good summer.” They
hoped the same to him.
As he strolled back to his room with the sounds of their voices in his
ears, but with no memory of what they had been saying, he wondered if,
after all, they hadn’t from the very first bored him just a little; if
his unhappiness--his sense of failure when he talked to young
people--didn’t come from the fact that they commended themselves to his
affections rather than to his intellect. Thorn was a vain man in a quiet
way.
Prescott’s final examination book certainly didn’t commend itself to his
intellect. It was long, and conscientious, and quite incorrect from
cover to cover. The instructor left it until the last. He almost missed
his train in deciding upon its mark.
THE CLASS DAY IDYL
Of course there is no such thing as the “typical Harvard man,” although
it interests--or irritates--people who didn’t go to Harvard to believe
every now and then that they have discovered him. If a well-dressed
youth with a broad A, and an abnormal ignorance of the life practical,
appears in a Western town, the business man from whom he seeks
employment, after sounding the profoundest depths of his incapacity,
amuses the family circle at dinner by telling of the call he had from a
“typical Harvard man.” If a girl sits out a dance with a fellow who
doesn’t give her the look of a slightly bewildered cow when she slings a
little Swinburne at him, but who lets fly the tail end of a Rossetti
sonnet in return, closely followed by a gem or two purloined here and
there from Henry James, she thinks she has met another of those “typical
Harvard men.” The young American travelling abroad who displays a
decent reticence when compatriots of whom he never has heard, “put
their paws on his shoulders and lap his face,” is described in many
terms--that of “the typical Harvard man” coming last. This strange,
mythical being is all things to all men--who are not Harvard men; but it
is worthy of note that in the various aspects in which he is
apperceived, he manages to repeat certain distinguished traits that even
the enemy is bound--often secretly--to admire. No one, for instance,
marks as typical of Harvard, a man who is ill-dressed, or ill-bred; he
is usually good looking. So if the typical Harvard man, like the
sea-serpent, continues to agitate the provinces from time to time, one
is thankful that whatever his disguise may be for the moment, he is
always a distinctly presentable young person.
Beverly Beverly of the graduating class was often thought by outsiders
to be of the type to which most Harvard men belonged. He was a very well
arranged young gentleman who wore glasses. He always seemed to have
plenty of money; he lived on the ground floor of Beck Hall, and had a
servant.
He lived in Beck rather than in Claverly, because, for some reason or
other, Beck is not annually overrun by a crowd of sporty freshmen just
released from highchurch fitting-schools. Furthermore, although
surrounded in Beck by fellow-students whom he felt it possible to know,
he didn’t happen to know any of them more intimately than a polite nod
of the head would imply. So when he retired to his own room he was
spared the nocturnal visitations and talk-to-deaths of a more populous
building.
Beverly was intelligent, reserved, and “set in his ways.” He had been in
a great many places, and had met a great many people. By the end of his
senior year he preferred to spend his time in doing nothing at all,
rather than in doing something that didn’t interest him exceedingly. As
he had gone to Harvard, people said he was a typical product of that
institution. They couldn’t have said this if his father had seen fit to
send him to a business college to learn how to audit accounts, and make
an American eagle with a fist full of thunderbolts in two penstrokes.
But Beverly would have been very much the same sort of person after
all, only perhaps not as agreeable as he actually was.
Early in his college career, Beverly had identified himself with the few
fellows he cared to know. Since then, his little circle of intimate
friends had, if anything, become smaller.
When Class Day--his Class Day--began to be talked about, Beverly, as a
matter of course, was asked to spread at Beck. His decision not to
spread there--nor anywhere--was as much a matter of course. He didn’t
enjoy Class Day, he said; it was always unbearably warm; it was
impossible on that day to procure nourishment that wasn’t fluid or
semi-fluid,--punch, chicken-salad, or icecream; and the vast armies of
women, from Heaven knows where, who came early and stayed until they
were put out, managed to kill the sentiment of the day for him, he said,
even as they exterminated the grass in the College Yard.
“I sha’n’t even be in Cambridge,” Beverly declared at breakfast, the
morning before the great day.
“You really ought to have spread, you know,” said Billy Fields. “It’s
the only way we have of being nice to people in town who’ve been nice to
us.”
“You forget that Bevy considers himself perfectly square with everybody.
He went to their entertainments,” said Haydock.
“The truth of the matter is, Bevy’s afraid somebody will propose to him,
and he is too polite to refuse. Those Boston girls are so impulsive!”
suggested Wynne.
“Maybe he wouldn’t look well in a cap and gown,” added another.
“It’s foolish not to go to Class Day,” said Prescott, for whom the
universe was conveniently divided into things that were “foolish” and
things that weren’t.
“He’s afraid that if he stays, he might be bored,” chimed in Haydock,
again. “Somebody might ask him whether college men didn’t have a
‘perfectly lovely time,’ and which building Austin Hall was. Of course
he doesn’t know.”
“I don’t,” admitted Beverly, serenely.
“He’d rather sit in his own room on a dais all day, and have Michael fan
him, while three black slaves at his feet try to guess the secret of his
ennui,” continued Haydock. “Own up, Bevy--aren’t you afraid of being
bored?”
“Why, of course,” answered Beverly. “That’s my constant fear; and you
idiots sometimes make me think that it isn’t an altogether groundless
one.”
“To what do we owe the honour of your presence at breakfast this
morning?” asked Wynne, bowing low. Beverly usually breakfasted at ten.
It was then half-past eight.
“To an examination in pre-Christian Hebrew literature,--nothing else I
assure you.” Beverly didn’t look up from the morning paper he was trying
to read.
“And we’re just a little peevish at having to stay for it, instead of
getting away five days earlier--aren’t we?”
To this Beverly paid no attention whatever, but rang for the steward and
asked him to telephone to Foster to send round Lloyd the cabman at once.
It looked like rain, and Beverly’s examination that morning was over in
the Museum--at least a quarter of a mile away. Billy Fields listened to
the order, and then called out:--
“Oh, I say there, look out for Beverly Beverly; he’s horribly haughty
this morning, ha, ha!” Billy could exaggerate Beverly’s accent, and
sound startlingly like the original. He could also imitate his “Who the
devil are you?” expression and his walk. These things he proceeded to do
around the breakfast-table and out into the hall, until the front door
slammed behind him. He lingered on the street outside in order to stand
in the gutter and salute when Beverly drove away in his cab.
Beverly had watched Billy’s little performance with dispassionate
interest, and remarked before returning to his newspaper:--