Charles Macomb Flandrau

“ The riotous new green of early spring had matured to an academic sombreness that made the elms, the stretches of sun-flecked grass, the tremulous ivy, and the simple brick buildings inseparable in one’s thoughts. The dignity of the great space between Grays and Holworthy had grown with the late afternoon shadows, and Haydock and his mother, who had sauntered from path to{180} path, listening to the leaves, and the robins, and the quiet confidences of the wise bricks, talked of Harvard. ”

“ He picked his way, one evening, through the darkness and the mud, and among the disabled butcher-waggons, by the black alley that leads to the Polo Club,—once upon a time he too had belonged to that genial institution,—and beguiled Billy and Dilford Bancroft to his room. He gave them beer, and things to smoke, and then wondered how, with two such elusive, mercurial creatures flitting about, he could ever begin to “talk shop.” Strangely enough Billy himself provided the opportunity.
“Play something, Dilly,” he said, opening Haydock’s piano. ”

“ 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. ”

“ There was a gleam of hope in John’s eyes.
“Why?” he asked.
“Because he’ll get kicked out,” said Haydock.
“Fire Billy?” John looked terrified.
“That’s what they’ll do. And why not?” the senior went on heartlessly. “From what you say, he doesn’t seem to be quite ready for the place, as yet; so put him out.”
“But he isn’t bad, really bad.”
“No, certainly not; merely a damn fool; when he gets over being one, let him come back. The college understands that sort of thing much better than you or I do. It’s not only highly intelligent, but extremely benevolent. I’m sorry about Billy.” ”

“ 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 ”

“ Hewitt, noting the overcoat that lay limp and unheeded on the sidewalk, and the almost imperceptible uncertainty of the young fellow’s neat, boyish back in its conscious equilibrium, stopped to give that second and more searching look one always gives a drunken man, however usual the spectacle of drunkenness. They both stood there a moment: Hewitt half way up the stone steps of the building, the other with his back turned, swaying gently on the walk below, as if listening to the diminishing clatter of the shabby little cab. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The crowd on the lawn at Beck was less objectionable to Beverly, only because it was unhoused. He stopped at the top of the steps leading down to the little enclosure packed with white frocks and the startling flora and fauna of summer millinery. It wasn’t easy to recognise any one in the soft half light of the lanterns swinging in long festoons overhead; and it took him some time to discover Mrs. Lauriston and the girls seated around a table very near him at the foot of the steps on which he was standing. ”

“ Curtiss spoke as if he were still in college. “It’s taken rather for granted that young men, who are delightful in so many ways, are the complete embodiment, when chance herds them together, of the ‘hale-fellow-well-met-God-bless-everybody’ ideal a lot of people seem to have of them. The plain truth of the matter is, that at Harvard, at least, they aren’t at all. Wander a moment from the one royal road we all try to prance along in common here, and you’ll find most of us picking our way in very much the same varied paths we are destined to follow later on. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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{113} you laugh and wonder why you never saw before. ”

“ The McGaw-Crœsus episode was one of those little interpolated experiences two people own together so completely that they can’t share it if they want to. This one happened to be the kind over which the partners could laugh. When it happens the other way,—when two people get together and cry,—it isn’t nearly as valuable a factor in the divine accident of friendship; there is always one of them who very selfishly does most of the crying. For a time there was only mirth over McGaw. ”

“ The trouble with you and every one like you is simply this: you didn’t come to Harvard from a preparatory school with a lot of acquaintances and some friends; you didn’t come from any of the few big towns that annually send a number of fellows who know, or who at least have heard, of one another; you are athletic, perhaps, but scarcely what one would call an athlete—although I confess, that isn’t of much consequence; we don’t, as a rule, reward athletes for being athletes. ”

“ But there is such a thing here more than in any other college. An outsider, hearing me talk this way, would say I was making an unnecessarily large mountain out of a very ordinary molehill. But that’s because he wouldn’t understand that Society at Harvard is really the most important issue in undergraduate life. The comparatively few men who compose it, have it in their power to take hold of anything they choose to be interested in, and run it according to their own ideas—which shows the value of even a rather vague form of organisation. Fortunately, their ideas are good ones,—clean and manly. ”

“ Ellis—limited, conscientious, uncompromising—created countless occasions for such repression. He was a pale tissue of all the virtues. His sobriety was the kind that drove men to the gutter; his chastity lowered temperatures. Once at a small dinner he inadvertently got drunk and became so austere that the fellows went home. To-night, in running down a member of the club at the club, he had more than irritated Haydock. And then—which in this instance was to the point—the member had been Wolcott. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Hewitt burst into honest laughter. This tall child struck him as indescribably funny and young and drunk. Then, with a quick downward wriggle, he broke away, still laughing, and made a dash for the steps. Hatless, wild-eyed Bradley, screaming curses into the night, had him round the knees, as he stumbled across the top step to the door. Together they rolled and slid, scuffling, gasping, to the brick sidewalk.
“You would try to get away from me, would you? What a hell of a dirty trick to play a man! ”

“ If we don’t drool about the things here we care for very much, it’s because people who do are indecent; they bore us.”
“They do bore one,” assented Mrs. Haydock.
“Once in a while some one does tear out his heart and drip it around the stage in Sanders Theatre for the benefit of all the tiresome old women in Cambridge, and the Glee Club drones Latin hymns to a shiny upright piano hired for the occasion, while the orator calms himself with ice-water from the bedroom pitcher that is always prominent on those occasions. But such performances, thank God, are rare.” ”

“ But Beverly didn’t consider that he had seen the best, until the bridge car that was to bear away Cousin Marguerite appeared in Harvard Square. He would have rushed off—the rain had begun in earnest—as soon as his companion of the afternoon and evening was seated, had she not extended her plump hand for a last, lingering pressure.
“Good-bye,” she said, softly. “There are some things one cannot express; they are here,” she touched her chest lightly with the finger-tips of her left hand. ”

“ If I had only been given a chance—” he broke out with sudden vehemence,—“a good, square chance, the kind a man has a right to expect when he enters college—to meet my equals equally—to make myself felt and liked if I had the power to, why I shouldn’t mind failing, you know, not in the least; a man who isn’t an ass accepts chronic unpopularity as he does chronic red hair, or any other personal calamity.” ”

“ John burst out so hotly that the senior, who was filling his pipe at the table, almost looked up in ill-timed surprise. “Nobody sees anything of him any more; nobody who ought to, like you.”
“And you,” added Haydock, to himself. The situation was perennial; he divined it perfectly.
“Nobody but that damned Dilford Bancroft and that gang,” continued John.{215} “Billy could know any one in the class that’s worth knowing; he really does know every one. But you understand what I mean, they’re not his friends; he doesn’t go to their rooms, and they don’t come to ours. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But Prescott had given information of the most direct and convincing kind. That astounded{286} 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. ”

“ Beverly considered her absurd.
“I just know you’re a Harvard man,” she said engagingly. “Now aren’t you?”
“Yes, I am,” admitted Beverly.
“Oh, I’m so glad!” she clapped her hands with all the glee of a little girl of fifty. “You can help me—you can explain everything; the newspapers take so much for granted.” Beverly looked a trifle wild.
“Now here’s a Yard ticket,” she fumbled a moment among black-satin intricacies, “and here’s a Tree ticket, and here’s one for Memorial Hall. I have an invitation for Beck Hall, too,” she added, drawing out some envelopes. ”

“ 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{276} 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. ”

“ Lots of people who have only a newspaper acquaintance with the place think that wealth is the only requisite here. They have an affection for the phrase ‘a rich man’s college,’—whatever that may mean. But of course all that is absurd to any one who has spent four years in the place, and has known all the fellows with no allowances to speak of who are welcome in pretty much everything; and has seen all the bemillioned nonentities who languish through college in a sort of richly upholstered isolation. ‘Birth’ is certainly not the open sesame ”

“ Haydock, usually full of resource when it came to rectifying other people’s mistakes—he made very few himself—was quite at a loss in this instance. He ended by telling himself that what he cared most about, after all, was that Wolcott should feel genuinely uncomfortable; for the good of his soul he oughtn’t to be allowed to jeer at a man and then abandon him to his bitter reflections, without being talked{137} to by some one. ”

“ One of those black votes he knew would never be changed; but the other three might be tired out, as he and Ellis had combined to hold at bay every other candidate as long as Wolcott was in the running.
“Now for another go at Leonard,” said Haviland, wearily. “Just what he had before, twelve red and two black,” he added when the hat came back to the desk. “Who is doing it? Get up and curse him out like a man; it’s a shame, when all but two are willing to have him in.” But no one got up and cursed. Haydock and Ellis were the guilty ones, and they had nothing against Leonard. ”