HARVARD EPISODES

BY

CHARLES MACOMB FLANDRAU



BOSTON

COPELAND AND DAY
MDCCCXCVII


First edition (3500 copies) November, 1897
Second edition (5000 copies) December, 1897


COPYRIGHT BY COPELAND AND DAY, 1897



To W. A.


Dear W. A. I have written about a very little corner of a very great place; but one that we knew well, and together.

C. M. F.

CONTENTS

Harvard Episodes

THE CHANCE

TWO men were talking in a room in Claverly Hall. Horace Hewitt, the sophomore who owned the apartment, had passed, during the hour with his visitor, from the state in which conversation is merely a sort of listless chaffing to where it becomes eager, earnest, and perplexing. The other, a carefully dressed, somewhat older young man, across whose impassive, intellectual profile a pair of eyeglasses straddled gingerly, was not, perhaps, monopolising more than his share of the discussion, for Robinson Curtiss was the kind of person to whom a large conversational portion was universally conceded; but he was, without doubt, talking with a continuance and an air of authority that unconsciously had become relentless. Both men were smoking: Hewitt, a sallow meerschaum pipe, with his class in raised letters on the bowl; Curtiss, a cigarette he had taken from the metal case he still held meditatively in his hand. He smoked exceedingly good cigarettes, and practised the thrifty art of always discovering just one in his case.

“So you think my college life from an undergraduate’s standpoint, and it’s the only standpoint I give that for,”—Hewitt snapped his fingers impatiently,—“will always be as much of a fizzle as it has so far?” He had jumped up from the big chair in which he had all along been sprawling and stood before Robinson in an attitude that was at once incredulous and despairing. The momentary embarrassment that Curtiss felt at this unexpected show of feeling on the part of his young friend, took the form of extreme deliberation in returning his cigarette-case to his pocket, and in repeating the performance of lighting his cigarette that had not gone out.

He had not been a graduate quite three years in all, but that had been ample time—particularly as it had been spent far from Cambridge—for the readjustment of certain views of his,—views in which four eventful years at college had been grotesquely prominent. He found, on returning to the university town, that his absence rendered him frequently indifferent to the genuineness and importance, not merely of the more delicate problems of the undergraduate world,—it was one of these on which he was at the present moment indiscreetly touching,—but even to the obvious and common incidents of the academic experience: to the outcome of examinations, to the degree of Bachelor of Arts. It was not until Hewitt stood troubled and expectant before him that Curtiss appreciated how tactless the disparity in their knowledge of things collegiate had made him appear to his young friend. A sudden reminiscent intuition, that flashed him back to his own sophomore year, caused him to feel that what he was saying to Hewitt was almost brutal; in his capacity of a young graduate he had indulged in a cold-blooded lecture (it could hardly be called a discussion) on questions that very properly were not questions to a fellow in Hewitt’s situation, but warm, operative realities. Hewitt was in many ways such a mature young person, his valuation of other people and their actions had always seemed so temperate, so just, that Curtiss, without knowing it, had simply ignored the fellow’s healthy undergraduate attitude. He had failed to assume how eager the sophomore was to be some active part of the new and fascinating life going on everywhere about him; how completely he was possessed by the indefinable, disquieting, stimulative spirit that so triumphantly inhibits Harvard from becoming a mere place of learning. Curtiss had spent the evening in throwing what he sincerely believed was a searching light on some aspects of Harvard life; he was beginning to wish he had allowed Hewitt to perform the office for himself.

“Be honest with me, Curtiss.” Hewitt spoke in the distinct, simple tones that as a rule accompany words one hesitates to trifle with. “You’ve gone through the whole damn thing yourself, and got more out of it—not more than you deserve, of course, but more than most men get; you knew everybody and belonged to—to—” Hewitt hesitated a moment; any single college institution—social, athletic, or intellectual—did not in itself forcibly appeal to him; there was something petty in particularising. “You belonged to—to everything, when you were in college,” he finally said; “how was it done—how is it done every day? I see it going on around me all the time; but I can’t touch it in any way,—it never comes near enough, if you know what I mean; and what I can’t explain to myself is that I don’t see why it should come any nearer to me,—only, I want it to.” The manner in which Horace blurted out the last few words was an epitome of the situation; their confession of keen longing to know and be known in his class had gathered intensity with the growing suspicion that certain conditions of the place—conditions he felt rather than understood—were every day making the realisation of his desire for activity, acquaintances, friendship, more impossible. His great common sense—in Hewitt the quality amounted to a sort of prosaic talent—would always preclude his degenerating into one of the impotently rebellious; it had kept him free from the slightest tinge of bitterness toward any one, but it had not made his interminable, solitary walks up Brattle Street (there was apparently no other walk to take in Cambridge) less interminable; it had enlivened none of the stolid evenings in his rooms which, with a necessary amount of study, a chapter or two from some book he did not much care about, and a bottle of beer, always came to an end somehow or other in spite of themselves; it had not invested stupid theatres with interest, nor mediocre athletics with excitement. Common sense, the prevailing trait of Hewitt’s character, that induced the middle-aged to consider him “singularly well balanced for a young man,” was quite powerless to dispel the desperate loneliness of his sophomore year. His common sense was a coat of mail that defied sabre thrusts, perhaps, but let in the rain.

“You know everything, Rob,” Hewitt smiled; he had after all no wish to appear emotional. “Is there something the matter with me, or with Harvard, that has kept me what you very well know I am—an isolated nonentity who has rather begun to lose hope? Are there other fellows in college who are gentlemen, and used to all the word implies, but who might be in any one of the fifteen leading universities of Kansas, for all the good they are getting out of this place? 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.” Hewitt’s own locks had sufficient colour to lend authority to his statement. “It isn’t that—it’s the utter impossibility, as far as I can see, of a boy who came here as I did, getting a fair trial. Every day I am more and more convinced that my prospects for the broad, enlightening sort of existence I expected to find on entering Harvard were about as definite and as brilliant as the prospects of a stillborn child on entering the world. What’s the matter? What’s wrong? Who’s to blame?”

There was an admirable force to Hewitt’s manner when he was thoroughly in earnest that, as a rule, roused even in Curtiss a vague apprehension that sincerity was, somehow, obligatory. It did not restrain him, however, from assuming an expression of mock helplessness and murmuring,—

“It’s so long—so intricate.”

“If people only knew what they were in for before they came,” Hewitt continued.

“Maybe they wouldn’t come,” suggested the other.

“Of course they’d come,—the place is too great,—they couldn’t afford to stay away.” Horace passed over the axioms with the impatience of one who has problems to solve. “Of course they would come,” he repeated; “but they would come with their eyes opened—they would know what not to expect; that’s the important thing.”

“Ah, but who could do it? Who would do it? It would be like assisting a new kitten to see by means of a pin. We must all work out our own salvations,” Curtiss added sententiously.

“That brings it right round to my point again,” exclaimed Hewitt. “Of course every man wants to ‘work out his own salvation,’ as you put it; but at Harvard I don’t think it’s every man who is given the opportunity to. He doesn’t know that before he comes, he doesn’t find it out for some time after he gets here; but it’s true, and it’s precisely what I want you to tell me about—to explain.” There was but a faint note of triumph in Hewitt’s voice; he realised that he had Curtiss in a corner, but he had not been conscious of manœuvring to get him there. “Tell me this: Do you think that Harvard—and by that I don’t mean the Officers of Instruction and Government, they’re the least of it—do you think that Harvard is fair, and do you think that it is American?”

There was something so general, so meaningless, so senatorial in the application of Hewitt’s final word that Curtiss was surprised into a shout of laughter.

“Whether it’s fair or not, depends on who’s telling you about it,” he said gravely enough; “but there’s no question as to its nationality,” he laughed again; “of course it’s American, horribly American, deliciously American!”

Hewitt puckered his forehead and waited for more; he did not in the least understand.

“When I say American, I don’t mean what you mean; because—pardon me for saying it—you don’t mean anything.” Curtiss found it suddenly easy to rattle on as he had been doing earlier in the evening; his laugh had cleared the atmosphere. “My dear fellow,” he said, “Harvard University possesses its labouring class, its middle class, and its aristocracy, as sharply, as inevitably, as—as—” he was about to draw a rather over-emphatic comparison between Harvard and the social orders of Sparta in the days of Lycurgus, when Hewitt, still puzzled, broke in with,—

“But if that’s the case, it isn’t American at all—you contradict yourself in the same breath.”

“I assumed that you knew more about your own country,” Curtiss remarked with dry superiority; “I sha’n’t undertake to discuss the social system of the United States; it would simply necessitate my going over a lot of platitudes that would bore us both. It’s only when we apply to our college, what we all know to be so undeniable of the country at large, that the situation at once becomes novel and preposterous to so many people. The conventional idea of an American college—you know this because the idea was yours before you came here—is that it consists of a multitude of lusty young men linked together by the indissoluble bonds of class and college, all striving, shoulder to shoulder, for the same ends, in a general way,—just what the ends are I don’t think the public cares very much, but they’re presumably charmingly unpractical and fine,—and living in an intoxicating atmosphere of intimacy, a robust sense of loyalty that is supposed to pervade the academic groves and render them the temporary home of a great, light-hearted, impulsive, congenial brotherhood. Well, I don’t know whether other American institutions of learning answer the description, because I’ve never been to them; but Harvard doesn’t, not in the slightest particular.”

“Then I wish it wouldn’t attempt to,” murmured Hewitt.

“There is no attempt,” answered Curtiss; “there is merely a pretence,—a pretence that, strangely enough, isn’t meant to deceive any one. We find it in the naïve untruthfulness of the college papers, in the eloquent conventionality of the Class Day Orators; the college press prattles about ‘class feeling’ and all the other feelings that none of us, since the place has grown so large, has ever felt; the orator’s sentiments bear about the same relation to real life that his gestures do: he has a lot to say about everybody’s sitting together at the feet of the Alma Mater; but he doesn’t dwell at all on those of us who have been cuddled in her lap. That’s what I mean when I say the place is consistently ‘American.’” Curtiss got up and took a meditative turn about the room. “The undergraduate body faithfully reproduces, in little, the social orders of the whole country, and not only never formally recognises their existence, but takes occasion, every now and then, somewhat elaborately, to deny it,—a proceeding that of course doesn’t change any one’s position or make any one happier. ‘Fine words,’ indeed, never ‘buttered the parsnips’ of so sophisticated a crowd as you discover at Harvard; but if an American community finds it impossible, by reason of all the thousand and one artificial conditions that make such things impossible, to be ‘free and equal,’ what is left for the distracted concern to do, but flaunt its freedom and its equality, from time to time, in theory?”

“It’s all wrong then—frightfully wrong,” declared Hewitt, with considerable heat. He had been increasingly irritated through the calm progress of Curtiss’s discourse, and now stood with his back to the fire-place, staring fixedly before him,—a spirited figure of protest. “We’re too young at college for that kind of rot,” he went on emphatically; “where, in the name of Heaven, can a fellow expect square treatment, if it isn’t right here among what, just now, you scornfully called ‘a multitude of lusty young men’? They ought to be too young and too lusty and too good fellows to care—even to know about—about—all that.” His words tumbled out noisily, and had the effect of noticeably increasing Robinson’s deliberateness.

“The situation would be in no way remarkable, if it were not for just that fact,—our extreme youth.” 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. The only wonder is that we should have found them so soon. What makes people’s hair stand on end is that young America should begin to classify himself so instinctively—the crystallisation of the social idea seems, to put it mildly, a trifle premature. But”—Curtiss’s shrug comprehended many things—“what are you going to do about it?”

The question was perfectly general in intention, and might have ended the discussion had not Hewitt regarded it as the natural expression of Curtiss’s interest in his ambitions for a more diverting existence.

“And yet, after all, I am a gentleman as well as they,” he said simply.

There was something exquisitely intelligible to the graduate in the very vagueness of the boy’s pronoun. “They,”—he too, in the early forlornness of his college life, had been eagerly aware of them,—the great creatures, who, for some reason or other (not always a transparent one), seemed to emerge with such enviable distinction from the vast mediocrity of the crowd; “They” who put on astonishing black coats and spent Sunday afternoon in town; “They” who so frequently wore little crimson usher’s badges at the games, and bowed to so many of the attractive people they showed to their seats; “They” who, fine shouldered and brown from rowing on the crews, seemed to endure their education with such splendid listlessness; “They” whom he had so often heard rattling into the suburban stillness of Cambridge just before dawn, from some fine dance in town. How unmistakable they were in the class-room, at a football game, the theatre,—everywhere; how instinctively they seemed to know one another, and how inevitably they came to be felt in every class as something, if not exactly apart, at least aloof. Curtiss stared musingly at the fire a moment, and smiled as he recalled the various trivial circumstances that, in his own case, gradually, and with none of the excitement of a conscious transition, had brought about the substitution of a perfectly natural, matter-of-fact “We,” for the once tacitly understood but exasperating “They.” For a moment he thought of asking Hewitt to explain himself; he had a freakish desire to see the fellow flounder in the effort to be clear, without becoming pitifully transparent; however, he thought better of it, and only answered with some impatience,—

“Of course you’re as much of a gentleman as any one; but that—except very, very superficially—isn’t the question.” Curtiss was beginning to feel like a hoary old oracle. “There’s nothing strange or tragic in your situation; it’s shared by lots of other fellows in college,” he went on; “you slipped into Harvard as soon as your tutor thought you were ready to, and, as you came from a rather obscure place, you slipped in quite alone. A year and a half have dragged themselves through the vagaries of the Cambridge climate; you are still, broadly speaking, quite alone. Yet all this time you have been sensitive—keenly so—to the life that is being lived everywhere around you, and you begin to feel about as essential to the drama as a freshman does when he puts on a somewhat soiled court costume and assists Sir Henry Irving in one of his interesting productions. 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. If they perform well, we applaud them. At Harvard, athletics are occasionally a means to a man’s becoming identified with the sort of people he wishes to be one of; but I have never known them to be an end. Finally, you are not a Bostonian, and when I say ‘a Bostonian,’”—Curtiss removed his glasses and softly polished them with his handkerchief,—“when I say ‘a Bostonian,’” he repeated with the gentlest of satire, “I mean of course a Bostonian that one knows.”

“Now, although you are doubtless a great many interesting and attractive things, you do not happen to be any one of those I have just named; and it is from the men who are, that the crowd destined to be of importance in college—the fellows who are going to lead, who are going to be felt—whatever you choose to call it—will generally originate. Think of your own class for a moment, and, nine times out of ten, the men that you feel would be congenial as well as interesting, if you knew them, are taken from the sort of men I’ve specified.”

“Nine times out of ten!” Hewitt laughed hopelessly, “who the devil is the tenth man?”

“Why, you are, of course,—or you will be,” said Curtiss, gaily. “I was myself, once upon a time. It’s good fun too; my little ‘boom’ was a trifle belated—the tenth man’s usually is; but it only seems to make the more noise for going off all by itself; while it lasts you almost feel as if people were being superlatively nice to you in order to make up for lost time. Nine times out of ten though”—the sweeping phrase was beginning to assume the dignity of a formula—“it’s the other way. The ‘tenth man’ at Harvard would never have escaped from his obscurity and comparative isolation to become the ‘tenth man,’ if it were not for something that seems very much like chance.”

“How is a fellow going to find his chance in a place like this?” Hewitt exclaimed scornfully. “Do you suppose, if I knew where to look for it, that I wouldn’t run out to meet it more than half way?”

“Unfortunately it’s the chances that usually seek the introduction,” answered Robinson, oracularly.

“You mean to say then, in all seriousness, that a man—a gentleman—who comes here as I did, has no reason to expect that, as a matter of course, his friends will be the kind of people he’s been used to at home; that instead of at once finding his own level, he has to sit twirling his thumbs and waiting for the improbable to happen—which it perhaps doesn’t do in the course of four years?” Hewitt was scornful, incredulous, defiant.

“He is at perfect liberty to hope,” said the graduate, quietly; “but I can’t see that he has the slightest reason to expect. As for ‘twirling his thumbs,’ I think he might be better employed if he spent his spare time in going in for foot-ball and glee clubs and the ‘Lampoon’ and the hundred yards’ dash, and all that sort of thing; they bring your name before the college public—make you known and definite, and in that way widen the possibilities.”

“Then I can’t see that college is very different from any place else—from the outside world,” said Hewitt, disappointedly. Curtiss had taken considerable pains to tell him as much some time before; but with Hewitt mere information frequently failed in its mission; he was the sort of person whom to convince, one was first obliged to ensnare into believing that he had arrived at conviction unaided.

“No, it isn’t different; that is to say, Harvard isn’t,” assented Curtiss; “except that it is smaller, younger and possesses its distinctly local atmosphere.”

“Then coming here, under certain circumstances, may be like going to a strange town and living in a hotel.”

“Both ventures have been known to resemble each other.”

“And it’s about as sensible to suppose that your fellow students are going to take any notice of you, as it would be to expect people you had never met to lean out of their front windows and ask you to dinner if you were to stroll down the Avenue some fine evening.” Hewitt’s manner had become grim and facetious.

“You seem to have grasped the elements of the situation,” said Curtiss.

“The system is certainly unique,” mused Hewitt.

“Yes,” answered Robinson, “other colleges have societies; whereas Harvard unquestionably has Society.”

“Do you consider the place snobbish then?” asked Horace.

The graduate thought a moment before answering. “I object to the word,” he said at last; “it’s as easy to say, as vague and denunciatory, as ‘vulgar’ or ‘selfish’ or any of those hardworked terms we apply to other people; you can only say that, making some necessary allowances for a few purely local customs, Harvard society is influenced, or guided, or governed, as you please to express it, by about the same conventions that obtain in other civilised communities. 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; a superficial inquiry into the shop and inn keeping antecedents of some of our most prominent and altogether charming brothers, smashes that little illusion. I’m not a sociologist, and I don’t pretend to know what constitutes society with a big S—to put it vulgarly—here or any place else. 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. You all find out the truth of this, sooner or later. Then if you haven’t a good time, I suppose you can go away and call the place snobbish—lots of people do.”

“I don’t think that’s my style exactly, and I wish you wouldn’t take that tone about it. I want to know fellows, of course: fellows like Philip Haydock and Endicott Davis and Philip Irving and ‘Peter’ Bradley and Sherman and Prescott,” said Hewitt, frankly, naming six of the most prominent men in his class; “but I can’t imagine myself thinking worse of any of them if—if—”

“If you never do get to know them,” Curtiss broke in; “if your chance fails to materialise—if, after all, you are not the ‘tenth man.’” He got up as if to leave.

“I wish you wouldn’t go,” said the other, earnestly; “there ’re lots of things I want to ask you about. What have men like Bradley and Davis ever done here to be what they are?” he went on hurriedly.

“Ask me something hard,” laughed Curtiss, giving Hewitt his overcoat to hold for him. “They haven’t ‘done’ anything,” he continued, struggling into his sleeves; “I don’t suppose they would know how to. Fellows like Bradley and Davis simply arrive at Harvard when they are due, to fill, in their characteristic way, the various pleasant places that have been waiting the last two hundred and fifty years for them. From the little I’ve seen of them, I should say that these particular two happen to be the kind it would be a pleasure to know anywhere, which isn’t always the case with the ‘Bradleys’ and the ‘Davises’ of college. So, of course, you want to know them,” he ended, emphatically. “What we’ve been calling your ‘chance’ literally consists in fellows like these holding out their hands and saying simply, ‘Come and see me.’” As Curtiss said this, he impressively extended his own hand; Hewitt shook it, absently, and began with some abruptness to talk of other things.

He was, all at once, exceedingly glad that his guest was saying good-night. It was a positive relief to hear his footsteps resounding in the long corridor outside, and to feel the slight tremor of the building as the massive front door closed with a thump; for Curtiss had become, although perhaps unwillingly, that most objectionable person, the recipient of one’s impulsive confidence.

After he had gone, Hewitt stood a moment, looking undecidedly at the glass clock on his mantelpiece. It was long after midnight, and he was in the state of mind when even the oblivion of bed is numbered among sweet but unattainable ambitions. He was tired of his own room; the good taste that had been expended on it had, of late, begun to strike him as inexpressibly futile. Yet there was scarcely any one on whom he could drop in, even at a reasonable time of night, with the objectless familiarity of college intercourse, to say nothing of calling out under a lighted window in the small hours of the morning. He, of course, belonged to no college club, so his evening expeditions were of necessity limited by the theatres in town, or the listless thoroughfares of Cambridge. He often took long, aimless strolls through streets he barely looked at, and whose names he didn’t know. It was with the intention of walking now, that he put on a cap, turned out the lights, and left his room.

The season was that which precedes the first atmospheric intimations of spring. The snow had gone, and the ground was dry, and everything that was shabby and stark and colourless in Cambridge was admitting its inestimable obligation in the past to the loveliness of foliage. There was little of the sympathetic mystery of night in the long street in which Hewitt found himself on leaving his building; its lines of irregular wooden houses, aggressive with painty reflections of the dazzling arc-lights swung at intervals overhead, stretched away in distinct and uninviting perspective. Except where the gaslit sidestreets yawned murkily down to the river, Cambridge was hideous in the rectilinear nakedness of March. The university town is, as a rule, so very still after twelve o’clock that its occasional sounds come to have an individuality to one who prowls about, that the sounds of day do not possess. Intent as he was in pondering over the disheartening things Curtiss had been saying to him, Hewitt’s ears were keen, as he sauntered up the street with his hands in his pockets, to all the night noises he had learned to know so well. A student in a ground-floor room ablaze with light was reading aloud. Horace stopped a moment, and laughed at the sleepy voice droning wearily through the open window,—some one was taking his education hard. A policeman, half a block ahead of him, was advancing slowly down the street by a series of stealthy disappearances into shadowed doorways; Hewitt could hear him rattle the doorknobs before he emerged again to glitter a moment under the electric light; a car that had left town at half-past twelve was thumping faintly along somewhere between Boston and the Square—it might have been a great distance away, so intensely still was the intervening suburb; and through all the flat, silent streets the night air, cool and pungent with the damp of salt marshes, blew gently up from the Charles and intensified the atmosphere of emptiness.

Naturally enough, Hewitt’s sense of isolation was far less on these solitary rambles of his, than when he jostled elbows in crowded class-rooms with fellows who, he felt, were potentially his friends, at the same time that he was realising how utterly excluded he was from their schemes of life. Morbidness was foreign to a nature like his; and yet, as time went on, he had been forced to regard Cambridge as most satisfactory when deserted and asleep. It was only then that the forlorn feeling of being no essential part of his surroundings often left him; and although he recognised the weakness of strolling away from unpleasant truths, the altogether unlooked-for state of affairs at college had cowed him into temporary helplessness. That this furtive condition was temporary, even he himself was in a measure aware; one cannot but feel at college that after a certain time has passed, one’s fellows, in spite of the plasticity of youth, become, if not solid, at least viscous, in the moulds that have received them. There is an uneasy period of ebullition in which boys try very hard to enjoy the things that they do, in the absence of the self-poise that enables them to do what they eventually find they enjoy. Intimacies are formed and broken; habits are acquired and not broken; there is a weighing and a levelling, and at last, toward the end of one’s sophomore year, almost everybody has been made or marred or overlooked.

It was an intuition of something of this kind that led Hewitt, in his more thoughtful moods, to realise that he was having his worst time now. The great, ill-assorted crowd that technically composed his “class” would shift and change and finally become, not satisfied, perhaps, with the various combinations it had evolved, but certainly used to them. After that, life at Harvard, Hewitt told himself, would be simplified for him; the time for identifying one’s self with the companions of one’s choice would have come and gone; he would find himself standing alone. His future development would not be just what he had expected; but there was peace in the thought that his position would be definite, unalterable, and then, after all, he would be standing, and not running away, as in the past year he had been so often tempted to do. Although anything but a student, he could even fancy himself ploughing doggedly in self-defence through an incredible number of courses in history, or some such subject, and at the end pleasing his family with two or three Latin words of a laudatory nature on his degree. Hewitt was too thinking and too just a person not to have frequently contrasted his own condition with that of fellows one occasionally heard about, who starved their way through college on sums that would have made scarcely an impression on his room-rent; their persistent “sandiness” compelled his admiration; more than once he had given substantial expression to it. But it was at best a very theoretical sort of consolation that came from a knowledge of the depressing fact that many of his most deserving classmates neither ate nor bathed. His unhappiness differed in kind, but not in reality.

Although he appreciated how easy and foolish it was to assume the “chance” the graduate had dwelt on with such apparent authority, and then let loose an imagination that had been nourished for so long on nothing more satisfying than itself, he, nevertheless, could not help projecting himself into some of the delightful possibilities of that chance. As he loafed through sleeping Cambridge, he pictured himself under a variety of circumstances playing parts neither fanciful nor egoistic, but strikingly unlike the one he had been cast for. The common-place incident of being joined in the College Yard by two or three friends on their way to the same lecture, made his heart beat faster to think of; the thought of starting off for an evening in town with a crowd of fellows—like those talkative groups he so often saw after dinner, waiting impatiently on the corner for a bridge car—stirred him to a mild, pleasant sort of excitement. He even held imaginary conversations with Haydock and Davis and Bradley and the rest of them, in which he modestly refrained from saying all the good things,—conversations in which these classmates of his emerged, became individuals, and for an hour seemed glad to be numbered among Hewitt’s acquaintance. With his exhaustive knowledge of what might happen to a boy at college, he liked to imagine himself in the position where friends and influence are synonymous, constantly keeping fresh the memory of his own dreary experience, and taking infinite joy in quietly extricating others from a similar one.

When Hewitt returned to Claverly by a circuitous way through the College Yard, and out again into the empty triangular Square, he found a dumpy, patient-looking herdic cab drawn up to the curbstone. The driver had tucked away his money somewhere in the region of his portly waist, and was pulling his coat over the spot, preparatory to mounting the box. But the tall young man in evening dress, who apparently had just paid him, had not yet turned to pass through the brightly lighted doorway. 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. Horace scarcely knew why he himself lingered over an affair so personal and so manifestly not his own. He found justification for his curiosity, however,—although it was characteristic neither of his college nor himself,—when the object of it started slowly and aimlessly down the street, leaving his overcoat on the bricks, where it had dropped.

The garment was a light, slender thing, and as Horace hung it over his arm and smoothed its soft lining with his fingers, he wondered more what its wearer was like, than what he should do with it. It was easy enough to keep the coat in his room until—as was sure to happen—an advertisement, somewhat vague as to where the article had been lost, appeared in the “Harvard Crimson,” or he might restore it at once to its owner, who by this time had stopped undecidedly in the black shadow on the nearest street-corner. There was something companionable in the way the coat clung to his arm, that made him wish to keep it a little longer; but he ended by doing the simpler thing.

“Isn’t this your overcoat?” he said, walking up to the sharp line of shadow on the other side of which the shirt bosom and face of the drunken student showed faintly. Hewitt broke the pause that followed by repeating his question.

“Oh, how good of you! I had half decided to go after it,” came from the darkness in an astonishingly clear, fresh voice, whose convincing mastery of the first letter of the alphabet left little doubt as to its possessor’s birthplace. Had not the words been said with a formality that, under the circumstances, was absurd, Hewitt would have felt that he misjudged the man’s condition.

“Don’t mind me, really, I’m very, very tight.” It was impossible to misconstrue this statement, or the wild, exultant over-emphasis with which the final word was declaimed. Hewitt laughed.

“Oh, are you?” he answered, adding, “well, here’s your overcoat,” as if these two facts existed only in conjunction.

The man in the shadow veered suddenly from the wall he had been leaning against into the light; and Horace—seeing him distinctly for the first time—realised that it was his classmate, Bradley. Coming immediately after the talk with Curtiss, this meeting was startling to Horace. It seemed almost prearranged. He gently forced Bradley to take the overcoat, said good-night, and turned to walk away.

“Don’t go to bed! Oh, don’t go to bed!” pleaded Bradley, in a sort of engaging whimper. His clutch at Hewitt’s shoulder might have been either a gesture of entreaty or a measure of safety. “It’s early—awf’ly early. The longer you stay up in Cambridge the earlier it gets; and the sparrows walk all over Mount Auburn Street in the morning and sing,—corking big ones, like ostriches,—seen them lots of times. Don’t go to bed!”

“I’m afraid I must,” said Horace, looking gravely into his classmate’s large, kindly eyes, that swam helplessly, and focussed nothing. Bradley took possession of Hewitt’s other shoulder; then, in the intimate confidential tone that for so long had ceased to exist for Horace, he said, “I don’t want to go to bed—come on!”

The invitation, though as to form rather indefinite, was most sincere. There was distinctly some sort of an intention in Bradley’s wish to have the other man “Come on;” he spoke as if he already had expressed it. Hewitt, scanning his drawn face, and then lowering his glance to the snowy shirt-bosom, tried hard to find out, without asking, exactly where “on” was. Of course, any proposition from the fellow just then might be, in a general way, safely interpreted, “More drinks;” instinct told Horace that. But beyond this broad point of departure, along what lines did the amiable tipsy young person intend to proceed? He was becoming every moment more demonstrative, more insistent, and by reason of his condition, rather than in spite of it, more irresistible. Was he going back to town? Did he have some stuff in his own room? Or had he, perhaps, reached the stage that plans nothing more elaborate than the primitive, genial pastime of lurching, arm in arm, along the streets and making a noise? Bradley suddenly answered the unput questions by suggesting ways and means.

“We can wait until somebody comes out in a cab, and go back in it; done it lots of times.” He gave Hewitt a little urging shake.

“Why, you’ve just come from town about a minute ago!” Horace’s attempt to back gently from under his friend’s nervous hands was a failure. Bradley gave him the long, wise look of one whose mind is blank, until a slow sort of inspiration enabled him to exclaim,—

“Well, you can’t stay in there all alone, can you? “—a very telling bit of argument. “I came out here to get you; that’s why I came out.”

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! You would, would you?”

“Get off my stomach, Bradley, you hurt me.”

“You would break away, would you?” The robust emphasis of the remark pounded a painful staccato grunt out of Hewitt’s vitals.

“Please let me up!” It took a good deal of self-control to put it just that way; Hewitt had bumped his head, and was beginning to feel the cool bricks against his back.

“Oh, I don’t know,” mused Bradley, airily; “‘you’re not the only pebble on the beach.’” Then, after a silence, in which the man under him tried to rest his head more comfortably, “Will you be good? Do you know—I don’t think I can trust you! If I let you up, will you do what I want you to?”

“We’ll talk it over,” the other conceded.

They scrambled to their feet; Hewitt brushed himself off with his cap. Had both men been sober, they would have looked at each other a moment, and laughed. Under the circumstances, the situation was grotesque enough to seem quite natural to Bradley.

“Come on,” he said; “now we’ll go to town. Oh, my hat! where’s my hat—and my coat!” He cursed, as he looked about him,—an amiable, ingenuous ripple of blasphemy, as harmless in intention and as cheerfully spoken as a bit of verse.

A returning cab swung round the corner. Bradley sauntered into the middle of the street to stop it. The manner in which all idea of hat and coat passed from his mind made Hewitt think of a round-eyed baby absently letting drop the toy that has been thrust into its convulsive little fist. To Horace the cab was an unwelcome intrusion. He thought it foretold complications, and perhaps a scene. For he had decided, beyond the probability of changing his mind, that he would not spend the rest of the night in Boston with his exhilarated classmate. A nicer reticence than the simple one of moral scruples kept him from carousing with his new acquaintance. He shrank from taking advantage of this chance—so accidental, so far-fetched—of impressing himself on the one fellow in his class whose friendship, more than any other, he coveted. The proceeding, he felt, would be a somewhat thick-skinned one. There was something in the idea, not quite like winning a drunken man’s money at cards, but suggestive of it. “Peter” Bradley symbolised to Hewitt an entire chapter of Harvard life. To-night, Horace felt, in coming so unexpectedly on one with whom he existed in all the intimacy of the imagination, as if he had been caught surreptitiously reading the chapter in manuscript.

He went out where Bradley was talking earnestly to the cab-driver.

“Let’s not go to town, Bradley,” he said, yawning. “It’s so far and chilly and everything.” Quickly, as if inspired by a new and daring thought, he grasped the boy by the wrist, and exclaimed enthusiastically, “I’ll tell you what we’ll do—we’ll stay in Cambridge!”

“By Heaven, I’ll go you! Eh-h-h-h-h-h—we’ll stay in Cambridge! we’ll stay in Cambridge!” He danced all over the street in a frenzy of mirth and movement, singing again and again, “We’ll stay in Cambridge! we’ll stay in Cambridge! we’ll stay in Cambridge!” while Hewitt said, “Good-night—sorry he troubled you,” to the cabman. A voice from one of the small wooden houses that basks in the shadow of Claverly, yelled, “Oh, shut tup!” very peevishly, just as Bradley threw himself at Horace with a prolonged meaningless scream.

“What do you think you’d like to do now?” asked Hewitt, after a moment, bracing himself to support his burden.

“Wait till I get my breath, and we’ll do—everything,” panted the burden. It laughed hysterical, extremely silly little laughs. Then solemnly, soberly, Bradley led the way to the curbstone. “Come over here—I want to talk to you; sit down,” he said. “Will you wait here and not let a sparrow get by—not a single one—while I dash across and find something to drink?”

“It’s getting cold, Bradley; how long will you be?”

“You won’t know I’ve been gone, I’ll be so quick.” He was off,—half way across the street like a skittish young animal,—then tip-toeing back, stealthy, furtive, mysterious. He crouched by the man on the curbstone, and with his mouth close to Hewitt’s ear whispered earnestly:—

“If I tell you something, will you promise not to tell? It’s a secret, you know.”

“I don’t think you’d better,” gravely.

“I must,—it’s killing me.”

Horace looked to see if the fellow was crying.

“I’ll never repeat it to any one,” he promised.

“It’s awful,—horrible,” moaned Bradley, drawing closer to Hewitt, and putting his arms round him. “It’s this,” he sobbed; “I don’t believe in either Space or Time.” He was gone again, with a backward spring that sent the other sprawling. Horace sat up and watched the boy dart across to an opposite house, fumble a moment at the door, and disappear with a slam. Instantly every window upstairs and down glowed yellow. The noise of a piano, slapped pettishly from bass to treble by an open palm, came over to the young man who sat thinking on the curbstone.

What he thought was just about what any other normal person, under the same circumstances, would have thought. He wondered how long it would be before Peter came back; what they would do when he did come back; and where that night was leading. It might take him, Horace, far,—almost anywhere,—away from himself, to a troop of friends, to the club across the street. Or it might leave him at night’s ordinary destination. But whatever the end, the beginning was his opening, his chance. It had pranced at him in the guise of a crazy, faunlike, drunken thing; thanks to Curtiss, he had recognised it.

He tried to picture to himself the inside of the club house, over whose charmed threshold his friend had just plunged. He also marvelled a moment at the vagaries of inebriety; it was curious, for instance, that any one so far gone—so driven by every whimsical, erratic impulse as Bradley—should give heed to the etiquette that did not permit him to take into the club a man who had no club of his own. How artful the youth must have thought himself, when he left Horace behind, ostensibly to detain any large imaginary sparrows that might pass that way. Hewitt had begun to hope that the drink Bradley brought back might be beer, when the windows opposite blackened, the door slammed, and the boy came toward him once more. His expedition had not been in vain; in one hand he carried a pompous looking bottle, in the other some glasses that clinked cheerfully as he walked. From under one of his arms a second bottle aimed at Hewitt like a small piece of artillery.

“Unload me. That one’s burgundy; look out, don’t spill it, I pulled the cork. The other’s fizz. These are glasses. Got a knife?—cut the wires.” Bradley sat down on the curbstone.

“This looks as if we were going to see the sunrise,” said Hewitt, opening his penknife.

“I’d rather wait till hell freezes over; seen the other thing lots of times.” He filled a long glass more than half full of burgundy, and guzzled it. “Ugh—what belly wash—hot as tea.”

“That’s what you get for looking on the wine when it’s red. Here—try this.” Hewitt handed the other glass. It foamed at the edges.

“I could die drinking this stuff,” said Bradley, fervently.

“You probably will—here, give me some.” Horace with difficulty got possession of the glass, and held it to his lips. Bradley amused himself by wiping his wet hands in his friend’s hair.

They sat there until Peter had managed to drink and spill the contents 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,—