Chapter IV (4)

The big Prescott, however, became the real problem, around which the others were as mere corollaries. It was he who managed, in his “artless Japanese way,” as the fellows used to call it, to crystallise the situation, to bring it to a pass where Thorn’s rather unmanly sentimentality found itself confronted by something more definite and disturbing than merely the vanishing point of youth. Prescott accomplished this very simply, by doing the poorest kind of work--no work at all, in fact--in the course he was taking from Thorn. Barely, and by the grace of the instructor, had he scraped through the first examination in November. Since then he had rested calmly, like a great monolith, on his laurels. He went to Thorn’s lectures only after intervals of absence that made his going at all a farce. He ignored the written work of the course, and the reports on outside reading, with magnificent completeness. Altogether, he behaved as he wouldn’t have behaved had he ever for a moment considered Thorn in any light other than that of an instructor, an officer of the college, a creature to whom deference--servility, almost--was due when he was compelled to talk to him, but to whom all obligation ended there. His attitude was not an unusual one among college “men” who have not outgrown the school idea, but the attendant circumstances were. For Thorn’s concern over Prescott’s indifference to the course was aroused by a strong personal attachment, one in which an ordinary professorial interest had nothing to do. He smarted at his failure to attract the boy sufficiently to draw him to his lectures; yet he looked with a sort of panic toward the approaching day when he should be obliged, in all conscience, to flunk him in the midyear examination. He admired Prescott, as little, intelligent men sometimes do admire big, stupid ones. He idealised him, and even went the length, one afternoon when taking a walk with Haydock, of telling the senior that under Prescott’s restful, olympic exterior he thought there lurked a soul. To which Haydock had answered with asperity, “Well, I hope so, I’m sure,” and let the subject drop. Later in the walk, Haydock announced, irrelevantly, and with a good deal of vigour, that if he ever made or inherited millions, he would establish a chair in the university, call it the “Haydock Professorship of Common Sense,” and respectfully suggest to the President and Faculty that the course be made compulsory.

Thorn would have spoken to the soulful Prescott,--told him gently that he didn’t seem to be quite in sympathy with the work of the course,--if Prescott had condescended to go to his lectures in the six or seven weeks between the end of the Christmas recess and the examination period. But Prescott cut Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, at half-past two o’clock, with a regularity that, considered as regularity, was admirable. Toward the last, he did drop in every now and then, sit near the door, and slip out again before the hour was ended. This was just after he had been summoned by the Recorder to the Office for “cutting.” Thorn never got a chance to speak to him. He might have approached the boy at the club; but the instructor shrank from taking advantage of his connection with that place to make a delicate official duty possible. He had all along avoided “shop” there so elaborately,--had made so light of it when the subject had come up,--that he couldn’t bring himself at that late day to arise, viper like, from the hearthstone and smite. A note of warning would have had to be light, facetious, and consequently without value, in order not to prove a very false and uncalled for note indeed. The ready coöperation of the Dean, Thorn refrained from calling on; he was far from wishing to get Prescott into difficulties.

By the time the examination day arrived, the instructor was in a state of turmoil that in ordinary circumstances would have been excessive and absurd. In the case of Thorn, it was half pathetic, half contemptible. He knew that in spite of Prescott’s soul (a superabundance of soul is, as a matter of fact, a positive hindrance in passing examinations), the boy would do wretchedly. To give him an E--the lowest possible mark, always excepting, of course, the jocose and sarcastic F--would be to bring upon himself Prescott’s everlasting anger and “despision.” Of this Thorn was sure. Furthermore, the mark would not tend to make the instructor wildly popular at the club; for although everybody was willing to concede that Prescott was not a person of brilliant mental attainments, he was very much beloved. One hears a good deal about the “rough justice of boys.” Thorn knew that such a thing existed, and did not doubt but that, in theory, he would be upheld by the members of the club if he gave Prescott an E, and brought the heavy hand of the Office down on him. But the justice of boys, he reflected, was, after all, rough; it would acknowledge his right to flunk Prescott, perhaps, and, without doubt, hate him cordially for doing it. Thorn’s aversion to being hated was almost morbid.

If, on the other hand, he let the boy through,--gave him, say, the undeserved and highly respectable mark of C,--well, that would be tampering dishonestly with the standards of the college, gross injustice to the rest of the students, injurious to the self-respect of the instructor, and a great many other objectionable things, too numerous to mention. Altogether, Thorn was in a “state of mind.” He began to understand something of the fine line that separates instructor from instructed, on whose other side neither may trespass.

When at length the morning of the examination had come and gone, and Thorn was in his own room at his desk with the neat bundle of blue-covered books before him, in which the examinations are written, it was easy enough to make up his mind. He knew that the question of flunking or passing Prescott admitted of no arguments whatever. The boy’s work in the course failed to present the tiniest loophole in the way of “extenuating circumstances,” and Prescott had capped the climax of his past record that morning by staying in the examination-room just an hour and a quarter of the three hours he was supposed to be there. That alone was equivalent to failure in a man of Prescott’s denseness. Not to give Prescott a simple and unadorned E would be holding the pettiest of personal interests higher than one’s duty to the college. There was no other way of looking at it. And Thorn, whose mind was perfectly clear on this point, deliberately extricated Prescott’s book from the blue pile on his desk, dropped it carelessly--without opening it--into the glowing coals of his fireplace, and entered the boy’s midyear mark in the records as C.

No lectures are given in the college during the midyears. Men who are 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:--

“He’s really talented, in a singularly offensive way.” But the words sounded amiable rather than otherwise, for, on the whole, Beverly liked to be teased by the fellows. Some of them were clever at it--Billy especially. It pleased Beverly to think it was the little penalty he paid for being mature enough to know definitely what did and didn’t amuse him, and to act accordingly. He was sincere in his dislike of Class Day, and didn’t intend to go near it. He objected to having the Yard enclosed in Christmas-trees and festooned with paper lanterns,--to its “pretending to be a beer garden with Hamlet left out.” He considered it undignified to throw open the University to a rabble of women, to invite them to “kick up their heels” in Memorial Hall, and see them described in the evening papers as “Harvard’s Fair Invaders.” During breakfast, he enlarged on these views to a scornful audience that finally arose in its might, tore off his necktie, ruined his coiffure, threw him out of the club into his cab, and then retreated and locked itself in. Even this didn’t make Beverly really angry, he was used to differences of opinion followed by popular uprisings.

He had intended to say good-bye to Cambridge the next morning, and take the one-o’clock train for New York. But the next morning, after breakfasting at the Holly Tree,--there is no place else to breakfast on Class Day except the Oak Grove, and Beverly disliked the high stools of that place and the condescending services of the dethroned empresses who wait on one there,--he found it was too late to catch the one o’clock without more effort than he was able to make on so warm a day. So, in a moment of tolerance induced perhaps by the realisation that this was, after all, “good-bye,” he strolled over to the Yard.

The exercises in Sanders Theatre had just ended, and the “fair invaders” were beginning to invade by the hundreds. They streamed in brilliant procession along the walks, and swarmed over the shady lawns,--glorified groups of summer millinery, trailing after them the pale pink odour of sachet powder and blond hair. They took possession of the parapet of Matthews, the chairs and benches and doorsteps in front of Hollis and Stoughton and Holworthy, stretching the length of the Yard in a many coloured border that resembled the horticultural orgies of the Public Garden. Celestial companies of maidens in diaphanous drapery floated past Beverly, in the wake of panting but determined ladies richly upholstered.

“‘On, on to the Pudding spread,
My daughters must be--shall be fed,’”

the leaders seemed to say, as they elbowed through the crowd at the exit. Seniors in fluttering gowns and wilted collars, with proud mothers and satisfied fathers and eager sisters and observant aunts, seniors with one another, and lonely, unattached seniors Beverly had never seen before, who looked as if they didn’t quite know whether they were enjoying themselves or not, sauntered by, mopping their foreheads. The Yard was alive, not with the customary sprinkling of business-like young men hastening, note-book in hand, to lectures, but with a riot of colour, a swishing of skirts, a vague, babbling gaiety that rose in places to an acute trebleness. And there was the smell of festivity in the hot air,--a smell of pine branches and Chinese lanterns.

Beverly walked once around the Yard, staring severely at the various factors of the gigantic picnic, and was passing Matthews on his way out, when a sudden gust of wind blew a newspaper from the lap of a woman seated on the steps of the building. He strolled after it until it stopped flapping over the grass, picked it up, and, hat in hand, returned it to its owner. He had no difficulty in identifying the lady, although she was one of many resting on the steps, for she waved the remaining sheets of the paper at him as he approached, and smiled largely.

“I never was so embarrassed,” she declared, beaming up at him.

“There is no need to be, I assure you,” said Beverly, with a little bow.

“Oh, but I am--you know I am,” she continued archly. Beverly would have walked on, had not the strange woman suddenly leaned forward,--still looking up at him,--with the air of one about to impart a confidence. The action would have made retreat at that moment rather rude, or at least abrupt, so the senior hesitated deferentially, and returned her look by one of inquiry.

She was a stout, middle-aged woman with short, curly, dark hair. Her upturned face was round, red, unlined, and perspiring. She wore a black-satin skirt, under which Beverly could see her low shoes of yellow leather resting firmly, with their toes well turned out, on the step below. Where black skirt and white linen shirt-waist met, a crimson belt circumscribed her buxomness as with a band of flame. Under one of her chins perched a crimson cravat of another shade; and a crimson ribbon repeated the note in a tiny sailor hat that was almost upside down with coquetry. On her lap lay a red fan of the circular kind that appears and disappears at the pull of a silken cord. 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. “Oh, and this is my ticket to Poughkeepsie!” She unfolded a long strip of green pasteboard. “I’m going to be at that race; oh, I’m going to be there! You see--I’m a regular Harvard girl.”

“And what can I do for you?” asked Beverly, politely.

“I hate to trouble you,” she said, almost diffidently; “but I’m so afraid of missing something. If you would explain the tickets to me--tell me of the gates to which they are the key; if you would be so good--and I know you will be. _Ah--je connais mes âmes._” Her eyelids fluttered up, then down. She pressed the tickets into Beverly’s hand. The senior, somewhat astonished, explained their respective uses as rapidly as possible.

“And now the invitation to Beck Hall; you’ve forgotten that,” she said, with a little side glance of reproach.

“Why, it’s just an invitation to a spread,--a sort of garden party. You go there any time after the Tree exercises,” explained Beverly.

“Ah--but that’s not all,” said the lady.

“If she only wouldn’t look at me that way,” thought Beverly.

“I have a cousin,” she went on, “the dearest boy in all the world. Look--this is he.” Beverly, with a slight feeling of apprehension, followed her stubby finger down the first column of names engraved on the invitation, until it stopped at “William Paxton Fields.”

“Do you know him?” she asked. Beverly wavered a moment; he felt what was coming.

“Yes, I know Fields,” he said, restraining a panic-stricken impulse to dart away in the crowd.

“I felt that you did--something told me. He’s a dear boy, isn’t he?”

“He’s a very good fellow,” replied Beverly.

“Ah, I like that,” she said heartily, straightening her dumpy shoulders and expanding her chest with enthusiasm. “I love the way you great, loyal college men stand up for each other. It’s beautiful. Now I must find him,” she went on rapidly, with a keen sense of opportunity, “and tell him I’m here--give myself over to him. He lives--where does he live?” For his own sake, Beverly would have cheerfully told her that he didn’t know, or that Billy had moved, or that he didn’t have a room at all; but he hesitated to separate Billy from his family, when a word might unite them, so he said:--

“He rooms in Claverly Hall; but I doubt if you can find him there now.”

“But we can try,” she exclaimed with eager optimism. “Which is Claverly?” she looked blandly up and down the Yard.

“It isn’t here; it’s down there on Mt. Auburn Street.” Beverly indicated the direction.

“Not on the ‘campus’? Oh, dear!” said Billy’s cousin. There was dismay in her tone and on her broad disc of a face.

“No; but it’s very easy to find. Anybody will show you,” Beverly answered. He thought it was an excellent moment in which to bow himself away.

“Anybody?” she said softly, transfixing him with one of her oblique leers. She was a terribly arch woman.

Her kinship with Fields, and the assumable respectability that went with it, together with her abandoned trust in Harvard chivalry, didn’t make her any less awful in Beverly’s eyes. They were merely the complement of her already well-developed genius for imposition; they made her impossible to evade,--a something inevitable.

“I’m sure he won’t be there now,” repeated Beverly, helplessly. “We’re all so busy to-day; we haven’t a moment to ourselves,” he added furtively.

“Yes, yes, I know,” assented Billy’s cousin; “but it’s my only way to find him before evening. I can leave my card and arrange a rendezvous. I wouldn’t interfere with his plans for the world; I have a horror of being a burden. I’m such a perfectly independent little body!” She arose and gave Beverly the fan with the gesture of a lady fair bestowing her colours upon a knight who yearned. “Is it far?” she asked.

“No,” answered Beverly, shortly. “It isn’t far.”

“Then let us saunter--oh, so slowly--and drink it in.” She closed her eyes and breathed as one overcome by the sensuous beauty of the surroundings.

“I’m afraid I shall have to hurry,” said the senior, with unmistakable decision. He looked at his watch ostentatiously. “I’m going away, and I have to pack.” She ignored the suggestion.

“Which of these mellow, world-old buildings do you live in?” she asked dreamily, stopping in the path.

“I don’t live in any of them,” said Beverly. He was extremely angry.

“Recluse,” she murmured.

It was irritating enough, Beverly thought, to be inveigled into towing the fatuous old frump through the public streets; but the thought that his acquaintance with the lady might not end at Claverly was maddening. Billy wouldn’t be there, of course; and it was impossible to put an unattached female cousin into his room and leave her. That particular quarter of town was not, as a rule, the most decorous on Class Day. There is always more or less, what is technically known as “trouble” in Claverly and its vicinity on Class Day afternoon. It takes the harmless form of young men with wisps of pink mosquito netting in their buttonholes, to whom the world for the time being is not such a dreary place after all; or perhaps it merely consists of innocently garbed swimming parties running foot races down the long corridors on their way to the tank. But at any rate Beverly hesitated to turn Billy’s cousin adrift there. It would be difficult to explain his having done so to Billy. He meant to abandon her somewhere and quickly, but not there.

They passed out of the crowded Yard. In his earnest desire to reach Claverly without delay, Beverly thoughtlessly turned into Holyoke Street. It was thronged with carriages and summery looking girls making for a common objective point, half-way down on the left-hand side. He didn’t realise his mistake in having chosen that particular route until it was too late.

“How allegro life is,” remarked his companion.

“It’s very warm,” answered Beverly, increasing his pace.

“Cynic,” was the reply. Beverly stared straight ahead, but he knew the sort of expression that had accompanied the imputation.

“They all seem to be going in there,” said Billy’s cousin, stopping on the curbstone opposite the Pudding building. “What is it?”

“That? Oh, somebody’s spread, I suppose.” Beverly went on a step or two; but his companion didn’t follow him. Just then a lady with two girls bowed to him from a victoria waiting its turn across the street.

“Aren’t you coming in?” she called. Beverly went over to speak to them. The girls were exquisite creatures; he would have given his soul at that moment to be able to leave his burden on the sidewalk opposite and join them. But he was “catching a train,” he explained. When he turned away, with the feeling of one about to resume a millstone, Billy’s cousin was where he had left her. As he approached, she lifted a forefinger to her lips, raised her eyes mysteriously, and stood for some moments in what she probably fancied was the attitude of a listening faun.

“Music,” she whispered.

“I shall certainly strangle this woman before we reach Claverly,” thought Beverly.

“There is an orchestra inside,” he said.

“Oh, I could just die waltzing!” she exclaimed. She crossed the street, undulating ecstatically to the music that came gaily through the open doors and windows of the Pudding.

“I really must hurry,” said Beverly, very firmly.

“Just a moment,” she pleaded, resting her hand on his arm and swaying ponderously from side to side in time to the waltz.

“Could anything have been more odious?” Beverly said to the fellows afterwards, when trying to explain his presence in Cambridge on Class Day. “The Pudding steps--the whole street--swarming with people on their way to the spread; a line of carriages, a block long, full of girls I knew,--_girls I knew_; and I, standing there, a ridiculous little red fan in my hand--the thing popped out, and I couldn’t pull it back again--with a moon-faced tub of a woman I’d never seen before, rigged out in a crimson harness, hanging on to me as if she’d brought me into the world, and doing some sort of a can-can on the sidewalk, like a hypnotised old cobra.”

“Let’s go in,” pleaded Billy’s cousin, impulsively. Beverly drew away from her.

“It’s simply impossible,” he said sternly. “The spread is a private one, and I haven’t even my own ticket here; I’ve lost it.”

The note of irritation and despair in his voice was overheard by a fellow in a cap and gown who had come up behind them just then, on his way into the Pudding.

“That doesn’t make any difference, Beverly,” he said, touching his cap to the lady; “you can come in with me all right.” Beverly turned in anguish. It was Freddy Benson, who was helping to give the spread. Billy’s cousin became strangely radiant; she darted a glance at Freddy that impaled him. Beverly, she not only impaled, but crucified.

“I haven’t time to go in,” said Beverly abruptly. He was beginning to look flushed and obstinate. Freddy opened his eyes in polite astonishment; he was afraid he had intruded upon a family quarrel. The Millstone edged half way up the Pudding steps and pouted coyly. They stood there a moment,--Beverly, dangerous, explosive; Freddy, mystified and uncomfortable; the Millstone, with her “lady fair” expression once more, as if waiting expectantly for one of the stalwart males to defeat the other in mortal combat and claim her for his own. People brushed by them--people Beverly knew--with glances of concern.

“You might just as well come in, you know,” said Freddy, pacifically.

“You don’t understand,” answered Beverly, angrily.

“Just for a minute,--I promise,” chimed in the Millstone; “we may find my cousin in here,” she added. That possibility hadn’t occurred to Beverly; it was quite likely that Billy would be there at that hour. So he set his teeth and went up the steps. Freddy passed them before the big, white-gloved policeman at the door, and they pushed through the crowd in the vestibule. After a parting flutter of the eyelids at Freddy, Billy’s cousin looked up at Beverly in fond disapproval.

“Naughty, naughty,” she said.

The crush in the theatre of the Pudding was appalling on so warm an afternoon. But Beverly surveyed it with an exultant smile. Once separated from Billy’s cousin in that jam of people, escape would be easy, pursuit impossible.

“Now follow me,” he commanded, dexterously wriggling away from the arm that sought his. He meant to lead the Millstone to the corner of the room farthest away from the exit, and there, among the palms surrounding the orchestra, “wander” her like a cat in a strange wood.

“If you will be so good as to stand here,” he suggested, when they had fought their way to the other end of the room, “I’ll look for Fields. It may take me some time, there’s such a crowd.” He almost softened toward her for an instant, he was so elated at the thought of leaving her there forever in the exotic bushes,--like Ruth “in tears amid the alien corn.” Then he returned her red fan, and once more became part of the crowd. He loved the crowd now as he had hated it before; it was a friendly, favouring, protecting crowd,--a crowd that rendered his movements invisible, a crowd through which large, opacous bodies in black satin could attain no velocity. Beverly made a conscientious search for Billy. He struggled around the theatre, inspected the piazza and the tent and the front rooms, and finally went upstairs to the library. But Billy was chatting in none of the little alcove nooks, made cosey for the occasion with a prodigal display of Turkish rugs, and Beverly descended the stairs to the exit with a light heart.

The Millstone, dishevelled, apoplectic, and breathing hard, was waiting for him at the door.

“I grew faint and sought air,” she explained. “Do you know what to do when a lady faints?” she went on, fanning nervously.

“Oh, yes,” said Beverly, grimly; “I think I know what I should do if you fainted.”

“You’re giving me a very happy day,” she murmured.

“It is a memorable one for me,” he answered savagely.

They went out and on toward Claverly. If every man Beverly knew in college had arranged to meet him on Holyoke Street at that hour, Beverly would not have had to take off his hat many more times than he did. He bowed gravely, and had to hang on to himself to keep from calling out as every new group of wondering faces approached:--

“This woman doesn’t belong to me; I never saw her before, and I hate her.”

There were little knots of men talking on the piazzas of the clubs on Mount Auburn Street when he turned the corner. Out of the tail of his eye, he could see the agitation that seized them as he and the Millstone came into view. Then he heard windows opening upstairs and down, and knew, without turning around, that from every window craned a neck or two. He held his breath, and prayed to Heaven that his companion wouldn’t take it into her head to stop and rest, or gaze dreamily up and down the street, or slap him with her fan. Once safely inside Claverly, he didn’t wait to listen to her exclamations of surprise and admiration, but left her purring to herself at the foot of the stairs and dashed up to Billy’s room. Billy wasn’t there, but his door was unlatched and his room strewn with garments. His cap and gown were hanging over the back of a chair. Billy was somewhere in the building, probably in the tank, as unsuspicious of impending catastrophe as a playful dolphin. So Beverly hurried down the back stairs to the tank. As he opened the door, Billy, lying on his back on the marble ledge, shot suddenly into view like a long white projectile.

“I’ve invented a new game,” he gasped; “you make the marble all wet, and lie on your back with your feet against the wall, and then give yourself a push and--zip! You could go miles if there wasn’t a partition. But you have to lift up when you get to this crack, or you’ll tear your shoulder-blades out by the roots. Now watch me--”

“Shut up, Billy, and listen; your cousin is out here in the hall waiting for you.” Beverly mopped his forehead.

“My cousin?” Billy struggled to his feet.

“Yes, your cousin,--a lady. Now hurry up and get dry. I’ve got to go. She’s at the foot of the stairs. No, I’m not fooling, I swear to God I’m not. It’s the cousin you invited to Beck.”

“Wait, wait, don’t leave me, man. It’ll take me hours to dress,” said Billy, piteously, dabbing himself with a bath towel. “I haven’t any cousin; I never invited one to Beck; my family is away--they’re abroad. I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he went on. But he continued to dry himself frantically nevertheless.

“I’m simply telling you what I know,” answered Beverly, calmly. “A person, female, aged--say forty-five; of abundant tonnage and affable manners, would like to meet blond gentleman named Fields about to graduate from Harvard; object, a family reunion. Oh, never mind your hair. Here, put on your wrapper and come on.” He helped Billy, half dry, with his hair dripping stringily over his eyes, into a striped blanket covering, and pushed him gently into the hall.