Kitabı oku: «The Diary of a Freshman», sayfa 10

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I might have spared myself my anxiety in regard to the course in hieroglyphics. My adviser overtook me in the yard a day or so after our interview with Professor Pallas, and after walking along with me for a while he said, —

"Well, Wood, I 'm glad to see you looking about as usual; I had almost come to the conclusion that you 'd gone stark mad." I asked him what he meant, and it seems that old Pallas had made a speech at a Faculty meeting in which he declared that the deep and ever-growing interest throughout the undergraduate body in the subject of Egyptology had reached a climax that demanded a course of some kind. He was very eloquent, and caused a good deal of mild excitement. Then some one got up and asked who were concerned in the movement, and Pallas, after fumbling in his side pocket, finally produced a memorandum and said, —

"The names of those imbued with a spirit for serious archaeological research are many, but I think that the youth who by his zeal in collecting and preserving valuable antiquities has done more than any one else to further this study among his fellows is Mr. Thomas Wood, of the class of – " But the poor old man did n't get any further, my adviser says, for everybody in the room began to roar and the meeting broke up in confusion. Well, that 's off my mind, anyhow; although I don't see why they should have taken it the way they did. There 's nothing so very extraordinary in acquiring a love for study when that's what you 're supposed to come here for.

Berri and I discovered the most fascinating little place the other evening. We had been in town all afternoon on the trail of an express package of Berri's that had been lost for days, and were running along Tremont Street on the way to the Cambridge car, when Berri suddenly stopped in front of a sort of alley and clutched me. From the other end came the sound of music, – a harp, a flute, and a violin playing one of those Neapolitan yayayama songs that always, somehow, make you feel as if you 'd been abroad, even when you 've never been nearer Naples than waving good-by to your sister from a North German Lloyd dock in Hoboken.

"Let 's go see what it is," Berri said. So we skipped to the other end of the alley, and found a brightly lighted little restaurant with the music wailing away in the vestibule. We stood listening for a time and watching the people who went in. They all stopped to peer through a glass door, and then after a moment of indecision passed on – up a flight of steep stairs. Berri, of course, could n't be satisfied until he had solved the mystery of the glass door, and it was n't long before we were doing just as every one else did. We saw a long, narrow room with three rows of little tables reaching from end to end. The walls were covered with gay frescos of some kind (I could n't make them out, the tobacco smoke was so thick); foreign-looking waiters were tearing in and out among the tables; flower girls were wandering up and down with great-armfuls of roses and carnations for sale, and everybody was laughing and gesticulating and having such a good time, apparently, – the music was so shrill and the clatter of dishes so incessant, – that Berri and I turned and gazed at each other, as much as to say, "After all these years we 've found it at last." But a moment later we realized why the people we had seen go in had, after a glance, turned away and climbed the stairs; all the tables were occupied. I think we must have looked as dissatisfied as the others, for we felt that nothing upstairs could equal the scene we had just discovered. And we were right. The upper rooms were comparatively empty and quiet and rather dreary. So we came down again and were about to take a farewell look and start for home, when Berri, with his nose flattened against the glass, suddenly exclaimed, "Saved! Saved!" and pushing open the door, made his way across the room. Who should be there but Mr. Fleetwood, dining alone at a table in the corner? Berri, after shaking hands with him, beckoned to me, and in a moment we had both seated ourselves at Fleetwood's table.

"This is almost as nice as if we 'd really been invited, isn't it?" said Berri, in his easy way. "You know we were just on the point of giving up and going home."

"Why didn't you go upstairs?" Fleetwood inquired. (He pretended all through dinner that we had spoiled his evening.) "It is n't too late even now," he suggested; "it's much nicer up there; there 's more air."

"There's plenty of air, but no atmosphere," Berri answered. "This is what we enjoy," he added with a wave of his hand.

"I 'm glad you like my Bohemia," Fleetwood quavered.

"Oh, Bohemia's all right," replied Berri. "Bohemia would be perfect – if it weren't for the Bohemians."

"What are 'Bohemians'?" I asked, for I 'd often heard people called that without understanding just what it meant.

"Bohemians?" Berri repeated. "Why, Bohemians are perfectly horrid things who exist exclusively on Welsh rabbits and use the word 'conventional' as a term of reproach. My aunt knows hundreds of them."

"I wrote a paper once on 'What is a Bohemian?'" Fleetwood put in. "If you would really like to know – but of course you would n't," he broke off sadly; "no one does any more. You clever boys know everything before you come."

"Oh, Mr. Fleetwood, please let us read your paper," we both begged him enthusiastically. I think he was a little flattered, for we would n't allow him to talk about anything else until he had promised to tell me where I could find his article. Berri, however, he refused absolutely, and made me promise, in turn, not to let him know where to look for it and never to quote from it in Berri's presence.

"I know him," he muttered dolefully; "I know these memories that 'turn again and rend you;' I 'm an old man; 'Ich habe gelebt' and ge-suffered."

Well, we had a most delightful dinner. Fleetwood, when he saw that he was n't going to get rid of us, cheered up and made himself very agreeable. He can be charming when he wants to be. He and Berri did most of the talking, although his remarks, as a rule, were addressed to me. The fact is, he likes me because I 'm sympathetic and a good listener, but Berri he finds vastly more interesting. Berri has travelled such a lot, and, besides, he has the knack (I haven't it at all) of being able to discuss things of which he knows nothing in a way that commands not only attention but respect. For instance, they got into a perfectly absorbing squabble over the novelist Henry James, in which Fleetwood deplored and Berri defended what Fleetwood called his "later manner." Fleetwood ended up with, —

"I 've read everything he 's ever done – some of them many times over – and I wrote a paper on him for Lesper's not long ago; but I could n't, conscientiously, come to any other conclusion." To which Berri replied, as he smiled indulgently to himself and broke a bit of bread with his slim brown fingers, —

"I often wonder if you people over here who write things about Harry James from time to time, really comprehend the man at all – notice that I say 'James the man,' not 'James the writer.' 'Le style c'est l'homme,' you know; is n't it Bossuet who tells us that?"

"No, it is n't," said Fleetwood, rather peevishly; "it's Buffon – and he probably stole it from the Latin, 'Stylus virum arguit.'" Fleetwood, of course, knows what he 's talking about. But, nevertheless, I could see that Berri's general air of being foreign and detached and knowing James from the inside – or rather from the other side – impressed him; and as for me, I was simply paralyzed. For I could have testified under oath that Berri had never read a word of Henry James' in his life, and that he 'd never laid eyes on the man. I spoke to him about it afterward and asked him how he dared to do such things.

"Have you ever read anything by James – have you ever seen 'Harry James the man,' as you called him?" I inquired.

"No; of course not," Berri answered. "What difference does it make?"

"But you went on as if you knew more about him than even Fleetwood; and I think that toward the end Fleetwood almost thought you did himself."

"Oh – that," Berri shrugged, after trying to recall the conversation. "That was merely what an old frump of a woman said at my aunt's one day when I dropped in for luncheon. She and Aunt Josephine gabbled and gabbled, and never paid the slightest attention to me, and although they were both unusually tiresome, I suppose I could n't avoid remembering some of the things they said. But it would have been impossible for me to dwell any longer on that particular topic with Fleetwood, even if my life had depended on it, because that day at luncheon, just as my aunt's friend got started on 'James the man,' I happened to glance up and notice that she was wearing an entirely different kind of wig from the ratty old thing she 'd flourished in before she went abroad. She had brought back a new one that was – why, it was an architectural marvel; it looked like the dome of a mosque, and covered her whole head, from eyebrows to neck, with little cut-out places for her ears to peek through. It hypnotized me all through luncheon, and I never heard a word about 'James the man,' – so of course when I got that far with Fleetwood I had to change the subject. Don't you remember that we began to discuss Bernhardt's conception of Hamlet rather abruptly? I 'll never trust that old woman again – after making the mistake about Buffon. Why, she's positively illiterate!"

Fleetwood told me a lot about Mazuret's – that 's the name of the restaurant – which made me glad that we had come across it accidentally, – found it out for ourselves. It's very famous. All sorts of people – writers and painters and actors and exiled noblemen – used to make a kind of headquarters of it and dine there whenever they happened to be in town. Fleetwood has been going there for years, and always sits at the same table. (That's the proper thing to do; you must have a favorite table, and when you come in and find it occupied, you must scowl and shrug and complain to the waiters in a loud voice that the place is going to the dogs. Then everybody in the room takes it for granted that you 're a writer or a painter, an actor or an exiled nobleman, and looks interested and sympathetic. We saw several performances of this kind.) But the place, of course, "isn't what it used to be." I'm seven or eight years too late, as usual. Some of the poets have become very successful – which means, Fleetwood says, that they 're doing newspaper work in New York; some of the painters and actors are beyond the reach of criticism – which means that they 're dead; and some of the noblemen are confident that their respective governments are about to recall them to posts of responsibility and honor – which means that they are in jail.

It was more entertaining, Fleetwood says, in the days of Leontine, – the shrewd, vivacious, businesslike Frenchwoman who, when Monsieur Mazuret became too ill, and Madame too old, used to make change and scold the waiters and say good evening to you, and whose red-striped gingham shirt-waists fitted her like models from Paquin. It was Leontine who brought back the wonderful wall-paper from Paris (through the glass door it looked like a painting) that represents a hunting scene, with willowy ladies in preposterous pink velvet riding-habits and waving plumes, and gentlemen blowing tasselled horns, and hounds and stags – all plunging through a perfectly impenetrable forest, whose improbable luxuriance Berri brilliantly accounted for by saying that it was evidently "Paris green."

"Attend now – I tell you something," Leontine used to say confidentially when the evening was drawing to a close, and but one or two stragglers were left in the dining-room.

"These peoples – they stay so long sometimes; I tell to them that they must go. But non– they will not go; and they stay, and they stay, and they stay. And all at once the – what you call? – the chasse– she begin to move! The horses – he gallop; the ladies – she scream of laughing; the gentlemen – he make toot, toot, toot, tooooo! The dogs – Ah-h h-h! The – the —cet animal-là– the deer? – the deer – Ah-h-h-h!" Carried away by these midnight memories, Leontine would become a galloping horse, a screaming lady, a master of hounds, a savage pack, and a terrified monarch of the glen – all at once. Then, overpowered by the weird horror of it, she would cover her face with her apron and run coquettishly as if for protection to another table.

There was another tale – the description of a thunderstorm – a regular cloud-burst, it must have been – that, one afternoon, overtook Madame and Leontine in the Place de la Madeleine, Leontine personifying the truly Gallic elements – the lightning (reels backward – eyes covered with hands) – the thunder (fingers in ears – eyes rolling – mouth open and emitting groans) – the rain hissing back from the asphalt in a million silver bubbles (skirts lifted – tip-toes – mon dieus – shrieks – hasty exit to kitchen) – Leontine bringing this incoherent scene vividly before one, was worth one's eating a worse dinner, Fleetwood says, than the dinner at Mazuret's. But Monsieur is dead, and Madame just dried up and blew away, and Leontine is married, and – although I don't know when I 've enjoyed a dinner so much – "the place isn't what it used to be."

While Fleetwood was telling me all this, I noticed that Berri called one of the waiters and spoke to him in French. I don't know what he said, as he talked very fast – and anyhow it did n't sound much like the kind of French I 've been used to. The waiter disappeared, and in half an hour or so a messenger boy came in and gave Berri a little envelope which he put in his pocket without saying anything. Then, when we had finished dinner and were just about to push away from the table, Berri exclaimed, —

"Now we 'll all go to the theatre."

"My dear young man, if you could see the work I have to do this night," Fleetwood protested with a gesture that seemed to express mountains of uncorrected themes, "you would realize, for once in your life, what work really is."

"But I have the tickets," Berri explained; and he brought forth the little envelope that the messenger boy had given him.

"No – no – no!" Fleetwood answered decidedly, and started for the door. But Berri detained him.

"By inflicting our company on you we 've spoiled the evening for you, I know; but you won't spoil it for me by depriving us of yours," he begged in his engaging way.

"'Sweet invocation of a child: most pretty and pathetical,'" Fleetwood laughed, and backed into the vestibule. We followed and surrounded him, so to speak, each taking hold of an arm. Then we all walked through the alley toward Tremont Street, Fleetwood quavering apprehensively from time to time, "Now you 'll take me to my car and then bid me adieu, like two good boys, won't you?" while we agreed to everything he said and clung to him like sheriffs. Berri was giggling hysterically, but although I thought the situation rather amusing, I did n't see anything so terribly funny about it until we got to the parting of the ways and Fleetwood stopped. Then I noticed that, in addition to the three great red roses that Berri had bought for our button-holes, Fleetwood had a fourth one, with a long, flexible stem, growing apparently out of the top of his head. He was so unconscious of the absurd, lanky thing nodding solemnly over him whenever he spoke, that when he held out his hand, exclaiming tremulously, —

"'And so,' in the words of Jessica, 'Farewell; I will not have my father see me talk with thee,'" and the rose emphasized every word as if it were imitating him, I gave an uncontrollable whoop, and Berri doubled up on a near-by doorstep.

"I only would that my father were alive at the present moment to see me talking with thee," Berri gasped. "I don't know anything he would have enjoyed more."

Fleetwood looked hurt and mystified and vaguely suspicious, and he stood there merely long enough to say, —

"'You break jests as braggarts do their blades, which, God be thanked, hurt not.'" Then, as Berri was still sitting on the doorstep and I was leaning against the wall, he made a sudden dash for the other side of the street. We caught him, of course, grasped his arms once more, and walked him off to the theatre, pretending all the time that we did n't notice his struggles and how furious he was at having to go with us. Berri kept up an incessant stream of conversation, saying things that, to an outsider, would have given the impression that the theatre-party was Fleetwood's, and that we were the ones who were being dragged reluctantly away from the Cambridge car. Just before we got to the theatre the solemn rose in Fleetwood's hat toppled over and dangled against his face. This also we pretended not to see, and as we had him firmly by the arms, he was unable to reach up and throw it away; so we made a spectacular entrance through the brightly lighted doorway, with Fleetwood ineffectually blowing at the rose and shaking his head like an angry bull. A party of four or five fellows – students – who had been unable to get tickets were turning away from the box-office as we appeared, and they naturally stopped to look at us.

This was in the nature of a last straw, for Fleetwood almost tearfully broke out with, —

"You dreadful, dreadful boys, my reputation is ruined; they 'll think I 've been drinking." Even Berri began to see that we had gone somewhat far, for he plucked the rose from Fleetwood's cheek, exclaiming, —

"Good gracious, man! where did you get this? You must n't go to the theatre looking that way. Just because Bernhardt plays Hamlet is no reason why you should undertake to do Ophelia;" and then he threw it on the floor. Fleetwood rolled his eyes hopelessly.

Well, we never got home until almost four in the morning. A man whose seat was behind ours at the play tapped Fleetwood on the shoulder as soon as we had sat down, and after a whispered conversation he got up and went away. Then Fleetwood told us the man was a dramatic critic – an acquaintance of his – who had been sent to write up the play for a morning paper, but that, as he did n't understand French and was n't much of a Shakespearian scholar and wanted to go to a progressive peanut party in West Roxbury anyhow, he had asked Fleetwood to do the thing for him. Fleetwood used to be on a paper himself, and was delighted to renew old times.

So all during the performance he made notes on the margin of his program and chuckled to himself. The occupation, I think, diverted his mind from Berri and me and helped him to forgive us.

Afterward we went to Newspaper Row and waited for hours in a bare, rather dirty little room while Fleetwood, standing at a high desk under an electric light in the corner, wrote his review. He spent much more time in groaning, "My facility is gone – my hand has lost its cunning," than in actual writing. By the time he was ready to leave we were all famished; so before catching the owl car from Bowdoin Square we stopped at an all-night restaurant that Fleetwood used to patronize when he was a reporter, and had buckwheat cakes and maple syrup. I 've never tasted anything so good.

The Cambridge car was interesting, but fearful. It was jammed with people, and I wondered where so many could have come from that hour of the morning. They could n't all have been dramatic critics. The majority of those who got seats went sound asleep, and as the conductor could n't very well wake them up at every street, he found out beforehand where they wanted to get off, and then hung little tags on their coats that told their destination.

When we were saying good-by to Fleetwood in the Square, Berri laughed and asked, —

"Have you decided yet what you 're going to do to me, Mr. Fleetwood? I know you would like to give me E on my thesis, but I don't think I deserve quite that." Instead of answering him, however, Mr. Fleetwood ran away, exclaiming, —

"Don't talk shop, – don't talk shop; good-night, – good-night!"

Berri has begun to get awfully scared about the thesis, – not that he's afraid that Fleetwood will give it a low mark, but because it does n't look at present as if there would be anything to mark at all. I found him in his room the other day with a pile of books and a scratch-block on his table. But he had n't taken a note, and his attitude was one of utter despair. Of course he can't possibly write it unless he stays here during the holidays, for they begin day after to-morrow.