Kitabı oku: «The Diary of a Freshman», sayfa 12

XII

Poor Berri! I felt so sorry for him. I do yet, in fact; for although things can't possibly turn out in the way he thinks they may, I can't tell him so, and he lives in a state of perpetual dread. But it won't last long now; Duggie's steamer must have almost reached Southampton by this time, and it won't take more than a week or eight days for Berri to hear from Duggie himself. I came very near giving the thing away at one time. It's hard not to, although I realize that Duggie was wise when he asked me to let matters take their course.

It just happened that the next day after Berri had delivered his thesis, the talk at luncheon turned on cheating at exams and handing in written work that is n't your own. The sentiment against cheating seemed to be strong, partly from a sense of honor and partly from a sense of risk. As a matter of fact, I don't see how fellows can very well manage to cheat here – during an examination, that is to say – even if they want to. There are always a lot of proctors prowling up and down the room, ready to jump on anybody who has suspicious-looking bits of paper on his desk, or who seems to be unduly interested in his lap or the condition of his cuffs. And then, besides, assuming that the instructor occasionally gets absorbed in a newspaper and the proctors stroll to the windows to watch the muckers throwing snowballs in the Yard, how could a student prepare himself for this rare opportunity? It may be different in courses that involve the exact sciences, where certain definite formulas copied on a small bit of paper might be of use; but in the sort of things I take, one would have to conceal upon oneself the Encyclopædia Britannica, Ploetz's Epitome of History, Geschmitzenmenger's Ancient Art, or the Dictionary of Biography, in order to accomplish any really effective deception.

With written work it seems to be easier. If a man hands in a theme or a thesis in his own hand, the instructors are more or less forced to accept it as original, unless of course it was taken outright from a book and they happen to be familiar with the book. From what the fellows at the table said, there must be more of this sort of thing done than I had imagined; although, since Berri opened my eyes, I could believe almost anything. One of the fellows told about a student – a Junior – he had heard of who succeeded in getting himself fired two or three years ago in a rather complicated way. He was engaged, and his lady-love sent him a poem in one of her letters, saying that she had written it for him. The letter arrived while he was struggling with a daily theme; so he murmured to himself, "Tush! I 'll copy Araminta's pretty verses and send them in as my own; as they have just gushed from her surcharged heart into her letter, no one will be the wiser." A few days later the omnivorous Advocate asked permission to print them, and as they had received words of praise from the instructor, and as the fellow by that time had no doubt begun to believe he had written them himself, he allowed them to be published under his name. Somebody sent a copy of the Advocate to Araminta, who replied with an indignant letter to her futur; and while he was trying to think up an explanation of the matter with which to pacify her, somebody else came out in the Crimson with a most withering communication, asking how the Advocate dared to print as original a poem that had been written by his grandfather, the late Donovan H. Dennison, whose complete poetical works ("Dan Cupid and other Idyls") could be found in the college library at any time. Whereupon the student, disgusted at his lady-love's dishonesty in palming off the late Donovan H. Dennison's verses as original, broke his engagement; and the college, disgusted with the student for precisely the same reason, "separated" him (to use the suave official phrase) from the University.

There was, as I said, a great deal of talk at luncheon that day about cheating. Some of the men seemed to think the presence of proctors during an exam was insulting; but, as Bertie Stockbridge remarked, – and this struck me as unanswerable, – "If you don't cheat yourself and don't want to, what difference does it make whether they 're there or not? And if you do cheat, why, of course, proctors are necessary." In the matter of dishonest written work the same honorable sentiments were expressed. Everybody was sincere, but I could n't help realizing a little that they could not have had very much temptation as yet. If it had n't been for Berri, I probably should have laid down the law as loudly as the rest. But he sat there eating in silence, irritated and oppressed by so much high-minded babbling, and I hated to hurt him by adding to it. Usually he is one of the last to leave the table. That day, however, he hurried through his luncheon and slipped away alone.

Oh dear! (How silly those two words look written down, and yet it was what was passing through my mind as I wrote them.) I suppose that what I really mean is, How tiresome it is that a person's acts don't begin and end with himself! There doesn't seem to be any limit to the reach of their influence. It would be so much more simple and easy if you knew just where the consequences of a mistake or an indiscretion, or whatever you choose to call it, began and ended. Now, for instance, take Berri and the thesis. Of course, I think it was all wrong, and was sorry he handed it in; but I wasn't going to let it make any difference in my feelings toward Berri. As far as I am concerned, I don't think it has made a difference. Yet the beastly thing cast a sort of gloom over the house. For Berri after luncheon that day rather avoided the table in general and me in particular. What his object was in doing this, I don't know. It was probably just a feeling on his part; but it made me feel as if I 'd been putting myself on a moral pedestal somehow, and that Berri saw in me a perpetual accusation. Our relations became indescribably changed and sort of formal, and I did n't see how I could make them different. What could I have done? There was nothing, under the circumstances, for me to say. He stopped in my room that night to warm himself for a minute before going to bed, but I don't think he said anything except that it was snowing outside.

The next day we had the blizzard. People here usually assume that in the part of the country I come from we have nine months of winter and three of cold weather. But nevertheless I had to come to the staid and temperate East to see the kind of a winter storm you read about in books, – the regular old "Wreck of the Hesperus" kind, in which the crew are "swept like icicles from the deck," and able-bodied men get hopelessly lost and are frozen to death in their own front yards. I was to have dined in town that night with Hemington, who had tickets for a Paderewski recital. But he did n't turn up, so I joined some fellows who found me in the restaurant eating alone, and afterwards went to the theatre with them. It was snowing when we left the restaurant; in fact, great, wet cottony flakes had been falling at intervals all day. (It reminded me of those marvellous paper weights I haven't seen for years and years, – glass globes filled with water in which a white, powdery sediment swirls and drifts and finally settles in the most lifelike way on a beautiful little tin landscape. What's become of them all, I wonder?) But there was no wind, and it was n't particularly cold, so I don't think that anybody suspected what was going to happen before the show was over.

It took an unusually long time to get out of the theatre that night; the people in the aisles hardly moved at all. But after we had forced our way through the crowd, and climbed over seats, and finally reached the narrow corridor leading to the entrance, we saw why it was. The ones who had got to the door first were afraid to leave. Within an hour or two the wind had risen and risen until it screamed through the streets, blasting up the fallen snow in wild bewildering spirals and then fiercely slapping it back again in slants of hard, biting cold. From the door of the theatre it was impossible to see beyond the curbstone, except when the half-obliterated lights of a cab lurched by over the drifts. The rumor went through the crowd that the wires were down and that all the cars had stopped. No one seemed to know quite what to do. Just as the people nearest the door would make up their minds to start bravely out, a thick hurricane would strike erratically in at them, causing the ladies to shrink back with little exclamations of dismay. Nobody's carriage had arrived, and the few cabs that appeared ploughed laboriously past us. Our crowd waited a few moments, – more to share the excitement of the others than for anything else; then we turned up our collars and plunged out.

Standing at the door of the theatre, the world outside had seemed to me to be in a sort of insane uproar; but as soon as we got away from the human babble, and I lifted my head and opened my eyes and deliberately relaxed my ears, so to speak, I found the city almost solemnly silent. Every now and then, when we came to a cross street or turned a corner, there was, it is true, a sudden shriek and a sort of rattle of fine stinging ice particles; but as long as I could keep myself from being confused inside of me, while we were floundering over drifts and burrowing with our heads through the walls of wind that blocked the way and seemed to be falling on us, I could n't help noticing the terrible muffledness of everything. It was as if the place were being swamped, blotted out, suffocated.

When we reached the hotel where we had dined earlier in the evening, the other fellows went in to have something to eat, but for several reasons I decided not to. In the first place, I promised papa that I would try to economize, and I had already unexpectedly squandered two dollars on a theatre ticket, owing to Hemington's failure to appear. Then I felt that if I did n't make a dash for Cambridge right away, I should n't get there at all. (As a matter of fact, I never did reach there until nine the next morning, but it was n't because I did n't try hard enough. The other fellows put up at the hotel.) So I just shouted that I was going on, and as we were all about half frozen, no one stopped to persuade me not to.

Well, I found a string of cars about a mile long that were rapidly turning into Esquimau huts, and was told by one of the conductors that something had broken down ahead, and that, as the snow-plough could n't get by, they probably would n't move again until morning. He thought, however, that the other line was running; and I started to grope my way to Bowdoin Square.

I would n't go through that experience again for gold and precious stones; and I can't imagine now why I did it in the first place, except that I had acquired by that time a kind of pig-headed determination to reach Cambridge, and did n't know what I was in for. It was n't so bad while I was staggering along by the side of the blocked cars; they were lighted, and I knew that if I changed my mind about going on, I could pop into one of them and be safe. But when I passed the last one and found myself after a while among back streets choked with drifts, and could n't see my way, and fell down twice, and got snow up my sleeves, and my face and hands and feet pained so with cold that I could n't help crying (actually), and I realized at last that I did n't in the least know where I was, I began to be panic-stricken. I 'm not the huskiest person in the world, and all at once the wind blew me smash against an iron railing and almost into a basement of some kind. I think I should have hunted for a door-bell and tried to get into a house if I hadn't a moment later collided with a policeman (fell down again), who helped me up and led me to a sheltered place behind a wall, where I managed to collect myself and tell him what I was looking for. He too was on his way to Bowdoin Square; so after that I just hung on to his coat most of the time, and tried to keep my legs in motion without really knowing much where he was leading me or whether we were making any progress. Once there was a rip-tearing crash over our heads. The policeman jumped aside, and then stopped to exclaim, "Well, I never seen the likes o' that." I think a sign had blown off a building through a plate-glass window. Farther on a dangling wire romped in the wind. It spat dazzling blue and purple at us until we retreated and went around another way, muttering strange Hibernian mutters. When I opened my eyes again, we were in front of the hotel in Bowdoin Square and the policeman was advising me through his frozen mustache not to go to Cambridge. He said the cars had stopped long ago. So I said good-by to him and was just stumbling into the café, when who should come out but Berri and a cabman? They had gone in to get warm before starting across the bridge.

"I 'm not sure that we can make it," Berri said, "but the man says he's willing to try. I 'll tell you why I don't want to stay at the hotel when we get inside. Look out – look out!" he cried to me, as I opened the cab door and was about to jump in. I drew back, expecting at least to be decapitated or electrocuted, and then Berri explained that he was afraid I might "sit on the pigeons." He entered the cab first, and removed some indistinguishable objects from the back seat to the narrow seat that lifts up in front. "That's why I can't very well stay at the hotel," he went on. "As soon as these poor exhausted little darlings begin to thaw, they 'll fly around and make a dreadful fuss. I 'd rather have them in my own room." He had picked up four half frozen pigeons in the street on his way to the Square, and had carried them – two in his pockets and two in the bosom of his overcoat – until he came across the cab. After we got started, he lighted matches every now and then to see how they were getting along, and we took turns at blowing on their pink feet, all shrivelled with cold. One of them, to Berri's grief, was dead, but by the time the cab stopped suddenly and for the last time in the middle of the bridge (it had been going slower and slower and tipping more perilously over mounds of snow as we proceeded), the other three looked scared and intelligent and began to feel warm under their wings.

The driver opened the door and said he could n't go on, as a fallen wire was sagging across the street in front of the horse's nose. We jumped out, and Berri was just about to seize the thing and try to lift it over the horse's head, when I remembered the murderous ecstasy of the other one and jerked him back. Ahead of us there was a drift almost as high as the cab itself, and the man said that even without the wire we never could drive over or through it. So, after a short consultation, he decided to blanket his nag and spend the rest of the night in the cab; the horse was "dead beat," he said, and he very much doubted if it could pull back to town against the wind even after turning around, which was a more or less impossible undertaking in itself. Berri and I packed up the pigeons – the dead one included, as Berri remembered having read in the paper that morning of a case of "suspended animation" somewhere in Texas – and pushed on to the waiting-station at the other end of the bridge.

That was a queer night. I was simply played out when I got inside the waiting-room, and I had n't been there more than a few minutes when I discovered that my ear was frozen. A kind, officious woman all but broke it off rubbing snow on it; but though it pained excruciatingly during the night and is still sensitive and has a tendency to stick out at right angles from my head, I think it will recover. There must have been fifteen or twenty people cooped up in the waiting-room and the cigar-stand (with hot soda-water and candy facilities) next door. Some of them were cross and unhappy, and some of them were facetious. One of them had a small dog. Berri's pigeons created a sensation. The cigar-man gave us a box to put them under, and Berri bought them popcorn for fear they might be hungry during the night. The warmth of the room revived them completely, all but the dead one.

We talked for a while; but as Berri remembered, now that the excitement was over, to be formal and impersonal once more, it was rather dreary. We could have slept, I think, – in fact we were asleep, when one of the facetious refugees woke us up to ask if we did n't want to join him "and some other gentlemen in a game of euchre." Disappointed at his unsuccessful efforts to interest people in this diversion, he chased the little dog about the room, declaring that he intended to tie a glass of chocolate around its neck and send it out in the storm to look for travellers who had lost their way. It was impossible after that to get to sleep again.

We had been sitting with our heads against the wall for almost an hour, waiting for daylight, when Berri, who hadn't said anything for ever so long, suddenly came out with, —

"Oh, Granny, I 'm so sorry I did it!" I knew what he meant at once, although the thesis had n't been in my mind at all, and I was just about to advise him to have a talk with Fleetwood and tell him everything, when he added that he would have to stand by himself now, as it was too late to draw back.

The worst of the storm was over, the cabman had come in to get warm and tell us that his horse had frozen to death, and the windows of the waiting-room had begun to look pale instead of black, by the time I convinced Berri that it wasn't too late, and that as soon as we got to Cambridge he ought to go to The Holly Tree and wait until Fleetwood came in for his breakfast. When he finally made up his mind to do this, I never saw any one in such a state of impatience. He could n't sit still, and kept running to the door every other minute to see if the snow-plough was coming over the bridge. Once he suggested that we should walk; but although the morning was clear and beautiful, I had had enough of struggling through mountains of snow the night before, and refused. The plough appeared at last, preceded by a whirling cloud and followed by a car. We set the pigeons free (Berri told them all to return with olive branches as quickly as possible) and watched them fly to the nearest telegraph-pole and proceed to make their toilets for the day.

It must have been about half an hour after I parted with Berri (he went on to The Holly Tree and I came to my room) that he bounded up the stairs, pale with excitement. He had met Fleetwood, and after a few preliminary remarks about the blizzard (the whole place was submerged) he had blurted out, —

"Mr. Fleetwood, I want to tell you something about my thesis; I did n't write it." To which the instructor replied almost indifferently, —

"Yes, I noticed that. What was the trouble?" Berri just looked at him in amazement.

"I said I did n't write it," he faltered.

"Well, I know that," Fleetwood replied a trifle sharply. He was inclined to be "peevish," Berri said, because the morning papers had n't been delivered.

"But I want to tell you how sorry I am," Berri added; the situation was much worse, Berri says, than it would have been if Fleetwood had seemed more impressed by his dishonesty. As a matter of fact, Fleetwood merely smiled.

"Oh, I never had the vaguest idea that you would write it," he remarked airily. "But if you don't care, I don't. It's much easier for me to give you an E for having failed to hand it in, than it is to read fifty or sixty pages of your impossible writing."

At this Berri said he almost reeled from his chair.

"Did n't I hand it in?" he asked, while his heart thumped painfully. Fleetwood glanced up from his oatmeal only long enough to say, —

"I wish you would go some place else to eat; you bother me." But Berri insisted.

"Dear Mr. Fleetwood," he pleaded eagerly, "please answer me just that one thing. Did n't you find my thesis pushed through your door?" At this Fleetwood put his hands to his head, as he always does when he 's pretending that we 're trying to drive him mad, and moaned, —

"First you tell me you have n't written your thesis and then you ask me if I 've picked it up on my floor. Oh, go away, go away! I shall never be able to finish my breakfast and get back through all that ghastly snow to my ten-o'clock lecture." Then Berri dashed out, forgetting to pay for his breakfast, and came to find me.

Fleetwood must think that Berri isn't quite right; for he followed the instructor around all day more or less, waiting for him at the doors of lecture halls, intercepting him in front of the Colonial Club at lunch-time, running after him in the Square, and calling on him twice at his room, to ask if the thesis had turned up yet. But of course it never had. At that time neither of us could account for its disappearance, and Berri can't yet. He is existing in a state of nervous dread for fear it "may have fallen behind something" in the dark vestibule and will eventually turn up. Well, it will turn up, but not in Fleetwood's room.

Berri spent most of the time in which he wasn't dogging Fleetwood's footsteps discussing the thing with me. But I could n't help him much beyond hoping that the thesis – like the love-letter or the lost will in dramas at the Bowdoin Square Theatre – wouldn't be found until the fifth act, after an elapse of twenty years.

I had to leave him alone part of the afternoon. Duncan Duncan sent me word that he was sick and that the Advocate was in dire need. So I floundered through the alley to the printing-office, and learned from the proof-reader that they had to have six inches of poetry immediately or the paper would be very much delayed. I did n't know what to do, as we had n't any poems of that length in stock, so to speak. While I was sitting there in despair, one of the printers gave me a piece of paper and a pencil, and said, —

"Here, hurry up and write a couple of sticks of po'try; I want to go home." He was quite serious; so I got to work, and in about fifteen minutes had written twenty lines about the pigeons in the blizzard; only I referred to them, for various technical reasons, as doves. There was a heavenly smell of printer's ink in the place which made it easier to write somehow.

No letters came that day from any direction on account of the storm. The next afternoon I met the postman on the steps. He stopped to chat, and I thought I should grab the letters from his hand before he finished, as I caught sight of one in Duggie's handwriting addressed to me. I thought of course that he had postponed his trip and had written to tell me why. The postman talked on and on, but he told me one tale that interested me in spite of myself.

One Sunday morning old Professor Pallas (my ally in the hieroglyphics course) went over to the post-office for his letters. He must have been thinking very deeply about recent discoveries or cuneiform inscriptions or some such thing, because when he went up to the window he could n't remember whose letters he had come for. So he said to the clerk, —

"Young man, do you know who I am?"

The clerk unfortunately was a new one, and had to confess, with regret, that he did n't. So Professor Pallas, after a moment or two of reflection, looked up and murmured through the window, —

"I ask you this because I am equally at a loss myself; but perhaps if I take a little walk it may come to me." Then he strolled away, and in about ten minutes returned, very much pleased, with a slip of paper in his hand.

"I remembered it all by myself," he exclaimed, "and wrote it down."

I got Duggie's letter at last, and ran upstairs to read it. This is what it said: —

DEAR GRANNY, – We are steaming slowly out of the harbor, and I am sitting in a sheltered corner of the deck writing you this note for the pilot to take back with him. My fingers are stiff with cold, but as the air down below is thick with what Mrs. Chester calls "floral tributes." I 'd rather stay here and say good-by to you and the Goddess of Liberty at the same time.

What I wish particularly to do, however, is to thank you for letting me read your diary last night (I have some things to say about it – the parts where I come in, I mean – but that can wait) and to make a confession. When I got to the last page, where the ink was scarcely dry, I dashed over to Fleetwood's room, although I had lingered so long in your room I did n't have any too much time in which to catch my train. Fortunately there was a light in Fleetwood's window. While I was talking to him I saw out of the corner of my eye the great pile of – is the plural "theses" or "thesises"? – on his desk, and when he went into his bedroom for a minute to get a book for me to read going over, I sniped Berri's performance from the top of the pile and stuck it in my pocket. I did it on the impulse of the moment, and I may have been all wrong – I don't know; the whole thing worries me. But don't say anything to Berri about it. I should n't care to get you and the diary into trouble. When I reach Southampton I 'll send the thing back to him with a letter. Good-by, Granny. Take care of yourself and write often.

DUGGIE.