Kitabı oku: «The Diary of a Freshman», sayfa 13

XIII

Some day I 'm going to write a book about Boston, because it's the most wonderful place in the world. I suppose I really mean by this that it is so different from Perugia. Berri, of course, would have to help me, – that is, he would unless I lived here fifty or sixty years for the purpose of gathering notes. It would take about that long to understand everything and be able to write intelligently and sympathetically. Anybody, of course, may sojourn for a time among the Bostonians – just as he may among the Chinese or the strange races of the Pacific islands – and record his impressions of them. But I don't think his remarks would be more valuable than the ordinary travel book that tells you merely the things you could tell yourself if you were on the spot with a pencil and a strong right arm. Really to know the place you have to be born and brought up here; which in itself amounts to saying that Boston will never, never be understood. For the people who were born and brought up here know and won't tell, – "know and can't tell," Berri declares. "It would take a genius to do the thing properly," he says, "and Boston went out of the genius business some thirty or forty years ago."

Now, Berri was born in Paris ("Paa-is, France – or Paa-is, Kentucky?" as a Southern girl once asked him), and I don't suppose he's a genius, actually. But as he has, on his mother's side, more cousins and aunts and things in Boston than anybody I 'm ever likely to know so very intimately, and as he seems more like a genius than anybody I 've ever seen before, what he tells me always sounds somehow as if it were the real thing. He laughed, though, the other day – we were taking a long walk – when I said this to him, and answered that it was very evident I did n't know what the real thing was.

"I'm not," he added, "if for no other reason than that I am able, quite seriously at times, to consider going some place else to live after I finish with all this." And he fluttered his hand in the direction of Cambridge.

"Does n't anybody else?" I asked.

"Mercy, no – how you talk!" he exclaimed. "Why should they?"

"I suppose I was thinking of papa," I replied meekly. "He believes it's better for most young men to get away from home and start life for themselves as soon as they grow up; they 're always boys to somebody unless they do, he says. Then, besides, he has great faith in perfectly new places. He 's often told me that even Perugia was too old and crowded for a young man. Perugia was fifty-three years old last spring." Berri laughed.

"That's important, if true," he answered, "but what has it to do with Boston?"

"Why, I merely imagined that some one in this part of the world might have the same idea," I suggested. "Now, take Duggie, for instance. Don't you think that Duggie wants to get out and try to do something?"

"Oh, Duggie!" said Berri, with a shrug. "He thinks he does now, but he really doesn't. Of course Duggie is simply slopping over with strenuousness and that sort of thing. But he gets most of it out of books, – Fleetwood's books at that. And after all, as I say, he slops over; it 'll just run into the sand without making even a silly little hole. After a while, when he gets tired of reading, and thinking how unworthy everybody else is, it won't do even that. Duggie in college is stunning and a leader of men; but Duggie at forty will be leading nothing but a beautiful purple life down there at his country-place, – unless, of course, he gets fat; if he gets fat, he 'll be a stockbroker."

"Say, Berri, how old are you, anyhow?" I asked. I know he is older than I am, but he never will tell me how much, – he didn't this time, – he just laughs, and says his early education was grossly neglected over there in Europe, or he would have been classes and classes ahead of me. I did n't like what he said about Duggie, and told him so. He answered that I 'd brought it on myself, and I suppose I had.

"Maybe we'd better talk about Bertie Stockbridge," he added. "He's my third cousin, you know – but, dear me, if people begin to be loyal to third cousins, Boston would turn into a sort of gigantic asylum for deaf mutes. I don't mind what you say about Bertie. Besides, he 's a more perfect specimen than Duggie, because Duggie is passing through a phase. Even Bostonians sometimes pass through phases when they 're very young. It doesn't happen often, though. The truth is, Duggie can't decide whether to be a Greek god or a college settlement. He'd really rather be a Greek god, only it's so immoral. He 'll probably end, you know, by coming out of his trance some June morning and finding himself married. Then it will be too late to be either one or the other. But what was it we were talking about? Oh, yes – Bertie. Now, Bertie isn't passing through a phase. Not on your life. Bertie just rose Venus-like in a state of hopeless completion from the crystal waters of the Back Bay. He never disappoints."

"But I like Bertie," I protested; "not as much as I do Duggie, of course. But I do like him; he's so – so – sensible."

"Sensible!" Berri screamed. "Why, child, the Stockbridge family is all sense. With trousers bagging at the knee and Adam's apples rising and falling above their abashed collars, Bertie's ancestors came into a lovely foolish world and created sense. That's all they ever do now, – just create one another and sense. So, the next time you hear some old thing groaning about the scarcity of common-sense, you 'll know that it's because the Stockbridges have it all, – they and a few friends who live in the same street during the winter and share several thousand front feet of the Atlantic Ocean from May to November. But you mustn't think I don't like Bertie and his family, – perhaps I should simply say 'Bertie,' for Bertie is his family, – because I do, you know. I admire him very much," Berri added after a moment. "He radiates a sort of atmosphere of modest infallibility that makes me feel exactly as I should feel if I suddenly went into Appleton Chapel and found the Pope there reading the Boston Transcript. Calmly and without the slightest tinge of bitterness, I admit that Bertie is always right.

"You heard what he said to Bobbie Colburn, didn't you? It was after the hour exam in English 68, and we were all in Bobbie's room comparing notes. Now, Bertie had passed, of course, because he 'll always pass in everything, whether he has any talent for it or not; but he had n't passed particularly well. It takes a person of some imagination to get a good mark in that course. Bobbie Colburn, on the other hand, who apparently hadn't studied at all and who'd been having a fierce time the night before the exam, just sailed into the examination-room with a dress-suit on under his overcoat, and got through brilliantly, which worried Bertie to death. We 'd all made some comment on the matter, and finally Colburn, as if to end it, said in his breezy way, 'Well, you know the old proverb, – He laughs best who drinks most!' Whereupon Bertie fixed him with his fine gray eyes and remarked, 'That is n't the way it goes, Colburn; you 've got it mixed.' Then he repeated the words correctly, – not with triumph exactly, but with the cold joy of one whose life is spent in righting unimportant wrongs.

"And yet I can't help confessing," Berri mused, "that I 'm exceedingly glad to acknowledge my relationship to Bertie and his tribe. They madden me at times; they have such clear, narrow, unelastic, admirable intellects. Their attitude toward all questions, public or private, is so definite and uncompromising; they 're so dog-gonned right. Why, American history is just one glad, sweet testimonial to the fact that they 're never wrong. They 're not always on the popular side, or the successful; they 're merely right. Any other human beings would keep on trying to make use of such a splendid faculty. Years and years ago they did make use of it; but nowadays it's enough just to know that they have it, and pretty much all to themselves.

"But, as I was saying, I 'm secretly darned glad that Bertie and I belong to each other, so to speak. Is n't it funny – I'm not a bit loyal to Bertie, but he 's perfectly loyal to me. He does n't in the least understand me. I don't think he even likes me, although that disturbing thought probably has n't occurred to him yet; but there's no getting around the fact that I 'm one of his relatives, and he accepts me, – accepts me in a way he never will accept you, no matter how well he gets to know you and like you. There's something rather fine in that, don't you think? Of course, it might be a good deal of a bore if he took a fancy to me; but as he won't, it's really a great comfort. The fact that that plain, but healthy-looking, silent person in the very badly made dark gray suit accepts me and will always accept me, is equivalent to an illuminated address of welcome and the freedom of the city.

"You really can't imagine how it simplifies things," Berri continued. "It's such a relief, such an absolution! It leaves me, as some one says, 'with nothing on my mind but my hair and my hat;' and even they don't have to be brushed as long as people consider me a Stockbridge at heart. Why, if I didn't feel like it, I shouldn't have to be even polite. Of course I am polite. But it's a mere habit with me; I dare say I 'll get out of it. You've noticed, haven't you, how brusque and sort of primitive Bertie's manner is as a rule? Well, they 're all more or less like that. People who like them say it arises from shyness and simplicity, and people who don't like them declare that it's just common or domestic rudeness; but it really is n't one or the other, and I think I ought to know. The family manner comes from a curious conviction that politeness, grace, tact – the practice of making oneself agreeable free of charge, so to speak – has to do with the emotions; which is perfectly absurd. The habit of politeness is about as emotional as the habit of brushing one's teeth. But Bertie's tribe does n't think so; and emotion with them is simply another word for effeminacy. You see, they 're so sure of coming up to the scratch in the big things that they let the little ones slide. I think they always vaguely associate politeness with French waiters and Neapolitan cripples. So, in a way, they 'll rather expect it of you; they like all foreigners to seem foreign."

Bertie gabbled about no end of things that afternoon. He had what he calls a "dry jag," and hardly ever stopped talking from the time we left our house just after luncheon until we came down Brattle Street on the way back and went into Mrs. Brown's for dinner. Once he and a lot of kids coming out of a schoolhouse away across the river somewhere, pasted one another with snowballs (I joined them) until a policeman made us stop, and for a few minutes the torrent of talk was interrupted. But he made up for it by yelling every time he hit any one or got hit himself. He told me all sorts of tales, and I could n't help thinking how different everything was from Perugia.

It had never occurred to me before that Perugia was so happy-go-lucky and uncivilized. Why, out there we just seem to grow up like those great round weeds on the prairie that suddenly let go for no particular reason and then bound along in the breeze through the wide flat streets until they run against a fence or a house and, for a while, stick there. It does n't seem to me that anything much is decided for us in advance. I did n't know even that I was coming to college until about a year and a half beforehand, – which made it simply awful, as I had to study everything at once and did n't learn much of anything. Now, Berri says that, with the exception of himself, who was "grossly neglected" and never studied anything but French and German, his entire family for generations has lived by a sort of educational and social calendar from which they never deviate except in the event of a civil war. He says he should n't be a bit surprised to learn that there were certain definite, unalterable dates at which the little boys began and left off tin soldiers and the breeding of guinea-pigs, and the little girls began and left off paper-dolls and "dressing up." He declares that, providing the laws of nature are reasonably consistent, they all know exactly what they 'll be doing at any period of their lives; that even matrimony has ceased to be a lottery with them, as they go in for marrying, not individuals, but types. Isn't it perfectly wonderful?

"Now, take Bertie," he said. "Bertie knew who his classmates in college were going to be, at the age of five. They 're the same chaps he's been going to school with, and to the kid dancing-classes, you know, the Saturday Mornings and Thursday Afternoons or whatever they are, all these years. They go to the Friday Evenings this year, and next year they 'll go to the Saturday Evenings, and at all these morns and noons and dewy eves they dance with the same girls that two years from now they 'll meet in society and subsequently marry, just because it's part of the routine. After they get out of college they 'll all go abroad for a few months in groups of three and four, and when they get back they 'll be taken into the same club (their names will have been on the waiting list some twenty-odd years), and they 'll join a lunch club down town in order not to miss seeing one another every day at noon for the rest of their lives."

Then Berri told me about the girls. Really my heart bleeds for the girls, because apparently, unless they are terribly pretty or terribly clever or terribly rich, they must have a devil of a time. Berri says that although they all "come out," they don't all stay out; that after about a year or so a good many of them sort of slink in again by unanimous consent. (Imagine such a thing in Perugia! Why, every girl has a good time there for just as long as she wants to.) The pretty ones, however, never go in again; because, if you once get a reputation for beauty here, Berri says it never leaves you (the reputation, I mean), and that 's why an evening party in Boston often strikes a stranger as being so largely a matter of physical traditions. At a dance the rich plain girls, he says, have a good time too, but only for the first part of the evening. The men speak of them as "pills" (a quaint, chivalrous custom, is it not?), and try to dance with them as early in the evening as possible, because everybody else is trying to do the same thing and there isn't so great a chance of getting stuck for an hour or so. But later on they ask only the ones they really want to dance with, and the plain rich girl finds herself spending a cozy eternity with some one who is inwardly moaning because he delayed until the rush was over.

The girls too are born into a sort of rut, Berri says. It takes the form of sewing-circles. Berri can discourse for hours at a time on these institutions. His aunt Josephine has been going to the same one every week for fifty years. He said that once when he was a little child he heard an Englishman who had lived in India telling about the mysterious rapidity with which a piece of news spread among the natives of that country. Within half a day, this man declared, a rumor would sort of leap through the air from Calcutta to the most obscure villages on the Afghan frontier, and no one could explain how it was done. Berri used to fall asleep at night worrying over it. But now, even in India romance is dead, Berri says; he 's convinced that the whole thing was nothing but just sewing-circles.

"Why, Granny, if I were to lock myself up in my room in Cambridge and draw the curtains and stuff the keyhole and then murmur in a low voice that – well, for instance, that you and Sarah Bernhardt had been quietly married at the First Baptist Church in Somerville that afternoon, and then dash in to my aunt Josephine's as fast as a car could take me, she would greet me in the library with: 'My dear, have you heard! I 've just come from the sewing-circle, and they say – of course I don't believe it' – and so on. And this is n't any idle jest, either; it's a fact."

He was just beginning to tell me something else about them – I forget what – when we both realized that it was rather late, and that if we expected to get back in time for dinner we should have to find a shorter way or take the car. We neither of us knew where we were, although Berri said the place looked as if it might be called "Upper-West-Newtonville-Centre Corners." So we stopped a little girl who was trudging along with a pitcher of milk in her hand.

"Little girl, can you tell me where we are?" Berri asked her solemnly. She stared at us for a moment with great round eyes (Berri admitted afterwards that the question was a stupid one), and finally answered in a high, scornful little voice, —

"Main Street."

Berri refused to ask again after that, and we strolled about for a time until we caught sight of the tower of Memorial, – it suddenly appeared against the sky in quite the wrong direction, – and then of course getting home was easy enough.

We were rather confidential on the way back, and talked about the "Dickey," which we had never discussed before. The Dickey is the great Sophomore secret society. I don't remember just how the subject came up, but something reminded Berri of one night earlier in the year, – one of the nights on which the society takes on ten new members. They choose them from the Sophomore class always except late in the spring, just before college closes, when ten – the "First Ten" – are elected from among the Freshmen. However, by that time the Freshmen are almost Sophomores, so it amounts to about the same thing. When a ten is taken on, the whole club marches through the streets at about eleven o'clock at night, singing a song that has no words but "Tra la la la, la la, la la." It's a wonderful little tune; it's very short and simple, and after you 've heard it once it sticks in your head, you can't forget it. Unlike other catchy airs, though, you somehow don't get tired of it. I 've heard it over and over again since I 've been here, – on pianos as I passed under the windows of upper classmen, whistled by muckers in the Yard, and sung by the club at night, – and it always gives me a thrill; I suppose it 's because it means such a lot, and because you realize that no one (except the muckers) would play it or sing it or whistle it who was n't entitled to.

On the night that Berri referred to, the club must have been half a mile away when we first heard it. Berri was in my room reading, and I was writing a letter. My back was toward him, and we neither of us said anything when the vague musical "tra la la las" floated up from away down by the river somewhere. They were very faint, and after a minute or two stopped entirely. Then, just as I had forgotten about it, the song began again, – a little louder and more distinct this time and getting louder every second. Then it suddenly broke off once more. But I didn't forget it, for I knew that the club had stopped to take some one out of his room – some one who had just been elected – and march him along with the others, and I waited kind of nervously for the refrain to begin again; it never gets started quite evenly, – only a few voices at first, the rest joining in as the crowd turns away from the door of the "neophyte's" house and starts along the street. They came nearer and nearer, – the song grew louder and louder. Some of the fellows were singing a clear tenor that made the last few notes of every verse die away in a kind of high, sad wail. It seemed ridiculous for me to be sitting there pretending to write a letter, with Berri reading in such elaborate unconsciousness by the fire, when the ears of both of us were strained to catch every note, and the hoarse, fierce shouts that suddenly broke through the song as the Dickey turned into our street; but neither of us knew what to say exactly. At last, however, I could n't stand it any longer, and jumped up and blew out both the lamps. With the room dark we could stand at the window and not be seen. Freshmen are n't expected to show any particular interest in the proceedings of the Dickey; it's considered fresh. They were just tramping past our house when we leaned out, – a singing, shouting, irresistible mob, – and Berri and I looked down at them in silence. We were both excited, and I felt chilly all over – but that may have been on account of the open window. The crowd did not pass on, as we thought it would, but stopped at a house across the street a few doors down. Once more the song ceased; men formed in a double line that reached from the piazza to the street, and there were hoarse cries of "Pull him out – pull him out!" Then the front door burst open, and a fellow – he seemed to be half dressed – came hurtling through the air between the double row waiting for him. There was a moment of confusion and savage yells, during which it looked as if the whole crowd was trying to get its hands on him. We lost sight of him in the shuffle, and in another instant the song began, louder than before, and the Dickey swayed away into the darkness. We stood at the window until the clearness and energy of the "Tra la la la, la la, la la," faded to a thin, dim, uncertain rhythm, – a suggestion of tenor that all but lost itself in the pearly fog rolling up from the marshes.

I fumbled for a match when we turned at last to the room. But before I found one, Berri said, "I think I 'll go to bed, Granny," and by the time I got the lamp lighted he had slipped away. I don't know why exactly, but I was rather glad he hadn't waited. After that I tried to finish my letter, but I could n't make myself end the sentence I had been writing the way I had meant to end it in the first place. So I put the thing in the fire and sat there awhile, thinking, and then went to bed myself.