Kitabı oku: «The Diary of a Freshman», sayfa 14

XIV

Well, as I said, something reminded Berri of that night, and as we were on a deserted road far from Cambridge, he referred to it, – indirectly at first, and afterwards right out in so many words. But he didn't talk in the same free and airy strain he had been talking in before, and although I wanted to hear what he said and ask questions and say a few things myself, I had a feeling all the time that perhaps we ought to change the subject; it made me uncomfortable. Then I thought of the way I had talked to Duggie the first evening, away back in September, and positively blushed when I remembered that I had asked him, outright, how one ought to go about getting on clubs. Why, that was enough to sewer me with almost anybody in the world but Duggie. Imagine my doing such a thing now! No one ever thinks of mentioning the clubs in general conversation. Of course once in a while some fresh kid who happens to live next door to one of them comes out with an allusion of some kind, and embarrasses everybody to death; and I 've had one or two upper classmen – Juniors or Seniors – who hadn't made the Dickey and didn't belong to a club talk to me quite freely about the whole matter in a tone that implied that such things were all very well, no doubt, but did n't interest them particularly. You can get a good deal of information from upper classmen of this kind, – fellows who are n't on clubs and have given up expecting to be; they don't think you fresh. But it would never do to ask for any from a Dickey man; that would be awful. Why, you 'd never be taken on if you did that.

Even Berri does n't seem to know much about the Dickey, or, if he does, he did n't tell me anything very definite. He said, though, that if you didn't make it, you might just as well pack up and go home; that Dickey men kind of flocked together and did n't go outside much for their friends, and that the fellows you wanted to know usually were on the Dickey. Then, too, he said that if a man did n't make the Dickey, he wasn't likely to be taken into a club. Berri seemed to know a lot about the clubs. I knew hardly anything at all; in fact, I thought the Dickey was a club, but he says it isn't, – that it's a society. The clubs, he says, are great. His uncle took him to one for breakfast once before he – Berri – got into college. (Of course he couldn't be taken to one now.) He said he did n't notice anything particularly secret about it; it was just like one of the good clubs in town. I found out the names of most of them from him – they seem to have Greek names, yet are called by queer nicknames as a rule – and where they are. This last, however, I knew pretty well before, but I did n't know which was which, and could n't ask exactly. I had often seen fellows going in and out of certain houses along Mount Auburn Street that did n't look like residences somehow, although they might have been, and wondered just what they were. At night, even with the shades down, they were always lighted from top to bottom. No matter how late it was, the lights were there, cheerful and inviting, – which in itself seemed remarkable when I considered how early Cambridge (the town, I mean) goes to bed. But one morning when I was hurrying to a lecture, two fellows came out of Claverly Hall, and one of them said to the other, "Hold up a minute; I left my note-book at the club," and dashed across the street. Then it suddenly dawned on me. Of course I never look curiously at them any more, but just walk right on with my eyes fixed on something in the distance as if they were ordinary houses. I can't help wondering, sometimes, whether anybody ever noticed me staring at them and at the fellows going in and out – before I knew. I hope not.

When I asked Duggie about getting into clubs that time, I remember he evaded the subject (which was darned good of him, it seems to me now) by saying something about being polite to everybody.

"That's all very well," Berri answered, when I laughed a little and told him about it, "but there's such a thing as being too polite. You see, there are fellows right now in our class – you know who they are and I do too – who are, even as early as this, being considered for the First Ten. If you suddenly turned in and tried to make yourself nice to them, why, everybody would say you were 'swiping;' and so you would be. The First Ten elects the Second Ten, you know."

"Duggie did n't mean that you ought to be polite only to the fellows you think are going to help you along," I answered. "It was exactly the reverse of that. What he meant was that you ought to be the same to everybody."

"I wonder if he was," Berri mused. "It's so easy, after you 've once got to the top yourself, to think you did it all with the help of the Scriptures. It's like these old vultures who 've stolen everything in sight ever since they were born, beginning their magazine articles on 'How to Get Rich' with: 'Honesty and Industry must be the motto of him who would attain wealth!'"

I refused to see any connection between Duggie and the old vultures, and tried to get back to the clubs. However, we did n't say much more about them, and squabbled most of the way home over the subject of popularity. It does seem queer that some fellows have so many friends, while others who start with about the same opportunities and even greater natural advantages now and then have so few. I suggested that when a fellow was tremendously popular and "in" everything – and I could n't see why it was exactly – he probably had very interesting or fascinating qualities that I had n't perhaps discovered. Berri, however, maintained that popularity was often nothing but an idiotic fashion, and mentioned several popular fellows he did n't like, to prove it.

"Now look at Tucker Ludlow," he burst out. "What is he? A dissipated little beast; you know he is, everybody knows he is. Not that I should mind his being dissipated and a beast, if he were ever anything else; but he isn't. He's stupid, and he 's ignorant, and he is n't even good-looking, yet he moves in a crowd, – a nice crowd too; and when he moves, the crowd moves with him. That's nothing but fashion. It is n't possible that anybody can really like the creature. But it amounts to the same thing; I 've already heard it kind of whispered around that he 'll be on the First Ten."

What Berri said interested me very much, for Ludlow and I had agreed, a few days before, to grind together on a course for the mid-year exams. I had intended to remind him of it, but now that Berri said he was spoken of for the First Ten I don't like to; people might think I was swiping. I don't care much for Ludlow myself; but he doesn't irritate me the way he does Berri, and I do think there must be something to him.

After the freaks of fashion, Berri seemed to think that the most popular men – in one's Freshman year anyhow – were the fellows whose opportunities for making friends were good to begin with, and who were n't in any way particularly startling, – athletics, of course, always excepted; athletes never lack a following. But it does n't do, he says, to be different, or to excel at first in much of anything else. You may with perfect safety have the reputation for knowing things or being clever, but that 's very different from really knowing or being. The man who actually knows or is, is doomed.

"What about Reggie Howard, then?" I asked. Everybody likes Howard, and yet he knows a fearful amount and is as clever as any one could be. I knew Berri thought so, and wondered how he would get out of it.

"Yes, Reggie's wise, – very wise," he admitted, "but with the exception of you and me, almost no one suspects it. He does n't object to my knowing, because he feels sure I don't mind; and you 're safe because you 're so kind. But he takes care that people generally don't get on to it. That's part of his wisdom."

One thing I 've learned here that surprised me a good deal, and that is – popularity has nothing to do with money. I always had an idea that people with money to throw to the birds could n't help being liked; but that evidently is n't the case. And Berri did n't have to tell me; I found it out for myself. Of course it's nice to be able to live in comfortable rooms and have plenty to eat and wear decent clothes. No one objects to that, and no one objects, apparently, to a fellow's doing more than that, – to spending, indeed, a good deal of money if he has it to spend. But the mere fact of a man's having a record-breaking allowance does n't seem to interest people in the least, and if some frightfully rich fellow comes to college with a flourish of trumpets in the Sunday papers about his father's income, and how many horses he intends to keep, and how much the furnishing of his rooms will probably cost, it 's decidedly against him. I was thinking, I suppose, of Tony Earle in our class. His father makes millions and millions out of safety-matches – I believe it is. Anyhow, everybody speaks of Tony as "His Matchesty," and has very little to do with him. The fellows are simply prejudiced against him because the papers said he had so much money. And he 's really a perfectly harmless, rather quiet sort of person who plays well on the piano. Berri and I spent an evening with him once. We were dining in town, and Earle was all alone across the room. He looked so dreary that Berri finally exclaimed, —

"For heaven's sake, why doesn't some one take pity on that poor wretched millionaire? It's positively pathetic!"

I suggested asking him to come over and have his dinner with us. But Berri, like every one else, objected.

"He 'd probably order nightingales or peacocks or some such thing, and then insist on paying for us," he said.

"Well, let's ask him and see," I urged. "We'll make that the test. If he tries to pay the whole bill, he won't do." So Berri went over and asked him to join us, and he turned out just as I said, – quiet and not especially interesting, but a good deal nicer than a lot of fellows who won't know him. When it came to paying the waiter, Berri kicked me under the table and spent an indecently long time in looking over the check. I think he was actually disappointed when Earle glanced across the table and merely said, —

"By the way, what's my share?"

When we got to Cambridge he asked us over to his rooms. They certainly are dreams; even Berri could n't find anything wrong with them. He bangs the box like a wizard.

"I was afraid he was going to say he was lonely, or something melodramatic like that, when we got up to leave and he asked us to come again," Berri remarked on the way home. "Of course he is horribly lonely, and it was very considerate of him not to spoil everything by saying so. I think we 'll have to go back. To-morrow at luncheon we can start a society for the prevention of cruelty to millionaires."

Well, if I 'm ever ostracized it won't be because people are scared at my allowance. Papa and I have been having an exceedingly brisk correspondence lately. Just after the family got back to Perugia, Mildred wrote me that papa had won an important lawsuit and was going to get an unusually large fee. So I bought some clothes and a few things I really needed on the strength of it and had the bill sent home, as he made me promise to let him know just what I spent. He replied at some length, declaring, among other things, that I reminded him of what Charles Lamb says of a poor relation; Lamb's remark being, "A poor relation is a preposterous shadow lengthening in the noontide of your prosperity." I expostulated, and told him about Willie Jackson. Willie's elder brother passed through Boston not long ago, and when Willie went in to see him he asked for money with which to buy a dress-suit case and some shoes he needed badly. No one knows exactly how it happened, – some think that Willie had been brooding over the Fine Arts course he is taking and the instructor's plea for more beauty in one's every-day environment. Anyhow, when Willie stepped off the car in Cambridge, he had – not the shoes and the dress-suit case, but a palm and a canary-bird.

To this papa replied that he didn't see why I had taken the trouble to record for his benefit the exploits of Willie Jackson, as he never for a moment had doubted that there were as many fools in college as elsewhere. That is where the matter rests at present.

As there is nothing doing now that you can watch in the afternoon as you can the football practice in the autumn and the baseball and crews in the spring, some of us at the table have become athletes on our own account. We go to the gym every day at about five, and work with chest-weights and dumbbells, and are put through all sorts of agonizing performances in a large class of hard students who never take any other kind of exercise. Then we run up North Avenue as far as the railway-station and back to our rooms. I don't know how far it is, but the return trip at first seemed to be about a hundred miles; it's a little shorter now, and gets shorter every day. After a hot shower-bath and then a cold one you feel eight or ten feet high, and walk through the Square to dinner, sticking out your chest. It's queer you don't catch cold, running in the icy wind with literally nothing on but a pair of tennis shoes, loose short cotton drawers, and a thin sleeveless undershirt; but you never seem to. The gym made me stiff all over for a day or two, but I feel fine now, and wonder why we never thought of it before. The muckers on the Avenue bother us a good deal with snowballs when we run. Hemington very foolishly chased one of them not long ago and washed his face with snow. The paternal mucker has since sued Hemi for assault and battery. Hemi is in a great state about it, and we are all looking forward to cutting a morningful of lectures and testifying in court.

The mid-years are almost here, and I feel as if it were only about the day before yesterday that I was failing in the hour exams. I simply must do well in the mid-years, for if I don't they will probably change my probation to "special probation" (as it is called), which is the limit, my adviser says, of everything obnoxious. I should have to report – to him most likely – every morning at half-past eight, just to show that I was up bright and early and "in sympathy with the work," so to speak. Then at ten or eleven in the evening I should have to drop in again, which of course would make it impossible to go to the theatre without permission. An extra-sharp lookout would be kept on my work, and altogether special probation is easily a consummation devoutly to be avoided. I suppose I 'll have to grind and grind night and day in order to get everything down cold. I wish now that I had kept on studying an hour or two every day, as I did for about a week after my encounter with the exams in October. I should n't be well prepared even then, but it would n't all seem so perfectly hopeless as it does now. It's so hard, though, to do anything regularly when the front door is unlocked most of the time, as ours is. And there 's no use in locking the door of my room, as the fellows don't knock once and go away, but pound and rattle and shout insulting remarks through the keyhole. All of which makes me feel disagreeable and rather affected, – locking myself up when other people get along so well without that sort of thing. I have n't done it more than once or twice.

Anyhow I 'll probably get a good mark in my English Composition. The instructor seems to like my themes and reads a good many of them in class. Lately, however, he has developed the unnecessary trick of pronouncing the words, when he is reading, exactly as they are spelled, which is extremely trying for me and not fair to the theme. It has made several really good ones sound ridiculous. Spelling is n't my strong point, I know; but I draw the line at Berri's guying me about it, – Berri, whose spelling, unless he digs every other word out of the dictionary, looks like some kind of absurd French dialect. He has recently taken to getting off a rigmarole (it's supposed to be about me) that begins something like this, —

"'Berri, how do you spell "parallel"?'

"'Why, p-a-r-a-l-l-e-l, of course.'

"'Thank you; that's the way I have it.' (Then nothing was heard but the scratching of a penknife.)"

I think they 're rather fussy about details here. On the back of my last theme the instructor wrote: "By the way, dotting one's i's and crossing one's t's are charming literary habits when once acquired."

However, I think I shall get a good mark in this course, notwithstanding. But life isn't all English Composition, and I have a terrible amount of work to do in the other things. Berri and I began, in a way, to prepare for the ordeal by going to the theatre for the last time until the mid-year period is at an end. We made an occasion of it, and ended by doing something that I had never dreamed we were going to do when we started out. It was foolish, I suppose, and I don't know exactly what mamma would think about it. I should like to tell her and find out, but I 'm afraid papa might get hold of it, and my idea of his opinion on the subject is somewhat less vague. What we did was to invite one of the girls in the show to supper.

Berri proposed it. We were sitting in the front row away to one side, and when the second act was about half over, he exclaimed to me, —

"There, she 's done it again; that's the third time." I asked him what he meant, and he replied that one of the girls on our side of the stage had winked at us. The attention, he explained, must have been meant for us. And for a variety of reasons it did n't seem as if it could have been intended for any one else. In the first place our seats were the last in the row. Behind us were some ladies, and on the other side of Berri was a very old man who sat half turned away from the stage, holding a great black tin trumpet to his ear, as if he were expecting the actors to lean over the footlights and pour something into it.

"I don't want to appear vain," Berri went on, "but as a mere matter of geographical position I think that we 're It." The comedian was singing a song in the middle of the stage, and on either side of him was a row of girls – convent girls they were supposed to be – who joined in the chorus at the end of every verse and shook their fingers at him reprovingly. They were all dressed in tights. This was n't the convent uniform (they had appeared in that during the first act), and was explained by the fact that they had been rehearsing for private theatricals when the comedian fell in through the window. The comedian was a burglar, and his tights were merely a clever disguise. He was making the girls believe that he was a professional actor hired by the mother superior to teach them how to sing and dance. This was the plot, and it was really rather complicated, for when they all decided to leave the convent with the burglar and spend the evening at a roof-garden, they rushed in dressed as policemen, pretending that they had come to arrest the burglar. The mother superior did n't recognize them, of course, and was naturally glad to have the burglar taken away. Then, at the roof-garden – in the third act – they appeared as waiters; all of which made it hard for me to keep track of them very well. But Berri could spot our girl every time, and by carefully examining the program and comparing the names of the chorus with the various changes of costume she went through, he managed in some way, by the end of the second act, to discover her name. It was Miss Mae Ysobelle. To tell the truth, I did n't think her particularly pretty. She was tall and not a bit graceful, and when she danced she looked as if it were hard work to move her arms and legs the right number of times and finish with the others. She smiled a great deal, but the moment she stopped dancing her mouth sort of snapped back to place as if it were made of stiff red rubber. I found, after watching her for a long time, that my own mouth got very tired. I told Berri this; also that her clothes looked as if they had been made for some one else. But Berri somehow seemed to think she might be unusually agreeable if one knew her.

"Very often, you know, really pretty people don't make up well at all; and as for her clothes looking as if they did n't belong to her, why, she can't help that, poor thing! they probably don't. She is a little knock-kneed, but you would n't notice that if she had a skirt on."

"Well, there doesn't seem to be any immediate danger of our seeing her with a skirt," I answered, for some of the convent girls – Mae Ysobelle among them – had suddenly changed their minds about being waiters and had decided to give the interrupted private theatricals right there on the roof-garden stage. They came prancing in dressed as jockeys, while the man in the orchestra who, as Berri says, supplies music with local color, slapped two thin boards together to imitate the crack of a whip.

"Oh, I don't know," Berri mused; "we might manage to meet her after the show, – ask her to supper or something. She seems friendly enough," he added; for, as he was speaking, the jockeys drew up at the edge of the stage, touched their caps, then leaned over, and all winked. Miss Ysobelle was unmistakably looking at us as she did it.

I did n't believe she would go with us even if we asked her, but Berri said we 'd rush out after the third act and buy her some flowers and send an usher behind the scenes with them. We ended by doing this – we got her a big box of roses – and writing a note asking her to meet us at the stage door when the performance was ended. Berri signed it "Front row – extreme left."

We did n't get an answer to it, at least not in words; but when the curtain went up again on a scene in the convent garden, Miss Ysobelle had one of our roses in her hair and another at her belt, and I began to feel excited at the prospect of meeting her. In fact, the whole last act had a personal interest for us that the others had not. It was almost like being on the stage and enjoying everything from the inside. I even felt rather sorry for the rest of the audience who were sitting there perfectly oblivious to the intrigue going on in the blaze of the footlights, before their unsuspecting eyes. One thing struck us both as rather odd at first. Miss Ysobelle, except for the roses, scrupulously ignored us through the entire act. She not only never winked at us, she never even looked at us. In fact, she gave us both the impression that she had become absorbed in something at the other side of the house. I could n't understand this, and neither could Berri, although he said there was probably some theatrical etiquette connected with her averted gaze, or perhaps the stage-manager had told her to be more dignified. We decided to ask her about it at supper. Well, we never got a chance to ask her, but we found out soon enough for ourselves.

As we had the last seats on the left side of the front row, we were naturally the last to get into the middle aisle on the way out, or, rather, we and the people who had the corresponding seats on the other side of the house were the last. We met them when we reached the end of our row, and had to stop a moment as they stood there putting on their overcoats and blocking the way. One of them I noticed particularly, – a great, big thug of a creature who had shiny black hair slicked up in front with a barbery flourish, and a very fancy waistcoat and cravat. They kept just ahead of us on the way out, and laughed a good deal. Berri and I were unusually silent.

We did n't go quite to the stage door, as the electric light fizzing right over it made everything in the little alley as bright as day. Neither of us was very keen to join the group loitering near by, so we stood a little back in the shadow and waited. Finally some men with their collars turned up came out; then two women with thick veils on. They seemed to be in a great hurry, and for a few seconds we were afraid that one of them might be Miss Ysobelle; but we remembered how tall she was and did n't run after them. Then more men came, and more girls, – some of whom were joined by men waiting at the door. It seemed at last as if the whole company must have come out, and Berri and I were beginning to think that Miss Mae Ysobelle must have left before we arrived, when the door opened once more and she appeared with our box of flowers in her arms. For a moment she stood on the step and looked around expectantly.

"I think we ought to go up," Berri murmured nervously; but I thought it would be better to wait and join her as she passed by.

Then a queer thing happened. Just as she decided to leave the step, who should go up to her but the big thug with the shiny hair and loud waistcoat? He lifted his hat and shook hands with her very cordially, then took the box of flowers – our flowers – and strolled away with her out of the alley to the street. As they passed by, we heard her exclaim, "Say, it was awful nice of you to send those Jacques. When Myrtle seen me open the box – " The rest of the sentence was lost in the rattle of a cab.

Berri and I waited a moment before coming out of the shadow. Then we looked at each other, and Berri shrieked with laughter. We laughed all the way back to Cambridge. The people in the car must have thought – I don't know what they could have thought. For a long time we could n't imagine why things had turned out as they had until Berri remembered that he had signed the note "Front row – extreme left." He had meant our left, but Miss Ysobelle no doubt thought that it referred to her left, – which was quite another matter.