Читать книгу: «The Diary of a Freshman», страница 16

XVI

I notice that when I last wrote in my diary I was wishing for spring, and here it is almost the end of June! Where did all those slow days I complained of go to so quickly, I wonder? How did I spend them, and why haven't I tried to tell about them? I don't know unless it was because they were so slow and did go so quickly. Nothing ever happened, really, until just at the end; but to-day with Cambridge sizzling hot (I can smell the asphalt on the main street even here in my room) and perfectly deserted, except for its inhabitants (who don't count) and the kids who have come to take their entrance exams, the last three months and a half seem like a dream. The spring is scarcely over, and yet I 've already begun to look forward to it again next year.

I liked it so much, I suppose, because in Perugia we don't, as a rule, have any. Out there it's very much like what you read about Russia: for a long time it's winter, and then you wake up some morning feeling as if you had spent the night in a Turkish bath, and know that it is summer; you know that the soda-fountains are hissing, that a watering-cart is jolting past, leaving behind it a damp, earthy sensation (something between an odor and a faint breeze), that an Italian is leaning over the fence languidly calling out, "Bananos – bananos," that a scissors-grinder is ding-donging in the distance, and that, of course, a lawn-mower is whirring sharply back and forth under your windows.

Here warm weather comes slowly and shyly, as if it could n't quite make up its mind to come at all. There are many days that from the other side of a pane of glass look all blue and white and gold, and tempt you to snatch up a cap and run out. You do this, and stand undecidedly on the sidewalk for a moment; then you go in again and put on your overcoat and gloves.

Somehow the leaves don't seem to burst out all at once, as they do with us. You notice first, on Brattle Street and in the Yard, that the trees have undergone a change. That is, you think they have; the change is so slight you aren't sure, and may have only imagined it, after all. But in a few days – I can't now remember how many – you know that you were right; the branches and twigs that have stood out so hard and definite against all the winter sunsets have blurred a little, – they are no longer altogether in focus. They blur more and more as the days go by, until – shall I ever forget it? – you cease to think of them as trees, and only know that over and beyond you there is a faint, uncertain mist of tenderest green, – so faint, so uncertain that you almost glance up to see whether it has drifted away on a slow, pungent gust from the marshes. But instead of doing that, it grows denser and greener against the rain-washed blue, until it is no longer a mist, but a cloud. Then at last there is a delicious crinkling, and the leaves have come. In May and June bleak, shabby Cambridge covers all its angles and corners. They are softened and filled with billows and jets and sprays and garlands, – green, gold, silver, mauve, and – what is the color of apple blossoms? They are such a tremor of white and pink that I never really know. The wind loses its bite, and then its chill. The air is moist and warm, and as you walk slowly through the quiet leafy streets at night, the damp, fresh lilacs stretch out to dabble against your face, and something – it may be the stillness and sweetness of it all, or it may be just the penetrating smell of the box hedges – something makes you very sad and very happy at the same time.

During the day, between lectures, we loafed a good deal, – on Brattle Street chiefly; and often in the afternoon, when we were beginning to think of thinking of grinding for the finals, Berri and I and occasionally Hemington used to take a book or some notes and go up to the vacant lot across the street from the Longfellow house. At the further end of this open space – a meadow during the poet's lifetime, but now, unfortunately, a rather ugly little park – there is a stone terrace with a short flight of steps and two broad stone seats against the wall below. Passionate pilgrims come there for a moment, once in a while, but as a rule it is deserted. We pretended to study here; but dates and formulas and Geschmitzenmenger's reflections on the building materials of ancient Rome always got mixed up in Hemington's tobacco smoke, or we forgot about them in watching the sun sparkle on the pools left by the falling tide. Berri said that even Italy had very little more to offer one than a stone bench soaked in sunlight and the delusion that one was accomplishing something. Now and then we strolled in Longfellow's garden. The family were out of town, and Berri inherits the privilege of doing this from his aunt.

I can't get away from the idea that although the days were getting longer and slower as Class Day drew near, they went ever so much more quickly than they had at first; notwithstanding, also, the fact that I got up earlier. I happened to do this the first time by accident. Bertie Stockbridge was the only person at breakfast, and when I asked him not to leave me alone, he said he had to or he would be late for Chapel. I had n't known before that he went to Chapel, but he told me he never missed a morning. I had n't been there myself at all, but that morning I went with him. It was very nice. The President was there, and the Dean, and several of the professors, and a good many students – some of whom I would n't have suspected of even knowing where the Chapel was. The music was fine; the little boys in the choir sang like angels, – the same little boys who used to paste us with snowballs during the winter. After that I went to Chapel almost every morning until college closed. It was a good way to begin the day, somehow. Berri began to go too after a while, but he said he did it to give him luck in his exams.

On Saturday afternoons and Sundays we bicycled a great deal when the roads began to get into shape. The whole table would start off and explore the park system, and once we made a historical tour of Lexington and Concord, which Berri wrote up for the Lampoon. I think Berri will make the Lampoon next year if he keeps on. His way of going about it is killing. He writes things, and then comes into my room with a solemn, anxious face, and says, —

"Do you think this is funny? Glance through it carelessly and tell me just how it strikes you. I think it's perfectly side-splitting myself, – I do really; but it mightn't strike anybody else that way."

Then there was Riverside, where the Charles all but loses itself between steep, cool, shady banks, under trees that peer over the edges all through the long, drowsy summer, or flows brimming across a meadow where a man ploughs a rich black border and talks to his horses and sings. It takes just the amount of effort you like to make, to follow in a canoe the course of this lazy stream. Riverside is another place to which you like to take all the essentials for study except the power of will.

As the board decided to let me off probation late in the spring, I could cut lectures once more without anything very terrible happening, and it was great on a warm morning to walk into town for luncheon and keep our hats off while we were on the bridge. There 's almost always a sea-breeze on the bridge.

I hardly know how to write of the surprising and wonderful thing that happened to me at the end of May. It came so unexpectedly that even now I sometimes stop to wonder if it ever happened at all, and if I can be really I. But when I think it all over carefully, remembering a few of the situations that led up to it, – trifling incidents that were inexplicable at the time and worried me very much, – I see now that I wasn't very intelligent in not suspecting a little what they meant. I never did, though, not in the least.

The thing that happened – how little the simple statement would mean to papa, for instance, and how much it really does mean! – the thing that happened was, that I made the First Ten of the Dickey.

As long ago as April, the First Ten began to be – well, it began to be very much on people's minds, although, of course, hardly anything was said about it. Berri and I used to talk about it a little; Hemington and I mentioned it once in a while; I suppose there are about four men in our class that I knew well enough to discuss it with. But naturally we spoke of it only when we were absolutely alone. If any one else came into the room, we began to talk about something else. Yet, although the subject could n't come up in general conversation, I often knew that it was there – in everybody's thoughts – in the atmosphere. Every day some little thing would happen that almost made you jump, as it suddenly brought the question into your mind, "Who is going to make the First Ten?" things, for instance, like seeing some one in our class walking through the Square with a Dickey man who was in the Sophomore class. That always looked as if it meant something, because – well, because it very often did mean something. One night Berri told me (in the strictest confidence, of course) that Phil Blackwood – an upper classman – had met a girl cousin of his in town at a tea, and had said to her that he liked Berri, and thought he was great fun to talk to. She had told this to Berri's aunt, who had repeated the remark to Berri, who was in a great state about it, and wondered how much importance he ought to attach to it. It really did sound to me as if something might come of it.

We made lists of names and bet on them, and then locked them up in our desks. I put Berri's name on my list; but whether or not he put mine on his, I don't know, for after the crash came, we forgot to compare notes.

As the time grew near, not only Berri, but a good many fellows I knew well began to treat me in a way I did n't understand and did n't like. I don't know just how to describe the gradual change in their manner toward me, because it was the sort of thing you feel without being able to put your finger on the cause, or even on the change itself, without seeming morbid and exaggerated. But I could n't help realizing that they treated me rather coolly. They stopped coming to my room as often as they had been in the habit of coming, they left me out of all sorts of little things I had always been in before as a matter of course, and more than once, as I took my seat at the table or went into somebody's room, I could see that my appearance made the fellows uncomfortable for a moment, or at least gave the talk a different turn. All this hurt my feelings terribly, and I tried to think what I could have done to make the fellows I liked best and considered my friends treat me this way. But I could n't think of a thing. I supposed I must have done something without appreciating what the consequences would be. It made me feel pretty badly, I can tell you, and several times I was on the point of demanding an explanation; but they were all so polite and distant and reserved that I never could bring myself to.

Of course, now I understand exactly why it was, and see how hopelessly stupid I must have been not to have suspected anything. The whole situation arose from the fact that there was a rumor in the class to the effect that I was being considered for the First Ten, – a rumor that was apparently given foundation by my being seen several times with Dick Smith. This made the fellows instinctively avoid me a little, from a feeling that I and the class generally might imagine that they were trying to swipe if they went around much with me. It seems to me now particularly dense on my part not to have had a glimmer of this, because it was just the way I felt myself toward Tucker Ludlow, who had gone to the theatre one night with Phil Blackwood, and two or three other men who were spoken of for the First Ten. Yet I never dreamed that any one could look at me in this way.

Well, things went on, getting more whispery and panicky and uncomfortable, until finally one night at the end of last month the crash came. Just how anybody really knew that the Dickey was having its great spring meeting for the purpose of electing the First Ten it would be impossible to say, for I can't believe that it was breathed in so many words, but we did know it, and we knew that it lasted for three days and three nights before the decision was reached. Then —

In the afternoon Dick Smith overtook me in the street, and after walking along for half a block, said abruptly, —

"By the way, Wood, stay in your room to-night," and then disappeared in a doorway.

I think my heart stopped beating. I did n't dare let myself dwell on the meaning of his words, but stumbled to my lecture and sat there, simply dazed. At the end of the hour I ran back to my room. When I heard Berri come in, I grabbed a book and stared at it blindly, without seeing a word; but Berri passed along the hall to his own study without so much as stopping at my open door. I did n't go to our table for luncheon; I slipped into The Holly Tree later instead. But I could n't eat anything; I was so excited and nervous and full of doubt and fright that I don't remember just how I got through the afternoon. I know I tried to sit in my room, but gave it up and buried myself for a while in one of the alcoves of the library. Later I walked in back streets, and then ran all the way home, when the light began to fade, fearing that something – I could n't bring myself to think just what – might happen in my absence. By that time I was painfully hungry, and managed to swallow a cup of tea and a piece of toast at The Holly Tree.

The evening was endless. I tried to read, but by the time I reached the end of a sentence I had forgotten the beginning of it. Then I tried to write a letter to mamma, but my hand trembled so that the writing scarcely looked like mine at all, and anyhow I couldn't think of enough to fill the first page. It was as if I were two distinct persons, – one trying to write a calm letter to mamma, and the other in an agony of apprehension and uncertainty. I don't know which was worse, – the feeling that the Dickey was coming for me, or the feeling that perhaps it wasn't. Could Dick Smith have merely meant that he might drop in to see me that evening? He had never been in my room, and it seemed unlikely that he should come in that way. His manner, too, of telling me to stay at home had been so odd, his leave-taking so abrupt. I turned these things over in my mind interminably; then I would glance at the clock and find the hands glued to the same old place.

To make things worse, Berri had come home almost as soon as I had, and was in his room with the door shut. I longed to go in, but the feeling that I wouldn't have anything to say if I did, kept me back. He made me even more nervous than I really was by walking up and down, up and down, and occasionally moving a chair as if he had run into it in his restless promenade and were pushing it viciously out of the way. If his manner hadn't been so strained and queer, I think I should have gone in anyhow and relieved my mind. I did n't intend to do quite this, but at the end of about two hours I could n't endure the lonely suspense any longer, and decided at least to knock on his door and borrow something – I did n't know what when I started. Mrs. Chester had forgotten to light the lamp in the hall, and as I was feeling my way through the darkness and deciding that a match would be the most plausible excuse for going in and then going out again almost immediately, I bumped into somebody coming the other way. We both jumped back, and I thought for a second that I was about to collapse at the knees.

"Oh, it's you!" Berri exclaimed in a voice that I just recognized as his. "Heavens! but you scared me. I was on my way to your room to borrow your – your – your – to borrow – Oh, Granny!" He broke off with a kind of gulp, and threw his arms around me. "Isn't this ghastly!" Then I knew that he had been told to stay in his room too, and had been suffering the same horrors. Ever since dinner he had been pacing the floor unable, just as I had been, to make up his mind as to the exact significance of the advice to be at home that evening. He could n't help feeling that it might have been a mistake, that something would go wrong; and that again, if nothing did go wrong, there was the hideous conjecture as to what would happen to you to look forward to.

We sat down in my study, – Berri on the edge of a chair, his hands folded with desperate calmness on his lap; I at my desk, where I found, after a minute or two of strained silence, that I had dug a great hole in my blotter and ruined a stylographic pen.

"If they do come," Berri at last whispered, "how do you think we ought to be found? I don't know that it would be altogether the thing to be so – so dressed and apparently waiting." Our extreme preparedness did seem rather assuming, now that he spoke of it; I was far from wanting to appear cock-sure of my election or of anything else to a fiendish mob such as we had watched from my window that night in the autumn.

"And yet," I answered, "if we took off very much, I don't suppose they would wait for us to dress; in fact, I don't think I coulddress, and when I came in, it seemed to be getting cool outsi – "

"Ssssshh! I thought I heard something," Berri broke in. He leaned toward the window, and as the lamplight fell on his face, I saw for the first time how pale he was. We listened. The clock ticked with a queer little hum on two notes that I had never known it to make before; the student-lamp grumbled twice, and each time the flame rose and fell; I had never noticed this, either.

"I was perfectly sure," Berri whispered. His whisper was several times louder than his ordinary tone.

"How do you think it would do to take off our coats and neckties?" I suggested. "That would look as if we had begun to get ready for bed without any suspicion of – of – It; and at the same time we would have pretty much everything on."

"You talk now as if you had made up your mind that they were coming," Berri said nervously. "Do you think they are?" The fact of his asking me this dropped me back once more into all the sickening doubt from which for a minute or two I had been unconsciously lifted.

"I don't know," I faltered. "What do you think?" But instead of telling me Berri exclaimed, —

"Oh, this is awful!" and began to walk up and down the room. As he walked he took off his coat and threw it in a corner; then he gave the end of his necktie a jerk that not only undid the knot but ripped his shirt open from his neck to his shoulders, for he had forgotten that on one side the thing was pinned. I don't think he realized what he was doing, as he went on pulling and pulling until he had torn out a narrow strip of linen at least a foot and a half long. Berri, pacing the floor and tearing himself to pieces in a nervous frenzy as he paced, struck me all at once as the funniest thing I had ever seen, and I began, first to giggle, and then to laugh with the kind of laughter that takes possession of you all over and leaves you helpless.

I was leaning back in my chair, weak and hysterical, when Berri stopped as abruptly as if he had been shot, and stood petrified in the middle of the room. Away in the distance the chanting cry of the Dickey had begun to rise and fall, die with a tenor wail and begin again; my laughter died with it, and as I lay there, hypnotized by the sound, I think I must have forgotten to close my mouth, for when Berri spoke again, my throat was parched and rough. Perhaps he did n't speak – I think he just made a feeble motion with his hand that I interpreted as a sign to take off my coat and necktie. But I couldn't act on it; I could n't do anything but lean back with my eyes fixed, and listen to the approaching song. It grew louder and louder, clearer and clearer, fiercer and fiercer, until it broke all at once into a great roar, and I knew that they had turned the corner and were coming down our little street. Then I felt Berri's hand in mine, – it was cold and wet, – and he was saying incoherently, —

"Good by, Granny – I mustn't be found in your room – good-by – I must be found in my own room – reading a book – yes – reading a book – good-by." Then the exultant song and the heavy rhythm of feet under my window suddenly stopped; there was a moment almost of silence, followed by a hoarse yell from what seemed like a thousand savage throats. In the pandemonium my ears distinguished here and there the sound of my own name shouted and shrieked in various tones of impatient, unbridled, vindictive eagerness, and for a second my thoughts flashed back to the night Berri and I had seen some one else pulled out. That had thrilled me, but this reduced me to a quaking pulp.

The door downstairs crashed back – there was a deafening scramble on the tin steps – my own door burst open – the room was full of greedy hands and vengeful faces. I was lifted – hurled through the air out into the hall and down the stairs in two thuds – across the piazza, down the steps, along the walk, out of the gate between a double line of executioners into the hungry mob that dragged me this way and that, tore at my hair and clothes, rolled me in the dirt, and finally jerked me upright, linked my arms in those of some other neophytes (I could n't see who they were), and started me down the street with a kick. We swayed off – a million devils behind us – roaring the Dickey song, as we had been commanded to, at the top of our lungs.