The Diary of a Freshman
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"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.
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?