The Diary of a Freshman

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.

XV

I've been dead to the world for more than a month; it seems about a year. Yet when I came to look at the situation squarely, there wasn't anything else to do exactly. It was a case of getting the drop on my exams or letting them get the drop on me. Of course, I could have sort of fooled with them and thought I was learning something about them and then perhaps have scraped through in one or two and failed in the others. And this, as a matter of fact, was the way in which Tucker Ludlow and I did go at them at first. Tucker came up to my room two or three times, armed with some type-written notes on Greek architecture that he had bought at one of the book stores in the Square. The first time he came was rather late in the afternoon. He examined everything in my room, and we talked a good deal; he had been out West once, and seemed to know much more about that part of the country than I did. However, we finally got to work and had read about two pages of the notes when Hemington came in. He saw that we were grinding, and said he would n't sit down and interrupt us, especially as he ought to be in his own room, grinding himself. He did n't actually sit down, but leaned against the mantelpiece and smoked for a while, and then compromised by half sitting on the arm of a chair in a temporary way and swinging his leg. When at last he got up to leave, it was so near dinner that Ludlow went with him, and said he would continue some other time. He left the notes with me, and at first I thought I should study them alone, but as Ludlow and I had agreed to grind the course up together, there did n't seem to be any point in getting ahead of him; so in a few minutes I went to dinner myself.

The next time Ludlow came to study was in the evening. He proposed that I should read the notes aloud, as he found the architectural terms so hard to pronounce; we were to stop and talk over anything we did n't understand. I made myself comfortable in a chair near the lamp, and Ludlow drew up to the fire. After droning along for about ten minutes about triglyphs and epistyles and entablatures and all that sort of thing, I suddenly had a jealous feeling that he was getting more good from the performance than I was, for he had n't asked a question, while I had n't understood a single sentence. Finally, without looking up, I said, —

"Tucker, if you really know what 'pseudo-peripteral' means, I wish you would tell me." Tucker didn't answer, and I thought he was probably trying to get at a definition simple enough for me to grasp. But when I glanced over toward the fireplace, I saw that he was asleep with his mouth open. Well, I felt rather angry at first, – it all seemed such a waste of time; but it struck me, too, as being funny, so I did n't wake him. He must have slept for at least ten minutes longer (of course I did n't bother about reading aloud any more), and then he came to, exclaiming, —

"Read that about the ground plan once more; I don't think I quite got that." As the ground plan was almost the first topic mentioned, I suppose he had dozed off almost immediately. After that I made him do the reading, but he had n't stumbled through many pages before he put down the notes and said, —

"Granny, don't you think that if we tackled this beastly drivel in the daytime, our heads would be clearer?"

That was the end of our grinding together. He came to my room once more, but I was out. It was after this experience that I thought the matter over and decided I should have to do the thing differently, and for the most part alone. My most brilliant stroke was getting the key of Duggie's room from Mrs. Chester; I could lock myself up there and be perfectly safe. When fellows saw my own door wide open and no one at home, they went away at once without making a row. Of course I had to let Berri into the game; but as he began to be scared about some of his own exams, he was grateful for the refuge and did n't give it away.

I went to work at the whole business scientifically, determined not to leave a single thing, however unimportant, to chance. And I 'm convinced now that if I have the nerve always to do this, I can get through any examination I 'm ever likely to have, – not brilliantly, perhaps, but very respectably. First of all, I spent a day in the library and got hold of a lot of books that gave my various courses in their simplest, clearest form. For the Fine Arts course I found that a copy of the notes that Ludlow had was better than anything. They stated facts in a condensed way that made it possible to keep in your head a bird's-eye view of the entire course, as far as we had gone. Then I made a list of the number of pages of general reading we had to accomplish in every course, and split them up so as to be able to get through them all – taking notes as I read – by reading a certain number of pages a day. I left a margin at the end for review and in case of accidents. And finally, after I had made these preparations and collected as many of the necessary books as I could (I had to do some of my reading in the library), I locked Duggie's door one morning after breakfast, and sat down at his desk, and stayed there until luncheon; and after luncheon I went back and stayed until it was time to go to the gym and take a run; and after dinner I went back and stayed until bedtime. And I did this every day with very few interruptions until I could pick up any of the text-books, turn to the alphabetical index, and plough right through it, describing in detail every darned thing it mentioned; and an alphabetical index mentions a good deal. If I slipped up on anything, I would mark it with a pencil, go back and learn it. Oh, it was perfectly awful! I got so tired and discouraged and maudlin at times that I would have to lean back and close my eyes and let my bursting mind become a throbbing blank for a few minutes, in order to keep from screaming. But after the gym and the run and the shower-bath, I felt all right again, – just as if nothing had happened.

Two courses – the physics and philosophy – I had to tutor in for a while. There was no use pegging away at them by myself, for I simply did n't understand some of the experiments, and logic I could n't make head or tail of. A Senior who lived in College House explained them to me in simple golden words (three dollars an hour were his terms), and when I once saw through it all and had it down on paper in my own language, I could let it soak in at home. The other things – the ones I did understand, like History and Fine Arts – were merely a matter of incessant repetition and memory.

The night before the Fine Arts exam I went to what is called a "Seminar" in that subject. I could have got along very well without it after my days and days of slavery, but about every one I knew was going, and I wanted to see what it was like. There are several men here who make a business of boiling popular courses down to their most painlessly swallowable dimensions, and then giving the thing the evening before the examination in a kind of lecture, for which they charge an admittance fee of three or four dollars. This performance is a seminar, – a kind of royal road, if not to learning at least to passing examinations. They say that fellows who never look at a book or take a note in class often go to a seminar and, providing they have good memories, are able to answer enough questions on the exam paper the next morning to get through with colors flying. A certain number of questions on almost every paper simply have to deal with cold, isolated facts rather than with the generalities, comparisons, and discussions that necessitate a real knowledge of the subject, and it is with these facts – pounded in at a seminar – that one puts up a successful bluff. The authorities naturally object to all this. As Berri remarked about the seminar we went to, —

"After a professor has earnestly expounded a subject for half a year, it must make him rather sore to have a cheeky parrot get up and do the whole thing much better in four hours."

The Fine Arts seminar was held in a huge room, almost a hall, in a kind of office building near the Square. It was advertised to begin at half-past seven, and pretty much every one was there on time, – all the sports of the Freshman and Sophomore classes, some Juniors, and even a few Seniors. It was what the society reporter refers to as "a large and fashionable gathering." It certainly was a mighty nice-looking crowd of fellows; clean, well dressed, and (to quote Berri) "much more intelligent in appearance than we actually are, or we should n't be here at all." As every man came in, he was given a large sheet of stiff paper on which was printed a synopsis of the course, with all the subjects that had been touched on methodically arranged, and a list of definitions, simple and easily remembered, but adequate. It was Greek art in a nutshell, – a perfect marvel of clearness and condensation. The little folding chairs had been neatly arranged in a semicircle at first, but by the time the fellows had taken possession of them, they looked as if they had been thrown in at random. A good many men who were evidently old hands at the business arranged themselves comfortably in two chairs, leaning back in one with their legs stretched across another, as if prepared to spend the night. A lot of them took off their coats and waistcoats – the crowd and the gas made the already overheated room unbearably warm – and I 've never seen so many pretty shirts in my life as I did that evening.

After every one was settled, the man who was giving the seminar took a chair on a little platform in front of us, and began – not to talk exactly, but to drone. He had a harsh monotonous voice – une voix trainante, Berri called it – and spoke with painful slowness, as if trying not to emphasize any one topic to the exclusion of the others, – which had the effect of making his entire discourse, from beginning to end, horribly important. Except for this crawling sound, the room was absolutely silent; for once nobody seemed conscious of himself or of any one else. Even when the man on the platform pronounced Greek words in a novel fashion that was all his own, there was n't a smile. I don't think we realized the intense strain of attention we were undergoing until, at the end of an hour and three quarters, Tucker Ludlow, who had gone to sleep, fell off his chair. The second or two of relaxation that followed the crash was exquisite. We stretched our arms and swabbed our foreheads with our handkerchiefs, and then sank back again for another hour and fifteen minutes, until the bell in the tower of Memorial boomed out ten o'clock. This seemed to be the signal for a short vacation; for the fact-machine on the platform finished the sentence he had begun and then stood up.

There was a general shuffling of chairs and a babbling of voices, and the crowd divided into chattering groups. Some of the fellows did n't seem to know anybody, and they either went out and strolled up and down the corridor or sat studying the synopsis. The host of the evening had provided beer and ginger ale and cheese and crackers with which to sustain life until the ordeal was over. He could well afford it, as there were at least seventy-five men in the room, every one of whom would deposit three dollars and a half before he left.

While Berri and I and most of our table were talking in a corner, a fellow named Smith, a Sophomore, sauntered over to us. Berri and I were the only ones who knew him, so of course he must have come just to speak to us. I don't remember what he said exactly, as the conversation of the others sort of faded away when he approached, and Berri and I were fearfully rattled. He 's very prominent and belongs to everything. After we had stood there for a minute or two, Hemington and Bertie Stockbridge and the others drifted off, leaving us three together, and in a moment more Berri said, "I 'm going over to get another cracker," and also left us. I happened to notice that he did n't go near the crackers, and furthermore he never came back. This seemed so queer and unlike Berri that I spoke to him about it on the way home and asked him why he had done it. He answered by saying, —

"You don't have to be much of a fox to know when you 're wanted and when you 're not; and that happened to be one of the times when I wasn't." This struck me as absurd, and does still. Berri knew Smith every bit as well as I did, for the only other time he had ever spoken to us we happened to be together just as we were the night of the seminar. I reminded Berri of this; but he only laughed a little and replied, —

"Well, as Fleetwood says, 'I 'm an old man and I know my place.'" Since then Smith has joined me twice when I was walking through the Yard and seemed very friendly in a distant kind of way. I mean that his joining me at all was friendly; he is n't much of a talker, and I never know quite what to say to him. Of course it's very nice in him to do it, but it makes me rather uncomfortable; for both times we stopped a moment on the steps of Sever – the bell had n't rung yet – and although there were a lot of fellows I knew waiting to go in, they merely nodded to me and then looked away.

But I 'm forgetting about the seminar. We went back to our chairs again, and once more tuned our ears to the monotonous voice of the lecturer, that dragged on and on till midnight. It became harder and harder to take in everything he said. The air was heavy with the smoke of Egyptian cigarettes, and I counted nine men who were sound asleep. I suppose that, even though asleep, they were more likely to acquire a fact or two than if they hadn't been there at all. Just at the end – I can hear him now – the man on the platform leaned back wearily with closed eyes and chanted in the same hopeless tone, —

"Let me once more urge upon you the importance of expressing in your examination papers sympathy with the Greek life, the Greek art, and the Greek ideals of the best period. A page or two of sincere regret that we moderns do not possess the innate sense of beauty, the joy of life, civic pride, harmony, and all the other things that the Greeks went in for will help you to get a passing mark. Remember what I told you about [Greek: sophrosúne]. Refer to [Greek: sophrosúne] constantly. John Addington Symonds calls it 'that truly Greek virtue; the correlative in morals to the passion for beauty.' S-y-m-o-n-d-s, and there are two ds in Addington. If you get stuck, make use of the quotation I gave you from Goethe – G-o-e-t-h-e – it comes in well almost anywhere. Good-night and good luck." He stood at the door as we passed out, holding a box in his hand, into which every one dropped three Plunks and a half. I was tired when we got home and went right to bed. But Berri sat up almost until morning, studying the synopsis and going over his notes.