The Diary of a Freshman

It must have been some time before this that Berri's thesis arrived from England one morning with a long letter from Duggie. I have kept a sort of lookout for it right along, but that morning Berri saw the postman from my window and ran downstairs to meet him. As he was coming up, he exclaimed in a surprised voice, "What on earth do you suppose – " and then broke off abruptly. He passed quickly through my room, dropping a bill on my desk as he went, and after that the house for about half an hour was very silent. I had so often wondered what Berri would do, what he would say, how he would take Duggie's letter when it came, that I instinctively knew it had at last arrived, and asked no questions.

He surprised me by neither saying nor doing anything; and for two days I had no reason to suppose that the thesis had wandered back to Cambridge at all beyond the feeling in my bones that it had. On the third day, however, Berri, who was just starting off to spend Sunday at his aunt's, stopped in my room with a letter in his hand. He looked at it doubtfully for a moment, as if making up his mind about something, and then tossed it into my lap.

"I got that from Sherwin the other day," he said; and then added, as he made for the door and I drew the letter from its envelope, —

"Well, it may be all for the best."

I don't think anybody could read Duggie's letter and not feel that it was for the best. Berri has n't said anything more about it, and neither have I. There really is n't anything to say.

I passed all my exams. My marks are n't anything to be stuck up about, but they let me through decently, and in three courses were even a little better than they actually had to be, – which is a comfort in a way. For my adviser says he thinks that in a few weeks it would n't do any harm to petition the administrative board (or whatever it is that has charge of such things) to let me off probation. He says he can't promise anything, of course, but that stranger things have happened; all of which seems to me rather to explode Berri's conviction that every adviser in college spends all his odd moments in devising fiendish schemes for the destruction of his Freshmen charges. But then Berri was unfortunate in his adviser. He is n't young and does n't try to be sympathetic like mine, and he annoys Berri extremely by glaring at him over a pair of steel-rimmed spectacles and exclaiming à propos of nothing, —

"You can't fool me – you can't fool me!"

My adviser has had me to dinner twice at the professors' club. He invites his Freshmen, four or five at a time, to dinner, in order, I suppose, to get to know them better. Of course, he never really does get to know us better by having these stiff little parties, but it's awfully kind of him to ask us, and he thinks he does; so it's all right. I dreaded the first one, but my dread was n't a patch on the dread with which I dreaded the second, because I 'd been to the first. Naturally I did n't dare refuse to go to either of them. Nobody does. The dinner itself is good, and my adviser not only lays himself out to be just as nice as possible, – he succeeds. Yet the fellows don't feel altogether at their ease somehow and are n't themselves. They want to be and try to be, and once in a while they put up a pretty good bluff at it, but they never quite are. I don't know how to explain it exactly, but when you can't help feeling that your host is sizing you up and talking only about the things he thinks you like to talk about – even if you do like to talk about them, why, you just can't. (I've read that sentence over six times and it means a little less every time.) After dinner he takes the fellows up to his room and asks them to smoke, and they never know which would be the better swipe, – to accept or to refuse. Some decide one way and some the other; but whether they want to smoke or not has very little to do with the decision. The best part of the evening comes when somebody gets up enough nerve to murmur that he is very sorry he has to say good-night, as he has a lot of studying to do. This usually makes the others laugh, and it always breaks up the party. Then the fellows get together in somebody's room – if they know one another well enough – and talk the thing over.

Oh, I wish spring would come! This seems to be the time of year when nothing much happens. As long as we were all grinding most of the day for the mid-years, I didn't think much about the weather, except that when it was bad there wasn't so much temptation to idle out of doors. Now, however, everybody wants the weather to be good, and it's vile. It always manages to do four or five different things in the course of a day, and the walking is unspeakable. To a certain extent, though, this is the fault of the town itself. Most of the residence streets have dirt sidewalks and curbstones that might be very picturesque in Egypt or some place where it did n't rain and snow and freeze and melt all in the course of a few hours; but here they turn into troughs full of mud and slush, and the curbstones keep the mixture from running into the gutter. I know I ought n't to criticise such a fine old town. So many great people have, all their lives, floundered uncomplainingly through Cambridge mud that I suppose it's cheeky of me to notice it. But in wet weather the sidewalks are really not nice. In front of a few houses the owners put down temporary wooden walks, – three boards wide, running lengthwise, – but you invariably meet a lady in the middle of them and have to jump gracefully into the nearest puddle, looking as if you considered this the dearest privilege of your young life.

The candidates for the track team are crazy to get out of doors and begin regular practice on the Soldiers' Field cinder track, but it 's too soft yet to be raked and rolled, and they have to keep working in the gym and on the tiresome old board track behind it. Dick Smith was talking about this not long ago when he joined me in the Yard. He says it's great on a warm spring morning to go across the river and sit on the bleachers and watch the fellows practise starting and short sprints.

Well, there's nothing like that now. I hardly know how the days go by.

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.