THE CHANCE
TWO men were talking in a room in Claverly Hall. Horace Hewitt, the sophomore who owned the apartment, had passed, during the hour with his visitor, from the state in which conversation is merely a sort of listless chaffing to where it becomes eager, earnest, and perplexing. The other, a carefully dressed, somewhat older young man, across whose impassive, intellectual profile a pair of eyeglasses straddled gingerly, was not, perhaps, monopolising more than his share of the discussion, for Robinson Curtiss was the kind of person to whom a large conversational portion was universally conceded; but he was, without doubt, talking with a continuance and an air of authority that unconsciously had become relentless. Both men were smoking: Hewitt, a sallow meerschaum pipe, with his class in raised letters on the bowl; Curtiss, a cigarette he had taken from the metal case he still held meditatively in his hand. He smoked exceedingly good cigarettes, and practised the thrifty art of always discovering just one in his case.
“So you think my college life from an undergraduate’s standpoint, and it’s the only standpoint I give that for,”—Hewitt snapped his fingers impatiently,—“will always be as much of a fizzle as it has so far?” He had jumped up from the big chair in which he had all along been sprawling and stood before Robinson in an attitude that was at once incredulous and despairing. The momentary embarrassment that Curtiss felt at this unexpected show of feeling on the part of his young friend, took the form of extreme deliberation in returning his cigarette-case to his pocket, and in repeating the performance of lighting his cigarette that had not gone out.
He had not been a graduate quite three years in all, but that had been ample time—particularly as it had been spent far from Cambridge—for the readjustment of certain views of his,—views in which four eventful years at college had been grotesquely prominent. He found, on returning to the university town, that his absence rendered him frequently indifferent to the genuineness and importance, not merely of the more delicate problems of the undergraduate world,—it was one of these on which he was at the present moment indiscreetly touching,—but even to the obvious and common incidents of the academic experience: to the outcome of examinations, to the degree of Bachelor of Arts. It was not until Hewitt stood troubled and expectant before him that Curtiss appreciated how tactless the disparity in their knowledge of things collegiate had made him appear to his young friend. A sudden reminiscent intuition, that flashed him back to his own sophomore year, caused him to feel that what he was saying to Hewitt was almost brutal; in his capacity of a young graduate he had indulged in a cold-blooded lecture (it could hardly be called a discussion) on questions that very properly were not questions to a fellow in Hewitt’s situation, but warm, operative realities. Hewitt was in many ways such a mature young person, his valuation of other people and their actions had always seemed so temperate, so just, that Curtiss, without knowing it, had simply ignored the fellow’s healthy undergraduate attitude. He had failed to assume how eager the sophomore was to be some active part of the new and fascinating life going on everywhere about him; how completely he was possessed by the indefinable, disquieting, stimulative spirit that so triumphantly inhibits Harvard from becoming a mere place of learning. Curtiss had spent the evening in throwing what he sincerely believed was a searching light on some aspects of Harvard life; he was beginning to wish he had allowed Hewitt to perform the office for himself.
“Be honest with me, Curtiss.” Hewitt spoke in the distinct, simple tones that as a rule accompany words one hesitates to trifle with. “You’ve gone through the whole damn thing yourself, and got more out of it—not more than you deserve, of course, but more than most men get; you knew everybody and belonged to—to—” Hewitt hesitated a moment; any single college institution—social, athletic, or intellectual—did not in itself forcibly appeal to him; there was something petty in particularising. “You belonged to—to everything, when you were in college,” he finally said; “how was it done—how is it done every day? I see it going on around me all the time; but I can’t touch it in any way,—it never comes near enough, if you know what I mean; and what I can’t explain to myself is that I don’t see why it should come any nearer to me,—only, I want it to.” The manner in which Horace blurted out the last few words was an epitome of the situation; their confession of keen longing to know and be known in his class had gathered intensity with the growing suspicion that certain conditions of the place—conditions he felt rather than understood—were every day making the realisation of his desire for activity, acquaintances, friendship, more impossible. His great common sense—in Hewitt the quality amounted to a sort of prosaic talent—would always preclude his degenerating into one of the impotently rebellious; it had kept him free from the slightest tinge of bitterness toward any one, but it had not made his interminable, solitary walks up Brattle Street (there was apparently no other walk to take in Cambridge) less interminable; it had enlivened none of the stolid evenings in his rooms which, with a necessary amount of study, a chapter or two from some book he did not much care about, and a bottle of beer, always came to an end somehow or other in spite of themselves; it had not invested stupid theatres with interest, nor mediocre athletics with excitement. Common sense, the prevailing trait of Hewitt’s character, that induced the middle-aged to consider him “singularly well balanced for a young man,” was quite powerless to dispel the desperate loneliness of his sophomore year. His common sense was a coat of mail that defied sabre thrusts, perhaps, but let in the rain.
“You know everything, Rob,” Hewitt smiled; he had after all no wish to appear emotional. “Is there something the matter with me, or with Harvard, that has kept me what you very well know I am—an isolated nonentity who has rather begun to lose hope? Are there other fellows in college who are gentlemen, and used to all the word implies, but who might be in any one of the fifteen leading universities of Kansas, for all the good they are getting out of this place? If I had only been given a chance—” he broke out with sudden vehemence,—“a good, square chance, the kind a man has a right to expect when he enters college—to meet my equals equally—to make myself felt and liked if I had the power to, why I shouldn’t mind failing, you know, not in the least; a man who isn’t an ass accepts chronic unpopularity as he does chronic red hair, or any other personal calamity.” Hewitt’s own locks had sufficient colour to lend authority to his statement. “It isn’t that—it’s the utter impossibility, as far as I can see, of a boy who came here as I did, getting a fair trial. Every day I am more and more convinced that my prospects for the broad, enlightening sort of existence I expected to find on entering Harvard were about as definite and as brilliant as the prospects of a stillborn child on entering the world. What’s the matter? What’s wrong? Who’s to blame?”
There was an admirable force to Hewitt’s manner when he was thoroughly in earnest that, as a rule, roused even in Curtiss a vague apprehension that sincerity was, somehow, obligatory. It did not restrain him, however, from assuming an expression of mock helplessness and murmuring,—
“It’s so long—so intricate.”
“If people only knew what they were in for before they came,” Hewitt continued.
“Maybe they wouldn’t come,” suggested the other.