Harvard episodes

by Charles Macomb Flandrau

“Yes, I start in to-morrow.”

“I didn’t know anybody was tutoring in that course this year. Who did you get?”

“I don’t know his name. Oh, yes, I do, too. He’s a freak named McGaw; wears a black cutaway coat with braid round the edge, and looks nervous. Good-night, old Haystack. Don’t forget the lights.”

Before Haydock made the room dark, he took the Secretary’s letter from the mantelpiece, and put it on Wolcott’s desk, where it could not very well be overlooked.

II

“IF the primitive custom—in vogue, I believe, at certain colleges—of choosing by vote “the most popular man,” “the most unpopular man,” “the handsomest man,” and so on, were numbered among Harvard traditions (thank Heaven, it isn’t!), Wolcott would never have been elected to adorn the first of these distinctions. He would have had a large and enthusiastic backing for the second, and some scattering ballots for the third. Yet the material perquisites of popularity were his, for Wolcott presented the thought-compelling spectacle of a disliked person, to whom every social honour was paid with as much regularity as if he had come to Cambridge with a pocketful of promissory notes that called for them—to be drawn out and cashed when due. One never said of Wolcott, as is said of some fellows, “He made the first ten of the Dicky”—implying a certain amount of enterprise or discretion. The assertion that he was a first ten man required no implication; it was enough, for it was so ordained. Now this fact is one of significance,—of greater significance than any one, not a Harvard man, is likely to attach to the sophomore society (and it is a wise Harvard child that knows the mother of its soul). But just why Wolcott—arrogant, combative, unresponsive—had been a first ten man, is for a treatise, not a story. It is sufficient to say that he was one, and that it never occurred to his numerous acquaintances to question his individual fitness for that honour, however much they lamented the system that gave it to him. Wolcott himself never questioned it. Only in the circumstance of his having been omitted from the chosen first, would the subject have seemed to him in any way markworthy. His attitude from babyhood towards anything worth having, that he didn’t already possess, had been one of imminent proprietorship. Once when his nurse, holding him up to the window, had asked in the peculiarly imbecile way of nurses, “Whose moon is that, Searsy?” Searsy had replied, as one compelled to explain the obvious, “That’s Mr. Langdon Wolcott’s moon.” The gentleman referred to was his father. This attitude Searsy had practised through the nursery, and the fitting school, until, by the time he went to college, it was an exceedingly muscular, well-developed posture indeed. And that’s partly why he was called Wolcott The Magnificent. The other reason provoked less difference of opinion; he really was magnificent. Everybody who knew about arms, and legs, and chests, and things, agreed that he was. And as the people who don’t know about such things always have a deep admiration—either frank or sneaking—for them, Sears’s imperial subtitle was rarely disputed. As early as the close of his freshman year, the name spread to town. Girls with opera-glasses used to sit at back dining-room windows on the water-side of Beacon Street to see him row past with his crew. They took the same tender interest in the way the April sun and wind tanned his back, that a freshman takes in colouring a meerschaum pipe. In years gone by, Wolcott and these young ladies had—in the good Boston fashion—cemented their acquaintance with the mud that pies are made of. But wonderful things had happened since then; a lot of little girls, with piano legs and pigtails, had put their skirts down and their hair up; a chunky, dictatorial boy had become very magnificent.

Altogether, Sears was not the sort of fellow over whose welfare one would expect to find many people worrying. There would seem to be but little cause for anxiety about a man who knew how to spend an enormous allowance sensibly,—if selfishly,—who, on the whole, preferred to be in training most of the year rather than out of it, who rarely fell below what he called a “gentleman’s mark” in any of his studies, and who, as a matter of course, was given every social distinction in the power of the undergraduate world to bestow; yet there were several very intelligent human beings, who, when they thought about Sears—and they thought a good deal about him every day—did not meditate so much on what he had, as on what he so abundantly lacked. They wished that things were different. And Haydock used to say that worrying was merely wishing two or three times in succession that things were different. One of these persons was Sears’s eldest sister, another of them was Haydock.

Miss Wolcott was the sort of Boston girl that dresses like a penwiper, and becomes absorbed in associated charities after a second lugubrious season. In the patois of her locality, she was called a “pill;” a girl whom Harvard men carefully avoid until it is rumoured that her family shortly intends to “give something” in the paternal pill-box. Whereas, prior to her renunciation, dozens of Harvard men had been part of Miss Wolcott’s responsibility, her concern was now centred upon one, namely, her brother Sears. She and Haydock, unknown to each other, had found the same reason for wishing things different. After making each other’s acquaintance, they worried congenially in chorus. In their opinion Sears was not getting out of Harvard College the greatest things Harvard College had to offer. They did not expect him to see them,—that would have been demanding too much; the undergraduate who sees them is an extremely occasional, precocious, and, as a rule, objectionable person. But they wished earnestly that the boy might, somehow or other, be put in the way of feeling them—of realising, even dimly, that the world to which he had lent himself for four years was something besides two small clubs, a fashionable dormitory, and a class crew. They wanted him to know, for instance, that the steady, commonplace stream that flowed to five o’clock dinners in Memorial Hall, the damp, throat-clearing, tired mobs that packed Lower Massachusetts on wet Monday afternoons and smelled, the indefinite hundreds that sat at dusk on the grass in front of Holworthy to hear the Glee Club sing, were as necessary, as real, as himself. They thought that such a conviction, or even such a suspicion, would make Sears a bigger and a better man. They believed—knowing, as they did, how inevitable was the general scheme of his future—that if the glimmer of these things did not dawn now, when the horizon that bounded them all ended with the college fence, it never would. And they were perfectly right.

“Searsy is really such a splendid fellow,” Miss Wolcott would say to Haydock, with enthusiasm, “I want him to do something.” Haydock, too, wanted him to do something. But they never got much beyond that, although they had many satisfactory discussions on the subject on Sunday afternoons, while Mrs. Wolcott and the younger sisters (who weren’t failures) made tea and conversation for frock-coated youths in the next room. It was perplexing to know just where to begin with a person like Sears. Miss Wolcott laboured under a disadvantage; Sears was not the person to take suggestions from a failure. Haydock was more to the point. But he and Wolcott were of an age and a class; and it’s so easy to be a bore.

The Secretary’s letter struck Haydock as one of the few distinctly opportune requests for money he had ever heard of. After he had put out Wolcott’s lights, he walked up and down his own room, smoking his pipe and thinking it over. There were several possible outcomes to the little situation. An act of charity may be ignored, it may be performed with the enthusiasm with which one pays a bill for a suit of clothes long since worn out, or it may stir up a confusion of fine emotions that have lain quiescent in one, like the dregs of a comfortable bottle. The latter kind of charity is the sin-coverer. The chances were that Wolcott would never think of Barrows and his man again. It was just possible that he might send them a cheque for fifty dollars, and be unbearable for the next three days. But as for his being in any way stirred, awakened, made to know what he was doing, to wonder what he might do, Haydock felt, away down deep somewhere, that it was quite hopeless. And for that reason, the mind of man being so contrived, his thoughts dwelt that night, as they often did, on an apotheosised Wolcott, a Wolcott who justified himself, who didn’t disappoint, a Wolcott whose sympathies and judgments were as broad as his shoulders, a Wolcott, in short, whose inside was brother to his outside.