“There is no attempt,” answered Curtiss; “there is merely a pretence,—a pretence that, strangely enough, isn’t meant to deceive any one. We find it in the naïve untruthfulness of the college papers, in the eloquent conventionality of the Class Day Orators; the college press prattles about ‘class feeling’ and all the other feelings that none of us, since the place has grown so large, has ever felt; the orator’s sentiments bear about the same relation to real life that his gestures do: he has a lot to say about everybody’s sitting together at the feet of the Alma Mater; but he doesn’t dwell at all on those of us who have been cuddled in her lap. That’s what I mean when I say the place is consistently ‘American.’” Curtiss got up and took a meditative turn about the room. “The undergraduate body faithfully reproduces, in little, the social orders of the whole country, and not only never formally recognises their existence, but takes occasion, every now and then, somewhat elaborately, to deny it,—a proceeding that of course doesn’t change any one’s position or make any one happier. ‘Fine words,’ indeed, never ‘buttered the parsnips’ of so sophisticated a crowd as you discover at Harvard; but if an American community finds it impossible, by reason of all the thousand and one artificial conditions that make such things impossible, to be ‘free and equal,’ what is left for the distracted concern to do, but flaunt its freedom and its equality, from time to time, in theory?”
“It’s all wrong then—frightfully wrong,” declared Hewitt, with considerable heat. He had been increasingly irritated through the calm progress of Curtiss’s discourse, and now stood with his back to the fire-place, staring fixedly before him,—a spirited figure of protest. “We’re too young at college for that kind of rot,” he went on emphatically; “where, in the name of Heaven, can a fellow expect square treatment, if it isn’t right here among what, just now, you scornfully called ‘a multitude of lusty young men’? They ought to be too young and too lusty and too good fellows to care—even to know about—about—all that.” His words tumbled out noisily, and had the effect of noticeably increasing Robinson’s deliberateness.
“The situation would be in no way remarkable, if it were not for just that fact,—our extreme youth.” Curtiss spoke as if he were still in college. “It’s taken rather for granted that young men, who are delightful in so many ways, are the complete embodiment, when chance herds them together, of the ‘hale-fellow-well-met-God-bless-everybody’ ideal a lot of people seem to have of them. The plain truth of the matter is, that at Harvard, at least, they aren’t at all. Wander a moment from the one royal road we all try to prance along in common here, and you’ll find most of us picking our way in very much the same varied paths we are destined to follow later on. The only wonder is that we should have found them so soon. What makes people’s hair stand on end is that young America should begin to classify himself so instinctively—the crystallisation of the social idea seems, to put it mildly, a trifle premature. But”—Curtiss’s shrug comprehended many things—“what are you going to do about it?”
The question was perfectly general in intention, and might have ended the discussion had not Hewitt regarded it as the natural expression of Curtiss’s interest in his ambitions for a more diverting existence.
“And yet, after all, I am a gentleman as well as they,” he said simply.
There was something exquisitely intelligible to the graduate in the very vagueness of the boy’s pronoun. “They,”—he too, in the early forlornness of his college life, had been eagerly aware of them,—the great creatures, who, for some reason or other (not always a transparent one), seemed to emerge with such enviable distinction from the vast mediocrity of the crowd; “They” who put on astonishing black coats and spent Sunday afternoon in town; “They” who so frequently wore little crimson usher’s badges at the games, and bowed to so many of the attractive people they showed to their seats; “They” who, fine shouldered and brown from rowing on the crews, seemed to endure their education with such splendid listlessness; “They” whom he had so often heard rattling into the suburban stillness of Cambridge just before dawn, from some fine dance in town. How unmistakable they were in the class-room, at a football game, the theatre,—everywhere; how instinctively they seemed to know one another, and how inevitably they came to be felt in every class as something, if not exactly apart, at least aloof. Curtiss stared musingly at the fire a moment, and smiled as he recalled the various trivial circumstances that, in his own case, gradually, and with none of the excitement of a conscious transition, had brought about the substitution of a perfectly natural, matter-of-fact “We,” for the once tacitly understood but exasperating “They.” For a moment he thought of asking Hewitt to explain himself; he had a freakish desire to see the fellow flounder in the effort to be clear, without becoming pitifully transparent; however, he thought better of it, and only answered with some impatience,—
“Of course you’re as much of a gentleman as any one; but that—except very, very superficially—isn’t the question.” Curtiss was beginning to feel like a hoary old oracle. “There’s nothing strange or tragic in your situation; it’s shared by lots of other fellows in college,” he went on; “you slipped into Harvard as soon as your tutor thought you were ready to, and, as you came from a rather obscure place, you slipped in quite alone. A year and a half have dragged themselves through the vagaries of the Cambridge climate; you are still, broadly speaking, quite alone. Yet all this time you have been sensitive—keenly so—to the life that is being lived everywhere around you, and you begin to feel about as essential to the drama as a freshman does when he puts on a somewhat soiled court costume and assists Sir Henry Irving in one of his interesting productions. The trouble with you and every one like you is simply this: you didn’t come to Harvard from a preparatory school with a lot of acquaintances and some friends; you didn’t come from any of the few big towns that annually send a number of fellows who know, or who at least have heard, of one another; you are athletic, perhaps, but scarcely what one would call an athlete—although I confess, that isn’t of much consequence; we don’t, as a rule, reward athletes for being athletes. If they perform well, we applaud them. At Harvard, athletics are occasionally a means to a man’s becoming identified with the sort of people he wishes to be one of; but I have never known them to be an end. Finally, you are not a Bostonian, and when I say ‘a Bostonian,’”—Curtiss removed his glasses and softly polished them with his handkerchief,—“when I say ‘a Bostonian,’” he repeated with the gentlest of satire, “I mean of course a Bostonian that one knows.”
“Now, although you are doubtless a great many interesting and attractive things, you do not happen to be any one of those I have just named; and it is from the men who are, that the crowd destined to be of importance in college—the fellows who are going to lead, who are going to be felt—whatever you choose to call it—will generally originate. Think of your own class for a moment, and, nine times out of ten, the men that you feel would be congenial as well as interesting, if you knew them, are taken from the sort of men I’ve specified.”
“Nine times out of ten!” Hewitt laughed hopelessly, “who the devil is the tenth man?”
“Why, you are, of course,—or you will be,” said Curtiss, gaily. “I was myself, once upon a time. It’s good fun too; my little ‘boom’ was a trifle belated—the tenth man’s usually is; but it only seems to make the more noise for going off all by itself; while it lasts you almost feel as if people were being superlatively nice to you in order to make up for lost time. Nine times out of ten though”—the sweeping phrase was beginning to assume the dignity of a formula—“it’s the other way. The ‘tenth man’ at Harvard would never have escaped from his obscurity and comparative isolation to become the ‘tenth man,’ if it were not for something that seems very much like chance.”