Billy, on the other hand, was fatally gifted in his ability to please everybody. Other things being satisfactory, personal appearance doesn’t weigh heavily in the balance of undergraduate judgment; it was not Billy’s extremely pretty and well cared for exterior that compelled fellows to take him into account in their preliminary survey of the Freshman Class; although that may have helped, just at first. People who liked the plasticity of his quick smile and the restlessness of his black eyebrows—there was something very un-Anglo-Saxon in their facial importance—thought he had “an expressive face.” But what it expressed, if anything, no man undertook to say. Hemenway, who drew for the “Lampoon,” said it was a sketch, not a face,—the sketch of a painter who didn’t take art seriously. Neither was it cleverness that made fellows who met Ware remember him favourably, if they happened to be upper classmen, and glad of a subsequent occasion that threw them in his way, if they were his own classmates. For Billy had none of the talents of which parlour tricks are made. In the presence of older boys, he instinctively knew the number and kind of remarks that gain for a freshman the negative distinction of being “able to talk enough.” With his contemporaries, he talked a great deal—almost up to the line that separated him from youths who chatter. But except for a whimsical manner of attack, and his consistent frivolity of tone in regard to almost everything, his conversation was unimportant. What he did possess, to a rather extraordinary degree, was that which, if given the field, is more magical among one’s fellows at college than brains, manners, looks, or money,—that which is described only as “the indescribable something.”
And Billy had the field. S. Timothy’s sent fifteen men to Harvard that year; he knew them all, of course, and roomed with the very fine one. They all flocked together at first, until the acquaintance of each equalled the fourteen others plus fourteen times the friends of every one of them—which is all one knows, and all one needs to know. The number—it included the nebular hypothesis of the next year’s Institute and a few more—kept Billy’s head wagging incessantly in and about Cambridge. Of all this throng Billy was probably interested least in the man with whom he roomed. John Rice was a constant and living reminder of S. Timothy’s; Billy detested S. Timothy’s. He used to tell John pleasantly, that he not only didn’t like the school or anything he had learned there, but that it had bored him extremely for six years, although he hadn’t perhaps realised it at the time.
“Spend next Sunday with you up at School?” he would say, airily, to this frequent suggestion of John’s. “My dear fellow, how foolishness! My life-work consists just now in forgetting S. Timothy’s.” Then he would pull John’s hair, or, perhaps, shy harmless missiles at him from across the room; for he knew that John was abjectly grateful for any semi-affectionate demonstrations of this nature, and it amused Billy to be liked by people,—people for whom he didn’t particularly care. He didn’t care much for John; he found him solicitous rather than sympathetic. John was too contemplative—too “set”; he refused to accept freshman standards and go ahead accordingly. Billy, who managed, before he was through, to spread himself uncommonly thin over a considerable area, fancied that he thought his room-mate pitifully prudent. For when Billy entered college, he proceeded from the very first to expand in the largeness and fulness of his glorious new life. People said, afterwards, his development had been so slight and so artificial, in the stained-glass atmosphere of his imitation English “fitting” school, that it made up for lost time at a most astonishing rate when the boy became his own master. He was very much like a supersensitive photograph plate in the hands of a bungler. If you know what it does on being plunged into the developing solution, you have an idea of Billy’s Freshman year.
He had been such a nice little boy at S. Timothy’s,—piping liquidly in an angelic “nighty” at Chapel,—that when the inevitable rumours reached there, the rector and the masters were deeply pained to learn that still another butterfly had burst from the godly chrysalis. They assumed lank, pre-Raphaelite expressions, and murmured, “Oh, Harvard—Harvard!” Billy himself was not left in ignorance of their distress; there was always John, of course; and from time to time biblical excerpts, skilfully tortured into the form of letters, came to him through the mails. Somebody-or-other’s pamphlet on “The Life Beautiful,” and a horrid looking little thing in white celluloid covers, entitled “Daily Seeds for Daily Needs,” were also slipped through his letter-slide one morning—all of which, in turn, caused Billy to murmur, “Oh, S. Timothy’s—S. Timothy’s!” His attitude toward S. Timothy’s rapidly became that of one who places his thumb upon his nose and extends the fingers of his hand.
“‘Descensus averni facilis est,’” John, in one of his more playful moods, had remarked to him one evening. To which Billy had replied, “Ah, yes—E pluribus unum nux vomica facile princeps, as dear old Virgil used to say.” He was standing before the mirror in his bedroom adjusting an evening tie. Four crumpled failures already lay on the floor; from time to time Billy kicked at them as he moved about, or arrested the progress of his toilet to inhale deeply from the cigarette that had already burned several holes in the cover of his dressing-table. John was sitting on the bed, gravely watching the boy dress for the “Friday Evening.”
“Do you think you’ll come back to-night?” he asked.
“That’s the delightful part of it all—I don’t know,” answered Billy, with a shrug. He hadn’t told John where he was going after the dancing-class, because John, by various pathetic little indirect remarks, had displayed unmistakable interest in his movements. Billy withheld the satisfaction it would have given his room-mate to know all about him, partly because he wished to discourage a growing tendency, and for the reason that John’s—or any one’s—serious concern always aroused in him pleasant sensations of silliness, accompanied by a desire to giggle.
“After all—Boston is a busy little place, isn’t it Johnny?” his smile was radiant with mystery. “Don’t sit up for me, old man—unless you care for winter sunrises,” he added, imitating the tones he so often heard in Sanborn’s billiard place, and laughing at the way they sounded. “By the way, what are you going to do to-night,—something devilish of course,—but what?” He wasn’t asking for information; he knew that John usually spent his evenings quietly at home, or went to see one of the S. Timothy’s boys, and talk foot-ball or the intricacies of English A.
“I? Oh, I was thinking of going over to Claverly to see Haydock,”—Haydock was a senior. “He asked us to drop in often, you know,” said John, so casually that, after the manner of absolutely honest persons who attempt a subtlety, he “gave himself away.”
“Translated, I suppose that means I haven’t been there very often—that I haven’t been there at all, in fact?” said Billy, sweetly. He was thinking to himself that when John aimed at “foxiness,” he usually made a very successful cow of himself.