The season was that which precedes the first atmospheric intimations of spring. The snow had gone, and the ground was dry, and everything that was shabby and stark and colourless in Cambridge was admitting its inestimable obligation in the past to the loveliness of foliage. There was little of the sympathetic mystery of night in the long street in which Hewitt found himself on leaving his building; its lines of irregular wooden houses, aggressive with painty reflections of the dazzling arc-lights swung at intervals overhead, stretched away in distinct and uninviting perspective. Except where the gaslit sidestreets yawned murkily down to the river, Cambridge was hideous in the rectilinear nakedness of March. The university town is, as a rule, so very still after twelve o’clock that its occasional sounds come to have an individuality to one who prowls about, that the sounds of day do not possess. Intent as he was in pondering over the disheartening things Curtiss had been saying to him, Hewitt’s ears were keen, as he sauntered up the street with his hands in his pockets, to all the night noises he had learned to know so well. A student in a ground-floor room ablaze with light was reading aloud. Horace stopped a moment, and laughed at the sleepy voice droning wearily through the open window,—some one was taking his education hard. A policeman, half a block ahead of him, was advancing slowly down the street by a series of stealthy disappearances into shadowed doorways; Hewitt could hear him rattle the doorknobs before he emerged again to glitter a moment under the electric light; a car that had left town at half-past twelve was thumping faintly along somewhere between Boston and the Square—it might have been a great distance away, so intensely still was the intervening suburb; and through all the flat, silent streets the night air, cool and pungent with the damp of salt marshes, blew gently up from the Charles and intensified the atmosphere of emptiness.
Naturally enough, Hewitt’s sense of isolation was far less on these solitary rambles of his, than when he jostled elbows in crowded class-rooms with fellows who, he felt, were potentially his friends, at the same time that he was realising how utterly excluded he was from their schemes of life. Morbidness was foreign to a nature like his; and yet, as time went on, he had been forced to regard Cambridge as most satisfactory when deserted and asleep. It was only then that the forlorn feeling of being no essential part of his surroundings often left him; and although he recognised the weakness of strolling away from unpleasant truths, the altogether unlooked-for state of affairs at college had cowed him into temporary helplessness. That this furtive condition was temporary, even he himself was in a measure aware; one cannot but feel at college that after a certain time has passed, one’s fellows, in spite of the plasticity of youth, become, if not solid, at least viscous, in the moulds that have received them. There is an uneasy period of ebullition in which boys try very hard to enjoy the things that they do, in the absence of the self-poise that enables them to do what they eventually find they enjoy. Intimacies are formed and broken; habits are acquired and not broken; there is a weighing and a levelling, and at last, toward the end of one’s sophomore year, almost everybody has been made or marred or overlooked.
It was an intuition of something of this kind that led Hewitt, in his more thoughtful moods, to realise that he was having his worst time now. The great, ill-assorted crowd that technically composed his “class” would shift and change and finally become, not satisfied, perhaps, with the various combinations it had evolved, but certainly used to them. After that, life at Harvard, Hewitt told himself, would be simplified for him; the time for identifying one’s self with the companions of one’s choice would have come and gone; he would find himself standing alone. His future development would not be just what he had expected; but there was peace in the thought that his position would be definite, unalterable, and then, after all, he would be standing, and not running away, as in the past year he had been so often tempted to do. Although anything but a student, he could even fancy himself ploughing doggedly in self-defence through an incredible number of courses in history, or some such subject, and at the end pleasing his family with two or three Latin words of a laudatory nature on his degree. Hewitt was too thinking and too just a person not to have frequently contrasted his own condition with that of fellows one occasionally heard about, who starved their way through college on sums that would have made scarcely an impression on his room-rent; their persistent “sandiness” compelled his admiration; more than once he had given substantial expression to it. But it was at best a very theoretical sort of consolation that came from a knowledge of the depressing fact that many of his most deserving classmates neither ate nor bathed. His unhappiness differed in kind, but not in reality.
Although he appreciated how easy and foolish it was to assume the “chance” the graduate had dwelt on with such apparent authority, and then let loose an imagination that had been nourished for so long on nothing more satisfying than itself, he, nevertheless, could not help projecting himself into some of the delightful possibilities of that chance. As he loafed through sleeping Cambridge, he pictured himself under a variety of circumstances playing parts neither fanciful nor egoistic, but strikingly unlike the one he had been cast for. The common-place incident of being joined in the College Yard by two or three friends on their way to the same lecture, made his heart beat faster to think of; the thought of starting off for an evening in town with a crowd of fellows—like those talkative groups he so often saw after dinner, waiting impatiently on the corner for a bridge car—stirred him to a mild, pleasant sort of excitement. He even held imaginary conversations with Haydock and Davis and Bradley and the rest of them, in which he modestly refrained from saying all the good things,—conversations in which these classmates of his emerged, became individuals, and for an hour seemed glad to be numbered among Hewitt’s acquaintance. With his exhaustive knowledge of what might happen to a boy at college, he liked to imagine himself in the position where friends and influence are synonymous, constantly keeping fresh the memory of his own dreary experience, and taking infinite joy in quietly extricating others from a similar one.
When Hewitt returned to Claverly by a circuitous way through the College Yard, and out again into the empty triangular Square, he found a dumpy, patient-looking herdic cab drawn up to the curbstone. The driver had tucked away his money somewhere in the region of his portly waist, and was pulling his coat over the spot, preparatory to mounting the box. But the tall young man in evening dress, who apparently had just paid him, had not yet turned to pass through the brightly lighted doorway. Hewitt, noting the overcoat that lay limp and unheeded on the sidewalk, and the almost imperceptible uncertainty of the young fellow’s neat, boyish back in its conscious equilibrium, stopped to give that second and more searching look one always gives a drunken man, however usual the spectacle of drunkenness. They both stood there a moment: Hewitt half way up the stone steps of the building, the other with his back turned, swaying gently on the walk below, as if listening to the diminishing clatter of the shabby little cab. Horace scarcely knew why he himself lingered over an affair so personal and so manifestly not his own. He found justification for his curiosity, however,—although it was characteristic neither of his college nor himself,—when the object of it started slowly and aimlessly down the street, leaving his overcoat on the bricks, where it had dropped.
The garment was a light, slender thing, and as Horace hung it over his arm and smoothed its soft lining with his fingers, he wondered more what its wearer was like, than what he should do with it. It was easy enough to keep the coat in his room until—as was sure to happen—an advertisement, somewhat vague as to where the article had been lost, appeared in the “Harvard Crimson,” or he might restore it at once to its owner, who by this time had stopped undecidedly in the black shadow on the nearest street-corner. There was something companionable in the way the coat clung to his arm, that made him wish to keep it a little longer; but he ended by doing the simpler thing.
“Isn’t this your overcoat?” he said, walking up to the sharp line of shadow on the other side of which the shirt bosom and face of the drunken student showed faintly. Hewitt broke the pause that followed by repeating his question.
“Oh, how good of you! I had half decided to go after it,” came from the darkness in an astonishingly clear, fresh voice, whose convincing mastery of the first letter of the alphabet left little doubt as to its possessor’s birthplace. Had not the words been said with a formality that, under the circumstances, was absurd, Hewitt would have felt that he misjudged the man’s condition.
“Don’t mind me, really, I’m very, very tight.” It was impossible to misconstrue this statement, or the wild, exultant over-emphasis with which the final word was declaimed. Hewitt laughed.
“Oh, are you?” he answered, adding, “well, here’s your overcoat,” as if these two facts existed only in conjunction.