He went to bed and cried some more on the cool pillows. Haydock wrote out a respectful form of resignation from the college for him to copy in the morning, composed a letter to Mrs. Ware, tenderly adapted in all respects to that lady’s intellectual needs, and returned, when the fog at his windows was white with the morning, to Paradise Lost.
A DEAD ISSUE
MARCUS THORN, instructor in Harvard University, was thirty-two years old on the twentieth of June. He looked thirty-five, and felt about a hundred. When he got out of bed on his birthday morning, and pattered into the vestibule for his mail, the date at the top of the Crimson recalled the first of these unpleasant truths to him. His mirror—it was one of those detestable folding mirrors in three sections—enabled him to examine his bald spot with pitiless ease, reproduced his profile some forty-five times in quick succession, and made it possible for him to see all the way round himself several times at once. It was this devilish invention that revealed fact number two to Mr. Thorn, while he was brushing his hair and tying his necktie. One plus two equalled three, as usual, and Thorn felt old and unhappy. But he didn’t linger over his dressing to philosophise on the evanescence of youth; he didn’t even murmur,—
“Alas for hourly change! Alas for all
The loves that from his hand proud youth lets fall,
Even as the beads of a told rosary.”
He could do that sort of thing very well; he had been doing it steadily for five months. But this morning, the reality of the situation—impressed upon him by the date of his birth—led him to adopt more practical measures. What he actually did, was to disarrange his hair a little on top,—fluff it up to make it look more,—and press it down toward his temples to remove the appearance of having too much complexion for the size of his head. Then he went out to breakfast.
Thorn’s birthday had fallen, ironically, on one of those rainwashed, blue-and-gold days when “all nature rejoices.” The whitest of clouds were drifting across the bluest of skies when the instructor walked out into the Yard; the elms rustled gently in the delicate June haze, and the robins hopped across the yellow paths, freshly sanded, and screamed in the sparkling grass. All nature rejoiced, and in so doing got very much on Thorn’s nerves. When he reached his club, he was a most excellent person not to breakfast with.
It was early—half-past eight—and no one except Prescott, a sophomore, and Wynne, a junior, had dropped in as yet. Wynne, with his spectacles on, was sitting in the chair he always sat in at that hour, reading the morning paper. Thorn knew that he would read it through from beginning to end, carefully put his spectacles back in their case, and then go to the piano and play the “Blue Danube.” By that time his eggs and coffee would be served. Wynne did this every morning, and the instructor, who at the beginning of the year had regarded the boy’s methodical habits at the club as “quaint,”—suggestive, somehow, of the first chapter of “Pendennis,”—felt this morning that the “Blue Danube” before breakfast would be in the nature of a last straw. Prescott, looking as fresh and clean as the morning, was laughing over an illustrated funny paper. He merely nodded to Thorn, although the instructor hadn’t breakfasted there for many months, and called him across to enjoy something. Thorn glanced at the paper and smiled feebly.
“I don’t see how you can do it at this hour,” he said; “I would as soon drink flat champagne.” Prescott understood but vaguely what the man was talking about, yet he didn’t appear disturbed or anxious for enlightenment.
“I’ll have my breakfast on the piazza,” Thorn said to the steward who answered his ring. Then he walked nervously out of the room.
From the piazza he could look over a tangled barrier of lilac bushes and trellised grapevines into an old-fashioned garden. A slim lady in a white dress and a broad brimmed hat that hid her face was cutting nasturtiums and humming placidly to herself. Thorn thought she was a young girl, until she turned and revealed the fact that she was not a young girl—that she was about his own age. This seemed to annoy him in much the same way that the robins and Wynne and the funny paper had, for he threw himself into a low steamer-chair where he wouldn’t have to look at the woman, and gave himself up to a sort of luxurious melancholy.