Harvard episodes

by Charles Macomb Flandrau

In October, nine months before, Thorn had appeared one evening in the doorway of the club dining-room after a more or less continuous absence of eight years from Cambridge. It was the night before college opened, and the dining-room was crowded. For an instant there was an uproar of confused greetings; then Haydock and Ellis and Sears Wolcott and Wynne—the only ones Thorn knew—pushed back from the table and went forward to shake hands with him. Of the nine or ten boys still left at the table by this proceeding, those whose backs were turned to the new arrival stopped eating and waited without looking around, to be introduced to the owner of the unfamiliar voice. Their companions opposite paused too; some of them laid their napkins on the table. They, however, could glance up and see that the newcomer was a dark man of thirty years or more. They supposed, correctly, that he was an “old graduate” and a member of the club.

“You don’t know any of these people, do you?” said Haydock, taking him by the arm; “what a devil of a time you’ve been away from this place.”

“I know that that’s a Prescott,” laughed the graduate. In his quick survey of the table, while the others had been welcoming him back, his eyes had rested a moment on a big fellow with light hair. Everybody laughed, because it really was a Prescott and all Prescotts were simply more or less happy replicas of all other Prescotts. “I know your brothers,” said the graduate, shaking hands with the boy, who had risen.

“It’s Mr. Thorn.” Haydock made this announcement loud enough to be heard by the crowd. He introduced every one, prefixing “Mr.” to the names of the first few, but changing to given and even nicknames before completing the circuit of the table. The humour of some of these last,—“Dink,” “Pink,” and “Mary,” for instance,—lost sight of in long established usage, suggested itself anew; and the fellows laughed again as they made a place for Thorn at the crowded table.

“It’s six years, isn’t it?” Haydock asked politely. The others had begun to babble cheerfully again of their own affairs.

“Six! I wish it were; it’s eight,” answered Thorn. “Eight since I left college. But of course I’ve been here two or three times since,—just long enough to make me unhappy at having to go back to Europe again.”

“And now you’re a great, haughty Ph. D. person, an ‘Officer of Instruction and Government,’ announced in the prospectus to teach in two courses,” mused Ellis, admiringly. “How do you like the idea?”

“It’s very good to be back,” said Thorn. He looked about the familiar room with a contented smile, while the steward bustled in and out to supply him with the apparatus of dining.

It was, indeed, good to be back. The satisfaction deepened and broadened with every moment. It was good to be again in the town, the house, the room that, during his life abroad, he had grown to look upon more as “home” than any place in the world; good to come back and find that the place had changed so little; good, for instance, when he ordered a bottle of beer, to have it brought to him in his own mug, with his name and class cut in the pewter,—just as if he had never been away at all. This was but one of innumerable little things that made Thorn feel that at last he was where he belonged; that he had stepped into his old background; that it still fitted. The fellows, of course, were recent acquisitions—all of them. Even his four acquaintances had entered college long since his own time. But the crowd, except that it seemed to him a gathering decidedly younger than his contemporaries had been at the same age, was in no way strange to him. There were the same general types of young men up and down the table, and at both ends, that he had known in his day. They were discussing the same topics, in the same tones and inflections, that had made the dinner-table lively in the eighties,—which was not surprising when he considered that certain families belong to certain clubs at Harvard almost as a matter of course, and that some of the boys at the table were the brothers and cousins of his own classmates. He realised, with a glow of sentiment, that he had returned to his own people after years of absence in foreign lands; a performance whose emotional value was not decreased for Thorn by the conviction, just then, that his own people were better bred, and better looking, and better dressed than any he had met elsewhere. As he looked about at his civilised surroundings, and took in, from the general chatter, fragments of talk,—breezy and cosmopolitan with incidents of the vacation just ended,—he considered his gratification worth the time he had been spending among the fuzzy young gentlemen of a German university.

Thorn, like many another college antiquity, might have been the occasion of a mutual feeling of constraint had he descended upon this undergraduate meal in the indefinite capacity of “an old graduate.” The ease with which he filled his place at the table, and the effortless civility that acknowledged his presence there, were largely due to his never having allowed his interest in the life of the club to wane during his years away from it. He knew the sort of men the place had gone in for, and, in many instances, their names as well. Some of his own classmates—glad, no doubt, of so congenial an item for their occasional European letters—had never failed to write him, in diverting detail, of the great Christmas and spring dinners. And they, in turn, had often read extracts from Thorn’s letters to them, when called on to speak at these festivities. More than once the graduate had sent, from the other side of the world, some doggerel verses, a sketch to be used as a dinner-card, or a trifling addition to the club’s library or dining-room. Haydock and Ellis and Wolcott and Wynne he had met at various times abroad. He had made a point of hunting them up and getting to know them, with the result that his interest had succeeded in preserving his identity; he was not unknown to the youngest member of the club. If they didn’t actually know him, they at least knew of him. Even this crust is sweet to the returned graduate whose age is just far enough removed from either end of life’s measure to make it intrinsically unimportant.