“What courses do you give?” It was the big Prescott, sitting opposite, who asked this. The effort involved a change of colour.
“You’d better look out, or you’ll have Pink in your class the first thing you know,” some one called, in a voice of warning, from the other end of the table.
“Yes; he’s on the lookout for snaps,” said some one else.
“Then he’d better stay away from my lectures,” answered Thorn, smiling across at Prescott, who blushed some more at this sudden convergence of attention on himself. “They say that new instructors always mark hard—just to show off.”
“I had you on my list before I knew who you were,” announced another. “I thought the course looked interesting; you’ll have to let me through.”
“Swipe! swipe!” came in a chorus from around the table. This bantering attitude toward his official position pleased Thorn, perhaps, more than anything else. It flattered and reassured him as to the impression his personality made on younger—much younger—men. He almost saw in himself the solution of the perennial problem of “How to bring about a closer sympathy between instructor and student.”
After dinner Haydock and Ellis took him from room to room, and showed him the new table, the new rugs, the new books, ex dono this, that, and the other member. In the library he came across one of his own sketches, prettily framed. Some of his verses had been carefully pasted into the club scrap-book. Ellis and Haydock turned to his class photograph in the album, and laughed. It was not until long afterwards that he wondered if they had done so because the picture had not yet begun to lose its hair. When they had seen everything from the kitchen to the attic, they went back to the big room where the fellows were drinking their coffee and smoking. Others had come in in the interval; they were condoling gaily with those already arrived, on the hard luck of having to be in Cambridge once more. Thorn stood with his back to the fireplace, and observed them.
It was anything but a representative collection of college men. There were athletes, it was true,—Prescott was one,—and men who helped edit the college papers, and men who stood high in their studies, and others who didn’t stand anywhere, talking and chaffing in that room. But it was characteristic of the life of the college that these varied distinctions had in no way served to bring the fellows together there. That Ellis would, without doubt, graduate with a magna, perhaps a summa cum laude, was a matter of interest to no one but Ellis. That Prescott had played admirable foot-ball on Soldiers’ Field the year before, and would shortly do it again, made Prescott indispensable to the Eleven, perhaps, but it didn’t in the least enhance his value to the club. In fact, it kept him away so much, and sent him to bed so early, that his skill at the game was, at times, almost deplored. That Haydock once in a while contributed verses of more than ordinary merit to the “Monthly” and “Advocate” had nearly kept him out of the club altogether. It was the one thing against him,—he had to live it down. On the whole, the club, like all of the five small clubs at Harvard whose influence is the most powerful, the farthest reaching influence in the undergraduate life of the place, rather prided itself in not being a reward for either the meritorious or the energetic. It was composed of young men drawn from the same station in life, the similarity of whose past associations and experience, in addition to whatever natural attractions they possessed, rendered them mutually agreeable. The system was scarcely broadening, but it was very delightful. And as the graduate stood there watching the fellows—brown and exuberant after the long vacation—come and go, discussing, comparing, or simply fooling, but always frankly absorbed in themselves and one another, he could not help thinking that however much such institutions had helped to enfeeble the class spirit of days gone by, they had a rather exquisite, if less diffusive spirit of their own. He liked the liveliness of the place, the broad, simple terms of intimacy on which every one seemed to be with every one else, the freedom of speech and action. Not that he had any desire to bombard people with sofa-cushions, as Sears Wolcott happened to be doing at that instant, or even to lie on his back in the middle of the centre-table with his head under the lamp, and read the “Transcript,” as some one else had done most of the evening; but he enjoyed the environment that made such things possible and unobjectionable.
“I must make a point of coming here a great deal,” reflected Thorn.
The next day college opened. More men enrolled in Thorn’s class that afternoon than he thought would be attracted by the subject he was announced to lecture in on that day of the week. Among all the students who straggled, during the hour, into the bare recitation-room at the top of Sever, the only ones whose individualities were distinct enough to impress themselves on Thorn’s unpractised memory, were a negro, a stained ivory statuette of a creature from Japan, a middle-aged gentleman with a misplaced trust in the efficacy of a flowing sandy beard for concealing an absence of collar and necktie, Prescott, and Haydock. Prescott surprised him. There was a crowd around the desk when he appeared, and Thorn didn’t get a chance to speak to him; but he was pleased to have the boy enrol in his course,—more pleased somehow than if there had been any known intellectual reason for his having done such a thing; more pleased, for instance, than he was when Haydock strolled in a moment or two later, although he knew that the senior would get from his teachings whatever there was in them. Haydock was the last to arrive before the hour ended. Thorn gathered up his pack of enrolment cards, and the two left the noisy building together.