The seemingly unimportant question presented by his own name began to worry him a little as the weeks passed into months. First names and the absurd sounds men had answered to from babyhood were naturally in common use at the club. Thorn dropped into the way of them easily, as a matter of course. Not to have done so would, in time, have become impossible. The fellows would have thought it strange—formal. Yet the name of “Marcus” was rarely heard there. Haydock, once in a while, called him that, after due premeditation. Sears Wolcott occasionally used it by way of a joke—as if he were taking an impertinent liberty, and rather enjoyed doing it. But none of the other men ever did. On no occasion had any one said “Marcus” absent-mindedly, and then looked embarrassed, as Thorn had hoped might happen. It hurt him a little always to be called “Thorn;” to be appealed to in the capacity of “Mr. Thorn,” as he sometimes was by the younger members, positively annoyed him. Prescott was the most incorrigible in this respect. He had come from one of those fitting schools where all speech between master and pupil is carried on to a monotonous chant of “Yes, sir,” “No, sir,” and “I think so, sir.” He had ideas, or rather habits,—for Prescott’s ideas were few,—of deference to those whose mission it was to assist in his education that Thorn found almost impossible to displace. For a long time—until the graduate laughed and asked him not to—he prefixed the distasteful “Mr.” to Thorn’s name. Then, for as long again, he refrained markedly from calling him anything. One afternoon he came into the club where the instructor was alone, writing a letter, and after fussing for a time among the magazines on the table, he managed to say,—
“Thorn, do you know whether Sears has been here since luncheon?”
Thorn didn’t know and he didn’t care, but had Prescott handed him an appointment to an assistant professor’s chair, instead of having robbed him a little of what dignity he possessed, he would not have been so elated by half. Prescott continued to call him “Thorn” after that, but always with apparent effort,—as if aware that in doing it he was not living quite up to his principles. This trouble with his name might have served Thorn as an indication of what his position actually was in the tiny world he longed so much to be part of once more. But he was not a clever man where he himself was concerned.
Little things hurt him constantly without opening his eyes. For instance, it rarely occurred to the fellows that the instructor might care to join them in any of their hastily planned expeditions to town after dinner. Not that he was ostracised; he was simply overlooked. When he did go to the theatre, he bought the tickets himself, and asked Prescott or Sears, or some of them, to go with him. The occasion invariably lacked the charm of spontaneity. When he invited any of them to dine with him in town, as he often did, they went, if they hadn’t anything else to do, and seemed to enjoy their dinner. But to Thorn these feasts were a series of disappointments. He always got up from the table with a sense of having failed in something. What? He didn’t know—he couldn’t have told. He was like a man who shoots carefully at nothing, and then feels badly because he hits it. He persisted in loitering along sunny lanes, and growing melancholy because they led nowhere. It was Sears Wolcott who took even the zest of anticipation out of Thorn’s little dinners in town, by saying to the graduate one evening,—
“What’s the point of going to the Victoria for dinner? It’s less trouble, and a damned sight livelier, to eat out here.” Sears had what Haydock called, “that disagreeable habit of hitting promiscuously from the shoulder.” The reaction on Thorn of all this was at last a dawning suspicion of his own unimportance. By the time the midyear examinations came, he felt somehow as if he were “losing ground;” he hadn’t reached the point yet of realising that he never had had any. He used to throw down his work in a fit of depression and consult his three-sided mirror apprehensively.
The big Prescott, however, became the real problem, around which the others were as mere corollaries. It was he who managed, in his “artless Japanese way,” as the fellows used to call it, to crystallise the situation, to bring it to a pass where Thorn’s rather unmanly sentimentality found itself confronted by something more definite and disturbing than merely the vanishing point of youth. Prescott accomplished this very simply, by doing the poorest kind of work—no work at all, in fact—in the course he was taking from Thorn. Barely, and by the grace of the instructor, had he scraped through the first examination in November. Since then he had rested calmly, like a great monolith, on his laurels. He went to Thorn’s lectures only after intervals of absence that made his going at all a farce. He ignored the written work of the course, and the reports on outside reading, with magnificent completeness. Altogether, he behaved as he wouldn’t have behaved had he ever for a moment considered Thorn in any light other than that of an instructor, an officer of the college, a creature to whom deference—servility, almost—was due when he was compelled to talk to him, but to whom all obligation ended there. His attitude was not an unusual one among college “men” who have not outgrown the school idea, but the attendant circumstances were. For Thorn’s concern over Prescott’s indifference to the course was aroused by a strong personal attachment, one in which an ordinary professorial interest had nothing to do. He smarted at his failure to attract the boy sufficiently to draw him to his lectures; yet he looked with a sort of panic toward the approaching day when he should be obliged, in all conscience, to flunk him in the midyear examination. He admired Prescott, as little, intelligent men sometimes do admire big, stupid ones. He idealised him, and even went the length, one afternoon when taking a walk with Haydock, of telling the senior that under Prescott’s restful, olympic exterior he thought there lurked a soul. To which Haydock had answered with asperity, “Well, I hope so, I’m sure,” and let the subject drop. Later in the walk, Haydock announced, irrelevantly, and with a good deal of vigour, that if he ever made or inherited millions, he would establish a chair in the university, call it the “Haydock Professorship of Common Sense,” and respectfully suggest to the President and Faculty that the course be made compulsory.
Thorn would have spoken to the soulful Prescott,—told him gently that he didn’t seem to be quite in sympathy with the work of the course,—if Prescott had condescended to go to his lectures in the six or seven weeks between the end of the Christmas recess and the examination period. But Prescott cut Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, at half-past two o’clock, with a regularity that, considered as regularity, was admirable. Toward the last, he did drop in every now and then, sit near the door, and slip out again before the hour was ended. This was just after he had been summoned by the Recorder to the Office for “cutting.” Thorn never got a chance to speak to him. He might have approached the boy at the club; but the instructor shrank from taking advantage of his connection with that place to make a delicate official duty possible. He had all along avoided “shop” there so elaborately,—had made so light of it when the subject had come up,—that he couldn’t bring himself at that late day to arise, viper like, from the hearthstone and smite. A note of warning would have had to be light, facetious, and consequently without value, in order not to prove a very false and uncalled for note indeed. The ready coöperation of the Dean, Thorn refrained from calling on; he was far from wishing to get Prescott into difficulties.
By the time the examination day arrived, the instructor was in a state of turmoil that in ordinary circumstances would have been excessive and absurd. In the case of Thorn, it was half pathetic, half contemptible. He knew that in spite of Prescott’s soul (a superabundance of soul is, as a matter of fact, a positive hindrance in passing examinations), the boy would do wretchedly. To give him an E—the lowest possible mark, always excepting, of course, the jocose and sarcastic F—would be to bring upon himself Prescott’s everlasting anger and “despision.” Of this Thorn was sure. Furthermore, the mark would not tend to make the instructor wildly popular at the club; for although everybody was willing to concede that Prescott was not a person of brilliant mental attainments, he was very much beloved. One hears a good deal about the “rough justice of boys.” Thorn knew that such a thing existed, and did not doubt but that, in theory, he would be upheld by the members of the club if he gave Prescott an E, and brought the heavy hand of the Office down on him. But the justice of boys, he reflected, was, after all, rough; it would acknowledge his right to flunk Prescott, perhaps, and, without doubt, hate him cordially for doing it. Thorn’s aversion to being hated was almost morbid.
If, on the other hand, he let the boy through,—gave him, say, the undeserved and highly respectable mark of C,—well, that would be tampering dishonestly with the standards of the college, gross injustice to the rest of the students, injurious to the self-respect of the instructor, and a great many other objectionable things, too numerous to mention. Altogether, Thorn was in a “state of mind.” He began to understand something of the fine line that separates instructor from instructed, on whose other side neither may trespass.
When at length the morning of the examination had come and gone, and Thorn was in his own room at his desk with the neat bundle of blue-covered books before him, in which the examinations are written, it was easy enough to make up his mind. He knew that the question of flunking or passing Prescott admitted of no arguments whatever. The boy’s work in the course failed to present the tiniest loophole in the way of “extenuating circumstances,” and Prescott had capped the climax of his past record that morning by staying in the examination-room just an hour and a quarter of the three hours he was supposed to be there. That alone was equivalent to failure in a man of Prescott’s denseness. Not to give Prescott a simple and unadorned E would be holding the pettiest of personal interests higher than one’s duty to the college. There was no other way of looking at it. And Thorn, whose mind was perfectly clear on this point, deliberately extricated Prescott’s book from the blue pile on his desk, dropped it carelessly—without opening it—into the glowing coals of his fireplace, and entered the boy’s midyear mark in the records as C.