Harvard episodes

by Charles Macomb Flandrau

No lectures are given in the college during the midyears. Men who are fortunate enough to finish their examinations early in the period can run away to New York, to the country, to Old Point Comfort, to almost anywhere that isn’t Cambridge, and recuperate. Haydock went South. Ellis and Wynne tried a walking trip in the Berkshire Hills, and, after two days’ floundering in the mud, waded to the nearest train for a city. Boston men went to Boston—except Sears Wolcott and Prescott, who disappeared to some wild and inaccessible New England hamlet to snow-shoe or spear fish or shoot rabbits; no one could with authority say which, as the two had veiled their preparations in mystery. So it happened that Thorn didn’t see Prescott for more than a week after he had marked his book. In the mean time he had become used to the idea of having done it according to a somewhat unconventional system—to put it charitably. He passed much of the time in which the fellows were away, alone; for the few who went to the club, went there with note-books under their arms and preoccupied expressions in their eyes. They kept a sharp look-out for unexpected manœuvres on the part of the clock, and had a general air of having to be in some place else very soon. Thorn, thrown on his own resources, had a mild experience of what Cambridge can be without a crowd to play with, and came to the conclusion that, for his own interest and pleasure in life, he had done wisely in not incurring Prescott’s ill-will and startling the club in the new rôle of hard-hearted, uncompromising pedagogue. The insignificant part he played in the lives of the undergraduates was far from satisfying; but it was the sort of half a loaf one doesn’t willingly throw away. By the time Prescott came back, Thorn had so wholly accepted his own view of the case that he was totally unprepared for the way in which the boy took the news of his mark. He met Prescott in the Yard the morning college opened again, and stopped to speak to him. He wouldn’t have referred to the examination—it was enough to know that the little crisis had passed—had not Prescott, blushing uneasily, and looking over Thorn’s shoulder at something across the Yard, said,—

“I don’t suppose you were very much surprised at the way I did in the exam, were you?”

“It might have been better,” answered Thorn, seriously. “I hope you will do better the second half year. But then, it might have been worse; your mark was C.”

Prescott looked at him, a quizzical, startled look; and then realising that Thorn was serious, that there had been nothing of the sarcastic in his tone or manner, he laughed rudely in the instructor’s face.

“I beg your pardon,” he said, as politely as he could, with his eyes still full of wonder and laughter; “I had no idea I did so well.” He turned abruptly and walked away. Thorn would have felt offended, if he hadn’t all at once been exceedingly scared. Prescott’s manner was extraordinary for one who, as a rule, took everything as it came, calmly, unquestioningly. His face and his laugh had expressed anything but ordinary satisfaction at not having failed. There was something behind that unwonted astonishment, something more than mere surprise at having received what was, after all, a mediocre mark. Thorn had mixed enough with human kind to be aware that no man living is ever very much surprised in his heart of hearts to have his humble efforts in any direction given grade C. Men like Prescott, who know but little of the subjects they are examined in, usually try to compose vague answers that may, like the oracles, be interpreted according to the mood of him who reads them. No matter how general or how few Prescott’s answers had been—Thorn stopped suddenly in the middle of the path. The explanation that had come to him took hold of him, and like a tightened rein drew him up short. Prescott had written nothing. The pages of his blue book had left the examination-room as virgin white as when they had been brought in and placed on the desk by the proctor. There was no other explanation possible, and the instructor tingled all over with the horrid sensation of being an unspeakable fool. He turned quickly to go to University Hall; he meant to have Prescott’s mark changed at once. But Prescott, at that moment, was bounding up the steps of University, two at a time. He was undoubtedly on his way to the Office to verify what Thorn had just told him. Thorn walked rapidly to his entry in Holworthy, although he had just come from there. Then, with short, nervous steps, he turned back again, left the Yard, and hurried in aimless haste up North Avenue. He had been an ass,—a bungling, awful ass,—he told himself over and over again. And that was about as coherent a meditation as Mr. Thorn was able to indulge in for some time. Once the idea of pretending that he had made a mistake did suggest itself for a moment; but that struck him as wild, impossible. It would have merely resulted in forcing the Office to regard him as stupid and careless, and, should embarrassing questions arise, he no longer had Prescott’s book with which to clear himself. More than that, it would give Prescott reason to believe him an underhand trickster. The boy now knew him to be an example of brazen partiality; there was no point in incurring even harsher criticism. Thorn tried to convince himself, as he hurried along the straight, hideous highway, that perhaps he was wrong,—that Prescott hadn’t handed in a perfectly blank book. If only he could have been sure of that, he would have risked the bland assertion that the boy had stumbled on more or less intelligent answers to the examination questions, without perhaps knowing it himself. This, practically, was the tone he had meant to adopt all along. But he couldn’t be sure, and, unfortunately, the only person who could give information as to what was or wasn’t in the book, was Prescott. But Prescott had given information of the most direct and convincing kind. That astounded look and impertinent laugh had as much as said:—

“Well, old swipe, what’s your little game? What do you expect to get by giving a good mark to a man who wasn’t able to answer a single question?” And Thorn knew it. At first he was alarmed at what he had done. He could easily see how such a performance, if known, might stand in the light of his reappointment to teach in the college, even if it didn’t eject him at once. But before he returned to his room, after walking miles, he scarcely knew where, fear had entirely given way to shame,—an over-powering shame that actually made the man sick at his stomach. It wasn’t as if he had committed a man’s fault in a world of men where he would be comfortably judged and damned by a tribunal he respected about as much as he respected himself. He had turned himself inside out before the clear eyes of a lot of boys, whose dealings with themselves and one another were like so many shafts of white light in an unrefracting medium. He had let them know what a weak, characterless, poor thing he was, by holding himself open to a bribe, showing himself willing to exchange, for the leavings of their friendships, something he was bound in honour to give only when earned, prostituting his profession that they might continue to like him a little, tolerate his presence among them. And he was one whom the college had honoured by judging worthy to stand up before young men and teach them. It was really very sickening.

Thorn couldn’t bring himself to go near the club for some days. He knew, however, as well as if he had been present, what had probably happened there in the meanwhile. Prescott had told Haydock and Wolcott, and very likely some of the others, the story of his examination. They had laughed at first, as if it had been a good joke in which Prescott had come out decidedly ahead; then Haydock had said something—Thorn could hear him saying it—that put the matter in a pitilessly true light, and the others had agreed with him. They usually did in the end. It took all the “nerve” Thorn had to show himself again.

But when he had summoned up enough courage to drop in at the club late one evening, he found every one’s manner toward him pretty much as it always had been; yet he could tell instinctively, as he sat there, who had and who hadn’t heard Prescott’s little anecdote. Wolcott knew; he called Thorn, “Marcus,” with unnecessary gusto, and once or twice laughed his peculiarly irritating laugh when there was nothing, as far as Thorn could see, to laugh at. Haydock knew; Thorn winced under the cool speculative stare of the senior’s grey eyes. Wynne knew; although Thorn had no more specific reason for believing so, than that the boy seemed rather more formidably bespectacled than usual. Several of the younger fellows also knew; Thorn knew that they knew; he couldn’t stand it. When the front door slammed after him on his way back to his room, he told himself that, as far as he was concerned, it had slammed for the last time.

He was very nearly right. He would have had to be a pachyderm compared to which the “blood sweating behemoth of Holy Writ” is a mere satin-skinned invalid, in order to have brazened out the rest of the year on the old basis. He couldn’t go to the club and converse on base-ball and the “musical glasses,” knowing that the fellows with whom he was talking were probably weighing the pros and cons of taking his courses next year, and getting creditable marks in them, without doing a stroke of work. He couldn’t face that “rough justice of boys” that would sanction the fellows making use of him, and considering him a pretty poor thing, at the same time. So he stayed away; he didn’t go near the place through March and April and May. When his work didn’t call him elsewhere, he stayed in his room and attempted to live the life of a scholar,—an existence for which he was in every conceivable way unfitted. For a time he studied hard out of books; but the most profitable knowledge he acquired in his solitude was the great deal he learned about himself. He tried to write. He had always thought it in him to “write something,” if he ever should find the necessary leisure. But the play he began amounted to no more than a harmless pretext for discoursing in a disillusioned strain on Life and Art in the many letters he wrote to people he had known abroad,—people, for whom, all at once, he conceived a feeling of intimacy that no doubt surprised them when they received his letters. His volume of essays was never actually written, but the fact that he was hard at work on it served well as an answer to:—

“Why the devil don’t we ever see you at the club nowadays?”