THE CLASS DAY IDYL
OF course there is no such thing as the “typical Harvard man,” although it interests—or irritates—people who didn’t go to Harvard to believe every now and then that they have discovered him. If a well-dressed youth with a broad A, and an abnormal ignorance of the life practical, appears in a Western town, the business man from whom he seeks employment, after sounding the profoundest depths of his incapacity, amuses the family circle at dinner by telling of the call he had from a “typical Harvard man.” If a girl sits out a dance with a fellow who doesn’t give her the look of a slightly bewildered cow when she slings a little Swinburne at him, but who lets fly the tail end of a Rossetti sonnet in return, closely followed by a gem or two purloined here and there from Henry James, she thinks she has met another of those “typical Harvard men.” The young American travelling abroad who displays a decent reticence when compatriots of whom he never has heard, “put their paws on his shoulders and lap his face,” is described in many terms—that of “the typical Harvard man” coming last. This strange, mythical being is all things to all men—who are not Harvard men; but it is worthy of note that in the various aspects in which he is apperceived, he manages to repeat certain distinguished traits that even the enemy is bound—often secretly—to admire. No one, for instance, marks as typical of Harvard, a man who is ill-dressed, or ill-bred; he is usually good looking. So if the typical Harvard man, like the sea-serpent, continues to agitate the provinces from time to time, one is thankful that whatever his disguise may be for the moment, he is always a distinctly presentable young person.
Beverly Beverly of the graduating class was often thought by outsiders to be of the type to which most Harvard men belonged. He was a very well arranged young gentleman who wore glasses. He always seemed to have plenty of money; he lived on the ground floor of Beck Hall, and had a servant.
He lived in Beck rather than in Claverly, because, for some reason or other, Beck is not annually overrun by a crowd of sporty freshmen just released from highchurch fitting-schools. Furthermore, although surrounded in Beck by fellow-students whom he felt it possible to know, he didn’t happen to know any of them more intimately than a polite nod of the head would imply. So when he retired to his own room he was spared the nocturnal visitations and talk-to-deaths of a more populous building.
Beverly was intelligent, reserved, and “set in his ways.” He had been in a great many places, and had met a great many people. By the end of his senior year he preferred to spend his time in doing nothing at all, rather than in doing something that didn’t interest him exceedingly. As he had gone to Harvard, people said he was a typical product of that institution. They couldn’t have said this if his father had seen fit to send him to a business college to learn how to audit accounts, and make an American eagle with a fist full of thunderbolts in two penstrokes. But Beverly would have been very much the same sort of person after all, only perhaps not as agreeable as he actually was.
Early in his college career, Beverly had identified himself with the few fellows he cared to know. Since then, his little circle of intimate friends had, if anything, become smaller.
When Class Day—his Class Day—began to be talked about, Beverly, as a matter of course, was asked to spread at Beck. His decision not to spread there—nor anywhere—was as much a matter of course. He didn’t enjoy Class Day, he said; it was always unbearably warm; it was impossible on that day to procure nourishment that wasn’t fluid or semi-fluid,—punch, chicken-salad, or icecream; and the vast armies of women, from Heaven knows where, who came early and stayed until they were put out, managed to kill the sentiment of the day for him, he said, even as they exterminated the grass in the College Yard.
“I sha’n’t even be in Cambridge,” Beverly declared at breakfast, the morning before the great day.
“You really ought to have spread, you know,” said Billy Fields. “It’s the only way we have of being nice to people in town who’ve been nice to us.”
“You forget that Bevy considers himself perfectly square with everybody. He went to their entertainments,” said Haydock.