To this Beverly paid no attention whatever, but rang for the steward and asked him to telephone to Foster to send round Lloyd the cabman at once. It looked like rain, and Beverly’s examination that morning was over in the Museum—at least a quarter of a mile away. Billy Fields listened to the order, and then called out:—
“Oh, I say there, look out for Beverly Beverly; he’s horribly haughty this morning, ha, ha!” Billy could exaggerate Beverly’s accent, and sound startlingly like the original. He could also imitate his “Who the devil are you?” expression and his walk. These things he proceeded to do around the breakfast-table and out into the hall, until the front door slammed behind him. He lingered on the street outside in order to stand in the gutter and salute when Beverly drove away in his cab.
Beverly had watched Billy’s little performance with dispassionate interest, and remarked before returning to his newspaper:—
“He’s really talented, in a singularly offensive way.” But the words sounded amiable rather than otherwise, for, on the whole, Beverly liked to be teased by the fellows. Some of them were clever at it—Billy especially. It pleased Beverly to think it was the little penalty he paid for being mature enough to know definitely what did and didn’t amuse him, and to act accordingly. He was sincere in his dislike of Class Day, and didn’t intend to go near it. He objected to having the Yard enclosed in Christmas-trees and festooned with paper lanterns,—to its “pretending to be a beer garden with Hamlet left out.” He considered it undignified to throw open the University to a rabble of women, to invite them to “kick up their heels” in Memorial Hall, and see them described in the evening papers as “Harvard’s Fair Invaders.” During breakfast, he enlarged on these views to a scornful audience that finally arose in its might, tore off his necktie, ruined his coiffure, threw him out of the club into his cab, and then retreated and locked itself in. Even this didn’t make Beverly really angry, he was used to differences of opinion followed by popular uprisings.
He had intended to say good-bye to Cambridge the next morning, and take the one-o’clock train for New York. But the next morning, after breakfasting at the Holly Tree,—there is no place else to breakfast on Class Day except the Oak Grove, and Beverly disliked the high stools of that place and the condescending services of the dethroned empresses who wait on one there,—he found it was too late to catch the one o’clock without more effort than he was able to make on so warm a day. So, in a moment of tolerance induced perhaps by the realisation that this was, after all, “good-bye,” he strolled over to the Yard.
The exercises in Sanders Theatre had just ended, and the “fair invaders” were beginning to invade by the hundreds. They streamed in brilliant procession along the walks, and swarmed over the shady lawns,—glorified groups of summer millinery, trailing after them the pale pink odour of sachet powder and blond hair. They took possession of the parapet of Matthews, the chairs and benches and doorsteps in front of Hollis and Stoughton and Holworthy, stretching the length of the Yard in a many coloured border that resembled the horticultural orgies of the Public Garden. Celestial companies of maidens in diaphanous drapery floated past Beverly, in the wake of panting but determined ladies richly upholstered.
“‘On, on to the Pudding spread,
My daughters must be—shall be fed,’”
the leaders seemed to say, as they elbowed through the crowd at the exit. Seniors in fluttering gowns and wilted collars, with proud mothers and satisfied fathers and eager sisters and observant aunts, seniors with one another, and lonely, unattached seniors Beverly had never seen before, who looked as if they didn’t quite know whether they were enjoying themselves or not, sauntered by, mopping their foreheads. The Yard was alive, not with the customary sprinkling of business-like young men hastening, note-book in hand, to lectures, but with a riot of colour, a swishing of skirts, a vague, babbling gaiety that rose in places to an acute trebleness. And there was the smell of festivity in the hot air,—a smell of pine branches and Chinese lanterns.
Beverly walked once around the Yard, staring severely at the various factors of the gigantic picnic, and was passing Matthews on his way out, when a sudden gust of wind blew a newspaper from the lap of a woman seated on the steps of the building. He strolled after it until it stopped flapping over the grass, picked it up, and, hat in hand, returned it to its owner. He had no difficulty in identifying the lady, although she was one of many resting on the steps, for she waved the remaining sheets of the paper at him as he approached, and smiled largely.
“I never was so embarrassed,” she declared, beaming up at him.