“You would break away, would you?” The robust emphasis of the remark pounded a painful staccato grunt out of Hewitt’s vitals.
“Please let me up!” It took a good deal of self-control to put it just that way; Hewitt had bumped his head, and was beginning to feel the cool bricks against his back.
“Oh, I don’t know,” mused Bradley, airily; “‘you’re not the only pebble on the beach.’” Then, after a silence, in which the man under him tried to rest his head more comfortably, “Will you be good? Do you know—I don’t think I can trust you! If I let you up, will you do what I want you to?”
“We’ll talk it over,” the other conceded.
They scrambled to their feet; Hewitt brushed himself off with his cap. Had both men been sober, they would have looked at each other a moment, and laughed. Under the circumstances, the situation was grotesque enough to seem quite natural to Bradley.
“Come on,” he said; “now we’ll go to town. Oh, my hat! where’s my hat—and my coat!” He cursed, as he looked about him,—an amiable, ingenuous ripple of blasphemy, as harmless in intention and as cheerfully spoken as a bit of verse.
A returning cab swung round the corner. Bradley sauntered into the middle of the street to stop it. The manner in which all idea of hat and coat passed from his mind made Hewitt think of a round-eyed baby absently letting drop the toy that has been thrust into its convulsive little fist. To Horace the cab was an unwelcome intrusion. He thought it foretold complications, and perhaps a scene. For he had decided, beyond the probability of changing his mind, that he would not spend the rest of the night in Boston with his exhilarated classmate. A nicer reticence than the simple one of moral scruples kept him from carousing with his new acquaintance. He shrank from taking advantage of this chance—so accidental, so far-fetched—of impressing himself on the one fellow in his class whose friendship, more than any other, he coveted. The proceeding, he felt, would be a somewhat thick-skinned one. There was something in the idea, not quite like winning a drunken man’s money at cards, but suggestive of it. “Peter” Bradley symbolised to Hewitt an entire chapter of Harvard life. To-night, Horace felt, in coming so unexpectedly on one with whom he existed in all the intimacy of the imagination, as if he had been caught surreptitiously reading the chapter in manuscript.
He went out where Bradley was talking earnestly to the cab-driver.
“Let’s not go to town, Bradley,” he said, yawning. “It’s so far and chilly and everything.” Quickly, as if inspired by a new and daring thought, he grasped the boy by the wrist, and exclaimed enthusiastically, “I’ll tell you what we’ll do—we’ll stay in Cambridge!”
“By Heaven, I’ll go you! Eh-h-h-h-h-h—we’ll stay in Cambridge! we’ll stay in Cambridge!” He danced all over the street in a frenzy of mirth and movement, singing again and again, “We’ll stay in Cambridge! we’ll stay in Cambridge! we’ll stay in Cambridge!” while Hewitt said, “Good-night—sorry he troubled you,” to the cabman. A voice from one of the small wooden houses that basks in the shadow of Claverly, yelled, “Oh, shut tup!” very peevishly, just as Bradley threw himself at Horace with a prolonged meaningless scream.