With written work it seems to be easier. If a man hands in a theme or a thesis in his own hand, the instructors are more or less forced to accept it as original, unless of course it was taken outright from a book and they happen to be familiar with the book. From what the fellows at the table said, there must be more of this sort of thing done than I had imagined; although, since Berri opened my eyes, I could believe almost anything. One of the fellows told about a student—a Junior—he had heard of who succeeded in getting himself fired two or three years ago in a rather complicated way. He was engaged, and his lady-love sent him a poem in one of her letters, saying that she had written it for him. The letter arrived while he was struggling with a daily theme; so he murmured to himself, "Tush! I 'll copy Araminta's pretty verses and send them in as my own; as they have just gushed from her surcharged heart into her letter, no one will be the wiser." A few days later the omnivorous Advocate asked permission to print them, and as they had received words of praise from the instructor, and as the fellow by that time had no doubt begun to believe he had written them himself, he allowed them to be published under his name. Somebody sent a copy of the Advocate to Araminta, who replied with an indignant letter to her futur; and while he was trying to think up an explanation of the matter with which to pacify her, somebody else came out in the Crimson with a most withering communication, asking how the Advocate dared to print as original a poem that had been written by his grandfather, the late Donovan H. Dennison, whose complete poetical works ("Dan Cupid and other Idyls") could be found in the college library at any time. Whereupon the student, disgusted at his lady-love's dishonesty in palming off the late Donovan H. Dennison's verses as original, broke his engagement; and the college, disgusted with the student for precisely the same reason, "separated" him (to use the suave official phrase) from the University.
There was, as I said, a great deal of talk at luncheon that day about cheating. Some of the men seemed to think the presence of proctors during an exam was insulting; but, as Bertie Stockbridge remarked,—and this struck me as unanswerable,—"If you don't cheat yourself and don't want to, what difference does it make whether they 're there or not? And if you do cheat, why, of course, proctors are necessary." In the matter of dishonest written work the same honorable sentiments were expressed. Everybody was sincere, but I could n't help realizing a little that they could not have had very much temptation as yet. If it had n't been for Berri, I probably should have laid down the law as loudly as the rest. But he sat there eating in silence, irritated and oppressed by so much high-minded babbling, and I hated to hurt him by adding to it. Usually he is one of the last to leave the table. That day, however, he hurried through his luncheon and slipped away alone.
Oh dear! (How silly those two words look written down, and yet it was what was passing through my mind as I wrote them.) I suppose that what I really mean is, How tiresome it is that a person's acts don't begin and end with himself! There doesn't seem to be any limit to the reach of their influence. It would be so much more simple and easy if you knew just where the consequences of a mistake or an indiscretion, or whatever you choose to call it, began and ended. Now, for instance, take Berri and the thesis. Of course, I think it was all wrong, and was sorry he handed it in; but I wasn't going to let it make any difference in my feelings toward Berri. As far as I am concerned, I don't think it has made a difference. Yet the beastly thing cast a sort of gloom over the house. For Berri after luncheon that day rather avoided the table in general and me in particular. What his object was in doing this, I don't know. It was probably just a feeling on his part; but it made me feel as if I 'd been putting myself on a moral pedestal somehow, and that Berri saw in me a perpetual accusation. Our relations became indescribably changed and sort of formal, and I did n't see how I could make them different. What could I have done? There was nothing, under the circumstances, for me to say. He stopped in my room that night to warm himself for a minute before going to bed, but I don't think he said anything except that it was snowing outside.
The next day we had the blizzard. People here usually assume that in the part of the country I come from we have nine months of winter and three of cold weather. But nevertheless I had to come to the staid and temperate East to see the kind of a winter storm you read about in books,—the regular old "Wreck of the Hesperus" kind, in which the crew are "swept like icicles from the deck," and able-bodied men get hopelessly lost and are frozen to death in their own front yards. I was to have dined in town that night with Hemington, who had tickets for a Paderewski recital. But he did n't turn up, so I joined some fellows who found me in the restaurant eating alone, and afterwards went to the theatre with them. It was snowing when we left the restaurant; in fact, great, wet cottony flakes had been falling at intervals all day. (It reminded me of those marvellous paper weights I haven't seen for years and years,—glass globes filled with water in which a white, powdery sediment swirls and drifts and finally settles in the most lifelike way on a beautiful little tin landscape. What's become of them all, I wonder?) But there was no wind, and it was n't particularly cold, so I don't think that anybody suspected what was going to happen before the show was over.
It took an unusually long time to get out of the theatre that night; the people in the aisles hardly moved at all. But after we had forced our way through the crowd, and climbed over seats, and finally reached the narrow corridor leading to the entrance, we saw why it was. The ones who had got to the door first were afraid to leave. Within an hour or two the wind had risen and risen until it screamed through the streets, blasting up the fallen snow in wild bewildering spirals and then fiercely slapping it back again in slants of hard, biting cold. From the door of the theatre it was impossible to see beyond the curbstone, except when the half-obliterated lights of a cab lurched by over the drifts. The rumor went through the crowd that the wires were down and that all the cars had stopped. No one seemed to know quite what to do. Just as the people nearest the door would make up their minds to start bravely out, a thick hurricane would strike erratically in at them, causing the ladies to shrink back with little exclamations of dismay. Nobody's carriage had arrived, and the few cabs that appeared ploughed laboriously past us. Our crowd waited a few moments,—more to share the excitement of the others than for anything else; then we turned up our collars and plunged out.
Standing at the door of the theatre, the world outside had seemed to me to be in a sort of insane uproar; but as soon as we got away from the human babble, and I lifted my head and opened my eyes and deliberately relaxed my ears, so to speak, I found the city almost solemnly silent. Every now and then, when we came to a cross street or turned a corner, there was, it is true, a sudden shriek and a sort of rattle of fine stinging ice particles; but as long as I could keep myself from being confused inside of me, while we were floundering over drifts and burrowing with our heads through the walls of wind that blocked the way and seemed to be falling on us, I could n't help noticing the terrible muffledness of everything. It was as if the place were being swamped, blotted out, suffocated.
When we reached the hotel where we had dined earlier in the evening, the other fellows went in to have something to eat, but for several reasons I decided not to. In the first place, I promised papa that I would try to economize, and I had already unexpectedly squandered two dollars on a theatre ticket, owing to Hemington's failure to appear. Then I felt that if I did n't make a dash for Cambridge right away, I should n't get there at all. (As a matter of fact, I never did reach there until nine the next morning, but it was n't because I did n't try hard enough. The other fellows put up at the hotel.) So I just shouted that I was going on, and as we were all about half frozen, no one stopped to persuade me not to.
Well, I found a string of cars about a mile long that were rapidly turning into Esquimau huts, and was told by one of the conductors that something had broken down ahead, and that, as the snow-plough could n't get by, they probably would n't move again until morning. He thought, however, that the other line was running; and I started to grope my way to Bowdoin Square.
I would n't go through that experience again for gold and precious stones; and I can't imagine now why I did it in the first place, except that I had acquired by that time a kind of pig-headed determination to reach Cambridge, and did n't know what I was in for. It was n't so bad while I was staggering along by the side of the blocked cars; they were lighted, and I knew that if I changed my mind about going on, I could pop into one of them and be safe. But when I passed the last one and found myself after a while among back streets choked with drifts, and could n't see my way, and fell down twice, and got snow up my sleeves, and my face and hands and feet pained so with cold that I could n't help crying (actually), and I realized at last that I did n't in the least know where I was, I began to be panic-stricken. I 'm not the huskiest person in the world, and all at once the wind blew me smash against an iron railing and almost into a basement of some kind. I think I should have hunted for a door-bell and tried to get into a house if I hadn't a moment later collided with a policeman (fell down again), who helped me up and led me to a sheltered place behind a wall, where I managed to collect myself and tell him what I was looking for. He too was on his way to Bowdoin Square; so after that I just hung on to his coat most of the time, and tried to keep my legs in motion without really knowing much where he was leading me or whether we were making any progress. Once there was a rip-tearing crash over our heads. The policeman jumped aside, and then stopped to exclaim, "Well, I never seen the likes o' that." I think a sign had blown off a building through a plate-glass window. Farther on a dangling wire romped in the wind. It spat dazzling blue and purple at us until we retreated and went around another way, muttering strange Hibernian mutters. When I opened my eyes again, we were in front of the hotel in Bowdoin Square and the policeman was advising me through his frozen mustache not to go to Cambridge. He said the cars had stopped long ago. So I said good-by to him and was just stumbling into the café, when who should come out but Berri and a cabman? They had gone in to get warm before starting across the bridge.
"I 'm not sure that we can make it," Berri said, "but the man says he's willing to try. I 'll tell you why I don't want to stay at the hotel when we get inside. Look out—look out!" he cried to me, as I opened the cab door and was about to jump in. I drew back, expecting at least to be decapitated or electrocuted, and then Berri explained that he was afraid I might "sit on the pigeons." He entered the cab first, and removed some indistinguishable objects from the back seat to the narrow seat that lifts up in front. "That's why I can't very well stay at the hotel," he went on. "As soon as these poor exhausted little darlings begin to thaw, they 'll fly around and make a dreadful fuss. I 'd rather have them in my own room." He had picked up four half frozen pigeons in the street on his way to the Square, and had carried them—two in his pockets and two in the bosom of his overcoat—until he came across the cab. After we got started, he lighted matches every now and then to see how they were getting along, and we took turns at blowing on their pink feet, all shrivelled with cold. One of them, to Berri's grief, was dead, but by the time the cab stopped suddenly and for the last time in the middle of the bridge (it had been going slower and slower and tipping more perilously over mounds of snow as we proceeded), the other three looked scared and intelligent and began to feel warm under their wings.