“I mean that I was out of town. I was in Boston. I had gone home,” explained Bayard pleasantly.
“You won’t come in now till after the Z’s,” suggested Fenton quickly; “or else you’ll be left over till the postgraduates take turn, and the B’s come on again.”
The Baldwin apples were all eaten now, and the stone china was disappearing from the long table in detachments. Jaynes and the Special Course man had followed Tompkinton, and the middler and Bent now pushed back their chairs. Bayard remained a moment to ask after the landlady’s neuralgia,—he was one of the men who do not economize sympathy without more effort than its repression is usually worth,—and Fenton waited for him in the cold hall. The two young men shoved their shoulders into their overcoats sturdily, and walked across the Seminary green together to their rooms.
Strictly speaking, one should say the Seminary “white.” It was midwinter, and on top of Cesarea Hill. From the four corners of the earth the winds of heaven blew, and beat against that spot; to it the first snowflake flew, and on it the last blizzard fell. Were the winters longer and the summers hotter in Cesarea than in other places? So thought the theologues in the old draughty, shaking Seminary dormitories dignified by time and native talent with the name of “halls.”
Young Bayard trod the icy path to his own particular hall (Galilee was its name) with the chronic homesickness of a city-bred man forced through a New England country winter under circumstances which forbade him to find fault with it. His profession and his seminary were his own choice; he had never been conscious of wavering in it, or caught in grumbling about it, but sometimes he felt that if he had been brought up differently,—like Tompkinton, for instance, not to say Holt,—he should have expended less of that vitality necessary to any kind of success in the simple process of enduring the unfamiliar.
“How was the gale round your room last night?” inquired young Fenton, as the two climbed the frozen terraces, and leaped over the chains that hung between rows of stunted posts set at regular intervals in front of the Seminary buildings. For what purpose these stone dwarfs staggered there, no one but the founders of the institution knew; and they had been in their graves too long to tell.
“It made me think of my uncle’s house,” observed Bayard.
“By force of contrast? Yes. I never lived in Beacon Street. But I can guess. I pity you in that northwest corner. My mother sent me a soapstone by express last week. I should have been dead, I should have been frozen stark, without it. You heat it, you know, on top of the base-burner, and tuck it in the sheets. Then you forget and kick it out when you’re asleep, and it thumps on the fellow’s head in the room below, and he blackguards you for it through the ceiling. Better get one.”
“Are you really comfortable—all night?” asked Bayard wistfully. “I haven’t thought about being warm or any of those luxuries since I came here. I expected to rough it. I mean to toughen myself.”
In his heart he was repeating certain old words which ran like this: Endure hardness, as a good soldier of Jesus Christ. But they did not come to his lips. He was as afraid of cant as too many young theologues are of sincere simplicity.