The Hundred, and Other Stories

by Gertrude Hall Brownell

A change had come over the young man's mood. His eye was acquiring a roving habit. If his step had before been bent on duty, it was now less directly bent; if before he had been on time at his appointments, he must now have been always more or less late. He walked leisurely, swinging his books by a strap. He loitered before shop-windows, he turned to look after a face. The sky smiled down between the rows of buildings on the occasion of the first balmy day; little clouds floated in it, shimmering like dissolving pearls. He returned the soft sky's compliment; he looked up at it, the winter sternness melting from his eyes. At every street corner he was seen to stop, foolishly smiling upward; and, yes, positively, he was seen there, forgetful of all the people, to sigh and stretch! On that very day he lost three books out of his strap, and did not for some time notice it; when he did, he cared nothing! From a scrawl on the fly-leaf the finder of these books learned their rightful owner to be of the house of Fraisier.

He had come hundreds of miles from an obscure town to study in this great city; he had been a serious, mechanical plodder for months, feeling that he owed it to himself and to his distant family to fill his head full, full with precious notions. He had formed no friendships with his fellow-students, fearing that they would divert him, or perhaps, fearing the young fellows themselves, among whom he felt singularly green. He lived alone in one little room at the end of the world, took no holidays, had no fun, went to bed early so as to be fresh for his book in the morning. And now, suddenly, he had completely lost the point of view from which it had seemed necessary that he should get dizzily high marks, that he should conquer field after field in the realm of learning, and return to his home exuding glory. He could not persuade himself any more but that it befitted him perfectly to spend many hours strolling through the streets with his hands in his pockets, amusing his eyes with sights of every sort. He could find no argument that satisfied him why he should not lounge on a garden seat warm with sun, smoking cigarettes half the day, thinking nothing profitable. The wretched boy had lost all sober sense of the duty of man.

If he had limited himself to sitting idle in the garden, watching the year develop in that narrow, charming enclosure, one might have found an excuse for him, the same as for the scientist who studies a specimen under a glass; or, one might have said he had been overworking, his new circumstances on coming to the city had induced in him a false sort of fervor for work—a reaction was to be expected. But the mood whose first stage had been simple disinclination for study and a taste for pointless wanderings, by the time that in the march of the year the crocuses had gone, took on developments. It was not so often before a many-colored flower-bed he stopped, as before a window full of hats and bonnets.

If, again, he had limited himself to staring in at milliners' fronts! The wares there do somewhat resemble fantastic flowers, and might explain the interest of a botanist. But he halted in the same way before shops that offered no excuse for the same attention; windows in which were only idle feminine frocks displayed, flippant fans, frills of fluted lace, feathery things for the neck.

One might have imagined from his wonder and interest that all these things had just been invented, that they were a strange spring-crop; that new, too, was the race of smiling, chatting, shopping beings crowding the street on sunny days, new and in fashion only since this spring, such unaccustomed pleasure spoke in his eye that shyly followed them in their prettiest representatives. What exquisite sense shown, O ever-young Creator, in making the lip red, and the neck white, and the temperate cheek between white and red!

The boy had moments of being drunk in a glorified way even as is the innocent bee, with nothing but wandering among flowers. Owing to a confusion in the ideas attendant on that mysterious soft travailing among the atoms of the heart warmed through by spring, all sorts of things to him were as flowers! His imagination was so increased in power, that with nothing but a pair of little shoes in a show-case to start from he could build up the most astonishing, dreamy stories: he could set feet in the shoes and rear a palatial flesh-and-blood structure over them, as easy as sigh; fit the whole with graces, laces, circumstances and adventures—contrive even to tangle its fate pleasingly with his own.

Which may make supposed that he was a youth of some boldness. Far from it. He scarcely knew what a woman's eyes were like, except in profile or fugitive three-quarters; on the other hand, he was well acquainted with her back hair. Hair, in which he could pursue long studies unconfounded, seemed to him the most beautiful thing in all the world.

One day, with a view to lengthening the way by taking a road that though shorter must from novelty be richer in diversion than his daily track, he turned into the little street that cut off the triangle of the A. He paused before the window of the worn watches and sleeve-links; he took his time over the faded finery of the second-hand clothes shop; he examined certain yellowed wood-cuts and stained books he found in a narrow open stall. As he seemed coming to the end of the street's resources, he looked over the way and thoughtfully felt his cheek: he could not find there what would have justified a refreshing station at the barber's. He continued his way slowly, to make it last. Now, he stopped where several others were likewise stopping—he had come to Madame Finibald's.

The girl sat amid her hair, either unconscious or disdainful of the eyes watching her beyond the glass. She looked in a book open on her lap; now and then she turned over a leaf, sometimes revealing a picture on the page. Her chair was low, perhaps so that her hair should amply trail; its lowness made an excuse for the listlessness of her posture; her feet were outstretched and crossed, the passers might know that one of her shoes was laced with pink twine. If she moved her eyes from her book a moment, it was only to sweep them past the faces, unseeing, and lift them to the strip of sky between the houses—so blue this day, the little bit there was of it.