CHAPTER LX
“BOOSTER DAY” AND A MEMORY
Entering Bloomington this afternoon, the memories of all my old aches and pains were exceedingly dim. We say to ourselves at many particular times, “I will never forget this,” or, “The pain of this will endure forever,” but, alas! even our most treasured pains and sufferings escape us. We are compelled to admit that the memory of that which rankled so is very dim. Marsh fires, all of us. We are made to glow by the heat and radiance of certain days, but we fade—and we vanish.
Nevertheless, entering Bloomington now it had some charm, only as I thought the whole thing over the memory of my various sex failures still rankled. “I was not really happy here,” I told myself. “I was in too transient and inadequate a mood.” And perhaps that was true. At any rate, I wanted to see this one principal room I have previously mentioned, and the college and the court house, and feel the general atmosphere of the place.
As a whole, the town was greatly changed, but not enough to make it utterly different. One could still see the old town in the new. For although the old, ramshackle, picturesque attractive court house had been substituted by a much larger and more imposing building of red brick and white stone—a not uninteresting design—still a number of the buildings which had formerly surrounded it were here. The former small and by no means cleanly post office, with its dingy paper and knife marked writing shelf on one side, had been replaced by a handsome government building suitable for a town of thirty or forty thousand. A new city hall, a thing unthought of in my day, was being erected in a street just south of the square. New bank buildings, dry-goods stores, drug store, restaurants, were all in evidence. In my time there had been but two restaurants, both small, and one almost impossible. Now there were four or five quite respectable ones, and one of considerable pretensions. In addition, down the Main Street could be seen the college, or university, a striking group of buildings entirely different from those I had known. A picture postcard, referring to one of the buildings, spoke of five thousand population for the city, and a four thousand attendance for the University.
Feeling that too much had disappeared to make our stop of any particular import, still I was eager to see what had become of the old rooming house, and whether the little cottage next door and the home of Beatrice over the way were still in existence. Under my guidance we turned at the exact corner, and stopped the car at the curb. I was by no means uncertain, for on the corner diagonal from my old room was a quondam student’s rooming house too obviously the same to be mistaken. But where was the one in which I had lived? Apparently it was gone. There was an old house on the corner looking somewhat like it, and the second from it on the same side was evidently the small house in which Miss T—— had lived; and over the way—yes, save for another house crowded in beside it, that was the same too. Only in the case of this house on the corner....
All at once it came to me. I could see what had been done.
“Willie,” I said, to a boy who was playing marbles with two other boys, right in front of us, “how long has this second house been here—this one next to the corner?”
“I don’t know. I’ve only been here since Booster Day.”
“Booster Day?” I queried, suddenly and entirely diverted by this curious comment. “What in the world is Booster Day?”
“Booster Day!” He stared incredulously, as though he had not quite heard. “Aw, gwann, you know what Booster Day is.”