HARVARD EPISODES

BY CHARLES MACOMB FLANDRAU BOSTON COPELAND AND DAY MDCCCXCVII First edition (3500 copies) November, 1897 Second edition (5000 copies) December, 1897 COPYRIGHT BY COPELAND AND DAY, 1897 To W. A. Dear W. A. I have written about a very little corner of a very great place; but one that we knew well, and together.

C. M. F.

THE CHANCE

TWO men were talking in a room in Claverly Hall. Horace Hewitt, the sophomore who owned the apartment, had passed, during the hour with his visitor, from the state in which conversation is merely a sort of listless chaffing to where it becomes eager, earnest, and perplexing. The other, a carefully dressed, somewhat older young man, across whose impassive, intellectual profile a pair of eyeglasses straddled gingerly, was not, perhaps, monopolising more than his share of the discussion, for Robinson Curtiss was the kind of person to whom a large conversational portion was universally conceded; but he was, without doubt, talking with a continuance and an air of authority that unconsciously had become relentless. Both men were smoking: Hewitt, a sallow meerschaum pipe, with{2} his class in raised letters on the bowl; Curtiss, a cigarette he had taken from the metal case he still held meditatively in his hand. He smoked exceedingly good cigarettes, and practised the thrifty art of always discovering just one in his case.

“So you think my college life from an undergraduate’s standpoint, and it’s the only standpoint I give that for,”—Hewitt snapped his fingers impatiently,—“will always be as much of a fizzle as it has so far?” He had jumped up from the big chair in which he had all along been sprawling and stood before Robinson in an attitude that was at once incredulous and despairing. The momentary embarrassment that Curtiss felt at this unexpected show of feeling on the part of his young friend, took the form of extreme deliberation in returning his cigarette-case to his pocket, and in repeating the performance of lighting his cigarette that had not gone out.

He had not been a graduate quite three years in all, but that had been ample time—particularly as it had been spent far from Cambridge—for the readjustment of certain views of his,—views in which{3} four eventful years at college had been grotesquely prominent. He found, on returning to the university town, that his absence rendered him frequently indifferent to the genuineness and importance, not merely of the more delicate problems of the undergraduate world,—it was one of these on which he was at the present moment indiscreetly touching,—but even to the obvious and common incidents of the academic experience: to the outcome of examinations, to the degree of Bachelor of Arts. It was not until Hewitt stood troubled and expectant before him that Curtiss appreciated how tactless the disparity in their knowledge of things collegiate had made him appear to his young friend. A sudden reminiscent intuition, that flashed him back to his own sophomore year, caused him to feel that what he was saying to Hewitt was almost brutal; in his

capacity of a young graduate he had indulged in a cold-blooded lecture (it could hardly be called a discussion) on questions that very properly were not questions to a fellow in Hewitt’s situation, but warm, operative realities. Hewitt was in many ways such a mature young person,{4} his valuation of other people and their actions had always seemed so temperate, so just, that Curtiss, without knowing it, had simply ignored the fellow’s healthy undergraduate attitude. He had failed to assume how eager the sophomore was to be some active part of the new and fascinating life going on everywhere about him; how completely he was possessed by the indefinable, disquieting, stimulative spirit that so triumphantly inhibits Harvard from becoming a mere place of learning. Curtiss had spent the evening in throwing what he sincerely believed was a searching light on some aspects of Harvard life; he was beginning to wish he had allowed Hewitt to perform the office for himself.

“Be honest with me, Curtiss.” Hewitt spoke in the distinct, simple tones that as a rule accompany words one hesitates to trifle with. “You’ve gone through the whole damn thing yourself, and got more out of it—not more than you deserve, of course, but more than most men get; you knew everybody and belonged to—to—” Hewitt hesitated a moment; any single college institution—social, athletic,{5} or intellectual—did not in itself forcibly appeal to him; there was something petty in particularising. “You belonged to—to everything, when you were in college,” he finally said; “how was it done—how is it done every day? I see it going on around me all the time; but I can’t touch it in any way,—it never comes near enough, if you know what I mean; and what I can’t explain to myself is that I don’t see why it should come any nearer to me,—only, I want it to.” The manner in which Horace blurted out the last few words was an epitome of the situation; their confession of keen longing to know and be known in his class had gathered intensity

with the growing suspicion that certain conditions of the place—conditions he felt rather than understood—were every day making the realisation of his desire for activity, acquaintances, friendship, more impossible. His great common sense—in Hewitt the quality amounted to a sort of prosaic talent—would always preclude his degenerating into one of the impotently rebellious; it had kept him free from the slightest tinge of bitterness toward any one, but it had not made his{6} interminable, solitary walks up Brattle Street (there was apparently no other walk to take in Cambridge) less interminable; it had enlivened none of the stolid evenings in his rooms which, with a necessary amount of study, a chapter or two from some book he did not much care about, and a bottle of beer, always came to an end somehow or other in spite of themselves; it had not invested stupid theatres with interest, nor mediocre athletics with excitement. Common sense, the prevailing trait of Hewitt’s character, that induced the middle-aged to consider him

“singularly well balanced for a young man,” was quite powerless to dispel the desperate loneliness of his sophomore year. His common sense was a coat of mail that defied sabre thrusts, perhaps, but let in the rain.

“You know everything, Rob,” Hewitt smiled; he had after all no wish to appear emotional. “Is there something the matter with me, or with Harvard, that has kept me what you very well know I am—an isolated nonentity who has rather begun to lose hope? Are there other fellows in college who are gentlemen, and used to all{7} the word implies, but who might be in any one of the fifteen leading universities of Kansas, for all the good they are getting out of this place? If I had only been given a chance—” he broke out with sudden vehemence,—“a good, square chance, the kind a man has a right to expect when he enters college—to meet my equals equally—to make myself felt and liked if I had the power to, why I shouldn’t mind failing, you know, not in the least; a man who isn’t an ass accepts chronic unpopularity as he does chronic red hair, or any other personal calamity.” Hewitt’s own locks had sufficient colour to lend authority to his statement. “It isn’t that—it’s the utter impossibility, as far as I can see, of a boy who came here as I

did, getting a fair trial. Every day I am more and more convinced that my prospects for the broad, enlightening sort of existence I expected to find on entering Harvard were about as definite and as brilliant as the prospects of a stillborn child on entering the world. What’s the matter? What’s wrong? Who’s to blame?”

There was an admirable force to Hewit{8}t’s manner when he was thoroughly in earnest that, as a rule, roused even in Curtiss a vague apprehension that sincerity was, somehow, obligatory. It did not restrain him, however, from assuming an expression of mock helplessness and murmuring,—

“It’s so long—so intricate.”

“If people only knew what they were in for before they came,” Hewitt continued.

“Maybe they wouldn’t come,” suggested the other.

“Of course they’d come,—the place is too great,—they couldn’t afford to stay away.” Horace passed over the axioms with the impatience of one who has problems to solve. “Of course they would come,” he repeated; “but they would come with their eyes opened—they would know what not to expect; that’s the important thing.”

“Ah, but who could do it? Who would do it? It would be like assisting a new kitten to see by means of a pin. We must all work out our own salvations,” Curtiss added sententiously.

“That brings it right round to my point again,” exclaimed Hewitt. “Of{9} course every man wants to ‘work out his own salvation,’ as you put it; but at Harvard I don’t think it’s every man who is given the opportunity to. He doesn’t know that before he comes, he doesn’t find it out for some time after he gets here; but it’s true, and it’s precisely what I want you to tell me about—to explain.” There was but a faint note of triumph in Hewitt’s voice; he realised that he had Curtiss in a corner, but he had not been conscious of manœuvring to get him there. “Tell me this: Do you think that Harvard—and by that I don’t mean the Officers of Instruction and Government, they’re the least of it—do you think that Harvard is fair, and do you think that it is American?”

There was something so general, so meaningless, so senatorial in the application of Hewitt’s final word that Curtiss was surprised into a shout of laughter.

“Whether it’s fair or not, depends on who’s telling you about it,” he said gravely enough; “but there’s no question as to its nationality,” he laughed again; “of course it’s American, horribly American, deliciously American!{10}”

Hewitt puckered his forehead and waited for more; he did not in the least understand.

“When I say American, I don’t mean what you mean; because—pardon me for saying it—you don’t mean anything.” Curtiss found it suddenly easy to rattle on as he had been doing earlier in the evening; his laugh had cleared the atmosphere. “My dear fellow,” he said, “Harvard University possesses its labouring class, its middle class, and its aristocracy, as sharply, as inevitably, as—as—” he was about to draw a rather over-emphatic comparison between Harvard and the social orders of Sparta in the days of Lycurgus, when Hewitt, still puzzled, broke in with,—

“But if that’s the case, it isn’t American at all—you contradict yourself in the same breath.”

“I assumed that you knew more about your own country,” Curtiss remarked with dry superiority; “I sha’n’t undertake to discuss the social system of the United States; it would simply necessitate my going over a lot of platitudes that would bore us both. It’s only when we apply{11} to our college, what we all know to be so undeniable of the country at large, that the situation at once becomes novel and preposterous to so many people. The conventional idea of an American college—you know this because the idea was yours before you came here—is that it consists of a multitude of lusty young men linked together by the indissoluble bonds of class and college, all striving, shoulder to shoulder, for the same ends, in a general way,—just what the ends are I don’t think the public cares very much, but they’re presumably charmingly unpractical and fine,—and living in an intoxicating atmosphere of intimacy, a robust sense of loyalty that is supposed to pervade the academic groves and render them the temporary home of a great, light-hearted, impulsive,

congenial brotherhood. Well, I don’t know whether other American institutions of learning answer the description, because I’ve never been to them; but Harvard doesn’t, not in the slightest particular.”

“Then I wish it wouldn’t attempt to,” murmured Hewitt.

“There is no attempt,” answered Cur{12}tiss; “there is merely a pretence,—a pretence that, strangely enough, isn’t meant to deceive any one. We find it in the naïve untruthfulness of the college papers, in the eloquent conventionality of the Class Day Orators; the college press prattles about ‘class feeling’ and all the other feelings that none of us, since the place has grown so large, has ever felt; the orator’s sentiments bear about the same relation to real life that his gestures do: he has a lot to say about everybody’s sitting together at the feet of the Alma Mater; but he doesn’t dwell at all on those of us who have been cuddled in her lap. That’s what I mean when I say the place is consistently ‘American.’” Curtiss got up and took a meditative turn about the room. “The undergraduate body faithfully reproduces, in little, the social orders of the whole country, and not only never formally recognises their existence, but takes occasion, every now and then, somewhat elaborately, to deny it,—a proceeding that of course

doesn’t change any one’s position or make any one happier. ‘Fine words,’ indeed, never ‘buttered the parsnips’ of so sophisticated a{13} crowd as you discover at Harvard; but if an American community finds it impossible, by reason of all the thousand and one artificial conditions that make such things impossible, to be ‘free and equal,’ what is left for the distracted concern to do, but flaunt its freedom and its equality, from time to time, in theory?”

“It’s all wrong then—frightfully wrong,” declared Hewitt, with considerable heat. He had been increasingly irritated through the calm progress of Curtiss’s discourse, and now stood with his back to the fire-place, staring fixedly before him,—a spirited figure of protest. “We’re too young at college for that kind of rot,” he went on emphatically; “where, in the name of Heaven, can a fellow expect square treatment, if it isn’t right here among what, just now, you scornfully called ‘a multitude of lusty young men’? They ought to be too young and too lusty and too good fellows to care—even to know about—about—all that.” His words tumbled out noisily, and had the effect of noticeably increasing Robinson’s deliberateness.

“The situation would be in no way{14} remarkable, if it were not for just that fact,—our extreme youth.” Curtiss spoke as if he were still in college. “It’s taken rather for granted that young men, who are delightful in so many ways, are the complete embodiment, when chance herds them together, of the ‘hale-fellow-well-met-God-bless-everybody’ ideal a lot of people seem to have of them. The plain truth of the matter is, that at Harvard, at least, they aren’t at all. Wander a moment from the one royal road we all try to prance along in common here, and you’ll find most of us picking our way in very much the same varied paths we are destined to follow later on. The only wonder is that we should have found them so soon. What makes people’s hair stand on end is that young America should begin to classify himself so instinctively—the crystallisation of the social idea seems, to put it mildly, a trifle premature. But”—Curtiss’s shrug comprehended many things—“what are you going to do about it?”

The question was perfectly general in intention, and might have ended the discussion had not Hewitt regarded it as{15} the natural expression of Curtiss’s interest in his ambitions for a more diverting existence.

“And yet, after all, I am a gentleman as well as they,” he said simply.

There was something exquisitely intelligible to the graduate in the very vagueness of the boy’s pronoun. “They,”—he too, in the early forlornness of his college life, had been eagerly aware of them,—the great creatures, who, for some reason or other (not always a transparent one), seemed to emerge with such enviable distinction from the vast mediocrity of the crowd; “They” who put on astonishing black coats and spent Sunday afternoon in town; “They” who so frequently wore little crimson usher’s badges at the games, and bowed to so many of the attractive people they showed to their seats; “They” who, fine shouldered and brown from rowing on the crews, seemed to endure their education with such splendid listlessness; “They” whom he had so often heard rattling into the suburban stillness of Cambridge just before dawn, from some fine dance in town. How unmistakable they were in the class-room,{16} at a football game, the theatre,—everywhere; how instinctively they seemed to know one another, and how inevitably they

came to be felt in every class as something, if not exactly apart, at least aloof. Curtiss stared musingly at the fire a moment, and smiled as he recalled the various trivial circumstances that, in his own case, gradually, and with none of the excitement of a conscious transition, had brought about the substitution of a perfectly natural, matter-of-fact “We,” for the once tacitly understood but exasperating “They.” For a moment he thought of asking Hewitt to explain himself; he had a freakish desire to see the fellow flounder in the effort to be clear, without becoming pitifully transparent; however, he thought better of it, and only answered with some impatience,—

“Of course you’re as much of a gentleman as any one; but that—except very, very superficially—isn’t the question.” Curtiss was beginning to feel like a hoary old oracle. “There’s nothing strange or tragic in your situation; it’s shared by lots of other fellows in college,” he went on; “you slipped into{17} Harvard as soon as your tutor thought you were ready to, and, as you came from a rather obscure place, you slipped in quite alone. A year and a half have dragged themselves through the vagaries of the Cambridge climate; you are still, broadly speaking, quite alone. Yet all this time you have been sensitive—keenly so—to the life that is being lived everywhere around you, and you begin to feel about as essential to the drama as a freshman does when he puts on a somewhat soiled court costume and assists Sir Henry Irving in one of his interesting productions. The trouble with you and every one like you is simply this: you didn’t come to Harvard from a preparatory school with a lot of acquaintances and some friends; you didn’t come from any of the

few big towns that annually send a number of fellows who know, or who at least have heard, of one another; you are athletic, perhaps, but scarcely what one would call an athlete—although I confess, that isn’t of much consequence; we don’t, as a rule, reward athletes for being athletes. If they perform well, we applaud them. At Harvard, athletics are{18} occasionally a means to a man’s becoming identified with the sort of people he wishes to be one of; but I have never known them to be an end. Finally, you are not a Bostonian, and when I say ‘a Bostonian,’”—Curtiss removed his glasses and softly polished them with his handkerchief,—“when I say ‘a Bostonian,’” he repeated with the gentlest of satire, “I mean of course a Bostonian that one knows.”

“Now, although you are doubtless a great many interesting and attractive things, you do not happen to be any one of those I have just named; and it is from the men who are, that the crowd destined to be of importance in college—the fellows who are going to lead, who are going to be felt—whatever you choose to call it—will generally originate. Think of your own class for a moment, and, nine times out of ten, the men that you feel would be congenial as well as interesting, if you knew them, are taken from the sort of men I’ve specified.”