A Dead Issue
Marcus Thorn, instructor in Harvard University, was thirty-two years old on the twentieth of June. He looked thirty-five, and felt about a hundred. When he got out of bed on his birthday morning, and pattered into the vestibule for his mail, the date at the top of the Crimson recalled the first of these unpleasant truths to him. His mirror—it was one of those detestable folding mirrors in three sections—enabled him to examine his bald spot with pitiless ease, reproduced his profile some forty-five times in quick succession, and made it possible for him to see all the way round himself several times at once. It was this devilish invention that revealed fact number two to Mr. Thorn, while he was brushing his hair and tying his necktie. One plus two equalled three, as usual, and Thorn felt old and unhappy. But he didn’t linger over his dressing to philosophise on the evanescence of youth; he didn’t even murmur,—
“Alas for hourly change! Alas for all
The loves that from his hand proud youth lets fall,
Even as the beads of a told rosary.”
He could do that sort of thing very well; he had been doing it steadily for five months. But this morning, the reality of the situation—impressed upon him by the date of his birth—led him to adopt more practical measures. What he actually did, was to disarrange his hair a little on top,—fluff it up to make it look more,—and press it down toward his temples to remove the appearance of having too much complexion for the size of his head. Then he went out to breakfast.
Thorn’s birthday had fallen, ironically, on one of those rainwashed, blue-and-gold days when “all nature rejoices.” The whitest of clouds were drifting across the bluest of skies when the instructor walked out into the Yard; the elms rustled gently in the delicate June haze, and the robins hopped across the yellow paths, freshly sanded, and screamed in the sparkling grass. All nature rejoiced, and in so doing got very much on Thorn’s nerves. When he reached his club, he was a most excellent person not to breakfast with.
It was early—half-past eight—and no one except Prescott, a sophomore, and Wynne, a junior, had dropped in as yet. Wynne, with his spectacles on, was sitting in the chair he always sat in at that hour, reading the morning paper. Thorn knew that he would read it through from beginning to end, carefully put his spectacles back in their case, and then go to the piano and play the “Blue Danube.” By that time his eggs and coffee would be served. Wynne did this every morning, and the instructor, who at the beginning of the year had regarded the boy’s methodical habits at the club as “quaint,”—suggestive, somehow, of the first chapter of “Pendennis,”—felt this morning that the “Blue Danube” before breakfast would be in the nature of a last straw. Prescott, looking as fresh and clean as the morning, was laughing over an illustrated funny paper. He merely nodded to Thorn, although the instructor hadn’t breakfasted there for many months, and called him across to enjoy something. Thorn glanced at the paper and smiled feebly.
“I don’t see how you can do it at this hour,” he said; “I would as soon drink flat champagne.” Prescott understood but vaguely what the man was talking about, yet he didn’t appear disturbed or anxious for enlightenment.
“I’ll have my breakfast on the piazza,” Thorn said to the steward who answered his ring. Then he walked nervously out of the room.
From the piazza he could look over a tangled barrier of lilac bushes and trellised grapevines into an old-fashioned garden. A slim lady in a white dress and a broad brimmed hat that hid her face was cutting nasturtiums and humming placidly to herself. Thorn thought she was a young girl, until she turned and revealed the fact that she was not a young girl—that she was about his own age. This seemed to annoy him in much the same way that the robins and Wynne and the funny paper had, for he threw himself into a low steamer-chair where he wouldn’t have to look at the woman, and gave himself up to a sort of luxurious melancholy.
In October, nine months before, Thorn had appeared one evening in the doorway of the club dining-room after a more or less continuous absence of eight years from Cambridge. It was the night before college opened, and the dining-room was crowded. For an instant there was an uproar of confused greetings; then Haydock and Ellis and Sears Wolcott and Wynne—the only ones Thorn knew—pushed back from the table and went forward to shake hands with him. Of the nine or ten boys still left at the table by this proceeding, those whose backs were turned to the new arrival stopped eating and waited without looking around, to be introduced to the owner of the unfamiliar voice. Their companions opposite paused too; some of them laid their napkins on the table. They, however, could glance up and see that the newcomer was a dark man of thirty years or more. They supposed, correctly, that he was an “old graduate” and a member of the club.
“You don’t know any of these people, do you?” said Haydock, taking him by the arm; “what a devil of a time you’ve been away from this place.”
“I know that that’s a Prescott,” laughed the graduate. In his quick survey of the table, while the others had been welcoming him back, his eyes had rested a moment on a big fellow with light hair. Everybody laughed, because it really was a Prescott and all Prescotts were simply more or less happy replicas of all other Prescotts. “I know your brothers,” said the graduate, shaking hands with the boy, who had risen.
“It’s Mr. Thorn.” Haydock made this announcement loud enough to be heard by the crowd. He introduced every one, prefixing “Mr.” to the names of the first few, but changing to given and even nicknames before completing the circuit of the table. The humour of some of these last,—“Dink,” “Pink,” and “Mary,” for instance,—lost sight of in long established usage, suggested itself anew; and the fellows laughed again as they made a place for Thorn at the crowded table.
“It’s six years, isn’t it?” Haydock asked politely. The others had begun to babble cheerfully again of their own affairs.
“Six! I wish it were; it’s eight,” answered Thorn. “Eight since I left college. But of course I’ve been here two or three times since,—just long enough to make me unhappy at having to go back to Europe again.”
“And now you’re a great, haughty Ph. D. person, an ‘Officer of Instruction and Government,’ announced in the prospectus to teach in two courses,” mused Ellis, admiringly. “How do you like the idea?”
“It’s very good to be back,” said Thorn. He looked about the familiar room with a contented smile, while the steward bustled in and out to supply him with the apparatus of dining.
It was, indeed, good to be back. The satisfaction deepened and broadened with every moment. It was good to be again in the town, the house, the room that, during his life abroad, he had grown to look upon more as “home” than any place in the world; good to come back and find that the place had changed so little; good, for instance, when he ordered a bottle of beer, to have it brought to him in his own mug, with his name and class cut in the pewter,—just as if he had never been away at all. This was but one of innumerable little things that made Thorn feel that at last he was where he belonged; that he had stepped into his old background; that it still fitted. The fellows, of course, were recent acquisitions—all of them. Even his four acquaintances had entered college long since his own time. But the crowd, except that it seemed to him a gathering decidedly younger than his contemporaries had been at the same age, was in no way strange to him. There were the same general types of young men up and down the table, and at both ends, that he had known in his day. They were discussing the same topics, in the same tones and inflections, that had made the dinner-table lively in the eighties,—which was not surprising when he considered that certain families belong to certain clubs at Harvard almost as a matter of course, and that some of the boys at the table were the brothers and cousins of his own classmates. He realised, with a glow of sentiment, that he had returned to his own people after years of absence in foreign lands; a performance whose emotional value was not decreased for Thorn by the conviction, just then, that his own people were better bred, and better looking, and better dressed than any he had met elsewhere. As he looked about at his civilised surroundings, and took in, from the general chatter, fragments of talk,—breezy and cosmopolitan with incidents of the vacation just ended,—he considered his gratification worth the time he had been spending among the fuzzy young gentlemen of a German university.
Thorn, like many another college antiquity, might have been the occasion of a mutual feeling of constraint had he descended upon this undergraduate meal in the indefinite capacity of “an old graduate.” The ease with which he filled his place at the table, and the effortless civility that acknowledged his presence there, were largely due to his never having allowed his interest in the life of the club to wane during his years away from it. He knew the sort of men the place had gone in for, and, in many instances, their names as well. Some of his own classmates—glad, no doubt, of so congenial an item for their occasional European letters—had never failed to write him, in diverting detail, of the great Christmas and spring dinners. And they, in turn, had often read extracts from Thorn’s letters to them, when called on to speak at these festivities. More than once the graduate had sent, from the other side of the world, some doggerel verses, a sketch to be used as a dinner-card, or a trifling addition to the club’s library or dining-room. Haydock and Ellis and Wolcott and Wynne he had met at various times abroad. He had made a point of hunting them up and getting to know them, with the result that his interest had succeeded in preserving his identity; he was not unknown to the youngest member of the club. If they didn’t actually know him, they at least knew of him. Even this crust is sweet to the returned graduate whose age is just far enough removed from either end of life’s measure to make it intrinsically unimportant.
“What courses do you give?” It was the big Prescott, sitting opposite, who asked this. The effort involved a change of colour.
“You’d better look out, or you’ll have Pink in your class the first thing you know,” some one called, in a voice of warning, from the other end of the table.
“Yes; he’s on the lookout for snaps,” said some one else.
“Then he’d better stay away from my lectures,” answered Thorn, smiling across at Prescott, who blushed some more at this sudden convergence of attention on himself. “They say that new instructors always mark hard—just to show off.”
“I had you on my list before I knew who you were,” announced another. “I thought the course looked interesting; you’ll have to let me through.”
“Swipe! swipe!” came in a chorus from around the table. This bantering attitude toward his official position pleased Thorn, perhaps, more than anything else. It flattered and reassured him as to the impression his personality made on younger—much younger—men. He almost saw in himself the solution of the perennial problem of “How to bring about a closer sympathy between instructor and student.”
After dinner Haydock and Ellis took him from room to room, and showed him the new table, the new rugs, the new books, ex dono this, that, and the other member. In the library he came across one of his own sketches, prettily framed. Some of his verses had been carefully pasted into the club scrap-book. Ellis and Haydock turned to his class photograph in the album, and laughed. It was not until long afterwards that he wondered if they had done so because the picture had not yet begun to lose its hair. When they had seen everything from the kitchen to the attic, they went back to the big room where the fellows were drinking their coffee and smoking. Others had come in in the interval; they were condoling gaily with those already arrived, on the hard luck of having to be in Cambridge once more. Thorn stood with his back to the fireplace, and observed them.
It was anything but a representative collection of college men. There were athletes, it was true,—Prescott was one,—and men who helped edit the college papers, and men who stood high in their studies, and others who didn’t stand anywhere, talking and chaffing in that room. But it was characteristic of the life of the college that these varied distinctions had in no way served to bring the fellows together there. That Ellis would, without doubt, graduate with a magna, perhaps a summa cum laude, was a matter of interest to no one but Ellis. That Prescott had played admirable foot-ball on Soldiers’ Field the year before, and would shortly do it again, made Prescott indispensable to the Eleven, perhaps, but it didn’t in the least enhance his value to the club. In fact, it kept him away so much, and sent him to bed so early, that his skill at the game was, at times, almost deplored. That Haydock once in a while contributed verses of more than ordinary merit to the “Monthly” and “Advocate” had nearly kept him out of the club altogether. It was the one thing against him,—he had to live it down. On the whole, the club, like all of the five small clubs at Harvard whose influence is the most powerful, the farthest reaching influence in the undergraduate life of the place, rather prided itself in not being a reward for either the meritorious or the energetic. It was composed of young men drawn from the same station in life, the similarity of whose past associations and experience, in addition to whatever natural attractions they possessed, rendered them mutually agreeable. The system was scarcely broadening, but it was very delightful. And as the graduate stood there watching the fellows—brown and exuberant after the long vacation—come and go, discussing, comparing, or simply fooling, but always frankly absorbed in themselves and one another, he could not help thinking that however much such institutions had helped to enfeeble the class spirit of days gone by, they had a rather exquisite, if less diffusive spirit of their own. He liked the liveliness of the place, the broad, simple terms of intimacy on which every one seemed to be with every one else, the freedom of speech and action. Not that he had any desire to bombard people with sofa-cushions, as Sears Wolcott happened to be doing at that instant, or even to lie on his back in the middle of the centre-table with his head under the lamp, and read the “Transcript,” as some one else had done most of the evening; but he enjoyed the environment that made such things possible and unobjectionable.
“I must make a point of coming here a great deal,” reflected Thorn.
The next day college opened. More men enrolled in Thorn’s class that afternoon than he thought would be attracted by the subject he was announced to lecture in on that day of the week. Among all the students who straggled, during the hour, into the bare recitation-room at the top of Sever, the only ones whose individualities were distinct enough to impress themselves on Thorn’s unpractised memory, were a negro, a stained ivory statuette of a creature from Japan, a middle-aged gentleman with a misplaced trust in the efficacy of a flowing sandy beard for concealing an absence of collar and necktie, Prescott, and Haydock. Prescott surprised him. There was a crowd around the desk when he appeared, and Thorn didn’t get a chance to speak to him; but he was pleased to have the boy enrol in his course,—more pleased somehow than if there had been any known intellectual reason for his having done such a thing; more pleased, for instance, than he was when Haydock strolled in a moment or two later, although he knew that the senior would get from his teachings whatever there was in them. Haydock was the last to arrive before the hour ended. Thorn gathered up his pack of enrolment cards, and the two left the noisy building together.
“Prescott enrolled just a minute or two before you did,” said Thorn, as they walked across the Yard. He was a vain man in a quiet way.
“Yes,” answered Haydock drily, “he said your course came at a convenient hour,” he didn’t add that, from what he knew of Prescott, complications might, under the circumstances, be looked for.
“Shall I see you at dinner?” Thorn asked before they separated.
“Oh, are you going to eat at the club?” Haydock had wondered the night before how much the man would frequent the place.
“Why, yes, I thought I would—for a time at least.” No other arrangement had ever occurred to Thorn.
“That’s good—I’m glad,” said the senior; he asked himself, as he walked away, why truthful people managed to lie so easily and so often in the course of a day. As a matter of fact, he was vaguely sorry for what Thorn had just told him. Haydock didn’t object to the instructor. Had his opinion been asked, he would have said, with truth, that he liked the man. For Thorn was intelligent, and what Haydock called “house broken,” and the two had once spent a pleasant week together in Germany. It was not inhospitality, but a disturbed sense of the fitness of things that made Haydock regret Thorn’s apparent intention of becoming so intimate with his juniors. The instructor’s place, Haydock told himself, was with his academic colleagues, at the Colonial Club—or wherever it was that they ate.
Thorn did dine with the undergraduates that night, and on many nights following. It was a privilege he enjoyed for a time exceedingly. It amused him, and, after the first few weeks of his new life in Cambridge, he craved amusement. For in spite of the work he did for the college—the preparing and delivering of lectures, the reading and marking of various written tasks, and the enlightening, during consultation hours, of long haired, long winded seekers after truth, whose cold, insistent passion for the literal almost crazed him—he was often profoundly bored. He had not been away from Cambridge long enough to outlive the conviction, acquired in his Freshman year, that the residents of that suburb would prove unexhilarating if in a moment of inadvertence he should ever chance to meet any of them. But he had been too long an exile to retain a very satisfactory grasp on contemporary Boston. Of course he hunted up some of his classmates he had known well. Most of them were men of affairs in a way that was as yet small enough to make them seem to Thorn aggressively full of purpose. They were all glad to see him. Some of them asked him to luncheon in town at hours that proved inconvenient to one living in Cambridge; some of them had wives, and asked him to call on them. He did so, and found them to be nice women. But this he had suspected before. Two of his classmates were rich beyond the dreams of industry. They toiled not, and might have been diverting if they hadn’t—both of them—happened to be unspeakably dull men. For one reason or another, he found it impossible to see his friends often enough to get into any but a very lame sort of step with their lives. Thorn’s occasional meetings with them left him melancholy, sceptical as to the depth of their natures and his own, cynical as to the worth of college friendships—friendships that had depended, for their warmth, so entirely on propinquity—on the occasion. His most absorbing topics of conversation with the men he had once known—his closest ties—were after all issues very trivial and very dead. Dinner with a classmate he grew to look on as either suicide, or a post mortem.
It was the club with its fifteen or twenty undergraduate members that went far at first toward satisfying his idle moments. Dead issues, other than the personal traditions that added colour and atmosphere to the every day life of the place, were given no welcome there. The thrill of the fleeting present was enough. The life Thorn saw there was, as far as he could tell, more than complete with the healthy joy of eating and drinking, of going to the play, of getting hot and dirty and tired over athletics, and cool and clean and hungry again afterwards. The instructor was entranced by its innocence—its unconscious contentment. It was so unlike his own life of recent years, he told himself; it was so “physical.” He liked to stop at the club late in the winter afternoons, after a brisk walk on Brattle Street. There was always a crowd around the fire at that hour, and no room that he could remember had ever seemed so full of warmth and sympathy as the big room where the fellows sat, at five o’clock on a winter’s day, with the curtains drawn and the light of the fire flickering up the dark walls and across the ceiling. He often dropped in at midnight, or even later. The place was rarely quite deserted. Returned “theatre bees” came there to scramble eggs and drink beer, instead of tarrying with the mob at the Victoria or the Adams House. In the chill of the small hours, a herdic load of boys from some dance in town would often stream in to gossip and get warm, or to give the driver a drink after the long cold drive across the bridge. And Thorn, who had not been disposed to gather up and cling to the dropped threads of his old interests, who was not wedded to his work, who was not sufficient unto himself, enjoyed it all thoroughly, unreservedly—for a time.
For a time only. For as the winter wore on, the inevitable happened—or rather the expected didn’t happen, which is pretty much the same thing after all. Thorn, observant, analytical, and—where he himself was not concerned—clever, grew to know the fellows better than they knew themselves. Before he had lived among them three months, he had appreciated their respective temperaments, he had taken the measure of their ambitions and limitations, he had catalogued their likes and dislikes, he had pigeon-holed their weaknesses and illuminated their virtues. Day after day, night after night, consciously and unconsciously, he had observed them in what was probably the frankest, simplest intercourse of their lives. And he knew them.
But they didn’t know him. Nor did it ever occur to them that they wanted to or could. They were not seeking the maturer companionship Thorn had to give; they were not seeking much of anything. They took life as they found it near at hand, and Thorn was far, very far away. For them, the niche he occupied could have been filled by any gentleman of thirty-two with a kind interest in them and an affection for the club. To him, they were everything that made the world, as he knew it just then, interesting and beautiful. Youth, energy, cleanliness were the trinity Thorn worshipped. And they were young, strong, and undefiled. Yet, after the first pleasure at being back had left him, Thorn was not a happy man, although he had not then begun to tell himself so.
The seemingly unimportant question presented by his own name began to worry him a little as the weeks passed into months. First names and the absurd sounds men had answered to from babyhood were naturally in common use at the club. Thorn dropped into the way of them easily, as a matter of course. Not to have done so would, in time, have become impossible. The fellows would have thought it strange—formal. Yet the name of “Marcus” was rarely heard there. Haydock, once in a while, called him that, after due premeditation. Sears Wolcott occasionally used it by way of a joke—as if he were taking an impertinent liberty, and rather enjoyed doing it. But none of the other men ever did. On no occasion had any one said “Marcus” absent-mindedly, and then looked embarrassed, as Thorn had hoped might happen. It hurt him a little always to be called “Thorn;” to be appealed to in the capacity of “Mr. Thorn,” as he sometimes was by the younger members, positively annoyed him. Prescott was the most incorrigible in this respect. He had come from one of those fitting schools where all speech between master and pupil is carried on to a monotonous chant of “Yes, sir,” “No, sir,” and “I think so, sir.” He had ideas, or rather habits,—for Prescott’s ideas were few,—of deference to those whose mission it was to assist in his education that Thorn found almost impossible to displace. For a long time—until the graduate laughed and asked him not to—he prefixed the distasteful “Mr.” to Thorn’s name. Then, for as long again, he refrained markedly from calling him anything. One afternoon he came into the club where the instructor was alone, writing a letter, and after fussing for a time among the magazines on the table, he managed to say,—
“Thorn, do you know whether Sears has been here since luncheon?”
Thorn didn’t know and he didn’t care, but had Prescott handed him an appointment to an assistant professor’s chair, instead of having robbed him a little of what dignity he possessed, he would not have been so elated by half. Prescott continued to call him “Thorn” after that, but always with apparent effort,—as if aware that in doing it he was not living quite up to his principles. This trouble with his name might have served Thorn as an indication of what his position actually was in the tiny world he longed so much to be part of once more. But he was not a clever man where he himself was concerned.
Little things hurt him constantly without opening his eyes. For instance, it rarely occurred to the fellows that the instructor might care to join them in any of their hastily planned expeditions to town after dinner. Not that he was ostracised; he was simply overlooked. When he did go to the theatre, he bought the tickets himself, and asked Prescott or Sears, or some of them, to go with him. The occasion invariably lacked the charm of spontaneity. When he invited any of them to dine with him in town, as he often did, they went, if they hadn’t anything else to do, and seemed to enjoy their dinner. But to Thorn these feasts were a series of disappointments. He always got up from the table with a sense of having failed in something. What? He didn’t know—he couldn’t have told. He was like a man who shoots carefully at nothing, and then feels badly because he hits it. He persisted in loitering along sunny lanes, and growing melancholy because they led nowhere. It was Sears Wolcott who took even the zest of anticipation out of Thorn’s little dinners in town, by saying to the graduate one evening,—
“What’s the point of going to the Victoria for dinner? It’s less trouble, and a damned sight livelier, to eat out here.” Sears had what Haydock called, “that disagreeable habit of hitting promiscuously from the shoulder.” The reaction on Thorn of all this was at last a dawning suspicion of his own unimportance. By the time the midyear examinations came, he felt somehow as if he were “losing ground;” he hadn’t reached the point yet of realising that he never had had any. He used to throw down his work in a fit of depression and consult his three-sided mirror apprehensively.
The big Prescott, however, became the real problem, around which the others were as mere corollaries. It was he who managed, in his “artless Japanese way,” as the fellows used to call it, to crystallise the situation, to bring it to a pass where Thorn’s rather unmanly sentimentality found itself confronted by something more definite and disturbing than merely the vanishing point of youth. Prescott accomplished this very simply, by doing the poorest kind of work—no work at all, in fact—in the course he was taking from Thorn. Barely, and by the grace of the instructor, had he scraped through the first examination in November. Since then he had rested calmly, like a great monolith, on his laurels. He went to Thorn’s lectures only after intervals of absence that made his going at all a farce. He ignored the written work of the course, and the reports on outside reading, with magnificent completeness. Altogether, he behaved as he wouldn’t have behaved had he ever for a moment considered Thorn in any light other than that of an instructor, an officer of the college, a creature to whom deference—servility, almost—was due when he was compelled to talk to him, but to whom all obligation ended there. His attitude was not an unusual one among college “men” who have not outgrown the school idea, but the attendant circumstances were. For Thorn’s concern over Prescott’s indifference to the course was aroused by a strong personal attachment, one in which an ordinary professorial interest had nothing to do. He smarted at his failure to attract the boy sufficiently to draw him to his lectures; yet he looked with a sort of panic toward the approaching day when he should be obliged, in all conscience, to flunk him in the midyear examination. He admired Prescott, as little, intelligent men sometimes do admire big, stupid ones. He idealised him, and even went the length, one afternoon when taking a walk with Haydock, of telling the senior that under Prescott’s restful, olympic exterior he thought there lurked a soul. To which Haydock had answered with asperity, “Well, I hope so, I’m sure,” and let the subject drop. Later in the walk, Haydock announced, irrelevantly, and with a good deal of vigour, that if he ever made or inherited millions, he would establish a chair in the university, call it the “Haydock Professorship of Common Sense,” and respectfully suggest to the President and Faculty that the course be made compulsory.
Thorn would have spoken to the soulful Prescott,—told him gently that he didn’t seem to be quite in sympathy with the work of the course,—if Prescott had condescended to go to his lectures in the six or seven weeks between the end of the Christmas recess and the examination period. But Prescott cut Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, at half-past two o’clock, with a regularity that, considered as regularity, was admirable. Toward the last, he did drop in every now and then, sit near the door, and slip out again before the hour was ended. This was just after he had been summoned by the Recorder to the Office for “cutting.” Thorn never got a chance to speak to him. He might have approached the boy at the club; but the instructor shrank from taking advantage of his connection with that place to make a delicate official duty possible. He had all along avoided “shop” there so elaborately,—had made so light of it when the subject had come up,—that he couldn’t bring himself at that late day to arise, viper like, from the hearthstone and smite. A note of warning would have had to be light, facetious, and consequently without value, in order not to prove a very false and uncalled for note indeed. The ready coöperation of the Dean, Thorn refrained from calling on; he was far from wishing to get Prescott into difficulties.
By the time the examination day arrived, the instructor was in a state of turmoil that in ordinary circumstances would have been excessive and absurd. In the case of Thorn, it was half pathetic, half contemptible. He knew that in spite of Prescott’s soul (a superabundance of soul is, as a matter of fact, a positive hindrance in passing examinations), the boy would do wretchedly. To give him an E—the lowest possible mark, always excepting, of course, the jocose and sarcastic F—would be to bring upon himself Prescott’s everlasting anger and “despision.” Of this Thorn was sure. Furthermore, the mark would not tend to make the instructor wildly popular at the club; for although everybody was willing to concede that Prescott was not a person of brilliant mental attainments, he was very much beloved. One hears a good deal about the “rough justice of boys.” Thorn knew that such a thing existed, and did not doubt but that, in theory, he would be upheld by the members of the club if he gave Prescott an E, and brought the heavy hand of the Office down on him. But the justice of boys, he reflected, was, after all, rough; it would acknowledge his right to flunk Prescott, perhaps, and, without doubt, hate him cordially for doing it. Thorn’s aversion to being hated was almost morbid.
If, on the other hand, he let the boy through,—gave him, say, the undeserved and highly respectable mark of C,—well, that would be tampering dishonestly with the standards of the college, gross injustice to the rest of the students, injurious to the self-respect of the instructor, and a great many other objectionable things, too numerous to mention. Altogether, Thorn was in a “state of mind.” He began to understand something of the fine line that separates instructor from instructed, on whose other side neither may trespass.
When at length the morning of the examination had come and gone, and Thorn was in his own room at his desk with the neat bundle of blue-covered books before him, in which the examinations are written, it was easy enough to make up his mind. He knew that the question of flunking or passing Prescott admitted of no arguments whatever. The boy’s work in the course failed to present the tiniest loophole in the way of “extenuating circumstances,” and Prescott had capped the climax of his past record that morning by staying in the examination-room just an hour and a quarter of the three hours he was supposed to be there. That alone was equivalent to failure in a man of Prescott’s denseness. Not to give Prescott a simple and unadorned E would be holding the pettiest of personal interests higher than one’s duty to the college. There was no other way of looking at it. And Thorn, whose mind was perfectly clear on this point, deliberately extricated Prescott’s book from the blue pile on his desk, dropped it carelessly—without opening it—into the glowing coals of his fireplace, and entered the boy’s midyear mark in the records as C.
No lectures are given in the college during the midyears. Men who are fortunate enough to finish their examinations early in the period can run away to New York, to the country, to Old Point Comfort, to almost anywhere that isn’t Cambridge, and recuperate. Haydock went South. Ellis and Wynne tried a walking trip in the Berkshire Hills, and, after two days’ floundering in the mud, waded to the nearest train for a city. Boston men went to Boston—except Sears Wolcott and Prescott, who disappeared to some wild and inaccessible New England hamlet to snow-shoe or spear fish or shoot rabbits; no one could with authority say which, as the two had veiled their preparations in mystery. So it happened that Thorn didn’t see Prescott for more than a week after he had marked his book. In the mean time he had become used to the idea of having done it according to a somewhat unconventional system—to put it charitably. He passed much of the time in which the fellows were away, alone; for the few who went to the club, went there with note-books under their arms and preoccupied expressions in their eyes. They kept a sharp look-out for unexpected manœuvres on the part of the clock, and had a general air of having to be in some place else very soon. Thorn, thrown on his own resources, had a mild experience of what Cambridge can be without a crowd to play with, and came to the conclusion that, for his own interest and pleasure in life, he had done wisely in not incurring Prescott’s ill-will and startling the club in the new rôle of hard-hearted, uncompromising pedagogue. The insignificant part he played in the lives of the undergraduates was far from satisfying; but it was the sort of half a loaf one doesn’t willingly throw away. By the time Prescott came back, Thorn had so wholly accepted his own view of the case that he was totally unprepared for the way in which the boy took the news of his mark. He met Prescott in the Yard the morning college opened again, and stopped to speak to him. He wouldn’t have referred to the examination—it was enough to know that the little crisis had passed—had not Prescott, blushing uneasily, and looking over Thorn’s shoulder at something across the Yard, said,—
“I don’t suppose you were very much surprised at the way I did in the exam, were you?”
“It might have been better,” answered Thorn, seriously. “I hope you will do better the second half year. But then, it might have been worse; your mark was C.”
Prescott looked at him, a quizzical, startled look; and then realising that Thorn was serious, that there had been nothing of the sarcastic in his tone or manner, he laughed rudely in the instructor’s face.
“I beg your pardon,” he said, as politely as he could, with his eyes still full of wonder and laughter; “I had no idea I did so well.” He turned abruptly and walked away. Thorn would have felt offended, if he hadn’t all at once been exceedingly scared. Prescott’s manner was extraordinary for one who, as a rule, took everything as it came, calmly, unquestioningly. His face and his laugh had expressed anything but ordinary satisfaction at not having failed. There was something behind that unwonted astonishment, something more than mere surprise at having received what was, after all, a mediocre mark. Thorn had mixed enough with human kind to be aware that no man living is ever very much surprised in his heart of hearts to have his humble efforts in any direction given grade C. Men like Prescott, who know but little of the subjects they are examined in, usually try to compose vague answers that may, like the oracles, be interpreted according to the mood of him who reads them. No matter how general or how few Prescott’s answers had been—Thorn stopped suddenly in the middle of the path. The explanation that had come to him took hold of him, and like a tightened rein drew him up short. Prescott had written nothing. The pages of his blue book had left the examination-room as virgin white as when they had been brought in and placed on the desk by the proctor. There was no other explanation possible, and the instructor tingled all over with the horrid sensation of being an unspeakable fool. He turned quickly to go to University Hall; he meant to have Prescott’s mark changed at once. But Prescott, at that moment, was bounding up the steps of University, two at a time. He was undoubtedly on his way to the Office to verify what Thorn had just told him. Thorn walked rapidly to his entry in Holworthy, although he had just come from there. Then, with short, nervous steps, he turned back again, left the Yard, and hurried in aimless haste up North Avenue. He had been an ass,—a bungling, awful ass,—he told himself over and over again. And that was about as coherent a meditation as Mr. Thorn was able to indulge in for some time. Once the idea of pretending that he had made a mistake did suggest itself for a moment; but that struck him as wild, impossible. It would have merely resulted in forcing the Office to regard him as stupid and careless, and, should embarrassing questions arise, he no longer had Prescott’s book with which to clear himself. More than that, it would give Prescott reason to believe him an underhand trickster. The boy now knew him to be an example of brazen partiality; there was no point in incurring even harsher criticism. Thorn tried to convince himself, as he hurried along the straight, hideous highway, that perhaps he was wrong,—that Prescott hadn’t handed in a perfectly blank book. If only he could have been sure of that, he would have risked the bland assertion that the boy had stumbled on more or less intelligent answers to the examination questions, without perhaps knowing it himself. This, practically, was the tone he had meant to adopt all along. But he couldn’t be sure, and, unfortunately, the only person who could give information as to what was or wasn’t in the book, was Prescott. But Prescott had given information of the most direct and convincing kind. That astounded look and impertinent laugh had as much as said:—
“Well, old swipe, what’s your little game? What do you expect to get by giving a good mark to a man who wasn’t able to answer a single question?” And Thorn knew it. At first he was alarmed at what he had done. He could easily see how such a performance, if known, might stand in the light of his reappointment to teach in the college, even if it didn’t eject him at once. But before he returned to his room, after walking miles, he scarcely knew where, fear had entirely given way to shame,—an over-powering shame that actually made the man sick at his stomach. It wasn’t as if he had committed a man’s fault in a world of men where he would be comfortably judged and damned by a tribunal he respected about as much as he respected himself. He had turned himself inside out before the clear eyes of a lot of boys, whose dealings with themselves and one another were like so many shafts of white light in an unrefracting medium. He had let them know what a weak, characterless, poor thing he was, by holding himself open to a bribe, showing himself willing to exchange, for the leavings of their friendships, something he was bound in honour to give only when earned, prostituting his profession that they might continue to like him a little, tolerate his presence among them. And he was one whom the college had honoured by judging worthy to stand up before young men and teach them. It was really very sickening.
Thorn couldn’t bring himself to go near the club for some days. He knew, however, as well as if he had been present, what had probably happened there in the meanwhile. Prescott had told Haydock and Wolcott, and very likely some of the others, the story of his examination. They had laughed at first, as if it had been a good joke in which Prescott had come out decidedly ahead; then Haydock had said something—Thorn could hear him saying it—that put the matter in a pitilessly true light, and the others had agreed with him. They usually did in the end. It took all the “nerve” Thorn had to show himself again.
But when he had summoned up enough courage to drop in at the club late one evening, he found every one’s manner toward him pretty much as it always had been; yet he could tell instinctively, as he sat there, who had and who hadn’t heard Prescott’s little anecdote. Wolcott knew; he called Thorn, “Marcus,” with unnecessary gusto, and once or twice laughed his peculiarly irritating laugh when there was nothing, as far as Thorn could see, to laugh at. Haydock knew; Thorn winced under the cool speculative stare of the senior’s grey eyes. Wynne knew; although Thorn had no more specific reason for believing so, than that the boy seemed rather more formidably bespectacled than usual. Several of the younger fellows also knew; Thorn knew that they knew; he couldn’t stand it. When the front door slammed after him on his way back to his room, he told himself that, as far as he was concerned, it had slammed for the last time.
He was very nearly right. He would have had to be a pachyderm compared to which the “blood sweating behemoth of Holy Writ” is a mere satin-skinned invalid, in order to have brazened out the rest of the year on the old basis. He couldn’t go to the club and converse on base-ball and the “musical glasses,” knowing that the fellows with whom he was talking were probably weighing the pros and cons of taking his courses next year, and getting creditable marks in them, without doing a stroke of work. He couldn’t face that “rough justice of boys” that would sanction the fellows making use of him, and considering him a pretty poor thing, at the same time. So he stayed away; he didn’t go near the place through March and April and May. When his work didn’t call him elsewhere, he stayed in his room and attempted to live the life of a scholar,—an existence for which he was in every conceivable way unfitted. For a time he studied hard out of books; but the most profitable knowledge he acquired in his solitude was the great deal he learned about himself. He tried to write. He had always thought it in him to “write something,” if he ever should find the necessary leisure. But the play he began amounted to no more than a harmless pretext for discoursing in a disillusioned strain on Life and Art in the many letters he wrote to people he had known abroad,—people, for whom, all at once, he conceived a feeling of intimacy that no doubt surprised them when they received his letters. His volume of essays was never actually written, but the fact that he was hard at work on it served well as an answer to:—
“Why the devil don’t we ever see you at the club nowadays?”
For the fellows asked him that, of course, when he met them in the Yard or in the electric cars; and Haydock tarried once or twice after his lecture and hoped politely that he was coming to the next club dinner. He wasn’t at the next club dinner, however, nor the next, nor the next. Haydock stopped reminding him of them. The club had gradually ceased to have any but a spectacular interest for Thorn. His part at a dinner there would be—and, since his return, always had been—that of decorous audience in the stalls, watching a sprightly farce. The club didn’t insist on an audience, so Thorn’s meetings with its members were few. He saw Haydock and Prescott, in a purely official way, more than any of them. Strangely enough, Prescott seemed to be trying to do better in Thorn’s course. He came to the lectures as regularly as he had avoided them before the midyears. He handed in written work of such ingenious unintelligence that there was no question in Thorn’s mind as to the boy’s having conscientiously evolved it unaided. The instructor liked the spirit of Prescott’s efforts, although it was a perpetual “rubbing in,” of the memory of his own indiscretion; it displayed a pretty understanding of noblesse oblige.
The second half year was long and dreary and good for Thorn. It set him down hard,—so hard that when he collected himself and began to look about him once more, he knew precisely where he was—which was something he hadn’t known until then. He was thirty-two years old; he looked thirty-five, and he felt a hundred, to begin with. He wasn’t an undergraduate, and he hadn’t been one for a good many years. He still felt that he loved youth and sympathised with its every phase,—from its mindless gambolings to its preposterous maturity. But he knew now that it was with the love and sympathy of one who had lost it. He had learned, too, that when it goes, it bids one a cavalier adieu, and takes with it what one has come to regard as one’s rights,—like a saucy house-maid departing with the spoons. He knew that he had no rights; he had forfeited them by losing some of his hair. He wouldn’t get any of them back again until he had lost all of it. He was the merest speck on the horizon of the fellows whom he had, earlier in the year, tried to know on a basis of equality,—a speck too far away, too microscopic even to annoy them. If he had only known it all along, he told himself, how different his year might have been. He wouldn’t have squandered the first four months of it, for one thing, in a stupid insistence on a relation that must of necessity be artificial—unsatisfying. He wouldn’t have spent the last five of it in coming to his senses. He wouldn’t have misused all of it in burning—or at least in allowing to fall into a precarious state of unrepair—the bridges that led back to the friends of his own age and time.
“I have learned more than I have taught, this year,” thought Thorn.
To-day was Thorn’s birthday. Impelled by a tender, tepid feeling of self-pity the instructor had come once more to the club to look at it and say good-bye before leaving Cambridge. He would have liked to breakfast on the piazza and suffer luxuriously alone. But just at the moment he was beginning to feel most deeply, Sears Wolcott appeared at the open French window, and said he was “Going to eat out there in the landscape too.” So Thorn, in spite of himself, had to revive.
“What did you think of the Pudding show last night?” began Sears. Talk with him usually meant leading questions and their simplest answers.
“It was very amusing—very well done,” said Thorn. What was the use, he asked himself, of drawing a cow-eyed stare from Wolcott by saying what he really thought—that Strawberry Night at the Pudding had been “exuberant,” “noisy,” “intensely young.”
“I saw you after it was over,” Sears went on; “why didn’t you buck up with the old grads around the piano? You looked lonely.”
“I was lonely,” answered Thorn, truthfully this time.
“Where were your classmates? There was a big crowd out.”
“My classmates? Oh, they were there, I suppose. I haven’t seen much of them this year.”
Wolcott’s next question was:—
“Why the devil can’t we have better strawberries at this club, I wonder? Where’s the granulated sugar? They know I never eat this damned face powder on anything.” He called loudly for the steward, and Thorn went on with his breakfast in silence. After Sears had been appeased with granulated sugar, he asked:—
“Going to be here next year?”
“I’ve been reappointed; but I think I shall live in town. Why do you ask?”
“Oh, nothing—I was thinking I might take your courses. What mark is Prescott going to get for the year?”
Thorn looked up to meet Wolcott’s eyes unflinchingly; but the boy was deeply absorbed in studying the little air bubbles on the surface of his coffee.
“I don’t know what mark he’ll get. I haven’t looked at his book yet,” said Thorn. Sears remarked “Oh!” and laughed as he submerged the bubbles with a spoon. It was unlike him not to have said, “You do go through the formality of reading his books then?”
Prescott and Wynne joined them. They chattered gaily with Wolcott about nothing out there on the piazza, and watched the slim lady on the other side of the nodding lilac bushes cut nasturtiums. Thorn listened to them, and looked at them, and liked them; but he couldn’t be one of them, even for the moment. He couldn’t babble unpremeditatedly about nothing, because he had forgotten how it was done. So, in a little while, he got up to leave them. He had to mark some examination books and pack his trunks and go abroad, he told them. He said good-bye to Prescott and Wolcott and Wynne and some others who had come in while they were at breakfast, and hoped they would have “a good summer.” They hoped the same to him.
As he strolled back to his room with the sounds of their voices in his ears, but with no memory of what they had been saying, he wondered if, after all, they hadn’t from the very first bored him just a little; if his unhappiness—his sense of failure when he talked to young people—didn’t come from the fact that they commended themselves to his affections rather than to his intellect. Thorn was a vain man in a quiet way.
Prescott’s final examination book certainly didn’t commend itself to his intellect. It was long, and conscientious, and quite incorrect from cover to cover. The instructor left it until the last. He almost missed his train in deciding upon its mark.