Chapter 5

IXI was very sick for about three days, and just sick for three or four days more. When Berri signed off for me at the office, the college doctor bustled around to my room at noon to see what was the matter. His motives in doing this are somewhat mixed, I believe. He has not only the health but the veracity of the undergraduate very much at heart. If you are laid up, of course he has to know about it; and if you are n't well enough to attend lectures but manage with a heroic effort to go skating,—well, he likes to know about that too."Of course you haven't measles," Duggie said when he came in a few minutes after Dr. Tush had gone, "but equally, of course, he said you had,—did n't he?""Yes, he did," I answered dismally; for he had told me this at considerable length, and I remembered that measles a good many years before had almost been the end of me."Well,that's a relief," Duggie went on cheerfully. "You may have all sorts of things, but it's a cinch that you have n't measles. Tush is a conservative old soul; he always gambles on measles, and of course every now and then he wins. It pleases him immensely. He usually celebrates his success by writing a paper on 'The University's Health,' and getting it printed in the Graduates' Magazine."When the other doctor—the real one—came, he found that I was threatened with pneumonia.Oh, I had a perfectly miserable time of it at first. The feeling dreadfully all over and not being able to breathe was bad enough, but I think the far-away-from-homeness and the worrying about mamma were worse. I was afraid all the time that she would hear (although I could n't imagine how that would be possible), and then in the middle of the night I lay awake hoping and praying that shewouldhear and leave for Cambridge by the next train. I don't suppose I realized just then how wonderfully good Duggie and Berri and Mrs. Chester were to me. Duggie and Berri took turns in sitting up all night and putting flannel soaked in hot mustard-water on my chest (ugh! how I loathe the smell of mustard), and when they had to go to lectures during the day,—I think, as a matter of fact, they cut a great many of them,—Mrs. Chester would come in and hem endless dish-cloths by the window. Berri says that he ceased to worry about me from the time I looked over at Mrs. Chester after about half an hour's silence and exclaimed,—"Sew some more with the crisscross pattern; I 'm tired of those dingy white ones."As I began to get better, I appreciated how much trouble I 'd given them all and tried to thank them; but Berri said,—"Why, your illness has been a perfect god-send to me. I 've done more grinding lately between midnight and six in the morning than I ever thought would be possible. I 've caught up with almost everything." And Duggie stopped me with,—"But if it had n't been Berri and I, it would have been someone else—which we're very glad it was n't."Old Mrs. Chester is a jewel. I didn't pay much attention to her at first, but was just glad to know she was in the room. Later, however, when I began to want to get up and she devoted the whole of her marvellous art to keeping me amused, I appreciated her. She is wonderful. I was going to assert that she inspires the kind of affection one can't help feeling for a person who is all heart and no intelligence; but that, somehow, misses the mark. She has intelligence—lots of it—only it's different. And before my recovery was complete I began to wonder if it wasn't the only kind that is, after all, worth while. For it's the kind with which books and newspapers and "going a journey" and other mechanical aids have nothing to do. (Perhaps I should concede something to the influence of foreign travel, as there was a very memorable expedition "to Goshen in New York State" some time in the early sixties.) Mrs. Chester's intelligence gushes undefiled from the rock, and then flows along in a limpid, ungrammatical stream that soothes at first and then enslaves. Her gift for narrative of the detailed, photographic, New England variety positively out-Wilkins Mary, and I am to-day, perhaps, the greatest living male authority on what Berri callsla cronique scandaleuseof Cambridge. One of her studies in the life of the town forty years ago (it was a sort of epic trilogy that lasted all morning and afternoon and part of the evening with intermissions for luncheon and dinner) I mean to write some time for the Advocate. It all leads up to the New Year's Eve on which "old Mrs. Burlap passed away," but it includes several new and startling theories as to the real cause of the Civil War, an impartial account of the war itself, a magnificent tribute to the late General Butler, a description of Mrs. Chester's wedding,—the gifts and floral tributes displayed on that occasion together with a dreamy surmise as to their probable cost,—a brief history of religion from the point of view of one who is at times assailed by doubt,—but who doesn't make a practice of "rushin' around town tellin' folks who'd only be too glad to have it to say" (this last I assumed to be a thrust at Mis' Buckson),—a spirited word picture of the festivities that took place when Cambridge celebrated its fiftieth anniversary as a city, and at the end a brilliant comparison between Cambridge and "Goshen in New York State." There was, I believe, some mention of the passing away of old Mrs. Burlap on New Year's Eve, but of this I am not sure.One thing I discovered that rather astonished me in this part of the world (a locality that Berri in one of his themes called "a cold hot-bed of erudition"), and that is—Mrs. Chester doesn't know how to read. I never would have found it out but for an embarrassing little miscalculation on her part, in the method by which until then she had delightfully concealed the fact. More than once while I was sick, she sat by the lamp apparently enjoying the evening paper that Duggie subscribes to, and I had n't the slightest suspicion that she was probably holding it upside down, even when I would ask her what the news was and she would reply,—"Oh, shaw—these papers! They 're every one of 'em alike. They don't seem to be any news to 'em. I don't see why you young gentlemen waste your good money a-buyin' 'em."Often on the way upstairs she takes the letters that the postman leaves between the banisters in the little hall below, and manages to distribute them with more or less accuracy."I 've got somethin' for you, and it 's from your mother too, you naughty little man, you," is her usual way of handing me a communication from mamma. I did n't realise until the other day that, as mamma's letters always came in the same kind of gray-blue envelopes, it doesn't take a chirographic expert to tell whom they are from. Nor did I recall that, when Mrs. Chester appears with a whole handful of things, she invariably stops short in the middle of the room and artlessly exclaims,—"Well, now, if that does n't beat all! Here I 've climbed up them steep stairs again and forgotten my specs. Who 's gettin' all these letters anyhow?"A few mornings ago, however,—when they let me sit up for the first time,—Mrs. Chester appeared with two letters. One of them was unmistakably gray-blue, but the other was white and oblong and non-committal. She paused at the door as if about to examine the address, and then suddenly,—"If I ain't the most careless woman in the world," she said. "I 've gone and brought up the letters again, and forgotten—" But just at this point we both became aware that her steel-rimmed spectacles were dangling in her other hand. They not only dangled, but they seemed to me a moment later to dangle almost spitefully; for Mrs. Chester's worn cheeks became very pink. She looked at the spectacles and at the white envelope and at me. Then she said with a sort of wistful lightness,—"Maybe you can make it out; your eyes are younger than mine. I never seen such a letter; it's so—so—it's so flung together like.""It is—isn't it?" I agreed hastily, as I stretched out my hand, to receive a letter from papa with the address in type-writing.Just as I thought would happen, mamma heard I was sick and was, of course, very much worried. Dick Benton—who has never come near me, and whom I 've only seen twice on the street since College opened—mentioned the fact of my illness in a letter home. (I suppose he did it in a despairing effort to make his sentences reach the middle of page two.) Of course Mrs. Benton had to throw a shawl around her meddling old back and waddle across the street to our house, to find out the latest news; and as there had n't been any news, mamma's letter to me expressed a "state of mind." But I fixed her (and incidentally Dick Benton) with a telegram.By the way, I really must speak to mamma about her recent letters to me. Mildred has been away from home, and as mamma writes very regularly to both of us, she often refers to things she remembers having written to somebody, but without pausing to consider how maddening they are when the somebody doesn't happen to be myself. From her last, for instance, I gleaned these interesting items without having the vaguest idea what they belong to:—"Your father and I have just got back from the funeral. I suppose, when one arrives at such a great age, death is a relief. But it is always solemn."Is n't it nice about the Tilestons? I don't know when—in a purely impersonal way—I 've been so pleased. They 've struggled so long and so bravely and now it seems as if their ship had come in at last. Of course, I should n't care to spend so much time in South America myself, (Guatemalaisin South America, is n't it?) but they all seem delighted at the prospect."Now would n't that jar you?My acquaintances generally found out that I was sick about the time that Duggie and Berri and Mrs. Chester discharged me, so to speak, as well. I could n't go out, and the doctor made me stay in bed longer than was really necessary, as the bottom of the furnace fell to pieces one morning and it was impossible to heat the house for several days. But I felt pretty well. By that time, as I say, there was all at once a ripple of interest among my friends over the fact that I was sick. They were awfully kind, and came to my room from early in the morning—right after breakfast—until late at night, when they would drop in on their way back from the theatre. My desk was a perfect news-stand of illustrated magazines and funny papers, and I had left in my book-case, probably, the queerest collection of novels that was ever assembled outside of a city hospital. Duggie had a fit over them, and as he read out the titles one evening, he kept exclaiming, "What, oh, what are the children coming to!" The only volume that was n't fiction was a thing called "The Statesman's Year Book," and was brought by a queer sort of chap who is very much interested in sociology. I know him pretty well; so after I thanked him, I could n't help saying,—"What on earth did you lug this thing up here for?—it looks like an almanac." To which he replied,—"Well, it's darned interesting, I can tell you. Until I got it I never knew, for instance, how many quarts of alcohol per head were consumed annually in Finland."Although Duggie did n't say anything, I don't think he was particularly pleased at the fellows dropping in so often and staying so long. They played cards a lot, and smoked all the time until you could hardly see across the room; and sometimes when night came I felt rather tired and my eyes and throat hurt a good deal. But I confess I liked it, even if Duggie and Mrs. Chester did n't.Only one change of any importance took place while I was laid up: Berri's Icelandic dog—Saga—has been removed from our midst. I was aware that an unusual spirit of peace and order reigned in the house as soon as I began to be about once more, but I attributed it vaguely to the chastening influence of my illness. However, one morning, when on my way to a lecture I remembered that I had noticed my best hat lying on a chair in my study as I came away, and ran back to save it from being eaten, it occurred to me that I had n't seen Saga for days. So, while Berri and I were strolling home from luncheon, I asked him what had happened."He 's gone—gone, poor old darling!" said Berri; "I hate to speak of it.""He was n't stolen or run over or anything, was he?" I asked sympathetically; for now that Saga was no longer an hourly source of anxiety and conflict, I felt reasonably safe in expressing some regret. "Did he run away?""No, he did n't leave me," Berri answered sadly; "I gave him up. You see—I found out that there is a law against bringing them into the State; they always go mad as soon as the warm weather comes. So I gave him to one of the little Cabot girls on her birthday. She was awfully pleased."I am rather worried over something that I got into lately without stopping to think how much it might involve. Berri and that tall spook, named Ranny, that he met at Fleetwood's Wednesday Evening, struck up quite an intimacy not long ago, although I can't for the life of me see how they managed it. He isn't a Freshman, as we thought, but a Sophomore. Berri was waiting in a bookstore in town one day to go to a matinée with a fellow who did n't turn up; and while he was standing there, Ranny came in and began to drive the clerks insane over some Greek and Sanscrit books he had ordered weeks before and that no one had ever heard of. Berri looked on for a while, and, as his friend did n't come and it was getting late and he—Berri—did n't like to waste the extra ticket, he invited Ranny to go with him. Well, they not only went to the matinée, they dined in town together and went again to another show in the evening. Between the acts Ranny explained to him just wherein the wit of "The Girl from Oskosh" differed from the comedies of Aristophanes, and Berri says that before they parted he had learned all about the Greek drama from A to Izzard. Since then Ranny has been to our house several times, and although Berri likes him, he usually finds after about an hour that he isn't equal to the intellectual strain; so he lures Ranny into my room and then gracefully fades away.Now I like Ranny too. He has, in his ponderous, bespectacled way, an enthusiasm for several bespectacled, ponderous subjects that is simply irresistible. One of them is Egyptology and the study of hieroglyphics. Of course I don't know anything about this, any more than Berri knew about the Greek drama,—not as much even; for he did, at least, pretend to play a pagan instrument of some kind in a play they gave at school once, while a Frenchman behind the scenes toodled away on a flute. But when Ranny gets to talking about dynasties and cartouches and draws fascinating little pictures of gods and goddesses named Ma and Pa, and explains how the whole business was deciphered by means of a piece of stone somebody picked up in the mud one day,—a regular old Sherlock Holmes, he must have been,—you simply can't help being carried away and wishing you could discover something on your own account. He talked so much about it and made it all seem so real and important that one day when he exclaimed,—"And the mystery is that the University ignores this subject—ignores it!" I really felt that the Faculty was treating us rather shabbily and that we were n't, somehow, getting our money's worth. We talked the matter over very seriously, and decided at last that it could n't be stinginess on the part of the Corporation,—for why should it allow courses in higher mathematics and philosophy and Italian literature, to which only three or four fellows went, if it wanted to save the pennies? It was more likely just ignorance of the importance of hieroglyphics, and the growing demand for a thorough course of it."We probably could get a course all right if we showed them how some of us feel about it," Ranny mused. "There's a chap in Latin 47 who'd join, I think—you've seen that middle-aged man with the long sandy beard, have n't you? He tries almost everything."The person Ranny referred to did n't seem very promising to me. We sleep next each other in a history course. He never wears a necktie, and the last time I saw him there were a lot of dead maple leaves tangled up in his beard. No one seems to know why he is here."Well, that makes three right away," Ranny declared enthusiastically. "Perhaps Berrisford will join; but even if he does n't three 's enough."The very next morning after this Ranny appeared to say he was going to consult Professor Pallas about the new course, and wanted me to go along and put in a word now and then. This seemed a little sudden to me, and I said that perhaps I ought to consult my adviser before taking up a new study, as I had n't done particularly well in the old ones. However, Ranny said that my adviser ought to be thankful at my showing so much interest and public spirit. So we went over to Professor Pallas's little private room in Sever. He was very glad to see us, and when Ranny began to explain the subject of our coming, his old eyes just glittered. He kept smiling to himself and nodding his head in assent, and once, when Ranny paused for breath, he brought his fist down on the table, exclaiming,"I predicted this—predicted it." Then he thrust his hands in his pockets and paced excitedly up and down the room. Ranny was of course tremendously encouraged, and I was somewhat horrified a moment later, to have him turn toward me and with a wave of his hand declare,—"My friend, Mr. Wood, feels this weakness in the curriculum more, perhaps, than any of us; for long before he entered college with the purpose of specialising in the subject, he surrounded himself with a collection of Egyptian antiquities that far excels anything of the kind on this side of the British Museum." (He was referring in his intense way to a handful of imitation scarabs and a dissipated-looking old mummified parrot that Uncle Peter brought home from his trip up the Nile. I had indiscreetly mentioned them one afternoon.) "We are sure of four earnest workers, and there are, no doubt, many more."Now the thing that worries me about all this is that Professor Pallas seemed so gratified and eager to help the cause. His attitude toward us was that of a scholar among scholars,—deep calling unto deep. He said that he would love to conduct a course in hieroglyphics himself, but feared he was n't competent, as he had merely taken up the subject as a kind of recreation at odd moments during the last six or eight years. He could n't recall any one in the United States who was competent, in fact, but he knew of a splendid authority in Germany,—just the man for the place,—and he would speak to the President about him at the next Faculty meeting. Ranny and I thanked him profusely, and that at present is where the matter stands. I wake up in the night sometimes, positively cold at the thought of having added hieroglyphics to my other worries. Think of a course for which you could n't buy typewritten notes,—a course the very lectures of which would be in German,—a course so terrible that no one in the United States would dare undertake to tutor you in it when you got stuck.The Christmas holidays are almost here, but it has not been decided yet whether or not I am to spend them at home. Mildred is still gadding about, and papa may have to go to New York on business. If he does, mamma will, no doubt, go with him, and I'll join them there, and we'll all have thin slabs of Christmas turkey surrounded by bird bath-tubs at a hotel. Berri has invited me to spend the vacation with him (his mother is living in Washington this winter), but as he remarks dolefully every now and then that he has to stay in Cambridge to write a thesis that is due immediately after the holidays, I don't see how he means to manage. He's been putting off that thesis from day to day until I don't see how he can possibly do all the reading and writing and note-taking it necessitates. I 've tried to get him started once or twice, but he has merely groaned and said,—"You 're a nice one to preach industry, are n't you?" So I've given up. Well, it's none of my business if he gets fired from the course.XI might have spared myself my anxiety in regard to the course in hieroglyphics. My adviser overtook me in the yard a day or so after our interview with Professor Pallas, and after walking along with me for a while he said,—"Well, Wood, I 'm glad to see you looking about as usual; I had almost come to the conclusion that you 'd gone stark mad." I asked him what he meant, and it seems that old Pallas had made a speech at a Faculty meeting in which he declared that the deep and ever-growing interest throughout the undergraduate body in the subject of Egyptology had reached a climax that demanded a course of some kind. He was very eloquent, and caused a good deal of mild excitement. Then some one got up and asked who were concerned in the movement, and Pallas, after fumbling in his side pocket, finally produced a memorandum and said,—"The names of those imbued with a spirit for serious archaeological research are many, but I think that the youth who by his zeal in collecting and preserving valuable antiquities has done more than any one else to further this study among his fellows is Mr. Thomas Wood, of the class of ——" But the poor old man did n't get any further, my adviser says, for everybody in the room began to roar and the meeting broke up in confusion. Well, that 's off my mind, anyhow; although I don't see why they should have taken it the way they did. There 's nothing so very extraordinary in acquiring a love for study when that's what you 're supposed to come here for.Berri and I discovered the most fascinating little place the other evening. We had been in town all afternoon on the trail of an express package of Berri's that had been lost for days, and were running along Tremont Street on the way to the Cambridge car, when Berri suddenly stopped in front of a sort of alley and clutched me. From the other end came the sound of music,—a harp, a flute, and a violin playing one of those Neapolitan yayayama songs that always, somehow, make you feel as if you 'd been abroad, even when you 've never been nearer Naples than waving good-by to your sister from a North German Lloyd dock in Hoboken."Let 's go see what it is," Berri said. So we skipped to the other end of the alley, and found a brightly lighted little restaurant with the music wailing away in the vestibule. We stood listening for a time and watching the people who went in. They all stopped to peer through a glass door, and then after a moment of indecision passed on—up a flight of steep stairs. Berri, of course, could n't be satisfied until he had solved the mystery of the glass door, and it was n't long before we were doing just as every one else did. We saw a long, narrow room with three rows of little tables reaching from end to end. The walls were covered with gay frescos of some kind (I could n't make them out, the tobacco smoke was so thick); foreign-looking waiters were tearing in and out among the tables; flower girls were wandering up and down with great-armfuls of roses and carnations for sale, and everybody was laughing and gesticulating and having such a good time, apparently,—the music was so shrill and the clatter of dishes so incessant,—that Berri and I turned and gazed at each other, as much as to say, "After all these years we 've found it at last." But a moment later we realized why the people we had seen go in had, after a glance, turned away and climbed the stairs; all the tables were occupied. I think we must have looked as dissatisfied as the others, for we felt that nothing upstairs could equal the scene we had just discovered. And we were right. The upper rooms were comparatively empty and quiet and rather dreary. So we came down again and were about to take a farewell look and start for home, when Berri, with his nose flattened against the glass, suddenly exclaimed, "Saved! Saved!" and pushing open the door, made his way across the room. Who should be there but Mr. Fleetwood, dining alone at a table in the corner? Berri, after shaking hands with him, beckoned to me, and in a moment we had both seated ourselves at Fleetwood's table."This is almost as nice as if we 'd really been invited, isn't it?" said Berri, in his easy way. "You know we were just on the point of giving up and going home.""Why didn't you go upstairs?" Fleetwood inquired. (He pretended all through dinner that we had spoiled his evening.) "It is n't too late even now," he suggested; "it's much nicer up there; there 's more air.""There's plenty of air, but no atmosphere," Berri answered. "This is what we enjoy," he added with a wave of his hand."I 'm glad you like my Bohemia," Fleetwood quavered."Oh, Bohemia's all right," replied Berri. "Bohemia would be perfect—if it weren't for the Bohemians.""What are 'Bohemians'?" I asked, for I 'd often heard people called that without understanding just what it meant."Bohemians?" Berri repeated. "Why, Bohemians are perfectly horrid things who exist exclusively on Welsh rabbits and use the word 'conventional' as a term of reproach. My aunt knows hundreds of them.""I wrote a paper once on 'What is a Bohemian?'" Fleetwood put in. "If you would really like to know—but of course you would n't," he broke off sadly; "no one does any more. You clever boys know everything before you come.""Oh, Mr. Fleetwood, please let us read your paper," we both begged him enthusiastically. I think he was a little flattered, for we would n't allow him to talk about anything else until he had promised to tell me where I could find his article. Berri, however, he refused absolutely, and made me promise, in turn, not to let him know where to look for it and never to quote from it in Berri's presence."I know him," he muttered dolefully; "I know these memories that 'turn again and rend you;' I 'm an old man; 'Ich habe gelebt' and ge-suffered."Well, we had a most delightful dinner. Fleetwood, when he saw that he was n't going to get rid of us, cheered up and made himself very agreeable. He can be charming when he wants to be. He and Berri did most of the talking, although his remarks, as a rule, were addressed to me. The fact is, he likes me because I 'm sympathetic and a good listener, but Berri he finds vastly more interesting. Berri has travelled such a lot, and, besides, he has the knack (I haven't it at all) of being able to discuss things of which he knows nothing in a way that commands not only attention but respect. For instance, they got into a perfectly absorbing squabble over the novelist Henry James, in which Fleetwood deplored and Berri defended what Fleetwood called his "later manner." Fleetwood ended up with,—"I 've read everything he 's ever done—some of them many times over—and I wrote a paper on him for Lesper's not long ago; but I could n't, conscientiously, come to any other conclusion." To which Berri replied, as he smiled indulgently to himself and broke a bit of bread with his slim brown fingers,—"I often wonder if you people over here who write things about Harry James from time to time, really comprehend the man at all—notice that I say 'James the man,' not 'James the writer.' 'Le style c'est l'homme,' you know; is n't it Bossuet who tells us that?""No, it is n't," said Fleetwood, rather peevishly; "it's Buffon—and he probably stole it from the Latin, 'Stylus virum arguit.'" Fleetwood, of course, knows what he 's talking about. But, nevertheless, I could see that Berri's general air of being foreign and detached and knowing James from the inside—or rather from the other side—impressed him; and as for me, I was simply paralyzed. For I could have testified under oath that Berri had never read a word of Henry James' in his life, and that he 'd never laid eyes on the man. I spoke to him about it afterward and asked him how he dared to do such things."Have you ever read anything by James—have you ever seen 'Harry James the man,' as you called him?" I inquired."No; of course not," Berri answered. "What difference does it make?""But you went on as if you knew more about him than even Fleetwood; and I think that toward the end Fleetwood almost thought you did himself.""Oh—that," Berri shrugged, after trying to recall the conversation. "That was merely what an old frump of a woman said at my aunt's one day when I dropped in for luncheon. She and Aunt Josephine gabbled and gabbled, and never paid the slightest attention to me, and although they were both unusually tiresome, I suppose I could n't avoid remembering some of the things they said. But it would have been impossible for me to dwell any longer on that particular topic with Fleetwood, even if my life had depended on it, because that day at luncheon, just as my aunt's friend got started on 'James the man,' I happened to glance up and notice that she was wearing an entirely different kind of wig from the ratty old thing she 'd flourished in before she went abroad. She had brought back a new one that was—why, it was an architectural marvel; it looked like the dome of a mosque, and covered her whole head, from eyebrows to neck, with little cut-out places for her ears to peek through. It hypnotized me all through luncheon, and I never heard a word about 'James the man,'—so of course when I got that far with Fleetwood I had to change the subject. Don't you remember that we began to discuss Bernhardt's conception of Hamlet rather abruptly? I 'll never trust that old woman again—after making the mistake about Buffon. Why, she's positively illiterate!"Fleetwood told me a lot about Mazuret's—that 's the name of the restaurant—which made me glad that we had come across it accidentally,—found it out for ourselves. It's very famous. All sorts of people—writers and painters and actors and exiled noblemen—used to make a kind of headquarters of it and dine there whenever they happened to be in town. Fleetwood has been going there for years, and always sits at the same table. (That's the proper thing to do; you must have a favorite table, and when you come in and find it occupied, you must scowl and shrug and complain to the waiters in a loud voice that the place is going to the dogs. Then everybody in the room takes it for granted that you 're a writer or a painter, an actor or an exiled nobleman, and looks interested and sympathetic. We saw several performances of this kind.) But the place, of course, "isn't what it used to be." I'm seven or eight years too late, as usual. Some of the poets have become very successful—which means, Fleetwood says, that they 're doing newspaper work in New York; some of the painters and actors are beyond the reach of criticism—which means that they 're dead; and some of the noblemen are confident that their respective governments are about to recall them to posts of responsibility and honor—which means that they are in jail.It was more entertaining, Fleetwood says, in the days of Leontine,—the shrewd, vivacious, businesslike Frenchwoman who, when Monsieur Mazuret became too ill, and Madame too old, used to make change and scold the waiters and say good evening to you, and whose red-striped gingham shirt-waists fitted her like models from Paquin. It was Leontine who brought back the wonderful wall-paper from Paris (through the glass door it looked like a painting) that represents a hunting scene, with willowy ladies in preposterous pink velvet riding-habits and waving plumes, and gentlemen blowing tasselled horns, and hounds and stags—all plunging through a perfectly impenetrable forest, whose improbable luxuriance Berri brilliantly accounted for by saying that it was evidently "Paris green.""Attend now—I tell you something," Leontine used to say confidentially when the evening was drawing to a close, and but one or two stragglers were left in the dining-room."These peoples—they stay so long sometimes; I tell to them that they must go. Butnon—they will not go; and they stay, and they stay, and they stay. And all at once the—what you call?—thechasse—she begin to move! The horses—he gallop; the ladies—she scream of laughing; the gentlemen—he make toot, toot, toot, tooooo! The dogs—Ah-h h-h! The—the—cet animal-là—the deer?—the deer—Ah-h-h-h!" Carried away by these midnight memories, Leontine would become a galloping horse, a screaming lady, a master of hounds, a savage pack, and a terrified monarch of the glen—all at once. Then, overpowered by the weird horror of it, she would cover her face with her apron and run coquettishly as if for protection to another table.There was another tale—the description of a thunderstorm—a regular cloud-burst, it must have been—that, one afternoon, overtook Madame and Leontine in the Place de la Madeleine, Leontine personifying the truly Gallic elements—the lightning (reels backward—eyes covered with hands)—the thunder (fingers in ears—eyes rolling—mouth open and emitting groans)—the rain hissing back from the asphalt in a million silver bubbles (skirts lifted—tip-toes—mon dieus—shrieks—hasty exit to kitchen)—Leontine bringing this incoherent scene vividly before one, was worth one's eating a worse dinner, Fleetwood says, than the dinner at Mazuret's. But Monsieur is dead, and Madame just dried up and blew away, and Leontine is married, and—although I don't know when I 've enjoyed a dinner so much—"the place isn't what it used to be."While Fleetwood was telling me all this, I noticed that Berri called one of the waiters and spoke to him in French. I don't know what he said, as he talked very fast—and anyhow it did n't sound much like the kind of French I 've been used to. The waiter disappeared, and in half an hour or so a messenger boy came in and gave Berri a little envelope which he put in his pocket without saying anything. Then, when we had finished dinner and were just about to push away from the table, Berri exclaimed,—"Now we 'll all go to the theatre.""My dear young man, if you could see the work I have to do this night," Fleetwood protested with a gesture that seemed to express mountains of uncorrected themes, "you would realize, for once in your life, what work really is.""But I have the tickets," Berri explained; and he brought forth the little envelope that the messenger boy had given him."No—no—no!" Fleetwood answered decidedly, and started for the door. But Berri detained him."By inflicting our company on you we 've spoiled the evening for you, I know; but you won't spoil it for me by depriving us of yours," he begged in his engaging way."'Sweet invocation of a child: most pretty and pathetical,'" Fleetwood laughed, and backed into the vestibule. We followed and surrounded him, so to speak, each taking hold of an arm. Then we all walked through the alley toward Tremont Street, Fleetwood quavering apprehensively from time to time, "Now you 'll take me to my car and then bid me adieu, like two good boys, won't you?" while we agreed to everything he said and clung to him like sheriffs. Berri was giggling hysterically, but although I thought the situation rather amusing, I did n't see anything so terribly funny about it until we got to the parting of the ways and Fleetwood stopped. Then I noticed that, in addition to the three great red roses that Berri had bought for our button-holes, Fleetwood had a fourth one, with a long, flexible stem, growing apparently out of the top of his head. He was so unconscious of the absurd, lanky thing nodding solemnly over him whenever he spoke, that when he held out his hand, exclaiming tremulously,—"'And so,' in the words of Jessica, 'Farewell; I will not have my father see me talk with thee,'" and the rose emphasized every word as if it were imitating him, I gave an uncontrollable whoop, and Berri doubled up on a near-by doorstep."I only would that my father were alive at the present moment to see me talking with thee," Berri gasped. "I don't know anything he would have enjoyed more."Fleetwood looked hurt and mystified and vaguely suspicious, and he stood there merely long enough to say,—"'You break jests as braggarts do their blades, which, God be thanked, hurt not.'" Then, as Berri was still sitting on the doorstep and I was leaning against the wall, he made a sudden dash for the other side of the street. We caught him, of course, grasped his arms once more, and walked him off to the theatre, pretending all the time that we did n't notice his struggles and how furious he was at having to go with us. Berri kept up an incessant stream of conversation, saying things that, to an outsider, would have given the impression that the theatre-party was Fleetwood's, and that we were the ones who were being dragged reluctantly away from the Cambridge car. Just before we got to the theatre the solemn rose in Fleetwood's hat toppled over and dangled against his face. This also we pretended not to see, and as we had him firmly by the arms, he was unable to reach up and throw it away; so we made a spectacular entrance through the brightly lighted doorway, with Fleetwood ineffectually blowing at the rose and shaking his head like an angry bull. A party of four or five fellows—students—who had been unable to get tickets were turning away from the box-office as we appeared, and they naturally stopped to look at us.This was in the nature of a last straw, for Fleetwood almost tearfully broke out with,—"You dreadful, dreadful boys, my reputation is ruined; they 'll think I 've been drinking." Even Berri began to see that we had gone somewhat far, for he plucked the rose from Fleetwood's cheek, exclaiming,—"Good gracious, man! where did you get this? You must n't go to the theatre looking that way. Just because Bernhardt plays Hamlet is no reason why you should undertake to do Ophelia;" and then he threw it on the floor. Fleetwood rolled his eyes hopelessly.Well, we never got home until almost four in the morning. A man whose seat was behind ours at the play tapped Fleetwood on the shoulder as soon as we had sat down, and after a whispered conversation he got up and went away. Then Fleetwood told us the man was a dramatic critic—an acquaintance of his—who had been sent to write up the play for a morning paper, but that, as he did n't understand French and was n't much of a Shakespearian scholar and wanted to go to a progressive peanut party in West Roxbury anyhow, he had asked Fleetwood to do the thing for him. Fleetwood used to be on a paper himself, and was delighted to renew old times.So all during the performance he made notes on the margin of his program and chuckled to himself. The occupation, I think, diverted his mind from Berri and me and helped him to forgive us.Afterward we went to Newspaper Row and waited for hours in a bare, rather dirty little room while Fleetwood, standing at a high desk under an electric light in the corner, wrote his review. He spent much more time in groaning, "My facility is gone—my hand has lost its cunning," than in actual writing. By the time he was ready to leave we were all famished; so before catching the owl car from Bowdoin Square we stopped at an all-night restaurant that Fleetwood used to patronize when he was a reporter, and had buckwheat cakes and maple syrup. I 've never tasted anything so good.The Cambridge car was interesting, but fearful. It was jammed with people, and I wondered where so many could have come from that hour of the morning. They could n't all have been dramatic critics. The majority of those who got seats went sound asleep, and as the conductor could n't very well wake them up at every street, he found out beforehand where they wanted to get off, and then hung little tags on their coats that told their destination.When we were saying good-by to Fleetwood in the Square, Berri laughed and asked,—"Have you decided yet what you 're going to do to me, Mr. Fleetwood? I know you would like to give me E on my thesis, but I don't think I deserve quite that." Instead of answering him, however, Mr. Fleetwood ran away, exclaiming,—"Don't talk shop,—don't talk shop; good-night,—good-night!"Berri has begun to get awfully scared about the thesis,—not that he's afraid that Fleetwood will give it a low mark, but because it does n't look at present as if there would be anything to mark at all. I found him in his room the other day with a pile of books and a scratch-block on his table. But he had n't taken a note, and his attitude was one of utter despair. Of course he can't possibly write it unless he stays here during the holidays, for they begin day after to-morrow.XII don't think I 've had a pen in my hand, except when I wrote a note to Berri, for more than two weeks. In the first place I left in such a hurry to meet the family in New York that, among the various things I forgot to pack at the last minute, my diary was one. (Even if I had taken it, I probably shouldn't have found time to record all we did.) Then, as I was with mamma and papa and Mildred during the entire vacation, there was no necessity for writing letters.I did n't go to Washington with Berri for two reasons. The family naturally wanted me to spend the holidays with them, and I could n't help feeling that, if I refused Berri's kind invitation, he would be much more likely to stay, part of the time at least, in Cambridge and write his thesis. In a way I was right; for when I told him I simply could n't go with him, he said sort of listlessly,—"Well, then I suppose I ought to stay here and finish that thing, oughtn't I?" which was an optimistic way of letting me know that it had n't even been begun. I did n't know what to answer exactly, because if I 'd agreed with him he would have thought me unsympathetic and looked hurt, and if I had advised him to let the whole matter slide, and forget about it, and have a good time (which was, of course, what he wanted me to do), I felt sure that he would eventually blame me for giving him bad advice. That's Berri all over. So I merely remarked, "You 'll have to be the judge; it 's too serious a matter for any one else to meddle with," and felt like a nasty little prig as I said it. He was restless and gloomy after that, and took a long walk all alone, during which I 'm convinced that he very nearly made up his mind to stay in Cambridge and slave. I say very nearly, because he didn't bring himself quite to the point of telling anybody about it. But the next afternoon (college closed with the last lecture of that day), when I turned into our street on the way to my room, there was a cab with a steamer trunk on it standing in front of our house; and as I opened the front door, Berri and a dress-suit case clattered down the stairs. He stopped just long enough to shake hands and exclaim, "Good-by, Granny—have a good time—I left a note for you on your desk. The train goes in less than an hour." Then he rushed out of the gate and jumped into the cab, slamming the door after him with that sharp, thrilling "Now they're off" clack that cabs, and cabs only, possess. That was the last I saw of him.New York was a pleasing delirium of theatres and operas and automobile rides up and down Fifth Avenue, with just enough rows between Mildred and me, and papa and me and Mildred and mamma (the other possible combinations never scrap), to make us realize that the family tie was the same dear old family tie and had n't been in any way severed by my long absence. It took us three days to persuade mamma to ride in an automobile,—a triumph that we all lived bitterly to repent; for she ever afterwards refused to be transported from place to place by any other means,—which was not only inconvenient, but ruinous. She justified her extravagance by declaring that in an emergency she preferred to be the smasher to the smashed. I met lots of fellows I knew on the street, and some of them took me home with them to luncheon or to that curious five-o'clock-sit-around-and-don't-know-what-to-do-with-the-cup meal they call "tea." Meeting their families was very nice, and I felt as if I knew the fellows ever so much better than I did in Cambridge.One incident might have ended in a tragedy if I hadn't happened to preserve a certain letter of mamma's. ("Never write anything and never burn anything—isn't it Talleyrand who tells us that?" as the friend of Berri's aunt would say.) It was the real reason of our spending the last two days of the vacation in Boston, and came about in the following way.One day at luncheon (we were going to a matinée afterwards) I glanced at my watch to see how late we were, and mamma noticed, for the first time, that I was carrying a cheap nickel-plated alarm-clock sort of an affair instead of the gold-faced heirloom that has been reposing for lo! these many weeks in Mr. Hirsch's pawn-shop. Since our meeting she hadn't referred to this painful subject, and as I had become used to the dollar watch on the end of my chain, it never occurred to me to say anything about it. That day she looked at the watch and then at me, and finally she murmured, "Why, Tommy!" with the expression of one who seems to see the foundations of Truth, Respectability, and Honor crumbling to dust; and she finished her luncheon in silence, breathing in a resigned kind of way and studying the table-cloth with eyes like smitten forget-me nots. On the way upstairs I lagged behind, and Mildred said to me,—"Mamma has on her early-Christian-martyr look. What on earth's the matter now?" But I was unable to enlighten her. Mamma had known from the first that the watch had been pawned; I could n't imagine why she was so upset.All was explained, however, when I went to her room. Some time ago she had sent me a draft for thirty dollars. It came in a cheerful letter (no letter containing a draft for thirty dollars is sad) about nothing in particular. I remembered that at the time the postscript had puzzled me, for it said, "Of course I have told your father nothing about this," and there was no clew in the body of the letter to what "this" referred. The draft wasn't mentioned. It seems that mamma was under the impression she had written me several pages on the evils of extravagance, the horrors of debt, and the general desirability of redeeming one's watch as soon as possible,—which she hadn't at all. Not being a mind-reader, I assumed that her draft was a spontaneous outburst of maternal esteem, had it cashed with a loving grateful heart, and spent the money in three days. Therefore, when she caught sight of my tin timepiece (it keeps much better time, by the way, than the heirloom ever did), she had distressing visions of me indulging in a perfect carnival of embezzlement, and finally ending up with shorn locks, striped clothes, and a chain on my leg.I never realized before that the human brain is perfectly capable, under certain circumstances, of harboring two distinct beliefs at the same time,—the truth of either one of which necessarily excludes the other. (There is probably a more technical way of stating this, but I haven't got that far in my philosophy course as yet.) Now, when I solemnly declared to mamma that she had never mentioned her check in connection with my watch or anything else in fact, I am sure she believed me. She said she believed me, and seemed greatly relieved. But, on the other hand, although she knew I was telling the truth, and rejoiced in the fact, I am certain that she was unable at the same time to abandon her equally strong conviction that she had written and sent precisely the letter she had intended to. I don't pretend to explain this mental phenomenon, and I discreetly refrained from discussing it with mamma, for in the midst of our talk I began to have a dim, delicious suspicion that her letter was at that moment reposing in my inside pocket. (When I am away from home, I always carry several plainly addressed letters in order that there may be as little trouble as possible in case anything should happen to me. I remembered having put the letter with the postscript into my coat-pocket instead of my desk, as I wished to refer to it when I next wrote home.) So, when mamma finally said, "Well, I believe you," and then added with an air of abstraction, "But I wish you had saved that letter," I thrust my hand into my pocket, glanced at several envelopes, and exclaimed dramatically as I showed her one of them,—"Madam, your most idle whim is my inexorable law." Then we all went to the matinée.But that wasn't the end of the watch. Mamma made me give her the pawn-ticket, and insisted on going home by way of Boston for the purpose of redeeming it herself. The reason of this change in the family plans was not explained to Mildred and papa; but they were docile, and seemed to think it would be very nice to see my rooms before leaving for home.There was no opportunity to visit Mr. Hirsch when we arrived yesterday, as we spent most of the day in exploring Cambridge. But this morning (they all left for the West this afternoon), while Mildred was packing and papa had gone to see about tickets, mamma, with her head swathed in a thick black veil, and I slipped out to go to the pawnbroker's. I have an idea that by going herself instead of simply sending me mamma had a vague but noble belief that she was rescuing me somehow from moral shipwreck. And then, no doubt, the mere fact of one's venturing out incognito, as it were, to wrest ancestral relics from usurious fingers is not without a certain charm.Well, of course we met papa at the door of the hotel. The ticket-office was just around the corner, and he had engaged berths and tickets with a rapidity that was as unfortunate as it was incredible, for he greeted us with, "Starting for a walk? I'm just in time," and proceeded to join the expedition with evident pleasure. Mamma lingered uneasily on the sidewalk a moment, and then said,—"We 're not going for amusement, dear; we 're going to shop. You know how that always tires you." But papa, who was in good spirits at the prospect of leaving for home, quite unsuspiciously ignored the suggestion and replied cheerily,—"Well, I think I 'll go along, I might want to buy something myself."I exclaimed, "How jolly!" in a sepulchral tone, and we started.Now, mamma in the role of a gay deceiver is sublime. The fact that she is trying to play a part and perhaps setting "an awful example" makes her miserable, although she sometimes succeeds in concealing the fact until afterwards. I saw that we were in for a delightful morning, and would probably end by missing the train. We loitered unscrupulously in front of shop windows, apparently entranced by everything from hardware to cigars. We sauntered in and out of countless dry-goods places in quest of dark-blue ribbon of such an unusual shade that Boston had never seen its like; we paused for half an hour, now and then, to inquire the price of diamond tiaras and alabaster clocks set with rhinestones; we bought a bouquet of frost-bitten roses (I had to carry it) from a one-armed man, and tarried to hear his reminiscences of life in a sawmill; we went to pianola recitals, phonograph exhibits, and assisted at an auction sale of bar-room furniture. And papa wearied not. Mamma and I were nearly dead, but he not only wasn't bored,—he seemed to be having the time of his life. We could n't devise anything too silly and futile and tiresome for him to enjoy, and as the time before the train left was beginning to grow ominously short, mamma at last resorted to heroic measures.I don't think she had formed any definite plan when she abruptly led us into the subway; but our going there was probably not unconnected in her imagination with the boundless opportunities for losing oneself in the sewers of Paris and the catacombs of Rome. The subway may or may not resemble these historic places,—I'm sure I don't know,—but, at any rate, after we had been there five or six minutes we lost papa.We all three had stood aimlessly watching the cars whizz up to the platform and away again into the subterranean dusk, until papa (this was his first sign of impatience) mildly remarked, "I think, dear, that as you and Tommy seem to be rather attached to this place, I 'll buy a newspaper." Then he strolled off, and mamma clutched me. We watched him approach the news-stand and pick up a magazine. His back was partly turned."It 's our only chance," said mamma hoarsely, with a half-guilty, half-affectionate glance towards the news-stand. I understood and, seizing her hand, ran with her to the nearest car. An instant later we were buzzing through the bowels of the earth in quite the opposite direction from the pawn-shop.To tell the truth, the only thing I knew about the locality of Mr. Hirsch's establishment was that we should never reach it unless we got out and took a car going the other way. This we did, and when I thought we had gone far enough on the return trip and we emerged once more into the daylight, we seemed to be miles from the place—the only place—from which I could have found my way. So we jumped into a cab and told the man to drive as quickly as he could to that place. (I had to describe it at some length, as I don't as yet know the names of many streets here.) He was very intelligent, however, and it was n't his fault that, after we had jolted along for four or five blocks, the horse fell down. We left him lifting one of the poor thing's nervous hind legs in and out of the tangled harness. He looked as if he were trying to solve some kind of a gigantic, hopeless puzzle. We hurried on for about a quarter of a mile, and then I suddenly discovered that we had been in the right street all the time. It was one of those queer streets that never look familiar when you 're going the other way. I confess it took a great deal of courage to impart this discovery to mamma; but she appreciated the fact that we had very little time to lose, and did n't stop to point out to me that if I ever become a business man, I 'll be a failure. The horse was on his feet again when we got back to the cab, so we jumped in once more, and after an interminable drive (half of me was out of the window most of the time, like a Punch-and-Judy doll, directing the cabman) we finally drew up in front of the pawn-shop. It was then that we really distinguished ourselves."I've come for my watch," I said to Mr. Hirsch. He gave me the look of a bird of prey. It reminded me of an eagle I had seen once,—an eagle that had been stuffed by an amateur. He held out his hand and spoke a solitary, fateful word. Mamma's face—in the excitement of the moment she had pushed up her veil—became dim with horror; her features for an instant were positively incoherent."The ticket?" she whispered gropingly. "It's in the bottom of my trunk."Mildred and papa and a group of porters, peering up and down the street like a concourse of Sister Annes, were on the curbstone in front of the hotel when we got back. The baggage was piled on a wagon, papa looked haggard and years older than when I had last seen him, and Mildred gave us a haughty stare as we alighted. Mamma was hustled wildly from the cab to the carriage, and I had time merely to peck hastily at their tense faces and gasp good-by. As the carriage swung around the corner, mamma appeared for a moment at the window, exclaiming, "I 'll send it to you in my first letter," and then sank from view. This afternoon, when I returned to my peaceful little abode in Cambridge, who should be in his room but Berri? He was at his desk, bending earnestly over a big pad of thesis paper."You've finished it, after all," I said, for the floor near his chair was littered with neat manuscript."Yes, it's finished,—fifty beastly pages of it," Berri answered, as he jumped up to meet me. I wanted to ask him all about it,—how he had managed to do it during the gayeties of Washington, and if it had taken much time. But he said rather wearily,—"Oh, don't let's talk about it; I 'm so sick of it," and began at once to question me about my trip to New York. We chatted for about half an hour, and then I got up to go into my room and unpack my trunk. Thesis paper is n't like the ordinary paper on which themes are written; it has a margin on all four sides, and as I had never used any, I went over to Berri's desk to examine a sheet of his."Why, you 've had the thing type-written," I exclaimed; for there was a pile of type-written notes in front of the thesis paper. "Why don't you hand it in that way instead of copying it again? Your hand is so hard to read."Berri wrinkled his forehead in a queer, annoyed kind of way; then he looked confused and blushed a little, and finally he gave an uncomfortable laugh."Oh, Granny, you 're so brutally guileless," he murmured. "Why can't you just see and understand things? It sounds so much worse than it really is, when you make me say it in so many words." Even then I didn't altogether grasp the situation."You mean that somebody helped you?" I asked. That did n't seem to me worth making such a fuss about, somehow."Well, that's a very refined and ladylike way of putting it," he answered. "I got a man in the Law School to write it for me, and paid him ten dollars for his trouble."I had never thought much about this sort of thing, and it was impossible all at once to know just where I stood in the matter. I didn't know what to say, and I think I blurted out,—"Oh, Berri, I 'm so sorry.""Well, I 'm sorry you know about it," Berri mused drearily. "No, I 'm not, either," he added quickly, after a moment; "I 'm darned glad,—for now that you know, you can do what you like; I 'm not playing the hypocrite, anyhow. Only, don't talk to me about it. I 've thought the whole thing over from every point of view; it's the only thing I can do. I 'm willing to run the risks, and I 'm going to do it."It was impossible to go back to other topics after that, so I went into my room and unpacked my trunk. I don't believe I ever unpacked so carefully and put everything away so neatly before. Mrs. Chester came in and complimented me as I was finishing. It must have been because I was thinking.With all my thinking, however, I can't say that I 've got much farther than I was when Berri first told me. I simply know that he oughtn't to have done it, and am very, very sorry that he has. If he tried to defend himself in any way, I could have it out with him; but he does n't. When he finished copying the thesis, he came into my room and said, "I 'm going over to drop this through Fleetwood's door; do you want to go along?" and I went with him, hoping that at the last minute he might, in his unexpected way, change his mind. On the way over he did burst out with,—"You see, it's this way: If I didn't know Fleetwood so well, I should n't do it; I shouldn't care. But he'll think, if I fail to hand in the written work, that I'm presuming on the fact that we 've breakfasted together at The Holly Tree and gone to the theatre and all that. I hate that kind of thing." I tried to make him see that Fleetwood would n't look at it in this way at all, and that even if he did it would be his fault, not Berri's. But Berri answered: "You need n't go on to tell me how dishonest it is,—I know all that. I 'm not worse than lots of other people, though;" and by that time we had reached Fleetwood's door. I put my hand on his arm as he was about to drop the thesis through Fleetwood's letter-slide and said, "Please don't, Berri; wait until to-morrow morning, anyhow;" but he pushed the roll through the door, and as it fell with a thud inside, he laughed and answered,—"Too late. Now I'm going to forget about it." He went to town for dinner, and I had mine about an hour ago at Mrs. Brown's. I was the only one there. In a few minutes I have to go out again, as I promised——

IX

I was very sick for about three days, and just sick for three or four days more. When Berri signed off for me at the office, the college doctor bustled around to my room at noon to see what was the matter. His motives in doing this are somewhat mixed, I believe. He has not only the health but the veracity of the undergraduate very much at heart. If you are laid up, of course he has to know about it; and if you are n't well enough to attend lectures but manage with a heroic effort to go skating,—well, he likes to know about that too.

"Of course you haven't measles," Duggie said when he came in a few minutes after Dr. Tush had gone, "but equally, of course, he said you had,—did n't he?"

"Yes, he did," I answered dismally; for he had told me this at considerable length, and I remembered that measles a good many years before had almost been the end of me.

"Well,that's a relief," Duggie went on cheerfully. "You may have all sorts of things, but it's a cinch that you have n't measles. Tush is a conservative old soul; he always gambles on measles, and of course every now and then he wins. It pleases him immensely. He usually celebrates his success by writing a paper on 'The University's Health,' and getting it printed in the Graduates' Magazine."

When the other doctor—the real one—came, he found that I was threatened with pneumonia.

Oh, I had a perfectly miserable time of it at first. The feeling dreadfully all over and not being able to breathe was bad enough, but I think the far-away-from-homeness and the worrying about mamma were worse. I was afraid all the time that she would hear (although I could n't imagine how that would be possible), and then in the middle of the night I lay awake hoping and praying that shewouldhear and leave for Cambridge by the next train. I don't suppose I realized just then how wonderfully good Duggie and Berri and Mrs. Chester were to me. Duggie and Berri took turns in sitting up all night and putting flannel soaked in hot mustard-water on my chest (ugh! how I loathe the smell of mustard), and when they had to go to lectures during the day,—I think, as a matter of fact, they cut a great many of them,—Mrs. Chester would come in and hem endless dish-cloths by the window. Berri says that he ceased to worry about me from the time I looked over at Mrs. Chester after about half an hour's silence and exclaimed,—

"Sew some more with the crisscross pattern; I 'm tired of those dingy white ones."

As I began to get better, I appreciated how much trouble I 'd given them all and tried to thank them; but Berri said,—

"Why, your illness has been a perfect god-send to me. I 've done more grinding lately between midnight and six in the morning than I ever thought would be possible. I 've caught up with almost everything." And Duggie stopped me with,—

"But if it had n't been Berri and I, it would have been someone else—which we're very glad it was n't."

Old Mrs. Chester is a jewel. I didn't pay much attention to her at first, but was just glad to know she was in the room. Later, however, when I began to want to get up and she devoted the whole of her marvellous art to keeping me amused, I appreciated her. She is wonderful. I was going to assert that she inspires the kind of affection one can't help feeling for a person who is all heart and no intelligence; but that, somehow, misses the mark. She has intelligence—lots of it—only it's different. And before my recovery was complete I began to wonder if it wasn't the only kind that is, after all, worth while. For it's the kind with which books and newspapers and "going a journey" and other mechanical aids have nothing to do. (Perhaps I should concede something to the influence of foreign travel, as there was a very memorable expedition "to Goshen in New York State" some time in the early sixties.) Mrs. Chester's intelligence gushes undefiled from the rock, and then flows along in a limpid, ungrammatical stream that soothes at first and then enslaves. Her gift for narrative of the detailed, photographic, New England variety positively out-Wilkins Mary, and I am to-day, perhaps, the greatest living male authority on what Berri callsla cronique scandaleuseof Cambridge. One of her studies in the life of the town forty years ago (it was a sort of epic trilogy that lasted all morning and afternoon and part of the evening with intermissions for luncheon and dinner) I mean to write some time for the Advocate. It all leads up to the New Year's Eve on which "old Mrs. Burlap passed away," but it includes several new and startling theories as to the real cause of the Civil War, an impartial account of the war itself, a magnificent tribute to the late General Butler, a description of Mrs. Chester's wedding,—the gifts and floral tributes displayed on that occasion together with a dreamy surmise as to their probable cost,—a brief history of religion from the point of view of one who is at times assailed by doubt,—but who doesn't make a practice of "rushin' around town tellin' folks who'd only be too glad to have it to say" (this last I assumed to be a thrust at Mis' Buckson),—a spirited word picture of the festivities that took place when Cambridge celebrated its fiftieth anniversary as a city, and at the end a brilliant comparison between Cambridge and "Goshen in New York State." There was, I believe, some mention of the passing away of old Mrs. Burlap on New Year's Eve, but of this I am not sure.

One thing I discovered that rather astonished me in this part of the world (a locality that Berri in one of his themes called "a cold hot-bed of erudition"), and that is—Mrs. Chester doesn't know how to read. I never would have found it out but for an embarrassing little miscalculation on her part, in the method by which until then she had delightfully concealed the fact. More than once while I was sick, she sat by the lamp apparently enjoying the evening paper that Duggie subscribes to, and I had n't the slightest suspicion that she was probably holding it upside down, even when I would ask her what the news was and she would reply,—

"Oh, shaw—these papers! They 're every one of 'em alike. They don't seem to be any news to 'em. I don't see why you young gentlemen waste your good money a-buyin' 'em."

Often on the way upstairs she takes the letters that the postman leaves between the banisters in the little hall below, and manages to distribute them with more or less accuracy.

"I 've got somethin' for you, and it 's from your mother too, you naughty little man, you," is her usual way of handing me a communication from mamma. I did n't realise until the other day that, as mamma's letters always came in the same kind of gray-blue envelopes, it doesn't take a chirographic expert to tell whom they are from. Nor did I recall that, when Mrs. Chester appears with a whole handful of things, she invariably stops short in the middle of the room and artlessly exclaims,—

"Well, now, if that does n't beat all! Here I 've climbed up them steep stairs again and forgotten my specs. Who 's gettin' all these letters anyhow?"

A few mornings ago, however,—when they let me sit up for the first time,—Mrs. Chester appeared with two letters. One of them was unmistakably gray-blue, but the other was white and oblong and non-committal. She paused at the door as if about to examine the address, and then suddenly,—

"If I ain't the most careless woman in the world," she said. "I 've gone and brought up the letters again, and forgotten—" But just at this point we both became aware that her steel-rimmed spectacles were dangling in her other hand. They not only dangled, but they seemed to me a moment later to dangle almost spitefully; for Mrs. Chester's worn cheeks became very pink. She looked at the spectacles and at the white envelope and at me. Then she said with a sort of wistful lightness,—

"Maybe you can make it out; your eyes are younger than mine. I never seen such a letter; it's so—so—it's so flung together like."

"It is—isn't it?" I agreed hastily, as I stretched out my hand, to receive a letter from papa with the address in type-writing.

Just as I thought would happen, mamma heard I was sick and was, of course, very much worried. Dick Benton—who has never come near me, and whom I 've only seen twice on the street since College opened—mentioned the fact of my illness in a letter home. (I suppose he did it in a despairing effort to make his sentences reach the middle of page two.) Of course Mrs. Benton had to throw a shawl around her meddling old back and waddle across the street to our house, to find out the latest news; and as there had n't been any news, mamma's letter to me expressed a "state of mind." But I fixed her (and incidentally Dick Benton) with a telegram.

By the way, I really must speak to mamma about her recent letters to me. Mildred has been away from home, and as mamma writes very regularly to both of us, she often refers to things she remembers having written to somebody, but without pausing to consider how maddening they are when the somebody doesn't happen to be myself. From her last, for instance, I gleaned these interesting items without having the vaguest idea what they belong to:—

"Your father and I have just got back from the funeral. I suppose, when one arrives at such a great age, death is a relief. But it is always solemn.

"Is n't it nice about the Tilestons? I don't know when—in a purely impersonal way—I 've been so pleased. They 've struggled so long and so bravely and now it seems as if their ship had come in at last. Of course, I should n't care to spend so much time in South America myself, (Guatemalaisin South America, is n't it?) but they all seem delighted at the prospect."

Now would n't that jar you?

My acquaintances generally found out that I was sick about the time that Duggie and Berri and Mrs. Chester discharged me, so to speak, as well. I could n't go out, and the doctor made me stay in bed longer than was really necessary, as the bottom of the furnace fell to pieces one morning and it was impossible to heat the house for several days. But I felt pretty well. By that time, as I say, there was all at once a ripple of interest among my friends over the fact that I was sick. They were awfully kind, and came to my room from early in the morning—right after breakfast—until late at night, when they would drop in on their way back from the theatre. My desk was a perfect news-stand of illustrated magazines and funny papers, and I had left in my book-case, probably, the queerest collection of novels that was ever assembled outside of a city hospital. Duggie had a fit over them, and as he read out the titles one evening, he kept exclaiming, "What, oh, what are the children coming to!" The only volume that was n't fiction was a thing called "The Statesman's Year Book," and was brought by a queer sort of chap who is very much interested in sociology. I know him pretty well; so after I thanked him, I could n't help saying,—

"What on earth did you lug this thing up here for?—it looks like an almanac." To which he replied,—

"Well, it's darned interesting, I can tell you. Until I got it I never knew, for instance, how many quarts of alcohol per head were consumed annually in Finland."

Although Duggie did n't say anything, I don't think he was particularly pleased at the fellows dropping in so often and staying so long. They played cards a lot, and smoked all the time until you could hardly see across the room; and sometimes when night came I felt rather tired and my eyes and throat hurt a good deal. But I confess I liked it, even if Duggie and Mrs. Chester did n't.

Only one change of any importance took place while I was laid up: Berri's Icelandic dog—Saga—has been removed from our midst. I was aware that an unusual spirit of peace and order reigned in the house as soon as I began to be about once more, but I attributed it vaguely to the chastening influence of my illness. However, one morning, when on my way to a lecture I remembered that I had noticed my best hat lying on a chair in my study as I came away, and ran back to save it from being eaten, it occurred to me that I had n't seen Saga for days. So, while Berri and I were strolling home from luncheon, I asked him what had happened.

"He 's gone—gone, poor old darling!" said Berri; "I hate to speak of it."

"He was n't stolen or run over or anything, was he?" I asked sympathetically; for now that Saga was no longer an hourly source of anxiety and conflict, I felt reasonably safe in expressing some regret. "Did he run away?"

"No, he did n't leave me," Berri answered sadly; "I gave him up. You see—I found out that there is a law against bringing them into the State; they always go mad as soon as the warm weather comes. So I gave him to one of the little Cabot girls on her birthday. She was awfully pleased."

I am rather worried over something that I got into lately without stopping to think how much it might involve. Berri and that tall spook, named Ranny, that he met at Fleetwood's Wednesday Evening, struck up quite an intimacy not long ago, although I can't for the life of me see how they managed it. He isn't a Freshman, as we thought, but a Sophomore. Berri was waiting in a bookstore in town one day to go to a matinée with a fellow who did n't turn up; and while he was standing there, Ranny came in and began to drive the clerks insane over some Greek and Sanscrit books he had ordered weeks before and that no one had ever heard of. Berri looked on for a while, and, as his friend did n't come and it was getting late and he—Berri—did n't like to waste the extra ticket, he invited Ranny to go with him. Well, they not only went to the matinée, they dined in town together and went again to another show in the evening. Between the acts Ranny explained to him just wherein the wit of "The Girl from Oskosh" differed from the comedies of Aristophanes, and Berri says that before they parted he had learned all about the Greek drama from A to Izzard. Since then Ranny has been to our house several times, and although Berri likes him, he usually finds after about an hour that he isn't equal to the intellectual strain; so he lures Ranny into my room and then gracefully fades away.

Now I like Ranny too. He has, in his ponderous, bespectacled way, an enthusiasm for several bespectacled, ponderous subjects that is simply irresistible. One of them is Egyptology and the study of hieroglyphics. Of course I don't know anything about this, any more than Berri knew about the Greek drama,—not as much even; for he did, at least, pretend to play a pagan instrument of some kind in a play they gave at school once, while a Frenchman behind the scenes toodled away on a flute. But when Ranny gets to talking about dynasties and cartouches and draws fascinating little pictures of gods and goddesses named Ma and Pa, and explains how the whole business was deciphered by means of a piece of stone somebody picked up in the mud one day,—a regular old Sherlock Holmes, he must have been,—you simply can't help being carried away and wishing you could discover something on your own account. He talked so much about it and made it all seem so real and important that one day when he exclaimed,—

"And the mystery is that the University ignores this subject—ignores it!" I really felt that the Faculty was treating us rather shabbily and that we were n't, somehow, getting our money's worth. We talked the matter over very seriously, and decided at last that it could n't be stinginess on the part of the Corporation,—for why should it allow courses in higher mathematics and philosophy and Italian literature, to which only three or four fellows went, if it wanted to save the pennies? It was more likely just ignorance of the importance of hieroglyphics, and the growing demand for a thorough course of it.

"We probably could get a course all right if we showed them how some of us feel about it," Ranny mused. "There's a chap in Latin 47 who'd join, I think—you've seen that middle-aged man with the long sandy beard, have n't you? He tries almost everything."

The person Ranny referred to did n't seem very promising to me. We sleep next each other in a history course. He never wears a necktie, and the last time I saw him there were a lot of dead maple leaves tangled up in his beard. No one seems to know why he is here.

"Well, that makes three right away," Ranny declared enthusiastically. "Perhaps Berrisford will join; but even if he does n't three 's enough."

The very next morning after this Ranny appeared to say he was going to consult Professor Pallas about the new course, and wanted me to go along and put in a word now and then. This seemed a little sudden to me, and I said that perhaps I ought to consult my adviser before taking up a new study, as I had n't done particularly well in the old ones. However, Ranny said that my adviser ought to be thankful at my showing so much interest and public spirit. So we went over to Professor Pallas's little private room in Sever. He was very glad to see us, and when Ranny began to explain the subject of our coming, his old eyes just glittered. He kept smiling to himself and nodding his head in assent, and once, when Ranny paused for breath, he brought his fist down on the table, exclaiming,

"I predicted this—predicted it." Then he thrust his hands in his pockets and paced excitedly up and down the room. Ranny was of course tremendously encouraged, and I was somewhat horrified a moment later, to have him turn toward me and with a wave of his hand declare,—

"My friend, Mr. Wood, feels this weakness in the curriculum more, perhaps, than any of us; for long before he entered college with the purpose of specialising in the subject, he surrounded himself with a collection of Egyptian antiquities that far excels anything of the kind on this side of the British Museum." (He was referring in his intense way to a handful of imitation scarabs and a dissipated-looking old mummified parrot that Uncle Peter brought home from his trip up the Nile. I had indiscreetly mentioned them one afternoon.) "We are sure of four earnest workers, and there are, no doubt, many more."

Now the thing that worries me about all this is that Professor Pallas seemed so gratified and eager to help the cause. His attitude toward us was that of a scholar among scholars,—deep calling unto deep. He said that he would love to conduct a course in hieroglyphics himself, but feared he was n't competent, as he had merely taken up the subject as a kind of recreation at odd moments during the last six or eight years. He could n't recall any one in the United States who was competent, in fact, but he knew of a splendid authority in Germany,—just the man for the place,—and he would speak to the President about him at the next Faculty meeting. Ranny and I thanked him profusely, and that at present is where the matter stands. I wake up in the night sometimes, positively cold at the thought of having added hieroglyphics to my other worries. Think of a course for which you could n't buy typewritten notes,—a course the very lectures of which would be in German,—a course so terrible that no one in the United States would dare undertake to tutor you in it when you got stuck.

The Christmas holidays are almost here, but it has not been decided yet whether or not I am to spend them at home. Mildred is still gadding about, and papa may have to go to New York on business. If he does, mamma will, no doubt, go with him, and I'll join them there, and we'll all have thin slabs of Christmas turkey surrounded by bird bath-tubs at a hotel. Berri has invited me to spend the vacation with him (his mother is living in Washington this winter), but as he remarks dolefully every now and then that he has to stay in Cambridge to write a thesis that is due immediately after the holidays, I don't see how he means to manage. He's been putting off that thesis from day to day until I don't see how he can possibly do all the reading and writing and note-taking it necessitates. I 've tried to get him started once or twice, but he has merely groaned and said,—

"You 're a nice one to preach industry, are n't you?" So I've given up. Well, it's none of my business if he gets fired from the course.

X

I might have spared myself my anxiety in regard to the course in hieroglyphics. My adviser overtook me in the yard a day or so after our interview with Professor Pallas, and after walking along with me for a while he said,—

"Well, Wood, I 'm glad to see you looking about as usual; I had almost come to the conclusion that you 'd gone stark mad." I asked him what he meant, and it seems that old Pallas had made a speech at a Faculty meeting in which he declared that the deep and ever-growing interest throughout the undergraduate body in the subject of Egyptology had reached a climax that demanded a course of some kind. He was very eloquent, and caused a good deal of mild excitement. Then some one got up and asked who were concerned in the movement, and Pallas, after fumbling in his side pocket, finally produced a memorandum and said,—

"The names of those imbued with a spirit for serious archaeological research are many, but I think that the youth who by his zeal in collecting and preserving valuable antiquities has done more than any one else to further this study among his fellows is Mr. Thomas Wood, of the class of ——" But the poor old man did n't get any further, my adviser says, for everybody in the room began to roar and the meeting broke up in confusion. Well, that 's off my mind, anyhow; although I don't see why they should have taken it the way they did. There 's nothing so very extraordinary in acquiring a love for study when that's what you 're supposed to come here for.

Berri and I discovered the most fascinating little place the other evening. We had been in town all afternoon on the trail of an express package of Berri's that had been lost for days, and were running along Tremont Street on the way to the Cambridge car, when Berri suddenly stopped in front of a sort of alley and clutched me. From the other end came the sound of music,—a harp, a flute, and a violin playing one of those Neapolitan yayayama songs that always, somehow, make you feel as if you 'd been abroad, even when you 've never been nearer Naples than waving good-by to your sister from a North German Lloyd dock in Hoboken.

"Let 's go see what it is," Berri said. So we skipped to the other end of the alley, and found a brightly lighted little restaurant with the music wailing away in the vestibule. We stood listening for a time and watching the people who went in. They all stopped to peer through a glass door, and then after a moment of indecision passed on—up a flight of steep stairs. Berri, of course, could n't be satisfied until he had solved the mystery of the glass door, and it was n't long before we were doing just as every one else did. We saw a long, narrow room with three rows of little tables reaching from end to end. The walls were covered with gay frescos of some kind (I could n't make them out, the tobacco smoke was so thick); foreign-looking waiters were tearing in and out among the tables; flower girls were wandering up and down with great-armfuls of roses and carnations for sale, and everybody was laughing and gesticulating and having such a good time, apparently,—the music was so shrill and the clatter of dishes so incessant,—that Berri and I turned and gazed at each other, as much as to say, "After all these years we 've found it at last." But a moment later we realized why the people we had seen go in had, after a glance, turned away and climbed the stairs; all the tables were occupied. I think we must have looked as dissatisfied as the others, for we felt that nothing upstairs could equal the scene we had just discovered. And we were right. The upper rooms were comparatively empty and quiet and rather dreary. So we came down again and were about to take a farewell look and start for home, when Berri, with his nose flattened against the glass, suddenly exclaimed, "Saved! Saved!" and pushing open the door, made his way across the room. Who should be there but Mr. Fleetwood, dining alone at a table in the corner? Berri, after shaking hands with him, beckoned to me, and in a moment we had both seated ourselves at Fleetwood's table.

"This is almost as nice as if we 'd really been invited, isn't it?" said Berri, in his easy way. "You know we were just on the point of giving up and going home."

"Why didn't you go upstairs?" Fleetwood inquired. (He pretended all through dinner that we had spoiled his evening.) "It is n't too late even now," he suggested; "it's much nicer up there; there 's more air."

"There's plenty of air, but no atmosphere," Berri answered. "This is what we enjoy," he added with a wave of his hand.

"I 'm glad you like my Bohemia," Fleetwood quavered.

"Oh, Bohemia's all right," replied Berri. "Bohemia would be perfect—if it weren't for the Bohemians."

"What are 'Bohemians'?" I asked, for I 'd often heard people called that without understanding just what it meant.

"Bohemians?" Berri repeated. "Why, Bohemians are perfectly horrid things who exist exclusively on Welsh rabbits and use the word 'conventional' as a term of reproach. My aunt knows hundreds of them."

"I wrote a paper once on 'What is a Bohemian?'" Fleetwood put in. "If you would really like to know—but of course you would n't," he broke off sadly; "no one does any more. You clever boys know everything before you come."

"Oh, Mr. Fleetwood, please let us read your paper," we both begged him enthusiastically. I think he was a little flattered, for we would n't allow him to talk about anything else until he had promised to tell me where I could find his article. Berri, however, he refused absolutely, and made me promise, in turn, not to let him know where to look for it and never to quote from it in Berri's presence.

"I know him," he muttered dolefully; "I know these memories that 'turn again and rend you;' I 'm an old man; 'Ich habe gelebt' and ge-suffered."

Well, we had a most delightful dinner. Fleetwood, when he saw that he was n't going to get rid of us, cheered up and made himself very agreeable. He can be charming when he wants to be. He and Berri did most of the talking, although his remarks, as a rule, were addressed to me. The fact is, he likes me because I 'm sympathetic and a good listener, but Berri he finds vastly more interesting. Berri has travelled such a lot, and, besides, he has the knack (I haven't it at all) of being able to discuss things of which he knows nothing in a way that commands not only attention but respect. For instance, they got into a perfectly absorbing squabble over the novelist Henry James, in which Fleetwood deplored and Berri defended what Fleetwood called his "later manner." Fleetwood ended up with,—

"I 've read everything he 's ever done—some of them many times over—and I wrote a paper on him for Lesper's not long ago; but I could n't, conscientiously, come to any other conclusion." To which Berri replied, as he smiled indulgently to himself and broke a bit of bread with his slim brown fingers,—

"I often wonder if you people over here who write things about Harry James from time to time, really comprehend the man at all—notice that I say 'James the man,' not 'James the writer.' 'Le style c'est l'homme,' you know; is n't it Bossuet who tells us that?"

"No, it is n't," said Fleetwood, rather peevishly; "it's Buffon—and he probably stole it from the Latin, 'Stylus virum arguit.'" Fleetwood, of course, knows what he 's talking about. But, nevertheless, I could see that Berri's general air of being foreign and detached and knowing James from the inside—or rather from the other side—impressed him; and as for me, I was simply paralyzed. For I could have testified under oath that Berri had never read a word of Henry James' in his life, and that he 'd never laid eyes on the man. I spoke to him about it afterward and asked him how he dared to do such things.

"Have you ever read anything by James—have you ever seen 'Harry James the man,' as you called him?" I inquired.

"No; of course not," Berri answered. "What difference does it make?"

"But you went on as if you knew more about him than even Fleetwood; and I think that toward the end Fleetwood almost thought you did himself."

"Oh—that," Berri shrugged, after trying to recall the conversation. "That was merely what an old frump of a woman said at my aunt's one day when I dropped in for luncheon. She and Aunt Josephine gabbled and gabbled, and never paid the slightest attention to me, and although they were both unusually tiresome, I suppose I could n't avoid remembering some of the things they said. But it would have been impossible for me to dwell any longer on that particular topic with Fleetwood, even if my life had depended on it, because that day at luncheon, just as my aunt's friend got started on 'James the man,' I happened to glance up and notice that she was wearing an entirely different kind of wig from the ratty old thing she 'd flourished in before she went abroad. She had brought back a new one that was—why, it was an architectural marvel; it looked like the dome of a mosque, and covered her whole head, from eyebrows to neck, with little cut-out places for her ears to peek through. It hypnotized me all through luncheon, and I never heard a word about 'James the man,'—so of course when I got that far with Fleetwood I had to change the subject. Don't you remember that we began to discuss Bernhardt's conception of Hamlet rather abruptly? I 'll never trust that old woman again—after making the mistake about Buffon. Why, she's positively illiterate!"

Fleetwood told me a lot about Mazuret's—that 's the name of the restaurant—which made me glad that we had come across it accidentally,—found it out for ourselves. It's very famous. All sorts of people—writers and painters and actors and exiled noblemen—used to make a kind of headquarters of it and dine there whenever they happened to be in town. Fleetwood has been going there for years, and always sits at the same table. (That's the proper thing to do; you must have a favorite table, and when you come in and find it occupied, you must scowl and shrug and complain to the waiters in a loud voice that the place is going to the dogs. Then everybody in the room takes it for granted that you 're a writer or a painter, an actor or an exiled nobleman, and looks interested and sympathetic. We saw several performances of this kind.) But the place, of course, "isn't what it used to be." I'm seven or eight years too late, as usual. Some of the poets have become very successful—which means, Fleetwood says, that they 're doing newspaper work in New York; some of the painters and actors are beyond the reach of criticism—which means that they 're dead; and some of the noblemen are confident that their respective governments are about to recall them to posts of responsibility and honor—which means that they are in jail.

It was more entertaining, Fleetwood says, in the days of Leontine,—the shrewd, vivacious, businesslike Frenchwoman who, when Monsieur Mazuret became too ill, and Madame too old, used to make change and scold the waiters and say good evening to you, and whose red-striped gingham shirt-waists fitted her like models from Paquin. It was Leontine who brought back the wonderful wall-paper from Paris (through the glass door it looked like a painting) that represents a hunting scene, with willowy ladies in preposterous pink velvet riding-habits and waving plumes, and gentlemen blowing tasselled horns, and hounds and stags—all plunging through a perfectly impenetrable forest, whose improbable luxuriance Berri brilliantly accounted for by saying that it was evidently "Paris green."

"Attend now—I tell you something," Leontine used to say confidentially when the evening was drawing to a close, and but one or two stragglers were left in the dining-room.

"These peoples—they stay so long sometimes; I tell to them that they must go. Butnon—they will not go; and they stay, and they stay, and they stay. And all at once the—what you call?—thechasse—she begin to move! The horses—he gallop; the ladies—she scream of laughing; the gentlemen—he make toot, toot, toot, tooooo! The dogs—Ah-h h-h! The—the—cet animal-là—the deer?—the deer—Ah-h-h-h!" Carried away by these midnight memories, Leontine would become a galloping horse, a screaming lady, a master of hounds, a savage pack, and a terrified monarch of the glen—all at once. Then, overpowered by the weird horror of it, she would cover her face with her apron and run coquettishly as if for protection to another table.

There was another tale—the description of a thunderstorm—a regular cloud-burst, it must have been—that, one afternoon, overtook Madame and Leontine in the Place de la Madeleine, Leontine personifying the truly Gallic elements—the lightning (reels backward—eyes covered with hands)—the thunder (fingers in ears—eyes rolling—mouth open and emitting groans)—the rain hissing back from the asphalt in a million silver bubbles (skirts lifted—tip-toes—mon dieus—shrieks—hasty exit to kitchen)—Leontine bringing this incoherent scene vividly before one, was worth one's eating a worse dinner, Fleetwood says, than the dinner at Mazuret's. But Monsieur is dead, and Madame just dried up and blew away, and Leontine is married, and—although I don't know when I 've enjoyed a dinner so much—"the place isn't what it used to be."

While Fleetwood was telling me all this, I noticed that Berri called one of the waiters and spoke to him in French. I don't know what he said, as he talked very fast—and anyhow it did n't sound much like the kind of French I 've been used to. The waiter disappeared, and in half an hour or so a messenger boy came in and gave Berri a little envelope which he put in his pocket without saying anything. Then, when we had finished dinner and were just about to push away from the table, Berri exclaimed,—

"Now we 'll all go to the theatre."

"My dear young man, if you could see the work I have to do this night," Fleetwood protested with a gesture that seemed to express mountains of uncorrected themes, "you would realize, for once in your life, what work really is."

"But I have the tickets," Berri explained; and he brought forth the little envelope that the messenger boy had given him.

"No—no—no!" Fleetwood answered decidedly, and started for the door. But Berri detained him.

"By inflicting our company on you we 've spoiled the evening for you, I know; but you won't spoil it for me by depriving us of yours," he begged in his engaging way.

"'Sweet invocation of a child: most pretty and pathetical,'" Fleetwood laughed, and backed into the vestibule. We followed and surrounded him, so to speak, each taking hold of an arm. Then we all walked through the alley toward Tremont Street, Fleetwood quavering apprehensively from time to time, "Now you 'll take me to my car and then bid me adieu, like two good boys, won't you?" while we agreed to everything he said and clung to him like sheriffs. Berri was giggling hysterically, but although I thought the situation rather amusing, I did n't see anything so terribly funny about it until we got to the parting of the ways and Fleetwood stopped. Then I noticed that, in addition to the three great red roses that Berri had bought for our button-holes, Fleetwood had a fourth one, with a long, flexible stem, growing apparently out of the top of his head. He was so unconscious of the absurd, lanky thing nodding solemnly over him whenever he spoke, that when he held out his hand, exclaiming tremulously,—

"'And so,' in the words of Jessica, 'Farewell; I will not have my father see me talk with thee,'" and the rose emphasized every word as if it were imitating him, I gave an uncontrollable whoop, and Berri doubled up on a near-by doorstep.

"I only would that my father were alive at the present moment to see me talking with thee," Berri gasped. "I don't know anything he would have enjoyed more."

Fleetwood looked hurt and mystified and vaguely suspicious, and he stood there merely long enough to say,—

"'You break jests as braggarts do their blades, which, God be thanked, hurt not.'" Then, as Berri was still sitting on the doorstep and I was leaning against the wall, he made a sudden dash for the other side of the street. We caught him, of course, grasped his arms once more, and walked him off to the theatre, pretending all the time that we did n't notice his struggles and how furious he was at having to go with us. Berri kept up an incessant stream of conversation, saying things that, to an outsider, would have given the impression that the theatre-party was Fleetwood's, and that we were the ones who were being dragged reluctantly away from the Cambridge car. Just before we got to the theatre the solemn rose in Fleetwood's hat toppled over and dangled against his face. This also we pretended not to see, and as we had him firmly by the arms, he was unable to reach up and throw it away; so we made a spectacular entrance through the brightly lighted doorway, with Fleetwood ineffectually blowing at the rose and shaking his head like an angry bull. A party of four or five fellows—students—who had been unable to get tickets were turning away from the box-office as we appeared, and they naturally stopped to look at us.

This was in the nature of a last straw, for Fleetwood almost tearfully broke out with,—

"You dreadful, dreadful boys, my reputation is ruined; they 'll think I 've been drinking." Even Berri began to see that we had gone somewhat far, for he plucked the rose from Fleetwood's cheek, exclaiming,—

"Good gracious, man! where did you get this? You must n't go to the theatre looking that way. Just because Bernhardt plays Hamlet is no reason why you should undertake to do Ophelia;" and then he threw it on the floor. Fleetwood rolled his eyes hopelessly.

Well, we never got home until almost four in the morning. A man whose seat was behind ours at the play tapped Fleetwood on the shoulder as soon as we had sat down, and after a whispered conversation he got up and went away. Then Fleetwood told us the man was a dramatic critic—an acquaintance of his—who had been sent to write up the play for a morning paper, but that, as he did n't understand French and was n't much of a Shakespearian scholar and wanted to go to a progressive peanut party in West Roxbury anyhow, he had asked Fleetwood to do the thing for him. Fleetwood used to be on a paper himself, and was delighted to renew old times.

So all during the performance he made notes on the margin of his program and chuckled to himself. The occupation, I think, diverted his mind from Berri and me and helped him to forgive us.

Afterward we went to Newspaper Row and waited for hours in a bare, rather dirty little room while Fleetwood, standing at a high desk under an electric light in the corner, wrote his review. He spent much more time in groaning, "My facility is gone—my hand has lost its cunning," than in actual writing. By the time he was ready to leave we were all famished; so before catching the owl car from Bowdoin Square we stopped at an all-night restaurant that Fleetwood used to patronize when he was a reporter, and had buckwheat cakes and maple syrup. I 've never tasted anything so good.

The Cambridge car was interesting, but fearful. It was jammed with people, and I wondered where so many could have come from that hour of the morning. They could n't all have been dramatic critics. The majority of those who got seats went sound asleep, and as the conductor could n't very well wake them up at every street, he found out beforehand where they wanted to get off, and then hung little tags on their coats that told their destination.

When we were saying good-by to Fleetwood in the Square, Berri laughed and asked,—

"Have you decided yet what you 're going to do to me, Mr. Fleetwood? I know you would like to give me E on my thesis, but I don't think I deserve quite that." Instead of answering him, however, Mr. Fleetwood ran away, exclaiming,—

"Don't talk shop,—don't talk shop; good-night,—good-night!"

Berri has begun to get awfully scared about the thesis,—not that he's afraid that Fleetwood will give it a low mark, but because it does n't look at present as if there would be anything to mark at all. I found him in his room the other day with a pile of books and a scratch-block on his table. But he had n't taken a note, and his attitude was one of utter despair. Of course he can't possibly write it unless he stays here during the holidays, for they begin day after to-morrow.

XI

I don't think I 've had a pen in my hand, except when I wrote a note to Berri, for more than two weeks. In the first place I left in such a hurry to meet the family in New York that, among the various things I forgot to pack at the last minute, my diary was one. (Even if I had taken it, I probably shouldn't have found time to record all we did.) Then, as I was with mamma and papa and Mildred during the entire vacation, there was no necessity for writing letters.

I did n't go to Washington with Berri for two reasons. The family naturally wanted me to spend the holidays with them, and I could n't help feeling that, if I refused Berri's kind invitation, he would be much more likely to stay, part of the time at least, in Cambridge and write his thesis. In a way I was right; for when I told him I simply could n't go with him, he said sort of listlessly,—

"Well, then I suppose I ought to stay here and finish that thing, oughtn't I?" which was an optimistic way of letting me know that it had n't even been begun. I did n't know what to answer exactly, because if I 'd agreed with him he would have thought me unsympathetic and looked hurt, and if I had advised him to let the whole matter slide, and forget about it, and have a good time (which was, of course, what he wanted me to do), I felt sure that he would eventually blame me for giving him bad advice. That's Berri all over. So I merely remarked, "You 'll have to be the judge; it 's too serious a matter for any one else to meddle with," and felt like a nasty little prig as I said it. He was restless and gloomy after that, and took a long walk all alone, during which I 'm convinced that he very nearly made up his mind to stay in Cambridge and slave. I say very nearly, because he didn't bring himself quite to the point of telling anybody about it. But the next afternoon (college closed with the last lecture of that day), when I turned into our street on the way to my room, there was a cab with a steamer trunk on it standing in front of our house; and as I opened the front door, Berri and a dress-suit case clattered down the stairs. He stopped just long enough to shake hands and exclaim, "Good-by, Granny—have a good time—I left a note for you on your desk. The train goes in less than an hour." Then he rushed out of the gate and jumped into the cab, slamming the door after him with that sharp, thrilling "Now they're off" clack that cabs, and cabs only, possess. That was the last I saw of him.

New York was a pleasing delirium of theatres and operas and automobile rides up and down Fifth Avenue, with just enough rows between Mildred and me, and papa and me and Mildred and mamma (the other possible combinations never scrap), to make us realize that the family tie was the same dear old family tie and had n't been in any way severed by my long absence. It took us three days to persuade mamma to ride in an automobile,—a triumph that we all lived bitterly to repent; for she ever afterwards refused to be transported from place to place by any other means,—which was not only inconvenient, but ruinous. She justified her extravagance by declaring that in an emergency she preferred to be the smasher to the smashed. I met lots of fellows I knew on the street, and some of them took me home with them to luncheon or to that curious five-o'clock-sit-around-and-don't-know-what-to-do-with-the-cup meal they call "tea." Meeting their families was very nice, and I felt as if I knew the fellows ever so much better than I did in Cambridge.

One incident might have ended in a tragedy if I hadn't happened to preserve a certain letter of mamma's. ("Never write anything and never burn anything—isn't it Talleyrand who tells us that?" as the friend of Berri's aunt would say.) It was the real reason of our spending the last two days of the vacation in Boston, and came about in the following way.

One day at luncheon (we were going to a matinée afterwards) I glanced at my watch to see how late we were, and mamma noticed, for the first time, that I was carrying a cheap nickel-plated alarm-clock sort of an affair instead of the gold-faced heirloom that has been reposing for lo! these many weeks in Mr. Hirsch's pawn-shop. Since our meeting she hadn't referred to this painful subject, and as I had become used to the dollar watch on the end of my chain, it never occurred to me to say anything about it. That day she looked at the watch and then at me, and finally she murmured, "Why, Tommy!" with the expression of one who seems to see the foundations of Truth, Respectability, and Honor crumbling to dust; and she finished her luncheon in silence, breathing in a resigned kind of way and studying the table-cloth with eyes like smitten forget-me nots. On the way upstairs I lagged behind, and Mildred said to me,—

"Mamma has on her early-Christian-martyr look. What on earth's the matter now?" But I was unable to enlighten her. Mamma had known from the first that the watch had been pawned; I could n't imagine why she was so upset.

All was explained, however, when I went to her room. Some time ago she had sent me a draft for thirty dollars. It came in a cheerful letter (no letter containing a draft for thirty dollars is sad) about nothing in particular. I remembered that at the time the postscript had puzzled me, for it said, "Of course I have told your father nothing about this," and there was no clew in the body of the letter to what "this" referred. The draft wasn't mentioned. It seems that mamma was under the impression she had written me several pages on the evils of extravagance, the horrors of debt, and the general desirability of redeeming one's watch as soon as possible,—which she hadn't at all. Not being a mind-reader, I assumed that her draft was a spontaneous outburst of maternal esteem, had it cashed with a loving grateful heart, and spent the money in three days. Therefore, when she caught sight of my tin timepiece (it keeps much better time, by the way, than the heirloom ever did), she had distressing visions of me indulging in a perfect carnival of embezzlement, and finally ending up with shorn locks, striped clothes, and a chain on my leg.

I never realized before that the human brain is perfectly capable, under certain circumstances, of harboring two distinct beliefs at the same time,—the truth of either one of which necessarily excludes the other. (There is probably a more technical way of stating this, but I haven't got that far in my philosophy course as yet.) Now, when I solemnly declared to mamma that she had never mentioned her check in connection with my watch or anything else in fact, I am sure she believed me. She said she believed me, and seemed greatly relieved. But, on the other hand, although she knew I was telling the truth, and rejoiced in the fact, I am certain that she was unable at the same time to abandon her equally strong conviction that she had written and sent precisely the letter she had intended to. I don't pretend to explain this mental phenomenon, and I discreetly refrained from discussing it with mamma, for in the midst of our talk I began to have a dim, delicious suspicion that her letter was at that moment reposing in my inside pocket. (When I am away from home, I always carry several plainly addressed letters in order that there may be as little trouble as possible in case anything should happen to me. I remembered having put the letter with the postscript into my coat-pocket instead of my desk, as I wished to refer to it when I next wrote home.) So, when mamma finally said, "Well, I believe you," and then added with an air of abstraction, "But I wish you had saved that letter," I thrust my hand into my pocket, glanced at several envelopes, and exclaimed dramatically as I showed her one of them,—

"Madam, your most idle whim is my inexorable law." Then we all went to the matinée.

But that wasn't the end of the watch. Mamma made me give her the pawn-ticket, and insisted on going home by way of Boston for the purpose of redeeming it herself. The reason of this change in the family plans was not explained to Mildred and papa; but they were docile, and seemed to think it would be very nice to see my rooms before leaving for home.

There was no opportunity to visit Mr. Hirsch when we arrived yesterday, as we spent most of the day in exploring Cambridge. But this morning (they all left for the West this afternoon), while Mildred was packing and papa had gone to see about tickets, mamma, with her head swathed in a thick black veil, and I slipped out to go to the pawnbroker's. I have an idea that by going herself instead of simply sending me mamma had a vague but noble belief that she was rescuing me somehow from moral shipwreck. And then, no doubt, the mere fact of one's venturing out incognito, as it were, to wrest ancestral relics from usurious fingers is not without a certain charm.

Well, of course we met papa at the door of the hotel. The ticket-office was just around the corner, and he had engaged berths and tickets with a rapidity that was as unfortunate as it was incredible, for he greeted us with, "Starting for a walk? I'm just in time," and proceeded to join the expedition with evident pleasure. Mamma lingered uneasily on the sidewalk a moment, and then said,—

"We 're not going for amusement, dear; we 're going to shop. You know how that always tires you." But papa, who was in good spirits at the prospect of leaving for home, quite unsuspiciously ignored the suggestion and replied cheerily,—

"Well, I think I 'll go along, I might want to buy something myself."

I exclaimed, "How jolly!" in a sepulchral tone, and we started.

Now, mamma in the role of a gay deceiver is sublime. The fact that she is trying to play a part and perhaps setting "an awful example" makes her miserable, although she sometimes succeeds in concealing the fact until afterwards. I saw that we were in for a delightful morning, and would probably end by missing the train. We loitered unscrupulously in front of shop windows, apparently entranced by everything from hardware to cigars. We sauntered in and out of countless dry-goods places in quest of dark-blue ribbon of such an unusual shade that Boston had never seen its like; we paused for half an hour, now and then, to inquire the price of diamond tiaras and alabaster clocks set with rhinestones; we bought a bouquet of frost-bitten roses (I had to carry it) from a one-armed man, and tarried to hear his reminiscences of life in a sawmill; we went to pianola recitals, phonograph exhibits, and assisted at an auction sale of bar-room furniture. And papa wearied not. Mamma and I were nearly dead, but he not only wasn't bored,—he seemed to be having the time of his life. We could n't devise anything too silly and futile and tiresome for him to enjoy, and as the time before the train left was beginning to grow ominously short, mamma at last resorted to heroic measures.

I don't think she had formed any definite plan when she abruptly led us into the subway; but our going there was probably not unconnected in her imagination with the boundless opportunities for losing oneself in the sewers of Paris and the catacombs of Rome. The subway may or may not resemble these historic places,—I'm sure I don't know,—but, at any rate, after we had been there five or six minutes we lost papa.

We all three had stood aimlessly watching the cars whizz up to the platform and away again into the subterranean dusk, until papa (this was his first sign of impatience) mildly remarked, "I think, dear, that as you and Tommy seem to be rather attached to this place, I 'll buy a newspaper." Then he strolled off, and mamma clutched me. We watched him approach the news-stand and pick up a magazine. His back was partly turned.

"It 's our only chance," said mamma hoarsely, with a half-guilty, half-affectionate glance towards the news-stand. I understood and, seizing her hand, ran with her to the nearest car. An instant later we were buzzing through the bowels of the earth in quite the opposite direction from the pawn-shop.

To tell the truth, the only thing I knew about the locality of Mr. Hirsch's establishment was that we should never reach it unless we got out and took a car going the other way. This we did, and when I thought we had gone far enough on the return trip and we emerged once more into the daylight, we seemed to be miles from the place—the only place—from which I could have found my way. So we jumped into a cab and told the man to drive as quickly as he could to that place. (I had to describe it at some length, as I don't as yet know the names of many streets here.) He was very intelligent, however, and it was n't his fault that, after we had jolted along for four or five blocks, the horse fell down. We left him lifting one of the poor thing's nervous hind legs in and out of the tangled harness. He looked as if he were trying to solve some kind of a gigantic, hopeless puzzle. We hurried on for about a quarter of a mile, and then I suddenly discovered that we had been in the right street all the time. It was one of those queer streets that never look familiar when you 're going the other way. I confess it took a great deal of courage to impart this discovery to mamma; but she appreciated the fact that we had very little time to lose, and did n't stop to point out to me that if I ever become a business man, I 'll be a failure. The horse was on his feet again when we got back to the cab, so we jumped in once more, and after an interminable drive (half of me was out of the window most of the time, like a Punch-and-Judy doll, directing the cabman) we finally drew up in front of the pawn-shop. It was then that we really distinguished ourselves.

"I've come for my watch," I said to Mr. Hirsch. He gave me the look of a bird of prey. It reminded me of an eagle I had seen once,—an eagle that had been stuffed by an amateur. He held out his hand and spoke a solitary, fateful word. Mamma's face—in the excitement of the moment she had pushed up her veil—became dim with horror; her features for an instant were positively incoherent.

"The ticket?" she whispered gropingly. "It's in the bottom of my trunk."

Mildred and papa and a group of porters, peering up and down the street like a concourse of Sister Annes, were on the curbstone in front of the hotel when we got back. The baggage was piled on a wagon, papa looked haggard and years older than when I had last seen him, and Mildred gave us a haughty stare as we alighted. Mamma was hustled wildly from the cab to the carriage, and I had time merely to peck hastily at their tense faces and gasp good-by. As the carriage swung around the corner, mamma appeared for a moment at the window, exclaiming, "I 'll send it to you in my first letter," and then sank from view. This afternoon, when I returned to my peaceful little abode in Cambridge, who should be in his room but Berri? He was at his desk, bending earnestly over a big pad of thesis paper.

"You've finished it, after all," I said, for the floor near his chair was littered with neat manuscript.

"Yes, it's finished,—fifty beastly pages of it," Berri answered, as he jumped up to meet me. I wanted to ask him all about it,—how he had managed to do it during the gayeties of Washington, and if it had taken much time. But he said rather wearily,—

"Oh, don't let's talk about it; I 'm so sick of it," and began at once to question me about my trip to New York. We chatted for about half an hour, and then I got up to go into my room and unpack my trunk. Thesis paper is n't like the ordinary paper on which themes are written; it has a margin on all four sides, and as I had never used any, I went over to Berri's desk to examine a sheet of his.

"Why, you 've had the thing type-written," I exclaimed; for there was a pile of type-written notes in front of the thesis paper. "Why don't you hand it in that way instead of copying it again? Your hand is so hard to read."

Berri wrinkled his forehead in a queer, annoyed kind of way; then he looked confused and blushed a little, and finally he gave an uncomfortable laugh.

"Oh, Granny, you 're so brutally guileless," he murmured. "Why can't you just see and understand things? It sounds so much worse than it really is, when you make me say it in so many words." Even then I didn't altogether grasp the situation.

"You mean that somebody helped you?" I asked. That did n't seem to me worth making such a fuss about, somehow.

"Well, that's a very refined and ladylike way of putting it," he answered. "I got a man in the Law School to write it for me, and paid him ten dollars for his trouble."

I had never thought much about this sort of thing, and it was impossible all at once to know just where I stood in the matter. I didn't know what to say, and I think I blurted out,—

"Oh, Berri, I 'm so sorry."

"Well, I 'm sorry you know about it," Berri mused drearily. "No, I 'm not, either," he added quickly, after a moment; "I 'm darned glad,—for now that you know, you can do what you like; I 'm not playing the hypocrite, anyhow. Only, don't talk to me about it. I 've thought the whole thing over from every point of view; it's the only thing I can do. I 'm willing to run the risks, and I 'm going to do it."

It was impossible to go back to other topics after that, so I went into my room and unpacked my trunk. I don't believe I ever unpacked so carefully and put everything away so neatly before. Mrs. Chester came in and complimented me as I was finishing. It must have been because I was thinking.

With all my thinking, however, I can't say that I 've got much farther than I was when Berri first told me. I simply know that he oughtn't to have done it, and am very, very sorry that he has. If he tried to defend himself in any way, I could have it out with him; but he does n't. When he finished copying the thesis, he came into my room and said, "I 'm going over to drop this through Fleetwood's door; do you want to go along?" and I went with him, hoping that at the last minute he might, in his unexpected way, change his mind. On the way over he did burst out with,—

"You see, it's this way: If I didn't know Fleetwood so well, I should n't do it; I shouldn't care. But he'll think, if I fail to hand in the written work, that I'm presuming on the fact that we 've breakfasted together at The Holly Tree and gone to the theatre and all that. I hate that kind of thing." I tried to make him see that Fleetwood would n't look at it in this way at all, and that even if he did it would be his fault, not Berri's. But Berri answered: "You need n't go on to tell me how dishonest it is,—I know all that. I 'm not worse than lots of other people, though;" and by that time we had reached Fleetwood's door. I put my hand on his arm as he was about to drop the thesis through Fleetwood's letter-slide and said, "Please don't, Berri; wait until to-morrow morning, anyhow;" but he pushed the roll through the door, and as it fell with a thud inside, he laughed and answered,—

"Too late. Now I'm going to forget about it." He went to town for dinner, and I had mine about an hour ago at Mrs. Brown's. I was the only one there. In a few minutes I have to go out again, as I promised——

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