Later.Just as I had written that far, the front door opened and slammed and the tin steps clattered as they only do when Duggie is coming up. The loneliness of the house, and the feeling that college opened to-morrow, and Duggie on the stairs all took me back to my first evening in Cambridge. The only difference was that instead of going to his own room Duggie this time came bursting into mine."I came to say good-by," he exclaimed; and when I got over my astonishment, he went on to tell me that he had decided during the vacation to go away—to Europe—and stay until Class Day. He had never told me before that he had taken his degree in three years, and that it would n't have been necessary for him to come back this year at all if he had n't wanted to. He has been entitled to his degree for months; but of course he is anxious to graduate with his own class in the spring. He has n't talked to any one about going abroad, as he was n't sure of it until a few days ago."I 'm leaving on the midnight train to-night," he said, "and I came out here on the chance of your having got back. My family are all in the country, I left them this afternoon." I wanted to tell him how sorry I was that he was leaving us, and how glad I was that he could go; but somehow I don't think I showed what I really felt. The time was so short (I had promised Duncan Duncan to help him with some Advocate editorials at half past eight), and those things never seem to sound the way I should like to have them. But in a way I had an opportunity to let him know how I felt toward him, for while we were sitting there, he laughed and said,—"As you won't stay and talk to me, I think you might at least do the next best thing. You know I 've always wanted to read this, and now that I 'm going away, you ought to let me." Then he took my diary from the mantelpiece and pretended to read the first page.My first impulse was to ask him not to. If he had been going to stay in Cambridge, I should n't have let him, of course; but as he was leaving in a few hours and seemed anxious to read the thing, and as it really did n't make any difference whether he did or not, I finally let him."I don't see why you want to, and you probably won't get beyond the first few pages, but you may," I said.So I left him by the fire with the diary in his hand. I thought perhaps I should find a note about it when I got back this evening, but I didn't.XIIPoor Berri! I felt so sorry for him. I do yet, in fact; for although things can't possibly turn out in the way he thinks they may, I can't tell him so, and he lives in a state of perpetual dread. But it won't last long now; Duggie's steamer must have almost reached Southampton by this time, and it won't take more than a week or eight days for Berri to hear from Duggie himself. I came very near giving the thing away at one time. It's hard not to, although I realize that Duggie was wise when he asked me to let matters take their course.It just happened that the next day after Berri had delivered his thesis, the talk at luncheon turned on cheating at exams and handing in written work that is n't your own. The sentiment against cheating seemed to be strong, partly from a sense of honor and partly from a sense of risk. As a matter of fact, I don't see how fellows can very well manage to cheat here—during an examination, that is to say—even if they want to. There are always a lot of proctors prowling up and down the room, ready to jump on anybody who has suspicious-looking bits of paper on his desk, or who seems to be unduly interested in his lap or the condition of his cuffs. And then, besides, assuming that the instructor occasionally gets absorbed in a newspaper and the proctors stroll to the windows to watch the muckers throwing snowballs in the Yard, how could a student prepare himself for this rare opportunity? It may be different in courses that involve the exact sciences, where certain definite formulas copied on a small bit of paper might be of use; but in the sort of things I take, one would have to conceal upon oneself the Encyclopædia Britannica, Ploetz's Epitome of History, Geschmitzenmenger's Ancient Art, or the Dictionary of Biography, in order to accomplish any really effective deception.With written work it seems to be easier. If a man hands in a theme or a thesis in his own hand, the instructors are more or less forced to accept it as original, unless of course it was taken outright from a book and they happen to be familiar with the book. From what the fellows at the table said, there must be more of this sort of thing done than I had imagined; although, since Berri opened my eyes, I could believe almost anything. One of the fellows told about a student—a Junior—he had heard of who succeeded in getting himself fired two or three years ago in a rather complicated way. He was engaged, and his lady-love sent him a poem in one of her letters, saying that she had written it for him. The letter arrived while he was struggling with a daily theme; so he murmured to himself, "Tush! I 'll copy Araminta's pretty verses and send them in as my own; as they have just gushed from her surcharged heart into her letter, no one will be the wiser." A few days later the omnivorous Advocate asked permission to print them, and as they had received words of praise from the instructor, and as the fellow by that time had no doubt begun to believe he had written them himself, he allowed them to be published under his name. Somebody sent a copy of the Advocate to Araminta, who replied with an indignant letter to herfutur; and while he was trying to think up an explanation of the matter with which to pacify her, somebody else came out in the Crimson with a most withering communication, asking how the Advocate dared to print as original a poem that had been written by his grandfather, the late Donovan H. Dennison, whose complete poetical works ("Dan Cupid and other Idyls") could be found in the college library at any time. Whereupon the student, disgusted at his lady-love's dishonesty in palming off the late Donovan H. Dennison's verses as original, broke his engagement; and the college, disgusted with the student for precisely the same reason, "separated" him (to use the suave official phrase) from the University.There was, as I said, a great deal of talk at luncheon that day about cheating. Some of the men seemed to think the presence of proctors during an exam was insulting; but, as Bertie Stockbridge remarked,—and this struck me as unanswerable,—"If you don't cheat yourself and don't want to, what difference does it make whether they 're there or not? And if you do cheat, why, of course, proctors are necessary." In the matter of dishonest written work the same honorable sentiments were expressed. Everybody was sincere, but I could n't help realizing a little that they could not have had very much temptation as yet. If it had n't been for Berri, I probably should have laid down the law as loudly as the rest. But he sat there eating in silence, irritated and oppressed by so much high-minded babbling, and I hated to hurt him by adding to it. Usually he is one of the last to leave the table. That day, however, he hurried through his luncheon and slipped away alone.Oh dear! (How silly those two words look written down, and yet it was what was passing through my mind as I wrote them.) I suppose that what I really mean is, How tiresome it is that a person's acts don't begin and end with himself! There doesn't seem to be any limit to the reach of their influence. It would be so much more simple and easy if you knew just where the consequences of a mistake or an indiscretion, or whatever you choose to call it, began and ended. Now, for instance, take Berri and the thesis. Of course, I think it was all wrong, and was sorry he handed it in; but I wasn't going to let it make any difference in my feelings toward Berri. As far as I am concerned, I don't think it has made a difference. Yet the beastly thing cast a sort of gloom over the house. For Berri after luncheon that day rather avoided the table in general and me in particular. What his object was in doing this, I don't know. It was probably just a feeling on his part; but it made me feel as if I 'd been putting myself on a moral pedestal somehow, and that Berri saw in me a perpetual accusation. Our relations became indescribably changed and sort of formal, and I did n't see how I could make them different. What could I have done? There was nothing, under the circumstances, for me to say. He stopped in my room that night to warm himself for a minute before going to bed, but I don't think he said anything except that it was snowing outside.The next day we had the blizzard. People here usually assume that in the part of the country I come from we have nine months of winter and three of cold weather. But nevertheless I had to come to the staid and temperate East to see the kind of a winter storm you read about in books,—the regular old "Wreck of the Hesperus" kind, in which the crew are "swept like icicles from the deck," and able-bodied men get hopelessly lost and are frozen to death in their own front yards. I was to have dined in town that night with Hemington, who had tickets for a Paderewski recital. But he did n't turn up, so I joined some fellows who found me in the restaurant eating alone, and afterwards went to the theatre with them. It was snowing when we left the restaurant; in fact, great, wet cottony flakes had been falling at intervals all day. (It reminded me of those marvellous paper weights I haven't seen for years and years,—glass globes filled with water in which a white, powdery sediment swirls and drifts and finally settles in the most lifelike way on a beautiful little tin landscape. What's become of them all, I wonder?) But there was no wind, and it was n't particularly cold, so I don't think that anybody suspected what was going to happen before the show was over.It took an unusually long time to get out of the theatre that night; the people in the aisles hardly moved at all. But after we had forced our way through the crowd, and climbed over seats, and finally reached the narrow corridor leading to the entrance, we saw why it was. The ones who had got to the door first were afraid to leave. Within an hour or two the wind had risen and risen until it screamed through the streets, blasting up the fallen snow in wild bewildering spirals and then fiercely slapping it back again in slants of hard, biting cold. From the door of the theatre it was impossible to see beyond the curbstone, except when the half-obliterated lights of a cab lurched by over the drifts. The rumor went through the crowd that the wires were down and that all the cars had stopped. No one seemed to know quite what to do. Just as the people nearest the door would make up their minds to start bravely out, a thick hurricane would strike erratically in at them, causing the ladies to shrink back with little exclamations of dismay. Nobody's carriage had arrived, and the few cabs that appeared ploughed laboriously past us. Our crowd waited a few moments,—more to share the excitement of the others than for anything else; then we turned up our collars and plunged out.Standing at the door of the theatre, the world outside had seemed to me to be in a sort of insane uproar; but as soon as we got away from the human babble, and I lifted my head and opened my eyes and deliberately relaxed my ears, so to speak, I found the city almost solemnly silent. Every now and then, when we came to a cross street or turned a corner, there was, it is true, a sudden shriek and a sort of rattle of fine stinging ice particles; but as long as I could keep myself from being confused inside of me, while we were floundering over drifts and burrowing with our heads through the walls of wind that blocked the way and seemed to be falling on us, I could n't help noticing the terrible muffledness of everything. It was as if the place were being swamped, blotted out, suffocated.When we reached the hotel where we had dined earlier in the evening, the other fellows went in to have something to eat, but for several reasons I decided not to. In the first place, I promised papa that I would try to economize, and I had already unexpectedly squandered two dollars on a theatre ticket, owing to Hemington's failure to appear. Then I felt that if I did n't make a dash for Cambridge right away, I should n't get there at all. (As a matter of fact, I never did reach there until nine the next morning, but it was n't because I did n't try hard enough. The other fellows put up at the hotel.) So I just shouted that I was going on, and as we were all about half frozen, no one stopped to persuade me not to.Well, I found a string of cars about a mile long that were rapidly turning into Esquimau huts, and was told by one of the conductors that something had broken down ahead, and that, as the snow-plough could n't get by, they probably would n't move again until morning. He thought, however, that the other line was running; and I started to grope my way to Bowdoin Square.I would n't go through that experience again for gold and precious stones; and I can't imagine now why I did it in the first place, except that I had acquired by that time a kind of pig-headed determination to reach Cambridge, and did n't know what I was in for. It was n't so bad while I was staggering along by the side of the blocked cars; they were lighted, and I knew that if I changed my mind about going on, I could pop into one of them and be safe. But when I passed the last one and found myself after a while among back streets choked with drifts, and could n't see my way, and fell down twice, and got snow up my sleeves, and my face and hands and feet pained so with cold that I could n't help crying (actually), and I realized at last that I did n't in the least know where I was, I began to be panic-stricken. I 'm not the huskiest person in the world, and all at once the wind blew me smash against an iron railing and almost into a basement of some kind. I think I should have hunted for a door-bell and tried to get into a house if I hadn't a moment later collided with a policeman (fell down again), who helped me up and led me to a sheltered place behind a wall, where I managed to collect myself and tell him what I was looking for. He too was on his way to Bowdoin Square; so after that I just hung on to his coat most of the time, and tried to keep my legs in motion without really knowing much where he was leading me or whether we were making any progress. Once there was a rip-tearing crash over our heads. The policeman jumped aside, and then stopped to exclaim, "Well, I never seen the likes o' that." I think a sign had blown off a building through a plate-glass window. Farther on a dangling wire romped in the wind. It spat dazzling blue and purple at us until we retreated and went around another way, muttering strange Hibernian mutters. When I opened my eyes again, we were in front of the hotel in Bowdoin Square and the policeman was advising me through his frozen mustache not to go to Cambridge. He said the cars had stopped long ago. So I said good-by to him and was just stumbling into the café, when who should come out but Berri and a cabman? They had gone in to get warm before starting across the bridge."I 'm not sure that we can make it," Berri said, "but the man says he's willing to try. I 'll tell you why I don't want to stay at the hotel when we get inside. Look out—look out!" he cried to me, as I opened the cab door and was about to jump in. I drew back, expecting at least to be decapitated or electrocuted, and then Berri explained that he was afraid I might "sit on the pigeons." He entered the cab first, and removed some indistinguishable objects from the back seat to the narrow seat that lifts up in front. "That's why I can't very well stay at the hotel," he went on. "As soon as these poor exhausted little darlings begin to thaw, they 'll fly around and make a dreadful fuss. I 'd rather have them in my own room." He had picked up four half frozen pigeons in the street on his way to the Square, and had carried them—two in his pockets and two in the bosom of his overcoat—until he came across the cab. After we got started, he lighted matches every now and then to see how they were getting along, and we took turns at blowing on their pink feet, all shrivelled with cold. One of them, to Berri's grief, was dead, but by the time the cab stopped suddenly and for the last time in the middle of the bridge (it had been going slower and slower and tipping more perilously over mounds of snow as we proceeded), the other three looked scared and intelligent and began to feel warm under their wings.The driver opened the door and said he could n't go on, as a fallen wire was sagging across the street in front of the horse's nose. We jumped out, and Berri was just about to seize the thing and try to lift it over the horse's head, when I remembered the murderous ecstasy of the other one and jerked him back. Ahead of us there was a drift almost as high as the cab itself, and the man said that even without the wire we never could drive over or through it. So, after a short consultation, he decided to blanket his nag and spend the rest of the night in the cab; the horse was "dead beat," he said, and he very much doubted if it could pull back to town against the wind even after turning around, which was a more or less impossible undertaking in itself. Berri and I packed up the pigeons—the dead one included, as Berri remembered having read in the paper that morning of a case of "suspended animation" somewhere in Texas—and pushed on to the waiting-station at the other end of the bridge.That was a queer night. I was simply played out when I got inside the waiting-room, and I had n't been there more than a few minutes when I discovered that my ear was frozen. A kind, officious woman all but broke it off rubbing snow on it; but though it pained excruciatingly during the night and is still sensitive and has a tendency to stick out at right angles from my head, I think it will recover. There must have been fifteen or twenty people cooped up in the waiting-room and the cigar-stand (with hot soda-water and candy facilities) next door. Some of them were cross and unhappy, and some of them were facetious. One of them had a small dog. Berri's pigeons created a sensation. The cigar-man gave us a box to put them under, and Berri bought them popcorn for fear they might be hungry during the night. The warmth of the room revived them completely, all but the dead one.We talked for a while; but as Berri remembered, now that the excitement was over, to be formal and impersonal once more, it was rather dreary. We could have slept, I think,—in fact we were asleep, when one of the facetious refugees woke us up to ask if we did n't want to join him "and some other gentlemen in a game of euchre." Disappointed at his unsuccessful efforts to interest people in this diversion, he chased the little dog about the room, declaring that he intended to tie a glass of chocolate around its neck and send it out in the storm to look for travellers who had lost their way. It was impossible after that to get to sleep again.We had been sitting with our heads against the wall for almost an hour, waiting for daylight, when Berri, who hadn't said anything for ever so long, suddenly came out with,—"Oh, Granny, I 'm so sorry I did it!" I knew what he meant at once, although the thesis had n't been in my mind at all, and I was just about to advise him to have a talk with Fleetwood and tell him everything, when he added that he would have to stand by himself now, as it was too late to draw back.The worst of the storm was over, the cabman had come in to get warm and tell us that his horse had frozen to death, and the windows of the waiting-room had begun to look pale instead of black, by the time I convinced Berri that it wasn't too late, and that as soon as we got to Cambridge he ought to go to The Holly Tree and wait until Fleetwood came in for his breakfast. When he finally made up his mind to do this, I never saw any one in such a state of impatience. He could n't sit still, and kept running to the door every other minute to see if the snow-plough was coming over the bridge. Once he suggested that we should walk; but although the morning was clear and beautiful, I had had enough of struggling through mountains of snow the night before, and refused. The plough appeared at last, preceded by a whirling cloud and followed by a car. We set the pigeons free (Berri told them all to return with olive branches as quickly as possible) and watched them fly to the nearest telegraph-pole and proceed to make their toilets for the day.It must have been about half an hour after I parted with Berri (he went on to The Holly Tree and I came to my room) that he bounded up the stairs, pale with excitement. He had met Fleetwood, and after a few preliminary remarks about the blizzard (the whole place was submerged) he had blurted out,—"Mr. Fleetwood, I want to tell you something about my thesis; I did n't write it." To which the instructor replied almost indifferently,—"Yes, I noticed that. What was the trouble?" Berri just looked at him in amazement."I said I did n't write it," he faltered."Well, I know that," Fleetwood replied a trifle sharply. He was inclined to be "peevish," Berri said, because the morning papers had n't been delivered."But I want to tell you how sorry I am," Berri added; the situation was much worse, Berri says, than it would have been if Fleetwood had seemed more impressed by his dishonesty. As a matter of fact, Fleetwood merely smiled."Oh, I never had the vaguest idea that youwouldwrite it," he remarked airily. "But if you don't care, I don't. It's much easier for me to give you an E for having failed to hand it in, than it is to read fifty or sixty pages of your impossible writing."At this Berri said he almost reeled from his chair."Did n't I hand it in?" he asked, while his heart thumped painfully. Fleetwood glanced up from his oatmeal only long enough to say,—"I wish you would go some place else to eat; you bother me." But Berri insisted."Dear Mr. Fleetwood," he pleaded eagerly, "please answer me just that one thing. Did n't you find my thesis pushed through your door?" At this Fleetwood put his hands to his head, as he always does when he 's pretending that we 're trying to drive him mad, and moaned,—"First you tell me you have n't written your thesis and then you ask me if I 've picked it up on my floor. Oh, go away, go away! I shall never be able to finish my breakfast and get back through all that ghastly snow to my ten-o'clock lecture." Then Berri dashed out, forgetting to pay for his breakfast, and came to find me.Fleetwood must think that Berri isn't quite right; for he followed the instructor around all day more or less, waiting for him at the doors of lecture halls, intercepting him in front of the Colonial Club at lunch-time, running after him in the Square, and calling on him twice at his room, to ask if the thesis had turned up yet. But of course it never had. At that time neither of us could account for its disappearance, and Berri can't yet. He is existing in a state of nervous dread for fear it "may have fallen behind something" in the dark vestibule and will eventually turn up. Well, it will turn up, but not in Fleetwood's room.Berri spent most of the time in which he wasn't dogging Fleetwood's footsteps discussing the thing with me. But I could n't help him much beyond hoping that the thesis—like the love-letter or the lost will in dramas at the Bowdoin Square Theatre—wouldn't be found until the fifth act, after an elapse of twenty years.I had to leave him alone part of the afternoon. Duncan Duncan sent me word that he was sick and that the Advocate was in dire need. So I floundered through the alley to the printing-office, and learned from the proof-reader that they had to have six inches of poetry immediately or the paper would be very much delayed. I did n't know what to do, as we had n't any poems of that length in stock, so to speak. While I was sitting there in despair, one of the printers gave me a piece of paper and a pencil, and said,—"Here, hurry up and write a couple of sticks of po'try; I want to go home." He was quite serious; so I got to work, and in about fifteen minutes had written twenty lines about the pigeons in the blizzard; only I referred to them, for various technical reasons, as doves. There was a heavenly smell of printer's ink in the place which made it easier to write somehow.No letters came that day from any direction on account of the storm. The next afternoon I met the postman on the steps. He stopped to chat, and I thought I should grab the letters from his hand before he finished, as I caught sight of one in Duggie's handwriting addressed to me. I thought of course that he had postponed his trip and had written to tell me why. The postman talked on and on, but he told me one tale that interested me in spite of myself.One Sunday morning old Professor Pallas (my ally in the hieroglyphics course) went over to the post-office for his letters. He must have been thinking very deeply about recent discoveries or cuneiform inscriptions or some such thing, because when he went up to the window he could n't remember whose letters he had come for. So he said to the clerk,—"Young man, do you know who I am?"The clerk unfortunately was a new one, and had to confess, with regret, that he did n't. So Professor Pallas, after a moment or two of reflection, looked up and murmured through the window,—"I ask you this because I am equally at a loss myself; but perhaps if I take a little walk it may come to me." Then he strolled away, and in about ten minutes returned, very much pleased, with a slip of paper in his hand."I remembered it all by myself," he exclaimed, "and wrote it down."I got Duggie's letter at last, and ran upstairs to read it. This is what it said:—DEAR GRANNY,—We are steaming slowly out of the harbor, and I am sitting in a sheltered corner of the deck writing you this note for the pilot to take back with him. My fingers are stiff with cold, but as the air down below is thick with what Mrs. Chester calls "floral tributes." I 'd rather stay here and say good-by to you and the Goddess of Liberty at the same time.What I wish particularly to do, however, is to thank you for letting me read your diary last night (I have some things to say about it—the parts where I come in, I mean—but that can wait) and to make a confession. When I got to the last page, where the ink was scarcely dry, I dashed over to Fleetwood's room, although I had lingered so long in your room I did n't have any too much time in which to catch my train. Fortunately there was a light in Fleetwood's window. While I was talking to him I saw out of the corner of my eye the great pile of—is the plural "theses" or "thesises"?—on his desk, and when he went into his bedroom for a minute to get a book for me to read going over, I sniped Berri's performance from the top of the pile and stuck it in my pocket. I did it on the impulse of the moment, and I may have been all wrong—I don't know; the whole thing worries me. But don't say anything to Berri about it. I should n't care to get you and the diary into trouble. When I reach Southampton I 'll send the thing back to him with a letter. Good-by, Granny. Take care of yourself and write often.DUGGIE.XIIISome day I 'm going to write a book about Boston, because it's the most wonderful place in the world. I suppose I really mean by this that it is so different from Perugia. Berri, of course, would have to help me,—that is, he would unless I lived here fifty or sixty years for the purpose of gathering notes. It would take about that long to understand everything and be able to write intelligently and sympathetically. Anybody, of course, may sojourn for a time among the Bostonians—just as he may among the Chinese or the strange races of the Pacific islands—and record his impressions of them. But I don't think his remarks would be more valuable than the ordinary travel book that tells you merely the things you could tell yourself if you were on the spot with a pencil and a strong right arm. Really to know the place you have to be born and brought up here; which in itself amounts to saying that Boston will never, never be understood. For the people who were born and brought up here know and won't tell,—"know and can't tell," Berri declares. "It would take a genius to do the thing properly," he says, "and Boston went out of the genius business some thirty or forty years ago."Now, Berri was born in Paris ("Paa-is, France—or Paa-is, Kentucky?" as a Southern girl once asked him), and I don't suppose he's a genius, actually. But as he has, on his mother's side, more cousins and aunts and things in Boston than anybody I 'm ever likely to know so very intimately, and as he seems more like a genius than anybody I 've ever seen before, what he tells me always sounds somehow as if it were the real thing. He laughed, though, the other day—we were taking a long walk—when I said this to him, and answered that it was very evident I did n't know what the real thing was."I'mnot," he added, "if for no other reason than that I am able, quite seriously at times, to consider going some place else to live after I finish with all this." And he fluttered his hand in the direction of Cambridge."Does n't anybody else?" I asked."Mercy, no—how you talk!" he exclaimed. "Why should they?""I suppose I was thinking of papa," I replied meekly. "He believes it's better for most young men to get away from home and start life for themselves as soon as they grow up; they 're always boys to somebody unless they do, he says. Then, besides, he has great faith in perfectly new places. He 's often told me that even Perugia was too old and crowded for a young man. Perugia was fifty-three years old last spring." Berri laughed."That's important, if true," he answered, "but what has it to do with Boston?""Why, I merely imagined that some one in this part of the world might have the same idea," I suggested. "Now, take Duggie, for instance. Don't you think that Duggie wants to get out and try to do something?""Oh, Duggie!" said Berri, with a shrug. "He thinks he does now, but he really doesn't. Of course Duggie is simply slopping over with strenuousness and that sort of thing. But he gets most of it out of books,—Fleetwood's books at that. And after all, as I say, he slops over; it 'll just run into the sand without making even a silly little hole. After a while, when he gets tired of reading, and thinking how unworthy everybody else is, it won't do even that. Duggie in college is stunning and a leader of men; but Duggie at forty will be leading nothing but a beautiful purple life down there at his country-place,—unless, of course, he gets fat; if he gets fat, he 'll be a stockbroker.""Say, Berri, how old are you, anyhow?" I asked. I know he is older than I am, but he never will tell me how much,—he didn't this time,—he just laughs, and says his early education was grossly neglected over there in Europe, or he would have been classes and classes ahead of me. I did n't like what he said about Duggie, and told him so. He answered that I 'd brought it on myself, and I suppose I had."Maybe we'd better talk about Bertie Stockbridge," he added. "He's my third cousin, you know—but, dear me, if people begin to be loyal to third cousins, Boston would turn into a sort of gigantic asylum for deaf mutes. I don't mindwhatyou say about Bertie. Besides, he 's a more perfect specimen than Duggie, because Duggie is passing through a phase. Even Bostonians sometimes pass through phases when they 're very young. It doesn't happen often, though. The truth is, Duggie can't decide whether to be a Greek god or a college settlement. He'd really rather be a Greek god, only it's so immoral. He 'll probably end, you know, by coming out of his trance some June morning and finding himself married. Then it will be too late to be either one or the other. But what was it we were talking about? Oh, yes—Bertie. Now, Bertie isn't passing through a phase. Not on your life. Bertie just rose Venus-like in a state of hopeless completion from the crystal waters of the Back Bay. He never disappoints.""But I like Bertie," I protested; "not as much as I do Duggie, of course. But I do like him; he's so—so—sensible.""Sensible!" Berri screamed. "Why, child, the Stockbridge family isallsense. With trousers bagging at the knee and Adam's apples rising and falling above their abashed collars, Bertie's ancestors came into a lovely foolish world andcreatedsense. That's all they ever do now,—just create one another and sense. So, the next time you hear some old thing groaning about the scarcity of common-sense, you 'll know that it's because the Stockbridges have it all,—they and a few friends who live in the same street during the winter and share several thousand front feet of the Atlantic Ocean from May to November. But you mustn't think I don't like Bertie and his family,—perhaps I should simply say 'Bertie,' for Bertie is his family,—because I do, you know. I admire him very much," Berri added after a moment. "He radiates a sort of atmosphere of modest infallibility that makes me feel exactly as I should feel if I suddenly went into Appleton Chapel and found the Pope there reading the Boston Transcript. Calmly and without the slightest tinge of bitterness, I admit that Bertie is always right."You heard what he said to Bobbie Colburn, didn't you? It was after the hour exam in English 68, and we were all in Bobbie's room comparing notes. Now, Bertie had passed, of course, because he 'll always pass in everything, whether he has any talent for it or not; but he had n't passed particularly well. It takes a person of some imagination to get a good mark in that course. Bobbie Colburn, on the other hand, who apparently hadn't studied at all and who'd been having a fierce time the night before the exam, just sailed into the examination-room with a dress-suit on under his overcoat, and got through brilliantly, which worried Bertie to death. We 'd all made some comment on the matter, and finally Colburn, as if to end it, said in his breezy way, 'Well, you know the old proverb,—He laughs best who drinks most!' Whereupon Bertie fixed him with his fine gray eyes and remarked, 'That is n't the way it goes, Colburn; you 've got it mixed.' Then he repeated the words correctly,—not with triumph exactly, but with the cold joy of one whose life is spent in righting unimportant wrongs."And yet I can't help confessing," Berri mused, "that I 'm exceedingly glad to acknowledge my relationship to Bertie and his tribe. They madden me at times; they have such clear, narrow, unelastic, admirable intellects. Their attitude toward all questions, public or private, is so definite and uncompromising; they 're so dog-gonnedright. Why, American history is just one glad, sweet testimonial to the fact that they 're never wrong. They 're not always on the popular side, or the successful; they 're merely right. Any other human beings would keep on trying to make use of such a splendid faculty. Years and years ago they did make use of it; but nowadays it's enough just to know that they have it, and pretty much all to themselves."But, as I was saying, I 'm secretly darned glad that Bertie and I belong to each other, so to speak. Is n't it funny—I'm not a bit loyal to Bertie, but he 's perfectly loyal to me. He does n't in the least understand me. I don't think he even likes me, although that disturbing thought probably has n't occurred to him yet; but there's no getting around the fact that I 'm one of his relatives, and he accepts me,—accepts me in a way he never will acceptyou, no matter how well he gets to know you and like you. There's something rather fine in that, don't you think? Of course, it might be a good deal of a bore if he took a fancy to me; but as he won't, it's really a great comfort. The fact that that plain, but healthy-looking, silent person in the very badly made dark gray suit accepts me and will always accept me, is equivalent to an illuminated address of welcome and the freedom of the city."You really can't imagine how it simplifies things," Berri continued. "It's such a relief, such an absolution! It leaves me, as some one says, 'with nothing on my mind but my hair and my hat;' and even they don't have to be brushed as long as people consider me a Stockbridge at heart. Why, if I didn't feel like it, I shouldn't have to be even polite. Of course I am polite. But it's a mere habit with me; I dare say I 'll get out of it. You've noticed, haven't you, how brusque and sort of primitive Bertie's manner is as a rule? Well, they 're all more or less like that. People who like them say it arises from shyness and simplicity, and people who don't like them declare that it's just common or domestic rudeness; but it really is n't one or the other, and I think I ought to know. The family manner comes from a curious conviction that politeness, grace, tact—the practice of making oneself agreeable free of charge, so to speak—has to do with the emotions; which is perfectly absurd. The habit of politeness is about as emotional as the habit of brushing one's teeth. But Bertie's tribe does n't think so; and emotion with them is simply another word for effeminacy. You see, they 're so sure of coming up to the scratch in the big things that they let the little ones slide. I think they always vaguely associate politeness with French waiters and Neapolitan cripples. So, in a way, they 'll rather expect it of you; they like all foreigners to seem foreign."Bertie gabbled about no end of things that afternoon. He had what he calls a "dry jag," and hardly ever stopped talking from the time we left our house just after luncheon until we came down Brattle Street on the way back and went into Mrs. Brown's for dinner. Once he and a lot of kids coming out of a schoolhouse away across the river somewhere, pasted one another with snowballs (I joined them) until a policeman made us stop, and for a few minutes the torrent of talk was interrupted. But he made up for it by yelling every time he hit any one or got hit himself. He told me all sorts of tales, and I could n't help thinking how different everything was from Perugia.It had never occurred to me before that Perugia was so happy-go-lucky and uncivilized. Why, out there we just seem to grow up like those great round weeds on the prairie that suddenly let go for no particular reason and then bound along in the breeze through the wide flat streets until they run against a fence or a house and, for a while, stick there. It does n't seem to me that anything much is decided for us in advance. I did n't know even that I was coming to college until about a year and a half beforehand,—which made it simply awful, as I had to study everything at once and did n't learn much of anything. Now, Berri says that, with the exception of himself, who was "grossly neglected" and never studied anything but French and German, his entire family for generations has lived by a sort of educational and social calendar from which they never deviate except in the event of a civil war. He says he should n't be a bit surprised to learn that there were certain definite, unalterable dates at which the little boys began and left off tin soldiers and the breeding of guinea-pigs, and the little girls began and left off paper-dolls and "dressing up." He declares that, providing the laws of nature are reasonably consistent, they all know exactly what they 'll be doing at any period of their lives; that even matrimony has ceased to be a lottery with them, as they go in for marrying, not individuals, but types. Isn't it perfectly wonderful?"Now, take Bertie," he said. "Bertie knew who his classmates in college were going to be, at the age of five. They 're the same chaps he's been going to school with, and to the kid dancing-classes, you know, the Saturday Mornings and Thursday Afternoons or whatever they are, all these years. They go to the Friday Evenings this year, and next year they 'll go to the Saturday Evenings, and at all these morns and noons and dewy eves they dance with the same girls that two years from now they 'll meet in society and subsequently marry, just because it's part of the routine. After they get out of college they 'll all go abroad for a few months in groups of three and four, and when they get back they 'll be taken into the same club (their names will have been on the waiting list some twenty-odd years), and they 'll join a lunch club down town in order not to miss seeing one another every day at noon for the rest of their lives."Then Berri told me about the girls. Really my heart bleeds for the girls, because apparently, unless they are terribly pretty or terribly clever or terribly rich, they must have a devil of a time. Berri says that although they all "come out," they don't all stay out; that after about a year or so a good many of them sort of slink in again by unanimous consent. (Imagine such a thing in Perugia! Why, every girl has a good time there for just as long as she wants to.) The pretty ones, however, never go in again; because, if you once get a reputation for beauty here, Berri says it never leaves you (the reputation, I mean), and that 's why an evening party in Boston often strikes a stranger as being so largely a matter of physical traditions. At a dance the rich plain girls, he says, have a good time too, but only for the first part of the evening. The men speak of them as "pills" (a quaint, chivalrous custom, is it not?), and try to dance with them as early in the evening as possible, because everybody else is trying to do the same thing and there isn't so great a chance of getting stuck for an hour or so. But later on they ask only the ones they really want to dance with, and the plain rich girl finds herself spending a cozy eternity with some one who is inwardly moaning because he delayed until the rush was over.The girls too are born into a sort of rut, Berri says. It takes the form of sewing-circles. Berri can discourse for hours at a time on these institutions. His aunt Josephine has been going to the same one every week for fifty years. He said that once when he was a little child he heard an Englishman who had lived in India telling about the mysterious rapidity with which a piece of news spread among the natives of that country. Within half a day, this man declared, a rumor would sort of leap through the air from Calcutta to the most obscure villages on the Afghan frontier, and no one could explain how it was done. Berri used to fall asleep at night worrying over it. But now, even in India romance is dead, Berri says; he 's convinced that the whole thing was nothing but just sewing-circles."Why, Granny, if I were to lock myself up in my room in Cambridge and draw the curtains and stuff the keyhole and then murmur in a low voice that—well, for instance, that you and Sarah Bernhardt had been quietly married at the First Baptist Church in Somerville that afternoon, and then dash in to my aunt Josephine's as fast as a car could take me, she would greet me in the library with: 'My dear,haveyou heard! I 've just come from the sewing-circle, and they say—of course I don't believe it'—and so on. And this is n't any idle jest, either; it's a fact."He was just beginning to tell me something else about them—I forget what—when we both realized that it was rather late, and that if we expected to get back in time for dinner we should have to find a shorter way or take the car. We neither of us knew where we were, although Berri said the place looked as if it might be called "Upper-West-Newtonville-Centre Corners." So we stopped a little girl who was trudging along with a pitcher of milk in her hand."Little girl, can you tell me where we are?" Berri asked her solemnly. She stared at us for a moment with great round eyes (Berri admitted afterwards that the question was a stupid one), and finally answered in a high, scornful little voice,—"Main Street."Berri refused to ask again after that, and we strolled about for a time until we caught sight of the tower of Memorial,—it suddenly appeared against the sky in quite the wrong direction,—and then of course getting home was easy enough.We were rather confidential on the way back, and talked about the "Dickey," which we had never discussed before. The Dickey is the great Sophomore secret society. I don't remember just how the subject came up, but something reminded Berri of one night earlier in the year,—one of the nights on which the society takes on ten new members. They choose them from the Sophomore class always except late in the spring, just before college closes, when ten—the "First Ten"—are elected from among the Freshmen. However, by that time the Freshmen are almost Sophomores, so it amounts to about the same thing. When a ten is taken on, the whole club marches through the streets at about eleven o'clock at night, singing a song that has no words but "Tra la la la, la la, la la." It's a wonderful little tune; it's very short and simple, and after you 've heard it once it sticks in your head, you can't forget it. Unlike other catchy airs, though, you somehow don't get tired of it. I 've heard it over and over again since I 've been here,—on pianos as I passed under the windows of upper classmen, whistled by muckers in the Yard, and sung by the club at night,—and it always gives me a thrill; I suppose it 's because it means such a lot, and because you realize that no one (except the muckers) would play it or sing it or whistle it who was n't entitled to.On the night that Berri referred to, the club must have been half a mile away when we first heard it. Berri was in my room reading, and I was writing a letter. My back was toward him, and we neither of us said anything when the vague musical "tra la la las" floated up from away down by the river somewhere. They were very faint, and after a minute or two stopped entirely. Then, just as I had forgotten about it, the song began again,—a little louder and more distinct this time and getting louder every second. Then it suddenly broke off once more. But I didn't forget it, for I knew that the club had stopped to take some one out of his room—some one who had just been elected—and march him along with the others, and I waited kind of nervously for the refrain to begin again; it never gets started quite evenly,—only a few voices at first, the rest joining in as the crowd turns away from the door of the "neophyte's" house and starts along the street. They came nearer and nearer,—the song grew louder and louder. Some of the fellows were singing a clear tenor that made the last few notes of every verse die away in a kind of high, sad wail. It seemed ridiculous for me to be sitting there pretending to write a letter, with Berri reading in such elaborate unconsciousness by the fire, when the ears of both of us were strained to catch every note, and the hoarse, fierce shouts that suddenly broke through the song as the Dickey turned into our street; but neither of us knew what to say exactly. At last, however, I could n't stand it any longer, and jumped up and blew out both the lamps. With the room dark we could stand at the window and not be seen. Freshmen are n't expected to show any particular interest in the proceedings of the Dickey; it's considered fresh. They were just tramping past our house when we leaned out,—a singing, shouting, irresistible mob,—and Berri and I looked down at them in silence. We were both excited, and I felt chilly all over—but that may have been on account of the open window. The crowd did not pass on, as we thought it would, but stopped at a house across the street a few doors down. Once more the song ceased; men formed in a double line that reached from the piazza to the street, and there were hoarse cries of "Pull him out—pull him out!" Then the front door burst open, and a fellow—he seemed to be half dressed—came hurtling through the air between the double row waiting for him. There was a moment of confusion and savage yells, during which it looked as if the whole crowd was trying to get its hands on him. We lost sight of him in the shuffle, and in another instant the song began, louder than before, and the Dickey swayed away into the darkness. We stood at the window until the clearness and energy of the "Tra la la la, la la, la la," faded to a thin, dim, uncertain rhythm,—a suggestion of tenor that all but lost itself in the pearly fog rolling up from the marshes.I fumbled for a match when we turned at last to the room. But before I found one, Berri said, "I think I 'll go to bed, Granny," and by the time I got the lamp lighted he had slipped away. I don't know why exactly, but I was rather glad he hadn't waited. After that I tried to finish my letter, but I could n't make myself end the sentence I had been writing the way I had meant to end it in the first place. So I put the thing in the fire and sat there awhile, thinking, and then went to bed myself.
Later.
Just as I had written that far, the front door opened and slammed and the tin steps clattered as they only do when Duggie is coming up. The loneliness of the house, and the feeling that college opened to-morrow, and Duggie on the stairs all took me back to my first evening in Cambridge. The only difference was that instead of going to his own room Duggie this time came bursting into mine.
"I came to say good-by," he exclaimed; and when I got over my astonishment, he went on to tell me that he had decided during the vacation to go away—to Europe—and stay until Class Day. He had never told me before that he had taken his degree in three years, and that it would n't have been necessary for him to come back this year at all if he had n't wanted to. He has been entitled to his degree for months; but of course he is anxious to graduate with his own class in the spring. He has n't talked to any one about going abroad, as he was n't sure of it until a few days ago.
"I 'm leaving on the midnight train to-night," he said, "and I came out here on the chance of your having got back. My family are all in the country, I left them this afternoon." I wanted to tell him how sorry I was that he was leaving us, and how glad I was that he could go; but somehow I don't think I showed what I really felt. The time was so short (I had promised Duncan Duncan to help him with some Advocate editorials at half past eight), and those things never seem to sound the way I should like to have them. But in a way I had an opportunity to let him know how I felt toward him, for while we were sitting there, he laughed and said,—
"As you won't stay and talk to me, I think you might at least do the next best thing. You know I 've always wanted to read this, and now that I 'm going away, you ought to let me." Then he took my diary from the mantelpiece and pretended to read the first page.
My first impulse was to ask him not to. If he had been going to stay in Cambridge, I should n't have let him, of course; but as he was leaving in a few hours and seemed anxious to read the thing, and as it really did n't make any difference whether he did or not, I finally let him.
"I don't see why you want to, and you probably won't get beyond the first few pages, but you may," I said.
So I left him by the fire with the diary in his hand. I thought perhaps I should find a note about it when I got back this evening, but I didn't.
XII
Poor Berri! I felt so sorry for him. I do yet, in fact; for although things can't possibly turn out in the way he thinks they may, I can't tell him so, and he lives in a state of perpetual dread. But it won't last long now; Duggie's steamer must have almost reached Southampton by this time, and it won't take more than a week or eight days for Berri to hear from Duggie himself. I came very near giving the thing away at one time. It's hard not to, although I realize that Duggie was wise when he asked me to let matters take their course.
It just happened that the next day after Berri had delivered his thesis, the talk at luncheon turned on cheating at exams and handing in written work that is n't your own. The sentiment against cheating seemed to be strong, partly from a sense of honor and partly from a sense of risk. As a matter of fact, I don't see how fellows can very well manage to cheat here—during an examination, that is to say—even if they want to. There are always a lot of proctors prowling up and down the room, ready to jump on anybody who has suspicious-looking bits of paper on his desk, or who seems to be unduly interested in his lap or the condition of his cuffs. And then, besides, assuming that the instructor occasionally gets absorbed in a newspaper and the proctors stroll to the windows to watch the muckers throwing snowballs in the Yard, how could a student prepare himself for this rare opportunity? It may be different in courses that involve the exact sciences, where certain definite formulas copied on a small bit of paper might be of use; but in the sort of things I take, one would have to conceal upon oneself the Encyclopædia Britannica, Ploetz's Epitome of History, Geschmitzenmenger's Ancient Art, or the Dictionary of Biography, in order to accomplish any really effective deception.
With written work it seems to be easier. If a man hands in a theme or a thesis in his own hand, the instructors are more or less forced to accept it as original, unless of course it was taken outright from a book and they happen to be familiar with the book. From what the fellows at the table said, there must be more of this sort of thing done than I had imagined; although, since Berri opened my eyes, I could believe almost anything. One of the fellows told about a student—a Junior—he had heard of who succeeded in getting himself fired two or three years ago in a rather complicated way. He was engaged, and his lady-love sent him a poem in one of her letters, saying that she had written it for him. The letter arrived while he was struggling with a daily theme; so he murmured to himself, "Tush! I 'll copy Araminta's pretty verses and send them in as my own; as they have just gushed from her surcharged heart into her letter, no one will be the wiser." A few days later the omnivorous Advocate asked permission to print them, and as they had received words of praise from the instructor, and as the fellow by that time had no doubt begun to believe he had written them himself, he allowed them to be published under his name. Somebody sent a copy of the Advocate to Araminta, who replied with an indignant letter to herfutur; and while he was trying to think up an explanation of the matter with which to pacify her, somebody else came out in the Crimson with a most withering communication, asking how the Advocate dared to print as original a poem that had been written by his grandfather, the late Donovan H. Dennison, whose complete poetical works ("Dan Cupid and other Idyls") could be found in the college library at any time. Whereupon the student, disgusted at his lady-love's dishonesty in palming off the late Donovan H. Dennison's verses as original, broke his engagement; and the college, disgusted with the student for precisely the same reason, "separated" him (to use the suave official phrase) from the University.
There was, as I said, a great deal of talk at luncheon that day about cheating. Some of the men seemed to think the presence of proctors during an exam was insulting; but, as Bertie Stockbridge remarked,—and this struck me as unanswerable,—"If you don't cheat yourself and don't want to, what difference does it make whether they 're there or not? And if you do cheat, why, of course, proctors are necessary." In the matter of dishonest written work the same honorable sentiments were expressed. Everybody was sincere, but I could n't help realizing a little that they could not have had very much temptation as yet. If it had n't been for Berri, I probably should have laid down the law as loudly as the rest. But he sat there eating in silence, irritated and oppressed by so much high-minded babbling, and I hated to hurt him by adding to it. Usually he is one of the last to leave the table. That day, however, he hurried through his luncheon and slipped away alone.
Oh dear! (How silly those two words look written down, and yet it was what was passing through my mind as I wrote them.) I suppose that what I really mean is, How tiresome it is that a person's acts don't begin and end with himself! There doesn't seem to be any limit to the reach of their influence. It would be so much more simple and easy if you knew just where the consequences of a mistake or an indiscretion, or whatever you choose to call it, began and ended. Now, for instance, take Berri and the thesis. Of course, I think it was all wrong, and was sorry he handed it in; but I wasn't going to let it make any difference in my feelings toward Berri. As far as I am concerned, I don't think it has made a difference. Yet the beastly thing cast a sort of gloom over the house. For Berri after luncheon that day rather avoided the table in general and me in particular. What his object was in doing this, I don't know. It was probably just a feeling on his part; but it made me feel as if I 'd been putting myself on a moral pedestal somehow, and that Berri saw in me a perpetual accusation. Our relations became indescribably changed and sort of formal, and I did n't see how I could make them different. What could I have done? There was nothing, under the circumstances, for me to say. He stopped in my room that night to warm himself for a minute before going to bed, but I don't think he said anything except that it was snowing outside.
The next day we had the blizzard. People here usually assume that in the part of the country I come from we have nine months of winter and three of cold weather. But nevertheless I had to come to the staid and temperate East to see the kind of a winter storm you read about in books,—the regular old "Wreck of the Hesperus" kind, in which the crew are "swept like icicles from the deck," and able-bodied men get hopelessly lost and are frozen to death in their own front yards. I was to have dined in town that night with Hemington, who had tickets for a Paderewski recital. But he did n't turn up, so I joined some fellows who found me in the restaurant eating alone, and afterwards went to the theatre with them. It was snowing when we left the restaurant; in fact, great, wet cottony flakes had been falling at intervals all day. (It reminded me of those marvellous paper weights I haven't seen for years and years,—glass globes filled with water in which a white, powdery sediment swirls and drifts and finally settles in the most lifelike way on a beautiful little tin landscape. What's become of them all, I wonder?) But there was no wind, and it was n't particularly cold, so I don't think that anybody suspected what was going to happen before the show was over.
It took an unusually long time to get out of the theatre that night; the people in the aisles hardly moved at all. But after we had forced our way through the crowd, and climbed over seats, and finally reached the narrow corridor leading to the entrance, we saw why it was. The ones who had got to the door first were afraid to leave. Within an hour or two the wind had risen and risen until it screamed through the streets, blasting up the fallen snow in wild bewildering spirals and then fiercely slapping it back again in slants of hard, biting cold. From the door of the theatre it was impossible to see beyond the curbstone, except when the half-obliterated lights of a cab lurched by over the drifts. The rumor went through the crowd that the wires were down and that all the cars had stopped. No one seemed to know quite what to do. Just as the people nearest the door would make up their minds to start bravely out, a thick hurricane would strike erratically in at them, causing the ladies to shrink back with little exclamations of dismay. Nobody's carriage had arrived, and the few cabs that appeared ploughed laboriously past us. Our crowd waited a few moments,—more to share the excitement of the others than for anything else; then we turned up our collars and plunged out.
Standing at the door of the theatre, the world outside had seemed to me to be in a sort of insane uproar; but as soon as we got away from the human babble, and I lifted my head and opened my eyes and deliberately relaxed my ears, so to speak, I found the city almost solemnly silent. Every now and then, when we came to a cross street or turned a corner, there was, it is true, a sudden shriek and a sort of rattle of fine stinging ice particles; but as long as I could keep myself from being confused inside of me, while we were floundering over drifts and burrowing with our heads through the walls of wind that blocked the way and seemed to be falling on us, I could n't help noticing the terrible muffledness of everything. It was as if the place were being swamped, blotted out, suffocated.
When we reached the hotel where we had dined earlier in the evening, the other fellows went in to have something to eat, but for several reasons I decided not to. In the first place, I promised papa that I would try to economize, and I had already unexpectedly squandered two dollars on a theatre ticket, owing to Hemington's failure to appear. Then I felt that if I did n't make a dash for Cambridge right away, I should n't get there at all. (As a matter of fact, I never did reach there until nine the next morning, but it was n't because I did n't try hard enough. The other fellows put up at the hotel.) So I just shouted that I was going on, and as we were all about half frozen, no one stopped to persuade me not to.
Well, I found a string of cars about a mile long that were rapidly turning into Esquimau huts, and was told by one of the conductors that something had broken down ahead, and that, as the snow-plough could n't get by, they probably would n't move again until morning. He thought, however, that the other line was running; and I started to grope my way to Bowdoin Square.
I would n't go through that experience again for gold and precious stones; and I can't imagine now why I did it in the first place, except that I had acquired by that time a kind of pig-headed determination to reach Cambridge, and did n't know what I was in for. It was n't so bad while I was staggering along by the side of the blocked cars; they were lighted, and I knew that if I changed my mind about going on, I could pop into one of them and be safe. But when I passed the last one and found myself after a while among back streets choked with drifts, and could n't see my way, and fell down twice, and got snow up my sleeves, and my face and hands and feet pained so with cold that I could n't help crying (actually), and I realized at last that I did n't in the least know where I was, I began to be panic-stricken. I 'm not the huskiest person in the world, and all at once the wind blew me smash against an iron railing and almost into a basement of some kind. I think I should have hunted for a door-bell and tried to get into a house if I hadn't a moment later collided with a policeman (fell down again), who helped me up and led me to a sheltered place behind a wall, where I managed to collect myself and tell him what I was looking for. He too was on his way to Bowdoin Square; so after that I just hung on to his coat most of the time, and tried to keep my legs in motion without really knowing much where he was leading me or whether we were making any progress. Once there was a rip-tearing crash over our heads. The policeman jumped aside, and then stopped to exclaim, "Well, I never seen the likes o' that." I think a sign had blown off a building through a plate-glass window. Farther on a dangling wire romped in the wind. It spat dazzling blue and purple at us until we retreated and went around another way, muttering strange Hibernian mutters. When I opened my eyes again, we were in front of the hotel in Bowdoin Square and the policeman was advising me through his frozen mustache not to go to Cambridge. He said the cars had stopped long ago. So I said good-by to him and was just stumbling into the café, when who should come out but Berri and a cabman? They had gone in to get warm before starting across the bridge.
"I 'm not sure that we can make it," Berri said, "but the man says he's willing to try. I 'll tell you why I don't want to stay at the hotel when we get inside. Look out—look out!" he cried to me, as I opened the cab door and was about to jump in. I drew back, expecting at least to be decapitated or electrocuted, and then Berri explained that he was afraid I might "sit on the pigeons." He entered the cab first, and removed some indistinguishable objects from the back seat to the narrow seat that lifts up in front. "That's why I can't very well stay at the hotel," he went on. "As soon as these poor exhausted little darlings begin to thaw, they 'll fly around and make a dreadful fuss. I 'd rather have them in my own room." He had picked up four half frozen pigeons in the street on his way to the Square, and had carried them—two in his pockets and two in the bosom of his overcoat—until he came across the cab. After we got started, he lighted matches every now and then to see how they were getting along, and we took turns at blowing on their pink feet, all shrivelled with cold. One of them, to Berri's grief, was dead, but by the time the cab stopped suddenly and for the last time in the middle of the bridge (it had been going slower and slower and tipping more perilously over mounds of snow as we proceeded), the other three looked scared and intelligent and began to feel warm under their wings.
The driver opened the door and said he could n't go on, as a fallen wire was sagging across the street in front of the horse's nose. We jumped out, and Berri was just about to seize the thing and try to lift it over the horse's head, when I remembered the murderous ecstasy of the other one and jerked him back. Ahead of us there was a drift almost as high as the cab itself, and the man said that even without the wire we never could drive over or through it. So, after a short consultation, he decided to blanket his nag and spend the rest of the night in the cab; the horse was "dead beat," he said, and he very much doubted if it could pull back to town against the wind even after turning around, which was a more or less impossible undertaking in itself. Berri and I packed up the pigeons—the dead one included, as Berri remembered having read in the paper that morning of a case of "suspended animation" somewhere in Texas—and pushed on to the waiting-station at the other end of the bridge.
That was a queer night. I was simply played out when I got inside the waiting-room, and I had n't been there more than a few minutes when I discovered that my ear was frozen. A kind, officious woman all but broke it off rubbing snow on it; but though it pained excruciatingly during the night and is still sensitive and has a tendency to stick out at right angles from my head, I think it will recover. There must have been fifteen or twenty people cooped up in the waiting-room and the cigar-stand (with hot soda-water and candy facilities) next door. Some of them were cross and unhappy, and some of them were facetious. One of them had a small dog. Berri's pigeons created a sensation. The cigar-man gave us a box to put them under, and Berri bought them popcorn for fear they might be hungry during the night. The warmth of the room revived them completely, all but the dead one.
We talked for a while; but as Berri remembered, now that the excitement was over, to be formal and impersonal once more, it was rather dreary. We could have slept, I think,—in fact we were asleep, when one of the facetious refugees woke us up to ask if we did n't want to join him "and some other gentlemen in a game of euchre." Disappointed at his unsuccessful efforts to interest people in this diversion, he chased the little dog about the room, declaring that he intended to tie a glass of chocolate around its neck and send it out in the storm to look for travellers who had lost their way. It was impossible after that to get to sleep again.
We had been sitting with our heads against the wall for almost an hour, waiting for daylight, when Berri, who hadn't said anything for ever so long, suddenly came out with,—
"Oh, Granny, I 'm so sorry I did it!" I knew what he meant at once, although the thesis had n't been in my mind at all, and I was just about to advise him to have a talk with Fleetwood and tell him everything, when he added that he would have to stand by himself now, as it was too late to draw back.
The worst of the storm was over, the cabman had come in to get warm and tell us that his horse had frozen to death, and the windows of the waiting-room had begun to look pale instead of black, by the time I convinced Berri that it wasn't too late, and that as soon as we got to Cambridge he ought to go to The Holly Tree and wait until Fleetwood came in for his breakfast. When he finally made up his mind to do this, I never saw any one in such a state of impatience. He could n't sit still, and kept running to the door every other minute to see if the snow-plough was coming over the bridge. Once he suggested that we should walk; but although the morning was clear and beautiful, I had had enough of struggling through mountains of snow the night before, and refused. The plough appeared at last, preceded by a whirling cloud and followed by a car. We set the pigeons free (Berri told them all to return with olive branches as quickly as possible) and watched them fly to the nearest telegraph-pole and proceed to make their toilets for the day.
It must have been about half an hour after I parted with Berri (he went on to The Holly Tree and I came to my room) that he bounded up the stairs, pale with excitement. He had met Fleetwood, and after a few preliminary remarks about the blizzard (the whole place was submerged) he had blurted out,—
"Mr. Fleetwood, I want to tell you something about my thesis; I did n't write it." To which the instructor replied almost indifferently,—
"Yes, I noticed that. What was the trouble?" Berri just looked at him in amazement.
"I said I did n't write it," he faltered.
"Well, I know that," Fleetwood replied a trifle sharply. He was inclined to be "peevish," Berri said, because the morning papers had n't been delivered.
"But I want to tell you how sorry I am," Berri added; the situation was much worse, Berri says, than it would have been if Fleetwood had seemed more impressed by his dishonesty. As a matter of fact, Fleetwood merely smiled.
"Oh, I never had the vaguest idea that youwouldwrite it," he remarked airily. "But if you don't care, I don't. It's much easier for me to give you an E for having failed to hand it in, than it is to read fifty or sixty pages of your impossible writing."
At this Berri said he almost reeled from his chair.
"Did n't I hand it in?" he asked, while his heart thumped painfully. Fleetwood glanced up from his oatmeal only long enough to say,—
"I wish you would go some place else to eat; you bother me." But Berri insisted.
"Dear Mr. Fleetwood," he pleaded eagerly, "please answer me just that one thing. Did n't you find my thesis pushed through your door?" At this Fleetwood put his hands to his head, as he always does when he 's pretending that we 're trying to drive him mad, and moaned,—
"First you tell me you have n't written your thesis and then you ask me if I 've picked it up on my floor. Oh, go away, go away! I shall never be able to finish my breakfast and get back through all that ghastly snow to my ten-o'clock lecture." Then Berri dashed out, forgetting to pay for his breakfast, and came to find me.
Fleetwood must think that Berri isn't quite right; for he followed the instructor around all day more or less, waiting for him at the doors of lecture halls, intercepting him in front of the Colonial Club at lunch-time, running after him in the Square, and calling on him twice at his room, to ask if the thesis had turned up yet. But of course it never had. At that time neither of us could account for its disappearance, and Berri can't yet. He is existing in a state of nervous dread for fear it "may have fallen behind something" in the dark vestibule and will eventually turn up. Well, it will turn up, but not in Fleetwood's room.
Berri spent most of the time in which he wasn't dogging Fleetwood's footsteps discussing the thing with me. But I could n't help him much beyond hoping that the thesis—like the love-letter or the lost will in dramas at the Bowdoin Square Theatre—wouldn't be found until the fifth act, after an elapse of twenty years.
I had to leave him alone part of the afternoon. Duncan Duncan sent me word that he was sick and that the Advocate was in dire need. So I floundered through the alley to the printing-office, and learned from the proof-reader that they had to have six inches of poetry immediately or the paper would be very much delayed. I did n't know what to do, as we had n't any poems of that length in stock, so to speak. While I was sitting there in despair, one of the printers gave me a piece of paper and a pencil, and said,—
"Here, hurry up and write a couple of sticks of po'try; I want to go home." He was quite serious; so I got to work, and in about fifteen minutes had written twenty lines about the pigeons in the blizzard; only I referred to them, for various technical reasons, as doves. There was a heavenly smell of printer's ink in the place which made it easier to write somehow.
No letters came that day from any direction on account of the storm. The next afternoon I met the postman on the steps. He stopped to chat, and I thought I should grab the letters from his hand before he finished, as I caught sight of one in Duggie's handwriting addressed to me. I thought of course that he had postponed his trip and had written to tell me why. The postman talked on and on, but he told me one tale that interested me in spite of myself.
One Sunday morning old Professor Pallas (my ally in the hieroglyphics course) went over to the post-office for his letters. He must have been thinking very deeply about recent discoveries or cuneiform inscriptions or some such thing, because when he went up to the window he could n't remember whose letters he had come for. So he said to the clerk,—
"Young man, do you know who I am?"
The clerk unfortunately was a new one, and had to confess, with regret, that he did n't. So Professor Pallas, after a moment or two of reflection, looked up and murmured through the window,—
"I ask you this because I am equally at a loss myself; but perhaps if I take a little walk it may come to me." Then he strolled away, and in about ten minutes returned, very much pleased, with a slip of paper in his hand.
"I remembered it all by myself," he exclaimed, "and wrote it down."
I got Duggie's letter at last, and ran upstairs to read it. This is what it said:—
DEAR GRANNY,—We are steaming slowly out of the harbor, and I am sitting in a sheltered corner of the deck writing you this note for the pilot to take back with him. My fingers are stiff with cold, but as the air down below is thick with what Mrs. Chester calls "floral tributes." I 'd rather stay here and say good-by to you and the Goddess of Liberty at the same time.
What I wish particularly to do, however, is to thank you for letting me read your diary last night (I have some things to say about it—the parts where I come in, I mean—but that can wait) and to make a confession. When I got to the last page, where the ink was scarcely dry, I dashed over to Fleetwood's room, although I had lingered so long in your room I did n't have any too much time in which to catch my train. Fortunately there was a light in Fleetwood's window. While I was talking to him I saw out of the corner of my eye the great pile of—is the plural "theses" or "thesises"?—on his desk, and when he went into his bedroom for a minute to get a book for me to read going over, I sniped Berri's performance from the top of the pile and stuck it in my pocket. I did it on the impulse of the moment, and I may have been all wrong—I don't know; the whole thing worries me. But don't say anything to Berri about it. I should n't care to get you and the diary into trouble. When I reach Southampton I 'll send the thing back to him with a letter. Good-by, Granny. Take care of yourself and write often.
DUGGIE.
XIII
Some day I 'm going to write a book about Boston, because it's the most wonderful place in the world. I suppose I really mean by this that it is so different from Perugia. Berri, of course, would have to help me,—that is, he would unless I lived here fifty or sixty years for the purpose of gathering notes. It would take about that long to understand everything and be able to write intelligently and sympathetically. Anybody, of course, may sojourn for a time among the Bostonians—just as he may among the Chinese or the strange races of the Pacific islands—and record his impressions of them. But I don't think his remarks would be more valuable than the ordinary travel book that tells you merely the things you could tell yourself if you were on the spot with a pencil and a strong right arm. Really to know the place you have to be born and brought up here; which in itself amounts to saying that Boston will never, never be understood. For the people who were born and brought up here know and won't tell,—"know and can't tell," Berri declares. "It would take a genius to do the thing properly," he says, "and Boston went out of the genius business some thirty or forty years ago."
Now, Berri was born in Paris ("Paa-is, France—or Paa-is, Kentucky?" as a Southern girl once asked him), and I don't suppose he's a genius, actually. But as he has, on his mother's side, more cousins and aunts and things in Boston than anybody I 'm ever likely to know so very intimately, and as he seems more like a genius than anybody I 've ever seen before, what he tells me always sounds somehow as if it were the real thing. He laughed, though, the other day—we were taking a long walk—when I said this to him, and answered that it was very evident I did n't know what the real thing was.
"I'mnot," he added, "if for no other reason than that I am able, quite seriously at times, to consider going some place else to live after I finish with all this." And he fluttered his hand in the direction of Cambridge.
"Does n't anybody else?" I asked.
"Mercy, no—how you talk!" he exclaimed. "Why should they?"
"I suppose I was thinking of papa," I replied meekly. "He believes it's better for most young men to get away from home and start life for themselves as soon as they grow up; they 're always boys to somebody unless they do, he says. Then, besides, he has great faith in perfectly new places. He 's often told me that even Perugia was too old and crowded for a young man. Perugia was fifty-three years old last spring." Berri laughed.
"That's important, if true," he answered, "but what has it to do with Boston?"
"Why, I merely imagined that some one in this part of the world might have the same idea," I suggested. "Now, take Duggie, for instance. Don't you think that Duggie wants to get out and try to do something?"
"Oh, Duggie!" said Berri, with a shrug. "He thinks he does now, but he really doesn't. Of course Duggie is simply slopping over with strenuousness and that sort of thing. But he gets most of it out of books,—Fleetwood's books at that. And after all, as I say, he slops over; it 'll just run into the sand without making even a silly little hole. After a while, when he gets tired of reading, and thinking how unworthy everybody else is, it won't do even that. Duggie in college is stunning and a leader of men; but Duggie at forty will be leading nothing but a beautiful purple life down there at his country-place,—unless, of course, he gets fat; if he gets fat, he 'll be a stockbroker."
"Say, Berri, how old are you, anyhow?" I asked. I know he is older than I am, but he never will tell me how much,—he didn't this time,—he just laughs, and says his early education was grossly neglected over there in Europe, or he would have been classes and classes ahead of me. I did n't like what he said about Duggie, and told him so. He answered that I 'd brought it on myself, and I suppose I had.
"Maybe we'd better talk about Bertie Stockbridge," he added. "He's my third cousin, you know—but, dear me, if people begin to be loyal to third cousins, Boston would turn into a sort of gigantic asylum for deaf mutes. I don't mindwhatyou say about Bertie. Besides, he 's a more perfect specimen than Duggie, because Duggie is passing through a phase. Even Bostonians sometimes pass through phases when they 're very young. It doesn't happen often, though. The truth is, Duggie can't decide whether to be a Greek god or a college settlement. He'd really rather be a Greek god, only it's so immoral. He 'll probably end, you know, by coming out of his trance some June morning and finding himself married. Then it will be too late to be either one or the other. But what was it we were talking about? Oh, yes—Bertie. Now, Bertie isn't passing through a phase. Not on your life. Bertie just rose Venus-like in a state of hopeless completion from the crystal waters of the Back Bay. He never disappoints."
"But I like Bertie," I protested; "not as much as I do Duggie, of course. But I do like him; he's so—so—sensible."
"Sensible!" Berri screamed. "Why, child, the Stockbridge family isallsense. With trousers bagging at the knee and Adam's apples rising and falling above their abashed collars, Bertie's ancestors came into a lovely foolish world andcreatedsense. That's all they ever do now,—just create one another and sense. So, the next time you hear some old thing groaning about the scarcity of common-sense, you 'll know that it's because the Stockbridges have it all,—they and a few friends who live in the same street during the winter and share several thousand front feet of the Atlantic Ocean from May to November. But you mustn't think I don't like Bertie and his family,—perhaps I should simply say 'Bertie,' for Bertie is his family,—because I do, you know. I admire him very much," Berri added after a moment. "He radiates a sort of atmosphere of modest infallibility that makes me feel exactly as I should feel if I suddenly went into Appleton Chapel and found the Pope there reading the Boston Transcript. Calmly and without the slightest tinge of bitterness, I admit that Bertie is always right.
"You heard what he said to Bobbie Colburn, didn't you? It was after the hour exam in English 68, and we were all in Bobbie's room comparing notes. Now, Bertie had passed, of course, because he 'll always pass in everything, whether he has any talent for it or not; but he had n't passed particularly well. It takes a person of some imagination to get a good mark in that course. Bobbie Colburn, on the other hand, who apparently hadn't studied at all and who'd been having a fierce time the night before the exam, just sailed into the examination-room with a dress-suit on under his overcoat, and got through brilliantly, which worried Bertie to death. We 'd all made some comment on the matter, and finally Colburn, as if to end it, said in his breezy way, 'Well, you know the old proverb,—He laughs best who drinks most!' Whereupon Bertie fixed him with his fine gray eyes and remarked, 'That is n't the way it goes, Colburn; you 've got it mixed.' Then he repeated the words correctly,—not with triumph exactly, but with the cold joy of one whose life is spent in righting unimportant wrongs.
"And yet I can't help confessing," Berri mused, "that I 'm exceedingly glad to acknowledge my relationship to Bertie and his tribe. They madden me at times; they have such clear, narrow, unelastic, admirable intellects. Their attitude toward all questions, public or private, is so definite and uncompromising; they 're so dog-gonnedright. Why, American history is just one glad, sweet testimonial to the fact that they 're never wrong. They 're not always on the popular side, or the successful; they 're merely right. Any other human beings would keep on trying to make use of such a splendid faculty. Years and years ago they did make use of it; but nowadays it's enough just to know that they have it, and pretty much all to themselves.
"But, as I was saying, I 'm secretly darned glad that Bertie and I belong to each other, so to speak. Is n't it funny—I'm not a bit loyal to Bertie, but he 's perfectly loyal to me. He does n't in the least understand me. I don't think he even likes me, although that disturbing thought probably has n't occurred to him yet; but there's no getting around the fact that I 'm one of his relatives, and he accepts me,—accepts me in a way he never will acceptyou, no matter how well he gets to know you and like you. There's something rather fine in that, don't you think? Of course, it might be a good deal of a bore if he took a fancy to me; but as he won't, it's really a great comfort. The fact that that plain, but healthy-looking, silent person in the very badly made dark gray suit accepts me and will always accept me, is equivalent to an illuminated address of welcome and the freedom of the city.
"You really can't imagine how it simplifies things," Berri continued. "It's such a relief, such an absolution! It leaves me, as some one says, 'with nothing on my mind but my hair and my hat;' and even they don't have to be brushed as long as people consider me a Stockbridge at heart. Why, if I didn't feel like it, I shouldn't have to be even polite. Of course I am polite. But it's a mere habit with me; I dare say I 'll get out of it. You've noticed, haven't you, how brusque and sort of primitive Bertie's manner is as a rule? Well, they 're all more or less like that. People who like them say it arises from shyness and simplicity, and people who don't like them declare that it's just common or domestic rudeness; but it really is n't one or the other, and I think I ought to know. The family manner comes from a curious conviction that politeness, grace, tact—the practice of making oneself agreeable free of charge, so to speak—has to do with the emotions; which is perfectly absurd. The habit of politeness is about as emotional as the habit of brushing one's teeth. But Bertie's tribe does n't think so; and emotion with them is simply another word for effeminacy. You see, they 're so sure of coming up to the scratch in the big things that they let the little ones slide. I think they always vaguely associate politeness with French waiters and Neapolitan cripples. So, in a way, they 'll rather expect it of you; they like all foreigners to seem foreign."
Bertie gabbled about no end of things that afternoon. He had what he calls a "dry jag," and hardly ever stopped talking from the time we left our house just after luncheon until we came down Brattle Street on the way back and went into Mrs. Brown's for dinner. Once he and a lot of kids coming out of a schoolhouse away across the river somewhere, pasted one another with snowballs (I joined them) until a policeman made us stop, and for a few minutes the torrent of talk was interrupted. But he made up for it by yelling every time he hit any one or got hit himself. He told me all sorts of tales, and I could n't help thinking how different everything was from Perugia.
It had never occurred to me before that Perugia was so happy-go-lucky and uncivilized. Why, out there we just seem to grow up like those great round weeds on the prairie that suddenly let go for no particular reason and then bound along in the breeze through the wide flat streets until they run against a fence or a house and, for a while, stick there. It does n't seem to me that anything much is decided for us in advance. I did n't know even that I was coming to college until about a year and a half beforehand,—which made it simply awful, as I had to study everything at once and did n't learn much of anything. Now, Berri says that, with the exception of himself, who was "grossly neglected" and never studied anything but French and German, his entire family for generations has lived by a sort of educational and social calendar from which they never deviate except in the event of a civil war. He says he should n't be a bit surprised to learn that there were certain definite, unalterable dates at which the little boys began and left off tin soldiers and the breeding of guinea-pigs, and the little girls began and left off paper-dolls and "dressing up." He declares that, providing the laws of nature are reasonably consistent, they all know exactly what they 'll be doing at any period of their lives; that even matrimony has ceased to be a lottery with them, as they go in for marrying, not individuals, but types. Isn't it perfectly wonderful?
"Now, take Bertie," he said. "Bertie knew who his classmates in college were going to be, at the age of five. They 're the same chaps he's been going to school with, and to the kid dancing-classes, you know, the Saturday Mornings and Thursday Afternoons or whatever they are, all these years. They go to the Friday Evenings this year, and next year they 'll go to the Saturday Evenings, and at all these morns and noons and dewy eves they dance with the same girls that two years from now they 'll meet in society and subsequently marry, just because it's part of the routine. After they get out of college they 'll all go abroad for a few months in groups of three and four, and when they get back they 'll be taken into the same club (their names will have been on the waiting list some twenty-odd years), and they 'll join a lunch club down town in order not to miss seeing one another every day at noon for the rest of their lives."
Then Berri told me about the girls. Really my heart bleeds for the girls, because apparently, unless they are terribly pretty or terribly clever or terribly rich, they must have a devil of a time. Berri says that although they all "come out," they don't all stay out; that after about a year or so a good many of them sort of slink in again by unanimous consent. (Imagine such a thing in Perugia! Why, every girl has a good time there for just as long as she wants to.) The pretty ones, however, never go in again; because, if you once get a reputation for beauty here, Berri says it never leaves you (the reputation, I mean), and that 's why an evening party in Boston often strikes a stranger as being so largely a matter of physical traditions. At a dance the rich plain girls, he says, have a good time too, but only for the first part of the evening. The men speak of them as "pills" (a quaint, chivalrous custom, is it not?), and try to dance with them as early in the evening as possible, because everybody else is trying to do the same thing and there isn't so great a chance of getting stuck for an hour or so. But later on they ask only the ones they really want to dance with, and the plain rich girl finds herself spending a cozy eternity with some one who is inwardly moaning because he delayed until the rush was over.
The girls too are born into a sort of rut, Berri says. It takes the form of sewing-circles. Berri can discourse for hours at a time on these institutions. His aunt Josephine has been going to the same one every week for fifty years. He said that once when he was a little child he heard an Englishman who had lived in India telling about the mysterious rapidity with which a piece of news spread among the natives of that country. Within half a day, this man declared, a rumor would sort of leap through the air from Calcutta to the most obscure villages on the Afghan frontier, and no one could explain how it was done. Berri used to fall asleep at night worrying over it. But now, even in India romance is dead, Berri says; he 's convinced that the whole thing was nothing but just sewing-circles.
"Why, Granny, if I were to lock myself up in my room in Cambridge and draw the curtains and stuff the keyhole and then murmur in a low voice that—well, for instance, that you and Sarah Bernhardt had been quietly married at the First Baptist Church in Somerville that afternoon, and then dash in to my aunt Josephine's as fast as a car could take me, she would greet me in the library with: 'My dear,haveyou heard! I 've just come from the sewing-circle, and they say—of course I don't believe it'—and so on. And this is n't any idle jest, either; it's a fact."
He was just beginning to tell me something else about them—I forget what—when we both realized that it was rather late, and that if we expected to get back in time for dinner we should have to find a shorter way or take the car. We neither of us knew where we were, although Berri said the place looked as if it might be called "Upper-West-Newtonville-Centre Corners." So we stopped a little girl who was trudging along with a pitcher of milk in her hand.
"Little girl, can you tell me where we are?" Berri asked her solemnly. She stared at us for a moment with great round eyes (Berri admitted afterwards that the question was a stupid one), and finally answered in a high, scornful little voice,—
"Main Street."
Berri refused to ask again after that, and we strolled about for a time until we caught sight of the tower of Memorial,—it suddenly appeared against the sky in quite the wrong direction,—and then of course getting home was easy enough.
We were rather confidential on the way back, and talked about the "Dickey," which we had never discussed before. The Dickey is the great Sophomore secret society. I don't remember just how the subject came up, but something reminded Berri of one night earlier in the year,—one of the nights on which the society takes on ten new members. They choose them from the Sophomore class always except late in the spring, just before college closes, when ten—the "First Ten"—are elected from among the Freshmen. However, by that time the Freshmen are almost Sophomores, so it amounts to about the same thing. When a ten is taken on, the whole club marches through the streets at about eleven o'clock at night, singing a song that has no words but "Tra la la la, la la, la la." It's a wonderful little tune; it's very short and simple, and after you 've heard it once it sticks in your head, you can't forget it. Unlike other catchy airs, though, you somehow don't get tired of it. I 've heard it over and over again since I 've been here,—on pianos as I passed under the windows of upper classmen, whistled by muckers in the Yard, and sung by the club at night,—and it always gives me a thrill; I suppose it 's because it means such a lot, and because you realize that no one (except the muckers) would play it or sing it or whistle it who was n't entitled to.
On the night that Berri referred to, the club must have been half a mile away when we first heard it. Berri was in my room reading, and I was writing a letter. My back was toward him, and we neither of us said anything when the vague musical "tra la la las" floated up from away down by the river somewhere. They were very faint, and after a minute or two stopped entirely. Then, just as I had forgotten about it, the song began again,—a little louder and more distinct this time and getting louder every second. Then it suddenly broke off once more. But I didn't forget it, for I knew that the club had stopped to take some one out of his room—some one who had just been elected—and march him along with the others, and I waited kind of nervously for the refrain to begin again; it never gets started quite evenly,—only a few voices at first, the rest joining in as the crowd turns away from the door of the "neophyte's" house and starts along the street. They came nearer and nearer,—the song grew louder and louder. Some of the fellows were singing a clear tenor that made the last few notes of every verse die away in a kind of high, sad wail. It seemed ridiculous for me to be sitting there pretending to write a letter, with Berri reading in such elaborate unconsciousness by the fire, when the ears of both of us were strained to catch every note, and the hoarse, fierce shouts that suddenly broke through the song as the Dickey turned into our street; but neither of us knew what to say exactly. At last, however, I could n't stand it any longer, and jumped up and blew out both the lamps. With the room dark we could stand at the window and not be seen. Freshmen are n't expected to show any particular interest in the proceedings of the Dickey; it's considered fresh. They were just tramping past our house when we leaned out,—a singing, shouting, irresistible mob,—and Berri and I looked down at them in silence. We were both excited, and I felt chilly all over—but that may have been on account of the open window. The crowd did not pass on, as we thought it would, but stopped at a house across the street a few doors down. Once more the song ceased; men formed in a double line that reached from the piazza to the street, and there were hoarse cries of "Pull him out—pull him out!" Then the front door burst open, and a fellow—he seemed to be half dressed—came hurtling through the air between the double row waiting for him. There was a moment of confusion and savage yells, during which it looked as if the whole crowd was trying to get its hands on him. We lost sight of him in the shuffle, and in another instant the song began, louder than before, and the Dickey swayed away into the darkness. We stood at the window until the clearness and energy of the "Tra la la la, la la, la la," faded to a thin, dim, uncertain rhythm,—a suggestion of tenor that all but lost itself in the pearly fog rolling up from the marshes.
I fumbled for a match when we turned at last to the room. But before I found one, Berri said, "I think I 'll go to bed, Granny," and by the time I got the lamp lighted he had slipped away. I don't know why exactly, but I was rather glad he hadn't waited. After that I tried to finish my letter, but I could n't make myself end the sentence I had been writing the way I had meant to end it in the first place. So I put the thing in the fire and sat there awhile, thinking, and then went to bed myself.