Harvard episodes

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

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

He had not been a graduate quite three years in all, but that had been ample time--particularly as it had been spent far from Cambridge--for the readjustment of certain views of his,--views in which four eventful years at college had been grotesquely prominent. He found, on returning to the university town, that his absence rendered him frequently indifferent to the genuineness and importance, not merely of the more delicate problems of the undergraduate world,--it was one of these on which he was at the present moment indiscreetly touching,--but even to the obvious and common incidents of the academic experience: to the outcome of examinations, to the degree of Bachelor of Arts. It was not until Hewitt stood troubled and expectant before him that Curtiss appreciated how tactless the disparity in their knowledge of things collegiate had made him appear to his young friend. A sudden reminiscent intuition, that flashed him back to his own sophomore year, caused him to feel that what he was saying to Hewitt was almost brutal; in his capacity of a young graduate he had indulged in a cold-blooded lecture (it could hardly be called a discussion) on questions that very properly were not questions to a fellow in Hewitt’s situation, but warm, operative realities. Hewitt was in many ways such a mature young person, his valuation of other people and their actions had always seemed so temperate, so just, that Curtiss, without knowing it, had simply ignored the fellow’s healthy undergraduate attitude. He had failed to assume how eager the sophomore was to be some active part of the new and fascinating life going on everywhere about him; how completely he was possessed by the indefinable, disquieting, stimulative spirit that so triumphantly inhibits Harvard from becoming a mere place of learning. Curtiss had spent the evening in throwing what he sincerely believed was a searching light on some aspects of Harvard life; he was beginning to wish he had allowed Hewitt to perform the office for himself.

“Be honest with me, Curtiss.” Hewitt spoke in the distinct, simple tones that as a rule accompany words one hesitates to trifle with. “You’ve gone through the whole damn thing yourself, and got more out of it--not more than you deserve, of course, but more than most men get; you knew everybody and belonged to--to--” Hewitt hesitated a moment; any single college institution--social, athletic, or intellectual--did not in itself forcibly appeal to him; there was something petty in particularising. “You belonged to--to everything, when you were in college,” he finally said; “how was it done--how is it done every day? I see it going on around me all the time; but I can’t touch it in any way,--it never comes near enough, if you know what I mean; and what I can’t explain to myself is that I don’t see why it should come any nearer to me,--only, I want it to.” The manner in which Horace blurted out the last few words was an epitome of the situation; their confession of keen longing to know and be known in his class had gathered intensity with the growing suspicion that certain conditions of the place--conditions he felt rather than understood--were every day making the realisation of his desire for activity, acquaintances, friendship, more impossible. His great common sense--in Hewitt the quality amounted to a sort of prosaic talent--would always preclude his degenerating into one of the impotently rebellious; it had kept him free from the slightest tinge of bitterness toward any one, but it had not made his interminable, solitary walks up Brattle Street (there was apparently no other walk to take in Cambridge) less interminable; it had enlivened none of the stolid evenings in his rooms which, with a necessary amount of study, a chapter or two from some book he did not much care about, and a bottle of beer, always came to an end somehow or other in spite of themselves; it had not invested stupid theatres with interest, nor mediocre athletics with excitement. Common sense, the prevailing trait of Hewitt’s character, that induced the middle-aged to consider him “singularly well balanced for a young man,” was quite powerless to dispel the desperate loneliness of his sophomore year. His common sense was a coat of mail that defied sabre thrusts, perhaps, but let in the rain.

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

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

“It’s so long--so intricate.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I assumed that you knew more about your own country,” Curtiss remarked with dry superiority; “I sha’n’t undertake to discuss the social system of the United States; it would simply necessitate my going over a lot of platitudes that would bore us both. It’s only when we apply to our college, what we all know to be so undeniable of the country at large, that the situation at once becomes novel and preposterous to so many people. The conventional idea of an American college--you know this because the idea was yours before you came here--is that it consists of a multitude of lusty young men linked together by the indissoluble bonds of class and college, all striving, shoulder to shoulder, for the same ends, in a general way,--just what the ends are I don’t think the public cares very much, but they’re presumably charmingly unpractical and fine,--and living in an intoxicating atmosphere of intimacy, a robust sense of loyalty that is supposed to pervade the academic groves and render them the temporary home of a great, light-hearted, impulsive, congenial brotherhood. Well, I don’t know whether other American institutions of learning answer the description, because I’ve never been to them; but Harvard doesn’t, not in the slightest particular.”