The Whirligig of Time Part 12

CHAPTER VIII

LIVY AND VICTOR HUGO

On a certain Wednesday evening late in September Harry stood on a certain street-corner in the city of New Haven. Surging about him were a thousand or so youths of his own age or a little older, most of them engaged in making noises expressive of the pleasures of reunion. It was a merry and turbulent scene. Tall, important-looking seniors, wearing white sweaters with large blue Y's on their chests, moved through the crowd with a worried air, apparently trying to organize something that had no idea whatever of being organized. They were ineffectual, but oh, so splendid! Harry, who had almost no friends of his own there to talk to, watched them with undisguised admiration. He reflected that James would be one of their number a year hence, and wondered if by any chance he himself would be one three years from now.

Just as he dismissed the probability as negligible, a sort of order became felt among those who stood immediately about him. Men stopped talking and appeared to be listening to something which Harry could not hear. Then they all began shouting a strange, unmeaning succession of syllables in concert; Harry recognized this as a cheer and l.u.s.tily joined in with it. At the end came a number; repeated three times; a number which no one present had ever before heard bellowed forth from three or four hundred brazen young throats; a number that had a strange and unfamiliar sound, even to those who shouted it, and caused the uppercla.s.smen to break into a derisive jeer.

A new cla.s.s had officially started its career, and Harry was part of it.

No one flushed more hotly than he at the jeer of the uppercla.s.smen; no one jeered back with greater spirit when the soph.o.m.ores cheered for their own cla.s.s. No one took part more joyfully in the long and varied program of events that filled out the rest of the evening. The parade through the streets of the town was to him a joyous baccha.n.a.l, and the wrestling matches on the Campus a splendid orgy. After these were over even more enjoyable things happened, for James, with two or three fellow-juniors--magnificent, Olympian beings!--took him in tow and escorted him safe and unmolested through the turbulent region of York Street, where freshmen, who had nothing save honor to fight for, were pressed into organized hostility against soph.o.m.ores, who didn't even have that.

"Well, what did you think of it all?" asked James later.

"Oh, ripping," said Harry, "I never thought it would be anything like this. We never really saw anything of the real life of the college when we lived in town here, did we?"

"Not much. It all seems pretty strange to you now, I suppose, but you'll soon get onto the ropes and feel at home. What sort of a schedule did you get?"

"Oh, fairly rotten. They all seem to be eight-thirties. Here, you can see," producing a paper.

"That's not so bad," p.r.o.nounced James, approvingly. "Nothing on Wednesday or Sat.u.r.day afternoons, so that you can get to ball games and things, and nothing any afternoon till five, so that you'll have plenty of time for track work."

"Oh, yes, track work; I'd forgotten that."

"Well, you don't want to forget it; you want to go right out and hire a locker and get to work, to-morrow, if possible. If track's the best thing for you to go out for, that is, and I guess it is, all right.

You're too light for football, and you don't know anything about baseball, and you haven't got a crew build."

"What is a crew build?" asked Harry.

"Well, if you put it that way, I don't know that I can tell you. It's a mysterious thing; I've been trying to find out myself for several years.

I don't see why I haven't got a fairly good crew build myself, but they always tell me I haven't, when I suggest going out for it. However, you haven't got one, that's easy. So you'll just have to stick to track."

"Yes," said Harry soberly, "I suppose I shall."

Harry was what is commonly known as a good mixer, and made acquaintances among his cla.s.smates rapidly enough to suit even the nice taste of James. In general, however, they remained acquaintances and never became friends. It was not that they were not nice, most of them; "ripping fellows, all of them," Harry described them to his brother. They were, in fact, too nice; those who lived near him were all of the best preparatory school type, the kind that invariably leads the cla.s.s during freshman year. Harry found them conventional, quite as much so as the English type, though in a different way. Intercourse with them failed to give him stimulus; he found himself always more or less talking down to them, and intellectual stimulus was what Harry needed above all things among his friends.

There were exceptions, however. The most brilliant was that of Jack Trotwood, probably the last man with whom Harry might have been expected to strike up a friendship. Harry first saw him in a Latin cla.s.s, one of the first of the term. Trotwood sat in the same row as Harry, two or three seats away from him--the acquaintance was not even of the type that alphabetical propinquity is responsible for. On the day in question he dropped a fountain pen, and spent some moments in burrowing ineffectually under seats in search of it. The fugitive chattel at length turned up directly under Harry's chair, and as he leaned over to restore it to its owner he noticed something about his face that appealed to him at once. He never could tell what it was; the flush that bending over had brought to it, the embarra.s.sment, the dismay at having made a fuss in public, the smile, containing just the right mixture of cordiality and formality, yet undeniably sweet withal, with which he thanked him; perhaps it was any or all of these things. At any rate after cla.s.s, on his way back toward York Street, Harry found himself hurrying to catch up with Trotwood, who was walking a few paces ahead of him. Trotwood turned as he came up, and smiled again.

"That was sort of a stinking lesson, wasn't it?" he asked.

"Yes," said Harry, "wasn't it, though?"

"I should say! Boned for two hours on it last night before I could make anything out of it. Gee, but this Livy's dull, isn't he?"

"Yes, awfully dull. Do you use a trot?"

"No, I haven't yet, but I'm going to, after last night. I can't put so much time on one lesson. Do you?"

"Well, yes. That is, I shall. Do you like Latin?"

"Lord, no, not when it's like this stuff. I only took it because it comes easier to me than most other things. Do you like it?"

"Not much. Not much good at it, either.... Well, I live here--"

"Oh, do you? so do I. Where are you?"

"Fourth floor, back. Come up, some time."

"Thanks, I will. So long."

"So long."

So started a friendship, one of the sincerest and firmest that either ever enjoyed. And yet, as Harry pointed out afterward, it was founded on insincerity and falsehood. Harry's whole part in this first conversation was no more than a tissue of lies. He was extremely fond of Latin, and was so good at it that his entire preparation for his recitations consisted in looking up a few unfamiliar words beforehand; he could always fit the sentences together when he was called upon to construe.

It had never occurred to him to use a translation. He was rather fond of Livy, whose flowing and complicated style appealed to him. He gave a false answer to every question merely for the pleasure of agreeing with Trotwood, whom he liked already without knowing why.

The two got into the habit of doing their Latin lesson together regularly, three times a week. Trotwood did not buy a trot, after all; he found Harry quite as good.

"My, but you're a shark," he said in undisguised admiration one evening, as Harry brought order and clarity into a difficult pa.s.sage. "You certainly didn't learn to do that in this country. You're English, anyway, aren't you?"

"Lord, no; Yankee. Born in New Haven. I have lived over there for some years, though."

"Go to school there?"

"Yes; Harrow."

"Gosh." Trotwood stared at him for a few moments in dazed silence. He stood on the brink of a world that he knew no more of than Balboa did of the Pacific. "What sort of a place is it?"

"Oh, wonderful."

"You played cricket, I suppose, and--and those things?"

"Rugby football, yes," said Harry, smiling.

"And you liked it, didn't you?"

"Oh, rather! Only--"

"Only what?"

"Oh, nothing. I did like it. It's a wonderful place."

"Only it's different from what you're doing now?" said Trotwood, with a burst of insight. "Is that what you mean?"

"Yes."

"I see; I see," said Trotwood, and then he kept still. There was something so comforting, so sympathetic and understanding about his silence that Harry was inspired to confide in him.

"The truth is, I'm beginning to doubt whether I ought to have gone to an English school. I'm not sure but what it would have been better for me to go to school and college in the same country, whatever it was. You see, after spending five or six years in learning to value certain things, it's rather a wrench to come here and find the values all distorted."

"I see," said Trotwood again. He wasn't sure that he did see at all, but he felt that unquestioning sympathy was his cue.