One Sunday morning in the spring he ran into Freddy Wigglesworth in the Union just as they were both going in to breakfast; they say down at the same table. Freddy, and old Kent man, was a junior now. He asked Dick what he was doing and who he knew, and appeared horrified by what he heard. “My dear boy,” he said, “there’s nothing to do now but go out for the Monthly or the Advocate.… I don’t imagine the Crime would be much in your line, would it?”
“I was thinking of taking some of my stuff around, but I hardly had the nerve.”
“I wish you’d come around to see me last fall…. Goodness, we owe it to the old school to get you started right. Didn’t anybody tell you that nobody lived in the Yard except seniors?” Freddy shook his head sadly as he drank his coffee.
Afterwards they went around to Dick’s room and he read some poems out loud. “Why, I don’t think they’re so bad,” said Freddy Wigglesworth, between puffs at a cigarette. “Pretty purple I’d say, though…. You get a few of them typed and I’ll take them around to R.G…. Meet me at the Union at eight o’clock a week from Monday night and we’ll go around to Copey’s…. Well, so long, I must be going.” After he’d gone Dick walked up and down his room, his heart thumping hard. He wanted to talk to somebody, but he was sick of all the people he knew around Cambridge, so he sat down and wrote Hilda and Edwin a long letter with rhyming inserts about how well he was getting on at college.
Monday night finally came around. Already trying to tell himself not to be disappointed if Freddy Wigglesworth forgot about the date, Dick was on his way to the Union a full hour before the time. The cavernous clatter and smell of Mem, the funny stories of the boneheads at his table, and Mr. Kanrich’s sweaty bald head bobbing above the brass instruments of the band in the gallery seemed particularly dreary that evening.
There were tulips in the trim Cambridge gardens, and now and then a whiff of lilacs on the wind. Dick’s clothes irked him; his legs were heavy as he walked around and around the blocks of yellow frame houses and grass dooryards that he already knew too well. The blood pounding through his veins seemed too fast and too hot to stand. He must get out of Cambridge or go crazy. Of course at eight sharp when he walked slowly up the Union steps Wigglesworth hadn’t come yet. Dick went upstairs to the library and picked up a book, but he was too nervous to even read the title. He went downstairs again and stood around in the hall. A fellow who worked next to him in Physics 1 lab. came up and started to talk about something, but Dick could hardly drag out an answer. The fellow gave him a puzzled look and walked off. It was twenty past eight. Of course he wasn’t coming, God damn him, he’d been a fool to expect he’d come, a stuck up snob like Wigglesworth wouldn’t keep a date with a fellow like him.
Freddy Wigglesworth was standing in front of him, with his hands in his pockets. “Well, shall we Copify?” he was saying.
There was another fellow with him, a dreamy looking boy with fluffy light gold hair and very pale blue eyes. Dick couldn’t help staring at him he was so handsome. “This is Blake. He’s my younger brother…. You’re in the same class.” Blake Wigglesworth hardly looked at Dick when they shook hands, but his mouth twisted up into a lopsided smile. When they crossed the Yard in the early summer dusk fellows were leaning out the windows yelling “Rinehart O Rinehart” and grackles were making a racket in the elms, and you could hear the screech of streetcar wheels from Mass. Avenue; but there was a complete hush in the lowceiling room lit with candles where a scrubbylooking little man was reading aloud a story that turned out to be Kipling’s “The Man Who Would be King.” Everybody sat on the floor and was very intent. Dick decided he was going to be a writer.
Sophomore year Dick and Blake Wigglesworth began to go around together. Dick had a room in Ridgely and Blake was always there. Dick suddenly found he liked college, that the weeks were flying by. The Advocate and the Monthly each published a poem of his that winter; he and Ned, as he took to calling Blake Wigglesworth, had tea and conversation about books and poets in the afternoons and lit the room with candles. They hardly ever ate at Mem any more, though Dick was signed up there. Dick had no pocketmoney at all once he’d paid for his board and tuition and the rent at Ridgely but Ned had a pretty liberal allowance that went for both. The Wigglesworths were well off; they often invited Dick to have Sunday dinner with them at Nahant. Ned’s father was a retired art critic and had a white Vandyke beard; there was an Italian marble fireplace in the drawingroom over which hung a painting of a madonna, two angels and some lilies that the Wigglesworths believed to be by Botticelli, although B.B., out of sheer malice, Mr. Wigglesworth would explain, insisted that it was by Botticini.
Saturday nights Dick and Ned took to eating supper at the Thorndike in Boston and getting a little tight on sparkling nebbiolo. Then they’d go to the theatre or the Old Howard.
The next summer Hiram Halsey Cooper was campaigning for Wilson. In spite of Ned’s kidding letters, Dick found himself getting all worked up about the New Freedom, Too Proud to Fight, Neutrality in Mind and Deed, Industrial Harmony between capital and labor, and worked twelve hours a day typing releases, jollying smalltown newspaper editors into giving more space to Mr. Cooper’s speeches, branding Privilege, flaying the Interests. It was a letdown to get back to the dying elms of the Yard, lectures that neither advocated anything, nor attacked anything, The Hill of Dreams and tea in the afternoons. He’d gotten a scholarship from the English department and he and Ned had a room together in a house on Garden Street. They had quite a bunch of friends who were interested in English and Fine Arts and things like that, who’d gather in their room in the late afternoon, and sit late in the candlelight and the cigarettesmoke and the incense in front of a bronze Buddha Ned had bought in Chinatown when he was tight once, drinking tea and eating cake and talking. Ned never said anything unless the talk came around to drinking or sailingships; whenever politics or the war or anything like that came up he had a way of closing his eyes and throwing back his head and saying Blahblahblahblah.
Election Day Dick was so excited he cut all his classes. In the afternoon he and Ned took a walk round the North End, and out to the end of T wharf. It was a bitterly raw grey day. They were talking about a plan they had, that they never spoke about before people, of getting hold of a small yawl or ketch after they’d graduated and following the coast down to Florida and the West Indies and then through the Panama Canal and out into the Pacific. Ned had bought a book on navigation and started to study it. That afternoon Ned was sore because Dick couldn’t seem to keep his mind on talk about sailing and kept wondering out loud how this state and that state was going to vote. They ate supper grumpily at the Venice, that was crowded for once, of cold scallopini and spaghetti; the service was wretched. As soon as they’d finished one bottle of white orvieto, Ned would order another; they left the restaurant walking stiffly and carefully, leaning against each other a little. Disembodied faces swirled past them against the pinkishgold dark of Hanover Street. They found themselves on the Common in the fringes of the crowd watching the bulletin board on the Boston Herald building. “Who’s winning? Batter up…. Hurray for our side,” Ned kept yelling. “Don’t you know enough to know it’s election night?” a man behind them said out of the corner of his mouth. “Blahblahblahblah,” brayed Ned in the man’s face.