U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [216]
-86-Dick should feel his responsibilities he put it in the form of a note maturing in five years at four percent interest. He spent his two weeks' vacation with the Thurlows at Bay Head. He'd hardly been able to wait going down on the train to see how Hilda would be, but everything was different. Edwin didn't have the paperwhite look he used to have; he'd had a cal as assistant in a rich church on Long Island where the only thing that worried him was that part of the congregation was low and wouldn't al ow chanting or incense. He was comforting himself with the thought that they did al ow candles on the altar. Hilda was changed too. Dick was worried to see that she and Edwin held hands during supper. When they got alone she told him that she and Edwin were very happy now and that she was going to have a baby and that bygones must be bygones. Dick stalked up and down and ran his hands through his hair and talked darkly about death and hel onearth and going to the devil as fast as he could but Hilda just laughed and told him not to be sil y, that he was a goodlooking attractive boy and would find many nice girls crazy to fal in love with him. Before he left they had a long talk about religion and Dick told them with a bitter stare at Hilda, that he'd lost his faith and only be-lieved in Pan and Bacchus, the old gods of lust and drink. Edwin was quite startled, but Hilda said it was al non-sense and only growing pains. After he'd left he wrote a very obscure poem ful of classical references that he la-bel ed, To a Common Prostitute and sent to Hilda, add-ing a postscript that he was dedicating his life to Beauty and Sin. Dick had an exam to repeat in Geometry which he'd
flunked in the spring and one in Advanced Latin that he was taking for extra credits, so he went up to Cambridge a week before col ege opened. He sent his trunk and suitcase out by the transfer company from the South Station and went out on the subway. He had on a new grey suit and a
-87-new grey felt hat and was afraid of losing the certified cheque he had in his pocket for deposit in the Cambridge bank. The glimpse of redbrick Boston and the state house with its gold dome beyond the slatecolored Charles as the train came out into the air to cross the bridge looked like the places in foreign countries he and Hilda had talked about going to. Kendal Square . . . Central Square . . . Harvard Square. The train didn't go any further; he had to get out. Something about the sign on the turnstile Out To The College Yard sent a chil down his spine. He hadn't been in Cambridge two hours before he discovered that his felt hat ought to have been brown and old instead of new and that getting a room in the Yard had been a grave mistake for a freshman.
Perhaps it was the result of living in the Yard that he got to know al the wrong people, a couple of socialist Jews in first year law, a graduate student from the middle-west who was taking his Ph.D. in Gothic, a Y.M.C.A. ad-dict out from Dorchester who went to chapel every morn-ing. He went out for Freshman rowing but didn't make any of the crews and took to rowing by himself in a wherry three afternoons a week. The fel ows he met down at the boathouse were pleasant enough to him, but most of them lived on the Gold Coast or in Beck and he never got much further than hel o and solong with them. He went to al the footbal ral ies and smokers and beer nights but he never could get there without one of his Jewish friends or a graduate student so he never met anybody there who was anybody.
One Sunday morning in the spring he ran into Freddy Wigglesworth in the Union just as they were both going in to breakfast; they sat down at the same table. Freddy, an old Kent man, was a junior now. He asked Dick what
-88-he was doing and who he knew, and