U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [217]
. . . 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 fal . . . . Goodness, we owe it to the old school to get you started right. Didn't anybody tel 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 ciga-rette. "Pretty purple I'd say, though. . . . You get a few of them typed and I'l take them around to R. G. . . . Meet me at the Union at eight o'clock a week from Mon-day night and we'l go around to Copey's. . . . Wel , 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 al the people he knew around Cambridge, so he sat down and wrote Hilda and Edwin a long letter with rhyming inserts about how wel he was getting on at col ege.
Monday night final y came around. Already trying to tel himself not to be disappointed if Freddy Wigglesworth forgot about the date, Dick was on his way to the Union a ful hour before the time. The cavernous clatter and smel 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 gal ery 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
-89-around the blocks of yel ow frame houses and grass door-yards that he already knew too wel . 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 hal . A fel ow who worked next to him in Physics I lab. came up and started to talk about something, but Dick could hardly drag out an answer. The fel ow 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 fel ow like him. Freddy Wigglesworth was standing in front of him,
with his hands in his pockets. "Wel , shal we Copify?" he was saying. There was another fel ow 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 fel ows were leaning out the windows yel -ing "Rinehart O Rinehart" and grackles were making a racket in the elms, and you could hear the screech of street-car 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
-90-was always there. Dick suddenly found he liked col ege, 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 cal ing 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