Charles Flandrau - The Diary of a Freshman

Mamma left for home this afternoon. As I want to be perfectly truthful in my diary, I suppose I must confess that before she actually went away I sometimes thought I should be rather relieved when she was no longer here. Mamma has a fixed idea that I came to college for the express purpose of getting my feet wet by day, and sleeping in a draught by night. She began the furnishing of my rooms by investing in a pair of rubber boots, – the kind you tie around your waist with a string. The clerk in the shop asked her if I was fond of trout-fishing, and she explained to him that I had always lived in the West where the climate was dry, and that she did n't know how I would stand the dampness of the seacoast. Mamma thought the clerk was so interested in my last attack of tonsillitis I didn't have the heart to tell her that all the time he was looking sympathetic with his right eye, he was winking at me with his left.

Now that she is gone, however, I don't see how I could have thought, even for a moment, that I should be glad, and I 've been sitting here for an hour just looking at my room and all the nice things she advised me about and helped me to choose – wishing she could see how cosey it is late at night with the green lamp lighted and a little fire going. (It is n't really cool enough for a fire; I had to take my coat off for a while, the room got so warm – but I was anxious to know how the andirons looked with a blaze behind them.) I suppose she is lying awake in the sleeping-car thinking of me. She made me move my bed to the other side of the room, so that it would n't be near the window. I moved it back again; but I think now I 'll change it again to the way she liked it.

Of course I was disappointed last May when I found I hadn't drawn a room in one of the college buildings. I had an idea that if you did n't live in one of the buildings owned by the college you would n't feel, somehow, as if you "belonged." Before I arrived in Cambridge I worried a good deal over it. The old Harvard men at home were most unsatisfactory about this when I asked their advice. The ones who had lived in the Yard when they were in college seemed to think there was n't any particular use in going to college at all unless you could live either in their old rooms or some in the same building; and the ones who had lived outside as I am going to do (this year, anyhow) said the college buildings were nice enough in their way, but if I could only get the dear old place (which was pulled down fifteen years ago) where James Russell Lowell had scratched his name on the window-pane, and where somebody else (I 've forgotten who it was) crawled up the big chimney when the sheriff came to arrest him for debt and was discovered because he did not crawl far enough, I should be all right.

I don't see how the good times and the advantages of a place like this hold out for so long; everybody who has been here speaks as if he had about used them up.

Well, we found rooms pleading to be rented; every other house in Cambridge has a "Student's Room to Let" card in the window. Even some of the rooms in the Yard had been given up at the last minute by fellows who flunked their exams. Mamma said she felt very sorry for the poor boys; and after that the enormity of my having been conditioned in physics and solid geometry decreased considerably. The trouble (there were four days full of it) wasn't in finding a good place, but in trying to decide on some one place. For a while it looked as though I should either have to live in five separate houses – some of them over a mile apart – or give up going to college. We dragged up and down all the quiet side streets within a reasonable distance of the Yard, ringing bells and asking questions until the words "I should like to look at" and "What is the price of?" began to sound like some kind of a silly English Meisterschaft system. Several times when we were very tired we wandered by mistake into houses we had been to before. This made the landladies exceedingly peevish; but mamma said it was just as well, because now we knew what their true characters really were.

We found that we could rent some of the rooms lighted and heated; but most of them were merely "lit and het."

All the houses in Cambridge and many of the buildings in the Yard seemed to be disgorging roomfuls of old furniture and consuming cartloads of new, and everywhere we went we met strings of cheerful, energetic mothers with tired, rather cross-looking sons. I've seen only one fellow with his father so far, and they sort of apologized for the fact by being dressed in deep mourning.

At the end of three days we 'd picked out five rooms. Considered in a lump, they seemed fine; but tackling them separately, mamma could n't decide which one was least objectionable. One was in a part of town that "looked damp" – a man across the street unfortunately sneezed just as we were passing a stone wall covered with green moss. The second smelt of cooking. On the steps of the third a groceryman was waiting to deliver several gallons of gasoline (this one was almost struck off the list). The fourth was near the river (we had the bad luck to be in that part of town when the tide was out), and from the windows of the fifth there was a merry little view of a graveyard. We simply could n't make up our minds, and were standing in the middle of a narrow, rather shabby little street two or three blocks below the Square discussing the matter, when a door behind us opened and a mother and son (we turned to look) came out, followed by a gray-haired woman – evidently the landlady – who was doing the talking, in a very New England voice, for all three. The mother was slim and pretty, and had on a beautiful dress that went swish-swash-swish when she walked away, and the fellow looked like her; he was very handsome.

"Well, I 'm real glad to know you," the landlady said to the fellow's mother. "Jus' seems 's if I could n't rest till I knew the young men's folks; dustin' their photographs every day makes it sort of different. It do – don't it? Oh, yes – I 'll take care of him. They get real mad at me, the young men do, sometimes, for makin' them change their shoes when it's snow-in' and makin' them wear their rubber coats when it's rai-nin'. They 're in too much of a hurry, they are. That's what's the matter with them ." She gave the fellow a roguish look, and he and his mother walked up the street laughing as if they were very much pleased.

"I think," said mamma (who had become strangely animated on hearing of the change of shoes) – "I think that before we decide on one of these five rooms we 'll go in there." So we went up to the gray-haired woman, who had lingered outside to talk baby talk to a cat that was making gothic arches of itself all over the piazza, and in about seven minutes by the watch we 'd signed the lease of the last vacant rooms in the house.

A short, steep staircase like the companionway of a ship leads up to a landing about the size of a kitchen table. The edges of the steps are covered with tin and are terribly slippery. The door on the left opens into my study, and at the end of that is my bedroom, and next to that is a great big bathroom (it's bigger than the other two) with a porcelain tub and a shower which I am to share with the fellow who lives just across the staircase on the right. Mrs. Chester, the landlady, says: "All the young men thinks an awful lot of that bathroom."

The study is so small that we did n't have to buy as much furniture as we expected to. I have an oak desk with a rolling top that makes a noise like some one shovelling coal when you open and shut it, and usually sticks half-way. Of course, when we finally got it out from town (Boston is about four miles from Cambridge, and it takes anywhere from three days to a week for an express wagon to make the trip), we found that it was much too large to go up the staircase. But Mrs. Chester said we could take out the back of the house and have it swung up to the room on ropes – the "young men" always did that when they wanted pianos or sofas, or desks like mine. I wasn't present at the operation, as I had to go in town to lunch with mamma, but it was successfully performed (by "a real handy gentleman from down Gloucester way, who used to be a fisherman and is a carpenter now"), for I found the desk in the room when I returned and the walls of the house looked about the same.