Two men who have been comrades and classmates at the Alma Mater of John

Harkless and Tom Meredith; two who have belonged to the same dub and

roomed in the same entry; who have pooled their clothes and money in a

common stock for either to draw on; who have shared the fortunes of

athletic war, triumphing together, sometimes with an intense triumphancy;

two men who were once boys getting hazed together, hazing in no unkindly

fashion in their turn, always helping each other to stuff brains the night

before an examination and to blow away the suffocating statistics like

foam the night after; singing, wrestling, dancing, laughing, succeeding

together, through the four kindest years of life; two such brave

companions, meeting in the after years, are touchingly tender and

caressive of each other, but the tenderness takes the shy, United States

form of insulting epithets, and the caresses are blows. If John Harkless

had been in health, uninjured and prosperous, Tom Meredith could no more

have thrown himself on his knees beside him and called him "old friend"

than he could have danced on the slack-wire.

One day they thought the patient sleeping; the nurse fanned him softly,

and Meredith had stolen in and was sitting by the cot. One of Harkless's

eyes had been freed of the bandage, and, when Tom came in, it was closed;

but, by and by, Meredith became aware that the unbandaged eye had opened

and that it was suffused with a pathetic moisture; yet it twinkled with a

comprehending light, and John knew that it was his old Tom Meredith who

was sitting beside him, with the air of having sat there very often

before. But this bald, middle-aged young man, not without elegance, yet a

prosperous burgher for all that--was this the slim, rollicking broth of

a boy whose thick auburn hair used to make one streak of flame as he spun

around the bases on a home run? Without doubt it was the stupendous fact,

wrought by the alchemy of seven years.

For, though seven years be a mere breath in the memories of the old, it is

a long transfiguration to him whose first youth is passing, and who finds

unsolicited additions accruing to some parts of his being and strange

deprivations in others, and upon whom the unhappy realization begins to be

borne in, that his is no particular case, and that he of all the world is

not to be spared, but, like his forbears, must inevitably wriggle in the

disguising crucible of time. And, though men accept it with apparently

patient humor, the first realization that people do grow old, and that

they do it before they have had time to be young, is apt to come like a

shock.

Perhaps not even in the interminable months of Carlow had Harkless

realized the length of seven years so keenly as he did when he beheld his

old friend at his bedside. How men may be warped apart in seven years,

especially in the seven years between twenty-three and thirty! At the

latter age you may return to the inseparable of seven years before and

speak not the same language; you find no heartiness to carry on with each

other after half an hour. Not so these classmates, who had known each

other to the bone.




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