THE VAGABOND

Vag watched the old men moving the furniture out into Dunster Street in the blue haze of the last, last afternoon. It was like all the other afternoons, only with less of the ordinary sounds. Yet what seemed to him a thrashing in the tree tops that was very unlike Spring made him half aware of a rushing, rumbling intermixture of sound and motion. There was the haste and tension of every exam period, yet there was something more. Something that could have been frightening except that it was mixed with a certain gasp of relief, a feeling that had to come after months of school without a break, months when academic routine and peering into books failed to fill the void of inactivity in a world of action.

He knew what that rushing sound was trying to say, It had all been said before. It had saddened and sobered him when sounds of departure had only been a murmur, but now the sound of hopeful goodbyes was a deep chorus. It didn't matter much what had gone before, it would come again. What mattered was that the waiting which had never been anything but waiting was at an end. There would be no more gradual, lonely leavings. It was all at once and all together now and too important to be lonely.

Vag had gone to the Yard Concert to see if Fair Harvard and Radcliffe girls were still the same. They were. Then the slashing wail of the alarm, and Vag watched bright jackets and colorful skirts and the rest of the peaceful Spring scene, kaleidoscope-like, smashed, and the Yard was left to the men of war, and the pigeons who had been there before and would be there afterwards.