Halleck's face shone.
"Ai--i, boys, that's what we'll do! We'll get out there with canes
to-morrow and we'll make 'em scrap!"
"Yes, you will! I believe it," sneered Smith. "You fellows are just
fresh enough to queer yourselves that way."
"We'll queer _you_!" cried a valiant youngster "if you don't rush
to-morrow we'll tie up your baseball team and cart 'em off to Redwood."
"Yes, sir, and we'll show you how a class president looks braided with
bailing-rope,--we'll show you the pretty picture in a mirror, Mr.
President,--even if we have to haul you out of the arms of twenty Roble
dames."
Pete had taken his class-mates by storm and they piped acquiescence in
thin Freshman voices. Smith flushed angrily.
Here Lyman interfered.
"All right, make joshes of yourselves if you want to," he said, not so
good-natured as at first. "We have given you warning. Just open that
door and you may go on with your little conspiracy."
"Come again when you can't stay so long," wittily yelled Pete down the
hall. "I'll meet you on the field to-morrow."
"Oh, we'll be there," called back Lyman over his shoulder. "So will the
Faculty," and with this covert hint the peacemakers turned the corner.
The sun shown brightly on the red-brown earth of the diamond when the
Freshmen, the Sophomores and the Faculty met, according to agreement.
The enterprising student-body management had chalked the Quad in
conspicuous places:
RUSH of the YEAR,
Sophomore-Freshman Game.
Don't Miss It!
and the college responded. The co-eds were there, radiant in the
snowiest of duck shirts, the gayest of shirt-waists. With them were
"ladies' men," in variegated golf-stockings and gorgeous hat-bands. The
Freshmen, gathered near first base, contrasted disreputably with this
display; they wore old clothes, ragged hats, and they carried a
miscellaneous collection of canes, borrowed from Juniors or stolen from
Sophomores.
These stalwarts of the latest class were loaded with horns and
noise-machines. Defiance exhaled from them. It was an impressive
object-lesson on the evils of Freshman victories.
A few sensible Juniors went over and tried to quell their disturbance,
but the infants were beyond any control of their class fathers; they
had at their head the redoubtable Pete Halleck, with his perverted sense
of the proprieties, and their uproar moderated not a bit. The Juniors
returned to the bleachers, shaking their heads in disgust. Professor
Grind, of the Committee on Student Affairs, was observed to write in his
note-book. The Sophomores who saw this rejoiced that they were not in
rushing clothes. Still the racket went on.
Jack Smith, in spotless tennis flannels, sat on the bleachers. Some
girls from San Francisco, and one in particular as far as Cap was
concerned, had come down with Tom Ashley's mother that morning, and he
brought them over to the game. Pete Halleck picked him out at once and
reminded the others of their promise.
Hannah Grant Daly, who did not know him to speak to, also picked him
out. To her he looked more goodly than ever this afternoon, contrasted
with the uncouthness of Halleck and others of her class. She watched him
covertly, laughing and talking with the town girl beside him. He had
laughed and talked very much like that to her, once, but he had
forgotten it. That was natural; she had forgiven it long ago. Lillian
Arnold, in the brightest of Easter hats, watched him, too.
The game was not exciting. The Freshmen were badly outplayed; the
Sophomores galloped around the bases, and the babies' insolence grew
with their opponents' score. As the last inning dragged its tedious
length, the prospect of the Freshmen forcing a rush had become the
important thing with the crowd. The fighting class limbered up for
action. Now their third man struck out and the catcher's mask was off.
"Ready!" Pete Halleck's voice came out of the silence of the waiting
crowd.
"All set!" and the class was up and off on a trot toward the Sophomore
players, who were trying not to walk away any faster than was usual. One
after another the baseball men were overtaken and went down in clouds of
dust and hard language.
Yet the Sophomores would not rush. Frank Lyman had exhorted them simply,
while the Freshmen were attacking their nine. One or two of the
hot-heads hurried to the Hall for old clothes, but the majority stood
looking on, angry but quiet.
"Now for Smith!" yelled Halleck. His men turned toward the co-ed section
of the bleachers.
"Shall we get out of this?" Cap asked Ashley.
"Get out nothing! Stay right here with the girls. They wouldn't have the
gall."
But the lust of fight was in the Freshman heart as the dust of fight
was on the Freshman skin. They lined up, a ragged mass of impertinence,
as near the women as they dared, and waited for the leader of the
opposition. He chatted on, explaining the college rush to the girl with
him, and gave no sign of moving.
"Shall we go in and take him?" asked an excited youngster.
"I'll give him a chance to come easy," said Halleck. He squared himself,
adjusted his dusty hat, and went straight up the steps.
"Excuse me, Mr. Smith," said he, "you are forgetting an engagement you
made with some of your friends yesterday."
This was the freshest thing in the history of the college. The
Sophomore's fingers twitched.
"I think you can wait until later, Halleck," he said slowly. Then he
turned to the girl.
From the time Halleck climbed the bleachers and went toward Smith and
his guests, the spectators were stiff with astonishment; nobody did
anything. They saw Halleck look for one moment into Smith's angry blue
eyes, go down the steps, and bring back two big fellows. Before the
Sophomore could move away from the girls, the three men had dragged him
down the bleachers; one heave of Halleck's broad back and Smith was
under them, with his wind gone, and a Freshman was getting a rope
ready.
Then just as Ashley tore down the steps in a rage, a slip of a girl
darted past him and put her hands on Halleck's shoulders; a small,
sandy-haired girl with blazing eyes.
"Untie him, you great brutes!"
The man with the rope stared at her irresolutely, furtively slipping the
knot tighter. By this time, Halleck was on his feet again and had
recovered from his surprise.
"Excuse me," he began.
The girl looked him in the eye.
"Get that rope off!"
She was just a little thing, but her gaze never wavered. The direct gaze
is something that wild beasts and bullies, Freshmen or otherwise, cannot
bear. Pete Halleck looked around for moral support, but his men were
shame-faced and the bleachers were silent. He bent down and slipped the
rope off Smith's feet.
With the rout of their leader the whole fighting class, weighing some
ten tons in battle trim, vanished like chaff before the spirit of one
Freshie co-ed. By twos and threes they slouched away, trying to look
unconcerned.
She turned to the man she had rescued.
"Are you much hurt, Mr. Smith?" she asked, her voice sweet with
sympathy.
The Sophomore president stood there, rumpled, winded, flaming with
embarrassment. Away up on the bleachers a girl in an Easter hat tittered
and a general laugh followed. That laugh brought Smith to himself, but,
before he could turn to thank her, Hannah, with a swift, frightened
glance at the people, had fled to the Quadrangle. With swelling bosom
and eyes stinging with restrained tears she leaned her face against a
cool pillar and watched the swallows circle mistily about the red
tiling.
People, coming from the ball-ground, passed her, unnoticed in the
shadow. A man's voice, ringing with merriment, cried:
"Poor old Captain! I never saw him have such a chap. It's pretty hard on
a man to have a girl do the Pocahontas act like that!"
A peal of Roble laughter answered.
"Pocahontas! O--oh, that's a cute name for her!"
HIS UNCLE'S WILL.
His Uncle's Will.
"It's a wise child that resembles its richest relative."
MODERN PROVERB.
Walter Olcott Haviland came to Stanford in September at the age of
eighteen, and was rushed by the fraternities.
There is nothing remarkable about this, unless considered from
Haviland's point of view. With his High School pin illuminating the vest
on which a mystic Greek symbol was ere long to shine, he passed down the
line of inquisitive Sophomores in Encina lobby, and into the Den of the
Bear, presented his receipt for the room he had prudently engaged months
ahead, and was duly bestowed within those plain white walls between
which the Freshman begins a charmed existence of four years or four
months, as the Committee may determine.
It is recorded that once before Commencement two Seniors came from
fraternity houses at opposite ends of the campus and slept together the
last night, as they had slept their first, in their Freshman room at the
Hall. They had been rivals and in warring factions, but they lay down
together in that place of beginnings, before a new heaven opened for
them over a new earth. This is proof positive that you never forget your
first room in the Hall. You may give it up for an attic in a
chapter-house, you may go to live with young Freshleigh, with whom you
are already chums, and whose apartment has the morning sun; but the
first room is a foundation stone in your house of memories. Your trunk
is brought in by the Student Transfer man (first lesson in self-help)
and put down near the dreary-looking beds with their mattresses doubled
on the foot-rail. Then, sitting down by the bare, shining table where,
later on, theses are to be written and punches brewed, you stake out
claims for the decorative material in your trunk. Certainly decorations
are needed. The wardrobe stands forbiddingly against the wall. You will
soon learn how to move it forward, reverse it, and adorn the back. The
chilling whiteness of the walls is relieved only by one square,
uncompromising mirror. An "Addersonian" tenderness has placed a
yellow-flowered rug beside each bed. Otherwise, the place is barren.
If there is time before dinner, you swallow your loneliness and get out
the home photographs and stand them up here and there, and the room is
changed. These walls may become a scrap-book of four years' association
with Alma Mater; the wardrobe may be hidden with kodaks of the gang and
its exploits; but to-day, before you have even met the gang, you come
into your own.
The newly-arrived Haviland, in the throes of this emotion, looks about
him. He has put upon the ugly commode sundry pictures of his graduating
class at the High School, each one dressed in his best, each flanked by
floral offerings, each holding the impressive diploma. Later, these
portraits will be less prominent in this college room.
He looks at them with a feeling of pity. It must be hard not to come to
college. He is a lucky boy. Sliding unobtrusively into the hall-way, he
strikes up an acquaintance with some other social Freshman, and together
they watch the upper class-men coming in. Man after man drifts into the
arms of waiting friends. How well they all know one another! Gradually
he learns who and what these men are, the Seniors who manage the Hall or
edit the College papers, the 'Varsity idols, the men who make College
life. Important beings they seem to the Freshman, men who have reached
heights above his modest possibilities, heroes who are great in the
land. After dinner he mingles in the stag dances on the second floor
hall-way; finding that a fellow class-man has neglected the graceful
art, he takes him up on the third floor and teaches him the step. He is
fitting in, you see. Then he hears the crowd surging into the lobby and
picks up the chorus of "We'll rush the ball along," and before this
first day is over he catches the contagion of that intangible,
pervasive, never wholly fading thing, College spirit.
Jimmy Mason, Sophomore, hustling Student-Body assessments, drops in on
him, and stops to chat awhile. Haviland learns that our team this year
has lost such and such valuable men; that there are opportunities for a
chap with football in him. The Freshman thinks of the day when the crowd
at home cheered him as his school beat the Academy. He hands Mason the
assessment money, being beautifully green yet. Like oases are these
Freshmen to the Student-Body collector. Very likely the Sophomore
rewards him by coming to his door, after the lights are out, at the head
of a motley mob. They put him on the table, shivering in his nightie,
and make derogatory remarks about his shape and his personal charms;
then, having solemnly baptised him "Callipers," or whatever metaphorical
name his physical architecture may suggest, they make him cavort for
their delectation. If he shows modesty and courage in his unhappy
obedience, he is greeted as a nice little boy and is introduced to his
tormentors, who explain that the ritual was offered from the kindest
motives. Doubtless it is this knowledge that makes him enjoy so keenly
the sacrifice of fellow class-men, at which he is permitted to be
present the next evening.
When he is spoken to mysteriously one night by "Pellams" Chase, a Junior
from the Row, and told to put on his oldest clothes and to get his
trunk-rope ("to rope up a Sophomore's trunk this time," hints the
Junior), for the first time he sees his class as a whole, and stands
shoulder to shoulder with them in the first College rush. The subsequent
pullings and haulings, the poundings and jammings of this experience are
happily compensated for if Chase takes him when all is over, binds up
his bruises and tells him about fights of other days when there were
giants upon the campus. After this, the College is never the immense,
far-away thing it has seemed. He has seen his own class-men together, he
has measured his strength with the dread Sophs, he is a University man.
Long before this the fraternities have spotted him.
* * * * *
"What are you going to do next hour?"
Haviland had just come out from his nine-thirty recitation and found
"Cap" Smith waiting for him. Smith was a Beta Rho, and he had waited
there in the same way for the same Freshman more than once in the month
since the opening. It was Pellams who had discovered the boy, one night
in Mason's room, where the Junior loafed half his time. Pellams had a
big heart surely, for he had at once interested himself in Haviland,
asking him over to dinner to meet the fellows. The Freshman knew it was
the Juniors' duty to look after the infant class. This particular Junior
was a College favorite,--Walt had seen that--and the boy from far-away
New England went across the campus to the Row feeling that he was
getting into good hands. The Rho house seemed about right. Dinner was a
boisterous affair where the men took hands around the table and sang a
rollicking accompaniment to Pellams' coon songs, strange table-manners
that did not appear much to disturb Perkins' mother, who poured coffee
at the end. Afterward they all sat out on the porch steps in the summer
evening with their pipes, watching three of the men play catch. One of
the fellows danced a shuffle while the rest stood around and clapped
time and shouted, "Come on you _Nigger_!" They were very happy; it was a
bully way to live; the homelike look of things appealed to the Freshman.
Two of the fellows walked back to the Hall with him, and when they said
good-night they shook his hand strongly and hoped they would see more of
him.
This was the beginning. The college had become aware of his presence
now. So far he had taken just nine meals that he had paid for, and had
been away from the Hall one night out of four.
At the reception to the Freshmen he had been introduced to the same
Faculty people six times over by members of as many fraternities, each
presenting him as an individual entirely under their auspices and for
whom they alone were responsible. Higgins, the sky-scraping Beta Phi,
whom he had met only that evening, took him arm in arm up to the
President's wife, and said:
"I want to introduce Mr. Haviland, a particular friend of mine. You will
be good to him for my sake, won't you?" And the lady with a twinkle in
her brown eyes, having recently promised to do the same for Jack Smith's
sake, pledged her favors anew to the bewildered Walt.
Haviland did not quite understand this attitude of open arms. His first
days in the Hall had not prepared him for it. He did not know that
because he was well-bred, well-dressed and athletically promising, he
was generally voted the prize Freshman of the year.
Then came the bids. There were only a few of the crowds that did not
spike him; three who were manifestly not of his style and two who never
presumed to enter the game until the others had made their winnings. All
sorts of methods had been used. The first bid came early; he was given
twenty-four hours to answer it, as "the Gamma Chi Tau never wait for a
man." The Freshman, however, getting riper in the sun of experience,
interpreted this to mean fear of competition, and so "declined with
assurances of continued friendship." There was a crowd who slapped him
on the back and called him "old man." Once he had been fresh enough to
tell them a story, and they had laughed so uproariously over it that he
was dreadfully embarrassed. The hospitality of another set seemed to
consist of a sly but systematic attempt to get him drunk for some
mysterious purpose of their own. He had put some of them to bed and felt
superior, which was fatal to their chances.
He had been to many varieties of dinner-tables. Some of them were
homelike; the talk at others had robbed him of appetite.
"What do you think of our crowd?" asked Roach, keenly, after a
particularly disagreeable meal at which there had been much coarseness
and a wreck of a tablecloth.
"They seem to me to be about the most congenial fellows I ever met,"
answered the disgusted but tactful Haviland, and Roach, going back to
his house, announced authoritatively that the boy was theirs if they
wanted him.
By this time he had learned the art of dodging invitations and remaining
non-committal when asked, "Well, Walt, are you going to do the right
thing?" Many a set, piled upon the beds in a fraternity room, sat up
late talking him over and wondering how he was "coming on."
The Beta Phis, for instance, were in painful doubt. They were conscious
of a comparatively poor stack-up, but their rushing energy was
admirable, and once the persecuted Haviland had been obliged to ask a
Beta Rho to hide him from them. Pellams and Smith were merry at dinner
that night.
In his heart, Walt had about decided on Beta Rho. This crowd treated him
with well-bred cordiality but with far less effusiveness than the
others. He was pleased when they had let him mix with them without
permitting him to forget the gulf between. This had put him off his
guard so that he had grown accustomed to them. Observing him expertly
from the corners of their eyes, they affected not to notice the way he
blushed after having joined unconsciously in a Beta Rho song. One day he
dropped over uninvited, and they understood. But in the first week of
their acquaintance they had told him to hold off and be slow about
pledging himself, and nothing more had been said so far.
On the night of the first rush, ending in complete victory for the
Freshmen, Haviland had been so unfortunate as to clinch with Cap Smith,
and he was largely responsible for the ignominious tying up of that
husky Sophomore. He would much rather have been carted off himself, if
it hadn't been for the class. He saw his Beta Rho chances vanishing.
Pellams evidently did not know what had happened, he was so good to him
after it, rubbing his bruises and dressing his scraped cheek. The next
day Cap Smith came over and bid him to the fraternity. As a matter of
principle, Haviland asked for a week to decide.
This indulgence was up to-day and now Cap was waiting for him after the
second-hour class. Walt knew what answer he should give. He felt very
contented.
"I got your mail for you," said Smith, handing him an envelope. "I've a
letter of my own to read, so tackle yours while we walk along."
They went up toward the stock-farm, and the boy opened his mother's
letter and read eagerly the home news and the affectionate questions.
She enclosed, she said, the check which his uncle, who was putting him
through College, had sent for October. Following this were a few words
that made him stare hard at the road before him, as he and Smith
strolled on. "Your uncle writes," said the letter, "that when he was at
Amherst he was a fraternity man, and thinks you ought to be one, and he
would like to have you join the society to which he belonged, the Beta
Phi. I am sure, Wo dear, you will follow his wishes in a matter like
this. It is not much to do in return."
Poor Walt! The Beta Rhos had never seemed such smooth fellows as at this
moment when he felt himself suddenly pledged to the Beta Phis. In his
mind's eye the Phis passed before him, one by one, particularly a
certain long, unprepossessing member who had stayed till after twelve
one night and bored him with a dreary recital of the prominence of his
house in College politics, of the stump speeches that a former brother,
now a historical personage, had made in Mayfield for prohibition, to say
nothing of the essay prizes in philology that another ancient Phi had
won in the dim past, when the chapter must have been more prominent than
at present. In comparison with this record, the Rhos were numbskulls,
dwelling in an amplified smoking-room, Walt must admit; their control of
the Eleven and of the Glee Club was nothing. And now his future was
black with philology prizes, with meals at which stew was a staple, and
where only visitors had clean napkins.
The two fellows had by this time reached the trotting stables. They
looked in at the beautiful, sleek racers, carefully blanketed and
booted, and stroked an inquisitive nose or two, reached out over the
white doors. Then they went on up the stock-farm yard and along the road
to the bridge over San Francisquito. Here Smith stopped; leaning on the
rail, he looked down at his blonde image in the shallow water below.
"Well, Professor, what's your answer? You ought to know your mind by
this time, surely, and we want you bad, my boy."
"Cap, old man," began the Freshman, his voice a little husky, for he was
sorely troubled, "you must know how I appreciate the way you fellows
have treated me, and that I want you particularly for a friend." He
stopped, but Smith kept silent. The fraternity had had refusals before;
they usually began this way.
"I don't know just what I ought to say," went on the luckless Walt. "I
really did think you were the crowd I should join, but something has
come up and I can't say yes."
"What is it? Is it because you think we don't study enough? We do,
though, a great deal more than it looks. This has been rushing season
and we had to do the entertaining stunt a lot, and Pellams would give
any crowd the look of bumming. We really do work hard the rest of the
year."
"Oh, no," said Walt, "it isn't anything like that, Cap."
"There's somebody in the gang that you don't like, then; somebody that
you don't know well and don't understand. Isn't that so? Who is it? You
ought to tell me."
"I would, Cap, if that were the reason, but it isn't. I like every man
of them all."
"What is it then?"
"Nothing that I can tell you." Poor Walt, he was ashamed of his uncle;
Lyman at the Hall had told him that the whole Beta Phi fraternity was as
scrubby as their Stanford chapter.
Cap's eyes had an angry gleam. "Somebody has been throwing mud," he
said, kicking up a splinter from the bridge floor. "There are plenty of
them to do it."
"It isn't that at all. I wouldn't be influenced that way," protested
Haviland. "It's another matter."
"Well, I suppose this is final," said Smith, struggling hard with his
disappointment. The Freshman's past attitude had paved the way for a
different answer.
"Let's not say that," Walt began slowly. "Give me a while longer, Cap;
things may change. I had hoped--" He broke off;--he could never tell
Smith--he had not until that very moment told himself--how much he had
looked forward to being a Rho.