Ramsey passed the slightly disfigured Linski on the campus next day
without betraying any embarrassment or making a sign of recognition.
Fred Mitchell told his roommate, chuckling, that Linski had sworn
to “get” him, and, not knowing Fred's affiliations, had made him the
confidant of his oath. Fred had given his blessing, he said, upon the
enterprise, and advised Linski to use a brick. “He'll hit you on the
head with it,” said the light-hearted Fred, falling back upon this old
joke. “Then you can catch it as it bounces off and throw it back at
him.”
However, Linski proved to be merely an episode, not only so far as
Ramsey was concerned but in the Lumen and in the university as well. His
suspension from the Lumen was for a year, and so cruel a punishment it
proved for this born debater that he noisily declared he would found
a debating society himself, and had a poster printed and distributed
announcing the first meeting of “The Free Speech and Masses' Rights
Council.” Several town loafers attended the meeting, but the only
person connected with the university who came was an oriental student,
a Chinese youth of almost intrusive amiability. Linski made a fiery
address, the townsmen loudly appluading his advocacy of an embargo
on munitions and the distribution of everybody's “property,” but the
Chinaman, accustomed to see students so madly in earnest only when
they were burlesquing, took the whole affair to be intended humour, and
tittered politely without cessation--except at such times as he thought
it proper to appear quite wrung with laughter. Then he would rock
himself, clasp his mouth with both hands and splutter through his
fingers. Linski accused him of being in the pay of “capital.”
Next day the orator was unable to show himself upon the campus without
causing demonstrations; whenever he was seen a file of quickly gathering
students marched behind him chanting repeatedly and deafeningly in
chorus: “Down with Wall Street! Hoch der Kaiser! Who loves Linski? Who,
who, who? Hoo Lun! Who loves Linski? Who, who, who? Hoo Lun!”
Linski was disgusted, resigned from the university, and disappeared.
“Well, here it isn't mid-year Exams yet, and the good ole class of
Nineteen-Eighteen's already lost a member,” said Fred Mitchell. “I guess
we can bear the break-up!”
“I guess so,” Ramsey assented. “That Linski might just as well stayed
here, though.”
“Why?”
“He couldn't do any harm here. He'll prob'ly get more people to listen
to him in cities where there's so many new immigrants and all such that
don't know anything, comin' in all the time.”
“Oh, well,” said Fred. “What do _we_ care what happens to Chicago! Come
on, let's behave real wild, and go on over to the 'Teria and get us a
couple egg sandwiches and sassprilly.”
Ramsey was willing.
After the strain of the “mid-year Exams” in February, they lived a
free-hearted life. They had settled into the ways of their world; they
had grown used to it, and it had grown used to them; there was no
longer any ignominy in being a freshman. They romped upon the campus
and sometimes rioted harmlessly about the streets of the town. In the
evenings they visited their fellows and Brethren and were visited in
turn, and sometimes they looked so far ahead as to talk vaguely of their
plans for professions or business--though to a freshman this concerned
an almost unthinkably distant prospect. “I guess I'll go in with my
father, in the wholesale drug business,” said Fred. “My married brother
already is in the firm, and I suppose they'll give me a show--send me
out on the road a year or two first, maybe, to try me. Then I'm going to
marry some little cutie and settle down. What you goin' to do, Ramsey?
Go to Law School, and then come back and go in your father's office?”
“I don't know. Guess so.”
It was always Fred who did most of the talking; Ramsey was quiet. Fred
told the “frat seniors” that Ramsey was “developing a whole lot these
days”; and he told Ramsey himself that he could see a “big change” in
him, adding that the improvement was probably due to Ramsey's having
passed through “terrible trials like that debate.”
Ramsey kept to their rooms more than his comrade did, one reason for
this domesticity being that he “had to study longer than Fred did, to
keep up”; and another reason may have been a greater shyness than Fred
possessed--if, indeed, Fred possessed any shyness at all. For Fred was
a cheery spirit difficult to abash, and by the coming of spring knew all
of the best-looking girl students in the place--knew them well enough,
it appeared, to speak of them not merely by their first names but by
abbreviations of these. He had become fashion's sprig, a “fusser” and
butterfly, and he reproached his roommate for shunning the ladies.
“Well, the truth is, Fred,” said Ramsey one day, responding
darkly;--“well, you see the truth is, Fred, I've had a--a--I've had an
experience--”
So, only, did he refer to Milla.
Fred said no more; and it was comprehended between them that the past
need never be definitely referred to again, but that it stood between
Ramsey and any entertainment to be obtained of the gentler but less
trustworthy sex. And when other Brethren of the “frat” would have
pressed Ramsey to join them in various frivolous enterprises concerning
“co-eds,” or to be shared by “co-eds,” Fred thought it better to explain
to them privately (all being sacred among Brethren) how Ramsey's life,
so far as Girls went, had been toyed with by one now a Married Woman.
This created a great deal of respect for Ramsey. It became understood
everywhere that he was a woman-hater.