In freshman year they say, "Are you ready to feed your face?" instead
of "Are you going to dinner?" and at the eating clubs they call the
milk-pitcher the "cow," and shout "Butter me, please," when they wish
the butter handed to them. All their desires and opinions they express
in variously bold and vulgar metaphors, which are witty. This is
because there is no one to tell them they must not. The boy is a
college man now. He is free from the restraint of home or school or
both, and he doesn't know quite what to do with his liberty.
Like a young town horse turned loose for the first time in the open
green of the country, he sometimes loses his head and frisks and
snorts and kicks up his heels to an unbecoming degree. This is a way
of saying that every once in a while some little boy (the strictly
reared kind, usually), in his eagerness to show his fellows how
reckless and devilish he is, goes so far that he never comes quite
back. Others dissipate merely to the extent of cutting chapel twice
in succession or pretending that they have not poled all night for an
examination. In still others it breaks out in a different form, and
they persuade themselves that they are naughty cynics or bold, bad
agnostics. But that will do for that.
The point is this: Sooner or later, in some form or another, this
spirit is bound to get hold of every young man who is worthy of the
name, and, like measles or calf-love, it is better to have it sooner.
In the very young it is interesting. After that it is not. And the
older one is when it comes, the more he reminds the onlookers of the
frolicksome antics of some ancient, misguided cow, or of a kittenish
summer girl, aged twenty-eight. When seen in a poler it is pathetic.
* * * * *
At his first eating club in freshman year, H. Stacy felt himself
snubbed from the start; and when the crowd, which was not slow, became
well enough acquainted with one another and with the glorious freedom
of college life to pour syrup down their neighbors' backs and to hurl
fried eggs and coarse jokes about the table, little Stacy, although he
always said, "That was a pretty good shot," and wiped the potato from
his ear with a noisy laugh, saw that he was not in his own element,
which he should have seen a month before, and got out.
He joined a club of a very different sort of freshmen, who were too
busy speculating upon their chances at the approaching Divisional
Examinations to invent names for tough beefsteak, or learn what was
going on in Trenton at the theatres and other places.
This was his element. He drew in long, full breaths of freedom and
sunshine, and told himself that now he knew what was meant by the Joy
of College Life.
Here he settled down to the methodical poler habits he was intended
for, and when the next catalogue was issued his mother and sister
pointed out to the minister's wife the name of "Horatio B. Stacy, New
Jersey," in the small group of names called "First Group," and said,
"We knew he would do it." In his sophomore year he did it again and
won a prize or two besides and became a minor light in the Cliosophic
Society, and by this time he held in that Hall an office, the name of
which was a secret, and could not be divulged even to his sister
Fannie. He studied for high marks and was called a "greasy poler." But
he got the high marks.
You must not think he had no friends. He made some firm ones. About
these he could write home to his sister Fannie, telling what
magnificent characters some of them were. Often of a Saturday night,
if he had no essays to write or debates to prepare, he slipped off his
eye-shades and pattered across the campus to his friends' rooms and
knocked gently and said, "How do?" and conversed for an hour on the
difficulty of taking notes when your neighbor is borrowing your knife,
or about the elective courses for the next term. And down at the club
they had great horse calling each other "Blamed Neo-Platonists" and
"Doggoned Transcendentalists." Nor was it all shop. One of them
thought himself in love. It was Stacy that used to wink at the others
and bob his head and say, "I know some one who got a letter to-day."
They had great fun at the club.
By reason of his freshman year's disgust he remained innocent, which
was right, and ignorant, which was wrong, of much that he might have
experienced, and he bade fair to graduate a typical poler with a bad
breath and an eye on Commencement stage and special honors. Sometimes,
to be sure, dark questions arose in his mind, strange, shameful
yearnings that caused him to read whole pages without taking in a word
of it. But then, all polers have wild moments when they feel that they
would rather play on the team than win the Stinnecke Scholarship, so
Stacy should not have been distressed.
But sometimes it seemed to him that even those classmates whom he knew
only slightly and did not understand at all, those fellows who seemed
to do nothing but loaf about the campus all day and sing and shout at
night, while he was running his hands through his hair and his eyes
through Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason," they, it seemed to him, were
getting a poetry out of college life that he was missing. "But never
mind," he would say to himself. "They will regret it some day. They
will wish they had done as I am doing, instead of wasting golden
opportunities which come but once and which glide by like ships upon
the sea of life." Then he would pull his hair and start at the top of
the page again. It is better to have First Group than the Glee Club.
But there were some fellows who could do both. Some fellows stood high
in the class and were in with everybody besides. Why could not he be
like that? This question came to him quite suddenly in junior year,
and he tipped his head to one side and began to think about it. He
kept on thinking.
He was still thinking about it one Sunday afternoon in chapel when big
Jack Stehman, the tackle, came stalking down the aisles and threw
himself down beside Stacy, and the oak creaked. He was fresh and clean
and rosy from a long 'cross country tramp, and he said, "Hello,
Stace," in a hearty whisper. It was not from policy like the smiling
hello of a man a few pews in front, but because he felt like it. Stacy
enjoyed being saluted in that way, and if the big fellow grabbed and
pinched his thin leg he would beam for the rest of the hour, even
though he found a blue spot there at night when he undressed in
Edwards Hall.
It was because of his way of saying hello, as much as his great
football record, that Stehman was one of the most popular men in
college, and nobody worshipped him more than did Stacy, not even the
freshman who gazed across the pews and wondered what it would be like
to be on familiar terms with a man of that sort. Stacy had at one time
feared that there was something sinful in his own admiration; Stehman
was a fourth-group man.
He was thinking that his big class-mate looked just as strong and
clean and good as during the season. Just then Timberly, in the pew
behind, lay hold of Stehman's hair, drew his head back against the
rail, and then rubbed his own vigorously against Stehman's. "Little
Jackie's had his long locks cut, hasn't he?" he said. His teeth were
gritted and there was a sweet caress in his Southern voice, for he
loved his good pal Jack Stehman, though he would have called you
profane things if you had accused him of it. Stehman smiled, and said,
"Let go, Timber, you ass, the organ has stopped."
Little Stacy, watching this out of the corner of his glasses, said,
solemnly, "I'd give my first group for that," and then bowed his head
in prayer. He thought about it all through the service instead of
listening as he should have done to a returned missionary who told how
many widows there were in India under thirteen years of age, and other
interesting things.
The next day, when he walked with Stehman from a lecture by the Dean
on Robert Southey, he tried to catch his friend's tone of hello. Jack
said it to about fifty men between Dickinson Hall and Reunion, and it
sounded as though he were glad to see everyone of them, and he was.
Stacy liked to be seen with the big fellow. But he did not blush and
keep silent as in sophomore year when he was first permitted to walk
with him. He tried to show everyone that he was used to it.
This time something happened. When they reached the place where the
stone walks meet, in front of South Reunion, Stehman put a big hand
on his shoulder, and said, "Stace, will you dine with me this
evening?--Oh, yes, you can. I have an engagement in Dougal's room now.
I'll yell for you on the way to the club. So long." Stacy opened his
mouth and gazed after him until out of sight. Then he shut it and
started for his room. This was unexpected.
He had often thought about these large swell clubs with their elective
membership, and he had walked by the houses when the members were
lounging out in front. He had heard snatches of songs and the click of
billiard-balls from within, and he wondered what they did and said and
how it looked inside. And now he was going to see one of them, the one
he admired the most of all.
At his own little eating club, he and the others said that many of the
club men were snobs, and declared that they would have nothing to do
with them. He wondered if his friends envied them in secret, as he
did. At any rate he would not dread answering them the next morning
when they asked, "Where were you for dinner?"
When he reached his room he changed his necktie for a more becoming
one. At least he thought it was. And he put on his new, heavy, tan
shoes, like those Stehman and so many fellows wore. He would show them
that he knew things. Then he sat down and wrote to his sister Fannie
about it, as he did once before with a trembling hand, when he won
that essay prize in Hall and came late to dinner in consequence, and
all the fellows cried, "Yea-a, Stacy, Sophomore essay prize!" He had
pointed out that club to Fannie when she and his mother came over at
Commencement, and he had told her that Stehman was in that one. She
knew who Stehman was.
Stacy little imagined that he was of so much consequence, but Stehman,
the tackle, had been talking about him on Sunday evening by the club
fireplace. Two of the fellows who were younger than juniors ought to
be had smiled at what he said.
To them Jack turned with some heat, and observed, "You fellows make me
tired. You aren't under-class men now; you're old enough to know
better than to size up people by under-class man standards. Just
because Stacy has not learned to swear or smoke, and because he
worries and fusses and gets pale over what he came to college for, you
think you have a right to laugh at him. I respect him, and I wish to
the deuce I was more like him. Little Stacy is all right. And he'll
be in it all right some of these days, and he'll do a great deal more
good in the world than most of us."
This was the longest speech Jack Stehman had ever made, and he was
duly applauded and guyed for it. But he was serious. He had a Sunday
night sour on. It was junior year for Stehman also, and he too had
been coming to some conclusions about his college course. But of a
different kind.
It was nearly half after six when Stacy heard his friend's big voice
echo across the campus. As he pattered down the stairs in his stiff,
new Bluchers, he could not help wishing that Stehman had come a little
earlier. Not that he was hungry, but the campus would then have been
more crowded, while Stehman called, "Hello, Ray Stace."
As they passed under the lamp-post and Jack said "Hello" to somebody
going in the other direction, Stacy remembered how that once he would
not have believed that he should ever be walking as he was now with
Stehman's big, strong arm upon his shoulder, the same arm that had
brought down many a canvas jacket. But that was long ago.
When they reached the club, Stehman kicked the mud from his big, heavy
shoes on the porch steps, and Stacy did the same for his bright new
little ones. The door flew open and the brightly lighted interior of
the club was before them. Stacy caught a glimpse of an open fire and
deep, comfortable places to lounge in beside it, and some etchings on
the wall. He heard knives and forks and many voices, all going at
once, and laughter and exclamations. He spied a waiter hurrying in
with a tray full of dishes. A little nigger boy, with innumerable
buttons on his jacket, began to help him off with his overcoat, and
just then he heard one voice exclaim emphatically, "Doc., I say they
can't do it," and he wondered what it was and who could not do it.