WHEN GREEK MEETS GROUCH
It's a cinch that college life would be a whole lot more congested with
pleasure if it wasn't for the towns that the colleges are in. I don't
mean that a town around a college hasn't its uses. Wherever you find a
town you can find lunch counters and theaters with galleries from which
you can learn the drama at a quarter a throw, and street cars that can
be tampered with, and wooden sidewalks that burn well on celebration
nights, and nice girls who began being nice four college generations ago
and never forgot how. All of these things about a town are mighty handy
when it comes to getting a higher education in a good, live college
where you don't have to tunnel through three feet of moss to find the
college customs. But even all this can't reconcile me to the way a town
butts into college affairs. It is something disgusting.
You know it yourself, Bill. Didn't you go to Yellagain where the police
arrested the whole Freshman class for painting the Sophomores green?
Well, it's the same way all over. No sooner does a college town get big
enough to support a rudimentary policeman who peddles vegetables when
he isn't putting down anarchy than it gets busy and begins to regulate
the college students. And the bigger it gets the more regulating it
wants to do. Why, they tell me that at the University of Chicago there
hasn't been a riot for nine years, and that over in Washington Park,
three blocks away, an eleven-ton statue of old Chris. Columbus has lain
for ages and no college class has had spirit enough to haul it out on
the street-car tracks. That's what regulating a college does for it.
There are more policemen in Chicago than there are students in the
University. If you give your yell off the campus you have to get a
permit from the city council. It's worse than that in Philadelphia, they
tell me. Why, there, if a college student comes downtown with a
flareback coat and heart-shaped trousers and one of those nifty little
pompadour hats that are brushed back from the brow to give the brains a
chance to grow, they arrest him for collecting a crowd and disturbing
traffic. No, sir, no big-town college for me. Getting college life in
those places reminds me of trying to get that world-wide feeling on
ice-cream soda. There's as much chance in one as in the other.
Excuse me for getting sore, but that's the way I do when I begin to talk
about college towns. They don't know their places. Take Jonesville,
where Siwash is, for instance. When Siwash College was founded by "that
noble band of Christian truth seekers," as the catalogue puts it,
Jonesville was a mud-hole freckled with houses. The railroad trains
whistled "get out of my way" to the town when they whooped through it,
and when you went into a merchant's store and woke him up he started off
home to dinner from force of habit. The only thing they ever regulated
there was the clock. They regulated that once a year and usually found
that it was two or three days behind time. Hadn't noticed it at all.
That's what Jonesville was when Siwash started. You can bet for the
first forty years they didn't do much regulating around the college. The
students just let the town stay there because it was quiet. The citizens
used to elect town marshals over seventy years old, so their gray hairs
would protect them from the students, and when the boys had won a debate
or a ball game and wanted to burn a barn or two to cheer up the
atmosphere at evening, nothing at all was said--at least out loud.
Jonesville was meek enough, you bet. Why, back in the seventies the
students used to vote at town elections, and once for a joke they all
voted for old "Apple Sally" for president of the village board. Made her
serve, too. Talk about regulating! Did you ever see a farmer's dog go
out and try to regulate a sixty-horse-power automobile? That's about as
much as Jonesville would have regulated us thirty years ago.
But, of course, having a real peppery college in its midst, Jonesville
couldn't help but grow. People came and started boarding-houses. There
had to be restaurants and bookstores and necktie emporiums, too, and
pretty soon the railroad built a couple of branches into town and
started the division shops. Then Jonesville woke up and walked right
past old Siwash. In ten years it had street cars, paved streets,
water-works, a political machine and a city debt, as large as the law
would allow. And worse than that, it had a police force. It had nine
officers in uniform, most of whom could read and write and swing big
clubs with a strictly American accent. Nice sort of a thing to turn
loose in a quiet college town. This was long before my time, but they
tell me that the students held indignation meetings for a week after the
first arrest was made. You see, the students at Siwash always had their
own rules and lived up to them strictly. The Faculty put them on their
honor and that honor was never abused. Students were not allowed to burn
the college buildings nor kill the professors. These rules were never
broken, and naturally the boys felt rather insulted when the city turned
loose a horde of blue-coated busybodies to interfere with things that
didn't concern them.
Still, Siwash got along very well even after the police force was
organized. You see, after a town has had a college in its middle for
about fifty years, pretty much everybody in town has attended it at one
time or another. None of the police had diplomas, but it was no uncommon
thing to see an ex-member of a college debating society delivering
groceries, or an ex-president of his class getting up in an engine cab
to take the flyer into the city. For years every police magistrate was
an old Siwash man, and, though plenty of the boys would get arrested,
there were never any thirty-day complications or anything of the sort.
Two classes would meet on the main street and muss each other up. The
police would arrest nine or ten of the ringleaders. The next morning the
prisoners would appear before Squire Jennings, who climbed up on the old
college building with his class flag in '54 and kept a rival class away
by tearing down the chimney and throwing the bricks at them. Naturally,
nothing very deadly happened. The good old fellow would lecture the
crowd and let them off with a stern warning. Maybe two or three Seniors
would come home late at night from their frat hall and take a wooden
Indian cigar sign along with them just for company. One of those Indians
is such a steady sort of a chap to have along late at night. Of course,
they would be arrested by old Hank Anderson on the courthouse beat, but
it wasn't anything serious. They would telephone Frank Hinckley, who was
editor of the city daily, and just convalescing from four years of
college life himself, and he would come down and bail them out, and
Squire Jennings would kick them out of court next morning. Frank was the
patron saint of the students for years when it came to bail. He used to
say he had all the fun of being a doctor and getting called out nights
without having to try to collect any fees. Frank was no Croesus those
days and I've seen him go bail for fifteen students at one hundred
dollars apiece, when his total assets amounted to a dress suit, three
hundred and forty-five photographs and his next week's salary.
By the time I had come to college, getting arrested had gotten to be a
regular formality. A Freshman would go up Main Street at night, trying
to hide a nine-foot board sign under his spring overcoat. Halvor
Skoogerson, a pale-eyed guardian of the peace, who was studying up to be
a naturalized, would arrest him for theft, riot, disorderly conduct,
suspicious appearance and intoxication, not understanding why any sober
man would want to carry a young lumber-yard home under his coat at
night. The prisoner would telephone for Hinckley, who would crawl out of
bed, come downtown cussing, and bail away in sleepy tones. The next
morning the freshie would go up before Squire Jennings, who would ask
him in awful accents if he realized that the state penitentiary was only
four hours away by fast train, and that many a man was boarding there
who would blush to be seen in the company of a man who had stolen a
nine-foot sign and carried it down Main Street, interfering with
pedestrians, when there was a perfectly good alley which ought to be
used for such purposes. Then he would warn the culprit that the next
time he was caught lugging off a billboard or a wooden platform or a
corncrib he would be compelled to put it back again before he got
breakfast; after which he would tell him to go along and try studying
for a change, and the Freshman would go back to college and join the
hero brigade. It was a mighty meek man in Siwash who couldn't get
arrested those days. Even the hymn singers at the Y. M. C. A. had
criminal records. It got so, finally, that whenever we had a nightshirt
parade in honor of any little college victory the line of march would
lead right through the police station. We knew what was coming and would
save the cops the trouble of hauling us over in the hustle wagon.
Take it all in all, it was about as much fun to be regulated as it was
to run the town. But one night Squire Jennings put his other foot into
the grave and died entirely; and before any of us realized what was
happening a special election had been held and Malachi Scroggs had been
elected police magistrate.
Malachi Scroggs was a triple extract of grouch who lived on the north
side two miles away from college in a big white house with one of those
old-fashioned dog-house affairs on top of it. He was an acrimonious
quarrel all by himself. Sunlight soured when it struck him. I have seen
a fox terrier who had been lying perfectly happy on the sidewalk, get up
after Scroggs had passed him and go over and bite an automobile tire. He
lived on gloom and law-suits and the last time he smiled was 1878--that
was when a small boy fell nineteen feet out of a tree while robbing his
orchard, and the doctor said he would never be able to rob any more
orchards.
This was the kind of mental astringent Malachi was. Naturally, he loved
the gay and happy little college boys. Oh, how he loved us! He had
complained to the police regularly during each celebration for twenty
years and he had expressed the opinion, publicly, that a college boy was
a cross between a hyena and a grasshopper with a fog-horn attachment
thrown in free of charge. He wasn't a college man himself, you
see--never could find one where the students didn't use slang, probably,
and he just naturally didn't understand us at all. Of course, we didn't
mind that. It's no credit to carry an interlinear translation of your
temperament on your face. So long as he kept in his own yard and
quarreled with his own dog for not feeding on Freshmen more
enthusiastically, we got along as nicely as the Egyptian Sphinx and John
L. Sullivan. Even when he was elected police magistrate we didn't
object. In fact, we didn't bumpity-bump to the situation until we went
up against him in court.
Part of the Senior class had been having a little choir practice in one
of the town restaurants. It was a lovely affair and there wasn't a more
cheerful crowd of fellows on earth than they were when they marched down
the street at one A. M. eighteen abreast and singing one of the dear old
songs in a kind of a steam-siren barytone.
Now they had never attempted to regulate mere noise in Jonesville, but
that night a brand-new policeman had gone on the courthouse beat, and
blamed if he didn't arrest the whole bunch for disturbing the
peace--when they hadn't broken a single thing, mind you. They were
pretty mad about it at first; but after all it was only a joke, and when
Hinckley got down to bail them out they were singing with great feeling
a song which Jenkins, the class poet, had just composed, and which ran
as follows:
"As we walked along the street
Officer Sikes we chanced to meet,
And his shoes were full of feet
As he prowled along his beat.
He took us down and locked us up;
Left us in charge of a Norsky Cop,
And we didn't get home till early in the morning."
Hold that "morning" as long as you can and tonsorialize to beat the
band. Even the desk sergeant enjoyed it.
When the bunch lined up the next morning in police court there was Judge
Scroggs. They felt as if they ought to treat him nicely, he being a
newcomer and all of them being very familiar with the ropes; and Emmons,
the class president, started explaining to him that it was all a
mistake. Scroggs bit him off with a voice that sounded like a terrier
snapping at a fly.
"We're here to correct these mistakes," he said. "You were all singing
on the public street at one o'clock in the morning, weren't you?"
"We were trying to," said Emmons, still friendly.
"Ten days apiece," said the magistrate. "Call the next case."
If any one had removed the floor from under these Seniors and let them
drop one thousand and one feet into space they couldn't have felt more
shocked. Even the clerk and the desk sergeant were amazed. They tried to
help explain, but the human vinegar-cruet turned around and spat the
following through his clenched teeth:
"Gentlemen, I have been appointed to sit on this bench and I don't need
any help. Any more objections will be in contempt of court. Sergeant,
remove these young thugs and have them sent to the workhouse at once."
Maybe you don't think the college seethed when the news got out. There
were the leading lights of the school, including the president of the
Senior class, the chairman of the Junior promenade, two halfbacks, the
pitcher on the baseball team and the president of the Y. M. C. A., all
on the works for ten days, along with as choice an assortment of plain
drunks and fancy resters as you could find in ninety miles of mainline
railroad. The students fairly went mad and bit at the air. Even the
Faculty got busy and Prexy dropped over to the police court to square
it. He came out a minute later very white around the mouth. I don't know
what Old Maledictions said to him, but it was a great sufficiency, I
guess. He seemed as insulted as Lord Tennyson might have been if the
milkman had pulled his whiskers.
There wasn't a thing to be done. The Faculty appealed to the mayor, but
old Scroggs had some regular Spanish-bit hold on him in the way of a
short-time note, I guess, and he washed his hands of the whole affair.
Our college great men were hauled out to the works and served their
time. When they got out they were sights. They weren't strong on
sanitation in workhouses in those days. Even their friends shook hands
with them with tongs. Think of sixteen proud monarchs of the campus
making brick in striped suits, with a cross foreman who used to haul
ashes from the college campus lording it over them and tracing their
ancestry back through thirty generations of undesirable citizens! Nice,
wasn't it? Oh, very!
That was the beginning of a sad and serious year for Siwash. For the
first time Scroggs enjoyed college boys. Soaking students got to be his
specialty. We did our blamedest to behave, but you can't break off the
habits of generations in a week or two. Soon after the Seniors got out
the Mock Turtles, a Sophomore society, capacity thirty thousand quarts,
absent-mindedly tipped over a street car on their way home and were
jugged for thirty days. They had to enlarge the workhouse to take care
of them, and four of our best football players were retired from
circulation all through October. Think what that meant! The whole
college went up, just before the game with Hambletonian, and knelt on
the sidewalk before Judge Scroggs' house. He set the dog on us. Said
afterwards he wished the dog had been larger and hadn't had his supper.
A month later four members of the glee club tried to do our favorite
stunt of putting the horse in the herdic and hauling him home, and it
cost them twenty-nine days--just enough to break up the club. The whole
basket-ball team got thirty days because they took the bronze statue off
the fountain in the public square one night, laid him on the car tracks
in some old clothes, and had the ambulance force trying to resuscitate
him. Nobody had ever objected to this little joke before, but it cost us
the state championship and two of the team left school when they got
out. Said they'd come to Siwash for a college education, not for a
course of etymology in a workhouse.
It was terrible. We scarcely dared to cut out our mufflers enough to
whistle to each other on the street. By spring we were desperate. We had
lost the basket-ball championship. The glee club was ruined.
Muggledorfer had bumped us in football--that was the year before Ole
Skjarsen came to school--and college spirit at Siwash had been gummed up
until it could have been successfully imitated by a
four-thousand-year-old mummy. Our college meetings resembled the
overflow from a funeral around the front steps. We used to shut down all
the windows, say "shsh" nine times, and then write out our college yell
on curl papers and burn the papers. You could have swapped Siwash off
for a correspondence school without noticing any difference in the
reverberations. That was Petey Simmons' first year in college--as a
matter of fact, he was a Senior prep. I've told you more or less about
Petey before. He was the only son of one of these country bankers who
manage to get as much fun out of a half million as a New Yorker could
out of a whole railroad. Petey was a little chap who had always had what
he wanted and would cheerfully sit up all night thinking up new things
to want. He wasn't a Freshman yet, but he could give points to all the
college in the matter of explosive clothes and nifty ways of being
expensive to Dad. He couldn't get along without coat-cut underwear long
before we had heard of it, and you could tell by looking at his shoes
just what the rest of the school would be wearing in two years. That was
Petey all the way through. He was first and Father Time was nowhere,
forty miles back with a busted tire.
[Illustration: Martha caused some mild sensation
_Page 63_]
Petey took to college life like a kid to candy and just soaked himself
in college spirit. He proposed his sixty-five-dollar banjo for
membership in the club and went in with it of course. He was elected
yell-master before he had been in school two weeks, and if you ever want
to know how much noise can come out of a comparatively small orifice you
should have seen him emitting riot and pandemonium in the second half of
a lively football game. Naturally, it worried Petey almost to death to
see the dear old Coll. disintegrating under the Scroggs Inquisition, and
he used to sit around the frat house with his head on his hands for
hours, smoking his pipe, which had the largest bowl in school, and
combing his convolutions for a plan. Then, along in March, he
electrified the whole school by taking Martha Scroggs to the college
promenade.
Martha was old Malachi's daughter. We hadn't known it, but she had been
in school all that year. She was a quiet girl who was designed like a
tall problem in plane geometry. While it was possible for a clock to run
in the same room with her, still she was not what you might call a
picnic to look at. She was the kind of girl a man would look at once and
then go off and admire the scenery, even if it only consisted of a
ninety-acre cornfield and a grain elevator. Martha was only about
eighteen, and I never could understand how she got on to the styles of
thirty-six years ago and wore them as fluently as she did.
Naturally, Martha had gotten along in her studies without being pestered
by society to any extent. I sometimes think this helped old Scroggs to
hate us. She was his only child, and he had taken all the affection and
interest that most people distribute over their entire acquaintanceship
and concentrated it on her. They had grown up together since she became
a motherless baby, and they did say that while you could bombard the old
man with gatling guns without jarring his opinions he would lie down,
jump through a hoop or play dead whenever Martha wanted him to.
Naturally Martha caused some mild sensation when she appeared at the
biggest social spasm of the college year, with her sleeves bulging in
the wrong place, and nothing but her own hair on her head. But what
caused the real sensation was the fact that Petey had been released from
the workhouse the day before. Yes, sir--just turned out with seven more
days to serve. He had thrown a brick at a Sophomore who was trying to
catch him and dye his hair the Sophomore colors, and the brick had
annihilated one of the city's precious thirty-seven-cent street lights.
Petey had gone to the works for ten days, leaving a new dress suit that
hadn't been dedicated and unlimited woe among the girls, for he was a
Class A fusser.
Petey was non-committal about his insanity. He had the best eye for
beauty in the college, and yet he had been taking Miss Scroggs around to
church socials and town affairs for two months. But college boys aren't
slow, whatever you want to say about them. We had faith in Petey and we
backed up his game. We gave Martha the time of her young life at the
Prom.--pulled off three imitation rows over her program--and then we
turned in that winter and gave her a good, hot rush--which is a
technical college expression for keeping a girl dated up so that she
doesn't have time to wash the dishes at home once a month.
I must say that it wasn't much of a punishment, either, when we got
acquainted with Martha. She was a good fellow clear through and had a
smile that illuminated her plain face like a torchlight parade. Of
course, after you get out of school you learn that beauty is only skin
deep and seldom affects the brain; but this is a wonderful discovery for
a college boy to make when there are so many raving beauties about him
that he has to take a nap in the afternoon in order to dream about all
of them. At any rate, we took Martha to everything that came along, one
of us or another, and before a month we didn't have to pretend very much
to scrap for her dances, even if you did have to lug her around the room
by main strength--she was as heavy on her feet as a motor-bus.
April came and the first baseball game with it, and Saunders, our
pitcher, managed to draw a thirty-day sentence for stealing a steam
roller one noon and racing off down the avenue with a fat cop in
pursuit. We nearly fell dead once more when Saunders came walking into
chapel three days later. He had been released by Judge Scroggs with a
warning never under any circumstances to do anything of any sort at any
time any more, and been assured that he was nothing more than hangman's
meat. But he had been released! That night he took Martha Scroggs to the
Alfalfa Delt hop. And the next day he held Muggledorfer down to two hits
and no runs, with Martha waving hurrahs at him from a tally-ho.
We wanted to elect Petey president of the college, for we laid the whole
affair to him. But he wouldn't talk at all. If anything, he seemed a
little sore about the whole thing. Martha didn't loosen up, either. She
just smiled and told those of us who knew her well enough to ask
questions that Saunders was a lovely boy and that she had had that date
with him for ages--flies' ages, I guess she meant, for Alice Marsters,
one of the beauties of the school, stayed home from the dance after
announcing that she was going with Saunders, and never seemed able to
remember him by sight after that.
About a week afterward Maxwell, the college orator, a very solemn member
of the Siwash brain trust, was arrested for ever so little a thing. I
believe he so far forgot himself as to help give the college yell on
Main Street the night his literary society won a debate. Anyway, he got
ten days, and he was due in three days to orate for Siwash against the
whole Northwest. It was the biggest event of the school year--the
oratorical contest. We'd won seven of them--more than any other school
in the sixteen states--and we stood a good show with Maxwell. We were
crazy to win. Of course nobody ever goes to the contests; but we all
stay up all night to hear the results, and when we win, which we do once
every other college generation, we try to make the celebration bigger
than the stories of other celebrations that have been handed down. We'd
been planning this celebration all winter and had everything combustible
in Jonesville spotted.
Some of us were for going out and burning up the workhouse, but before
we got around to it Maxwell appeared. It was the day before the contest.
He'd served only two days, but instead of rushing right off to rehearse
his oration, which he couldn't do in the workhouse, owing to an
accountable prejudice the tramps and other prisoners had against
oratory, he took the evening off and went driving with Martha
Scroggs--about as queer a thing for him to do as it would be for the
Pope to take a young lady to the theatre. But we didn't ask any
questions. We cheered him off on the midnight train, and the next night,
when he won and we got the news, we turned out and built a bonfire of
everything that wasn't nailed down. And when the police got done chasing
us they had nineteen of the brightest and best sons of Siwash bottled up
in the booby hatch.
We didn't mind that on general principles. The bonfire was worth it,
especially since we managed to get a few palings from old Scroggs' fence
for it--but, as usual, the wrong men got pinched. There was the
intercollegiate track meet due in two weeks, and there, in the list of
felons, were Evans, our crack sprinter, Petersen, our hammer heaver, and
yours truly, who could pole vault about as high as they run elevators in
Europe, even if he was only a sub-Freshman with field mice in his hair.
Now, this was really serious. We could afford to lose an oratorical
contest--it just meant no bonfire for another year--but we had our
hearts set on that track meet. We were up against our lifelong
rivals--Muggledorfer, the State Normal, Kiowa, Hambletonian, and all the
rest of them. We had to win--I don't know why. Beats all how many things
you have to do in college that don't seem so absolutely necessary a few
years afterward. Anyhow, if we three point-gobblers had to spend the
next ten days in the works instead of rounding into form, the points
Siwash would win in that meet could be added up by a three-year-old boy
who was a bad scholar. It was so desperate that we hired a lawyer and
laid the case before him that night as we sat in our horrid cells--they
wouldn't take Hinckley for bail any more.
"Get a continuance," said he. And the next morning he appeared with us
before the awful presence and demanded the continuance on the score of
important evidence, lack of time to perfect a defense, other
engagements, poor crops, Presidential election, and goodness knows
what--regular lawyer style, you know.
Old Scroggs glared at us the way an unusually hungry tiger might look at
a lamb that was being taken away to get a little riper. "I cannot object
to a reasonable continuance," he said sourly. "And I don't deny that you
will need all the defense you can get. The case is an atrocious one, and
I propose to do my small part toward putting down arson and riot in this
unhappy town. You will appear two weeks from this morning."
The field meet was two weeks from that afternoon! And we didn't have a
ghost of a defense!
We three scraped up the required bail and went back to college feeling
cheerful as a man who has been told that his hanging has been postponed
until his wedding morning. Of course we sent for Petey Simmons. He
arrived dejected. "No use, fellows," he remarked as he came in the door.
"I know what you all want. You all want engagements with Martha Scroggs.
It's no go. I've been over to see her and she's afraid to tackle it. The
old man's told her that if she runs around with any more of this
disgraceful, disgusting and nine other epitheted college bunch he'll
show her the door. Says he's been worked and he's through. Says he's
going to give you the limit and, if possible, he's going to give you
enough to keep you in all vacation instead of letting you loose on a
defenseless world all summer. That's how strong you are up at the
Scroggs house."
There you were! Siwash College, the pride of six decades, mollycoddled
by an old parody on a gorilla with a grouch against the solar system! We
trained these two weeks in hopes that a chariot of fire would come up
and take the old man down, but there was nothing doing. He remained
abnormally healthy and supernaturally mad. On the morning before the
fatal day we all wrote letters home, explaining that we had secured
elegant jobs in various emporiums over the city and wouldn't be home
until late in the summer. Then we shivered a shake or two apiece and got
ready to retire from this vain world for somewhere between thirty and
ninety days. Just about that time Petey Simmons blew down to the
college, bursting with information. He demanded a meeting of the
Athletic Council at once and of us three sterling athletes as well. We
were all in order in ten minutes.
"Fellows, it's this way," said Petey. "Martha Scroggs is very loyal to
the college, as you all know. She has done her very best with old
Fireworks, but it hasn't made a dent in him. No little old party or
buggy ride is going to get any one out this time. There's just one
chance, she says, and she's taken it. This morning she confessed to her
father that she is engaged to one of the men who is to come up for trial
to-morrow morning. They think the old man will be well enough to
unmuzzle before noon, but he's been acting like a bad case of dog-days
all morning. He's given her twenty-four hours to name the man--and
Martha thinks that by night he'll be resting comfortably enough to
promise to let him off to-morrow. And she has given us the privilege of
choosing the man she's engaged to. Now, it's up to this council to pick
out the lucky chap. It's our only hope, fellows. We'll have one
point-winner anyway--unless the old man eats him alive to-morrow."
Evans and Petersen turned pale--they had real fiancées in college. But
each stepped forward nobly and offered himself for the sacrifice. I
stepped out, too, though I was so young at that time that I didn't know
any more how to go about being engaged to a girl than I did about my
Greek lessons. Then the council began to discuss the choice. And just
there the trouble began.
It all came about through the frats, of course. Frats are a good thing
all right, but they stir up more trouble in a college than a Turk's nine
wives can make for him. Ashcroft was president of the council. He was an
Alfalfa Delt. So was Evans. Ashcroft hung out for Evans like a bulldog
hanging to a tramp. Beeman, a council member, was a Sigh Whoop and so
was Petersen. Beeman argued that Petersen could win more points than the
rest of the school put together and that it would be unpatriotic,
unmanly, disgraceful and un-Siwash-like not to select him. Bailey, the
third member, was an Eta Bita Pie, and while sub-Freshmen are not
supposed to be anything with Greek letters on, we understood each other,
and I was to be initiated the next fall. Bailey pointed out caustically
that to imprison a sub-Freshman would be to ruin his reputation, break
his spirit and disgrace the school--that one world's record was worth
fifty points, and that, if allowed to, I would pole-vault so high the
next day that I would have to come down in a parachute. The result was
the council broke up in one big row and Martha Scroggs spent the
afternoon unengaged.
About five o'clock Bailey came over to the track, where we were going
through the last sad rites, and hauled me aside.
"Take off those togs, kid," he said. "I've got a stunt. These yaps are
going to hold another meeting to-night to decide on Martha Scroggs'
fiancé. In the meantime you're going out to ask the old man for her.
Understand? You're going to ask him and take what he gives you like a
little man and beg off for to-day, and then you're going to break the
pole-vault record. See?"
Unfortunately, I did. I liked the job just as well as I would like
getting boiled in oil. But one must stand by one's frat, you know--Gee,
how proud I felt when I said that! I didn't have any idea how an engaged
man ought to look or act, but I went home, put on the happiest duds I
had, and shinned up the street about eight o'clock.
The man-eating dog of the Scroggses was somewhere else, gorging himself
on another unfortunate, and I got to the front door all right. I rang
the bell. Some one opened the door. It was Judge Scroggs. He looked at
me as one might look at a bug which had wandered on to the table and was
trying to climb over a fork.
"Young man," he said, "what do you want?"
Did you ever have your voice slink around behind your larynx and refuse
to come out? Mine did. I only wish I could have slunk with it. I started
talking twice. My tongue went all right, but I couldn't slip in the
clutch and make any sound.
"Well," roared Scroggs, "what is it?"
That jarred me loose. "Mr. Scroggs," I sputtered, "I am engaged to your
daughter. I want to marry her. I want your permission. I--I'll be good
to her, sir."
He glared at me for a minute. "Oh!" he said with a queer look. "Well,
come on in with the rest of them."
I followed him into the parlor. There sat Evans and Petersen. They were
older than I, but if I looked as scared as they did I wish somebody had
shot me. In the corner was another student. His name was Driggs. His
specialty was cotillons.
We four sat and looked at each other with awful suspicions. Something
was excessively wrong. I felt indignant. Can't a fellow go to see his
fiancée without being annoyed by a Roman mob? I noticed Petersen and
Evans looked indignant, too. We took it out by staring Driggs almost
into the collywobbles. Who was he anyway, and why was he billy-goating
around?
Old Scroggs had called Martha. He sat and looked at us so peculiarly
that I got gooseflesh all over. Here I was, a Freshman so green that the
cows looked longingly at me, and up against the job of saving the
college, winning out for the frat and becoming engaged to a girl I
didn't know before a whole roomful of rivals. I wasn't up to the job. If
only I had gone to the works! They seemed a haven of sweet peace just
then.
Martha Scroggs came into the room. She looked at the quartet. We looked
at her with hunted looks. Scroggs looked at all of us.
"Martha," he said at last, "each one of these four young idiots says he
is engaged to you. Which of them shall I throw out?"
The jig was up! The college was ruined! Each one of us had the same
bright thought!
For a moment I thought Martha was going to faint. She looked at the mob
with a dazed expression. You could almost see her brain grabbing for
some explanation. It was just for a moment, though. My, but that girl
was a wonder! She gulped once or twice. Then she smiled in an inspired
sort of way.
"None of them, Papa," she said ever so sweetly. "I am engaged to all of
them."
The eruption of Vesuvius was only a little sputter to what followed. For
a moment we had hopes that old Scroggs would explode. I think if he had
had us there alone he would have tried to hang us. But every tyrant has
his master, so before long we began to see the halter on old Scroggs.
And his daughter held the leading rope. She let him rave about so long
and then she retired into her pocket-handkerchief and turned on a
regular equinoctial. Scroggs looked more uncomfortable than we felt. He
took her in his arms and there was a family reconciliation. Every little
while Martha would look over his shoulder at us four hopefuls sitting up
against the wall as lively as wooden Indians, and then she would bury
her face in her handkerchief again and shake her shoulders and writhe
with grief--or maybe it was something else. Martha always did have a
pretty keen sense of humor.
[Illustration: My, but that girl was a wonder!
_Page 74_]
Suddenly Scroggs remembered us and we went out of the house like
projectiles fired from a very loud gun. We cussed each other all the
way home--we three athletes. We would have cussed Driggs, but he sneaked
the other way and we lost him.
The next morning we went up to police court in our old clothes. Judge
Scroggs looked at us sourly when our turn came.
"Young men," he said, "my daughter has admitted that she has been
foolish enough to engage herself provisionally to all of you, with the
idea of choosing the hero in this afternoon's games. I do not admire her
taste. I think she is indeed reckless to fall in love with collegians
when there are so many honest cab drivers and grocery boys to choose
from. But I have, in the interests of peace, consented to allow you to
compete this afternoon. You are discharged. I do this the more willingly
because I have seen you here before and shall again. You may go."
We did go, and when we got through that afternoon the knobby-legged
athletes from our rival schools looked like quarter horses plowing home
just ahead of the next race. Siwash won by an enormous lead and we three
were the stars of the meet. Why shouldn't we be when our fiancée sat in
a box in the grandstand and cheered us impartially? More than that, old
Scroggs sat with her and I have an idea that he got excited, too, in the
breath-catching parts.
I think that engagement business must have broken the old man's spirit,
or else so much association with college people began to waken dormant
brain cells in his head. The rest of the rioters got out of the
workhouse right away, and that fall he retired from the bench, declaring
that if he was to have a college student for a son-in-law, as looked
extremely likely, he needed to put in all of his time at home protecting
his property. In honor of his retirement we had a pajama parade which
was nine blocks long and forty-two blocks loud, and a platoon of six
policemen led the way.
Of course that engagement business left all sorts of complications.
Scroggs pestered his daughter for about a month to make her decision. He
seemed somewhat relieved when she finally announced that she couldn't;
but it wasn't much relief, after all, for by this time he couldn't walk
around his own house without falling over Petey Simmons. Just two years
ago I got cards to Petey's wedding. He and Martha are living in Chicago
in one of those flats where you have seven hundred and eighty-nine
dollars' worth of bath-room, and eighty-nine cents' worth of living
room, and which you have to lease by measure just as you would buy a
vest. If Petey hangs on long enough he is going to be a big man in the
banking business, too.
I forgot to clear up this Driggs mystery. The evening after the races,
Martha called up Petey Simmons. "Petey," said she, "I wish you would
tell me who this fourth man is that I'm engaged to. He doesn't seem to
be on the track team and I didn't catch his name. I don't mind having to
make up an excuse for being engaged to four men right on the spur of
the moment if it is necessary, but I'd at least like to know their
names."
Petey was as puzzled as she was and lit out to find Driggs. He was gone,
but the next day he turned up and confessed all. He had a terrible
affair with a girl in the next town, it seems, and had a date to bring
her to the games. He was one of the nineteen criminals, and was so
terror-stricken at the idea of being compelled to desert his hypnotizer
that when the news of the engagement business leaked out he took a long
chance and went up and announced himself. It worked, but we caught him
two nights later and shaved his hair on one side as a gentle warning not
to do it again.