A FUNERAL THAT FLASHED IN THE PAN
Honest, Bill, sometimes when I sit down in these sober, plug-away
days--when we are kind to the poor dumb policemen and don't dare wear
straw hats after the first of September--and think about the good old
college times, I wonder how we ever had the nerve to imitate insanity
the way we did. Here I am, rubbing noses with thirty, outgrowing my
belts every year, and sitting eight hours at a desk without exploding.
Am I the chap who climbed up sixty feet of waterspout a few short years
ago and persuaded the clapper of the college bell to come down with me?
Here you are all worn smooth on top and proprietor of an overflow
meeting in a nursery. In about ten minutes you'll be tearing your
coat-tails out of my hands because you have to go back home before the
eldest kid asks for a story. Are you the loafer who spent all one night
getting a profane parrot into the cold-air pipes of the college chapel?
Maybe you think you are, but I don't believe it. If I were to tip this
table over on you now you'd get mad and go home instead of handing me a
volume of George Barr McCutcheon in the watch-pocket. You're not the
good old lunatic you used to be, and neither am I.
Yes, times have changed. I don't feel as unfettered as I used to. There
are a few things nowadays that I don't care to do. When I come home at
night I take my shoes off and tiptoe to my room instead of standing
outside and trying to persuade my landlady that the house is on fire.
When I visit a friend in his apartments I do not, as a bit of repartee,
throw all of his clothes out of the window while he is out of the room,
and it has been a long time since I last hung a basket out of my window
on Saturday night, expecting some early-rising friend to put a pocketful
of breakfast in it as he came past from boarding-club. I am a slave to
conventions and so are you, you slant-shouldered, hollow-chested,
four-eyed, flabby-spirited pill-roller, you! The city makes more mummies
out of live ones than old Rameses ever did out of his obituary crop.
And yet it's no time at all since you and I were back at Siwash College,
making a dear playmate out of trouble from morning till night. I wonder
what it is in college that makes a fellow want to stick his finger into
conventions and customs and manners, to say nothing of the revised
statutes, and stir the whole mess 'round and 'round! When you're in
college, college life seems big and all the rest of the world so small
that what you want to do as a student seems to be the only important
thing in life--no matter if what you want to do is only to put a
free-lunch sign over the First Methodist Church. What does the college
student care for the U. S. A., the planet or the solar system? Why, at
Siwash, I remember the biggest man in the world was Ole Skjarsen. Next
to him was Coach Bost, then Rogers, captain of the football team, and
then Jensen, the quarter. After him came Frankling, of the Alfalfa
Delts, whose father picked up bargains in railroads instead of gloves;
then came Prexy, and after him the President of the United States and a
few scattered celebrities, tailing down to the Mayor of Jonesville and
its leading citizens--mere nobodies.
That's how important the outside world seemed to us. Is it any wonder
that when we wanted to go downtown in pajamas and plug hats we paddled
right along? Or that when we wanted to steal a couple of actors and tie
them in a barn, while two of us took their places, we did not hesitate
to do so? We felt perfectly free to do just what we pleased. The college
understood us, and what the world thought never entered our heads.
Those were certainly nightmarish times for the Faculty of a small but
husky college filled with live wires who specialized in applied
mischief. It beats all what peculiar things college students can do and
not think anything of it at all; and it's funny how closely wisdom and
blame foolishness seem to be related. I remember after I had spent two
hours putting my Polykon down on a concrete foundation so that I could
recite John Stuart Mill by the ream, it seemed as if I couldn't live
half an hour longer without a certain kind of pie that was kept in
captivity a mile away downtown at a lunch-counter. And, moreover, I
couldn't eat that pie alone. A college student doesn't know how to
masticate without an assistant or two. When I think of the hours and
hours I have spent traveling around at midnight and battering on the
doors of perfectly respectable houses, trying to drag some student out
and take him a mile or two away downtown after pie, I am struck with
awe. When I came to this town I walked two days for a job and then sat
around with my feet on a sofa cushion for three days. I'll bet I've
walked twice as far hunting up some devoted friend to help me go
downtown and eat a piece of pie. And that pie seemed three times as
important as the easy lessons for beginners in running the earth that I
had been absorbing all the evening.
You needn't grin, Bill. You were just as bad. I remember you were the
biggest math. shark in college. You could do calculus problems that took
all the English letters from A to Z and then slopped over into the Greek
alphabet; and everybody predicted that you would be a great man if
anybody ever found any use for calculus. And yet the chief ambition of
your life was to find a way of tampering with the college clock so that
it would run twice as fast as its schedule. You used to sit around and
figure all evening over it and declare that if you could only do it once
and watch the profs. letting out classes early and going home to supper
at one P. M. you would consider your life well spent. Sounds fiddling
now, doesn't it? But I admired you for it then. I really looked up to
you, Bill, as a man with a firm, fixed purpose, while I was just a
trifler who would be satisfied to steal the hands of the clock or jolly
it into striking two hundred times in a row.
There was Rearick, for instance. He was the smartest man in our class.
Took scholarship prizes as carelessly as a policeman takes peanuts from
a Dago stand. Since then he's gone up so fast that every time I see him
I insult him by congratulating him on getting the place he's just been
promoted from. But what was Rearick's hobby at Siwash? Stealing hatpins.
He had four hundred hatpins when he graduated, and he never could see
anything wrong in it. Guess he's got them yet. Perkins is in Congress
already. He out-debated the whole Northwest and wrote pieces on subjects
so heavy that you could break up coal with them. But I never saw him so
earnest in debate as he was the night he talked old Bill Morrison into
letting him drive his hack for him all evening. He told me he had driven
every hack in town but Bill's, and that Bill had baffled him for two
years. It cost him four dollars to turn the trick, but he was happier
after it than he was when he won the Siwash-Muggledorfer debate. Said he
was ready to graduate now--college held nothing further for him.
Perkins' brains weren't addled, because he has been working them double
shift ever since. He just had the college microbe, that's all. It gets
into your gray matter and makes you enjoy things turned inside out. You
remember "Prince" Hogboom's funeral, don't you?
What year was it? Why, ninety-ump-teen. What? That's right, you got out
the year before. I remember they held your diploma until you paid for
the library cornerstone that your class stole and cut up into
paper-weights. Well, by not staying the next year you missed the most
unsuccessful funeral that was ever held in the history of Siwash or
anywhere else. It was one of the very few funerals on record in which
the corpse succeeded in licking the mourners. I've got a small scar from
it now. You may think you're going home to that valuable baby of yours,
but you are not. You'll hear me out. I haven't talked with a Siwash man
for a month, and all of these Hale and Jarhard and Stencilmania fellows
give me an ashy taste in my mouth when I talk with them. It's about as
much fun talking college days with a fellow from another school as it is
to talk ranching with a New England old maid; and when I get hold of a
Siwash man you can bet I hang on to him as long as my talons will stick.
You just sit right there and start another Wheeling conflagration while
I tell you how we killed Hogboom to make a Siwash holiday.
I helped kill him myself. It was my first murder. It was an awful thing
to do, but we were desperate men. It was spring--in May--and not one of
us had a cut left. You know how unimportant your cuts are in the fall
when you know that you can skip classes ten times that year without
getting called up on the green carpet and gimleted by the Faculty. Ten
cuts seem an awful lot when you begin. You throw 'em away for anything.
You cut class to go downtown and buy a cigarette. You cut class to see a
dog fight. I've even known a fellow to cut a class in the fall because
he had to go back to the room and put on a clean collar. But, oh, how
different it is in May, when you haven't a cut left to your name and the
Faculty has been holding meetings on you, anyway; when classroom is a
jail and the campus just outside the window is a paradise, green and
sunshiny and fanned by warm breezes--excuse these poetries. And you can
sit in your class in Evidences of Christianity--of which you knew as
much as a Chinese laundryman does of force-feed lubrication--and look
out of the window and see your best girl sitting on the grass with some
smug oyster who has saved up his cuts. How I used to hate these chaps
who saved up their cuts till spring and then took my girl out walking
while I went to classes! Is there anything more maddening, I'd like to
know, than to sit before a big, low window trying to follow a psychology
recitation closely enough to get up when called on, and at the same time
watch five girls, with all of whom you are dead in love, strolling
slowly off into the bright distance with five job-lot male beings who
are dull and uninteresting and just cold-blooded enough to save their
cuts until the springtime? If there is I've never had it.
In this spring of umpty-steen it seemed as if only one ambition in the
world was worth achieving--that was to get out of classes. Most of us
had used up our cuts long ago. The Faculty is never any too patient in
the spring, anyhow, and a lot of us were on the ragged edge. I remember
feeling very confidently that if I went up before that brain trust in
the Faculty room once more and tried to explain how it was that I was
giving absent treatment to my beloved studies, said Faculty would take
the college away from me and wouldn't let me play with it never no more.
And that's an awful distressing fear to hang over a man who loves and
enjoys everything connected with a college except the few trifling
recitations which take up his time and interfere with his plans. It hung
over five of us who were trying to plan some way of going over to
Hambletonian College to see our baseball team wear deep paths around
their diamond. We were certain to win, and as the Hambletonians hadn't
found this out there was a legitimate profit to be made from our
knowledge--profit we yearned for and needed frightfully. I wonder if
these Wall Street financiers and Western railroad men really think they
know anything about hard times? Why, I've known times to be so hard in
May that three men would pool all their available funds and then toss up
to see which one of them would eat the piece of pie the total sum
bought. I've known Seniors to begin selling their personal effects in
April--a pair of shoes for a dime, a dress suit for five dollars--and to
go home in June with a trunk full of flags and dance programs and
nothing else. I've known students to buy velveteen pants in the spring
and go around with big slouch hats and very long hair--not because they
were really artistic and Bohemian, but because it was easier to buy the
trousers and have them charged than it was to find a quarter for a
haircut.
That's how busted live college students with unappreciative dads can get
in the spring. That's how busted we were; and there was Hambletonian,
twenty miles away, full of money and misguided faith in their team. If
we could scrape up a little cash we could ride over on our bicycles and
transfer the financial stringency to the other college with no trouble
at all. But it was a midweek game and not one of us had a cut left. That
was why we murdered Hogboom.
It happened one evening when we were sitting on the front porch of the
Eta Bita Pie house. That was the least expensive thing we could do. We
had been discussing girls and baseball and spring suits, and the
comparative excellence of the wheat cakes at the Union Lunch Counter and
Jim's place. But whatever we talked about ran into money in the end and
we had to change the subject. There's mighty little a poor man can talk
about in spring in college, I can tell you. We discussed around for an
hour or two, bumping into the dollar mark in every direction, and
finally got so depressed that we shut up and sat around with our heads
in our hands. That seemed to be about the only thing to do that didn't
require money.
"We'll have to do something desperate to get to that game," said Hogboom
at last. Hogboom was a Senior. He ranked "sublime" in football,
"excellent" in baseball, "good" in mandolin, "fair" in dancing, and from
there down in Greek, Latin and Mathematics.
"Intelligent boy," said Bunk Bailey pleasantly; "tell us what it must
be. Desperate things done to order, day or night, with care and
thoroughness. Trot out your desperate thing and get me an axe. I'll do
it."
"Well," said Hogboom, "I don't know, but it seems to me that if one of
us was to die maybe the Faculty would take a day off and we could go
over to Hambletonian without getting cuts."
"Fine scheme; get me a gun, Hogboom." "Do you prefer drowning or
lynching?" "Kill him quick, somebody." "Look pleasant, please, while the
operator is working." "What do you charge for dying?" Oh, we guyed him
good and plenty, which is a way they have at old Harvard and middle-aged
Siwash and Infant South Dakota University and wherever two students are
gathered together anywhere in the U. S. A.
Hogboom only grinned. "Prattle away all you please," he said, "but I
mean it. I've got magnificent facilities for dying just now. I'll
consider a proposition to die for the benefit of the cause if you
fellows will agree to keep me in cigarettes and pie while I'm dead."
"Done," says I, "and in embalming fluid, too. But just demonstrate this
theorem, Hoggy, old boy. How extensively are you going to die?"
"Just enough to get a holiday," said Hogboom. "You see, I happen to have
a chum in the telegraph office in Weeping Water, where I live. Now if I
were to go home to spend Sunday and you fellows were to receive a
telegram that I had been kicked to death by an automobile, would you
have sense enough to show it to Prexy?"
"We would," we remarked, beginning to get intelligent.
"And, after he had confirmed the sad news by telegram, would you have
sense enough left to suggest that college dismiss on Tuesday and hold a
memorial meeting?"
"We would," we chuckled.
"And would you have foresight enough to suggest that it be held in the
morning so that you could rush away to Weeping Water in the afternoon to
attend the funeral?"
"Yes, indeed," we said, so mildly that the cop two blocks away strolled
down to see what was up.
"And then would you be diplomatic enough to produce a telegram saying
that the report was false, just too late to start the afternoon
classes?"
"You bet!" we whooped, pounding Hogboom with great joy. Then we sat down
as unconcernedly as if we were planning to go to the vaudeville the next
afternoon and arranged the details of Hogboom's assassination. As I was
remarking, positively nothing looks serious to a college boy until after
he has done it.
That was on Friday night. On Saturday we killed Hogboom. That is, he
killed himself. He got permission to go home over Sunday and retired to
an upper back room in our house, very unostentatiously. He had already
written to his operator chum, who had attended college just long enough
to take away his respect for death, the integrity of the telegraph
service and practically everything else. The result was that at nine
o'clock that evening a messenger boy rang our bell and handed in a
telegram. It was brief and terrible. Wilbur Hogboom had been submerged
in the Weeping Water River while trying to abduct a catfish from his
happy home and had only just been hauled out entirely extinct.
It was an awful shock to us. We had expected him to be shot. We read it
solemnly and then tiptoed up to Hogboom with it. He turned pale when he
saw the yellow slip.
"What is it?" he asked hurriedly. "How did it happen?"
"You were drowned, Hoggy, old boy," Wilkins said. "Drowned in your
little old Weeping Water River. They have got you now and you're all
damp and drippy, and your best girl is having one hysteric after
another. Don't you think you ought to throw that cigarette away and show
some respect to yourself? We've all quit playing cards and are going to
bed early in your honor."
"Well, I'm not," said Hogboom. "It's the first time I have ever been
dead, and I'm going to stay up all night and see how I feel. Another
thing, I'm going down and telephone the news to Prexy myself. I've had
nothing but hard words out of him all my college course, and if he can't
think up something nice to say on an occasion like this I'm going to
give him up."
Hogboom called up Prexy and in a shaking voice read him the telegram. We
sat around, choking each other to preserve the peace, and listened to
the following cross section of a dialogue--telephone talk is so
interesting when you just get one hemisphere of it.
"Hello! That you, Doctor? This is the Eta Bita Pie House. I've some very
sad news to tell you. Hogboom was drowned to-day in the Weeping Water
River. We've just had a telegram--Yes, quite dead--No chance of a
mistake, I'm afraid--Yes, they recovered him--We're all broken up--Oh,
yes, he was a fine fellow--We loved him deeply--I'm glad you thought so
much of him--He was always so frank in his admiration of you--Yes, he
was honorable--Yes, and brilliant, too--Of course, we valued him for
his good fellowship, but, as you say, he was also an earnest boy--It's
awful--Yes, a fine athlete--I wish he could hear you say that,
Doctor--No, I'm afraid we can't fill his place--Yes, it is a loss to the
college--I guess you just address telegram to his folks at Weeping
Water--That's how we're sending ours--Good-night--Yes, a fine
fellow--Good-night."
Hogboom hung up the 'phone and went upstairs, where he lay for an hour
or two with his face full of pillows. The rest of us weren't so gay. We
could see the humor of the thing all right, but the awful fact that we
were murderers was beginning to hang over our heads. It was easy enough
to kill Hogboom, but now that he was dead the future looked tolerably
complicated. Suppose something happened? Suppose he didn't stay dead?
There's no peace for a murderer, anyway. We didn't sleep much that
night.
The next day it was worse. We sat around and entertained callers all
day. Half a hundred students called and brought enough woe to fit out a
Democratic headquarters on Presidential election night. They all had
something nice to say of Hoggy. We sat around and mourned and gloomed
and agreed with them until we were ready to yell with disgust.
Hogboom was the most disgracefully lively corpse I ever saw. He insisted
on sitting at the head of the stairs where he could hear every good word
that was said of him, and the things he demanded of us during the day
would have driven a stone saint to crime. Four times we went downtown
for pie; three times for cigarettes; once for all the Sunday newspapers,
and once for ice cream. As I told you, it was May, the time of the year
when street-car fare is a problem of financial magnitude. We had to
borrow money from the cook before night. Hoggy had us helpless, and he
was taking a mean and contemptible advantage of the fact that he was a
corpse. Half a dozen times we were on the verge of letting him come to
life. It would have served him right.
Old Siwash was just naturally submerged in sorrow when Monday morning
came. The campus dripped with sadness. The Faculty oozed regret at every
pore. We loyal friends of Hogboom were looked on as the chief mourners
and it was up to us to fill the part. We did our best. We talked with
the soft pedal on. We went without cigarettes. We wiped our eyes
whenever we got an audience. Time after time we told the sad story and
exhibited the telegram. By noon more particulars began to come in. Prexy
got an answer to his telegram of condolence. The funeral, the telegram
said, would be on Tuesday afternoon. There was great and universal grief
in Weeping Water, where Hogboom had been held in reverent esteem.
Hoggy's chum in the telegraph office simply laid himself out on that
telegram. Prexy read it to me himself and wiped his eyes while he did
it. He was a nice, sympathetic man, Prexy was, when he wasn't discussing
cuts or scholarship.
Getting the memorial meeting was so easy we hated to take it. The
Faculty met to pass resolutions Monday afternoon, and when our
delegation arrived they treated us like brothers. It was just like
entering the camp of the enemy under a flag of truce. Many a time I've
gone in on that same carpet, but never with such a feeling of holy calm.
"They would, of course, hold the memorial meeting," said Prexy. They had
in fact decided on this already. They would, of course, dismiss college
all day. It was, perhaps, best to hold the memorial in the morning if so
many of us were going out to Weeping Water. It was nice so many of us
could go. Prexy was going. So was the mathematics professor, old
"Ichthyosaurus" James, a very fine old ruin, whom Hogboom hated with a
frenzy worthy of a better cause, but who, it seemed, had worked up a
great regard for Hogboom through having him for three years in the same
trigonometry class.
We went out of Faculty meeting men and equals with the professors. They
walked down to the corner with us, I remember, and I talked with Cander,
the Polykon professor, who had always seemed to me to be the embodiment
of Comanche cruelty and cunning. We talked of Hogboom all the way to the
corner. Wonderful how deeply the Faculty loved the boy; and with what
Spartan firmness they had concealed all indications of it through his
career!
When Monday night came we began to breathe more easily. Of course there
was some kind of a deluge coming when Hogboom appeared, but that was
his affair. We didn't propose to monkey with the resurrection at all. He
could do his own explaining. To tell the truth, we were pretty sore at
Hogboom. He was making a regular Roman holiday out of his demise. It
kept four men busy running errands for him. We had to retail him every
compliment that we had heard during the day, especially if it came from
the Faculty. We had to describe in detail the effect of the news upon
six or seven girls, for all of whom Hogboom had a tender regard. He
insisted upon arranging the funeral and vetoed our plans as fast as we
made them. He was as domineering and ugly as if he was the only man who
had ever met a tragic end. He acted as if he had a monopoly. We hated
him cordially by Monday night, but we were helpless. Hoggy claimed that
being dead was a nerve-wearing and exhausting business, and that if he
didn't get the respect due to him as a corpse he would put on his plug
hat and a plush curtain and walk up the main street of Jonesville. And
as he was a football man and a blamed fool combined we didn't see any
way of preventing him.
However, everything looked promising. We had made all the necessary
arrangements. The students were to meet in chapel at nine o'clock in the
morning and eulogize Hogboom for an hour, after which college was to be
dismissed for the day in order that unlimited mourning could be indulged
in. There were to be speeches by the Faculty and by students. Maxfield,
the human textbook, was to make the address for the Senior class. We
chuckled when we thought how he was toiling over it. Noddy Pierce, of
our crowd, was to talk about Hogboom as a brother; Rogers, of the
football team, was to make a few grief-saturated remarks. So was
Perkins. Every one was confidently expecting Perkins to make the effort
of his life and swamp the chapel in sorrow. He was in the secret and he
afterward said that he would rather try to write a Shakespearean tragedy
offhand than to write another funeral oration about a man who he knew
was at that moment sitting in a pair of pajamas in an upper room half a
mile away and yelling for pie.
As a matter of fact, there were so many in the secret that we were dead
afraid that it would explode. We had to put the baseball team on so that
they would be prepared to go over to Hambletonian at noon. The game had
been called off, of course, and Hambletonian had been telegraphed. But I
was secretary of the Athletic Club and had done the telegraphing. So I
addressed the telegram to my aunt in New Jersey. It puzzled the dear old
lady for months, I guess, because she kept writing to me about it. We
had to tell all the fellows in the frat house and every one of the
conspirators let in a friend or two. There were about fifty students who
weren't as soggy with grief as they should have been by Monday night.
I blame Hogboom entirely for what happened. He started it when he
insisted that he be smuggled into the chapel to hear his own funeral
orations. We argued half the Monday night with him, but it was no use.
He simply demanded it. If all dead men are as disagreeable as Hogboom
was, no undertaker's job for me. He was the limit. He put on a blue
bath-robe and got as far as the door on his promenade downtown before we
gave in and promised to do anything he wanted. We had to break into the
chapel and stow him away in a little grilled alcove in the attic on the
side of the auditorium where he could hear everything. Sounds
uncomfortable, but don't imagine it was. That nervy slavedriver made us
lug over two dozen sofa pillows, a rug or two, a bottle of moisture and
three pies to while away the time with. That was where we first began to
think of revenge. We got it, too--only we got it the way Samson did when
he jerked the columns out from under the roof and furnished the material
for a general funeral, with himself in the leading rôle.
By the time we got Hogboom planted in his luxurious nest, about three
A. M., we were ready to do anything. Some of us were for giving the
whole snap away, but Pierce and Perkins and Rogers objected. They wanted
to deliver their speeches at the meeting. If we would leave it to them,
they said, they would see that justice was ladled out.
The whole college and most of the town were at the memorial meeting. It
was a grand and tear-spangled occasion. There were three grades of
emotion plainly visible. There was the resigned and almost pleased
expression of the students who weren't in on the deal and who saw a
vacation looming up for that afternoon; the grieved and sympathetic
sorrow of the Faculty who were attempting to mourn for what they had
always called a general school nuisance; and there was the phenomenally
solemn woe of the conspirators, who were spreading it on good and thick.
The Faculty spoke first. Beats all how much of a hypocrite a good man
can be when he feels it to be his duty. There was Bates, the Latin prof.
He had struggled with Hogboom three years and had often expressed the
firm opinion that, if Hoggy were removed from this world by a
masterpiece of justice of some sort, the general tone of civilization
would go up fifty per cent. Yet Bates got up that morning and
cried--yes, sir, actually cried. Cried into a large pocket handkerchief
that wasn't water-tight, either. That's more than Hoggy would ever have
done for him. And Prexy was so sympathetic and spoke so beautifully of
young soldiers getting drawn aside by Fate on their way to the battle,
and all that sort of thing, that you would have thought he had spent the
last three years loving Hogboom--whereas he had spent most of the time
trying to get some good excuse for rooting him out of school. You know
how Faculties always dislike a good football player. I think, myself,
they are jealous of his fame.
Maxfield made a telling address for the Senior class. He and Hoggy had
always disagreed, but it was all over now; and the way he laid it on was
simply wonderful. I thought of Hoggy up there behind the grilling,
swelling with pride and satisfaction as Maxfield told how brave, how
tender, how affectionate and how honorable he was, and I wished I was
dead, too. Being dead with a string to it is one of the finest things
that can happen to a man if he can just hang around and listen to
people.
Pierce got up. He was the college silver-tongue, and we settled back to
listen to him. Previous speakers had made Hoggy out about as fine as Sir
Philip Sidney, but they were amateurs. Here was where Hoggy went up
beside A. Lincoln and Alexander if Pierce was anywhere near himself.
There is no denying that Pierce started out magnificently. But pretty
soon I began to have an uneasy feeling that something was wrong. He was
eloquent enough, but it seemed to me that he was handling the deceased a
little too strenuously. You know how you can damn a man in nine ways and
then pull all the stingers out with a "but" at the end of it. That was
what Pierce was doing. "What if Hogboom was, in a way, fond of his
ease?" he thundered. "What if the spirit of good fellowship linked arms
with him when lessons were waiting, and led him to the pool hall? He may
have been dilatory in his college duties; he may have wasted his
allowance on billiards instead of in missionary contributions. He may
have owed money--yes, a lot of money. He may, indeed, have been a
little selfish--which one of us isn't? He may have frittered away time
for which his parents were spending the fruit of their early toil--but
youth, friends, is a golden age when life runs riot, and he is only half
a man who stops to think of petty prudence."
That was all very well to say about Rameses or Julius Cæsar or some
other deceased who is pretty well seasoned, but I'll tell you it made
the college gasp, coming when it did. It sounded sacrilegious and to me
it sounded as if some one who was noted as an orator was going to get
thumped by the late Mr. Hogboom about the next day. I perspired a lot
from nervousness as Pierce rumbled on, first praising the departed and
then landing on him with both oratorical feet. When he finally sat down
and mopped his forehead the whole school gave one of those long breaths
that you let go of when you have just come up from a dive under cold
water.
Rogers followed Pierce. Rogers wasn't much of a talker, but he surpassed
even his own record that day in falling over himself. When he tried to
illustrate how thoughtful and generous Hogboom was he blundered into the
story of the time Hoggy bet all of his money on a baseball game at
Muggledorfer, and of how he walked home with his chum and carried the
latter's coat and grip all the way. That made the Faculty wriggle, I can
tell you. He illustrated the pluck of the deceased by telling how
Hogboom, as a Freshman, dug all night alone to rescue a man imprisoned
in a sewer, spurred on by his cries--though Rogers explained in his
halting way, it afterward turned out that this was only the famous
"sewer racket" which is worked on every green Freshman, and that the
cries for help came from a Sophomore who was alternately smoking a pipe
and yelling into a drain across the road. Still, Rogers said, it
illustrated Hogboom's nobility of spirit. In his blundering fashion he
went on to explain some more of Hoggy's good points, and by the time he
sat down there wasn't a shred of the latter's reputation left intact.
The whole school was grinning uncomfortably, and the Faculty was acting
as if it was sitting, individually and collectively, on seventeen great
gross of red-hot pins.
By this time we conspirators were divided between holy joy and a fear
that the thing was going to be overdone. It was plain to be seen that
the Faculty wasn't going to stand for much more loving frankness. Pierce
whispered to Tad Perkins, Hogboom's chum, and the worst victim of his
posthumous whims, to draw it mild and go slow. Perkins was to make the
last talk, and we trembled in our shoes when he got up.
We needn't have feared for Perkins. He was as smooth as a Tammany
orator. He praised Hogboom so pathetically that the chapel began to show
acres of white handkerchiefs again. Very gently he talked over his
career, his bravery and his achievements. Then just as poetically and
gently he glided on into the biggest lie that has been told since
Ananias short-circuited retribution with his unholy tale.
"What fills up the heart and the throat, fellows," he swung along, "is
not the loss we have sustained; not the irreparable injury to all our
college activities; not even the vacant chair that must sit mutely
eloquent beside us this year. It's something worse than that. Perhaps I
should not be telling this. It's known to but a few of his most intimate
friends. The saddest thing of all is the fact that back in Weeping Water
there is a girl--a lovely girl--who will never smile again."
Phew! You could just feel the feminine side of the chapel
stiffen--Hogboom was the worst fusser in college. He was chronically in
love with no less than four girls and was devoted to dozens at a time.
We had reason to believe that he was at that time engaged to two, and
spring was only half over at that. This was the best of all; our revenge
was complete.
"A girl," Perkins purred on, "who has grown up with him from childhood;
who whispered her promise to him while yet in short dresses; who sat at
home and waited and dreamed while her knight fought his way to glory in
college; who treasured his vows and wore his ring and--"
"'Tain't so, you blamed idiot!" came a hoarse voice from above. If the
chapel had been stormed by Comanches there couldn't have been more of a
commotion. A thousand pairs of eyes focused themselves on the grill. It
sagged in and then disappeared with a crash. The towsled head of Hogboom
came out of the opening.
"I'll fix you for that, Tad Perkins!" he yelled. "I'll get even with you
if it takes me the rest of my life. I ain't engaged to any Weeping Water
girl. You know it, you liar! I've had enough of this--" You couldn't
hear any more for the shrieks. When a supposedly dead man sticks his
head out of a jog in the ceiling and offers to fight his Mark Antony it
is bound to create some commotion. Even the professors turned white. As
for the girls--great smelling salts, what a cinch! They fainted in
windrows. Some of us carried out as many as six, and you had better
believe we were fastidious in our choice, too.
There had never been such a sensation since Siwash was invented. Between
the panic-stricken, the dazed, the hilarious, the indignant and the
guilty wretches like myself, who were wondering how in thunder there was
going to be any explaining done, that chapel was just as coherent as a
madhouse. And then Hogboom himself burst in a side door, and it took
seven of us to prevent him from reducing Perkins to a paste and
frescoing him all over the chapel walls. Everybody was rattled but
Prexy. I think Prexy's circulation was principally ice water. When the
row was over he got up and blandly announced that classes would take up
immediately and that the Faculty would meet in extraordinary session
that noon.
How did we get out of it? Well, if you want to catch the last car, old
man, I'll have to hit the high spots on the sequel. Of course, it was a
tremendous scandal--a memorial meeting breaking up in a fight. We all
stood to be expelled, and some of the Faculty were sorry they couldn't
hang us, I guess, from the way they talked. But in the end it blew over
because there wasn't much of anything to hang on any one. The telegrams
were all traced to the agent at Weeping Water, and he identified the
sender as a long, short, thick, stout, agricultural-looking man in a
plug hat, or words to that effect. What's more, he declared it wasn't
his duty to chase around town confirming messages--he was paid to send
them. Hogboom had a harder time, but he, too, explained that he had come
home from Weeping Water a day late, owing to a slight attack of
appendicitis, and that when he found himself late for chapel he had
climbed up into the balcony through a side door to hear the chapel talk,
of which he was very fond, and had found, to his amazement, that he was
being reviled by his friends under the supposition that he was dead and
unable to defend himself. Nobody believed Hogboom, but nobody could
suggest any proof of his villainy--so the Faculty gave him an extra
five-thousand-word oration by way of punishment, and Hogboom made
Perkins write it in two nights by threats of making a clean breast. Poor
Hoggy came out of it pretty badly. I think it broke both of his
engagements, and what between explaining to the Faculty and studying to
make a good showing and redeem himself, he didn't have time to work up
another before Commencement--while the rest of us lived in mortal terror
of exposure and didn't enjoy ourselves a bit all through May, though it
was some comfort to reflect on what would have happened if the scheme
had worked--for Hambletonian beat us to a frazzle that afternoon.
That's what we got for monkeying with a solemn subject. But, pshaw! Who
cares in college? What a student can do is limited only by what he can
think up. Did I ever tell you what we did to the English Explorer? Take
another cigar. It isn't late yet.