THE GREEK DOUBLE CROSS
Suffering bear-cats! Say! excuse me while I take a long rest, Jim. I
need it. I've just read a piece of information in this letter that makes
me tired all over.
What is it? Oh, just another variety of competition smothered with a
gentlemanly agreement--that's all; another bright-eyed little trust
formed and another readjustment of affairs on a business basis. We old
fellows needn't break our necks to get back to Siwash and the frat this
fall, they write me. Of course they'll be delighted to see us and all
that; but there's no burning need for us and we needn't jump any jobs to
report in time to put the brands on the Freshmen and rescue them from
the noisome Alfalfa Delts and Sigh Whoops--because there isn't going to
be any rescuing this fall.
They've had an agreement at Siwash. They're going to approach the
Freshies under strict rules. No parties. No dinners at the houses. No
abductions. No big, tall talk about pledging to-night or staggering
through a twilight life to a frowzy-headed and unimportant old age in
some bum bunch. All done away with. Everything nice and orderly.
Freshman arrives. You take his name and address. Call on him, attended
by referees. Maintain a general temperature of not more than sixty-five
when you meet him on the campus. Buy him one ten-cent cigar during the
fall and introduce him to one girl--age, complexion and hypnotic power
to be carefully regulated by the rushing committee. Then you send him a
little engraved invitation to amalgamate with you; and when he answers,
per the self-addressed envelope inclosed, you are to love him like a
brother for the next three and a half years. Gee! how that makes me
ache!
Think of it! And at old Siwash, too!--Siwash, where we never considered
a pledge safe until we had him tied up in a back room, with our colors
on him and a guard around the house! That settles me. I've always
yearned to go back and cavort over the campus in the fall when college
opened; but not for me no more! Why, if I went back there and got into
the rushing game, first thing I knew they'd have me run up before a
pan-Hellenic council, charged with giving an eligible Freshman more than
two fingers when I shook hands with him; and I'd be ridden out of town
on a rail for rushing in an undignified manner.
Rushing? What's rushing? Oh, yes; I forgot that you never participated
in that delicious form of insanity known as a fall term in college.
Rushing is a cross between proposing to a girl and abducting a coyote.
Rushing a man for a frat is trying to make him believe that to belong to
it is joy and inspiration, and to belong to any other means misery and
an early tomb; that all the best men in college either belong to your
frat or couldn't get in; that you're the best fellows on earth, and that
you're crazy to have him, and that he is a coming Senator; that you
can't live without him; that the other gang can't appreciate him; that
you never ask men twice; that you don't care much for him anyway, and
that you are just as likely as not to withdraw the spike any minute if
you should happen to get tired of the cut of his trousers; that your
crowd can make him class president and the other crowds can make him
fine mausoleums; that you love him like real brothers and that he has
already bound himself in honor to pledge--and that if he doesn't he will
regret it all his life; and, besides, you will punch his head if he
doesn't put on the colors. That's rushing for you.
What's my crowd? Why, the Eta Bita Pie, of course. Couldn't you tell
that from my skyscraper brow? We Eta Bites are so much better than any
other frat that we break down and cry now and then when we think of the
poor chaps who can't belong to us. We're bigger, grander, nobler and
tighter about the chest than any other gang. We've turned out more
Senators, Congressmen, Supreme Justices, near-Presidents, captains of
industry, foreign ambassadors and football captains than any two of
them. We own more frat houses, win more college elections, know more
about neckties and girls, wear louder vests and put more cross-hatch
effects on our neophytes than any three of them. We're so immeasurably
ahead of everything with a Greek-letter name that every Freshman of
taste and discrimination turns down everything else and waits until we
crook our little finger at him. Of course, sometimes we make a mistake
and ask some fellow that isn't a man of taste and discrimination; he
proves it by going into some other frat; and that, of course, keeps all
the men of poor judgment out of our gang and puts them in the others.
Regular automatic dispensation of Providence, isn't it?
It's been a long time since I had a chance to gather with the brethren
back at Siwash and agree with them how glorious we are, but this note
brings it all back. My! how I'd like this minute to go back about ten
years and cluster around our big grate fire, which used to make the
Delta Kaps so crazy with envy. Those were the good old days when we came
back to college in the fall, looked over the haycrop in the Freshman
class, picked out the likeliest seed repositories, and then proceeded to
carve them out from the clutches of a round dozen rival frats, each one
crazy to get a spike into every new student who looked as if he might be
president of the Senior class and an authority on cotillons some day. No
namby-pamby, drop-three-and-carry-one crochet effects about our rushing
those days! We just stood up on our hind legs and scrapped it out. For
concentrated, triple-distilled, double-X excitement, the first three
weeks of college, with every frat breaking its collective neck to get a
habeas corpus on the same six or eight men, had a suffragette riot in
the House of Parliament beaten down to a dove-coo.
There was nothing that made us love a Freshman so hard as to have about
six other frats after him. I've seen women buy hats the same way.
They've got to beat some other woman to a hat before they can really
appreciate it. And when we could swat half a dozen rival frats over the
heart by waltzing a good-looking young chap down the walk to chapel with
our colors on his coat, and could watch them turning green and purple
and clawing for air--well, I guess it beat getting elected to Congress
or marrying an heiress-apparent for pure, unadulterated, unspeckled joy!
Competition was getting mighty scarce in the country even then. There
were understandings between railroad magnates and beef kings and biscuit
makers--and even the ministers had a scale of wedding fees. But
competition had a happy home on our campus. About the best we had been
able to do had been to agree not to burn down each other's frat houses
while we were haltering the Freshmen. I've seen nine frats, with a total
of one hundred and fifty members, sitting up nights for a week at a time
working out plans to despoil each other of a runty little fellow in a
pancake hat, whose only accomplishment was playing the piano with his
feet. One frat wanted him and that started the others.
Of course we'd have got along better if we'd put the whole Freshman
class in cold storage until we could have found out who the good men
were and who the spoiled fruit might be. We were just as likely to fall
in love with a suit of clothes as with a future class orator. We took in
one man once because he bought a pair of patent-leather tan shoes in his
Junior year. We argued that, if he had the nerve to wear the things to
his Y. M. C. A. meetings, there must be some originality in him after
all--and we took a chance. We won. But it's a risky business. Once five
frats rushed a fellow for a month because of the beautiful clothes he
wore--and just after the victorious bunch had initiated him a clothing
house came down on the young man and took the whole outfit. You can't
always tell at first sight. But then, I don't know but that college
fraternities exercise as much care and judgment in picking brothers as
women do in picking husbands. Many a woman has married a fine mustache
or a bunch of noble clothes and has taken the thing that wore them on
spec. That's one more than we ever did. You could fool us with clothes;
but the man who came to Siwash with a mustache had to flock by himself.
He and his whiskers were considered to be enough company for each other.
There were plenty of frats in Siwash to make things interesting in the
fall. There were the Alfalfa Delts, who had a house in the same block
with us and were snobbish just because they had initiated a locomotive
works, two railroads and a pickle factory. Then there were the Sigh
Whoopsilons, who got to Siwash first and who regarded the rest of us
with the same kindly tolerance with which the Indians regarded Daniel
Boone. And there were the Chi Yis, who fought society hard and always
had their picture taken for the college annual in dress suits. Many's
the time I've loaned my dress suit to drape over some green young Chi
Yi, so that the annual picture could show an unbroken row of open-faced
vests. And there were the Shi Delts, who were a bold, bad bunch; and the
Fli Gammas, who were good, pious boys, about as exciting as a
smooth-running prayer-meeting; and the Delta Kappa Sonofaguns, who got
every political office either by electing a member or initiating one;
and the Delta Flushes; and the Mu Kow Moos; the Sigma Numerous; and two
or three others that we didn't lie awake nights worrying about. Every
one of these bunches had one burning ambition--that was to initiate the
very best men in the Freshman class every fall. That made it necessary
for us, in order to maintain our proud position, to disappoint each one
of them every year and to make ourselves about as popular as the
directors of a fresh-air and drinking-water trust.
Of course we always disappointed them. Wouldn't admit it if we didn't.
But, holy mackerel! what a job it was! Herding a bunch of green and
timid and nervous and contrary youngsters past all the temptations and
pitfalls and confidence games and blarneyfests put up by a dozen frats,
and landing the bunch in a crowd that it had never heard of two weeks
before, is as bad as trying to herd a bunch of whales into a fishpond
with nothing but hot air for gads. It took diplomacy, pugnacity and
psychological moments, I tell you; and it took more: it took ingenuity
and inventiveness and cheek and second sight and cool heads in time of
trouble and long heads on the job, from daybreak to daybreak. I'd rather
go out and sell battleships to farmers, so far as the toughness of the
job is concerned, than to tackle the job of persuading a wise young
high-school product with two chums in another frat that my bunch and he
were made for each other. What did he care for our glorious history? We
had to use other means of getting him. We had to hypnotize him, daze
him, waft him off his feet; and if necessary we had to get the other
frats to help us. How? Oh, you never know just how until you have to;
and then you slip your scheme wheels into gear and do it. You just have
to; that's all. It's like running away from a bear. You know you can't,
but you've got to; and so you do.
Makes me smile now when I think of some of the desperate crises that
used to roll up around old Eta Bita Pie like a tornado convention and
threaten to engulf the bright, beautiful world and turn it into a
howling desert, peopled only by Delta Kappa Whoops and other
undesirables. I'm far enough away, now, to forget the heart-bursting
suspense and to see only the humor of it. Once I remember the Shi Delts,
in spite of everything we could do, managed so to befog the brain of the
Freshman class president that he cut a date with us and sequestered
himself in the Shi Delt house in an upper back room, with the horrible
intention of pledging himself the next morning. Four of the largest Shi
Delts sat on the front porch that evening and the telephone got
paralysis right after supper. They had told the boy that if he joined
them he would probably have to leave school in his Junior year to become
governor; and he didn't want to see any of us for fear we would wake him
up. I chuckle yet when I think of those four big bruisers sitting on the
front porch and guarding their property while I was shinning up the
corner post of the back porch, leaving a part of my trousers fluttering
on a nail and ordering the youngster in a blood-curdling whisper to hand
down his coat, unless he wanted to lose forever his chance of being
captain of the football team in his Sophomore year. He weighed the
governorship against the captaincy for a minute, but the right triumphed
and he handed down his coat. I sewed a big bunch of our colors on it,
discoursed with him fraternally while balancing on the slanting roof,
shook hands with him in a solemn, ritualistic way and bade him be firm
the next morning. When the Shi Delts came in and found that Freshman
pledged to another gang they had a convulsion that lasted a week; and to
this day they don't know how the crime was committed.
There was another Freshman, I remember, who was led violently astray by
the Chi Yis and was about to pledge to them under the belief that their
gang contained every man of note in the United States. We had to get him
over to the house and palm off a lot of our alumni as leading actors and
authors, who had dropped in to dinner, before he was sufficiently
impressed to reason with us. Of course this is not what the English
would call "rully sporting, don't you know!" but in our consciences it
was all classified as revenge. We got the same doses. Pillings, of the
Mu Kow Moos, pulled one of our spikes out in beautiful fashion once by
impersonating our landlord. He rushed up the steps just as a Freshman
rushee was starting down all alone and demanded the rent for six months
on the spot, threatening to throw us out into the street that minute.
The Freshman hesitated just long enough to get his clothes out of the
house, and we didn't know for a month what had frozen his feet.
The Fli Gams weren't so slow, either. They found out once that one of
the men we were just about to land had a great disgust for two of our
men. What did one of their alumni do but happen craftily over our way
and mention in the most casual manner the undying admiration that the
boy had for those two? Of course we sandwiched him between them for a
week--and of course we were pained and grieved when he tossed us into
the discard; but we got even with them the next year. We picked up an
eminent young pugilist, who made his headquarters in the next town, and
for a little consideration and a suit of clothes that was a regular
college yell we got him to hang around the campus for a week. We rushed
him terrifically for a day and then managed to let the Fli Gams get him.
They rushed him for a week in spite of our carefully regulated
indignation and then proposed to him. When he told them that he might
consider coming to school--as soon as he had gone South and had cleaned
up a couple of good scraps--they let out an awful shriek and fumigated
the house. They were nice young chaps, but no judge of a pugilist. They
expected to be able to see his hoofs.
Well, it was this way every year all fall. Ding-dong, bing-bang, give
and take, no quarter and pretty nearly everything fair. As I said, it
wasn't considered exactly proper to burn a rival frat house in order to
distract the attention of the occupants while they were entertaining a
Freshman, but otherwise we did pretty nearly what we pleased to each
other--only being careful to do it first. Of course a lot of things are
fair in love and war that would not be considered strictly ethical in a
game of croquet. And rushing a Freshman is as near like love as
anything I know of. It isn't that we love the Freshman so much. When I
think of some of the trash we fought over and lost I have to laugh. But
we couldn't bear the idea of losing him. To sit by and watch another
gang win the affections of a young fellow who you know is designed by
Nature for your frat and the football team; to note him gradually
breaking off the desperate chumminess that has grown up between you in
the last forty-eight hours; to think that in another day he will have on
the pledge colors of another fraternity and will be lost to you forever
and ever and ever, and then some--what is losing a mere girl to some
other fellow compared with that? Of course I realize now that, even if a
Freshman does join another frat, you can eventually get chummy with him
again after college days are over if you find him worth crossing the
street to see; and I find myself lending money to Shi Delts and
borrowing it from Delta Whoops just as freely as if they were Eta Bites.
But somehow you don't learn these things in time to save your poor old
nerves in college.
[Illustration: Naturally I was somewhat dazzled
_Page 147_]
When I was in school the Alfalfa Delts, the Sigh Whoopsilons and the Chi
Yis were giving us a horrible race. I'm willing to admit it now, though
I'd have fought Jeffries before doing it ten years ago. Each fall was
one long whirlwind. The President of the United States in an
office-seekers' convention would have had a placid time compared with
the Freshmen. We didn't exactly use real axes on each other and we
didn't actually tear any Freshman in two pieces, but we came as near the
limit as was comfortable. No frat was safe for a minute with its guests.
If you tried to feed 'em there was kerosene in the ice cream. If you
entertained them some frat with a better quartet worked outside the
house. If you took them out to call the parlor would fill up with
riffraff in no time; and if you took your eye off your victim for a
minute he was gone--some other gang had got him. I sometimes think some
of the crowds knew how to palm Freshmen the way magicians do, from the
way they disappeared.
Even the girls took a hand in it. When I was a Sophomore I was intrusted
with the task of leading a Freshman three blocks down to Browning Hall
to call on one of our solid girls, and before I had gone a block two
Senior girls met us. They were bare acquaintances of mine, being strong
Delta Kap. allies, and they usually managed to see me only after a
severe effort; but this time you'd have thought I was a whole regiment
of fiancés. They literally fell on my neck. It was cruel of me, they
declared, to be so unsociable. There I was, a football hero--I'd just
broken my rib on the scrub team--and every girl in school was dying to
tell me how grand it was to suffer for one's college; and yet I wouldn't
so much as hint that I wanted to come to the sorority parties--and lots
more talk of the same kind. Naturally I was somewhat dazzled and I'd
walked about half a block with the prettiest one before I noticed that
the other one was steering Freshie the other way. I turned around and
never even said "Good day" to that girl; but it was too late. About a
dozen Delta Kaps appeared out of the ground and tried to look surprised
as they gathered around that scared little Freshman and engulfed him. We
never saw him again--that is, in his innocent condition--and the boys
wouldn't even trust me with the pledges we were rushing around for bait
the rest of the fall term. Bait? Oh, yes. Sometimes we'd pledge a man on
the quiet and leave him out a week or two, so that plenty of frats could
bid him--made them appreciate his worth, you know, and got every one
well acquainted.
By the time I was a Senior the competition was desperate. We spent the
summers scouring the country for prospects and we spent the first week
of school smuggling our trophies into our houses and pledging them,
without giving the other fellow a look in--that is, we tried to. We came
back fairly strong in my Senior year, with a good bunch of prospects;
but the one that excited us most was a telegram from Snooty Vincent in
Chicago. It was brief and erratic, like Snooty himself, and read as
follows:
Freshman named Smith will register from Chicago. Son of old man
Smith, multimillionaire. Kid's a comer. Get him sure! SNOOTY.
That was all. One of the half million Smiths of Chicago was coming to
college--age, weight, complexion, habits and time of arrival unknown.
That telegram qualified Snooty for the paresis ward. We didn't even know
what Smith his millionaire father was. The world is full of Smiths who
are pestered by automobile agents. All we knew was the fact that we had
to find him, grab him, sequester him where no meddling Alfalfa Delt or
Chi Yi could find him, and make him fall in love with us inside of
forty-eight hours. Then we could lead him forth, with the colors and his
_art-nouveau_ clothes on, spread the glad news--and there wouldn't have
to be any more rushing that fall. We'd just sit back and take our pick.
We sat back and built brains full of air-castles for about three
minutes--and then got busy. It was matriculation day. There were half a
dozen trains to come yet from Chicago on various roads. We had to meet
them all, pick out the right man by his aura or by the way the porter
looked when he tipped him, and grab him out from under the ravenous foe.
The next train was due in ten minutes and the depot was a mile away. We
sent Crawford down. He was trying for the distance runs anyway.
The rest of us went out to show a couple of classy boys from a big prep
school how to register and find a room, and pick out textbooks; and
incidentally how to distinguish a crowd of magnificent young student
leaders from eleven wrangling bunches of miscellaneous thickheads, who
wouldn't like anything better than to rope in a couple of good men to
teach them the ways of the world. We were succeeding in this to the
queen's taste, having accidentally dropped in on our porch with the
pair, when young Crawford rushed up green with despair and took the
rushing committee inside. He almost cried when he told us. He'd watched
the train as carefully as he could, he said, but he couldn't be
everywhere at once; and so a couple of Mu Kow Moos had got Smith. He
knew it because he had heard them ask what his name was and he had told
them Smith. He'd pretty nearly wrecked his brain trying to think of an
excuse to butt in, but they had taken the boy away and he'd run all the
way to the house to see if something couldn't be done.
Petey Simmons had listened, sitting crosslegged on the windowseat, which
was a habit of his. Petey was a Senior and his deep studies in rhetoric
during his four years in the frat had given him a great power of
expression. He turned to the despairing Crawford and reduced him to a
cinder with one look.
"So you couldn't think of any excuse to butt in!" he remarked slowly,
"Say, Crawford, if you saw a young lady falling through the ice you'd
write to her mother for permission to cheer her up. Which way did they
go?"
"They're coming this way," said what was left of Crawford.
[Illustration: He was so bashful that his voice blushed when he used it
_Page 151_]
Petey grabbed his hat and discharged himself toward the depot. We
brought in those big prep school boys and tried to give them the time of
their lives, but our hearts weren't in it. We were thinking of those Mu
Kow Moos--that frat of all others--blissfully towing home a prize they'd
stumbled onto and didn't know anything about! We thought of those
beautifully designed air-castles we were hoping to move into and we got
pumpkins in our throats. Stung on the first day of school by a bunch
that had to wear their pins on their neckties to keep from being
mistaken for a literary society! Oh, thunder! We went in to dinner all
smeared up with gloom. Then the door opened and Petey came in. He was
five feet five, Petey was, but he stooped when he came under the
chandelier. He had a suitcase in one hand and a stranger in the other.
"Boys," he said, "I want you to meet Mr. Smith, of Chicago."
* * * * *
At first glance you wouldn't have taken Smith for a perambulating
national bank, with a wheelbarrow of spending-money every month. He was
well-enough dressed and all that, but he didn't loom up in any
mountainous fashion as to looks. He was runty and his hair was a kind of
discouraged red. He had freckles, too, and he was so bashful that his
voice blushed when he used it. He didn't have a word to say until
dinner, when he said "thank you" to Sam, the waiter. Altogether he was
so meek that he had us worried; but then, as Allie Bangs said, you can't
always tell about these multimillionaires. Some of them didn't have the
nerve of a mouse. He'd seen millionaires in New York, he said, who were
afraid of cab drivers.
"And besides," said Petey, when a few of us were talking it over after
dinner, "I'd never have got him if he hadn't been so meek. I was
determined that no Mu Kow Moo was going to hang anything on us; and when
I saw the three of them coming I waded right in. Allison and Briggs,
those two dumb Juniors, were doing the steering. It was like taking
candy from the baby. I just fell right into them and took about five
minutes to tell those two how glad I was to see them back. I introduced
myself to Smith; and--would you believe it?--he was still carrying his
suitcase! I grabbed it and apologized for not having carried it all the
way up from the station. You should have seen those yaps scowl. They
wanted to shred me up, but I never noticed them again. I pointed out all
the sights to Smith and told him his friends had written me about him.
There was so little room on the sidewalk that I suggested we two walk
ahead; and I shoved him right into the middle of the walk and made
Allison and Briggs fall behind. I had a piece of luck just then. Old
Pete and his sawed-off cab came by and I flagged him in a minute. I
shoved Smith in and got in after him. Then I told the two babes that I
could take care of Smith all right and that there was no need of their
walking clear up to the house. After that I shut the door and we came
away. If looks could kill I'd be tuning up my harp this minute. Say, if
I didn't have any more nerve than those two I'd get a permit from the
city to live. And all the time Smith never made a kick. I had him
hypnotized. Now I'm going in and make him jump through a hoop."
We should have been very happy--and we would have been, but just then
Symington came in with some astounding news. The Alfalfa Delts had a man
named Smith, of Chicago, over at their house. He was on the front porch,
with the whole gang around him; and from the looks of things they'd have
him benevolently assimilated before twenty-four hours. Naturally this
created a tremendous lot of emotion around our house. It was a serious
situation. We might have the right Smith and then again we might have a
Smith who would be borrowing money for car fare inside of ten minutes.
We had to find out which Smith it was before we tampered with his young
affections.
Did you ever snuggle up to a young captain of industry and ask him who
his father was and whether he was important enough in the business world
to be indicted by the Government for anything? That was the job we
tackled that night. Smith was meek enough, but somehow even Petey's
nerve had its limits. We approached the subject from every corner of the
compass. We led up to it, we beat around it--and finally we got
desperate and led the boy up to it. But he was too shy to come down with
the information. Yes, he lived in Chicago. Oh, on the North Side. Yes,
he guessed the stock market was stronger. Yes, the Annex was a great
hotel. No, he didn't know whether they were going to put a tower on the
Board of Trade or not. Yes, the lake Shore Drive was dusty in
summer.--[Good!]--He wouldn't care to live on it.--[Bah!]--Altogether he
was as unsatisfactory to pump as a well full of dusty old brickbats.
Just then Rawlins, who had been scouting around seeing what he could run
against in the dark of the moon, arrived with the stunning information
that the Chi Yis had a man named Smith, of Oak Park, at their house and
that every corner of the lawn was guarded by picked men!
When we got this news most of us went upstairs and bathed our heads in
cold water. Oak Park sounded even more suspicious than Chicago. It's a
solid mahogany suburb and everybody there is somebody or other. You have
to get initiated into the place just as if it were a secret society,
it's so exclusive. That meant there were three Smiths from Chicago in
school. We had only one Smith. We had a one-in-three shot.
We stuck the colors on the boys from the big prep school just to keep
our hands in and went to bed so nervous that we only slept in patches.
Still, two Chicago Smiths in other frat houses were better than one. It
meant that at least one frat wasn't sure of its man. Maybe neither one
was. Our scouts had reported that, from what they could pick up, neither
Smith had it on our Smith much in looks. That could only mean one thing:
there had been a leak in the telegraph office again. What show has a
guileless sixty-five-dollar-a-month operator against a bunch of crafty
young diplomatists? They had read our telegram and were after the same
Smith that we were.
By morning the suspense around the house could have been shoveled out
with a pitchfork. If one of the other frats had the right Smith and knew
it, and had pledged him during the night, there was positively no use in
living any longer. Petey, who had shared his room with our Smith,
reported that he was now like wax in our hands. But that didn't comfort
us much. It was too confoundedly puzzling. Maybe we had the heir to a
subtreasury panting to join us and maybe his freckles were his fortune.
All Petey had gouged out of him during the night was the fact that his
father wanted him to come to Siwash because it was a nice, quiet place.
Oh, yes; it was deadly calm!
It couldn't have been more than seven o'clock when the telephone rang.
Petey answered it. A relative of Smith's was at the hotel and had heard
the boy was at our house. Would we please tell him to come right down?
Petey said he would and then rang off. Then he grabbed the 'phone again
and asked Central excitedly why she had cut him off. Central said she
hadn't, but of course she rang the other line again.
"Hello!" said Petey blandly. "This is the Alfalfa Delt house?"
"No; it's the Chi Yi house," was the answer. Petey put the receiver up
contentedly and we all turned handsprings over the library table. Fifty
per cent safe, anyway. The Chi Yis were trying to sort out the Smiths,
too.
It was an hour before anything else happened. Then Matheson of the
Alfalfa Delts, a ponderous personage, who wore a silk hat on Sunday and
did instructing, came over and asked if we had a man named Smith with
us. He was to be a pupil of his, he said, and he wanted to arrange his
work. Of course Matheson was hoping to get a green man at the door, but
he didn't have any luck. Bangs himself let him in and let him read two
or three magazines through in the library while we turned some more
handsprings--in the dining room this time. The Alfalfa Delts were
fishing, too. It was a fair field and no favors.
After a while Bangs told Matheson that the man named Smith presented his
compliments and said it was all a mistake. His tutor's name was not
Matheson, but Muttonhead. That sent Matheson away as pleasant as you
please.
All that day we sat around and beat off the enemy and got beaten off
ourselves. Our Smith got a Faculty notice to appear at once and
register--that is, it got as far as the door. We sent it back to the Chi
Yi house. We sent the Alfalfa Delt Smith a telegram from Chicago,
reading: "Father ill. Come at once." That only got as far as a door,
too. Some Alfalfa Delt got it and sent the boy back with the answer: "So
careless of father!" Blanchard called up the fire department and sent it
over to the Chi Yi house, hoping to be able to slip over and cut out
Smith in the confusion that followed; but the game was too old. The Chi
Yis had played it themselves the year before and refused to bite.
Meantime we had found a Chi Yi alumnus in the kitchen trying to sell a
book to the cook; and in the proceedings that followed we discovered
that the book had a ten-dollar bill in it. All around, it was an
entertaining but profitless day. By night, there wasn't another idea
left in the three camps. We sat exhausted, each clutching its Smith and
glaring at the other two.
As far as our Smith was concerned we almost wished some one would steal
him. He was about as interesting as a pound of baking powder. What with
fishing for his Bradstreet rating, and inventing lies to keep him from
going out and seeing the town, and watching the horizon for predatory
Alfalfa Delts and Chi Yis, we were plumb worn out. We were so skittish
that, when the bell rang about eight o'clock, we let it ring four times
more before we answered it; and when the ringer claimed to be an Eta
Bita Pie from Muggledorfer who had come over to attend Siwash, we made
him repeat pretty nearly the whole ritual before we would consider his
credentials good.
He got in at last, slightly peevish at our unbrotherly welcome, and took
his place in the library circle. We were explaining the whole situation
to him, when Allie Bangs gave an earnest yell and stood on his head in
the corner.
"What did you say your name was?" he asked the visitor after he had been
set right side up again.
"Maxwell, of Fella Kappa chapter," said the latter.
"No, it isn't," said Bangs earnestly. "You ought to know your own name!"
he went on severely. "It's Smith--and you're a barb from the cornfield!
You've come to Siwash to forget how to plow and to-morrow you're going
to organize a Smith Club. Do you hear? Don't let me catch you forgetting
your name now--and listen closely."
It was all as simple as beating a standpat Congressman. Maxwell was a
stranger, of course. He was to pin his Eta Bita Pie pin on his
undershirt and go forth in the morning a brand-new Smith, green and
guileless. It was to occur to him just before chapel that a Smith Club
ought to be formed and he was to post a notice to that effect. He would
get a couple of well-known non-fraternity Smiths interested and have
them visit the houses and see the Chicago Smiths. With all the Smiths in
session that night he ought to have no difficulty in finding out which
was the son of old man Smith. He could be lowdown and vulgar enough to
ask right out if he wished. If he found out he was to cut out that Smith
and bring him to our house--if he had to bind and gag him. If he didn't
he was to bring all three--if he could.
There was a quiet and most reassuring tone in Maxwell's voice as he
said: "I can." They evidently had their little troubles at Muggledorfer,
too.
"After we get them here," said Bangs earnestly, "we'll just pledge all
three. We'll surely get the right one that way and perhaps the other two
will not be so bad."
Upstairs, Petey Simmons was wearily explaining to our Smith for the
ninth time that Freshmen were not allowed to appear on the campus for
the first three days; and that it was considered good form to keep
indoors until the Sophomore rush; and that there wasn't a room left in
town anyway, and he might as well stay with us a while; and that the
police were looking for college students downtown and locking them up,
as they did each fall, to show their authority. Blanchard relieved him
of his task and he came downstairs mopping his brow. Then we went to
work and planned details until midnight. It was to be the plot of the
century and every wheel had to mesh.
We spent the next day in a cold perspiration. Neither Alfalfa Delt nor
Chi Yi paraded any pledged Freshmen. They were still hunting for the
right Smith, too--evidently. They fell for the Smith Club plan with such
suspicious eagerness that it was plain each bunch had some nasty,
low-lived scheme up its sleeves. We were righteously indignant. It was
our game and they ought not to butt in. But Maxwell only smiled. He was
a Napoleon, that boy was. He just waved us aside. "I'll run this little
thing the way we do at Muggledorfer," he explained. "You fellows can
play a few lines of football pretty well, but when it comes to
surrounding a Freshman and making a Greek out of him, I wouldn't take
lessons from old Ulysses himself." And so we left him alone and held
each other's hands and smoked and cussed--and hoped and hoped and hoped.
Maxwell went after the three Smiths himself that night. He had taken a
room in an out-of-the-way part of town and his plan was to take them
over there after the meeting to discuss the future good of the Smith
Club. Then about a dozen of us would slide gently over there--and a
curtain would have to be drawn over the woe that would ensue for the
other gangs. Meanwhile, all we had to do was to sit around the house and
gnaw our fingers. Maxwell called for our Smith last and he had the other
two in tow. Oh, no; we didn't invite them in. Two Alfalfa Delts and
three Chi Yis were sitting on our porch, visiting us. Three Chi Yis and
two Eta Bita Pies were sitting on the Alfalfa Delt porch. Four Eta
Bites and two Alfalfa Delts were calling on the Chi Yi house. It was a
critical moment and none of us was taking chances. We couldn't keep our
Smiths from wandering, but we could make sure they didn't wander into
the wrong place.
Maxwell led his flock of Smiths away and we all sat and talked to each
other in little short bites. The Chi Yis were nervous as rabbits. They
looked at their watches every five minutes. The Alfalfa Delts listened
to us with one ear and swept the other around the gloom. The night was
charged with plots. Innumerable things seemed trembling in the immediate
future. When the visitors excused themselves a little later, and went
away very hurriedly, we learned with pleasure from one of our boys, who
had been wandering around to break in a new pair of shoes or something,
that the Smith meeting, which had been called for the Erosophian Hall,
had been attended by four nondescript and unknown Smiths and fourteen
Chi Yis, who had dropped in casually. First blood for us! Maxwell had
evidently succeeded in segregating his Smiths. We expected a telephone
call from his room at any minute.
We kept on expecting it until midnight and then strolled down that way.
The house was dark. A very mad landlady came down in response to our
earnest request and informed us that the young carouser who had rented
her room had not been there that evening; and that if we were his rowdy
friends we could tell him that he would find his trunk in the alley.
Then we went home and our brains throbbed and gummed up all night long.
We went to chapel the next morning to keep from going insane outright.
The Chi Yis were there looking perfectly sour. The Alfalfa Delts on the
other hand were riotous. Every one of them had a pleasant greeting for
us. They slapped us on the back and asked us how we were coming on in
our rushing. Matheson was particularly vicious. He came over to Bangs
and put his arm around him in a friendly way. "I am going to have dinner
with my pupil to-night," he said triumphantly. "He wants me to come over
and get his trunk. Says he's got a good room now and he's much obliged
to you fellows for your trouble. Have you heard that there's another
Smith in school--son of a big Chicago man? There's some great material
here this fall, don't you think?"
Bangs tripped on Matheson's pet toe and went away. Something horrible
had happened. How we hated those Alfalfa Delts! They had stung us
before, but this was a triple-expansion, double-back-action,
high-explosive sting, with a dum dum point. We hurt all over; and the
worst of it was, we hadn't really been stung yet and didn't know where
it was going to hit us. Did you ever wait perfectly helpless while a
large, taciturn wasp with a red-hot tail was looking you over?
The Alfalfa Delts frolicked up and down college that day, Smithless but
blissful. We consoled ourselves with a couple of corking chaps whom the
Delta Flushes had been cultivating, and put the ribbons on them in
record time. Ordinarily we would have been perfectly happy about this,
but instead we were perfectly miserable. We detailed four men at a time
to be gay and carefree with our pledges; and the rest of us sat around
and listened to our bursting hearts. Of all the all-gone and utterly
hopeless feelings, there is nothing to compare with the one you have
when your frat--the pride of the nation--has just been tossed into the
discard by some hollow-headed Freshman.
I took my head out of my hands just before dinner and went down the
street to keep a rushing engagement. I had to pass the Alfalfa Delt
house. It hurt like barbed wire, but I had to look. I was that miserable
that it couldn't have bothered me much more, anyway, to see that wildly
happy bunch. But I didn't see it. I saw instead a crowd of fellows on
the porch who made our dejection look like disorderly conduct. There was
enough gloom there to fit out a dozen funerals, and then there would
have been enough left for a book of German philosophy. The crowd looked
at me and I fancied I heard a slight gnashing of teeth. I didn't
hesitate. I just walked right up to the porch and said: "Howdedo? Lovely
evening!" says I. "How many Smiths have you pledged to-day?"
The gang turned a dark crimson. Then Matheson got up and came down to
me. He was as safe-looking as somebody else's bull terrier.
"We don't care to hear any more from you," he said, clenching his words;
"and it would be safer for you to get out of here. We're done with your
whole crowd. You're lowdown skates--that's what you are. You're
dishonorable and sneaky. You're cads! We'll get even. I give you
warning. We'll get even if it takes a hundred years."
"Thanks!" says I. "Hope it takes twice as long." Then I went back home
and let my date take care of itself.
* * * * *
We went through dinner in a daze and sat around, that night, like a
bunch of vacant grins on legs. Our grins were vacant because we didn't
know why we were grinning. We'd stung the Alfalfa Delts. We didn't know
why or how or when. But we'd stung them! We had their word for it.
Sooner or later something would turn up in the shape of particulars;
only we wished it would hurry. If it didn't turn up sooner we were
extremely likely to burst at the seams.
It turned up about nine o'clock. There was a commotion at the front door
and Maxwell came in. He was followed by an avalanche of Smiths. There
was our Smith, and a tall, lean Smith, and a Smith who waddled when he
walked. They were all dirty and dusty; they all wore our pink-and-blue
pledge ribbons on their coat lapels and when they got in the house they
gave the Eta Bita Pie yell and sang about half of the songbook. Maxwell
had not only pledged them, but he had educated them.
After we had stopped carrying the bunch about on our shoulders, and had
put the roof of the house back, and had righted the billiard table, and
persuaded the cook to come down out of a tree in the back yard, we
allowed Maxwell to tell his story.
"It was perfectly simple," he said. "Didn't expect to be kidnapped, of
course; but it's all in the day's work. You've no idea what a job I had
getting colors to pin on these chumps. If it hadn't been for my pink
garters and a blue union suit I'd put on yesterday--"
We stopped Maxwell and backed him up to the starting pole again. But he
was no story-teller. He skipped like a cheap gas engine. We had to take
the story away from him piece by piece. He'd dodged his Smiths down a
side street, it seems, on the plea that there weren't any more Smiths
coming--and they might as well go over to his room. All would have been
well if one Smith hadn't got an awful thirst. There was a corner drug
store on the way to the room and while the quartet were insulting their
digestions with raspberry ice-cream soda a college man with a wicked eye
came by. A few minutes later, just as they were crossing the railroad
viaduct near Smith's home, two closed carriages drove up and six husky
villains fell upon them, shouting: "Chi Yi forever!" And after dumping
them in the carriages, they sat on them while the teams went off.
"After I'd got my man's knee out of my neck," said Maxwell, "I didn't
seem to care much whether I was kidnapped or not. It would bind us four
closer together after we escaped; and, besides, I have never found
kidnapping to pay--too much risk. Anyway, they drove us nothing less
than twenty miles and bundled us into an old deserted house. The leader
told us, with a whole lot of unnecessary embroidery, that we were to
stay there until we pledged to Chi Yi if we rotted in our shoes. Then,
of course, I saw through the whole thing. It was an Alfalfa Delt gang
disguised as Chi Yis. The Alfalfa Delts would send another gang out the
next day, rout the bogus Chi Yis and allow the poor Freshies to fall on
their necks and pledge up. That used to be popular at Muggledorfer.
"I did the talking and let my knees knock together considerably. I told
them that we'd been too badly shaken up to think, but if they would let
us alone that night we'd try to learn to love them by morning. So they
put us upstairs and warned us that every window was guarded; then we lay
down together and I began at the first chapter and pumped those chaps
full of Eta Bita Pie all night.
[Illustration: With our colors on and four particularly wicked-looking
chair legs in our hands
_Page 167_]
"It was six o'clock when they finally pledged. When the gang came up
they found us adamant. 'Never!' said I. 'We'll pledge Alfalfa Delt or
die martyrs to a holy cause!' Of course they didn't dare give
themselves away. They couldn't even shout for joy. All they could do was
to wait for the rescuing party. I spent the day teaching the boys the
songs and the yell in whispers; and about three o'clock I got my grand
inspiration about the colors and rigged them out. Then I dug my own pin
out and put on my vest and about four o'clock the rescuing party drove
up. Say, you'd have laughed to see that fight! Ham-actors in Richard the
Third would have made it look tame. The Chi Yis put up a fist or two,
threw a brick and then cut for the timber; and the noble Alfalfa Delts
burst open the door just as I got the chorus going on that grand old
song:
"_'Oh, you've got to be an Eta Bita Pie
Or you won't get a scarehead when you die!_'
"When they saw us there, with our colors on and four particularly
wicked-looking chair legs in our hands, they gave one simultaneous
gasp--and say, boys, I don't believe in ghosts, but I don't see yet how
they disappeared so instantaneously! And anyway, for Heaven's sake,
bring out the prog. We drilled eight miles to a railroad station and my
vest buttons are tickling my backbone."
Just then a telegram arrived.
"Don't look for Smith. Changed his mind and went to Jarhard!
"SNOOTY."
No wonder we couldn't blast any information out of our Smiths! Oh, they
were our Smiths all right--and they weren't such a bad bunch at that.
The fat one turned out to be the champion mandolin teaser in school and
the lean one made the debating team; while our own particular first
edition Smith won the catch-as-catch-can chess championship of the
college three years later.
Just the same, I'd like to get one fair crack at that Smith who went to
Jarhard. I'd get even for those three days, I'll bet a few!