TAKING PACE FROM FATHER TIME
Honestly, Bill, it's so hard to keep up to date these days, that
sometimes I'm afraid to go to sleep at night for fear I'll find myself
in an ethnological museum when I wake up the next morning, with people
making funny cracks about the strange clothes I was wearing when they
caught me.
I'm not constitutionally a back number myself either. I come as near
wearing next year's styles as most fellows, and I had my wrist broken
cranking an automobile before most Americans believed the things would
go. I was tired of this hand-chopped furniture fad years ago, and if you
hand me any slang that I can't catch on the fly you'll have to make it
up right now. But there's no use talking. No one man can keep up with
this world all by himself. Sometimes I get to thinking I'm so far ahead
that I can afford to sit down and get a breath or two, and when I get up
I have to eat dust for the next year trying to catch up.
Take colleges, for instance. I've been conceited enough to think that
these flappy little college boys, with their front hair brushed back
down on their necks, couldn't show me anything that I wasn't tired of.
I've kept up to date on college things, I've always flattered myself.
You might lose me now and then on some new way of abusing lettuce during
a salad course, perhaps, but as far as looking startled at anything that
might be said or done around a college campus goes, I've had a notion
that I wasn't in the learning class--which shows how much I knew about
it. This morning a gosling from the old school--a Sophomore--came in and
visited with me for a few minutes, on the strength of the fact that he
knew my baby brother in high school. We hadn't talked a minute before he
handed me "pragmatism" and "zing-slingers." While I was rolling my eyes
and clawing for a foothold he confessed that he was the best glider in
college. When I remarked that I had been somewhat of a glider myself,
but that I had preferred the twostep, he laughed and explained that he
was captain of the aviation team--that they had three gliders and were
finishing a monoplane that had a home-made engine with concentric
cylinders.
Can you beat it? There I was, Petey Simmons' best friend, and personally
acquainted with eleven thousand forms of college excitement, listening
to an infant with my mouth open and stopping him every few words to say
"land sakes," "dew tell" and "what d'ye mean by that?" I never was so
humiliated in my life, but there's no getting around the truth. I've
been ten years out of college, and when I go back they'll pull the
grandfather clause on me and wheel me in early nights. I'm a back number
and I know the symptoms. When that young Sophomore told me the boys of
Eta Bita Pie had just spent twenty dollars apiece on a formal dance and
house party, I put up the same kind of a lecture to him that my father
gave me when I explained that we simply had to spend five dollars apiece
on our party, or belong in the fag end of things. And I suppose when my
father's crowd blew in a couple of dollars for a load of wood, his
father reminded him that when HE went to college they didn't coddle
themselves with fires in their dormitories. And I suppose that some day
this Sophomore will be telling his son that when he was in college a
simple little home-made aeroplane furnished amusement for twenty
fellows, and that they never dreamed of dropping over to the coast on
Saturdays for a dip in the surf in their private monoplanes. Oh, well,
it's human nature and natural law, I suppose. No use trying to put a
rock on the wheels of progress--and there's no use trying to ride the
darned thing either. It'll throw you every time.
When I went to college, Billy--loud pedal on that "I"--things were
different. We didn't spend our time fooling with gliders or blow
ourselves up monkeying with pragmatism. We attended strictly to
business. We were there for educational purposes and we had no time to
chase humming birds and chicken hawks. Why, the gasoline money of a
young collegian to-day would have paid my board bills then! We didn't
go to Japan on baseball tours, or lug telescopes around South America
when we ought to have been studying ethics. We lived simply and plainly.
There wasn't an automatic piano in a single frat house when I was in
college, and as for wasting our money on motion-picture shows and
taxi-cabs--nonsense. We'd have died first.
You see I'm getting into practice. Some day I'll have a son, I hope, and
he'll go back to Siwash. Just wait till he comes home at the end of the
first semester and tries to put across any bills for radium stickpins
and lookophonic conversations with the co-eds at Kiowa. I'll pull a
When-I-was-at-Siwash lecture on him that will make him feel like a
spider on a hot stove. If I've got to be a back number I want to romp
right back far enough to have some fun out of it. I'll make him sweat as
much lugging me up to date as I had to perspire in the old days to
illuminate things for Pa.
After all, there is no question at college more serious than the Pa
question, anyway, Bill. It was always butting into our youthful
ambitions and tying pig iron to our coat-tails when we wanted to soar.
It's simply marvelous how hard it is to educate a Pa a hundred miles or
more away into the supreme importance of certain college necessities. It
isn't because they forget, either. It's because they don't realize that
the world is roaring along.
I can see it all since this morning. Take my father, for instance.
There was no more generous or liberal a Pa up to a certain point. He
wanted me to have a comfortable room and vast quantities of good food,
and he was glad to pay literary society dues, and he would stand for
frat dues; but when it came to paying cab hire, you could jam an
appropriation for a post-office in an enemy's district past Joe Cannon
in Congress more easily than you could put a carriage bill through him.
He just said "no" in nine languages; said that when he went to
Siwash--"and it turned out good men then, too, young fellow"--the girls
were glad to walk to entertainments through the mud; and when it was
unusually muddy they weren't averse to being carried a short distance. I
believe I would have had to lead disgusted co-eds to parties on foot
through my whole college course if I hadn't happened across an old
college picture of father in a two-gallon plug hat. That gave me an
idea. I put in a bill for a plug hat twice a year and he paid it without
a murmur. Then I paid my carriage bills with the money. Plug hats had
been the peculiar form of insanity prevalent at Siwash in his day and he
thought they were still part of the course of study.
I got along much easier than many of the boys, too. Allie Bangs' Pa made
him buy all his clothes at home, for fear he'd get to looking like some
of the cartoons he'd seen in the funny papers. "Prince" Hogboom was a
wonder of a fullback, and his favorite amusement was to get out at night
and try to pull gas lamps up by the roots. He was a natural born holy
terror, but his father thought he was fitted by nature to be a
missionary, and so Hoggie had to harness himself up in meek and
long-suffering clothes and attend Bible-study class twice a week. The
crimes he committed by way of relieving himself after each class were
shocking. Then there was Petey Simmons, who was a perpetual sunbeam and
greatly beloved because it was so easy to catch happiness from him. And
yet Petey went through school with a cloud over his young life, in the
shape of a Pa who gave him a thousand dollars a year for expenses and
wouldn't allow a single cent of it to be spent for frivolity. And he had
a blanket definition for frivolity that covered everything from dancing
parties to pie at an all-night lunch counter. By hard work Petey could
spend about four hundred dollars on necessary expenses, and that left
him six hundred dollars a year to blow in on illuminated manuscripts,
student lamps, debating club dues and prints of the old masters. He had
to borrow money from us all through the year, and then hold a great
auction of his art trophies and student lamps, before vacation came, in
order to pay us back.
But all of these troubles weren't even annoyances beside what Keg
Rearick had to endure. Keg was an affectionate contraction of his real
nickname--"Keghead." He had the worst case of "Pa" I ever heard of. He
was a regular high explosive--one of these fine, old, hair-triggered
gentlemen, who consider that they have done all the thinking that the
world needs and refuse to have any of their ideas altered or edited in
any particular. Keg had had his life laid out for him since the day of
his birth, and when he left for Siwash--on the precise day announced by
his father eighteen years before--the old man stood him up and
discoursed with him as follows:
"My son, I am about to give you the finest education obtainable. You are
to go down to Siwash and learn how to be a credit to me. Let me impress
it on you that that is your only duty. You will meet there companions
who will try to persuade you that there are other things to be done in
college besides becoming a scholar. You will pay no attention to them.
You are to spend your time at your books. You are to lead your class in
Latin and Greek. Mathematics I am not so particular about. You are to
waste no time on athletics and other modern curses of college. I shall
pay your expenses and I shall come down occasionally to see how you are
progressing. And you know me well enough to know that if I find you
deviating from the course I have laid out in any particular, you will
return home and go into the store at six dollars a week."
That's the way Keg always repeated it to us. With that affectionate
farewell ringing in his ears he came on down to Jonesville; and when the
Eta Bita Pies saw his honest features and his particularly likable
smile, they surrounded and assimilated him in something less than
fifteen minutes by the clock. And then his troubles began. Keg's father
had come down the week before school and had selected a quiet place
about three miles from the college--out beyond the cemetery in a nice
lonely neighborhood, where there was just about enough company to keep
the telephone poles from getting despondent. Moreover, he hadn't given
Keg any spending money.
"Education is the cheapest thing in the world," he roared. "You don't
have to keep your pockets full of dollars to live in the times of Homer
and Horace. I've told them to let you have what you need at the
bookstore. For the rest, the college library should be your haunt and
the debating society your recreation." If ever any one was getting
knowledge put down his throat with a hydraulic ram, it certainly was Keg
Rearick.
It isn't hard to imagine the result. Keg toiled away three miles from
anything interesting and got bluer and gloomier and more anarchistic
every day. Wouldn't have been so bad if nobody had loved him. Lots of
fellows go through college with no particular friends and emerge in good
health and spirits. But we had courted Keg and had tried to make it
impossible for him to live without us. We liked him and we hankered for
his company. We wanted to parade him around the campus and confer him
upon the prettiest co-ed in his boarding hall, and teach him to sing a
great variety of interesting songs, with no particular sense to them,
and snatch off two or three important offices around school. Instead of
that he only got to say "howdy" to us between classes, and the rest of
his time he spent Edward Payson Westoning back and forth from his
suburban lair, without a cent in his pockets and the street-car
motor-men giving him the bell to get off of the track into the mud every
other block.
We very soon found this wasn't going to do. Keg's spirits were down
about two notches below the absolute zero. If this was college life, he
said, would somebody kindly take a pair of forceps and remove it. It
ached. The upshot was we made Keg steward of the frat-house table, which
paid his board and room and moved him into the chapter house. He
objected at first, because of what his father would say when he heard of
it. But he finally concluded that anything he might say would be
pleasanter than going all day without hearing anything, so he
surrendered and came along.
The first night at dinner, when we pushed back our chairs and sang a few
lines by way of getting ready to go upstairs and chink a little assorted
learning into our headpieces, Keg cried for pure joy. He buckled down to
work the way a dog takes hold of a root, and inside of a week he
couldn't remember a time in his young existence when he had been
unhappy. He was tossing out Greek declensions to the prof. like a
geyser, and Conny Matthews, our champion Livy unraveler, had shown him
how to hold a Latin verb in his teeth while he broke open the rest of
the sentence. And, besides that, we had introduced him to all the
nicest girls in the college and had assisted the glee club coach to
discover that he had a fine tenor voice. He was a sure-enough find, and
fitted into college life as if it had been made to measure for him.
Of course all this pleasantness had to have a gloom spot in it
somewhere. Rearick's father furnished the gloom. He was certainly the
most rambunctious, most unreconstructed and most egregious Pa that ever
tried to turn the sunshine off of a bright young college career.
Regularly once a week a letter would come to Keg from him. It always
began "When I was in college," and it always wound up by ordering Keg to
eat a few assorted lemons for the good of his future. He was to go to
morning prayer, regularly--there hadn't been any for twenty years. He
was to become as well acquainted as possible with his professors,
because of the inspiration it would give him--fancy snuggling up to old
Grubb. He was to take a Sunday-school class at once. He was to remember
above all things that though it was a disgrace to waste a minute of the
precious college years it was equally a disgrace to go through college
without being self-supporting. He should by all means learn to milk at
once. He, Keg's father, had been valet to a couple of very fine Holstein
cows while he was in college, and he attributed much of his success to
this fact. He would of course pay Keg's expenses while he had to, but he
would hold it to his discredit. He must at once begin to find work.
This last command impressed Keg deeply, for he had been sailing along
with us without a cent. He'd been earning his board and room, of course,
but that was already paid for for a month out on the edge of the planet;
and as it was the first time the family that owned the house had ever
got a student boarder they firmly declined to rebate. It's pretty hard
to butterfly joyously along with the fancy-vest gang without any other
assets than unlimited credit at the bookstore, so Keg began to prowl for
a job. Presently he picked up a laundry route. The laundry wagon was a
favorite vehicle on which to ride to fame and knowledge in those days.
By getting up early two mornings a week and working late nights, Keg
managed to put away about six dollars and forty-five cents a week,
providing every one paid his laundry bill. He was so pleased and tickled
over the idea that he wrote to his father at once explaining that he now
had plenty of work, but had had to move downtown in order to do it.
Did this please old pain-in-the-face? Not noticeably. There had been no
such things as laundry wagons in his day. Students were lucky if they
had a shirt to wear and one to have washed at the same time. He wrote a
letter back to Keg that bit him in every paragraph. He was to give up
the frivolous laundry job and get some wood to saw. That and tending
cows were the only real methods of toiling through college. He, Keg's
father, had received his board and room for milking cows and doing
chores, and he had sometimes earned as much as three dollars a week
after school hours and before breakfast sawing cordwood at seventy-five
cents a cord. It was healthful and classic. He would send his old saw by
express. And he was further to remember--there were about four more
pages to memorize, a headache in every page.
Good old Keg did his best to be obedient, but he had no chance. In the
first place, cordwood was phenomenally scarce in Jonesville, and anyway,
people had a vicious habit of hindering the cause of education by sawing
it at the wood-yards with a steam saw. There were plenty of cows in the
outskirts, but they were either well provided with companions for their
leisure hours, or their owners declined to allow Keg to practice on
them--he knowing about as much about a cow as he did about a locomotive.
And so he dawdled on with us at the chapter house, gulping down Livy,
getting a strangle hold on Homer, and pulling in six or seven dollars a
week at his frivolous laundry job, some of which cash he was saving up
for a dress suit. And then, one day, Pa Rearick blew in for another
visit and caught his son playing a mandolin in our lounging room--far,
far from the nearest cyclone cellar.
To judge from the conversation that followed--we couldn't help hearing
it, although we went out-of-doors at once--one might have thought that
Keg had been caught in a gilded den of sin, playing poker with
body-snatchers. Pa Rearick simply cut loose and bombarded the
neighborhood with red-hot adjectives. That he should have brought up a
son to do him honor and should have found him dawdling his college
moments away with loafers; fawning on the idle sons of the rich;
tinkling a mandolin instead of walking with Homer; wasting time and
money instead of trying to earn his way to success--"Bah," likewise
"Faugh," to say nothing of other picturesque expressions of entire
disgust--from all of which one would judge almost without effort that
Keg was in bad, and in all over.
I suppose Keg attempted to explain. Possibly some people try to argue
with a funnel-shaped cloud while it is juggling the house and the barn
and the piano. Anyway the explanations weren't audible. Presently Pa
Rearick announced, for most of the world to hear, that he was going to
take his idle, worthless, disgraced and unspeakable nincompoop of a son
back to his home and set him to weighing out dried apples for the rest
of his life. Then up rose Keg and spoke quite clearly and distinctly as
follows:
"No, you're not, Dad."
"Wh-wh-wh-whowhowwy not!" said Pa Rearick, with perfect self-possession
but some difficulty.
"Because I like this college and I'm going to stay here," said Keg. "I'm
standing well in my studies and I'm learning a lot all around."
"All I have to say is this," said Pa Rearick. I really haven't time to
repeat all of those few words, but the ukase, when it was completely
out, was the following: Keg was to have a chance to ride home in the
cars if he packed up within ten minutes. After that he could walk home
or dance home or play his way home with his mandolin. And he was given
to understand that, when he finally arrived, the nearest substitute to a
fatted calf that would be prepared for dinner would be a plate of cold
beans in the kitchen with the hired man.
"You may stay here and dawdle with your worthless companions if you
desire," shouted Pa Rearick to a man in an adjoining county. "The lesson
may be a good one for you. I wash my hands of the whole matter. But
understand. Don't write to me for a cent. Not one cent. You've made your
bed. Now lie on it."
With which he went away, and we tiptoed carefully in to rearrange the
shattered atmosphere and comfort Keg. We found him looking thoughtfully
at nothing, with his hands deep in his pockets, from which about six
dollars and seventy-five cents' worth of jingle sounded now and then. We
waited patiently for him to speak. At last he turned on us and grinned
pensively.
"Do you know, boys," he said, "as a bed-maker I can beat the owner of
that prehistoric old corn-husk mattress out in the suburbs with one hand
tied behind me."
* * * * *
Of course it is a sad thing to be regarded with indignation and disgust
by one's only paternal parent, but Keg bore up under it pretty
manfully. He dug into his work harder than ever--and he was a good
student. Latin words stuck to him like sandburrs. That wasn't his fault,
of course. Some men are born with a natural magnetism for Latin words;
and others, like myself, have to look up _quoque_ as many as nine times
in a page of Mr. Horace's celebrated metrical salve-slinging. Keg went
into a literary society, too, and developed such an unholy genius at
wadding up the other fellow's words and feeding them back to him that he
made the Kiowa debate in his Freshman year. He also chased locals for
the college paper, made his class football team, got on the track squad
and won the Freshman essay prize. In fact, he killed it all year long
and likewise he trained all year long with his idle and vicious
companions--meaning us.
It beats all how much benefit you can get from training with idle and
vicious companions, if you are built that way. Of course we taught him
how to play a mandolin, and how to twostep on his own feet exclusively,
and how to roll a cigarette without carpeting the floor with tobacco,
and how to make a pretty girl wonder if she is as beautiful as all that,
without really saying it himself, and dozens of other pretty and
harmless little tricks. But that wasn't half he picked up while he was
loafing away the golden hours of his college course in our chapter
house. Conny Matthews, whose hobby was Latin verse, plugged him up to
sending in translated sonnets from Horace for Freshman themes. Noddy
Pierce showed him how to grab the weak point in the other fellow's
debate and hang on to it through the rebuttal, while the enemy
floundered and struggled and splattered disjointed premises all over the
hall. Allie Bangs had a bug on fencing, and because he and Keg used to
tip over everything in the basement trying to skewer each other, they
got to reading up on old French customs of producing artistic
conversations and deaths and other things, and eventually they wrote one
of those "Ha" and "Zounds" plays for the Dramatic Club. In fact, there's
no limit to what you can absorb from idle and vicious companions. In one
term alone I myself picked up banjo playing, pole vaulting, a little
Spanish, a bad case of mumps, and two flunks, simply by associating with
the Eta Bita Pie gang twenty-seven hours a day.
But nobody had to show Keg how to get jobs after his first experience.
He had a knack of scenting a soft financial snap a mile away to leeward,
and working his way through college was the least of his troubles. It
used to make me tired to see the nonchalance with which he would sleuth
up to a nice fat thing like a baseball season program, and put away a
couple of hundred with a single turn of the wrist and about four days'
hard soliciting among the long-suffering Jonesville merchants. I never
could do it myself. I had the popular desire to work my way through
school when I entered Siwash, and I pictured myself at the end of my
college career receiving my diploma in my toil-scarred fist, without
having had a cent from home. But pshaw! I was a joke. I mowed one lawn
in my Freshman year, after hunting for work for three weeks; and I lost
that engagement because the family decided the hired girl could do it
better. After that I gave up and took my checks from home like a little
man. In Siwash it is all right to get sent through school, and nobody
looks down on you for it. The boys who make their own way are very kind
and never taunt you if you have to lean on Pa. But all the same, you
feel a little bit disgraced. Why, I've seen a cotillon leader run all
the way home from a downtown store where he clerked after school hours,
in order to get into his society harness on time; and when the winner of
the Interstate Oratorical in my Freshman year had received his laurel
wreath and three times three times three times three from the crazy
student body, he excused himself and went off to the house where he
lived, to fill up the hard-coal heater and pump the water for the next
day's washing.
As I started to say, some time ago, Keg proved to be a positive genius
in nailing down jobs. He hadn't been with us three months until he had
presented his laundry route to one of the boys. He didn't have time to
attend to it. He had hauled down a chapel monitorship that paid his
tuition. He got his board and room from us for being steward, and how he
ever got the fancy eats he gave us out of four dollars per week per
appetite is an unsolved wonder. He made twenty-five dollars in one week
by introducing a new brand of canned beans among the hash clubs. He took
orders for bookbinding on Saturdays, and sold advertising programs for
the college functions after school hours. More than once I borrowed ten
dollars from him that year, while I was living on hope and meeting the
mailman half-way down the block each morning just before the first of
the month. And I wasn't the only man who did it, either.
Perhaps you wonder how he had time to do all this and to mix up in all
the various departments of student bumptiousness, besides absorbing
enough information laid down and prescribed by the curriculum to batter
an "A" out of old Grubb, who hated to give a top mark worse than most
men hate to take quinine. That's one of the mysteries of college life.
No one has time to do anything but the busy man. In every school there
are a few hundred joyous loafers who hold down an office or two, and
make one team, and then have only time to take a few hasty peeps at a
book while running for chapel; and there are a dozen men who do the
debating and the heavy thinking for half a dozen societies, and make
some athletic team, and get their lessons and make their own living on
the side--and who always have time, somehow, to pick up some new and
pleasant pastime, like reading up for an oration on John Randolph, of
Roanoke, or some other eminent has-been. When I think of my wasted years
in college and of how I was always going to take hold of Psych. and
Polykon and Advanced German, and shake them as a terrier does a rat,
just as soon as I had finished about three more hands of whist--oh,
well, there's no use of crying about it now. What makes me the maddest
is that my wife says I'm an imposingly poor whist player at that.
Keg went home with one of us for the semester holidays. And at
commencement time he wrote an affectionate letter home to his volcanic
old sire, and told him that he was going to stride forth into the
unappreciative world and yank a living away from it that summer. That
was the great ambition of almost every Siwash boy. When we weren't
thinking of girls and exams in the blissful spring days, we were
stalking some summer job to its lair and sitting down to wait for it.
There wasn't anything that a Siwash boy wouldn't tackle in the summer
vacation. The farmer boys had a cinch, of course. They were skilled
laborers; and, besides, they came back in the fall in perfect condition
for the football squad. Some of the town boys became street-car
conductors. The new railroad that was built into Jonesville about that
time was a bonanza for us. It was no uncommon thing, the summer of my
Sophomore year, to find a dozen muddy society leaders shoveling dirt in
a construction crew and singing that grand old hymn composed by Petey
Simmons, which ran as follows:
_I've a blister on me heel, and me beak's begun to peel;
I've an ache for every bone that's in me back.
I've a feeling I could eat rubber hose and call it sweet,
And me hands is warped from lugging bits of track._
_Oh, me closes they are tore, and me shoulders they are sore,
And I sometimes wish that I had died a 'borning';
And me eye is full of dirt, and there's gravel in me shirt,
But I'm going back to Siwash in the mor-r-r-r-r-r-r-rning._
One of our own boys is a division superintendent on one of the big
western roads to-day, and he caught the railroad microbe in the shovel
gang.
The boys got newspaper positions and clerked in the stores, and one or
two of them tooted cornets or other disturbances at summer-resort
hotels. One junior, during my time, aroused the envy of the whole
college by painting the steeple of the First Baptist Church during
vacation; and when he finished the job his class numerals were painted
in big letters on top of the ornamental knob that tipped the spire. At
least, so he announced, and no rival class had the nerve to investigate.
But the most popular road to prosperity during the summer was the
canvassing route. About the last of April various smooth young college
chaps from other schools would drift into Siwash and begin to sign up
agents for the summer. There were three favorite lines--books,
stereopticon slides and a patent combination desk, blackboard,
sewing-table, snow-shovel, trundle-bed and ironing-board--which was sold
in vast numbers at that time by students all over the country. All
through May the agents fished for victims. They signed them up with
contracts guaranteeing them back-breaking profits, and then instructed
them with great care in a variety of speeches. Speech No. 1,
introductory. Speech No. 2, to women. Speech No. 3, clinching talk for
waverers. Speech No. 4, to parents. Speech No. 5, rebuttal to argument
that victim already has enough reading matter. Speech No. 6, general
appeal to patriotism and love of progress. Then on Commencement day the
hopeful young collegians would go forth to argue with the calm and
unresponsive farmer's wife and sell her something that she had never
needed and had never wanted, until hypnotized by the classic eloquence
of a bright-eyed young man with his foot in the crack of the half-opened
door.
I chose the book game one summer, and went out with about thirty others.
Twenty-five of them quit at the end of the first week. That was about
the usual proportion--but the rest of us stuck. I devastated a swath of
territory fifty miles wide and a hundred miles long. I talked, argued,
persuaded, plead, threatened and mesmerized. I sold books to men on
twine binders, to women with their hands in the bread dough, and once,
after a farmer had come grudgingly out to rescue me from his dog, I sold
a book to him from a tree. I worked two months, tramped four hundred
miles, told the same story of impassioned praise for and confidence in
my book eleven hundred times, and sold sixty-five volumes at a gross
profit of seventy-nine dollars--my expenses being eighty dollars even.
But it was worth the effort. I was a shy young thing at the beginning
of the summer, who believed that strangers would invariably bite when
spoken to. When school began I was a tanned pirate who believed the
world belonged to him who could grab it, and who would have walked up to
a duke and sold him a book on practical farming with as much assurance
as if it were a subpoena I was serving.
Keg went out with the desk crowd, and it was evident from the first
minute that he was going to return a plutocrat. He sold a desk to the
train brakeman on his way to his field, and another to a kind old
gentleman who incautiously got into conversation with him. He raged
through four counties like a plague, selling desks in farmhouses, public
libraries, harness stores, banks and old folks' homes. He was the
season's sensation and won a prize every month from the proud and happy
company. When he had finished collecting he took a hasty run to Denver
on a sight-seeing trip, and came back to Siwash that fall in a parlor
car, with something over four hundred dollars in his jeans.
Naturally we would have ceased worrying about the probability of keeping
Keg with us then if we had not done so long before. As a matter of fact,
he was more prosperous than any of us. He had made his own money and he
drew his own checks when he pleased, instead of taking them the first of
the month wrapped up in a cayenne coating composed of parental remarks
on extravagance and laziness. He gave away all of his little jobs to the
rest of us first thing, and said he was content with what he had; but,
pshaw!--when a man has the gift he can't dodge prosperity. Keg had to
manage the college paper that year because no one else could do it quite
so well; and it netted him about fifty dollars a month. When the
glee-club manager got cold feet over the poor prospects, Keg backed a
trip himself--and I hate to say how much he cleared from it. That was
the first year we swept the West with our famous football team of
trained mastodons; and at the earnest solicitation of about a dozen
daily papers here and there, Keg dashed off something like one hundred
yards of football dope at five dollars a column--sort of a literary
hundred-yard dash. He used to write it between bites at the dinner
table. And then to top off everything, his precious desk company came
along and stole him from us early in April. It considered him too
valuable a man to tramp the country selling desks, while there were
other young collegians who only needed the touch of a magic tongue to
get them into the great calling. So Keg made a tour of Kiowa and
Muggledorfer and Hambletonian and Ogallala colleges, lining up
canvassers at a net profit of something like fifty dollars per
head--full or empty. When he blew in at the end of the year to spend
Commencement week with us he was nothing short of an amateur Croesus.
He bulged with wealth. I remember yet the awe with which the rest of us,
hoarding our last nickels at the end of the long and billful year, took
a peep at the balance in his checkbook and touched him humbly for
advances, great and small.
Keg had gone out the second evening of Commencement week to bring a
little pleasure into the barren life of a girl who hadn't been shown any
attention by any one for upward of four hours. The rest of the boys were
also away scattering seeds of kindness in a similar manner, and so I was
alone when Pa Rearick stumped up the walk to the chapter-house porch and
glared at me.
"I want to see my boy," he said, out of the corner of his beard. He
seemed to suspect that I had made him into a meat pie or otherwise done
away with him.
"He's out," I said, not very scared; "but if you want to wait for him,
won't you make yourself quite at home?"
He took a seat on the porch without a word. I went on smoking a
cigarette in my most abandoned style and saying all I had to say, which
was nothing. After a while Pa Rearick glared over at me again in a most
belligerent manner.
"Is he well?" he asked.
"Finer'n silk," I answered, most disrespectfully.
"Humph!" said he; which, being freely translated, seemed to mean: "If I
had an impudent, lazy, immoral, shiftless, unlicked cub like you, I'd
grind him up for hen feed."
Much more silence. I lit another cigarette.
"Does he get enough to eat?"
"When he has time," I said. "He's generally pretty busy."
"Playing the mandolin, I suppose."
"Most of the time," said I. "He runs the college in his odd moments."
"He wouldn't have run the Siwash I went to," said Pa Rearick grimly.
"No," said I, "you egregious timber-head, he'd have spent his time
limping after Homer." But as I said it only to myself, no one was
insulted.
"Has he learned anything?" said old Hostilities, after some more
silence.
"Took the Sophomore Greek prize this year," I said, blowing one of the
most perfect smoke rings I had ever achieved.
"I don't believe it," said Pa Rearick deliberately.
I blew another ring that was very fair, but it lacked the perfect double
whirl of the first one. And presently the neatest spider phaeton that
was owned by a Jonesville livery stable drew up before the house and Keg
jumped out, telling a delicious chiffon vision to hold old Bucephalus
until he got his topcoat. Keg was a good dresser, but I never saw him
quite as letter-perfect and wholly immaculate as he was just then. He
hurried up the steps, took one look, and yelled "Dad," then made a rush;
and I went inside to see if I couldn't beat that smoke ring where there
was not so much atmospheric disturbance.
* * * * *
Pa Rearick stayed the rest of the week, and after he had interviewed
certain professors the next day he moved over to the house and stayed
with us. Mrs. Rearick came down, too, and on this account we didn't see
quite as much of Keg as we had hoped to. The girl in chiffon didn't,
either, but that's neither here nor there. She was only a passing fancy,
anyway. By successive degrees Keg's father viewed the rest of us with
disapproval, suspicion, tolerance, benevolence, interest and
friendliness. But I am convinced that it was only on Keg's account. He
gave us credit for exercising unexpected good taste in liking him. And
maybe it wasn't interesting to see him thaw and melt and struggle with a
stiff, wintry smile, as a young man does with his first mustache, and
finally give himself up unreservedly to fatherly pride. When a father
has religiously put away these things all his life for fear of spoiling
a son, and finally finds that that son is unspoilable, even by
friendliness and parental tenderness, he has a lot of pleasure to
indulge himself in during his remaining years.
It was like the old fire-eater to call us together before he went and
punished himself. I suppose it was his sense of justice which was too
keen for any good use. "I've misjudged my son," he said to us; "and I
want to make public admission of it. I am perhaps a little out of
date--a little old-fashioned. The world didn't move so fast when I was a
boy here. When I was in school we saved our money and studied. My son
tells me he can't afford to save money--that time is too precious. I
don't pretend to understand all your ways, but he seems to think you
have been good to him and I want to thank you for it. My son has made
his way alone these two years. I threw him out to support himself. When
I casually mentioned yesterday that times were very hard in the business
just now, he wanted to put five hundred dollars into it. I want you to
know I'm proud of him. I hope you young gentlemen will feel free to stop
and visit us when you come through our town. I must say, times seem to
have changed."
Right he was. Times have changed. And here I have been dunderheading
along in just his way, imagining that I was pacing them, instead of
sitting on the fence and watching them go by. If I can find that little
Sophomore who insulted me this morning, I'm going to make him come to
dinner and tell me some more about the way they do things this
afternoon. As for to-morrow--what does he or any one else know about it?