SIC TRANSIT GLORIA ALL-AMERICA
How did the Siwash game come out Saturday? Forget it, my boy. You'll
never know in this oversized, ingrowing, fenced-off, insulated
metropolis till some one writes and tells you. Every fall I ask myself
that same question all day Saturday and Sunday, and do you suppose I
ever find a Siwash score in one of those muddy-faced, red-headed,
ward-gossip parties that they call newspapers in New York? Never, not at
all, you hopeful tenderfoot from the unimportant West. After you've
existed in this secluded portion of the universe a few years you'll get
over trying to find anything that looks like news from home in the daily
disturbances here. And I don't care whether your home is in Buffalo,
Chicago or Strawberry Point, Iowa, either. Go down on the East Side and
beat up a policeman, and you'll get immortalized in ten-inch type. Go
back West and get elected governor, and ten to one if you're mentioned
at all they'll slip you the wrong state to preside over.
Excuse me, but I'm considerably sore, just as I am every Sunday during
the football season. Here I am, eating my heart out with longing to know
whether good old Siwash has dusted off half a township with
Muggledorfer again, and what do I get to read? Four yards of Gale; five
yards of Jarhard; two yards of Ohell; and a page of Quincetown,
Hardmouth, Jamhurst, Saint Mikes, Holy Moses College and the Connecticut
Institute of Etymology. Nice fodder for a loyal alumnus eleven hundred
and then some miles from home, isn't it? Honest, when I first hit this
seething burg I used to go down to the Grand Central station on Sunday
afternoon and look at the people coming in from the trains, just because
some of them were from the West. Once I took a New Yorker up to
Riverside Park, pointed him west and asked him what he saw. He said he
saw a ferryboat coming to New York. That was all he had ever seen of the
other shore. He called it Hinterland. That made me mad and I called him
an electric-light bug. We had a lovely row.
But we're blasting out a corner for the old coll., even back here. We've
got things fixed pretty nicely here now, we Siwash men. Down near
Gramercy Park there's an old-fashioned city dwelling house, four stories
high and elbow-room wide. It's the Siwash Alumni Club. There are half a
hundred Siwash men in New York, gradually getting into the king row in
various lines of business, and we pay enough rent each year for that
house to buy a pretty fair little cottage out in Jonesville. Whenever a
Siwash man drops in there he's pretty sure to find another Siwash man
who smokes the same brand of tobacco and knows the same brand of
college songs. We've got one legislator, four magazine publishers, two
railroad officials, a city prosecutor and three bankers on the
membership roll, and maybe some day we'll have a mayor. Then we'll pass
a law requiring the boys and girls of New York to spend at least one
hour a day learning about Siwash College, Jonesville, the big team of
naughty-nix and the formula for getting credit at the Horseshoe Café.
We'll make it obligatory for every newspaper to publish a full page
about each Siwash game in the fall, with pictures of the captain, the
coach and the fullback's right leg. Hurrah for revenge! I see it coming.
Join the club? Why, you don't have to ask to join it. You've got to join
it. Ten dollars, please, and sign here. When we get a little huskier
financially we won't charge new-fledged graduates anything for a year or
two, but we've got to now. The soulless landlord wants his rent in
advance. You'll find the whole gang there Saturday nights. Just butt
right in if I'm not around. You're a Siwash man, and if you want to
borrow the doorknob to throw at a hackman you've a perfect right to do
it.
I'll tell you, old man, you don't know how nice it is to have a hole
that you can hunt in this hurricane town, when you're a bright young
chap with a glorious college past and a business future that you can't
hock for a plate of beans a day! Leaving college and going into business
in a big city is like taking a high dive from the hall of fame into an
ice-water tank. Think of that and be cheerful. You've got a nice time
coming. Just now you're Rudolph Weedon Burlingame, Siwash
Naughty-several, late captain of the baseball team, prize orator,
manager of two proms and president of the Senior class. To-morrow you'll
be a nameless cumberer of busy streets, useful only to the street-car
companies to shake down for nickels. To-morrow you're going around to
the manager of some firm or other with a letter from some customer of
his, and you're going to put your hand on your college diploma so as to
have it handy, and you're going to hand him the letter and prepare to
tell the story of your strong young life. But just before you begin
you'll go away, because the manager will tell you he's sorry, but he's
busy, and there are fourteen applicants ahead of you, and anyway he'll
not be hiring any more men until 1918, and will you please come around
then, and shut the door behind you, if you don't mind.
Yep, that's what will happen to you. You'll spend your first three days
trying to haul that diploma out. The fourth day you'll put it in your
trunk. I've known men to cut 'em up for shaving paper. You'll stop
trying to tell the story of your life and in about a week you'll be
wondering why you have been allowed to live so long. In two weeks a
clerk will look as big as a senator to you and you'll begin to get
bashful before elevator men. You'll get off the sidewalk when you see a
man who looks as if he had a job and was in a hurry. You'll envy a
messenger boy with a job and a future; you'll wonder if managers are
really carnivorous or only pretend to be. You feel as tall as the Singer
Building to-day, but you'll shrink before long. You'll shrink until,
after a long, hard day, with about nine turndowns in it, you'll have to
climb up on top of the dresser to look at yourself in the glass.
That's what you're going up against. Then the Siwash Club will be your
hole and you'll hunt it every evening. You'll be a big man there, for we
judge our members not by what they are, but by what they were at school.
You'll sit around with the boys after dinner, and the man on your right,
who is running a railroad, will be interested in that home run you made
against Muggledorfer, and the man on your left, who won't touch a law
case for less than five thousand dollars, will tell you that he, too,
won the Perkins debate once. And he'll treat you as if you were a real
life-sized human being instead of a job hunter, knee high to a copying
clerk. You'll be back in the old college atmosphere, as big as the best
of 'em, and after you've swapped yarns all evening you'll go to bed full
of tabasco and pepper and you'll tackle the first manager the next
morning as if he were a Kiowa man and had the ball. And sooner or later
you'll get old Mr. Opportunity where he can't give you the straight arm,
and if you don't put a knee in his chest and tame him for life you
haven't got the real Siwash spirit, that's all.
Funny thing about college. It isn't merely an education. It's a whole
life in itself. You enter it unknown and tiny--just a Freshman with no
rights on earth. You work and toil and suffer--and fall in love--and
climb and rise to fame. When you are a Senior, if you have good luck,
you are one of the biggest things in the whole world--for there isn't
any world but the campus at college. Freshmen look up to you and admire
men who are big enough to talk with you. The Sophomores may sneer at
faculties and kings, but they wouldn't think of sassing you. The papers
publish your picture in your football clothes. You dine with the
professors, and prominent alumni come back and shake you by the hand. Of
course, you know that somewhere in the dim nebulous outside there is a
President of the United States who is quite a party in his way, but none
of the girls mention it when they tell you how grand you looked after
they had hauled the other team off of you and sewed on your ear. They
talk about you exclusively because you're really the only thing worth
talking about, you know.
When Commencement comes you move about the campus like some tall
mountain peak on legs. The students bring their young brothers up to
meet you and you try to be kind and approachable. They give you a
tremendous cheer when you go down the aisle in the chapel to get your
prizes. You are referred to on all sides as one of the reasons why
America is great. The professors when they bid you good-by ask you
anxiously not to forget them. Then Commencement is over and college life
is past, and there is nothing left in life but to become a senator or
run a darned old trust. You leave the campus, taking care not to step on
any of the buildings, and go out into the world pretty blue because
you're through with about everything worth while; and you wonder if you
can stand it to toil away making history eleven months in the year with
only time to hang around college a few weeks in spring or fall. You're
done with the real life. You're an old man, you've seen it all; and it
sometimes takes you two weeks or more to recover and decide that after
all a great career may be almost as interesting in a way as college
itself. So you buck up and decide to accept the career--and that's where
you begin to catch on to the general drift of the universe in dead
earnest.
Take a man of sixty, with a permanent place in Who's Who and a large
circle of people who believe that he has some influence with the sunrise
and sunset. Then let him suddenly find himself a ten-year-old boy with
two empty pockets and an appetite for assets, and let him learn that it
isn't considered even an impertinence to spank him whenever he tries to
mix in and air his opinions. I don't believe he would be much more
shocked than the college man who finds, at the conclusion of a glorious
four-year slosh in fame, that he is really just about to begin life, and
that the first thing he must learn is to keep out from under foot and
say "Yes, sir," when the boss barks at him. It's a painful thing,
Burlingame. Took me about a year to think of it without saying "ouch."
The saddest thing about it all is that the two careers don't always
mesh. The college athlete may discover that the only use the world has
for talented shoulder muscles is for hod-carrying purposes. The society
fashion plate may never get the hang of how to earn anything but last
year's model pants; and the fishy-eyed nonentity, who never did anything
more glorious in college than pay his class tax, may be doing a
brokerage business in skyscrapers within ten years.
When I left Siwash and came to New York I guess I was as big as the next
graduate. Of course I hadn't been the one best bet on the campus, but I
knew all the college celebrities well enough to slap them on the backs
and call them by pet names and lend them money. That of course should be
a great assistance in knowing just how to approach the president of a
big city bank and touch him for a cigar in a red-and-gold corset, while
he is telling you to make yourself at home around the place until a job
turns up. Allie Bangs, my chum, went on East with me. We had decided to
rise side by side and to buy the same make of yachts. Of course we were
sensible. We didn't expect to crowd out any magnates the first week or
two. We intended to rise by honest worth, if it took a whole year. All
we asked was that the fellows ahead should take care of themselves and
not hold it against us if we ran over them from behind. We didn't think
we were the biggest men on earth--not yet. That's where we fell down.
We've never had a chance to since. You've got to seize the opportunity
for having a swelled head just as you have for everything else.
It took us just six weeks to get a toe-hold on the earth and establish
our right to breathe our fair share of New York air. At the end of that
time neither one of us would have been surprised if we had been charged
rent while waiting in the ante-rooms of New York offices to be told that
no one had time to tell us that there was no use of our waiting to get a
chance to ask for anything. Talk about a come-down! It was worse than
coming down a bump-the-bumps with nails in it. It was three months
before we got jobs. They were microscopic jobs in the same company, with
wages that were so small that it seemed a shame to make out our weekly
checks on nice engraved bank paper--jobs where any one from the
proprietor down could yell "Here, you!" and the office boy could have
fired us and got away with it. If I had been hanging on to a rope
trailing behind a fifty-thousand-ton ocean liner I don't believe I
should have felt more inconsequential and totally superfluous.
But they were jobs just the same and we were game. I think most college
graduates are after they get their feelings reduced to normal size. We
hung on and dug in, and sneaked more work into our positions, and
didn't quarrel with any one except the window-washer's little boy who
brought meat for the cats in the basement. We drew the line at letting
him boss us. And how we did enjoy being part of the big rumpus on
Manhattan Island. We had a room--it wasn't so much of a room as it was a
sort of stationary vest--and we ate at those hunger cures where a girl
punches out your bill on a little ticket and you don't dare eat up above
the third figure from the bottom or you'll go broke on Friday. By hook
or crook we always managed to save a dollar from the wreckage each week
for Sunday, and say, did you ever conduct a scientific investigation
into just how far a dollar will go providing a day's pleasure in a big
city? We did that for six months, and if I do say it myself we stretched
some of those dollars until the eagle's neck reached from Tarrytown to
Coney Island. We saw New York from roof garden to sub-cellar. We even
got to doing fancy stunts. We'd dig out our dress suits, go over to one
of those cafés where you begin owing money as soon as you see the head
waiter, and put on a bored and haughty front for two hours on a dollar
and twenty cents, including tips. And what we didn't know about the
Subway, the Snubway and the Grubway, the Clubway, and the various
Dubways of New York wasn't worth discovering or even imagining.
We hadn't been conducting our explorations for more than a week when a
most tremendous thing happened to us. You know how you are always
running up against mastodons in the big town. You see about every one
who is big enough to die in scare-heads. Taking a stroll down Fifth
Avenue with an old residenter and having him tell about the people you
pass is like having the hall of fame directory read off to you. Well,
one Sunday night when we were blowing in our little fifty cents apiece
on one of those Italian table d'hôte dinners with red varnish free,
Allie looked across the room and began to tremble. "Look at that chap,"
says he.
"Who is he?" I asked, getting interested. "Roosevelt?"
"Roosevelt nothing," he says scornfully. "Man alive, that's Jarvis!"
I just dropped my jaw and stared. Of course you remember Jarvis, the
great football player. At that time I guess most of the college boys in
America said their prayers to him. Out West we students used to read of
his terrific line plunges on the eastern fields and of his titanic
defense when his team was hard pushed, and wonder if any of us would
ever become great enough to meet him and shake him by the hand. What did
we care for the achievements of Achilles and Hector and Hercules and
other eminent hasbeens, which we had to soak up at the rate of forty
lines of Greek a day? They had old Homer to write them up--the best man
ever in the business. But they were too tame for us. I've caught myself
speculating more than once on what Achilles would have done if Jarvis
had tried to make a gain through him. Achilles was probably a pretty
good spear artist, and all that, but if Jarvis had put his
leather-helmeted head down and hit the line low--about two points south
of the solar plexus--they would have carted Ac. away in a cab right
there, invulnerability and all.
That's about what we thought of Jarvis. We had his pictures pasted all
over our training quarters along with those of the other
super-dreadnoughts from the colleges that break into literature, and I
imagine that if he had suddenly appeared back in Jonesville we should
have put our heads right down and kow-towed until he gave us permission
to get up. And here we were, sitting in the same café with him. I'll
tell you, I had never felt the glory of living in the metropolis and
prowling around the ankles of the big chiefs more vividly than right
there in that room the night we first saw him.
We sat and watched Jarvis while our meat course got cold. There was no
mistaking him--some people have their looks copyrighted and Jarvis was
one of them. We would have known it was he if we had seen him in a Roman
mob. After a while Bangs, who always did have a triple reënforced
Harveyized steel cheek, straightened up. "I'm going over to speak to
him," he said.
"Sit still, you fool," says I; "don't annoy him."
"Watch me," says Bangs; "I'm going over to introduce myself. He can't
any more than freeze me. And after I've spoken to him they can take my
little old job away from me and ship me back to the hayfields whenever
they please. I'll be satisfied."
"You ought to bottle that nerve of yours and sell it to the
lightning-rod pedlers," says I, getting all sweaty. "Just because you
introduced yourself to a governor once you think you can go as far as
you like. You stay right here--" But Bangs had gone over to Jarvis.
I sat there and blushed for him, and suffered the tortures of a man who
is watching his friend making a furry-eared nuisance of himself. There
was the greatest football player in the world being pestered by a
frying-sized sprig of a ninth assistant shipping clerk. It was
preposterous. I waited to see Bangs wilt and come slinking back. Then I
was going to put on my hat and walk out as if I didn't belong with him
at all. But instead of that Bangs shook hands with Jarvis, talked a
minute and then sat down with him. When Bangs is routed out by the Angel
Gabriel he'll sit down on the edge of his grave and delay the whole
procession, trying to find a mutual acquaintance or two. That's the kind
of a leather-skin he is.
Presently Bangs turned around and beckoned to me to come over. More
colossal impudence. I wasn't going to do it, but Jarvis turned, too, and
smiled at me. Like a hypnotized man I went over to their table. "I want
you to meet Mr. Jarvis," said Bangs, with the air of a man who is giving
away his aeroplane to a personal friend.
"Glad to meet you," said Jarvis kindly.
"M-m-m-mrugh," says I easily and naturally. Then I sat down on the edge
of a chair.
Well, sir, Jarvis--it was the real Jarvis all right--was as pleasant a
fellow as you would ever care to meet. There he was talking away to us
fishworms just as cordially as if he enjoyed it. He didn't seem to be a
bit better than we were. I've often noticed that when you meet the very
greatest people they are that way. It's only the fellows who aren't sure
they're great and who are pretty sure you aren't sure either, who have
to put up a haughty front. Jarvis offered us cigarettes and put us so
much at our ease that we stayed there an hour. It was a dazzling
experience. He told us a lot about the city, and asked us about
ourselves and laughed at our experiences. And he told us that he often
dined there and hoped to see us again. When we got safely outside, after
having bade him good-by without any sort of a break, I mopped my
forehead. Then I took off my hat. "Bangs," said I, "you're the world's
champion. Some day you'll get killed for impudence in the first degree,
but just now I've got ten cents and I'm going to buy you a big cigar and
walk home to pay for it."
Incredible as it may sound, that was the beginning of a real friendship
between the three of us. Jarvis seemed to take a positive pleasure in
being democratic. And he was wonderfully thoughtful, too. He realized
instinctively that we had about nine cents apiece in our clothes as a
rule, and he didn't offer to be gorgeous and buy things we couldn't buy
back. We got to dropping in at the café once a week or so and eating at
the same table with him. Why on earth he fancied eating around with
grubs like us, when he could have been tucking away classy fare up on
Fifth Avenue, we couldn't imagine. Some people are naturally Bohemian,
however. It seemed to delight Jarvis to hear us tell about our team, and
our college, and our prospects, and how lucky we had been up to date,
not getting stepped on by any financial magnate or other tall city
monument. He wasn't a talkative man himself. It was especially hard to
pry any football talk out of him, probably because he was so modest.
When we insisted he would finally open up, and tell us the inside facts
about some great college game that we knew by heart from the newspaper
accounts. And he would mention all the famous players by their first
names--you can't imagine how much more alarming it sounded than calling
a president "Teddy"--and we would just sit there and drink it in, and
watch history from behind the scenes until suddenly he would stop, look
absent and shut up like a clam. No use trying to turn him on again.
Presently he would bid us good night and go away. The first time we
thought we had offended him and we were miserable for a week. But when
we ran across him again he seemed as pleased as ever to see us. It was
just moods, after all, we finally decided, and thought no more about
it. Great men have a right to have moods if they want to. We admired his
moods as much as the rest of him, and were only glad they weren't
violent.
It was a couple of months before we got up courage enough to ask him to
drop in at our room. Even Allie got timid. He explained that he didn't
want to break the spell. But finally I braced up myself and invited him
to drop around with us, and he consented as kindly as you please. Came
right up to our little three by twice and wouldn't even sit in the one
chair. Sat on the bed and looked over our college pictures, and chatted
until Allie asked him if he was going back for the big game that fall.
Then he said sort of abruptly that he couldn't get away, and a few
minutes afterward he went home. We thought we'd offended him again, but
a week afterward he turned up and called on us--we'd asked him to drop
in any time. We decided that he didn't like to have too much familiarity
about his football career and we respected him for it. It's all right
for a man like that to be affable and democratic, but he mustn't let you
crawl all over him. He's got his dignity to maintain.
As the winter came on Jarvis dropped up to see us quite frequently. He
never asked us to come and see him and we were really a little
grateful--for I don't believe I should have had the nerve to go bouncing
into the apartments of a national hero and hobnob with the mile-a-minute
class. Anyway we didn't expect it or dream of it. And we didn't ask him
any more questions about himself. We didn't care to try to elbow into
his circle. If he chose to come slumming and sit around with us, we were
more than content. We had seen enough of him already to keep us busy
paralyzing Siwash fellows for a week when we went back to Commencement.
"Jarvis? Oh, yes. Fact is, he's a friend of ours. Comes up to our rooms
right along. We happened to meet him in a café. And say, he tells us
that when he made that fifty-yard run--and so on." We used to practise
saying things like this naturally and easily. We could just see the
undergrads at the frat house sitting around in circles and lapping it
up.
All this time we were plugging away down at the plant, early and late,
with every ounce of steam we had. There's one good thing about business
in this Bedlam--when you break in you keep right on going. By the time
Commencement rolled around we were getting checks with two figures on
them, and had a better job treed and ready to drop. Ask for a vacation?
Why, we wouldn't have asked for four days off to go home and help bury
our worst enemy. That's what business does to the dear old college days
when it gets a good bite at them. There we were, one year out of Siwash,
breaking forty-five reunion dates, and never even sitting around with
our heads in our hands over it. This business bug is a bad, bad biter
all right. Just let it get its tooth into you, and what do you care if
some other fellow is smoking your two-quart pipe back in the old chapter
house? And for that matter, what do you care about anything else until
you get up far enough to take breath and look around? Sometimes, after a
couple of weeks of extra hard work, I've taken my mind off invoices long
enough to wag it around a bit and I've felt like a swimmer coming up
after a long dive.
We landed those promotions in July and went right after another pair. I
got mine in August--Allie in September. And along in December they
called us both up in the office, where the big crash was. He said nice
things to us about getting a chance to fire our own chauffeurs if we
kept on tending to business, and first thing we knew we had offices of
our own in the back of the building, with our names painted on the
doors, and call-bells that brought stenographers and the same old brand
of office boys that used to blow us out of the other offices along with
their cigarette smoke. And we realized then that if we worked like
thunder for thirty years more and saved our money and made it earn one
hundred per cent, perhaps some of the real business kings would notice
us on the street some day. That's about the way the college swelling
goes down.
All this time we hadn't seen much of Jarvis. He'd stopped coming to the
café and we'd really been so busy that we almost forgot about him. It's
simply wonderful the things business will drive out of your mind. It
wasn't until late in the winter that we realized that we'd probably lost
track of Jarvis for good--that is, until we climbed up into his set and
discovered him at some dinner that was a page out of the social
register. We mixed around a lot more now. We went to the
million-candle-power restaurants every now and then, and ate a good deal
more than sixty-five cents' worth apiece without batting an eye; and we
went to see a play occasionally and didn't climb up into the rarefied
atmosphere to find our seats, either. And whenever we broke in with the
limousine crowd we kept a bright lookout for Jarvis. We wanted to see
him and show him that we were coming along. We wanted him to be proud of
us. I'd have given all my small bank balance to hear him say: "Fine
work, old man; keep it up." I'll tell you when a big chap like that
takes an interest in you, it's just as bracing as a hypodermic of
ginger. Baccalaureates and inspirational editorials can't touch it.
I was holding down the proud position of shipping clerk and Allie was my
assistant the next spring, and it seemed as if we had to empty that
warehouse every twenty-four hours and find the men to load the stuff
with search-warrants. Help was scandalously scarce. We couldn't have
worked harder if we had been standing off grizzly bears with brickbats.
I'd just fired the fourth loafer in one day for trying to roll barrels
by mental suggestion, when the boss came into my office.
"Can you use an extra man?" he asked me.
"Use him?" says I, swabbing off my forehead--I'd been hustling a few
barrels myself. "Use him? Say, I'll give him a whole car to load all by
himself, and if he can get the job finished by yesterday he can have
another to load for to-day."
"Now, see here," said the boss, sitting down; "this is a peculiar case.
This chap's been at me for a job for months. There's nothing in the
office. He's a fine fellow and well educated, but he's on his uppers. He
can't seem to land anywhere. I'm sorry for him. He looks as if he was
headed for the bread line. He's too good to roll barrels, but it won't
hurt him. If you'll take him in and use him I'll give him a place as
soon as I get it; let me know how he pans out."
"Just ask him to run all the way here," I said, and put my nose down in
a bill of lading. After a while the door opened and some one said, "Is
this the shipping clerk?" It was the ghost of a voice I used to know and
I turned around in a hurry. It was Jarvis.
I don't suppose it is strictly business to cry while you are shaking
hands with a husky you're just putting into harness at one-fifty per. I
didn't intend to do it, but somehow when your whole conception of fame
and glory comes clattering down about your ears, and you find you've got
to order your star and idol to get a hustle on him and load the car at
door four damquick, you are likely to do something foolish. I just
stood and sniveled and let my mouth hang open. Neither of us said a
word, but presently I put my arm around his shoulders and led him out
into the shipping room. "There's the foreman," I said, in a voice like a
wet sponge. "And you report here at six o'clock sharp." Then I went and
hunted up Allie and for once we let business go hang in business hours.
We couldn't work. We kept clawing for the solid ground and trying to
readjust society and the universe and the beacon lights of progress all
afternoon.
When quitting time came we waited for Jarvis. We didn't say anything,
but we loaded him into a cab and took him up to the old café. Then he
told us his story, while we learned a lot of things about glory we
hadn't even vaguely suspected before. He was one of the greatest
football players who ever carried a ball, Jarvis was. Of that there was
no doubt. He admitted it himself then. I might say he confessed it. He'd
come to his university without any real preparation--you know even in
the best regulated institutions of learning they sometimes get your
marks on tackling mixed with your grades on entrance algebra. He'd spent
two hours a day on football and the rest of his time being a college
hero. He'd had to work at it like a dog, he said. How he got by the
exams, he never knew. It seemed to him as if he must have studied in his
sleep. By the time he graduated he'd had about every honor that has been
invented for campus consumption. He belonged to the exclusive
societies. All kinds of big people had shaken hands with him--asked for
the privilege. He had a scrapbook of newspaper stories about his career
that weighed four pounds. He knew the differences between eight kinds of
wine by the taste and he had a perfect education in forkology,
waltzology, necktiematics, and all the other branches of social science.
He would never forget, he said, how he felt when he was graduated and
the university moved off behind him and left him alone. It was up to him
to keep on being a famous character, he felt. His college demanded it.
He had to make good. But there he was with a magnificent football
education and no more football to play. His financial training consisted
in knowing when his bank account was overdrawn. His folks had pretty
nearly paralyzed themselves putting him through and he wasn't going to
draw on them any further. He went to New York because it seemed to be
almost as big as the university, and he started all alone on the job of
shouldering his way past the captains of finance up to the place where
his college mates might feel proud of him some more.
The result was so ridiculous that he had to laugh at it himself. He lost
five yards every time he bucked an office boy. His college friends kept
inviting him out and he went until they began offering him help. Then he
cut the whole bunch. He didn't care to have them watch the struggle.
He'd been in New York two years when he met us, he said, and he hadn't
earned enough money to pay his room-rent in that time. There were times
when he might have got a decent little job at twelve dollars per, or so,
but he would have had to meet the boys who had looked up to him as a
world-beater and somehow he just couldn't tackle it. When we had come
over and paid homage to him he saw we had taken him for a successful man
of the world, as well as a member of the All-America team, and he hadn't
been able to resist the desire to let two human beings look up to him
again. He hadn't invited us to his room, he said, because part of the
time he didn't have a room; and he even confessed that once or twice
he'd walked up to our rooms from downtown because he was crazy for a
smoke and didn't have the price.
I guess there never was a more peculiar dinner party in New York. Part
of the time I sniveled and part of the time Allie sniveled, and once or
twice we were all three all balled up in our throats. But after a while
we braced up and I told Jarvis what the Boss had told me, and we drank a
toast to the glad new days, and another to success, and another to
Jarvis, the coming business pillar, and some more to our private yachts
and country homes, and to Commencement reunions, and this and that. Then
we chartered a sea-going cab and took Jarvis home with us. We made him
sleep in the bed while we slept on the floor, and the next morning we
loaned him a pair of overalls that we had honorably retired and we all
went down to work together.
The next three months were perfectly ridiculous. We simply couldn't
order Jarvis around. Suppose you had to ask the Statue of Liberty to get
a move on and scrub the floors? We couldn't get our ingrained awe of
that freight hustler out of our systems. Of course when any one was
around we had to keep up appearances, but when I was alone and I had
something for Jarvis to do I'd call him in and get at it about this way:
"Er--say, Jarvis, could you help me out on a little matter, if you have
the time? You know there's a shipment for Pittsburgh that's got to go
out by noon. I think the car is at door 6. Those barrels ought to be put
into the car right away, and if you'd see that they get in there I'd be
very much obliged to you. I'd attend to it myself, but they've given me
a lot of stuff to go over here."
Then Jarvis would grin cheerfully and hustle those barrels in before I
could get over blushing. If you don't believe football has its
advantages in after life you ought to watch a prize tackle waltzing a
three-hundred-pound barrel through a car door.
By day we ordered Jarvis about in this fashion, and made him earn his
one-fifty with the rest of the red-shirted gang. But at six o'clock we
dropped all that like a hot poker. Nights we were his adoring young
friends again. We sat together in restaurants and said "sir" to him to
his infinite disgust, and made him tell over and over again the stories
of the big games and the grand doings of the old days. When his
promotion came, three months later, and he went into a small job in the
office, with a traveling job looming up in the offing, we held a
celebration that set us back about half the price of a railroad ticket
home. It meant more to us than it did to him. To him it was three
dollars more a week, congenial work and a chance. But to us it was the
release of a great man from grinding captivity--a racehorse rescued from
the shafts of a garbage cart; a Richard the Lion-hearted hauled from the
gloomy dungeon, where he had had to peel his own potatoes, and set on
the road to kingly pomp and circumstance again. Excuse me for this
frightful mess of language. I can't help getting a little squashy with
my adjectives when I think of that glorious banquet night.
I'm glad to say that Jarvis kept coming along after that. He developed
into a first-class salesman, and in a couple of years he came in from
the road and took a desk in the house with his name on the side in gilt
letters. When this happened we made him look up every one of his old
college friends again. He hesitated a little, but we got behind him and
pushed. We pushed him into his college club and back to Commencement,
and we really pushed him out of our life--for every one was glad to see
him, of course, and to his amazement he found that he was still a grand
old college institution among the alumni. So he trained with his own
crowd after that, but even now we go over to his club and dine with him
at least once a year--always on some anniversary or other. And for the
last two years he has been sending his machine around for us.
Oh, no, you don't! I'm paying for this lunch, young fellow. Don't fight
any one about paying for your lunch just because you still have the
price. It's a privilege we older chaps insist on with you newcomers
anyway. And remember, there is always a bunch of us before the fire at
the club Saturday evenings, and we don't talk business. While you're
waiting for that job, don't you dare miss a meeting. And say--one thing
more. Don't be afraid of those blamed office boys. They're all a bluff.
I'm getting so I can fire them without even getting pale.
TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES
Minor changes have been made to make punctuation and spelling
consistent; every other effort has been made to remain true to the
original book.