At the Kennedy steps The Roman was waiting for him. Stover shook hands
or, rather, allowed The Roman to pump him, as was the custom.
"Why, dear me--dear me--this is actually Stover!" said The Roman.
"Well, well! How you have grown--shouldn't have known you. Had a
pleasant vacation? Yes? Glad to have you in the Kennedy. It's a good
House--good boys--manly, self-reliant, purposeful. You'll like 'em."
The Roman released Stover's hand, which had grown limp in the process,
and said with a twinkle to his quick little eyes:
"Don't put too much ginger into them, Stover."
This remark confirmed Stover's darkest suspicions.
"I'll scatter a little ginger around all right," he said under his
breath, as he climbed the stairs to his room. "He thinks he has the
laugh on me, does he? Well, we'll see who laughs last!"
On the third floor the Tennessee Shad and Dennis de Brian de Boru
Finnegan, from their respective trunks, were volubly debating the
merits of Finnegan's victory--the Tennessee Shad claiming that the
external application of cream puffs was equivalent to doping and
invalidated the result.
"Hello!" said Dink.
"Why, it's my honorable roommate," said the Tennessee Shad, emerging
with a load of flannels.
"It's the Dink himself," said Dennis, gamboling up. "Welcome to our
city!"
"I hear I'm rooming with you," said Stover, shaking hands with the
Shad.
"You certainly are, my bounding boy."
"Where's the room?"
"Straight ahead, turret room, finest on the campus, swept by ocean
breezes and all that sort of thing."
"Why, Dink," said Dennis de Brian de Boru in affectionate octaves,
"you old, slab-sided, knock-kneed, baby-cheeked, wall-eyed, battling
Dink. You've grown ee-normously."
"How's your muscle?" said the Tennessee Shad, with an ulterior motive.
"Feel it," said Stover, who had consecrated the summer to the same.
"Hard as a goat," said Dennis after an admiring whistle. "All nice
little cast-iron, jerky bunches, ready and willing. Been in training,
Dink?"
"Yes, just so."
"Feels sort of soft to me," said the Tennessee Shad pensively.
"Oh, it does?"
"Question: what can you do with it? Lift a trunk as heavy as this?"
"Huh!" said Stover, bending down. "Where do you want it?"
"Gee! I do believe he can carry it almost to the room," said the
Tennessee Shad, whose theory of life was to admire others do his work
for him.
Stover bore it proudly on his shoulders and set it down. Dennis,
planting himself arms akimbo, surveyed him with melancholy
disapproval.
"Too bad, Dink! I had expected better things from you. You're still
green, Dink. Been too much with the cows and chickens. Don't do it;
don't do it!"
Stover glanced at the Tennessee Shad, who, satisfied, had curled
himself up on the bed, to rest himself after the exertion of walking.
"I guess I am still a sucker," he said, scratching his head with a
foolish grin, "I'll not be so easy next time."
"Never mind, Dink," said Dennis comfortingly. "Your education's been
neglected, but I'm here. Remember that, Dennis is here, ready and
willing."
Presently the Gutter Pup and Lovely Mead came tumbling in, and then
the lumbering proportions of P. Lentz, King of the Kennedy, crowded
through the doorway, and the conversation continued in rapid
crossfire.
"Who's seen the Waladoo Bird?"
"Jock Hasbrouck's dropped into the third form."
"What do you think of the electric lights they've given us?"
"They've stuck an arc light in the Circle, too."
"We'll fix that."
"How's the new material, King?"
"Rotten!"
"Think we've a chance for the House championship?"
"A fine chance--to finish last."
"Say, who do you think they've stuck us with?"
"Who?"
"Beekstein."
"Suffering Moses!"
"Never mind. We've got the Dink."
"What's he do?"
"He's the champion truckman--carry your trunk for you anywhere you
want."
Dink, thus brought unwillingly into the conversation, blushed a warm
red.
"Truckman?" said P. Lentz, mystified.
"Champion," said Finnegan. "The mysterious champion truckman of Broad
Street Station, Philadelphia. Stand up, Dink, my man, and twitch your
muscles."
Stover squirmed uneasily on his chair. There was no malice in the
teasing, and yet he was at a loss how to turn it.
The Gutter Pup, as president of the Sporting Club and chief authority
on the life and works of the late Marquis of Queensberry, examined the
embarrassed Stover, running professional fingers over his legs and
arms.
"You're the fellow who tried to fight the whole Green House, aren't
you?" he said, immensely interested.
"Why, yes."
"Good nerve," said the Gutter Pup. "You've got something the style of
Beans Middleton, who stood up to me for ten rounds in the days of the
old Seventy-second Street gang. I'll train you up some time. You'd do
well with the crouching style--good reach, quick on the trigger and
all that sort of thing. Like fighting?"
"Why, I--I don't know," said Stover helplessly, unable to make out
whether the Gutter Pup spoke in jest.
"Modest and brave!" said the irrepressible Finnegan.
The conversation drifted away; Stover, with a sigh of relief,
obliterated himself in a corner, feeling immense distances between
himself and the laughing group that continued to exchange rapid
banter.
"Dennis, they tell me you're fresher than ever."
"Sir, you compliment me."
"Say, Boru, have they put you on the bottle yet?"
"Not yet, Lovely. Waiting for you to drop it."
It was not particularly brilliant, but it was good-natured, and there
was a certain trick to it that he had lost in the long weeks of
Coventry.
Presently the group departed to take the keen edge off the approaching
luncheon pangs by a trip to the Jigger Shop, the center of social
life.
"Coming, Dink?" said the Gutter Pup.
"I--I'll be over a little later," said Stover, who did and did not
want to go.
Left alone, half angry at his own enforced aloofness, and yet desiring
solitude, Stover stood among the litter of boxes and gaping trunks and
surveyed the four bare walls that spelled for him the word home.
"It's a bully room--bully," he said to himself with a tender feeling
of possession. "The Shad's a bully fellow--bully! Dennis is a corker!
I'm going to make good; see if I don't! But I'm going slow. They've
got to come to me. I won't break in until they want me. Gee! What a
peach of a room!"
He went to the window and looked out at the whole panorama of the
school that ran beneath him, from the long, rakish lines of the Upper,
by Memorial Hall, to the chapel and the circle of Houses that ended at
the rear with the Dickinson. Below, boys were streaking across the
green depths like water-bugs over limpid surfaces, or hallooing
joyfully from window to terrace, greeting one another with bearlike
hugs, tumbling about in frolicking heaps. He was on the mountain, they
on the plain. His was the imaginative perspective and the troubled
vision of one who finds a strange city at his feet.
"It's all there," he said lamely, confused by his own impressions.
"All of it."
"Homesick?" said a thin voice behind him.
He turned to find Finnegan eyeing him uncertainly.
"Why, you wild Irishman," Dink said, surprised. "Thought you'd gone
with the crowd. Hello, what's up now?"
Finnegan, with an air of great mystery, locked the door, extracted the
key and, returning, enthroned himself on a chair which he had
previously planted defiantly on a trunk.
"That's so you can't throw me out."
"Well?"
"I'm going to be fresh as paint."
"You are?" said Stover, mystified and amused.
"Fact," said Finnegan, who, having crossed his legs, plunged his hands
into his pockets and cocked one eye, said impressively: "Dink, you're
wrong."
"I am--am I?"
"But never mind; I'm here. Dennis de Brian de Boru Finnegan--ready and
willing."
"Irishman, I do believe you're embarrassed," said Stover, surprised.
"I'm not," said Finnegan indignantly. "Only--only, I want to be
impressive. Dink, you're getting in wrong again."
"What in thunder----"
"You are, Dink, you are. But don't worry; I'm here. In the first
place, you can't forget what every one else has forgotten."
"Forget what?"
"The late unpleasantness," said Finnegan, with an expelling wave of
his hand. "That's over, spiked, dished, set back, covered up,
cobwebbed, no flowers and no tombstone."
"I know."
"No, you don't--that's just it. You've got it on your mind--brooding
and all that sort of thing."
Stover sat down and stared at the Lilliputian philosopher.
"Well, I like your nerve!"
"Don't--don't start in like that," said Finnegan, rolling up his
sleeves over his funny, thin forearms, "cause I shall have to thrash
you."
"Well, go on," said Stover suddenly.
"You're not in Coventry--you never have been. You're one of us," said
Dennis glibly. "BUT--I repeat BUT--you can't be one of us if you don't
believe in your own noddle that you are one of us! Get that? That's
deep--no charge, always glad to oblige a customer."
"Keep on," said Stover, leaning back.
"With your kind permission, directly. It's all in this--you haven't
got the trick."
"The trick?"
"The trick of conversation. That's not just it. The trick of answering
back. Aha, that's better! Scratch out first sentiment. Change
signals!"
"There's something in that," said Stover, genuinely amazed.
"You blush."
"What?"
"The word was blush," said Finnegan firmly. "I saw you--Finnegan saw
you and grieved. And why? Because you didn't have the trick of
answering back."
"Dennis de Brian de Boru Finnegan," said Stover slowly, "I believe
you are a whole-hearted little cuss. Also, you're not so far off,
either. Now, since this is a serious conversation, this is where I
stand: I went through Hades last spring--I deserved it and it's done
me good. I've come back to make good. Savez? And that's a serious
thing, too. Now if you have one particular theory about your art of
conversation to elucidate--eluce."
"One theory!" said Finnegan, chirping along as he perceived the
danger-point passed. "I'm a theorist, and a real theorist doesn't have
one theory; he has dozens. Let me see; let me think, reflect,
cogitate, tickle the thinker. Best way is to start at the A, B,
C--first principles, all that sort of thing. Supposin', supposin' you
come into the room with that hat on--it's a bum hat, by the way--and
some one pipes up; 'Get that at the fire sale?' What are you going to
answer?"
"Why, I suppose I'd grin," said Stover slowly, "and say: 'How did you
guess it?'"
"Wrong," said Finnegan. "You let him take the laugh."
"Well, what?"
"Something in this style: 'Oh, no, I traded it for luck with a
squint-eyed, humpbacked biter-off of puppy-dog tails that got it out
of Rockefeller's ashcan.' See?"
"No, Dennis, no," said Stover, bewildered. "I see, but there are some
things beyond me. Every one isn't a young Shakspere."
"I know," said Finnegan, accepting the tribute without hesitation.
"But there's the principle. You go him one better. You make him look
like a chump. You show him what you could have said in his place. That
shuts him up, makes him feel foolish, spikes the gun, corks the
bottle."
"By Jove!"
"It's what I call the Superiority of the Superlative over the
Comparative."
"It sounds simple," said Stover pensively.
"When you know the trick."
"You know, Dennis," said Stover, smiling reminiscently, "I used to
have the gift of gab once, almost up to you."
"Then let's take a few crouching starts," said Dennis, delighted.
"Go ahead."
"Room full of fellows. You enter."
"I enter."
"I speak: 'Dink, I bet Bill here a quarter that you used a
toothbrush.'"
"You lose," said Stover; "I use a whisk-broom."
"Good!" said Dennis professionally, "but a little quicker, on the
jump, get on the spring-board. Try again. 'Why, Dink, how _do_ you
get such pink cheeks?'"
"That's a hard one," said Dink.
"Peanuts!"
"Let me think."
"Bad, very bad."
"Well, what would you say?"
"Can't help it, Bill; the girls won't let me alone!"
"Try me again," said Stover, laughing.
"Say, Dink, did your mamma kiss you good-by?"
"Sure, Mike," said Stover instantly; "combed my hair, dusted my hands,
and told me not to talk to fresh little kids like you."
"Why, Dink, come to my arms," said Dennis, delighted. "A Number 1.
Mark 100 for the term. That's the trick."
"Think I'll do?"
"Sure pop. Of course, there are times when the digestion's jumping
fences and you get sort of in the thunder glums. Then just answer, 'Is
that the best you can do to-day?' or 'Why, you're a real funny man,
aren't you?' sarcastic and sassy."
"I see."
"But better be original."
"Of course."
"Oh, it's all a knack."
"And to think that's all there is to it!" said Stover, profoundly
moved.
"When you know," said Dennis in correction.
"Dennis, I have a thought," said Stover suddenly. "Let's get out and
try the system."
"Presto!"
"The Jigger Shop?"
"Why tarry?"
On the way over Dink stopped short with an exclamation.
"What now?" said Finnegan.
"Tough McCarty and a female," said Stover in great indignation.
They stood aside, awkwardly snatching off their caps as McCarty and
his companion passed them on the walk. Stover saw a bit of blue felt
with the white splash of a wing across, a fluffy shirtwaist, and a
skirt that was a skirt, and nothing else. His glance went to McCarty,
meeting it with the old, measuring antagonism. They passed.
"Damn him!" said Stover.
"Why, Dink, how shocking!"
"He's grown!"
In the joy of his own increased stature he had never dreamed that like
processes of Nature produce like results.
"Ten pounds heavier," said Dennis. "He ought to make a peach of a
tackle this year!"
"Bringing girls around!" said Stover scornfully, to vent his rage.
"More to be pitied than blamed," sang Dennis on a popular air. "It's
his sister. Luscious eyes--quite the figure, too."
"Figure--huh!" said Stover, who hadn't seen.
At the Jigger Shop the Gutter Pup, looking up from a meringue entirely
surrounded by peach jiggers, hailed them:
"Hello, Rinky Dink! Changed your mind, eh? Thought you were homesick."
"Sure I was, but Dennis came in with a bucket and caught the tears,"
said Stover gravely. "I'll call you in next time. Al, how be you?
Here's what I owe you. Set 'em up."
"_Tres bien_!" said Dennis de Brian de Boru Finnegan.
That night, as they started on the problem of interior decorations,
Stover threw himself on the bed, rolling with laughter.
"Well, I'm glad you've decided to be cheerful; but what in blazes are
you hee-hawing at?" said the Tennessee Shad, mystified.
"I'm laughing," said Stover, loud enough for Dennis down the hall to
hear, "at the Superiority of the Superlative over the Comparative."