happiness to you because you are giving him all this with your own
hands. Frank said to me he dared not ask it of you--he thought the
sacrifice too great--and that is why I came to you with my offer. Do not
think me rude, therefore."
He answered gravely. I was not rude, he assured me, and he owed me deep
thanks. He had only one favor to ask; that I should not tell Frank the
secret, but would leave it and the joy that it would bring, for him, his
father. He would tell him immediately after Frank had returned home from
his stay at my apartment.
I hurried home, for it was now nearly suppertime. To my amazement I
found Frank sitting in the lobby of the apartment, his old suitcase
beside him, his look one of fevered disconsolement.
"What's the trouble?" I asked him.
"Oh, I just wanted to say goodby to you," he said hurriedly. "I did not
want to go without doing that. I've--I've had a pleasant time."
"But why are you going?"
"Oh, I want to be home ... you know, I get a little homesick." But he
said it so stumblingly that I was sure he was not telling me all.
"Frank," I demanded, "tell me the truth. Has anything gone wrong? I had
hoped you would stay until my aunt returned."
He laughed at that, and mystified me the more. "Have any of the servants
offended you in any way?" I asked, searching my brain for some reason
for his change of attitude.
"The servants? Oh, no, of course not!" He picked up his suitcase and
started for the street. "Well, goodby," he said. He stopped as if he
wanted to explain, then thought better--or worse--of it, and went on. I
was a little nettled by this time, and let him go.
As I went up in the elevator, it seemed to me a mighty mystery. But no
sooner had I let myself into the apartment than I was due for a bigger
surprise.
For there, blocking the hallway, a figure of offended pride, stood Aunt
Selina.
I went to her to kiss her, but she stepped back and glared into my face.
"It's a lucky thing I came back unexpectedly," she said. "The idea of
finding a little Jew boy like that in my room--sitting in my own bedroom
with his copy books spread all over my directoire desk! A common little
boy with an accent!"
I saw it all, now.
"That boy was one of my best friends," I told her as calmly as I could.
"Had I thought you would have objected to his presence here, I would
never have invited him to stay with me for these weeks."
"Weeks? What, you have had that little East Side creature here for
weeks?" She began to walk up and down the hall in feline fury. "Haven't
you any idea of what is proper? Here I go away with some of the most
cultured and well-known society people in New York--an absolute
triumph--and you use my home as a refuge for nasty little scum of the
slums. It isn't bad enough for you to spend your summer in such
disgusting company. You have to cap it all by bringing them up into my
own home. Think of the disgrace it would mean if any of these new
friends of mine were to discover it!"
"I have my own friends to consider," I told her patiently. "And this boy
is one of them. What did you tell him?"
"Tell him? What should I tell him?" She made a great show of shuddering.
"I told him to get out. To--to get out as fast as he could."
I looked at her evenly for as long a while as she could stand it. Then
her miserable pose gave way to pettishness, and she cried:
"And what's more, you'll have to get out yourself, if you insist on
trying any more of these outrageous things. I can't bear it, that's
all. You'll have to get out before you disgrace me!"
"I shall," I agreed, and, passing her, went into my own room and began
to pack.
We had a silent, sullen supper. At the end of it I told her that my
clothes were packed and that I intended moving on the morrow to
Trevelyan's empty suite, up at college. I would take none of the
furniture from my room, however, since I did not wish to inconvenience
her. I would not trouble her at all after tonight.
She may have thought this was pure bragging, she may have been
reconciled to it. At any rate she made no answer, and let me go to my
room without a word of comment.
And it was only two weeks later, when I was comfortably settled in my
room on the campus, that I received a stormy letter from her, calling me
a "most ungrateful monster of a nephew."
XV
COLLEGE LIFE
Across the hall from Trevelyan's rooms lived one of the college
"grinds." Now that I had moved there and came and went at all hours of
the day, I saw this man often.
Fallon--that was his name--stood fully six-feet four, and had about a
thirty-two-inch waist. He stooped until his thin shoulder blades were at
directly right angles to each other. He would never talk to any one he
met on his way; his nose was always deep in the book which he held
outspread. He was the most ferocious grind I have ever known.
Next to Fallon lived Waters, a cheery, well-dressed little person, who
had pink cheeks and no disturbing thoughts. Waters was a member of one
of the minor fraternities; he spoke longingly of the day when he would
be living in his "chapter lodge." Waters was easy company. He had four
hundred "friends" around the campus, and when I met him was engaged in
capitalizing on those friendships by canvassing votes for his election
to a team managership.
That perhaps is why he came into my room so often to sit and chat
pleasantly, lightly, about almost every topic known to the college man.
He was very much of a type. There were at least thirty other men in that
class who were like him, no better nor worse, nor more nor less
attractive than he was. Popularity was an end and a means with him. It
was all he wanted of college.
"Well, how are you, old top?" was the greeting that came singing from
his room, each time I passed its open door. It was a door perennially
open, lest some passerby might escape without the greeting.
"D'you know, old chap," he'd say, sweeping into my room in the midst of
a study-hour and slumping down upon the divan with a great show of silk
socks and shirtings, "it's high time you and I did something for that
'grind' across the hall."
He was tremendously interested in Fallon, it would appear. Not
personally, he explained to me--but just because Fallon might become a
valuable friend in time. A college man needed friends--and he, Waters,
had only four hundred of them!
Fallon, however, had something of his own opinion about it. He went
about the building with his book before him, bowing neither to me nor
Waters nor any one else. It was dreadful to have to speak to him. He
could scarcely answer; his big Adam's-apple would go juggling painfully
up and down, and finally he would succeed in emitting a barely audible
whisper. He would blush, stammer, clap his mouth shut, then hurry away.
That was Fallon, worst of "grinds." He was beginning to be the butt of
all sorts of miserable jokes. Even the freshmen over-stepped the line to
make fun of him. For, like Waters and myself, he was a sophomore.
In the guise of helping a classmate, Waters took charge of him. He gave
him nightly lectures in cordiality, in self-confidence, in the bettering
of one's appearance. Once, when I chanced to go by, I heard him
delivering glib advice upon what "Fallon, old top" ought to eat, in
order that he might grow stouter and more favorable to look upon. And
Fallon sat through it all and clutched his bony knees and grinned the
grin of the helpless.
But one day, the story goes, he surprised Waters by finding his
voice--and a very full-toned, convincing voice it proved to be, not at
all like his usual whisper. And he told Waters to keep out of his room
in study hour; he told him that he did not care to have his chances of
becoming class valedictorian spoiled through having to divert his
attention and listen to such superficial tommy-rot. And he told him to
keep himself away, now and forever more, from his room and its owner.
"Oh, very well!" I heard the injured Waters say. A second later he had
come across into my room and was pouring into my ear a complaint
concerning the beggarly rudeness of that "grind, Fallon, who never would
amount to anything in the college world, anyhow!"
He had just returned from a very important meeting, he told me, for the
express purpose of having that heart-to-heart talk with Fallon--and the
big, uncouth beggar didn't appreciate it at all. No wonder some fellows
never did get along in college--and here he was, absent from this most
important meeting, with no results at all.
He didn't mind telling me--(here his voice died down into an impressive
whisper)--that it was from a fraternity meeting he had come. They were
great things, these fraternity meetings. It was really too bad that I
had never been able to join a fraternity--but then, of course, I must
realize that fraternities had to draw the line somewhere! Now, I mustn't
take that as a reflection on me personally--because it wasn't. I was all
right, I was--and some day, he was sure, I was going to be a big man in
the college world--bigger than he himself ever hoped to be. But Jews
were a funny people--and I must admit, if I wanted to be fair, that some
of them weren't fit to come to college at all, not to speak of joining
fraternities.
And so he went on, until, thoroughly nauseated by the bland niceness of
his speech, I followed Fallon's example and threw him out, though he
refused to be insulted at this move, and promised to come around the
next night and discuss the question of who should be elected our next
football manager.
A little while after he was gone, Fallon came across the hall and
knocked at my door. It was a timid, scared sort of a knock, and it
needed a loud and repeated, "Come in," before he finally obeyed my
summons.
He was pitifully wrought up over the incident. He had wanted to be
polite to Waters, but he had had to study. He hadn't wanted to insult
him, but somehow Waters never did understand how valuable time was, and
what it would mean to Fallon's mother if he could come out a
valedictorian at the end of our four years.
"Which would you rather have," I asked him, "a valedictory or a friend?"
He stammered a good deal over it. He knew that Waters was right about
that: he did not have a single friend in the whole college--didn't know
how to go about it--but he didn't want such men as Waters trying to
teach him the way either.
That began my friendship for Fallon. I had acquaintances enough on the
campus, but I was almost as friendless as he--for friendlessness, I
think, is not so much a matter of other people's as of one's own habit
of mind. And there was something so grotesquely miserable about his
loneliness--something so like a grinning gargoyle, solitary in its
elevation--that I was drawn to him without much conscious effort.
I began by taking him for long walks. It was the first exercise of any
sort, outside of the required freshman gymnasium course, which he had
had in college. At first he would not talk at all; would just walk
beside me through the city's fringes into the half-suburban roads, his
eyes drinking in the green vistas as if they were astounding novelties,
his breath coming fast with exertion, his cheeks glowing with new color.
Gradually I urged him into talking--and, like all beginners, he talked
of himself entirely. It was good for him. The more he spoke of himself,
the more highly he thought of himself. He needed pride.
I had already been elected an editor of the college joke paper. I was
qualified, therefore, to persuade Fallon to contribute what he could to
that periodical. But he had not a jot of humor, and his contributions
turned out to be very long and serious bits of verse in studied French
rhyme schemes. I did not even risk reading them at a meeting of the
board, but always turned them over to Trevelyan who could have them used
in the coming issue of the other magazine, the literary monthly. This
set Fallon writing entirely for the "lit," as we called it--and, as a
result, when the elections to that paper were announced in the middle of
the sophomore year, Fallon's name and mine stood together.
But the happiest inspiration came to me one Sunday when at noon Fallon
and I were resting atop the Palisades, whither we had gone upon an
all-day tramp. I watched him pick up a flat rock and sent it sailing out
and down through space. His long thin arm gave the toss a surprising
power.
I asked him, had he ever seen a discus. He said, "No."
The next day I had overcome all his scruples as to the immodesty of a
track costume and had led him out upon the field to practice with the
discus. It was hard work, because he was by far the clumsiest man I have
ever known. Later on I interested the old coach on his behalf. Before
Thanksgiving Fallon gave promise of becoming one of the college's best
discus throwers.
When winter began, I took him down to the gymnasium. At first I had in
mind only to keep him in good condition; but his handling of the heavy
medicine ball gave me another idea. I put him to work with a
basketball--and here the training I had given the young boys at the
settlement served me in good stead. He was so tall, he need only swing
up his arms to drop the ball into the basket. He was the ideal build for
a "center," and our 'varsity team needed a center.
He did not make the 'varsity--not that year, anyhow. But he did make our
class team, and won his numerals.
Also when spring came in, he was chosen as one of the track team's
discus throwers. Add to this the fact that he had lately been elected to
the board of the literary monthly, and it will be seen that Fallon had
had a skyrocket rise. No wonder that Waters, the genial, now forgot that
autumn affront and paid nightly visits upon his particular friend
Fallon. And Fallon, of course, having had his attention diverted into so
many foreign channels, no longer cared so singularly for his studies,
but was willing to receive Waters and such as Waters with an
ever-increasing cordiality.
The inevitable happened. Fallon, exhibiting his latest development--a
full-sized, roistering swagger--came into my room one evening and told
me jubilantly that he was pledged to join Waters' fraternity.
"It's not the best in college," he admitted loftily, "but it'll tone up
a bit when I get the track captaincy and Waters gets elected to a
managership."
"And how about that senior year valedictory?" I asked him.
"Oh, I was a fool in those days, wasn't I?"
He mistook my silence. "Say, old chap," he went on, "this is no time for
you to be jealous of me. I know well enough, you ought to be in a
fraternity--in the very best one. I wish I could get you into ours--but,
say, you know how it is about Jews."
Yes, I knew, I assured him, and gave him the heartiest hand-clasp I
could manage.
"You know, my mother's going to be awfully proud of this," he exclaimed
huskily.
But though Waters did succeed in winning himself a team managership,
Fallon never became the captain of the track team. For his election to
that fraternity meant his ruin. He lost his grip upon everything.
Perhaps it was his fellow-members, perhaps he had only himself to blame.
He began to drink. At the end of junior year he was expelled from
college.
And I wondered if the mother, who had wanted him to be the class
valedictorian, was as proud of him as ever.
XVI
THE HUN'S INVASION
So far in my college course I had met with actually little outspoken
insult. Once or twice in my freshman year some loutish sophomore had not
stopped at making comments upon my religion. There had been that
incident at Trevelyan's fraternity house, too. But, generally speaking,
the prejudice had been of a negative sort, restricting rather than
driving--though none the less offensive and chafing on that account.
There was nothing on which I could actually lay my finger to complain. I
had no actual proof that I had been kept off any college organization
because of my religion. I might have had, had I cared at the time to
follow up the favoritism shown in the dramatic society--but that was a
small affair, by now, and I preferred to let it rest forgotten.
Otherwise, I was treated with a fair amount of kindness by almost all of
the college. The members of my own class, in which I was gradually
acquiring such positions as work and merit could win me, had begun to
show me a good, clean respect; and those in the class above soon
followed their lead. All that I asked was fair play, and the chance to
overcome that handicap which I knew existed. This was easier, now that I
lived at college, and I gave to the various activities in which I was
interested, all the spare time which I could afford from my studies. I
was beginning to realize what that preachment meant: "The college will
give you back all that you give to it in work."
Thus, at the end of my sophomore year, when I again went to the
settlement for the summer, I was planning big and enthusiastic things
for the autumn term.
Mr. Richards placed me in charge of one of the settlement's fresh-air
camps, up the state. I had two other boys to help me in my work, and one
of them was Frank Cohen. It had taken me a long time to overcome Frank's
sensitiveness, after his encounter with my aunt; but we were fast
friends again now, and it was good to have him with me where I could
help him with his daily noon-time studying for his "preliminaries." When
the fall came, he passed them easily--and it was now definitely decided
that he would enter my college when I was a senior.
My own return to the university, however, gave me an unpleasant shock. I
had arrived a few days late, because I had wanted to help Mr. Richards
with some of his coming year's programs. The campus was already alive
and crowded, therefore, and the dormitory windows were all thrown open
and overflowing with the rugs and chair cushions of autumn cleaning. The
campus teemed with a thousand youths who grasped each other cordially by
the wrist and went through all sorts of contortions to prove that they
"were glad to see you, old man!"
But there was a difference! The first glimpse I had of it, I called
myself a self-conscious fool. I tried to reassure myself, everybody's
greeting had been as cordial as I could expect. Everybody had said he
was glad to see me--and--yet!
Then, the second day that I was at college, I had my first proof of the
truth of my suspicions. I had it through eavesdropping--but I was
justified. For I heard little Waters, the genial popularist, talking of
it to another classmate in front of the laboratory steps.
"It's a rotten shame," he was declaiming. "Haven't you noticed? I don't
see how it could escape you! Jews and Jews! The freshman class is just
swarming with 'em!"
"What? Really?"
"Honestly. If there's one Jew in the freshman class, there are fifty.
And such Jewy-looking Jews!"
"Gee whizz, it's a disgrace. It was bad enough when they used to come in
four or five--or even ten--in a class. But fifty! Are there really
fifty?"
"Oh, easily! Maybe a hundred--I don't know. They are swarming all over
the place! Gosh, we'll have to do something to get rid of them. It just
simply ruins the college name to have so many of them around."
"You bet! A campaign for ours!"
I watched them going off together, arm in arm, towards "fraternity
row"--and wondered what that campaign would be.
It did not take me long to investigate the real state of affairs. There
were some thirty members of the freshman class listed in the dean's
office under the designation of "Jew," "Hebrew" or "Ethical Culturist."
And the faces that I met under freshman caps were certainly Semitic, to
a large percentage.
At first it annoyed me. Annoyed me more, too, when the first member of
the freshman class to be expelled for ungentlemanly conduct was a Jew.
There were one or two others, I noticed, who would sooner or later reach
the same end if they did not keep away from the city at night--and from
the things the city teaches.
These one or two gradually became scape-goats for the rest of the Jewish
boys in the class. They were sons of rich fathers; they paraded their
automobiles about the campus--and thus broke the rule number one in the
"freshman bible." They had unbridled tongues, and used them
ungraciously. One of them, a big, swaggering chap, "went out" for his
class football team--and, having been selected to play in a minor game,
developed a dying aunt overnight and disappeared for the day. When he
came back, on Sunday night, he was caught and hazed. His automobile was
dumped on its side in the middle of the campus. His face, when I saw him
the next day, was a network of plaster strips. Three days after that he
left college--and I, for one, was devoutly thankful for his resigning.
He did not belong in our college, had done nothing to fit himself into
its environment, had talked loudly, acted the cad and the coward--and
had reaped the reward of such a person, Jew or Gentile, in whatever
community.
The persecution--for it had taken on proportions worthy of that
name--went forward, however. There was an annual "freshman parade," for
instance, when the entering class was dressed in grotesque costumes and
sent marching in and out a lane of laughing spectators to the football
field. In my own freshman year this was a good-natured affair--and each
class, including the victimized one, took it for the boisterous joke
that it was.
But this year, when the parade was starting at the gymnasium, and the
big, card-board placards were being lifted to the marchers' shoulders, I
noticed that all the Jewish boys were being put conspicuously into one
group. They would march together. And those placards! The sickening
succession of them was only a repetition of "Oi oi" and the pawnbroker's
symbol--and humor of that high order. And these Jewish freshmen went
down the street amid the jeering--and I had to stand by and see them,
some with heads high and eyes blazing with pride, others stumbling and
bowed, one of them with tears running inanely down his cheeks--had to
stand there and watch it all, and curse myself for a coward because I
would not, could not, go out into the middle of the road and tear down,
one by one, the daubed, cheap jests that they had to carry.
A few weeks later there was another such celebration. There were
speeches to be made. The class wits--and what class is without
them?--were to have their turn.
And their wit--what did it consist of? One after another, they made
blunt, exaggerated references to the "invasion of the Huns," to the
"Jews coming unto Jordan," to "the lost Ten Tribes ..." and hoots of
applause went up to the night sky like the roar of a Philistine army!
One of the men who spoke was a classmate of mine--a fellow-member of
the joke paper's board. I knew him well, for he had been to see me
often. It was only a few nights ago that he had told me he was chosen to
speak at this celebration, and had promised me he would make no
reference to the Jewish influx.
"I don't agree with you about it," he had said. "You're too sensitive,
all you Jews--and anyhow, you know perfectly well we're not aiming this
campaign at you personally. It's against this big bunch of them in the
freshman class."
"So it's a regular campaign, is it?" I demanded.
He evaded the question--but satisfied me with his promise.
But when I heard him break it--heard him, more than any other speaker,
launch one smiling epithet after another against the "sons of Abraham,
Isaac and Jacob," I lost all the gnawing consciousness that I had had as
to the justice of this remark about Jewish sensitiveness--and I went
forward to the cart-end from which he was speaking. I meant to pull him
down and get up there in his place, and to speak hotly, straight from
the shoulder--I didn't care what I said so long as I put them all to
disgrace!
But when I was within a few feet of him in the jostling, laughing crowd,
I could go no further. I tried to cry out, but that was denied me. My
courage gave me only the power to glare and sneer at him--and once, as
he spoke, he looked down and saw my face, I think. For his own grew
paler in the light of the gas lantern which flared windily beside him,
and he faltered in his speech.
Later on he came over to my room and asked to speak to me. I heard him
through; listened to his smooth explanation about the committee of
arrangements demanding that he put something into his speech about the
Jews--and he was sorry he had broken his word to me--only, of course, I
was to consider myself an exception to all this sort of thing. Everybody
knew I was a good fellow and was doing bully work for the name of the
college--and what right had I to class myself with these insignificant
little Jews in the Freshman class? and he didn't want it to break up our
friendship, because he thought the world of me.