After the Sanford-Raleigh game, the college seemed to be slowly dying.
The boys held countless post-mortems over the game, explaining to each
other just how it had been lost or how it could have been won. They
watched the newspapers eagerly as the sport writers announced their
choice for the so-called All American team. If Slade was on the team,
the writer was conceded to "know his dope"; if Slade wasn't, the writer
was a "dumbbell." But all this pseudo-excitement was merely picking at
the covers; there was no real heart in it. Gradually the football talk
died down; freshmen ceased to write themes about Sanford's great
fighting spirit; sex and religion once more became predominant at the
"bull sessions."
Studies, too, began to find a place in the sun. Hour examinations were
coming, and most of the boys knew that they were miserably prepared.
Lights were burning in fraternity houses and dormitories until late at
night, and mighty little of their glow was shed on poker parties and
crap games. The college had begun to study.
When Hugh finally calmed down and took stock, he was horrified and
frightened to discover how far he was behind in all his work. He had
done his lessons sketchily from day to day, but he really knew nothing
about them, and he knew that he didn't. Since Morse's departure, he had
loafed, trusting to luck and the knowledge he had gained in high school.
So far he had escaped a summons from the dean, but he daily expected
one, and the mere thought of hour examinations made him shiver. He
studied hard for a week, succeeding only in getting gloriously confused
and more frightened. The examinations proved to be easier than he had
expected; he didn't fail in any of them, but he did not get a grade
above a C.
The examination flurry passed, and the college was left cold. Nothing
seemed to happen. The boys went to the movies every night, had a peanut
fight, talked to the shadowy actors; they played cards, pool, and
billiards, or shot craps; Saturday nights many of them went to a dance
at Hastings, a small town five miles away; they held bull sessions and
discussed everything under the sun and some things beyond it; they
attended a performance of Shaw's "Candida" given by the Dramatic Society
and voted it a "wet" show; and, incidentally, some of them studied. But,
all in all, life was rather tepid, and most of the boys were merely
marking time and waiting for Christmas vacation.
For Hugh the vacation came and went with a rush. It was glorious to get
home again, glorious to see his father and mother, and, at first,
glorious to see Helen Simpson. But Helen had begun to pall; her kisses
hardly compensated for her conversation. She gave him a little feeling
of guilt, too, which he tried to argue away. "Kissing isn't really
wrong. Everybody pets; at least, Carl says they do. Helen likes it
but..." Always that "but" intruded itself. "But it doesn't seem quite
right when--I don't really love her." When he kissed her for the last
time before returning to college, he had a distinct feeling of relief:
well, that would be off his mind for a while, anyway.
It was a sober, quiet crowd of students--for the first time they were
students--that returned to their desks after the vacation. The final
examinations were ahead of them, less than a month away; and those
examinations hung over their heads like the relentless, glittering blade
of a guillotine. The boys studied. "College life" ceased; there was a
brief period of education.
Of course, they did not desert the movies, and the snow and ice claimed
them. Part of Indian Lake was scraped free of snow, and every clear
afternoon hundreds of boys skated happily, explaining afterward that
they had to have some exercise if they were going to be able to study.
On those afternoons the lake was a pretty sight, zestful, alive with
color. Many of the men wore blue sweaters, some of them brightly colored
Mackinaws, all of them knitted toques. As soon as the cold weather
arrived, the freshmen had been permitted to substitute blue toques with
orange tassels for their "baby bonnets." The blue and orange stood out
vividly against the white snow-covered hills, and the skates rang
sharply as they cut the glare ice.
There was snow-shoeing, skiing, and sliding "to keep a fellow fit so
that he could do good work in his exams," but much as the boys enjoyed
the winter sports, a black pall hung over the college as the examination
period drew nearer and nearer. The library, which had been virtually
deserted all term, suddenly became crowded. Every afternoon and evening
its big tables were filled with serious-faced lads earnestly bending
over books, making notes, running their fingers through their hair,
occasionally looking up with dazed eyes, or twisting about miserably.
The tension grew greater and greater. The upper-classmen were quiet and
businesslike, but most of the freshmen were frankly terrified. A few of
them packed their trunks and slunk away, and a few more openly scorned
the examinations and their frightened classmates; but they were the
exceptions. All the buoyancy seemed gone out of the college; nothing was
left but an intense strain. The dormitories were strangely quiet at
night. There was no playing of golf in the hallways, no rolling of bats
down the stairs, no shouting, no laughter; a man who made any noise was
in danger of a serious beating. Even the greetings as the men passed
each other on the campus were quiet and abstracted. They ceased to cut
classes. Everybody attended, and everybody paid close attention even to
the most tiresome instructors.
Studious seniors began to reap a harvest out of tutoring sections. The
meetings were a dollar "a throw," and for another dollar a student could
get a mimeographed outline of a course. But the tutoring sections were
only for the "plutes" or the athletes, many of whom were subsidized by
fraternities or alumni. Most of the students had to learn their own
lessons; so they often banded together in small groups to make the task
less arduous, finding some relief in sociability.
The study groups, quite properly called seminars, would have shocked
many a worthy professor had he been able to attend one; but they were
truly educative, and to many students inspiring. The professor had
planted the seed of wisdom with them; it was at the seminars that they
tried honestly, if somewhat hysterically and irreverently, to make it
grow.
Hugh did most of his studying alone, fearing that the seminars would
degenerate into bull sessions, as many of them did; but Carl insisted
that he join one group that was going "to wipe up that goddamned
English course to-night."
There were only five men at the seminar, which met in Surrey 19, because
Pudge Jamieson, who was "rating" an A in the course and was therefore an
authority, said that he wouldn't come if there were any more. Pudge, as
his nickname suggests, was plump. He was a round-faced, jovial youngster
who learned everything with consummate ease, wrote with great fluency
and sometimes real beauty, peered through his horn-rimmed spectacles
amusedly at the world, and read every "smut" book that he could lay his
hands on. His library of erotica was already famous throughout the
college, his volumes of Balzac's "Droll Stories," Rabelais complete,
"Mlle. de Maupin," Burton's "Arabian Nights," and the "Decameron" being
in constant demand. He could tell literally hundreds of dirty stories,
always having a new one on tap, always looking when he told it like a
complacent cherub.
There were two other men in the seminar. Freddy Dickson, an earnest,
anemic youth, seemed to be always striving for greater acceleration and
never gaining it; or as Pudge put it, "The trouble with Freddy is that
he's always shifting gears." Larry Stillwell, the last man, was a dark,
handsome youth with exceedingly regular features, pomaded hair parted in
the center and shining sleekly, fine teeth, and rich coloring: a
"smooth" boy who prided himself on his conquests and the fact that he
never got a grade above a C in his courses. There was no man in the
freshman class with a finer mind, but he declined to study, declaring
firmly that he could not waste his time acquiring impractical tastes for
useless arts.
"Now everybody shut up," said Pudge, seating himself in a big chair and
laboriously crossing one leg over the other. "Put some more wood on the
fire, Hugh, will you?"
Hugh stirred up the fire, piled on a log or so, and then returned to his
chair, hoping against belief that something really would be accomplished
in the seminar. All the boys, he excepted, were smoking, and all of them
were lolling back in dangerously comfortable attitudes.
"We've got to get going," Pudge continued, "and we aren't going to get
anything done if we just sit around and bull. I'm the prof, and I'm
going to ask questions. Now, don't bull. If you don't know, just say,
'No soap,' and if you do know, shoot your dope." He grinned. "How's that
for a rime?"
"Atta boy!" Carl exclaimed enthusiastically.
"Shut up! Now, the stuff we want to get at to-night is the poetry. No use
spending any time on the composition. My prof said that we would have
to write themes in the exam, but we can't do anything about that here.
You're all getting by on your themes, anyway, aren't you?"
"Yeah," the listening quartet answered in unison, Larry Stillwell adding
dubiously, "Well, I'm getting C's."
"Larry," said Carl in cold contempt, "you're a goddamn liar. I saw a B
on one of your themes the other day and an A on another. What are you
always pulling that low-brow stuff for?"
Larry had the grace to blush. "Aw," he explained in some confusion, "my
prof's full of hooey. He doesn't know a C theme from an A one. He makes
me sick. He--"
"Aw, shut up!" Freddy Dickson shouted. "Let's get going; let's get
going. We gotta learn this poetry. Damn! I don't know anything about it.
I didn't crack the book till two days ago."
Pudge took charge again. "Close your gabs, everybody," he commanded
sternly. "There's no sense in going over the prose lit. You can do that
better by yourselves. God knows I'm not going to waste my time telling
you bone-heads what Carlyle means by a hero. If you don't know Odin from
Mohammed by this time, you can roast in Dante's hell for all of me. Now
listen; the prof said that they were going to make us place lines, and,
of course, they'll expect us to know what the poems are about. Hell!
how some of the boys are going to fox 'em." He paused to laugh. "Jim
Hicks told me this afternoon that 'Philomela' was by Shakspere." The
other boys did not understand the joke, but they all laughed heartily.
"Now," he went on, "I'll give you the name of a poem, and then you tell
me what it's about and who wrote it."
He leafed rapidly through an anthology. "Carl, who wrote 'Kubla Khan'?"
Carl puffed his pipe meditatively. "I'm going to fox you, Pudge," he
said, frankly triumphant; "I know. Coleridge wrote it. It seems to be
about a Jew who built a swell joint for a wild woman or something like
that. I can't make much out of the damn thing."
"That's enough. Smack for Carl," said Pudge approvingly. "Smack" meant
that the answer was satisfactory. "Freddy, who wrote 'La Belle Dame sans
Merci'?"
Freddy twisted in his chair, thumped his head with his knuckles, and
finally announced with a groan of despair, "No soap."
"Hugh?"
"No soap."
"Larry?"
"Well," drawled Larry, "I think Jawn Keats wrote it. It's one of those
bedtime stories with a kick. A knight gets picked up by a jane. He puts
her on his prancing steed and beats it for the tall timber. Keats isn't
very plain about what happened there, but I suspect the worst. Anyhow,
the knight woke up the next morning with an awful rotten taste in his
mouth."
"Smack for Larry. Your turn, Carl. Who wrote 'The West Wind'?"
"You can't get me on that boy Masefield, Pudge. I know all his stuff.
There isn't any story; it's just about the west wind, but it's a goddamn
good poem. It's the cat's pajamas."
"You said it, Carl," Hugh chimed in, "but I like 'Sea Fever' better.
"I must go down to the seas again,
To the lonely sea and the sky....
Gosh! that's hot stuff. 'August, 1914's a peach, too."
"Yeah," agreed Larry languidly; "I got a great kick when the prof read
that in class. Masefield's all right. I wish we had more of his stuff
and less of Milton. Lord Almighty, how I hate Milton! What th' hell do
they have to give us that tripe for?"
"Oh, let's get going," Freddy pleaded, running a nervous hand through
his mouse-colored hair. "Shoot a question, Pudge."
"All right, Freddy." Pudge tried to smile wickedly but succeeded only in
looking like a beaming cherub. "Tell us who wrote the 'Ode on
Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.'
Cripes! what a title!"
Freddy groaned. "I know that Wadsworth wrote it, but that is all that I
do know about it."
"Wordsworth, Freddy," Carl corrected him. "Wordsworth. Henry W.
Wordsworth."
"Gee, Carl, thanks. I thought it was William."
There was a burst of laughter, and then Pudge explained. "It is William,
Freddy. Don't let Peters razz you. Just for that, Carl, you tell what
it's about."
"No soap," said Carl decisively.
"I know," Hugh announced, excited and pleased.
"Shoot!"
"Well, it's this reincarnation business. Wordsworth thought you lived
before you came on to this earth, and everything was fine when you were
a baby but it got worse when you got older. That's about all. It's kinda
bugs, but I like some of it."
"It isn't bugs," Pudge contradicted flatly; "it's got sense. You do lose
something as you grow older, but you gain something, too. Wordsworth
admits that. It's a wonderful poem, and you're dumbbells if you can't
see it." He was very serious as he turned the pages of the book and laid
his pipe on the table at his elbow. "Now listen. This stanza has the
dope for the whole poem." He read the famous stanza simply and
effectively:
"Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;
The soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting
And cometh from afar;
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,
But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy;
The Youth who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is Nature's priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended;
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day."
There was a moment's silence when he finished, and then Hugh said
reverently: "That is beautiful. Read the last stanza, will you, Pudge?"
So Pudge read the last stanza, and then the boys got into an argument
over the possible truth of the thesis of the poem. Freddy finally
brought them back to the task in hand with his plaintive plea, "We've
gotta get going." It was two o'clock in the morning when the seminar
broke up, Hugh admitting to Carl after their visitors departed that he
had not only learned a lot but that he had enjoyed the evening heartily.
The college grew quieter and quieter as the day for the examinations
approached. There were seminars on everything, even on the best way to
prepare cribs. Certain students with low grades and less honor would
somehow gravitate together and discuss plans for "foxing the profs."
Opinions differed. One man usually insisted that notes in the palm of
the left hand were safe from detection, only to be met by the objection
that they had to be written in ink, and if one's hand perspired, "and it
was sure as hell to," nothing was left but an inky smear. Another held
that a fellow could fasten a rubber band on his forearm and attach the
notes to those, pulling them down when needed and then letting them snap
back out of sight into safety. "But," one of the conspirators was sure
to object, "what th' hell are you going to do if the band breaks?" Some
of them insisted that notes placed in the inside of one's goloshes--all
the students wore them but took them off in the examination-room--could
be easily read. "Yeah, but the proctors are wise to that stunt." And so
_ad infinitum_. Eventually all the "stunts" were used and many more. Not
that all the students cheated. Everything considered, the percentage of
cheaters was not great, but those who did cheat usually spent enough
time evolving ingenious methods of preparing cribs and in preparing them
to have learned their lessons honestly and well.
The night before the first examinations the campus was utterly quiet.
Suddenly bedlam broke loose. Somehow every dormitory that contained
freshmen became a madhouse at the same time. Hugh and Carl were in
Surrey 19 earnestly studying. Freddy Dickson flung the door open and
shouted hysterically, "The general science exam's out!"
Hugh and Carl whirled around in their desk-chairs.
"What?" They shouted together.
"Yeah! One of the fellows saw it. A girl that works at the press copied
down the exam and gave it to him."
"What fellow? Where's the exam?"
"I don't know who the guy is, but Hubert Manning saw the exam."
Hugh and Carl were out of their chairs in an instant, and the three boys
rushed out of Surrey in search of Manning. They found him in his room
telling a mob of excited classmates that he hadn't seen the exam but
that Harry Smithson had. Away went the crowd in search of Smithson, Carl
and Hugh and Freddy in the midst of the excited, chattering lads.
Smithson hadn't seen the exam, but he had heard that Puddy McCumber had
a copy.... Freshmen were running up and down stairs in the dormitories,
shouting, "Have you seen the exam?" No, nobody had seen the exam, but
some of the boys had been told definitely what the questions were going
to be. No two seemed to agree on the questions, but everybody copied
them down and then rushed on to search for a _bona fide_ copy. They
hurried from dormitory to dormitory, constantly shouting the same
question, "Have you seen the exam?" There were men in every dormitory
with a new list of questions, which were hastily scratched into
note-books by the eager seekers. Until midnight the excitement raged;
then the campus quieted down as the freshmen began to study the long
lists of questions.
"God!" said Carl as he scanned his list hopelessly, "these damn
questions cover everything in the course and some things that I know
damn well weren't in it. What a lot of nuts we were. Let's go to bed."
"Carl," Hugh wailed despondently, "I'm going to flunk that exam. I can't
answer a tenth of these questions. I can't go to bed; I've got to study.
Oh, Lord!"
"Don't be a triple-plated jackass. Come on to bed. You'll just get woozy
if you stay up any longer."
"All right," Hugh agreed wearily. He went to bed, but many of the boys
stayed up and studied, some of them all night.
The examinations were held in the gymnasium. Hundreds of class-room
chairs were set in even rows. Nothing else was there, not even the
gymnasium apparatus. A few years earlier a wily student had sneaked into
the gymnasium the night before an examination and written his notes on a
dumbbell hanging on the wall. The next day he calmly chose the seat in
front of the dumbbell--and proceeded to write a perfect examination. The
annotated dumbbell was found later, and after that the walls were
stripped clean of apparatus before the examinations began.
At a few minutes before nine the entire freshman class was grouped
before the doors of the gymnasium, nervously talking, some of them
glancing through their notes, others smoking--some of them so rapidly
that the cigarettes seemed to melt, others walking up and down,
muttering and mumbling; all of them so excited, so tense that they
hardly knew what they were doing. Hugh was trying to think of a dozen
answers to questions that popped into his head, and he couldn't think of
anything.
Suddenly the doors were thrown open. Yelling, shoving each other about,
fairly dancing in their eagerness and excitement, the freshmen rushed
into the gymnasium. Hugh broke from the mob as quickly as possible,
hurried to a chair, and snatched up a copy of the examination that was
lying on its broad arm. At the first glance he thought that he could
answer all the questions; a second glance revealed four that meant
nothing to him. For a moment he was dizzy with hope and despair, and
then, all at once, he felt quite calm. He pulled off his goloshes and
prepared to go to work.
Within three minutes the noise had subsided. There was a rustling as the
boys took off their baa-baa coats and goloshes, but after that there was
no sound save the slow steps of the proctors pacing up and down the
aisle. Once Hugh looked up, thinking desperately, almost seizing an idea
that floated nebulous and necessary before him. A proctor that he knew
caught his eye and smiled fatuously. Hugh did not smile back. He could
have cried in his fury. The idea was gone forever.
Some of the students began to write immediately; some of them leaned
back and stared at the ceiling; some of them chewed their pencils
nervously; some of them leaned forward mercilessly pounding a knee; some
of them kept running one or both hands through their hair; some of them
wrote a little and then paused to gaze blankly before them or to tap
their teeth with a pen or pencil: all of them were concentrating with an
intensity that made the silence electric.
That proctor's idiotic smile had thrown Hugh's thoughts into what
seemed hopeless confusion, but a small incident almost immediately
brought order and relief. The gymnasium cat was wandering around the
rear of the gymnasium. It attracted the attention of several of the
students--and of a proctor. Being very careful not to make any noise, he
picked up the cat and started for the door. Almost instantly every
student looked up; and then the stamping began. Four hundred freshmen
stamped in rhythm to the proctor's steps. He Hushed violently, tried
vainly to look unconcerned, and finally disappeared through the door
with the cat. Hugh had stamped lustily and laughed in great glee at the
proctor's confusion; then he returned to his work, completely at ease,
his nervousness gone.
One hour passed, two hours. Still the freshmen wrote; still the proctors
paced up and down. Suddenly a proctor paused, stared intently at a youth
who was leaning forward in his chair, walked quickly to him, and picked
up one of his goloshes. The next instant he had a piece of paper in his
hand and was, walking down the gymnasium after beckoning to the boy to
follow him. The boy shoved his feet into his goloshes, pulled on his
baa-baa coat, and, his face white and strained, marched down the aisle.
The proctor spoke a few words to him at the door. He nodded, opened the
door, left the gymnasium--and five hours later the college.
Thus the college for ten days: the better students moderately calm, the
others cramming information into aching heads, drinking unbelievable
quantities of coffee, sitting up, many of them, all night, attending
seminars or tutoring sessions, working for long hours in the library,
finally taking the examination, only to start a new nerve-racking grind
in preparation for the next one.
If a student failed in a course, he received a "flunk notice" from the
registrar's office within four days after the examination, so that four
days after the last examination every student knew whether he had passed
his courses or not. All those who failed to pass three courses were, as
the students put it, "flunked out," or as the registrar put it, "their
connection with the college was severed." Some of the flunkees took the
news very casually, packed their trunks, sold their furniture, and
departed; others frankly wept or hastened to their instructors to plead
vainly that their grades be raised: all of them were required to leave
Haydensville at once.
Hugh passed all of his courses but without distinction. His B in
trigonometry did not give him great satisfaction inasmuch as he had
received an A in exactly the same course in high school; nor was he
particularly proud of his B in English, since he knew that with a
little effort he could have "pulled" an A. The remainder of his grades
were C's and D's, mostly D's. He felt almost as much ashamed as Freddy
Dickson, who somehow hadn't "got going" and had been flunked out. Carl
received nothing less than a C, and his record made Hugh more ashamed of
his own. Carl never seemed to study, but he hadn't disgraced himself.
Hugh spent many bitter hours thinking about his record. What would his
folks think? Worse, what would they _say?_ Finally he wrote to them:
Dear Mother and Dad:
I have just found out my grades. I think that they will
be sent to you later. Well, I didn't flunk out but my
record isn't so hot. Only two of my grades are any good.
I got a B in English and Math but the others are all C's
and D's. I know that you will be ashamed of me and I'm
awfully sorry. I've thought of lots of excuses to write
to you, but I guess I won't write them. I know that I
didn't study hard enough. I had too much fun.
I promise you that I'll do better next time. I know that
I can. Please don't scold me.
Lots of love,
HUGH
All that his mother wrote in reply was, "Of course, you will do better
next time." The kindness hurt dreadfully. Hugh wished that she had
scolded him.