A
pile of shoes and nose-guards and bicycle-pumps and broken hockey-sticks; a wall covered with such stolen signs as "East College Avenue," and "Pants Presser Ladys Garments Carefully Done," and "Dr. Sloats Liniment for Young and Old"; a broken-backed couch with a red-and-green afghan of mangy tassels; an ink-spattered wooden table, burnt in small black spots along the edges; a plaster bust of Martha Washington with a mustache added in ink; a few books; an inundation of sweaters and old hats; and a large, expensive mouth-organ—such were a few of the interesting characteristics of the room which Carl and the Turk were occupying as room-mates for sophomore year at Plato.
Most objectionable sounds came from the room constantly: the Gang's songs, suggestive laughter, imitations of cats and fowls and fog-horns. These noises were less ingenious, however, than the devices of the Gang for getting rid of tobacco-smoke, such as blowing the smoke up the stove.
Carl was happy. In this room he encouraged stammering Genie Linderbeck to become adaptable. Here he scribbled to Gertie and Ben Rusk little notes decorated with badly drawn caricatures of himself loafing. Here, with the Turk, he talked out half the night, planning future glory in engineering. Carl adored the Turk for his frankness, his lively speech, his interest in mechanics—and in Carl.
Carl was still out for football, but he was rather light for a team largely composed of one-hundred-and-eighty-pound Norwegians. He had a chance, however. He drove the banker's car two or three evenings a week and cared for the banker's lawn and furnace and cow. He still boarded at Mrs. Henkel's, as did jolly Mae Thurston, whom he took for surreptitious rides in the banker's car, after which he wrote extra-long and pleasant letters to Gertie. It was becoming harder and harder to write to Gertie, because he had, in freshman year, exhausted all the things one can say about the weather without being profane. When, in October, a new bank clerk stormed, meteor-like, the Joralemon social horizon, and became devoted to Gertie, as faithfully reported in letters from Joe Jordan, Carl was melancholy over the loss of a comrade. But he strictly confined his mourning to leisure hours—and with books, football, and chores for the banker, he was a busy young man.... After about ten days it was a relief not to have to plan letters to Gertie. The emotions that should have gone to her Carl devoted to Professor Frazer's new course in modern drama.
This course was officially announced as a study of Bernard Shaw, Ibsen, Strindberg, Pinero, Hauptmann, Sudermann, Maeterlinck, D'Annunzio, and Rostand; but unofficially announced by Professor Frazer as an attempt to follow the spirit of to-day wherever it should be found in contemporary literature. Carl and the Turk were bewildered but staunchly enthusiastic disciples of the course. They made every member of the Gang enroll in it, and discouraged inattention in the lecture-room by dexterous side-kicks.
Even to his ex-room-mate, Plain Smith, the grim and slovenly school-teacher who had called him "bub" and discouraged his confidences, Carl presented the attractions of Professor Frazer's lectures when he met him on the campus. Smith looked quizzical and "guessed" that plays and play-actin' were useless, if not actually immoral.
"Yes, but this isn't just plays, my young friend," said Carl, with a hauteur new but not exceedingly impressiveto Plain Smith. "He takes up all these new stunts, all this new philosophy and stuff they have in London and Paris. There's something besides Shakespeare and the Bible!" he added, intending to be spiteful. It may be stated that he did not like Plain Smith.
"What new philosophy?"
"The spirit of brotherhood. I suppose you're too orthodox for that!"
"Oh no, sonny, not for that, not for that. And it ain't soverynew. That's what Christ taught! No, sonny, I ain't so orthodox but what I'm willing to have 'em show me anything that tries to advance brotherhood. Not that I think it's very likely to be found in a lot of Noo York plays. But I'll look in at one lesson, anyway," and Plain Smith clumped away, humming "Greenland's Icy Mountains."
Professor Frazer's modern drama course began with Ibsen. The first five lectures were almost conventional; they were an attempt to place contemporary dramatists, with reflections on the box-office standpoint. But his sixth lecture began rather unusually.
There was an audience of sixty-four in Lecture-room A—earnest girl students bringing out note-books and spectacle-cases, frivolous girls feeling their back hair, and the men settling down with a "Come, let's get it over!" air, or glowing up worshipingly, like Eugene Field Linderbeck, or determined not to miss anything, like Carl—the captious college audience, credulous as to statements of fact and heavily unresponsive to the spirit. Professor Frazer, younger than half a dozen of the plow-trained undergraduates, thin of hair and sensitive of face, sitting before them, with one hand in his pocket and the other nervously tapping the small reading-table, spoke quietly:
"I'm not going to be a lecturer to-day. I'm not going to analyze the plays of Shaw which I assigned to you. You're supposed to have read them yourselves. I am going to imagine that I am at tea in New Haven, or downin New York, at dinner in the basement of the old Brevoort, talking with a bunch of men who are trying to find out where the world is going, and why and when and how, and asking who are the prophets who are going to show it the way. We'd be getting excited over Shaw and Wells. There's something really worth getting excited over.
"These men have perceived that this world is not a crazy-quilt of unrelated races, but a collection of human beings completely related, with all our interests—food and ambitions and the desire to play—absolutely in common; so that if we would take thought all together, and work together, as a football team does, we would start making a perfect world.
"That's what socialism—of which you're beginning to hear so much, and of which you're going to hear so much more—means. If you feel genuinely impelled to vote the Republican ticket, that's not my affair, of course. Indeed, the Socialist party of this country constitutes only one branch of international socialism. But I do demand of you that you try to think for yourselves, if you are going to have the nerve to vote at all—think of it—to vote how this whole nation is to be conducted! Doesn't that tremendous responsibility demand that you do something more than inherit your way of voting? that you really think, think hard, why you vote as you do?... Pardon me for getting away from the subject proper—yet am I, actually? For just what I have been saying is one of the messages of Shaw and Wells.
"The great vision of the glory that shall be, not in one sudden millennium, but slowly advancing toward joys of life which we can no more prevision than the aboriginal medicine-man could imagine the X-ray! I wish that this were the time and the place to rhapsodize about that vision, as William Morris has done, inNews from Nowhere. You tell me that the various brands of socialists differ so much in their beliefs about this future that the bewildered layman can make nothing at all of their theories.Very well. They differ so much because there are so many different things wecando with this human race.... The defeat of death; the life period advancing to ten-score years all crowded with happy activity. The solution of labor's problem; increasing safety and decreasing hours of toil, and a way out for the unhappy consumer who is ground between labor and capital. A real democracy and the love of work that shall come when work is not relegated to wage-slaves, but joyously shared in a community inclusive of the living beings of all nations. France and Germany uniting precisely as Saxony and Prussia and Bavaria have united. And, most of all, a general realization that the fact that we cannot accomplish all these things at once does not indicate that they are hopeless; an understanding that one of the wonders of the future is the fact that we shallalways, in all ages, have improvements to look forward to.
"Fellow-students, object as strongly as you wish to the petty narrowness and vituperation of certain street-corner ranters, but do not be petty and narrow and vituperative in doing it!
"Now, to relate all this to the plays of Bernard Shaw. When he says——"
Professor Frazer's utterances seem tamely conservative nowadays; but this was in 1905, in a small, intensely religious college among the furrows. Imagine a devout pastor when his son kicks the family Bible and you have the mental state of half the students of Plato upon hearing a defense of socialism. Carl, catching echoes of his own talks with Bone Stillman in the lecture, exultantly glanced about, and found the class staring at one another with frightened anxiety. He saw the grim Plain Smith, not so much angry as ill. He saw two class clowns snickering at the ecstasy in the eyes of Genie Linderbeck.
In the corner drug-store, popularly known as "TheClub," where all the college bloods gather to drink lemon phosphate, an excited old man, whose tieless collar was almost concealed by his tobacco-stained beard, pushed back his black slouch-hat with the G. A. R. cord, and banged his fist on the prescription-counter, shouting, half at the clerk and half at the students matching pennies on the soda-counter, "I've lived in Plato, man and boy, for forty-seven years—ever since it wa'n't nothing but a frontier trading-post. I packed logs on my back and I tramped fifty-three miles to get me a yoke of oxen. I remember when the Indians went raiding during the war and the cavalry rode here from St. Paul. And this town has always stood for decency and law and order. But when things come to such a pass that this fellow Frazer or any of the rest of these infidels from one of these here Eastern colleges is allowed to stand up on his hind legs in a college building and bray about anarchism and tell us to trample on the old flag that we fought for, and none of these professors that call themselves 'reverends' step in and stop him, then let me tell you I'm about ready to pull up stakes and go out West, where there's patriotism and decency still, and where they'd hang one of these foreign anarchists to the nearest lamp-post, yes, sir, and this fellow Frazer, too, if he encouraged them in their crank notions. Got no right in the country, anyway. Better deport 'em if they ain't satisfied with the way we run things. I won't stand for preaching anarchism, and never knew any decent place that would, never since I was a baby in Canada. Yes, sir, I mean it; I'm an old man, but I'd pull up stakes and go plugging down the Santa Fe trail first, and I mean it."
"Here's your Bog Bitters, Mr. Goff," said the clerk, hastily, as a passer-by was drawn into the store by the old man's tirade.
Mr. Goff stalked out, muttering, and the college sports at the soda-counter grinned at one another. But Gus Osberg, of the junior class, remarked to Carl Ericson:"At that, though, there's a good deal to what old Goff says. Bet a hat Prexy won't stand for Prof Frazer's talking anarchy. Fellow in the class told me it was fierce stuff he was talking. Reg'lar anarchy."
"Rats! It wasn't anything of the kind," protested Carl. "I was there and I heard the whole thing. He just explained what this Bernard Shaw that writes plays meant by socialism."
"Well, even so, don't you think it's kind of unnecessary to talk publicly, right out in a college lecture-room, about socialism?" inquired a senior who was high up in the debating society.
"Well, thunder——!" was all Carl said, as the whole group stared at him. He felt ridiculous; he was afraid of seeming to be a "crank." He escaped from the drug-store.
When he arrived at Mrs. Henkel's boarding-house for supper the next evening he found the students passing from hand to hand a copy of the town paper, thePlato Weekly Times, which bore on the front page what the town regarded as a red-hot news story:
PLATO PROFESSOR
TALKS SEDITIOUSLY
As we go to press we learn that rumors are flying about the campus that the "powers that be" are highly incensed by the remarks of a well-known member of the local faculty praising Socialism and other form of anarchy. It is said that one of the older members of the faculty will demand from the erring teacher an explanation of his remarks which are alleged to have taken the form of a defense of the English anarchist Bernhard Shaw. Those on the que vive are expecting sensational developments and campus talk is so extensively occupied with discussions of the affair that the important coming game with St. John's college is almost forgotten.While the TIMES has always supported Plato College as one of the chief glories in the proud crown of Minnesota learning, we can but illy stomach such news. It goes without saying that we cannot too strongly disapprove express our disapproval ofsuch incendiary utterances and we shall fearlessly report the whole of this fair let the chips fall where they may.
As we go to press we learn that rumors are flying about the campus that the "powers that be" are highly incensed by the remarks of a well-known member of the local faculty praising Socialism and other form of anarchy. It is said that one of the older members of the faculty will demand from the erring teacher an explanation of his remarks which are alleged to have taken the form of a defense of the English anarchist Bernhard Shaw. Those on the que vive are expecting sensational developments and campus talk is so extensively occupied with discussions of the affair that the important coming game with St. John's college is almost forgotten.
While the TIMES has always supported Plato College as one of the chief glories in the proud crown of Minnesota learning, we can but illy stomach such news. It goes without saying that we cannot too strongly disapprove express our disapproval ofsuch incendiary utterances and we shall fearlessly report the whole of this fair let the chips fall where they may.
"There, Mr. Ericson," said Mrs. Henkel, a plump, decent, disapproving person, who had known too many generations of great Platonians to be impressed by anything, "you see what the public thinks of your Professor Frazer. I told you people wouldn't stomach such news, and I wouldn't wonder if they strongly disapproved."
"This ain't anything but gossip," said Carl, feebly; but as he read the account in theWeekly Timeshe was sick and frightened, such was his youthful awe of print. He wanted to beat the mossy-whiskered editor of theTimes, who always had white food-stains on his lapels. When he raised his eyes the coquette Mae Thurston tried to cheer him: "It 'll all come out in the wash, Eric; don't worry. These editors have to have something to write about or they couldn't fill up the paper."
He pressed her foot under the table. He was chatty, and helped to keep the general conversation away from the Frazer affair; but he was growing more and more angry, with a desire for effective action which expressed itself within him only by, "I'll show 'em! Makes me sosore!"
Everywhere they discussed and rediscussed Professor Frazer: in the dressing-room of the gymnasium, where the football squad dressed in the sweat-reeking air and shouted at one another, balancing each on one leg before small lockers, and rubbing themselves with brown, unclean Turkish towels; in the neat rooms of girl co-eds with their banners and cushions and pink comforters and chafing-dishes of nut fudge and photographic postal-cards showing the folks at home; in the close, horse-smelling, lap-robe and whip scattered office of the town livery-stable, where Mr. Goff droned with the editor of theTimes.
Everywhere Carl heard the echoes, and resolved, "I've got todosomething!"
T
he day of Professor Frazer's next lecture, a rain-sodden day at the end of October, with the stubble-fields bleakly shelterless beyond the campus. The rain splashed up from pools on the worn brick walks and dripped from trees and whipped about buildings, soaking the legs and leaving them itchingly wet and the feet sloshily uncomfortable. Carl returned to his room at one; talked to the Turk, his feet thrust against the side of their rusty stove. He wanted to keep three o'clock, the hour of Frazer's lecture, from coming. "I feel as if I was in for a fight and scared to death about it. Listen to that rain outside. Gee! but the old dame keeps these windows dirty. I hope Frazer will give it to them good and hard. I wish we could applaud him. I do feel funny, like something tragic was going to happen."
"Oh, tie that dog outside," yawned the Turk, stanch adherent of Carl, and therefore of Professor Frazer, but not imaginative. "Come on, young Kerl; I'll play you a slick little piece on the mouth-organ. Heh?"
"Oh, thunder! I'm too restless to listen to anything except a cannon." Carl stumped to the window and pondered on the pool of water flooding the graying grass stems in the shabby yard.
When it was time to start for Professor Frazer's lecture the Turk blurted: "Why don't we stay away and forget about it? Get her off your nerves. Let's go down to the bowling-alley and work up a sweat."
"Not a chance, Turk. He'll want all the supporters he's got. And you'd hate to stay away as much as I would.I feel cheered up now; all ready for the scrap. Yip! Come on!"
"All right, governor. I like the scrap, all right, but I don't want to see you get all worked up."
Through the rain, across the campus, an unusual number of students in shining, cheap, black raincoats were hastening to the three o'clock classes, clattering up the stone steps of the Academic Building, talking excitedly, glancing up at the arched door as though they expected to see something startling. Dozens stared at Carl. He felt rather important. It was plain that he was known as a belligerent, a supporter of Professor Frazer. As he came to the door of Lecture-room A he found that many of the crowd were deserting their proper classes to attend the Frazer event. He bumped down into his own seat, gazing back superciliously at the outsiders who were edging into unclaimed seats at the back of the room or standing about the door—students from other classes, town girls, the young instructor in French, German, and music; a couple of town club-women in glasses and galoshes and woolen stockings bunchy at the ankles. Every one was rapidly whispering, watching every one else, peeping often at the platform and the small door beside it through which Professor Frazer would enter. Carl had a smile ready for him. But there was no chance that the smile would be seen. There must have been a hundred and fifty in the room, seated and standing, though there were but seventy in the course, and but two hundred and fifty-six students in the whole college that year.
Carl looked back. He clenched his fist and pounded the soft side of it on his thigh, drawing in his breath, puffing it out with a long exasperated "Hellll!" For the Greek professor, the comma-sized, sandy-whiskered martinet, to whom nothing that was new was moral and nothing that was old was to be questioned by any undergraduate, stalked into the room like indignant Napoleon posing before two guards and a penguin at St. Helena. A studentin the back row thriftily gave the Greek god his seat. The god sat down, with a precise nod. Instantly a straggly man with a celluloid collar left the group by the door, whisked over to the Greek professor, and fawned upon him. It was the fearless editor and owner (also part-time type-setter) of thePlato Weekly Times, who dated back to the days of Washington flat-bed hand-presses and pure Jeffersonian politics, and feared neither man nor devil, though he was uneasy in the presence of his landlady. He ostentatiously flapped a wad of copy-paper in his left hand, and shook a spatter of ink-drops from a fountain-pen as he interviewed the Greek professor, who could be seen answering pompously. Carl was hating them both, fearing the Greek as a faculty spy on Frazer, picturing himself kicking the editor, when he was aware of a rustling all over the room, of a general turning of heads toward the platform.
He turned. He was smiling like a shy child in his hero-worship. Professor Frazer was inconspicuously walking through the low door beside the platform. Frazer's lips were together. He was obviously self-conscious. His motions were jerky. He elaborately did not look at the audience. He nearly stumbled on the steps up to the platform. His hand shook as he drew papers from a leather portfolio and arranged them on the small reading-table. One of the papers escaped and sailed off the platform, nearly to the front row. Nearly every one in the room snickered. Frazer flushed. A girl student in the front row nervously bounded out of her seat, picked up the paper, and handed it up to Frazer. They both fumbled it, and their heads nearly touched. Most of the crowd laughed audibly.
Professor Frazer sat down in his low chair, took out his watch with a twitching hand, and compared his time with the clock at the back of the room—and so closely were the amateur executioners observing their victim that every eye went back to the clock as well. EvenCarl was guilty of that imitation. Consequently he saw the editor, standing at the back, make notes on his copy-paper and smirk like an ill-bred hound stealing a bone. And the Greek professor stared at Frazer's gauche movements with a grim smugness that indicated, "Quite the sort of thing I expected." The Greek's elbows were on the arm of the seat, and he held up before his breast a small red-leather-covered note-book which he superciliously tapped with a thin pencil. He was waiting. Like a judge of the Inquisition....
"Old Greek 's going to take notes and make a report to the faculty about what Frazer says," reflected Carl. "If I could only get hold of his notes and destroy them!"
Carl turned again. It was just three. Professor Frazer had risen. Usually he sat while lecturing. Fifty whispers commented on that fact; fifty regular members of the course became self-important through knowing it. Frazer was leaning slightly against the table. It moved an inch or two with his weight, but by this time every one was too high-strung to laugh. He was pale. He re-arranged his papers. He had to clear his throat twice before he could speak, in the now silent, vulturishly attentive room, smelling of wet second-rate clothes.
The gusty rain could be heard. They all hitched in their seats.
"Oh, Frazercan'tbe going to retract," groaned Carl; "but he's scared."
Carl suddenly wished himself away from all this useless conflict; out tramping the wet roads with the Turk, or slashing through the puddles at thirty-five miles an hour in the banker's car. He noted stupidly that Genie Linderbeck's hair was scarcely combed. He found he was saying, "Frazer 'll flunk, flunk, flunk; he's going to flunk, flunk, flunk."
Then Frazer spoke. His voice sounded harsh and un-rhythmical, but soon swung into the natural periods of a public speaker as he got into his lecture:
"My friends," said he, "a part of you have come here legitimately, to hear a lecture; a part to satisfy the curiosity aroused by rumors to the effect that I am likely to make indecorous and indecent remarks, which your decorum and decency make you wish to hear, and of which you will carry away evil and twisted reports, to gain the reputation of being fearless defenders of the truth. It is a temptation to gratify your desire and shock you—a far greater temptation than to be repentant and reactionary. Only, it occurs to me that this place and time are supposed to be devoted to a lecture by Henry Frazer on his opinions about contemporary drama. It is in no sense to be given to the puling defense of a martyr, nor to the sensational self-advertisement of either myself or any of you. I have no intention of devoting any part of my lecture, aside from these introductory adumbrations, to the astonishing number of new friends whose bright and morning faces I see before me. I shall neither be so insincerely tactful as to welcome you, nor so frightened as to ignore you. Nor shall I invite you to come to me with any complaints you have about me. I am far too busy with my real work!
"I am not speaking patiently. I am not patient with you! I am not speaking politely. Truly, I do not think that I shall much longer be polite!
"Wait. That sounds now in my ears as rhetorical! Forgive me, and translate my indiscretions into more colloquial language.
"Though from rumors I have overheard, I fancy some of you will do that, anyway.... And now, I think, you see where I stand.
"Now then. For such of you as have a genuine interest in the brilliant work of Bernard Shaw I shall first continue the animadversions on the importance of his social thought, endeavor to link it with the great and growing vision of H. G. Wells (novelist and not dramatist though he is, because of the significance of his new books,KipsandMankind in the Making), and point out the serious purpose that seems to me to underlie Shaw's sarcastic pictures of life's shams.
"In my last lecture I endeavored to present the destructive side of present social theories as little as possible; to dwell more on the keen desire of the modern thinkers for constructive imagination. But I judge that I was regarded as too destructive, which amuses me, and to which I shall apply the antidote of showing how destructive modern thought is and must be—whether running with sootily smoking torch of individuality in Bakunin, or hissing in Nietzsche, or laughing at Olympus in Bernard Shaw. My 'radicalism' has been spoken of. Radical! Do you realize that I am not suggesting that there might possibly some day be a revolution in America, but rather that now I am stating that there is, this minute, and for some years has been, an actual state of warfare between capital and labor? Do you know that daily more people are saying openly and violently that we starve our poor, we stuff our own children with useless bookishness, and work the children of others in mills and let them sell papers on the streets in red-light districts at night, and thereby prove our state nothing short of insane? If you tell me that there is no revolution because there are no barricades, I point to actual battles at Homestead, Pullman, and the rest. If you say that there has been no declaration of war, open war, I shall read you editorials fromThe Appeal to Reason.
"Mind you, I shall not say whether I am enlisted for or against the revolutionary army. But I demand that you look about you and understand the significance of the industrial disturbances and religious unrest of the time. Never till then will you understand anything—certainly not that Shaw is something more than anenfant terrible; Ibsen something more than an ill-natured old man with dyspepsia and a silly lack of interest in skating. Then you will realize that in the most extravagant utterancesof a red-shirted strike-leader there may be more fervent faith and honor, oftentimes, than in the virgin prayers of a girl who devoutly attends Christian Endeavor, but presumes to call Emma Goldman 'that dreadful woman.' Follow the labor-leader. Or fight him, good and hard. But do not overlook him.
"But I must be more systematic. When John Tanner's independent chauffeur, of whom you have—I hope you have—read inMan and Superman——"
Carl looked about. Many were frowning; a few leaning sidewise to whisper to neighbors, with a perplexed head-shake that plainly meant, "I don't quite get that." Wet feet were shifted carefully; breaths caught quickly; hands nervously played with lower lips. The Greek professor was writing something. Carl's ex-room-mate, Plain Smith, was rigid, staring unyieldingly at the platform. Carl hated Smith's sinister stillness.
Professor Frazer was finishing his lecture:
"If it please you, flunk this course, don't read a single play I assign to you, be disrespectful, disbelieve all my contentions. And I shall still be content. But do not, as you are living souls, blind yourself to the fact that there is a world-wide movement to build a wider new world—and that the world needs it—and that in Jamaica Mills, on land owned by a director of Plato College, there are two particularly vile saloons which you must wipe out before you disprove me!" Silence for ten seconds. Then, "That is all."
The crowd began to move hesitatingly, while Professor Frazer hastily picked up his papers and raincoat and hurried out through the door beside the platform. Voices immediately rose in a web of talk, many-colored, hot-colored.
Carl babbled to the man next him, "He sure is broad.He doesn't care whether they're conservative or not. And some sensation at the end!"
"Heh? What? Him?" The sophomore was staring.
"Yes. Why, sure! Whadya mean?" demanded Carl.
"Well, and wha' doyoumean by 'broad'? Sure! He's broad just like a razor edge."
"Heh?" echoed the next man down the row, a Y. M. C. A. senior. "Do you mean to say you liked it?"
"Why, sure! Why not? Didn't you?"
"Oh yes. Yes indeed! All he said was that scarlet women like Emma Goldman were better than a C. E. girl, and that he hoped his students would bluff the course and flunk it, and that we could find booze at Jamaica Mills, and a few little things like that. That's all. Sure! That's the sort of thing we came here to study." The senior was buttoning his raincoat with angry fingers. "That's——Why, the man was insane! And the way he denounced decency and——Oh, I can't talk about it!"
"W-w-w-well by gosh, of all the—the——" spluttered Carl. "You and your Y. M. C. A.—calling yourself religious, and misrepresenting like that—you and your——Why, you ain't worth arguing with. I don't believe you 'came to study' anything. You know it all already." Passionate but bewildered, trying not to injure the cause of Frazer by being nasty, he begged: "Straight, didn't you like his spiel? Didn't it give you some new ideas?"
The senior vouchsafed: "No, 'me and my Y. M.' didn't like it. Now don't let me keep you, Ericson. I suppose you'll be wanting to join dear Mr. Frazer in a highball; you're such a pet of his. Did he teach you to booze? I understand you're good at it."
"You apologize or I'll punch your face off," said Carl. "I don't understand Professor Frazer's principles like I ought to. I'm not fighting for them. Prob'ly would if I knew enough. But I don't like your face. It's too long. It's like a horse's face. It's an insult to Frazerto have a horse-faced guy listen to him. You apologize for having a horse face, see?"
"You're bluffing. You wouldn't start anything here, anyway."
"Apologize!" Carl's fist was clenched. People were staring.
"Cut it out, will you! I didn't mean anything."
"You wouldn't," snapped Carl, and rammed his way out, making wistful boyish plans to go to Frazer with devotion and offers of service in a fight whose causes grew more confused to him every moment. Beside him, as he hurried off to football practice, strode a big lineman of the junior class, cajoling:
"Calm down, son. You can't lick the whole college."
"But it makes me so sore——"
"Oh, I know, but it strikes me that no matter how much you like Frazer, he was going pretty far when he said that anarchists had more sense than decent folks."
"He didn't! You didn't get him. He meant——O Lord, what's the use!"
He did not say another word as they hastened to the gymnasium for indoor practice.
He was sure that they who knew of his partisanship would try to make him lose his temper. "Dear Lord, please just let me take out just one bonehead and beat him to a pulp, and then I'll be good and not open my head again," was his perfectly reverent prayer as he stripped before his locker.
Carl and most of the other substitutes had to wait, and most of them gossiped of the lecture. They all greedily discussed Frazer's charge that some member of the corporation owned saloon lots, and tried to decide who it was, but not one of them gave Frazer credit. Twenty times Carl wanted to deny; twenty times speech rose in him so hotly that he drew a breath and opened his mouth; but each time he muttered to himself: "Oh, shut up! You'll only make 'em worse." Students who had attendedthe lecture declared that Professor Frazer had advocated bomb-throwing and obscenity, and the others believed, marveling, "Well, well, well, well!" with unctuous appreciation of the scandal.
Still Carl sat aloof on a pair of horizontal bars, swinging his legs with agitated quickness, while the others covertly watched him—slim, wire-drawn, his china-blue eyes blurred with fury, his fair Norse skin glowing dull red, his chest strong under his tight football jersey; a clean-carved boy.
The rubber band of his nose-guard snapped harshly as he plucked at it, playing a song of hatred on that hard little harp.
An insignificant thing made him burst out. Tommy La Croix, the French Canuck, a quick, grinning, evil-spoken, tobacco-chewing, rather likeable young thug, stared directly at Carl and said, loudly: "'Nother thing I noticed was that Frazer didn't have his pants pressed. Funny, ain't it, that when even these dudes from Yale get to be cranks they're short on baths and tailors?"
Carl slid from the parallel bars. He walked up to the line of substitutes, glanced sneeringly along them, dramatized himself as a fighting rebel, remarked, "Half of you are too dumm to get Frazer, and the other half are old-woman gossips and ought to be drinking tea," and gloomed away to the dressing-room, while behind him the substitutes laughed, and some one called: "Sorry you don't like us, but we'll try to bear up. Going to lick the whole college, Ericson?"
His ears burned, in the dressing-room. He did not feel that they had been much impressed.
To tell the next day or two in detail would be to make many books about the mixed childishness and heroic fineness of Carl's partisanship; to repeat a thousand rumors running about the campus to the effect that the faculty would demand Frazer's resignation; to explainthe reason why Frazer's charge that a Plato director owned land used by saloons was eagerly whispered for a little while, then quite forgotten, while Frazer's reputation as a "crank" was never forgotten, so much does muck resent the muck-raker; to describe Carl's brief call on Frazer and his confusing discovery that he had nothing to say; to repeat the local paper's courageous reports of the Frazer affair, Turk's great oath to support Frazer "through hell and high water," Turk's repeated defiance: "Well, by golly! we'll show the mutts, but I wish we coulddosomething"; to chronicle dreary classes whose dullness was evident to Carl, now, after his interest in Frazer's lectures.
Returning from Genie Linderbeck's room, Carl found a letter from Gertie Cowles on the black-walnut hat-rack. Without reading it, but successfully befooling himself into the belief that he was glad to have it, he went whistling up to his room.
Ray Cowles and Howard Griffin, those great seniors, sat tilted back in wooden chairs, and between them was the lord of the world, Mr. Bjorken, the football coach, a large, amiable, rather religious young man, who believed in football, foreign missions, and the Democratic party.
"Hello! Waiting for me or the Turk?" faltered Carl, gravely shaking hands all round.
"Just dropped up to see you for a second," said Mr. Bjorken.
"Sorry the Turk wasn't here." Carl had an ill-defined feeling that he wanted to keep them from becoming serious as long as he could.
Ray Cowles cleared his throat. Never again would the black-haired Adonis, blossom of the flower of Joralemon, be so old and sadly sage as then. "We want to talk to you seriously about something—for your own sake. You know I've always been interested in you, and Howard, and course we're interested in you as frat brothers, too.For old Joralemon and Plato, eh? Mr. Bjorken believes—might as well tell him now, don't you think, Mr. Bjorken?"
The coach gave a regally gracious nod. Hitching about on the wood-box, Carl felt the bottom drop out of his anxious stomach.
"Well, Mr. Bjorken thinks you're practically certain to make the team next year, and maybe you may even get put in the Hamlin game for a few minutes this year, and get your P."
"Honest?"
"Yes, if you do something for old Plato, same 's you expect her to do something for you." Ray was quite sincere. "But not if you put the team discipline on the bum and disgrace Omega Chi. Of course I can't speak as an actual member of the team, but still, as a senior, I hear things——"
"How d'you mean 'disgrace'?"
"Don't you know that because you've been getting so savage about Frazer the whole team 's getting mad?" said the coach. "Cowles and Griffin and I have been talking over the whole proposition. Your boosting Frazer——"
"Look here," from Carl, "I won't crawl down on my opinion about Frazer. Folks haven't understood him."
"Lord love you, son," soothed Howard Griffin, "we aren't trying to change your opinion of Frazer. We're, your friends, you know. We're proud of you for standing up for him. Only thing is, now that he's practically fired, just tell me how it's going to help him or you or anybody else, now, to make everybody sore by roasting them because they can't agree with you. Boost; don't knock! Don't make everybody think you're a crank."
"To be frank," added Mr. Bjorken, "you're just as likely to hurt Frazer as to help him by stirring up all this bad blood. Look here. I suppose that if the faculty had already fired Frazer you'd still go ahead trying to buck them."
"Hadn't thought about it, but suppose I would."
"Afraid it might be that way. But haven't you seen by this time about how much good it does for one lone sophomore to try and run the faculty?" It was the coach talking again, but the gravely nodding mandarin-like heads of Howard and Ray accompanied him. "Mind you, I don't mean to disparage you personally, but you must admit that you can't hardly expect to boss everything. Just what good 'll it do to go on shouting for Frazer? Quite aside from the question of whether he is likely to get fired or not."
"Well," grunted Carl, nervously massaging his chin, "I don't know as it will do any direct good—except maybe waking this darn conservative college up a little; but it does make me so dog-gone sore——"
"Yes, yes, we understand, old man," the coach said, "but on the other hand here's the direct good of sitting tight and playing the game. I've heard you speak about Kipling. Well, you're like a young officer—a subaltern they call it, don't they?—in a Kipling story, a fellow that's under orders, and it's part of his game to play hard and keep his mouth shut and to not criticize his superior officers, ain't it?"
"Oh, I suppose so, but——"
"Well, it's just the same with you. Can't you see that? Think it over. What would you think of a lieutenant that tried to boss all the generals? Just same thing.... Besides, if you sit tight, you can make the team this year, I can practically promise you that. Do understand this now; it isn't a bribe; we want you to be able to play anddosomething for old Plato in arealway—in athletics. But you most certainly can't make the team if you're going to be a disorganizer."
"All we want you to do," put in Ray Cowles, "is not to make a public spectacle of yourself—as I'm afraid you've been doing. Admire Frazer all you want to, and talk about him to your own bunch, and don't back down on your own opinions, only don't think you've got to goround yelling about him. People get a false idea of you. I hate to have to tell you this, but several of the fellows, even in Omega Chi, have spoken about you, and wondered if you really were a regular crank. 'Of course he isn't, you poor cheese,' I tell 'em, but I can't be around to answer every one all the time, and you can't lick the whole college; that ain't the way the world does things. You don't know what a bad impression you make when you're too brash. See how I mean?"
As the council of seers rose, Carl timidly said to Ray, "Straight, now, have quite a lot of the fellows been saying I was a goat?"
"Good many, I'm afraid. All talking about you.... It's up to you. All you got to do is not think you know it all, and keep still. Keep still till you understand the faculty's difficulties just a little better. Savvy? Don't that sound fairly reasonable?"
T
hey were gone. Carl was full of the nauseating shame which a matter-of-fact man, who supposes that he is never pilloried, knows when a conscientious friend informs him that he has been observed, criticized; that his enthusiasms have been regarded as eccentricities; his affectionate approaches toward friendship as impertinence.
There seemed to be hundreds of people in the room, nudging one another, waiting agape for him to do something idiotic; a well-advertised fool on parade. He stalked about, now shamefaced, now bursting out with a belligerent, "Aw, rats! I'll show 'em!" now plaintively beseeching, "I don't suppose I am helping Frazer, but it makes me so darn sore when nobody stands up for him—and he teaches stuff they need so much here. Gee! I'm coming to think this is a pretty rough-neck college. He's the first teacher I ever got anything out of—and——Oh, hang it! what 'd I have to get mixed up in all this for, when I was getting along so good? And if it isn't going to help him——"
His right hand became conscious of Gertie's letter crumpled in his pocket. As turning the letter over and over gave him surprisingly small knowledge of its contents, he opened it:
Dear Carl,—You are justsillyto tease me about any bank clerk. I don't like him any more at all and he can go with Linda all he likes, much I care!We are enjoying good health, though it is getting quite cold now and we have the furnace running now and it feels prettygood to have it. We hadsucha good time at Adelaide's party she wore such a pretty dress. She flirted terribly with Joe Jordan though of course you'll call me a cat for telling you because you like her so much better than me & all.Oh I haven't told you the news yet Joe has accepted a position at St. Hilary in the mill there.I have some pretty new things for my room, a beautiful hand-painted picture. Before Joe goes there is going to be a party for him at Semina's. I wish you could come I suppose you have learned to dance well, of course you go to lots of parties at Plato with all the pretty girls & forget all aboutme.I wish I was in Minneapolis it is pretty dull here, & such good talks you and me haddidn'twe!Oh Carl dear Ray writes us you are sticking up for that crazy Professor Frazer. I know it must take lots of courage & I admire youlotsfor it even if Ray doesn't but oh Carl dear if you can't do anygoodby it I hope you won't get everybody talking about you without its doing any good, will you, Carl?I do so expect you to succeed wonderfully & I hope you won't blast your career even to stand up for folks when it's too late & won't do any good.We all expect so much of you—we are waiting! You are our knight & you aren't going to forget to keep your armor bright, nor forget,
Dear Carl,—You are justsillyto tease me about any bank clerk. I don't like him any more at all and he can go with Linda all he likes, much I care!
We are enjoying good health, though it is getting quite cold now and we have the furnace running now and it feels prettygood to have it. We hadsucha good time at Adelaide's party she wore such a pretty dress. She flirted terribly with Joe Jordan though of course you'll call me a cat for telling you because you like her so much better than me & all.
Oh I haven't told you the news yet Joe has accepted a position at St. Hilary in the mill there.
I have some pretty new things for my room, a beautiful hand-painted picture. Before Joe goes there is going to be a party for him at Semina's. I wish you could come I suppose you have learned to dance well, of course you go to lots of parties at Plato with all the pretty girls & forget all aboutme.
I wish I was in Minneapolis it is pretty dull here, & such good talks you and me haddidn'twe!
Oh Carl dear Ray writes us you are sticking up for that crazy Professor Frazer. I know it must take lots of courage & I admire youlotsfor it even if Ray doesn't but oh Carl dear if you can't do anygoodby it I hope you won't get everybody talking about you without its doing any good, will you, Carl?
I do so expect you to succeed wonderfully & I hope you won't blast your career even to stand up for folks when it's too late & won't do any good.
We all expect so much of you—we are waiting! You are our knight & you aren't going to forget to keep your armor bright, nor forget,
Yours as ever,
Gertie.
"Mmm!" remarked Carl. "Dun'no' about this knight-and-armor business. I'd look swell, I would, with a wash-boiler and a few more tons of junk on. Mmm! 'Expect you to succeed wonderfully——' Oh, I don't suppose I had ought to disappoint 'em. Don't see where I can help Frazer, anyway. Not a bit."
The Frazer affair seemed very far from him; very hysterical.
Two of the Gang ambled in with noisy proposals in regard to a game of poker, penny ante, but the thought of cards bored him. Leaving them in possession, one of them smoking the Turk's best pipe, which the Turk had been so careless as to leave in sight, he strolled out on the street and over to the campus.
There was a light in the faculty-room in the Academic Building, yet it was not a "first and third Thursday," dates on which the faculty regularly met. Therefore, it was a special meeting; therefore——
Promptly, without making any plans, Carl ran to the back of the building, shinned up a water-spout (humming "Just Before the Battle, Mother"), pried open a class-room window with his large jack-knife, of the variety technically known as a "toad-stabber" (changing his tune to "Onward, Christian Soldiers"), climbed in, tiptoed through the room, stopping often to listen, felt along the plaster walls to find the door, eased the door open, calmly sat down in the corridor, pulled off his shoes, said, "Ouch, it's cold on the feets!" slipped into another class-room in the front of the building, put on his shoes, crawled out of the window, walked along a limestone ledge one foot wide to a window of the faculty-room, and peeped in.
All of the eleven assistant professors and full professors, except Frazer, were assembled, with President S. Alcott Wood in the chair, and the Greek professor addressing them, referring often to a red-leather-covered note-book.
"Um! Making a report on Frazer's lecture," said Carl, clinging precariously to the rough faces of the stones. A gust swooped around the corner of the building. He swayed, gripped the stones more tightly, and looked down. He could not see the ground. It was thirty-five or forty feet down. "Almost fell," he observed. "Gosh! my hands are chilly!" As he peered in the window again he saw the Greek professor point directly at the window, while the whole gathering startled, turned, stared. A young assistant professor ran toward the door of the room.
"Going to cut me off. Dog-gone it," said Carl. "They'll wait for me at the math.-room window. Hooray! I've started something."
He carefully moved along the ledge to a point half-way between windows and waited, flat against the wall.
Again he glanced down from the high, windy, narrow ledge. "It 'd be a long drop.... My hands are cold.... I could slip. Funny, I ain't really much scared, though.... Say! Where'd I do just this before? Oh yes!" He saw himself as little Carl, lost with Gertie in the woods, caught by Bone Stillman at the window. He laughed out as he compared the bristly virile face of Bone with the pasty face of the young professor. "Seems almost as though I was back there doing the same thing right over. Funny. But I'm not quite as scared as I was then. Guess I'm growing up. Hel-lo! here's our cunning Spanish Inquisition rubbering out of the next window."
The window of the mathematics class-room, next to the faculty-room, had opened. The young professor who was pursuing Carl peppered the night with violent words delivered in a rather pedagogic voice. "Well, sir! We have you! You might as well come and give yourself up."
Carl was silent.
The voice said, conversationally: "He's staying out there. I'll see who it is." Carl half made out a head thrusting itself from the window, then heard, insotto voce, "I can't see him." Loudly again, the pursuing professor yapped: "Ah, I see you. You're merely wasting time, sir. You might just as well come here now. I shall let you stay there till you do." Softly: "Hurry back into the faculty-room and see if you can get him from that side. Bet it's one of the sneaking Frazer faction."
Carl said nothing; did not budge. He peeped at the ledge above him. It was too far for him to reach it. He tried to discern the mass of the ground in the confusing darkness below. It seemed miles down. He did not know what to do. He was lone as a mateless hawk, there on the ledge, against the wall whose stones were pinchingly cold to the small of his back and his spread-eagled arms. He swayed slightly; realized with trembling nausea what would happen if he swayed too much.... He rememberedthat there was pavement below him. But he did not think about giving himself up.
From the mathematics-room window came: "Watch him. I'm going out after him."
The young professor's shoulders slid out of the window. Carl carefully turned his head and found that now a form was leaning from the faculty-room window as well.
"Got me on both sides. Darn it! Well, when they haul me up on the carpet I'll have the pleasure of telling them what I think of them."
The young professor had started to edge along the ledge. He was coming very slowly. He stopped and complained to some one back in the mathematics-room, "This beastly ledge is icy, I'm afraid."
Carl piped: "Look out! Y're slipping!"
In a panic the professor slid back into the window. As his heels disappeared through it, Carl dashed by the window, running sidewise along the ledge. While the professor was cautiously risking his head in the night air outside the window again, gazing to the left, where, he had reason to suppose, Carl would have the decency to remain, Carl was rapidly worming to the right. He reached the corner of the building, felt for the tin water-pipe, and slid down it, with his coat-tail protecting his hands. Half-way down, the cloth slipped and his hand was burnt against the corrugated tin. "Consid'able slide," he murmured as he struck the ground and blew softly on his raw palm.
He walked away—not at all like a melodramatic hero of a slide-by-night, but like a matter-of-fact young man going to see some one about business of no great importance. He abstractedly brushed his left sleeve or his waistcoat, now and then, as though he wanted to appear neat.
He tramped into the telephone-booth of the corner drug-store, called up Professor Frazer:
"Hello? Professor Frazer?... This is one of yourstudents in modern drama. I've just learned—I happened to be up in the Academic Building and I happened to find out that Professor Drood is making a report to the faculty—special meeting!—about your last lecture. I've got a hunch he's going to slam you. I don't want to butt in, but I'm awfully worried; I thought perhaps you ought to know.... Who? Oh, I'm just one of your students.... You're welcome. Oh, say, Professor, g-good luck. G'-by."
Immediately, without even the excuse that some evil mind in the Gang had suggested it, he prowled out to the Greek professor's house and tied both the front and back gates. Now the fence of that yard was high and strong and provided with sharp pickets; and the professor was short and dignified. Carl regretted that he could not wait for the pleasure of seeing the professor fumble with the knots and climb the fence. But he had another errand.
He walked to the house of Professor Frazer. He stood on the walk before it. His shoulders straightened, his heels snapped together, and he raised his arm in a formal salute.
He had saluted the gentleness of Henry Frazer. He had saluted his own soul. He cried: "I will stick by him, as long as the Turk or any of 'em. I won't let Omega Chi and the coach scare me—not the whole caboodle of them. I——Oh, I don'tthinkthey can scare me...."