Part 12 (1/2)
He got up, rubbing his shoulder, wondering at the suspended life in the faces of the other two as they ran down-hill toward him.
”Jiminy,” he said. ”Glad the glider broke the fall. Wish we had time to make a new glider, with wing-warp. Say, we'll be late on the job.
Better beat it P. D. Q.”
The others stood gaping.
CHAPTER VIII
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 ta.s.sels; an ink-spattered wooden table, burnt in small black spots along the edges; a plaster bust of Martha Was.h.i.+ngton 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 soph.o.m.ore 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 surrept.i.tious 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 ch.o.r.es 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 impressive to 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 so _very_ new.
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 wors.h.i.+pingly, 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 a.n.a.lyze the plays of Shaw which I a.s.signed to you. You're supposed to have read them yourselves. I am going to imagine that I am at tea in New Haven, or down in New York, at dinner in the bas.e.m.e.nt 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 const.i.tutes 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.