Part 14 (1/2)
”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 cla.s.s, 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 partisans.h.i.+p 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 subst.i.tutes 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 attended the 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 subst.i.tutes, 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 subst.i.tutes 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 partisans.h.i.+p; to repeat a thousand rumors running about the campus to the effect that the faculty would demand Frazer's resignation; to explain the 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 h.e.l.l and high water,” Turk's repeated defiance: ”Well, by golly! we'll show the mutts, but I wish we could _do_ something”; to chronicle dreary cla.s.ses 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.
”h.e.l.lo! 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?”