Part 7 (1/2)

”What do you think it did to mine?” Marty observed quietly. ”I'm still giddy from being relieved of so much money in one operation. And yet I can't see how they get along. Look at the big faculty they have, and all these buildings to keep up and keep going. When I think of how big a dollar seems to me, the tuition looks like the national debt of Mexico; but when I try to figure out how much it costs the college per student, I feel as though I were paying lunch-counter prices for a dining-car dinner. How _do_ they do it, J.W.?”

”Who told you I was to be looked on in the light of a World Almanac, my son? I could give you the answer to that question without getting out of my chair, but for one small difficulty--I just don't know. Tell you what--it's a good question--let's look in the catalogue. I'd like to find information in that volume about something besides the four centuries of study that loom before my freshman eyes.”

So they looked in the catalogue and discovered that Cartwright College had an endowment of $1,750,000, producing an income of about $80,000 a year, and that the churches of its territory gave about $25,000 more.

They learned also that most of the buildings had been provided by friends of the college, with the Carnegie Library mainly the gift of the millionaire ironmaster. They learned also that about $500,000 of the endowment had been raised in the last two years, under the promise of the General Education Board, which is a Rockefeller creation, to provide the last $125,000. The college property was valued at about half a million dollars.

”And there you are, Martin Luther, my bold reformer,” said J.W., cheerfully. ”The people who put up the money have invested about two and a half millions on you and me, and the other five hundred students, say about $250 a year per student. And we pay the rest of what it costs to give us a college career, $125 to $175 a year, depending on our taste in courses. I remember I felt as if the John Wesley Farwell family had almost gone broke when dad signed up for $1,000 on that last endowment campaign. I thought the money gone forever, but I see now he merely invested it. I've come to Cartwright to spend the income of it, and a little more. Five or six people have given a thousand dollars apiece to make a college course possible for each of us. There's some reason in college endowments, after all.”

And Marty said, ”One good I can see in this particular endowment is that anybody but a selfish idiot would be glad to match four years of his life against all the money and work that Christian people have put into Cartwright College.”

”I hope you don't mean anything personal by that remark,” J.W. said, with mock solemnity, ”because I'm inclined to believe you're more than half right. It reminds me again of what Phil Khamis said. I'm beginning to think I'll never have a chance to forget that Greek's Christian remark about Christians.”

By being off at school together J.W. and Marty gave each other unconfessed but very real moral support in those first days when a lone freshman would have known he was homesick.

But another antidote, both pleasant and potent, was supplied by the Epworth League of First Church. It had allied itself with the college Y.M.C.A.--and for the women students, with the Y.W.C.A.--in various ways, but particularly it purposed to see that the first few Sundays were safely tided over.

So the two chums found themselves in one of the two highly attractive study courses which had been put on in partners.h.i.+p with the Sunday school. It was in the early afternoon of one of the early Sundays that J.W. called Marty's attention to a still more alluring opportunity.

”Looky here, Marty, it's raining, I know, but I've a feeling that you'd better not write that letter home until a little further on in the day.

What's to stop us from taking a look at this League fellows.h.i.+p hour we're invited to, and getting a light lunch? We don't need to stay to the League meeting unless we choose, though we're members, you know.”

Marty picked up the card of invitation which J.W. had flipped across the table to him, and read it.

”Well,” he commented, ”it reads all right. Let's try it.”

Out into the rain they went and put in two highly cheerful hours, including one in the devotional meeting, so that when Marty at last sat down to write home, he produced, without quite knowing how, a letter that was vastly more heartening when it reached the farm than it would have been if he had written it before dark.

Joe Carbrook set out for the State University in what was for him a fas.h.i.+on quite subdued. Before his experience at the Inst.i.tute he would have gone, if at all, in his own car, and his arrival would have been notice to ”the sporty crowd” that another candidate for initiation into that select circle had arrived.

But Joe was enjoying the novelty of thinking a little before he acted.

Though he would always be of the irrepressible sort, he was not the same Joe. He had laid out a program which surprised himself somewhat, and astonished most of the people who knew him.

He knew now that he would become, if he could, a doctor; a missionary doctor. No other career entered his mind. He would finish his college work at the State University, and then go to medical school. He would devote himself without ceasing to all the studies he would need. Not for him any social life, any relaxation of purpose. Grimly he told himself that his play days were over. They had been lively while they lasted; but they were done.

Of course that was foolish. If he had persisted in any such scholastic regimen, the effort would have lasted a few days, or possibly weeks; and then in a reaction of disgust he might easily have come to despair of the whole project.

Fortunately for Joe and for a good many other people, his purpose of digging into his books and laboratory work and doggedly avoiding any other interest was tempered by the happenings of the first week.

Doubtless he would have made a desperate struggle, but it would have been useless. Not even conversion can make new habits overnight, and in his first two years at college Joe had been known to teachers and students alike as distinctly a sketchy student, wholly inexpert at concentrated effort.

And so, instead of becoming first a grind and then a discouraged rebel against it all, he had the immense good fortune to be captured by an observant Junior whom he had met while they were both registering for Chemistry III.

”You're new here,” said the Junior, Heatherby by name, ”and I've had two years of it. Maybe you'll let me show you the place. I'm the proud half-owner of a decidedly second-hand 'Hooting Nanny,' you know, and I rather like b.u.mping people around town in it.”

That was the beginning of many things. Joe liked it that Heatherby made no apologies for his car, and before long he discovered that the other half-owner, Barnard, was equally unaffected and friendly. It was something of a surprise, though, to learn that Barnard was not a student, but the youthful-looking pastor of the University Methodist Church, of late known as the Wesley Foundation.

”I'm not up on Methodism as I should be,” said Joe to Barnard, a day or two later, ”and I may as well admit that I never heard before of this Wesley Foundation of yours. Is it a church affair?”

”Well, rather,” Barnard answered. ”It is just exactly that. You know, or could have guessed, that a good many of the students here are from Methodist homes--about a fourth of the whole student body, as it happens. And our church has been coming to see, perhaps a bit slowly, that although the State could not provide any religious influences, and could certainly do nothing for denominational interests, there was all the more reason for the church to do it. That's the idea under the Foundation, so to speak, and the work is now established in nine of the great State Universities.”