Chapter XX: The Candles Are Lighted 181 (4)

I had come to be so fond of him, it was not long before I decided upon what seemed to be a proper solution. Without a word to Frank, I escaped from college early one afternoon and went downtown to that East Side street where he lived. I found his father in the cellar of the bakery shop which he owned, his beard all whitened with flour dust, his thin, bare arms thick with the paste of dough.

With rehearsed gesticulations I made him understand what I offered. My own father had left me fairly well off; I wanted to lay out the money which would be necessary to afford Frank a college education. They could pay it back when they pleased--not for many years would I need it.

I had a distinct surprise, then. My generosity was taken somewhat aback by the man's apparent anger. He seemed to be resenting any suggestion of charity. I tried to assure him that this was not what I intended, but he did not understand. At length we had to call in one of the bakery's oven-tenders to act as interpreter. And through this third party Mr. Cohen thanked me kindly. He appreciated all I offered, but he had long ago made arrangements for Frank.

"And what are those arrangements?" I asked anxiously, picturing the boy at work in this dark, mouldy cellar.

"It is a secret," said Mr. Cohen. "But it is time now for me to disclose what his mother and I have planned for him. For ten years we have saved. And we have saved enough to send him to college. He shall go there and we ourselves shall send him." He drew himself up as he said it, so that I had a glimpse of that pride which all Jewish fathers seem to take in hardships which they undergo for their children. "It is so with the son of the president of my synagogue," he said. "It shall be no less so with my son, either. He shall have what his father could not have, though his father starve and slave to give it to him!"

The dull interpreter gave me this in flat, spiritless tones; but I could see the clenched hands and the earnest face of Mr. Cohen, and I nodded quickly.

"I am very glad," I told him. "And I know it will mean ten times more in happiness to you because you are giving him all this with your own hands. Frank said to me he dared not ask it of you--he thought the sacrifice too great--and that is why I came to you with my offer. Do not think me rude, therefore."

He answered gravely. I was not rude, he assured me, and he owed me deep thanks. He had only one favor to ask; that I should not tell Frank the secret, but would leave it and the joy that it would bring, for him, his father. He would tell him immediately after Frank had returned home from his stay at my apartment.

I hurried home, for it was now nearly suppertime. To my amazement I found Frank sitting in the lobby of the apartment, his old suitcase beside him, his look one of fevered disconsolement.

"What's the trouble?" I asked him.

"Oh, I just wanted to say goodby to you," he said hurriedly. "I did not want to go without doing that. I've--I've had a pleasant time."

"But why are you going?"

"Oh, I want to be home ... you know, I get a little homesick." But he said it so stumblingly that I was sure he was not telling me all.

"Frank," I demanded, "tell me the truth. Has anything gone wrong? I had hoped you would stay until my aunt returned."

He laughed at that, and mystified me the more. "Have any of the servants offended you in any way?" I asked, searching my brain for some reason for his change of attitude.

"The servants? Oh, no, of course not!" He picked up his suitcase and started for the street. "Well, goodby," he said. He stopped as if he wanted to explain, then thought better--or worse--of it, and went on. I was a little nettled by this time, and let him go.

As I went up in the elevator, it seemed to me a mighty mystery. But no sooner had I let myself into the apartment than I was due for a bigger surprise.

For there, blocking the hallway, a figure of offended pride, stood Aunt Selina.

I went to her to kiss her, but she stepped back and glared into my face.

"It's a lucky thing I came back unexpectedly," she said. "The idea of finding a little Jew boy like that in my room--sitting in my own bedroom with his copy books spread all over my directoire desk! A common little boy with an accent!"

I saw it all, now.

"That boy was one of my best friends," I told her as calmly as I could. "Had I thought you would have objected to his presence here, I would never have invited him to stay with me for these weeks."

"Weeks? What, you have had that little East Side creature here for weeks?" She began to walk up and down the hall in feline fury. "Haven't you any idea of what is proper? Here I go away with some of the most cultured and well-known society people in New York--an absolute triumph--and you use my home as a refuge for nasty little scum of the slums. It isn't bad enough for you to spend your summer in such disgusting company. You have to cap it all by bringing them up into my own home. Think of the disgrace it would mean if any of these new friends of mine were to discover it!"

"I have my own friends to consider," I told her patiently. "And this boy is one of them. What did you tell him?"

"Tell him? What should I tell him?" She made a great show of shuddering. "I told him to get out. To--to get out as fast as he could."

I looked at her evenly for as long a while as she could stand it. Then her miserable pose gave way to pettishness, and she cried:

"And what's more, you'll have to get out yourself, if you insist on trying any more of these outrageous things. I can't bear it, that's all. You'll have to get out before you disgrace me!"

"I shall," I agreed, and, passing her, went into my own room and began to pack.

We had a silent, sullen supper. At the end of it I told her that my clothes were packed and that I intended moving on the morrow to Trevelyan's empty suite, up at college. I would take none of the furniture from my room, however, since I did not wish to inconvenience her. I would not trouble her at all after tonight.

She may have thought this was pure bragging, she may have been reconciled to it. At any rate she made no answer, and let me go to my room without a word of comment.

And it was only two weeks later, when I was comfortably settled in my room on the campus, that I received a stormy letter from her, calling me a "most ungrateful monster of a nephew."

XV

COLLEGE LIFE

Across the hall from Trevelyan's rooms lived one of the college "grinds." Now that I had moved there and came and went at all hours of the day, I saw this man often.

Fallon--that was his name--stood fully six-feet four, and had about a thirty-two-inch waist. He stooped until his thin shoulder blades were at directly right angles to each other. He would never talk to any one he met on his way; his nose was always deep in the book which he held outspread. He was the most ferocious grind I have ever known.

Next to Fallon lived Waters, a cheery, well-dressed little person, who had pink cheeks and no disturbing thoughts. Waters was a member of one of the minor fraternities; he spoke longingly of the day when he would be living in his "chapter lodge." Waters was easy company. He had four hundred "friends" around the campus, and when I met him was engaged in capitalizing on those friendships by canvassing votes for his election to a team managership.

That perhaps is why he came into my room so often to sit and chat pleasantly, lightly, about almost every topic known to the college man. He was very much of a type. There were at least thirty other men in that class who were like him, no better nor worse, nor more nor less attractive than he was. Popularity was an end and a means with him. It was all he wanted of college.

"Well, how are you, old top?" was the greeting that came singing from his room, each time I passed its open door. It was a door perennially open, lest some passerby might escape without the greeting.

"D'you know, old chap," he'd say, sweeping into my room in the midst of a study-hour and slumping down upon the divan with a great show of silk socks and shirtings, "it's high time you and I did something for that 'grind' across the hall."

He was tremendously interested in Fallon, it would appear. Not personally, he explained to me--but just because Fallon might become a valuable friend in time. A college man needed friends--and he, Waters, had only four hundred of them!

Fallon, however, had something of his own opinion about it. He went about the building with his book before him, bowing neither to me nor Waters nor any one else. It was dreadful to have to speak to him. He could scarcely answer; his big Adam's-apple would go juggling painfully up and down, and finally he would succeed in emitting a barely audible whisper. He would blush, stammer, clap his mouth shut, then hurry away.

That was Fallon, worst of "grinds." He was beginning to be the butt of all sorts of miserable jokes. Even the freshmen over-stepped the line to make fun of him. For, like Waters and myself, he was a sophomore.

In the guise of helping a classmate, Waters took charge of him. He gave him nightly lectures in cordiality, in self-confidence, in the bettering of one's appearance. Once, when I chanced to go by, I heard him delivering glib advice upon what "Fallon, old top" ought to eat, in order that he might grow stouter and more favorable to look upon. And Fallon sat through it all and clutched his bony knees and grinned the grin of the helpless.

But one day, the story goes, he surprised Waters by finding his voice--and a very full-toned, convincing voice it proved to be, not at all like his usual whisper. And he told Waters to keep out of his room in study hour; he told him that he did not care to have his chances of becoming class valedictorian spoiled through having to divert his attention and listen to such superficial tommy-rot. And he told him to keep himself away, now and forever more, from his room and its owner.

"Oh, very well!" I heard the injured Waters say. A second later he had come across into my room and was pouring into my ear a complaint concerning the beggarly rudeness of that "grind, Fallon, who never would amount to anything in the college world, anyhow!"

He had just returned from a very important meeting, he told me, for the express purpose of having that heart-to-heart talk with Fallon--and the big, uncouth beggar didn't appreciate it at all. No wonder some fellows never did get along in college--and here he was, absent from this most important meeting, with no results at all.

He didn't mind telling me--(here his voice died down into an impressive whisper)--that it was from a fraternity meeting he had come. They were great things, these fraternity meetings. It was really too bad that I had never been able to join a fraternity--but then, of course, I must realize that fraternities had to draw the line somewhere! Now, I mustn't take that as a reflection on me personally--because it wasn't. I was all right, I was--and some day, he was sure, I was going to be a big man in the college world--bigger than he himself ever hoped to be. But Jews were a funny people--and I must admit, if I wanted to be fair, that some of them weren't fit to come to college at all, not to speak of joining fraternities.

And so he went on, until, thoroughly nauseated by the bland niceness of his speech, I followed Fallon's example and threw him out, though he refused to be insulted at this move, and promised to come around the next night and discuss the question of who should be elected our next football manager.

A little while after he was gone, Fallon came across the hall and knocked at my door. It was a timid, scared sort of a knock, and it needed a loud and repeated, "Come in," before he finally obeyed my summons.

He was pitifully wrought up over the incident. He had wanted to be polite to Waters, but he had had to study. He hadn't wanted to insult him, but somehow Waters never did understand how valuable time was, and what it would mean to Fallon's mother if he could come out a valedictorian at the end of our four years.

"Which would you rather have," I asked him, "a valedictory or a friend?"

He stammered a good deal over it. He knew that Waters was right about that: he did not have a single friend in the whole college--didn't know how to go about it--but he didn't want such men as Waters trying to teach him the way either.

That began my friendship for Fallon. I had acquaintances enough on the campus, but I was almost as friendless as he--for friendlessness, I think, is not so much a matter of other people's as of one's own habit of mind. And there was something so grotesquely miserable about his loneliness--something so like a grinning gargoyle, solitary in its elevation--that I was drawn to him without much conscious effort.

I began by taking him for long walks. It was the first exercise of any sort, outside of the required freshman gymnasium course, which he had had in college. At first he would not talk at all; would just walk beside me through the city's fringes into the half-suburban roads, his eyes drinking in the green vistas as if they were astounding novelties, his breath coming fast with exertion, his cheeks glowing with new color. Gradually I urged him into talking--and, like all beginners, he talked of himself entirely. It was good for him. The more he spoke of himself, the more highly he thought of himself. He needed pride.

I had already been elected an editor of the college joke paper. I was qualified, therefore, to persuade Fallon to contribute what he could to that periodical. But he had not a jot of humor, and his contributions turned out to be very long and serious bits of verse in studied French rhyme schemes. I did not even risk reading them at a meeting of the board, but always turned them over to Trevelyan who could have them used in the coming issue of the other magazine, the literary monthly. This set Fallon writing entirely for the "lit," as we called it--and, as a result, when the elections to that paper were announced in the middle of the sophomore year, Fallon's name and mine stood together.

But the happiest inspiration came to me one Sunday when at noon Fallon and I were resting atop the Palisades, whither we had gone upon an all-day tramp. I watched him pick up a flat rock and sent it sailing out and down through space. His long thin arm gave the toss a surprising power.

I asked him, had he ever seen a discus. He said, "No."

The next day I had overcome all his scruples as to the immodesty of a track costume and had led him out upon the field to practice with the discus. It was hard work, because he was by far the clumsiest man I have ever known. Later on I interested the old coach on his behalf. Before Thanksgiving Fallon gave promise of becoming one of the college's best discus throwers.

When winter began, I took him down to the gymnasium. At first I had in mind only to keep him in good condition; but his handling of the heavy medicine ball gave me another idea. I put him to work with a basketball--and here the training I had given the young boys at the settlement served me in good stead. He was so tall, he need only swing up his arms to drop the ball into the basket. He was the ideal build for a "center," and our 'varsity team needed a center.

He did not make the 'varsity--not that year, anyhow. But he did make our class team, and won his numerals.

Also when spring came in, he was chosen as one of the track team's discus throwers. Add to this the fact that he had lately been elected to the board of the literary monthly, and it will be seen that Fallon had had a skyrocket rise. No wonder that Waters, the genial, now forgot that autumn affront and paid nightly visits upon his particular friend Fallon. And Fallon, of course, having had his attention diverted into so many foreign channels, no longer cared so singularly for his studies, but was willing to receive Waters and such as Waters with an ever-increasing cordiality.

The inevitable happened. Fallon, exhibiting his latest development--a full-sized, roistering swagger--came into my room one evening and told me jubilantly that he was pledged to join Waters' fraternity.

"It's not the best in college," he admitted loftily, "but it'll tone up a bit when I get the track captaincy and Waters gets elected to a managership."

"And how about that senior year valedictory?" I asked him.

"Oh, I was a fool in those days, wasn't I?"

He mistook my silence. "Say, old chap," he went on, "this is no time for you to be jealous of me. I know well enough, you ought to be in a fraternity--in the very best one. I wish I could get you into ours--but, say, you know how it is about Jews."

Yes, I knew, I assured him, and gave him the heartiest hand-clasp I could manage.

"You know, my mother's going to be awfully proud of this," he exclaimed huskily.

But though Waters did succeed in winning himself a team managership, Fallon never became the captain of the track team. For his election to that fraternity meant his ruin. He lost his grip upon everything. Perhaps it was his fellow-members, perhaps he had only himself to blame. He began to drink. At the end of junior year he was expelled from college.

And I wondered if the mother, who had wanted him to be the class valedictorian, was as proud of him as ever.

XVI

THE HUN'S INVASION

So far in my college course I had met with actually little outspoken insult. Once or twice in my freshman year some loutish sophomore had not stopped at making comments upon my religion. There had been that incident at Trevelyan's fraternity house, too. But, generally speaking, the prejudice had been of a negative sort, restricting rather than driving--though none the less offensive and chafing on that account. There was nothing on which I could actually lay my finger to complain. I had no actual proof that I had been kept off any college organization because of my religion. I might have had, had I cared at the time to follow up the favoritism shown in the dramatic society--but that was a small affair, by now, and I preferred to let it rest forgotten.

Otherwise, I was treated with a fair amount of kindness by almost all of the college. The members of my own class, in which I was gradually acquiring such positions as work and merit could win me, had begun to show me a good, clean respect; and those in the class above soon followed their lead. All that I asked was fair play, and the chance to overcome that handicap which I knew existed. This was easier, now that I lived at college, and I gave to the various activities in which I was interested, all the spare time which I could afford from my studies. I was beginning to realize what that preachment meant: "The college will give you back all that you give to it in work."

Thus, at the end of my sophomore year, when I again went to the settlement for the summer, I was planning big and enthusiastic things for the autumn term.

Mr. Richards placed me in charge of one of the settlement's fresh-air camps, up the state. I had two other boys to help me in my work, and one of them was Frank Cohen. It had taken me a long time to overcome Frank's sensitiveness, after his encounter with my aunt; but we were fast friends again now, and it was good to have him with me where I could help him with his daily noon-time studying for his "preliminaries." When the fall came, he passed them easily--and it was now definitely decided that he would enter my college when I was a senior.

My own return to the university, however, gave me an unpleasant shock. I had arrived a few days late, because I had wanted to help Mr. Richards with some of his coming year's programs. The campus was already alive and crowded, therefore, and the dormitory windows were all thrown open and overflowing with the rugs and chair cushions of autumn cleaning. The campus teemed with a thousand youths who grasped each other cordially by the wrist and went through all sorts of contortions to prove that they "were glad to see you, old man!"

But there was a difference! The first glimpse I had of it, I called myself a self-conscious fool. I tried to reassure myself, everybody's greeting had been as cordial as I could expect. Everybody had said he was glad to see me--and--yet!

Then, the second day that I was at college, I had my first proof of the truth of my suspicions. I had it through eavesdropping--but I was justified. For I heard little Waters, the genial popularist, talking of it to another classmate in front of the laboratory steps.

"It's a rotten shame," he was declaiming. "Haven't you noticed? I don't see how it could escape you! Jews and Jews! The freshman class is just swarming with 'em!"

"What? Really?"

"Honestly. If there's one Jew in the freshman class, there are fifty. And such Jewy-looking Jews!"

"Gee whizz, it's a disgrace. It was bad enough when they used to come in four or five--or even ten--in a class. But fifty! Are there really fifty?"

"Oh, easily! Maybe a hundred--I don't know. They are swarming all over the place! Gosh, we'll have to do something to get rid of them. It just simply ruins the college name to have so many of them around."

"You bet! A campaign for ours!"

I watched them going off together, arm in arm, towards "fraternity row"--and wondered what that campaign would be.

It did not take me long to investigate the real state of affairs. There were some thirty members of the freshman class listed in the dean's office under the designation of "Jew," "Hebrew" or "Ethical Culturist." And the faces that I met under freshman caps were certainly Semitic, to a large percentage.

At first it annoyed me. Annoyed me more, too, when the first member of the freshman class to be expelled for ungentlemanly conduct was a Jew. There were one or two others, I noticed, who would sooner or later reach the same end if they did not keep away from the city at night--and from the things the city teaches.

These one or two gradually became scape-goats for the rest of the Jewish boys in the class. They were sons of rich fathers; they paraded their automobiles about the campus--and thus broke the rule number one in the "freshman bible." They had unbridled tongues, and used them ungraciously. One of them, a big, swaggering chap, "went out" for his class football team--and, having been selected to play in a minor game, developed a dying aunt overnight and disappeared for the day. When he came back, on Sunday night, he was caught and hazed. His automobile was dumped on its side in the middle of the campus. His face, when I saw him the next day, was a network of plaster strips. Three days after that he left college--and I, for one, was devoutly thankful for his resigning. He did not belong in our college, had done nothing to fit himself into its environment, had talked loudly, acted the cad and the coward--and had reaped the reward of such a person, Jew or Gentile, in whatever community.

The persecution--for it had taken on proportions worthy of that name--went forward, however. There was an annual "freshman parade," for instance, when the entering class was dressed in grotesque costumes and sent marching in and out a lane of laughing spectators to the football field. In my own freshman year this was a good-natured affair--and each class, including the victimized one, took it for the boisterous joke that it was.

But this year, when the parade was starting at the gymnasium, and the big, card-board placards were being lifted to the marchers' shoulders, I noticed that all the Jewish boys were being put conspicuously into one group. They would march together. And those placards! The sickening succession of them was only a repetition of "Oi oi" and the pawnbroker's symbol--and humor of that high order. And these Jewish freshmen went down the street amid the jeering--and I had to stand by and see them, some with heads high and eyes blazing with pride, others stumbling and bowed, one of them with tears running inanely down his cheeks--had to stand there and watch it all, and curse myself for a coward because I would not, could not, go out into the middle of the road and tear down, one by one, the daubed, cheap jests that they had to carry.

A few weeks later there was another such celebration. There were speeches to be made. The class wits--and what class is without them?--were to have their turn.

And their wit--what did it consist of? One after another, they made blunt, exaggerated references to the "invasion of the Huns," to the "Jews coming unto Jordan," to "the lost Ten Tribes ..." and hoots of applause went up to the night sky like the roar of a Philistine army!

One of the men who spoke was a classmate of mine--a fellow-member of the joke paper's board. I knew him well, for he had been to see me often. It was only a few nights ago that he had told me he was chosen to speak at this celebration, and had promised me he would make no reference to the Jewish influx.

"I don't agree with you about it," he had said. "You're too sensitive, all you Jews--and anyhow, you know perfectly well we're not aiming this campaign at you personally. It's against this big bunch of them in the freshman class."

"So it's a regular campaign, is it?" I demanded.

He evaded the question--but satisfied me with his promise.

But when I heard him break it--heard him, more than any other speaker, launch one smiling epithet after another against the "sons of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob," I lost all the gnawing consciousness that I had had as to the justice of this remark about Jewish sensitiveness--and I went forward to the cart-end from which he was speaking. I meant to pull him down and get up there in his place, and to speak hotly, straight from the shoulder--I didn't care what I said so long as I put them all to disgrace!

But when I was within a few feet of him in the jostling, laughing crowd, I could go no further. I tried to cry out, but that was denied me. My courage gave me only the power to glare and sneer at him--and once, as he spoke, he looked down and saw my face, I think. For his own grew paler in the light of the gas lantern which flared windily beside him, and he faltered in his speech.

Later on he came over to my room and asked to speak to me. I heard him through; listened to his smooth explanation about the committee of arrangements demanding that he put something into his speech about the Jews--and he was sorry he had broken his word to me--only, of course, I was to consider myself an exception to all this sort of thing. Everybody knew I was a good fellow and was doing bully work for the name of the college--and what right had I to class myself with these insignificant little Jews in the Freshman class? and he didn't want it to break up our friendship, because he thought the world of me.

And so I showed him the door.

The next day I began to pay for that stroke of arrogance. The classmates who belonged to that man's fraternity snubbed me on the street.

It didn't matter much, I thought--but in reality, it did. Because these men, as it happened, had been my closest friends. I was beginning to worry myself into a maudlin state, and no doubt did attribute hostility to altogether too many of the undergraduates. But it is hard to choose and distinguish surely in a land that is generally hostile and strange. I began to stay more and more within the shelter of my room, working at my studies and at those activities which had already given me recognition. I wanted to be plucky about it. I wanted to keep on smiling--but there were times, I must confess, when I wished that I were through with college and all its rough-and-tumble boyishness.

I did not care so much myself. There were all these freshmen who were probably ten times lonelier than I was, ten times more bewildered and disheartened by the welcome they had had. I tried to visit as many of them as lived in dormitories. I wanted to talk things over with them, to help them in some possible way. But it wasn't much of a success--I could make no progress out of condonement and asking them to wait patiently until the foolish campaign had dwindled away.

Then, one day, as I crossed the campus to a first recitation, I saw that the brick walls of the oldest of the dormitories had been adorned with huge painted letters:

"OUT WITH THE JEWS."

I went into a telephone booth and called up the house of one of the professors with whom I had become friendly. He was a kindly, well-meaning man, and an alumnus of the college.

His telephone line was busy when I called it. I heard him talking with some one. I was about to ring off when suddenly I heard my own name mentioned.

The professor was an alumnus member of one of the college fraternities. And this other man--evidently an undergraduate, though I never tried to identify him--was asking the professor what he thought of offering me an election to this fraternity.

And I heard the professor sigh in his patient way.

"I like him--I like him very much, mind you," I heard him say, "but--er, er--I do think it would be disastrous--nothing short of disastrous to elect a Jew to any of our fraternities in the present situation."

I rang off. It was something to know that I was even being considered for membership--but it was disastrous, that was all--disastrous!

When I was out upon the campus again I saw that painters were already at work obliterating the sign. They had whitewashed the "_Out With the_" away, and there was nothing left upon the wall but a huge, red

"JEWS."

And thank God, I could laugh at the incident!

XVII

MANY IMPULSES

Fair play comes first--and reasoning follows it. For fair play is always an impulse. It comes when least expected.

That is how it was at the university. The incident of the big, painted sign was practically the last demonstration against the influx of Jewish boys. Waters, who made capital of everything, attempted to found a formal organization dignified by the title of the Anti-Hebrew Collegiate League, but when, at the first meeting, he was not elected to the presidency, abandoned the project with bitter complaints against the ingratitude of his fellow members. A little later on, when the tide had turned in the opposite direction, he became the head of the Helping Hand League, and was atop the wave of contrition.

For the tide did turn. Men are always afraid to carry their propaganda beyond the point of the ridiculous. When tomfoolery turns to foolishness its perpetrators are only too anxious for a chance to abandon it.

It was impossible to keep the thing out of the newspapers. The day after that sign incident, there was a lurid story to be read at each of the city's breakfast tables and in the evening subways. New York took it up and made it a matter of shocked debate for a day and a half. The president of the university, in his quarterly sermon in chapel, spoke fervently of toleration and the gentle spirit.

The reaction was almost as hysterical as the movement itself. The little Jewish freshmen--timid, frightened little mice, who had been going about their classroom work and scurrying home and out of reach for so many months--suddenly found themselves lauded as martyrs, as the best of fellows.

One evening a deputation of them were waiting for me when I came in from supper. They had formed a Jewish fraternity, and wished me to join with them. Appeal to a Jewish philanthropist had brought them enough money to lease a house near the campus. They were sure that they would have sanction and support from the rest of the college, now that the prejudice had abated. And since they could not join any of the other fraternities, why should they not have one of their own?

I thought it over carefully. I wanted to be fair to myself as well as to them. That same old repugnance of being identified with a distinctly Jewish propaganda troubled me and made me turn from them. And yet it wasn't only that, either. For when I thought it out, I knew that, according to my point of view, theirs was not the proper solution. Fire can fight fire, perhaps--in proverbs, anyhow--but discrimination is not to be overpowered by a like amount of secularity. If Jewish college men objected to that unwritten rule of fraternities; if they contended that fraternities should be democratic; if they wanted equal rights in those fraternities ... how, then, were they justified in standing apart and founding a fraternity of their own--a brotherhood which should be open only to Jews?

That is what I thought. I may have been wrong--and the excellent records of the Jewish fraternity chapters in various colleges and universities do perhaps prove me wrong--but I could not bring myself to join them. I was heartily glad the whole heated question of race and race prejudice was abated. I asked, for myself, only that I be given something of the fair-play that other men had. I was working hard for the college. I was doing all that my talents enabled me to do and I was sure that, sooner or later, there would be the reward.

This reward did come, definitely. It came at the end of May when, at the height of the reaction against the whole year of prejudice, I was chosen for the college senior society. It was a public election, held on the afternoon of one of the most important baseball games. There were crowds to watch the ceremony--students and graduates, young girls and parents ... so that the memory of the green campus and the banks of pretty gowns and parasols, the sunshine and the cheering will be with me till I die. I remember that there were tears in my eyes as I was chosen ... and that there came to me, with all the cool freshness of the spring winds, the thought that this was the end, the salvation from out of all the year's mean, squalid troubles. Here was I, a Jew, raised above all the other Jews who had ever entered this college ... raised among the highest, to be a power in the land, to be the champion of all those who had suffered, the winner through hardship and handicap, a vindicated Dreyfus, an example to all the lower classes.... For, at twenty-one, alas, we are our own best heroes, and none can take our place!

College closed in a blaze of glory for me. There was even a note from Aunt Selina Haberman, wishing me well of this new honor and informing me that "Mrs. Fleming-Cohen, when she heard it, was green with envy!" Aunt Selina wanted to know, was I going to be a wicked boy, however, and stay away from her all next year, too. She was sure that, now I had won out, we could get along much more smoothly than we had.

I fear I began to think a little too highly of my position in the community. I was now capable of going to no less a person than the dean of the college and talking over with him, as if man to man, the possibility of an anti-Jewish agitation, the next year, and demanding in none too deferential tones that, should it come, the college authorities must do their share to stamp it out.

"Really, Mr.-er-er-,--what's your name?"

I told him very slowly, but it did not mean much to him. I rather pitied the old gentleman for not paying more attention to the undergraduate contests and triumphs.

But he did hear me out, and gave me information which I thought worth acting on. The large majority of the Jewish boys in the freshman class had prepared for college at one school--a large private preparatory school in New York City. Perhaps it would be as well, suggested the dean, for me to go to the principal of this school and talk things over with him.

"Do you mean, I should warn him against sending so many of his boys to our college?" I asked.

The dean appeared dreadfully shocked. "Oh, no--dear me, no. That wouldn't do at all. Only--well, it seems that this school caters almost entirely to the sons of wealthy Jewish men--and that this principal is very fond of our college ... and so he grievously sends us all the boys that he can. You know, so many boys don't know where to go to college--and the principal often has a chance to suggest one, don't you see!"

The dean had a very sober face, but his eyes were twinkling. It relieved me to know, he was not taking this principal's bad judgment too seriously.

"So you think it would be wiser if there weren't so many Jewish boys in next year's entering class?"

"Precise--oh, no, I shouldn't dare say that, even if I thought so. Remember, I am in an official capacity here. But come around to my house tonight, when I've doffed my scholastic robe and am in my shirt sleeves--and perhaps I'll tell you, then, the name of that principal."

I did not even bother to do this. Without waiting for further advice, I went down to this school to beard the foolish principal in his den.

It was a hard matter to work my way into his presence. He had an office and inner office, and stenographers to guard them both. I wrote on my card, however, that I wished to speak to him regarding affairs at my college, and evidently piqued his curiosity to the extent of his giving me the interview.

In that inner office I found a youngish man whose face was adorned with a heavy black beard. He seemed strangely familiar, but I could not place him.

"Come in," he said, looking hard at me. His restless eyes did not leave my face all the while I was talking.

"What is it you want me to do?" he asked me when I had given him some stumbling hint of my mission.

"I think you ought to keep Jewish boys out of my college," I told him. "It--it isn't altogether fair, and it would only provoke a renewal of the prejudice, if there should be as many freshmen next year as there were this."

"You are a Jew yourself," he said accusingly.

"Yes, I am. But don't judge by me.... I have always been an exception to all that prejudice."

"Oh, have you? I wonder why?"

I resented his tone, but went on to explain how I had entered college long before the antagonism had broken out; had worked hard, with Christian friends to help me, until I had won honors which assured me immunity from any unpleasantness.

"I congratulate you," he said dryly. "You no doubt deserve these honors. Your sort always does."

I stood up angrily and looked him square in the face. Then suddenly I recognized him.... Pictures of my public school days came up before me.... The class room and the big, crippled bully, Geoghen.... That finding of the Hebrew prayer book when the teacher was out of the room, and the hooting and mocking ... and then the teacher's return--and the fight.

It was Mr. Levi.

He smiled when he saw that I knew him, now. "I remembered you more readily," he said. "You have no beard to change your appearance." But it was more than his beard: there was a complete change in him from the dreamy, pale young man who had learned so harsh a lesson in those old days. There was a bitter twist to his mouth. His lips were set sternly, his eyebrows were lowered, his brow crossed by scowling lines.

"There's one thing about you that I remember," he snapped at me. "You were a Jew--and yet you stood aside and let those little cads take the book of God and make nasty fun of it--and never raised your hand or even your voice to stop them. That's the sort of boy you were. And, I suppose, you're still the same. It'd seem so, anyhow. You probably won all your college honors through standing aside. And now you have the audacity to ask me to do the same, lest you be made uncomfortable by the number of other Jewish boys at your college. You want me to stand aside, do you? Well, I wish I had a thousand Jewish boys to enter into your college's next year's class!"

He glared at me. "If you want to know the truth, I can't get a single boy in my school to go to your college, now. I wish I could. Because I'm training them to fight like men. They aren't the sort who win honors by allowing themselves to be classed as exceptions...."

As for myself, I knew that he was half wrong, half right--and that there was nothing more for me to say. I had learned what I came to learn. So I got up to go.

"And if there's another such demonstration, next year," he sneered, "you and your precious honors will have to stand aside again, eh? It must keep you very light on your feet!"

XVIII