Chapter XL (2)

“I must have been asleep, Thropper. The sounds sent me off.”

“You were homesick, I’ll bet,” he laughed. “That’s a fine description of it.”

“It wouldn’t be surprising, would it?” I asked.

“Not a bit,” he said, “but you just wait till you get to know the folks about here, and you’ll get over that.”

“Did you have a good service, Thropper?”

“Oh, fair,” he replied. “Fair. Miss Ebberds didn’t particularly like the sermon.”

“But she enjoyed the walk to and from it,” I laughed.

“Well,” he said earnestly, “I know I did.”

While he was preparing himself for bed, he said,

“When I went out I forgot to tell you about the Scroll. You might have had a good time with it. Have you ever seen one?”

“Scroll?”

“Yes.”

“What is it?”

Thropper plunged into the heart of his trunk again, and this time extracted a black, leather case. He opened the front, turned a knob and unfolded a scriptural panorama of chromo pictures, depicting the thrilling events which took place in Eden, first of all, and then continuing through the murder of Abel to the Flood.

“I was agent for this last summer,” said Thropper. “Look through it, Priddy, it’s quite interesting.”

The Scroll had unfolded to Sinai accompanied by a running comment by Thropper, which, itself, was a panorama of the exciting adventures of a Scroll agent, when he heaved a sigh and said,

“Oh, um!”

I looked up in time to see him throw himself on his knees at the bed-side, to bend his head in a cup made by his hands, for his evening prayer.

The Scroll brought before me the Tabernacle, the Temple, the victory of David over the Giant in the midst of a profound silence. Thropper was still engaged in his devotions as devoutly, as deeply, as any Augustinian monk. The panorama of the Divine Plan unfolded the adventures which befell the prophets and came at last to the Birth of Christ, when I looked around again to find Thropper still kneeling at the bed-side. To me it was a display of the prayer-spirit unusual and I was just investing my roommate with all the pious dignity of a Saint, when a loud, long-drawn snore came from him. He had fallen asleep! I shook him. He drawled, as he crept into bed,

“I’m glad you wakened me, Priddy. I fall asleep quite often. One night I nearly got frozen to death. I didn’t have a roommate. Thanks. Turn off the light, won’t you.”

After the Crucifixion I closed the Scroll and snuggled into bed with Thropper. My first day in Evangelical University had ended.

_Chapter IV. Thundering Gymnastics. How to Keep on the Good Side of the Young Women with Scriptural Quotations. The Establishment of Friendship. Carrying Water for Beauty. How Music may be Something More than Music. The Wonderful, Austere Man that Thropper Led me to_

I linked myself to the following day’s life by clutching the gaudy comforter in both my hands while I sat up in bed, startled by a thundering that shook Pungo Hall.

“What’s--that?” I gasped, turning towards Thropper, expecting to discover that the vibrations had brought him up in alarm.

“It’s only ‘Budd’ doing his gymnastics,” he muttered, drowsily, “what time?”

“Six.”

“Better get up and go over to the dining-room at half-past,” he explained. “Say,” he added, lifting up his head, “you wouldn’t mind letting me know at twenty minutes past, would you, Priddy?”

“Not at all, Thropper.” He dropped half under the clothes and in a surprising manner was soon invested in all the dignity of thorough repose.

From that moment until the clamor of the rising bell, at half-past six, the heart of Pungo Hall was turned into a huge alarm clock, for first in this corner, then in that, on this floor and then on that, intermittent clatterings of clocks brought intermittent yawns and mutterings as the different students were signalled by their unsleeping timepieces. Every noise seemed to pierce from room to room as if it went through telegraphic sounding boards. Splashings, jumpings, muttered prayers, readings aloud, animated conversations: these increased as half-past six drew near. The Monday morning, with its new week of study, demanding a fresh enthusiasm after the Sabbath’s interruption, was not being approached in any business manner. Over the banister, leading to the top floor, a voice exclaimed, so that all could hear, “Say, Headstone, how fine you looked last night with Her!” To which an answer came from a suddenly opened door, “Thank you!” Then over that banister, into the laundry basket, in a dark corner of the hall, the bed wash was hurled accompanied by dull thuds.

“Got your quotation?” asked Thropper, as he dressed.

“Quotation?”

“Yes, Bible verse for the tables. You’ll probably be asked to give one. You see, it’s a sort of custom for Bible verses to go the rounds of the tables, in the morning. You don’t have to have one, but it fits in nicely, if you have one. Especially if you’re a waiter.”

“Oh, of course I’ll take one,” I said.

“Only just remember and not do what one waiter did, Priddy: take that verse and quote it: ‘Let your women keep silence in the churches.’ It would get you in wrong--with the young ladies.”

“Why?”

“Well, so many of them are going to be evangelists and ministers and missionaries: ever so many of them. You see how they would be liable to take it.”

“We had better keep on the good side of--the ladies,” I laughed.

Thropper winked.

“Betcher life,” he replied.

Just then the head waiter peeped in at the door to say,

“Brother Priddy, are you coming across to the dining-room? I’m going over.”

Eager to face my responsibilities of the day in the leadership of somebody I accompanied the tall German across the road and into the dining-room.

“Black for breakfast and supper. White for dinner,” announced Brock. “I mean the kind of coats that are to be worn,” he explained.

While I arranged my two tables for twenty people with plates, knives and forks, milk in granite-ware pitchers, sliced bread, corn bread left over from the previous night’s meal, tomato butter, and dishes of crisp, browned, fried potatoes, the other waiters came in and greeted me with hearty,

“Morning’s!” “Howdy’s!” and “Hello, Priddy’s!” which had the effect of making me feel in strong fellowship with them, although our acquaintance was but a day and a night old, at the utmost. Brock smiled at all these evidences of friendship, and whispered, as he showed me how to arrange the breakfast things,

“Things are going well, eh?”

“Yes,” I muttered, “if I can manage not to drop another tray!”

Then the breakfast bell brought the hurried, chattering, hungry crowd of young men and women into the room again, though, at this meal, they were less formidable in their every-day clothes. Some brought books, others writing pads. Fountain pens and pencils projected from the outer pockets of the men, and were stabbed in the hair of the women.

My tables were soon lined with students. They, too, seemed to have met me, long ago, in the remote past and to some of them I must have been at least a third cousin or present at a family party, so freely and lavishly did the greetings come: greetings that put me at my ease because I felt that they came from sincere hearts.

The floor was ready to bend under the weight of the crowd that stood waiting behind the chairs for Brock’s signal to sit. Like a stern, powerful, determining Ruler, the head waiter stood at the opposite end of the room, with his eye on his watch, not willing to press his thumb on the Sunday-School bell until the instant seven o’clock arrived. Eyes looked longingly on the hot, fried potatoes. It was no use. Seven o’clock was a minute off. Some rumbled the legs of the chairs. To no purpose. The German had patience. Finally the snap of the bell sent every man and woman to the table accompanied by the roar of scraping chairs, thumping feet, and expressions of satisfaction.

Near the head of my first table sat a very young, pink-cheeked Southern girl possessed of charming, gracious ways. Her “Mr. Priddy, please, a spoon,” was as musical as ever a request could be. It made me feel sorry that the spoon was not gold instead of German metal. Consequently, when she asked me for a third glass of water during the first five minutes of breakfast, it was no small happiness for me to secure it, as speedily as possible, for her. But on my return with the third glass her neighbor asked for one. On my return with that, the Southern girl had her glass emptied. So it went for ten minutes: each one of them drinking amounts of water sufficient for ducks or geese to swim in--it seemed to me. Finally, on picking up a fork some one had let fall on the floor, I saw several glasses, full to the brim with water, under the Southern girl’s chair. She had been initiating me. With a broad wink at the others, I very slyly sprinkled some pepper on the glass of water before her when her head was turned and then waited for results. They soon came. She reached for her glass, took a sip, and then commenced to choke.

“What is the matter, miss?” I asked, “will you have some more water?”

She looked at me in resentful astonishment, at first, and then seeing that the others at the table were laughing, she joined in with them, saying,

“Who peppered the water?”

“Was there pepper in the water?” asked one across the table.

There the matter ended, although, when in a spirit of boastfulness I recounted the experience at the waiter’s table, Brock chided me by saying,

“You will have to be careful. We must have discipline, brother Priddy!”

Thropper was waiting for me, after breakfast, when the call to chapel sounded: the first exercise of the day. We joined the procession of students which moved swiftly towards the central building. Into it the procession hurried, racing against the tolling of the bell. Then followed a tiresome climb up three pairs of stairs to the topmost room of all, used for a chapel. An attic room, square and dimly lighted by dormer windows. The roof girders overhead clung together like knitted arms bent on holding together such a load of humanity as trusted to them. Against the wall, opposite the door, spread a broad platform with a semi-circle of male and female faculty arrayed on it. Before it, and awed into respectful silence by it, spread a fan of students, sitting in chairs, by groups. I sat at the heart of Evangelical University. This chapel, in its plainness, its bareness, its poverty, formed the pivot on which the life of the University swung; for here the religious faith and doctrine which were the most eagerly sought gifts of the place were received. Here, in these simple chairs, was where men and women found God: the highest advertisement of the University.

The doors closed out late-comers. A hymn was sung. This has been said, and echoed many a time: that a hymn was sung. But this first hymn I heard, proceeding from over a hundred hearts, should not be plainly, unemphatically said to have been merely sung. If each word be trebly underscored and trebly emphasized, then, one may say, a hymn was sung that morning, for to me, the first bar of melody seemed to be the onrush of an Angelic symphony through a suddenly opened door of Heaven! Were they common men and women who were singing with such resonant exultation! The boarded ceiling and the huge square attic room throbbed with it. Rapture, adoration, victory, joy unspeakable weighted down each note as the melody unfolded itself. The reliant basses, anchored to the background of the melody--a resonant, manly anchorage--made sudden excursions into the higher realms of the theme, but not to displace the tenors whose shrill praises were the nearest to what a hammer stroke on a bar of silver would produce. The dulcet altos, as rich depths of throat as any one might expect, entwined themselves in and out of the sopranos’ soaring, singing as if to keep those higher voices from too suddenly darting past the doors of Heaven and surprising God. That was no mere singing of a hymn. It was a hymn for the love of the hymn; singing for the pure love of singing. Or, better, a spiritual exercise that could certainly be no more willingly or much better done in a morning rehearsal of the Court melodists!

“Wonderful!” I gasped to Thropper, whose tenor had added much to the dignity of that part.

“They do sing well, don’t they?” he commented.

A demure little woman in black, with a very set, white face, came to the reading desk and read a scripture lesson. Then the sober Dean, whose eyes knew every thought in that room and said so, gave some notices. There followed a prayer whose outstanding character was earnestness of expression, of theme, of length. Then the whole service was embroidered by three verses of another hymn, after which we fell in orderly lines and marched through the open doors, where an electric gong broke up the line into unorganized groups, scattering for the classrooms.

“Now for the President’s office,” announced Thropper, abruptly.

But a sudden pang of fear whipped across my thoughts.

“Oh, suppose I can’t enter, Thropper!” I exclaimed. “It has tasted so good, thus far!”

He patted me on the back, in his manly way, did Thropper, and heartened me by saying,

“Well, Priddy, if you like the first taste, I guess you’ll stay for the whole meal--if you are hungry!”

“Thanks, old fellow,” I said. “Take me to the President!”

He led me downstairs into a very busy office where some young women were typewriting, inscribing books, and where one dudish young man with up-combed, wavy hair, was flirting with a pretty, tan-cheeked girl who was supposed to be engrossed in the task of trimming a window shelf of geraniums.

Thropper was told that the President was engaged and that we should have to wait our turn. So we sat in high-backed chairs, in line with three others, where I waited with a palpitating heart that began to spell panic if my turn were delayed much longer. To increase this threatened panic of courage, Thropper began to whisper terrible things about the President: how he was a wonderful reader of books and had a mentality and memory so well disciplined that he was able to read an entire page at a mere glance and be able to pass an exacting examination on its contents a day afterwards! Thropper also whispered in an awe-struck voice,

“The President just feeds on learning! He can speak in ten different languages, read in fifteen, about, and think in twelve: so they say. You mustn’t fool with him or tell him any funny stories! He’d never get over it, Priddy. Now, come on, it’s your turn. I’ll introduce you and leave you with him!”

My sensitive imagination enkindled by all that Thropper had fed me on, in the waiting room, I appeared before the President considerably unnerved. He sat behind his desk, waiting for me: the embodiment of every austere report I had heard. His mouth twitched; twitched all the time. His eyes shone as brightly as those of an aroused lion from the dark mask of a cave. It was a race between his mouth and his eyes: the mouth slipped in and out, lip over lip, lip under and over lip, while those two small eyes snapped back and forth with electric suddenness. His gaunt features had the pallor of death. A world of woe, of hunger, of intellectual dissipation could be read in him. He tried to compose his features into a smile of welcome when he saw me, but it seemed so unusual a thing for those ascetic signs to be disturbed by the intrusion of anything pleasurable, that the first attempt ended in a sad failure. He did not try again. His voice was tired when he spoke. It had neither vibration nor health in it. I stood before that presence chilled, uninspired, while a strong temptation to flight pulled on my courage.

“Sir,” began Thropper, fingering his cap, “I’ve brought Mr. Priddy in. He came yesterday, and I’ve been letting him share my room till he saw you.”

“‘Had seen,’ you should say, sir,” corrected the President, “if you are after the proper tense of the verb. You may go.”

Thropper sighed deeply as he left, probably over the grammatical correction just imposed on him.

A seat was indicated and I was asked to place myself in it. Then the President said,

“Just tell your story in your own way till I interrupt you, young man.”

Thereupon I went into such minute details about myself, that I soon brought from the official a grunt of impatience.

“No,” he said, “I’m not a bit eager to know how many times your family has moved about the country. I want to know the salient things about you yourself.”

“I’ve been working in the mill till last week,” I said. “I always have been eager to get an education. I haven’t been able to save any money. I heard about this place. I came on. If you can’t take me, then please let me live here; just live here, it will do me good even if I don’t take any studies. I can work out and earn my board, I promise you. I have been earning my own living for a long time now, sir.”

“How much money have you brought?” he asked.

“Three dollars,” I said. “But you don’t need to take me in yet, sir,” I explained, hurriedly, for I felt that he would surely turn me off.

“A young woman came here, last year, with just four cents in her pocket and only her own strength to rely upon, young man,” replied the President. “Her own strength and God to rely upon, I should say, sir.”

“Yes?”

“There are several here who, at middle age, have arrived with wives and families and hardly more than enough to keep them a week, save their own strength and God’s.”

“Yes?”

“There is one student here who, at forty-five, has given up his position in business to begin in the lowest grade of study, with arithmetic, that he may receive an education.”

“Yes, sir.”

“So that you, with your youth, your three dollars, your opportunity, ought really to get along fairly well here.”

“If you take me, sir?”

“Do you think we would turn you off, young man?”

“You mean that you’ll give me a chance, then?” I cried, in great exultation at his quiet words.

At last a faint smile did untangle itself from his austere line.

“You are already earning your board in the dining-hall, I understand.”

“Yes, sir.”

“That leaves merely the small item of tuition and room rent. I think that you will be able to find enough work about the campus and in the village to arrange for the payment of that. If not, you should be able to earn enough next summer to do it.”

“Just the thing, sir,” I cried. “I’ll do it! Here is the first payment.” I handed him the three dollars.

He waved his hand.

“Keep them for necessities,” he said. “There is no hurry. God is back of us, young man, and will raise up friends for us. I want you to work hard and make of yourself a useful man in the world. We have no luxuries here. It is plain living and high thinking: the two essential equipments of manhood, I believe. If you will share our hardships faithfully and work hard, we welcome you to us. That is all. Now we will see about your list of studies.”

After fifteen minutes’ appraisement of my intellectual attainments and of my intellectual aim, the President made me out a list of subjects with such diverse studies on it as: Beginning Grammar, Church history, elementary arithmetic, Jevon’s Logic, elementary Latin, typewriting and zoölogy! I hurried from the office, with the card, to attend my first class, the first real step in my higher education, the class in Church history!

_Chapter V. Pungo Hall’s Occupants: Estes Who Planned to Take a Tent and Plant it in the Midst of the World’s Sin; of the Little Man Who Fled from the Chidings of a ‘D. D.’: of Calloused Hands and Showing How ‘Pa’ Borden was Beaten by the Grass Widower with the Long Hair_

Every scar that a sin may leave, every phase of ambition made possible in a democratic world, every type of dramatic character: these I found in Pungo Dormitory. As to a shelter from the world’s temptations had come firm-lipped, tense-browed men in middle life. As to the door which led into serviceable adventures, had come stout-hearted, finely-fibred but poor youths. Evangelical University meant more than a place where one could get a formal education. To some it meant a haven from a rough sea: a sea so rough, indeed, that but for the harbor must have wrecked them inevitably.

The sea, for instance, on which Estes, in Number 18, had found such tempestuous experiences. To imagine Estes you have to think of two small, very glistening black eyes shining through a forest of beard like hut lights gleaming like faint stars in the midst of a dense grove. That was all you noticed, at first, about him, for his body was insignificant, unimportant. The little knobs of cheek that came between the eyes and the black beard shone with a dull red glow, like flesh that the winds and the frosts had hardened and tinted. When on the campus, Estes crowned his blackish head with a cow-boy’s sombrero, worn at a rakish, foppish slant, as if he were trying to be reminiscent of a Mexican señor. A man to be called merely a _poseur_ when met on the campus or in the classroom, with his arithmetic, his grammar, his English history, and his black teacher’s Bible in the crook of his arm; a thirty-seven-year-old man with his foot on the first rung of the educational ladder. To most of the students he was known only in the rôle of “elementary student.” But in the confidence of his chamber, among his selected friends, when he opened his record, it was akin to the opening of furnace doors to show the furious white heat of a man’s sinful passion and the dark, twisting, sulphurous smoke of criminal deceit. He had betrayed men and women in selfish conspiracies; had drowned his wit in seas of alcohol; had abandoned his mother and family to the cruelties of poverty and illness; had stolen money and honor from his fellows; had mixed in the cheap and petty evil sports of sailors and tramps; had roamed through the land in the guise of an Indian doctor selling watery and greasy medicaments under a hissing, gasolene torch to confiding purchasers; had held responsible positions in shops; had--there seemed to be no end to his adventures in which the coloring always turned out to be the fact that in all of them he had introduced elements of sin, of criminality, of cruelty. They always ended against those grim stone walls! After walking through the pages of several high-strung romances of vagabondage and clap-trap he had turned to Evangelical University as to the mould for a new character which was to form him over, not only into a socialized being, but into a serviceable, spiritual servant; for after he should have had ingrained on him the elementary knowledge of Grammar, Bible, and History, he planned to take a tent into the world, set it in the midst of the slums for a season, and nightly exhort bad men to become good with the same fervid impulsiveness with which he had formerly exhorted them, under the yellow blaze of gasolene lamps, to buy pills and medicine-cure-alls.

In room “20” dwelt a student of an opposite type who embodied in an eloquent degree the strength and adventure to which ambition may attain. “Dr.” Upwell was a little north-of-Ireland Scotchman, past his forty-third summer: an ordained clergyman in an energetic denomination. He was one of those unfortunate men--of which there are a sad number in the pastorate--who, in a moment of illogical frailty had succumbed to the temptation which a letter offered, of securing for a trivial sum of dollars the dignified, honorary degree of “Doctor of Divinity.” At first the privilege of adding two capital “D’s” to his name, on his letter heads, his visiting cards, his church advertisements in the Saturday evening paper, and on the gold-lettered sign in front of his church, had been highly appraised. Those two “D’s” had added almost a furlong to his mental egoism. He felt himself admitted to the highest peak where dwelt the chosen theological giants. But finally, after much thinking--for Upwell was at heart an honorable man--conscience had asserted itself with a flaming manifestation that shrivelled up this mental egoism and left inside the poor man’s mind a mass of smoking, smouldering remorse which no amount of “Poohing” could quench. Conscience, in that sure way it has, and blunt, kept saying: “You are not worthy of the ‘D.D.’ In the first place, you are ill furnished with education. You have never been under the discipline of a school. What you have is merely the results of desultory home reading. You have never accomplished anything worthy of a ‘D.D.’ honor. You are minister to a handful of farmers, in an isolated community, in a church which pays a salary of five hundred and fifty dollars a year--when it does. You have never made more than four speeches in Conference, and they were in debate--remarks from the floor, in which the Chairman found you ‘out-of-order’ twice! You have played no heroic part in social reform or made any spiritual stir. The degree was purchased because you were selfishly ambitious. It was sold to you in cold blood by a college that funded itself, partly, by such sales. Suppose that Peter, when you came to the gates of Heaven, should ask you, ‘Upwell, give me name, dignities, and titles!’ what would you reply? ‘Chadworth Upwell, Doctor of Divinity!’ with a host of angels to laugh at you? Not so. You would feel cheap, miserable!”

Thus stung more and more into remorse, the little Scotchman had finally been driven out to seek a place where, at least, he could be worthy of his ill-gotten honorary degree. He had come to Evangelical University to fill the mind with theology, ethics, history, and literature, so that at the end of a year or two there might be some degree of merit and fitness when he placed “D.D.” after his name! Of course, Upwell did not put it in that bald way, but from the persistency with which he rolled the “D.D.” under his tongue, while criticizing the possession of it, it was not difficult to know that he would never bury it.

In Pungo Hall I came face to face with young men to whom the gates of educational privilege had been closed until they, like myself, were on the threshold of young manhood. They had come from the hearts of coal mines and breakers, bringing their life’s dreams with them, and an indomitable purpose. Every penny they spent for books and board had been earned by the sweat of their brow. They had come, many of them, from far-away farms and from the Southern mountain fastnesses where life’s expressions of hope and desire were to be seen in crude form; where they found that it took the “breath of an ideal to blow the dust off the actual.” Hands I shook, in fellowship, that were scarred from hard toil, calloused through contact with the tools of labor.

The comprehensiveness of the curriculum of Evangelical University was shown in the case of the Borden family. I became intimately acquainted with the head of the family, Julius Borden, while cutting sugar-cane on the University farm. Julius was a pale edition of Falstaff: fat, self-sufficient, self-important, with a scraggly yellowish moustache half screening his pouting lips, and with a triple chin constantly slipping like a worm back and forth over the folds of the points of his collar. Mr. Borden, even at forty-two, after the discipline of business, married life, and children, took himself too seriously. He spoke with hesitating precision, though not with grammatical fluency, as if he had predetermined that no word should ever come from the depths of his profundity that did not aptly fit into the seriousness of life. The merest word I flung at him became a challenge that could be answered only when the hoe had been put down, the moustache pulled, the brows contracted in thought, and the throat cleared. When I greeted him with a trivial, “How do!” he could not trust himself to reply with audible words; he wanted me to take his acquiescence for granted--I could see it by the surprised look in his eyes. As he had been a success at the grave-stone business, had been married the longest of any of the married students, and possessed the most children, he seemed to realize that these were tokens of superior power when compared to our bachelor, or the other married students’ bridal, limitations. He fairly withered our proffered suggestions or theories or criticisms, with his weighty authoritative, “I’ve seen so much, you see!” It was, in his own estimation, equal to a hurricane from the Talmud blowing on the chaff of the Apocrypha. By reason of this constantly paraded wisdom, Julius soon became current on the campus as “Pa” Borden.

He had given up his grave-stone business; had brought his money, his wife, and two children to the University for a “family fitting” as he termed it; much as a farmer goes to the general store with his family to be clothed, shoed, and candied. The wife, at her marriage, had just graduated from a high school, so that she entered the collegiate department of the University, on her way towards an A.B. to be earned outside of the chicken-raising in which she indulged. Jack, a quick-witted lad of twelve, found a place in the elementary classes, by the side of Estes, two Porto Ricans, a Japanese, a missionary’s little girl, and several other students who had to commence at the bottom of the educational scale. Edith, a romantic-eyed daughter, who wore Scotch-plaid dresses and Sis Hopkins’ braids, was plunging through the College Preparatory division close on the heels of her mother. The father, least of the family in school discipline, had to humble himself so low as to take his place with a backward grass widower in a “B” section of the grammar class because of his tendency to forget, after a day, the relations and distinctions between verbs and nouns and the various other members of the grammar family. But Julius saw to it that besides the baneful necessity of his humble place in the grammar class he came to a proper level in those studies in which he could express his preference. He revelled in the Bible class, the Historical and the Oratorical classes to his heart’s content, but though he shone creditably in them, he never could quite clear himself from the “B” section of the grammar class; grammar being his thorn in the flesh, as he testified in one evening’s prayer-meeting, when the Apostle Paul and his historic affliction was the lesson. Even the backward grass widower, who had a thick mass of shining curls and intended becoming a temperance “orator” finally graduated from the “B” section, thereby heightening the shame of poor Julius, who seemed predestined to do poorly with the science of speech, and forever linger in the shadow of the “poor-doers.”

_Chapter VI. Financial Pessimism Taken in Hand by Thropper and Shown in its Real Light. A Turkish Rug that Smoked. A Poet in Search of Kerosene. Wonderful Antics of an Ironing-Board. Economy at a Tub. Three more Waiting for it After Brock’s Bath. The Chemical Reduction of a Cauldron of Tomatoes into Something Sweet_

My capital of three dollars was very quickly expended. After I had spent the last quarter of a dollar for writing paper and pens, my pockets were as empty as they were the hour I bought my suit from the Jewish merchant. I stood penniless in the first week of my educational career: a realization that brought out every atom of self-distrust, philosophical pessimism and gloomy foreboding. I had been completely dependent upon nickels and half dollars previously. I had not moved without they paved the way. Nothing of enjoyment and privilege had been secured without money. Theatres, games, parties, trips; these had always made their call on my spending money. Now I stood facing an academic career absolutely without a penny and with no possible hope that in the outside world there would ever be any benefactor to forward one. I was stranded. I thought of the students who relied upon monthly checks from home or from friends. I thought of the students who had their own bank accounts which would carry them through the school. I thought, with a kindling of envy, of the students who the previous summer had earned the following year’s expenses. I secured a minimum of comfort from such reflections. They plunged me deeper and deeper into the gulping pit that sucks enthusiasm out of life.

Thropper found me, standing by the window, indulging in such a dispiriting review of my prospects. In his bustling way he shouted:

“Well, Priddy, what’s the row now, eh?”

“I shouldn’t be--here,” I choked.

“Well,” he exclaimed, “I thought you’d get ’em--soon.”

“What do you mean, Thropper?”

“Homesick blues, that’s all. You’ve got every symptom showing, Priddy. They’re on you, all right.”

“I’m not homesick, Thropper,” I blurted out. “I have no reason to be homesick. It’s not that at all. I’m fretting about money: that’s all.”

“The root of all evil,” he mocked.

“Wrong there, Thropper.” I half smiled, cheered beyond measure by his banter. “I heard a preacher say that the Bible said, ‘The love of money is the root of evil.’”

“Well,” bluffed Thropper, “what’s the difference? Wherever you find money you find the love of it. They are synonymous.”

“I’m in no danger from either, about this time, Thropper. I haven’t a cent to my name, and as I search the future I don’t see a prospect of any except I give up the University.”

“That needn’t worry you, Priddy!”

I looked at my roommate in amazement. He was not smiling. In fact, he was looking very seriously at me.

“Not worry me?” I gasped. “That’s comforting, to be sure!”

“What have you got to worry about?” he asked.

“What--worry about?” I stammered, not falling in with his mood.

“Yes. Tell me!”

“In the first place,” I explained, “you know that I had but three dollars--three--t-h-r-e-e, three, d-o-l-l-a-r-s, dollars; three dollars--to begin my education with.”

“Yes.”

“I don’t think I told you that I shall never expect any help from the outside; that if I stay here I shall have to rely entirely on what I can earn with my own hands.”

“I see.”

“Well!”

“Well?”

“Well!”

“Well?”

“Isn’t it clear, Thropper?”

“Isn’t what clear?”

“The predicament I’m in.”

“Predicament?”

“Of course!” I retorted, impatiently. “What else is it for a fellow to be stranded as I am? You surely wouldn’t call it a blessing, would you?”

“I might!”

“What!”

Then Thropper, without another word, deliberately turned inside out each pocket that he owned and deposited in my hands the following items: A well-worn ink and pencil eraser, a fountain pen, a stub of a Dixon’s indelible pencil, some blurred pencil notes, a half-dozen toothpicks, a crumpled letter, a bunch of keys, a bachelor button, two handkerchiefs, and fifteen cents in two nickels and five coppers.

“There,” he sighed. “That’s all. There’s not a penny in my trunk. The money represents my worldly fortunes--until I go out and earn more. I, too, have to rely upon my own efforts. Shake, Priddy!”

The big-hearted fellow reached for my empty hand and gave it a vigorous shaking.

“You’re not bad off!” he declared. “Let me tell you why. You see,” he went on to explain, “after you’ve got in the swing of things here, you become somewhat of a social or economic philosopher. You’re rich, Priddy!” He smiled benevolently on me.

“What do you mean?” I demanded.

“You’re English, aren’t you?”

“Of course.”

“That accounts for it, probably.”

“Accounts for what?”

“Your high and exalted estimate put on money necessary to get you through college. I understand that across the water it is only the rich and the noble who are welcomed to the colleges; that the mass of workers have come to respect education accordingly. At least, that is the idea one gets through the books and magazine articles which have to do with English college life. Whether it is true or not is another matter. Anyway, Priddy, you’ve got to understand that things are different in America. Our colleges are democratic and extremely practical. Now take yourself, for instance; you have come out here regarding it impossible for you to move hand or foot towards your education without money in your pocket. Things are so arranged that you don’t need to give yourself much trouble on that account. You say you’ve got no money and that you ought to get away from here, on that account. That’s the way thousands of plow boys and machine tenders are arguing, only they say, ‘We haven’t any money; therefore we’ve no chance to get to college.’”

“I know that’s so,” I interrupted.

“You see this arm,” and Thropper made a sledge-hammer of his right arm, bringing his clenched fist down on his table. “That represents my endowment of good health and strength. How much is that worth, in terms of dollars earned in a year during spare time, Priddy?”

“Why--I--”

“Sixty-five dollars during school terms last year, outside of vacations: sixty-five dollars earned at odd jobs during Saturdays and odd hours,” he said. “All the spare cash I was called upon to spend. Of course in the summer, by canvassing stereoscopic views, I cleared sixty-seven more, above my expenses. That’s what the arm stands for. Its strength is convertible into cash almost any day that I care to go out and earn it--keeping on with my studies, too, of course.”

“But I’m earning my board by waiting on table,” I urged; “that does not touch my tuition and room rent, Thropper.”

“Which amounts to about thirty dollars outside of board,” he laughed. “You aren’t worth much if you can’t earn that in a year and keep on with your studies, Priddy. I think you’re lucky, that’s what I think, in earning your board so easily. That’s the big item!”

“But what can I find to do? I can’t leave the campus. I have to be around for the meal hours.”

Thropper went over to his desk and secured a brown-backed account book, and read off the following list:

“Stacking books in the library, twelve cents an hour. Wheeling Professor Dix’s invalid aunt in wheel chair, twelve cents an hour and dinner. Scrubbing floors in University Hall, twelve cents an hour. Weeding garden, cutting sugar-cane, thawing frozen gas pipes, grading lawn, kneading bread, cleaning black-boards, ringing bell, watchman, running washing-machines, errands, pruning trees, dusting Professor Harvey’s insects; all twelve cents an hour, Priddy. The list of my chores for last year. Possibilities for you, my boy!”

“Oh, I see!”

“Feel better, now?”

I smiled and then said, feelingly, to my roommate:

“Thropper, you’d be worth ten dollars an hour in a hospital bracing up discouraged financiers; that you would!”

“Oh, I don’t know,” he answered, pleased with what I said. “I’ve been up against it myself, Priddy. I understand, that’s all.”

“Have been up against it?” I gasped. “Thropper, I guess you should put it in the present tense: _are_ up against it. Here is your fifteen cents, your present fortune. What are you going to do about money?”

“Oh, me?” He felt under his table and brought out to view a tin lunch box made to resemble a bundle of school books. “I’ll have that filled on Saturday morning at six o’clock, put on these--” he rumbled behind his clothes-screen and threw a pair of dirty overalls on the floor and a soft, black shirt--“and go to my regular Saturday job in the glass factory. A dollar and fifty for the day; regular as the week comes around. That’s the way I take care of myself, Priddy!”

“But when I work for the University I don’t get cash, do I, Thropper?”

“No,” he said, “it goes on your bill. But you won’t find it hard to get along without money here,” he said, “there isn’t much that you can buy, outside of clothes and a lecture in the village once in a while. You’ll soon become accustomed to getting along without cash, all right.”

When Saturday morning arrived, it was a distinct surprise to hear Thropper moving in the room first, for he usually had droned while I prepared for the day’s work. I opened my eyes. The alarm clock on the table told me that it was half-past five. I watched my roommate as he donned his working clothes and put on a slouch hat.

“An Englishman would call you a ‘navvy,’” I smiled.

“I should think an American would call me a tramp!” he replied. “But you ought to see some of the Bulgarians I have to work with!” He spread out his hands expressively to indicate that whatever the Bulgarians did look like, he had not the rhetoric available at that moment with which to describe them.

There came a knock on the door and in response to Thropper’s cheery “Come in!” there appeared another “tramp” with his lunch box; a tall, high-cheek-boned Southerner, named Tripp, who drawled,

“Best be gettin’ deown, Thropper!”

So with a good-bye, Thropper left the room, turning to tell me that if I found time, I might clean up the room--in his absence.

“Be sure and shake the Turkish rugs,” he laughed, pointing to the patches of well-worn carpet that were used for rugs. “When you shake them you’ll find them very Turkish; they smoke!”

By the time the early lunch for the workers had ended, there were seven “tramps” who went to the glass factory with Thropper. Included among them were two students, whom, judged by their excellent dress and their social graces on the campus, I had thought were none other than the sons of wealthy parents.

When the Bible verses had been given at the tables and after the last slice of fried potato had been scraped out of the dish, the students hurried from the room and disposed themselves for work.

As I left the dining-hall, I saw young women with duster caps on their heads, leaning out of dormitory windows shaking rugs; others I found hurrying down to other dormitories with bundles of laundry. When I arrived in Pungo Hall, I was greeted with the thumping of brushes, the clatter of furniture, and the shouts of the men as they called to one another above the clouds of dust that were being hurled from the rooms into the hallway.

A knock came on my door as I started to sweep the room, and Jason, the poet, poking his long neck around the corner of the door-post, asked in the most concerned way imaginable,

“Brother Priddy, is the kerosene can here?”

“Why--no, I haven’t seen it. What do you do with kerosene? Don’t you burn gas?”

Jason blushed, and then replied,

“Oh--we--er--use the kerosene for beds!”

“Beds?”

“To subdue those fiery creatures who domicile in beds!” he affirmed.

“Oh, bugs!” I blurted with such roughness that it must have made his sensitive and poetic nerves clang.

At eight o’clock a group of students, with clean collars and well-pressed clothes, came down from the University building, each carrying an ironing-board, to be sold in some nearby town. This ironing-board was entirely unlike every other ironing-board invented by man or woman. It was the product of the fertile and practical mind of our mathematical professor; its chief virtues being, as described in the prospectus, that “it stands up like a soldier, kneels down like a camel, and folds up like a jack-knife!” With all its novelty, it was extremely practical and, the agents reported, sold well. A large number of useful citizens are out in the serviceable centres of life, who, if they ever choose a coat of arms will have to adorn their shield with an ironing-board--“rampant,” for to it they owe much of the financial lubrication which smoothed their passage through the school.

Hurrying after the same train were three young women, each armed with a book, on their way to make fifty per cent from literary householders. At different hours of the morning other students went to the village where every sort of task from house-cleaning to raking up dead gardens was undertaken. Evangelical University was at work.

The head waiter, Brock, came into the room as I was cleaning it and said:

“Priddy, has any one been in after the tub?”

“The tub?”

“Yes, and the rubbing board!”

“I didn’t know those things were here.”

“Your roommate and I have a whole laundry set on shares. Look in my room and you’ll see the irons; the flat-irons.”

“No, the tub and the board are not here,” I reported, after a search.

The tall German went into the hall, raised his voice in a great, resounding shout:

“The wash tub! Who has it?”

A door at the end of the hallway opened and a voice replied:

“Just rinsing out my shirt, Brock. Have it in a jiffy!”

A few minutes later Brock called to me from his room. When I presented myself before him, I discovered him with his sleeves rolled up, busily engaged in pouring hot water from a kettle over some shirts and handkerchiefs.

“Any white things of yours, handkerchiefs or shirts, Priddy,” he announced, “might just as well go in with mine.”

So we shared the wash that morning. After they had been rinsed, I carried them to the rear of the building and hung them on a double wire line where the gas-laden air from the sheep pastures hummed through them and the sun burned them dry in an hour.

That same afternoon, after having expressed to Brock my desire for extra work in the hours when I was not on duty in the dining-hall, I found myself standing over an immense cauldron under which blazed a hot camp-fire. In the cauldron were bushels of tomatoes and many pounds of sugar. With a long ladle I stirred the concoction until nine o’clock that night, save for the interruption of supper, and by that time I had the satisfaction of seeing it turn from a vivid pink to a dark red until it turned into a tarty, pasty preserve, not unlike strawberry damson in appearance. That night there went on the University records, against my name, “To seven hours’ labor, at 12 cents, .84.” I had paid that much, that week, towards my tuition.

_Chapter VII. An Academic Ride in Five Carriages at Once. A Business Appeal Mixed in with the Order of Creation. Is it Best for a Man to Marry his First Love. A Sleuth-Dean. A Queen’s Birthday Supper with an Athletic Conclusion. Jerry Birch Stands up for Albion. How we Tamed him_

The terror that at first had been imposed upon me by the sense of my own ignorance, a terror which had led me to think that at twenty years of age no ambitious youth could at all fit into the educational scheme, died down quite rapidly at Evangelical University. The curriculum there was no arbitrary imposition, as it is so commonly in the Four-Hundred-Dollar-a-Year University, into which a student must fit himself willy-nilly, and to which he must either conform or not approach. The Evangelical University curriculum was made to bend to the needs of an illiterate man of forty and to the advanced demands of the graduate who sought his doctorate in Philosophy. Its principle was that of intellectual service to fit the needs of all who come whether poorly fitted, old or poor. Estes, “Pa” Borden, myself and many others, who certainly would not have had the chance for inspiration offered us in hundreds of dignified schools, especially on such terms, were given our lifetime’s chance in Evangelical University.

But it must have looked chaotic, intellectually riotous, to a dignified dean of a classic university, and, no doubt, he would have had much in criticism of the university to offer, from his proper angle, after looking on the manner in which the students mixed their courses.

In my first term I spread myself through the common school, the business, the college preparatory, the collegiate, and the theological divisions of the University! It was akin to taking an academic ride in five carriages at once! When the professor dismissed me from the college class in logic I went immediately into the basement, where I joined the grammar class, and from the grammar class I went to the theological department and recited on Church History. From that class I went into the scientific department and was heard in zoölogy, and from zoölogy I found my way in the business department where I practised on the typewriter.

Though I came before this intellectual privilege with a hungry mind, yet, threaded throughout it all were the complaints of the professors in regard to the limitations under which they worked. The professor of science constantly unfolded to us, who met him in zoölogy, a pet dream of his which comprehended a future benefactor who should increase the number of specimens in the museum. The English professor was embarrassed frequently by the inadequacy of the library. In our Bible classes, the President would take us into his confidence, the day after a faculty meeting, and descant upon the hardship, the embarrassing, financial hardship, of meeting the expenses of the school. There was no lack of dignity to this proceeding, for each one of us felt under obligations to the University, knowing well enough that whatever financial sacrifices the faculty underwent, were sacrifices made in order that we might receive an education. So the President was within the bounds of propriety and discipline when he concluded his report with his customary: “And so, young ladies and gentlemen, if you are acquainted with any business men or wealthy person who might be made generous by our worthy appeal, kindly hand me their names and addresses after class. Mr. Stanton, you will please describe the order of creation as given in the first book of Moses!”