Chapter XL (1)

_In Which the Account Comes to a Conclusion in the Life of a
Relative. Martin Quotes Spanish, and has the_ LAST WORD 387

_Illustrations_

I APPEARED BEFORE THE PRESIDENT CONSIDERABLY
UNNERVED _Frontispiece_

FACING
PAGE

JASON, THE POET, LOOKED IN 76

EVANGELICAL UNIVERSITY WAS TREATED TO ITS FIRST MATCH GAME 142

SAY, HOW MUCH YO’ WANT FO’ DAT WATCH? 184

SO ARM IN ARM THE BLIND STUDENT AND I WALKED 350

THROUGH THE SCHOOL

THROUGH THE SCHOOL

_Chapter I. Fifteen Dollars and Sixty-five Cents Worth of International Travel. An Inspiring Reception in Front of Chief Pungo Memorial Hall_

It was like taking off an old, worn, unadorning suit of clothes as the Boston Express whirled me away from the City of Mills. It hummed with me over the streets on which I had walked to and from work as a mill boy. It darted me past the rows of tenements where sordid and sinful memories lingered. “Thank God! Thank God!” Out and away from it all. Away from the hum, the bee-like, monotonous hum of the mill machines that overpower the nerves and dull the spirit of the workers! Away from the bells and blaring fog whistles that disturb the sleep of tired, weary, discouraged toilers; the bells and whistles that sometimes mean the jubilant clamor of the mills over their moaning, rebellious workers. Past the pale faces that waited at the crossings for the train to pass; faces whose eyes gleamed with an instant’s wish that the train had them in it, too! Yes, I was the chosen from among over twenty thousand workers that day. I was actually on my way to seek an education! There, for proof that it was no dream, was my long green ticket with its dozen coupons in my hands! There was my brand new suit-case! How lucky I was! Think of the fellows who had better mental furnishing than I, who had even money in the bank, parents who were urging them to strive for an education, friends who would loan them money, and yet, they were going to the mill at that very moment, and would go tomorrow, and the day after, because they were afraid to make the break! Then I thought: “Well, they would have made the break long ago if they had lived with an aunt and uncle who wasted their money on drink. That would frighten them into it. There’s some good in evil after all. I shouldn’t be on this train today if my foster parents had been kinder, more considerate! I guess it’d be a good thing if a few of the other mill fellows, who are ambitious, had something like it to frighten them off. It’s probably the only way they’ll go out and make their chance!”

Then the vision of the country-side, painted in the glories of Autumn, the flashing views of cranberry bogs, crowded with sun-bonneted pickers, called my mind to the new joys of existence. Here I was, out in the world at last! Not the romp of a holiday, with the mill room for _next_ morning, not a vacation of two days with a return at the end of it; but the beginning of an education, a start towards a profession, a great big chance at last to “make something of myself!”

“Here,” I said to the train boy, as he was about to pass me, “give me a packet of that there gum--the peppermint sort.” That train boy didn’t know, as I paid him the five cents by giving him a dollar bill to change, that the purchase was the greatest luxury I should have on that trip of fifteen hundred miles.

While working in the mill, I had never been able to afford a trip to Boston, so when I arrived in the station, and realized that I was even going beyond it, on my first excursion, I said to myself, “Boston is only the first, small step in your travel!” The next coupon on my long ticket paid my fare from the South Station to the North--in a CAB WITH A UNIFORMED DRIVER!! It was the first time I had been in a cab, except at a funeral. I was pleased when the driver took me through the main streets; glad when he had to move cautiously through congested traffic, because people could see me, as I sat nonchalantly in the cab. I took care to see that the blinds were up as far as possible.

In the North Station, when the cab driver had taken me to the train, the car that I was to travel on, to Montreal, was marked off from its fellows by its salmon color. Awed, impressed, I went groping through the dim car until I found a vacant seat into which I comfortably arranged myself. But as the train pulled out, I studied my railroad map, and, on discovering that the Green Mountains would be on the opposite side of the railroad, I made haste to change my seat, so that I might insure myself a view of them; for I had never seen a mountain in my life.

That ride of twelve hours, on an express, did not tire me one bit. I was before the world with a starved, hungry mind and starved, hungry eyes. I kept my eyes glued on the out-of-doors. Yes, I watched both sides of the car at once. I listened for the comments around me and if anything of interest was mentioned I bobbed up my head to look. I watched the time-table for the stations so that I might know when the train passed from one state to another I was actually passing through whole states--five of them in all! Five states of the United States of America! There were few details that I did not observe. I watched the farms, the villages, the back yards of cities; watched the flying trees, the colors of soil, the crops that were being reaped, the winding roads, and the vehicles that waited for us at the country crossings.

At noon we were lumbering through the streets of Manchester, N.H., past the long canal which flows like a sluggish moat along the dismal wall of the mill. Crowds of workers were waiting for us at the crossings; watching us with looks of envy, I thought. I threw up my window, leaned back in my seat, and ostentatiously chewed gum with a smug, proud look, with which I hoped to show the mill boys how unconcerned I was about being a passenger on a Montreal Express!

It was not until we had cleared the big cotton factory towns and cities of New England that I felt entirely like an adventurer, however. Only by the time the cities had been left, the big cities, and the small towns were succeeded by country villages, and the country villages by vast wildernesses of woods and uncultivated fields, did I feel satisfied. Then I knew that if a train wreck should end my journeying, I could settle down on some farm. I should not have to go back into the mill.

By watching my time-table carefully, I knew when to look for the mountains; but long before we reached the place appointed for the vision, my heart was leaping with expectation. We had reached the hilly country, and every high knoll served me for a mountain. But on and on and on, past soaring foothills, went the train until what seemed a slate-colored storm-cloud, a thin veil of atmosphere, caught my attention. Then, as the train turned a bend, the foothills dropped away, and there, like a majestic dream, higher than anything on earth before imagined, were the mountains!

Following the delight of the mountains, I had to think of our approach into another country. We were actually going to leave the United States and enter Canada! Immediately the English blood stirred within me. I was actually entering the domains of the Queen. Just over the border, the train stopped at a little village for water. I spoke to the brakeman “Please, mister,” I said, “how long will we stop?” “Eight minutes altogether,” he replied; “eight sure.” “Are we really in Canada now?” I ventured. “Yep,” he said with decision, “this is Canada, sure enough.” “Then I’m going to get off, for a couple of minutes,” I said. I didn’t explain to him the motive I had in getting off. It was to put the soles of my shoes on FOREIGN SOIL! Unfortunately there had been a generous rain that had mixed with the dirt of the village road, so that when I sought to step on Canadian earth I was called upon to wallow in Canadian mud, and that I would not do. “Never mind,” I consoled myself with. “This board walk is a Canadian board walk and will do.” So I ran a hundred yards into the village along the board walk and came back to the train satisfied. I had stepped on Queen Victoria’s territory, come what might.

When the darkness shut out the view, even then I did not keep my eyes from the windows. I did not know what sights I should get a view of even in the darkness. But all I saw of towns were lights, like stars, followed by masses of inky night. Then we stopped at a Canadian city station. I pushed up the window, and heard the great French chatter that went on outside. Not a word of English could I pick out, neither did I want to hear such a word. It would have spoiled all. At last I was in a new country, among a people who spoke a different language from my own! I was a real traveler at last!

At ten o’clock the lights of Montreal, strings of stars, flashed by the windows. Three miles away from the station the passengers became restless. Some of them stood up and waited during all that time. At last the brakeman called out with finality, a downward deflection of the last syllable, as if that ended his day, “Mon-tree-AL!”

There my ticket told me I should have to change. The next stage of my journey would take me along the border of Canada as far as Detroit; an all-night journey.

During the hour that I had to wait in Montreal, I went on a thrilling, timid sight-seeing. I recollect to have seen a couple of dim-lit business streets, silent, ghostly, a couple of buildings which must have been structures of importance in daylight, and a sign which could be read because it was directly in the glare of an arc light, “National Bank.” Having seen so much, and satisfied my provincial soul on so spare a meal, I went back to get on my new train.

I found myself in a most comfortable car. The seat was well padded, the back was high enough to serve for a pillow, and there was no one in the seat in front. So I turned over that seat, took off my coat and hat, unlaced my shoes and put them on one side, leaned back with a sigh of content, ready for a night’s rest when--the conductor came down the aisle, looked at my ticket, and said, “This is a first-class car and you have a second class ticket. The next car ahead, sir!”

I slung my coat over my arm, picked up my shoes and suit-case and went into the car ahead. It was a Tourist Sleeping car and was filled, largely, with a medley of Europeans. Europeans, too, with peasant manners, with peasant dirt and peasant breath. There was odor of garlic mixed with odor of stale rye bread, as some ate lunches. There was odor of unwashed clothes mixed with odor of sour milk. Double seats, leather padded, had been pushed together into berths, while overhead shelves had been let down for upper berths, with thin pads of mattress for the colonists to find rest upon. The aisles were littered with paper, fruit remnants, broken cigarette stubs, empty bottles, and expectoration. The air was vapid, like a drunkard’s breath. I waded through it all to the lower end of the car where there seemed to be an oasis of cleanliness and order. Here, though, were men sprawled out in unpoetic postures of sleep. At the lowest end, even the train boy had left his basket of fruit and soda on one side, while he lay for the night, crumpled up, snorting like a pig.

I looked around and up for a place to sleep. There on one of the high shelves, I saw a young fellow sitting up, eating a sandwich. He saw me looking in his direction. “Hello, fellow,” he greeted cheerily, “you’re English, aren’t you, fellow?” I replied that I was and that I was wanting a place to sleep for the night. He said, “These places are for two. Get a leg up and bunk with me.” He reached down his hand, braced me as I stood on the edge of a lower berth, and then I found myself in the bed with my benefactor.

He sat there in his shirt, ready for bed, with a large basket of sandwiches in front of him. There were more sandwiches together in that one basket than I have ever seen piled up on the counter of any lunch room.

“You aren’t a train boy, are you?” I asked. “Oh, no,” said the young fellow, “that’s my lunch. I got a week’s go on the trains yet, so I brought enough to eat for that time. I’m going to college away out West. Have one,” he broke in and pointed to the basket. I had no scruples in assisting at the reduction of such a mountain of sandwiches, for I imagined that a company of soldiers could have subsisted on them for three days. I ate my fill, and the young fellow watched me with evident delight. “I’m going out to college, too,” I explained. “We’re birds of a feather, eh?” “What college?” he asked. “Evangelical University,” I replied. “It’s easy to get through there because expenses are moderate. I don’t think I’ll have a chance to get in right away,” I explained. “You see, I haven’t written them that I’m coming or asked for a chance even. I can get out there and get some kind of work, and when everything’s arranged, get into the University. A friend told me about it.”

“Why didn’t you go back with some one?” asked my friend. “Well, you see,” I answered, “I couldn’t afford to go the way the others go. It costs twenty-four dollars and this route only costs me fifteen dollars and sixty-five cents.” “Oh,” said the young fellow. “When you do enter the University what class will you join?” “I’ll have to join the beginners with common school branches,” I said. “Then I’ll work up into the Academic course to prepare for college, then go through college, you see.” “Oh, yes,” he said, “I see.” He then asked me to help myself to another sandwich. “You’ve got nerve, anyway,” he commented. “It’ll be a long pull, won’t it, to do what you plan? How old are you?” “Oh, around twenty,” I answered. “I wish, for your sake,” said the young man, “that you were through with it; this education business takes a lot out of a fellow. It’s a fight right from the start if you don’t have any money. I’m a sophomore in college. By the way, you haven’t told me your name, fellow. Mine’s Harlan M. N. I. Droughtwell. Plenty of initials because my folks wanted to please both branches of the family. In full, I am Harlan Micknell Norman Ingraham Droughtwell.” “And I,” I replied, “am just Al Priddy. No middle name. I suppose, though, that really I am Albert, but it ain’t used much.”

Harlan put the basket aside, after having put over the bread a damp towel and closed the cover. Then he told me to turn in near him. So we both gave ourselves into the keeping of the engineer and slept profoundly above the odors, the litter, the droning aliens:--two youths college bound.

I was first up, in the morning. Harlan, on opening his eyes, proposed that I “dive in” and he pointed to the sandwiches. First of all I wanted to wash my face. I did so at the drinking tank. I looked around. There was a stirring among the aliens; just a stirring. Some were turning over, yawning and giving guttural explosions of sleepy comment. Mothers were feeding hungry, lively babies; but at my end everything was profoundly still. The train boy’s basket was still where I had seen it the night before with the fruit exposed to the air. The boy himself was a tousled, sleepy, uninspiring bundle of blue and white. I looked at my berth-mate, the sandwich man, and noted that he combed his hair from the side. Immediately I was conscious that I combed mine down the middle, and I recollected that my aunt Millie had always said that I looked like a masher with it in that way. So I took out my pocket comb and changed the style of my hair-dressing, while Harlan, entirely unconscious of having wielded so powerful an influence over a fellow, sat in his berth and struggled with his clothes.

All through the morning we traveled; over high trestles, through deep cuts, skirting tobacco fields, whirling through little settlements until at last we were rolled to the deck of a massive iron ferry and, still in the cars, were taken across the lake and landed at Detroit. Meanwhile, I had parted company with Harlan, who had told me to “keep right at it,” meaning thereby, a college education.

Transfer after transfer was made for another night and a day, each time the trains seemed to get slower, to stop more at stations, while the cities grew less frequent. Friday turned into Saturday, Saturday into Sunday, and by Sunday, too, we plunged into an overpowering odor of gas. “Is the lamp leaking?” I asked the trainman mournfully. “It’s terrible. It must be leaking. It makes me seasick.” The man laughed. “Oh, you’re in the gas belt,” he said. “It’s in the air. You will get used to it. I can’t smell it at all, though at first it smells like being right in a gas house, doesn’t it?”

The gas tinged everything; food and drink. I felt like going to sleep to lose the sense of it. But deeper and deeper into it the train plunged, without mercy. “If you’ve got a piece of silver about you,” said the trainman, “a watch-chain or anything of gold or silver, this air will turn it black soon enough. But you’ll get used to it,” he added comfortingly enough. “I shall have to,” I complained, gloomily. “It tastes as if all the gas works in the world had exploded about here.”

Finally I was nearing Groat’s Crossing, the seat of Evangelical University. The train deposited me at a station within twelve miles of it, where I should have to take an accommodation four hours later. There was nothing to see in the place where I waited, but glaring brick buildings and houses on stilts. So I waited around the hot, splintered platform, seated now on a truck, watching a group of young men reading sections of a Sunday paper, or walking miserably up and down wishing for the train, for the gas had gotten into my system, and I felt lonesome, miserable. I might have gone to sleep in the waiting room, but the seats were spoiled for beds by having iron arm rests at intervals of two feet. I tried to thread myself through these, at full length, but could not. There was nothing to do, but stand around and taste gas, until the Groat’s Crossing train came.

With great joy I watched the accommodation come into the station. Only twelve more miles between me and Evangelical University! The end of three days’ travel. Three days from the cotton mills! In that thought I renewed my spirit. Soon I should at least be NEAR a college!

College! For me! It was the anticipation of a first watch twenty times intensified. I, go to college! Look back in the genealogies of the Priddys, rooted back in Britain’s centuries, and lay your finger on a single member of it who ever went beyond the secondary school! And there was the brakeman calling, inconsequently, “Groat’s Crossing!”

I half stumbled from that car, thanking God that He had allowed me this sweet day. Here I was on the platform at last. There was no one about. A Sabbath quiet lingered over everything. The black splinters on the platform went like knife blades between the soles of my worn shoes.

Groat’s was a very small station. Some sort of a village lay behind it. I asked a man on the street corner if this was where Evangelical University could be found. He pointed away from the village in the direction of a rutted, clay road bordered by a line of houses on stilts which ended in a pasture fence made from dry stumps interlocked. “The place’s up thar!” mumbled the man as he moved the morsel of tobacco from one cheek to the other. “You’ll run smack inter it ef yo’ keeps ergoin’.” “How far about?” I asked. “Uh, ’bout a mile or mo’, I guess.”

The fumes of gas half choked me. They drowned out the perfumes from decaying leaves which lay thick on the streets. It was a land given over to gas, evidently, for instead of cows grazing in the flat pastures, latticed derricks towered over oil and gas wells. In place of the twitter of Fall songsters reaching me from the trees along the roadside, came the mournful creaking of oil pumps and the gasps and barks from the sputtering engines. A well had just been shot. A crowd of spectators stood at the base of a derrick whose latticework glistened with the black baptism of oil, and the dead grass on which the spectators stood was soaked by a tarry iridescence; the thick, black, greasy mess which had spouted up from the torn heart of the underworld.

I walked along a board walk which gave me a level path over little brooks, open culverts, house drains, and masses of surface gas mains. It took me up a slight grade in a lonesome part of the road where were neither houses nor trees. I stood on the crest of the hill looking ahead for the University. It stood on the open plain ahead of me, in full sight, Evangelical University!

I had never seen a college before. I had feasted my imagination on photographs of the world’s leading universities: Cambridge, Oxford, Edinburgh, and Harvard. I had revelled in the Tom Brown type of literature which has for its background armorial gateways, ivy-clothed turrets in which sparrows twitter all the day; which showed myriads of mullioned windows peeping shyly through the branches of sedate, century oaks; which showed grassy-carpeted lawns, yew gardens, swans breasting placid, rose-fringed lakes, lakes girded by pebbled paths whereon walked pale, lanky scholars in board caps and mourning gowns, walking with bulky tomes of Latin on their palms in serene meditation!

And there the reality of a college, Evangelical University, spread itself for my contemplation, a heart-choked contemplation, because that view shattered a lifetime’s romance! It brought to mind a group of tenements surrounding a big square, brick grammar school. The buildings stood open to the glare of the sun, for there were no tall trees for shade. The smaller houses, little cheaply constructed cottages, stood on cedar posts and were so fragile that the first tempest might readily twist them from their anchorages and carry them tumbling down the fields like empty hat-boxes.

After the armorial-gatewayed universities of my dreams had completely melted away, and the reality in its Puritan, pioneer severity challenged me, I took a firm hold on my slate-colored baggage and strode rapidly on towards my goal.

“What do you want for ninety dollars a year?” I argued with myself. “It’s your chance, and that’s enough.”

I soon came to a newly plowed road which led to the first of the university buildings. The hot sun had not been thirsty enough to suck all the rain which had fallen on the new road in the last storm. The clayey earth had mixed with it and formed a broth which waited for the first unwary foot to slip from the springy board walk, which led over it.

Directly ahead, I saw a salmon-colored, clapboarded building squat and frail like an evangelist’s tabernacle, over which I read on a sign the following explanatory inscription:

“CHIEF PUNGO HALL, 1889.
BORN IN AFRICA. DIED HERE 1885.”

With but a mere glance at this Memorial Dormitory, I had need next to press my teeth over my under lip, stiffen my gait, bulge out my chest, and perform all the other affectations of courage, for in front of Pungo Hall stood a group of well-dressed young men, all looking at me! The heart of the horseman who dashed in the charge of the Six Hundred was a stouter one in feeling than mine when I charged on those lolling young men. My kneecaps vibrated like a cello string. My finger nerves leaped one over the other. My heart pumped double quantity of blood to my cheeks. The board walk dropped from under my shoes and I walked on a tipping cloud.

One of the students, in response to my waiting and my embarrassment, which must have been as clear to him as an electric advertisement over a skyscraper, advanced and asked if he could be of any service to me, saying that his name was Thropper, James Thropper.

Now, during the long, three days’ journey, I had spent much thought in preparation of the introduction of myself to the University upon arrival. I had succeeded in framing an introduction which had both the qualities of completeness and brevity. I had rehearsed it, mentally, in many hypothetical contingencies, so that I might let them see that I knew, definitely, what I had come for. But among all the contingencies I had invented not one of them had resembled the one in which I found myself: making my business known to a student. I had thought of meeting with a gowned don or a “bursar”--whatever he was--because I was saturated with Tom Brown. But I managed to explode my introduction to the student, with all its brevity, in all its boyish completeness.

“My name is Al Priddy. I have come from the mills. I have not been to school beyond common fractions. I am nineteen years old. I am willing to learn. I heard of this place from a friend. He said there was a chance. I have only three dollars. I am willing to work. If you think I can’t be taken in, right off, I shall be happy to live near here, so that when I have earned more money I can begin!”

James Thropper picked up my slate-colored suit-case and led me before the group of students, without comment. Then, after he had introduced me to them all, as “Brother Priddy,” he signalled to a tall, moustached German. “Come here, Brock.” The German came to one side, and Thropper repeated, though not so completely nor with equal brevity, the tale I had unfolded.

“You’ve come to just the right place, Brother Priddy,” said Brock. “We have plenty of students here who arrive without much money or much education. It’s a splendid place for getting a start, isn’t it, Brother Thropper?”

Thropper said, “It’s been a blessing to many a struggler.”

“But is there room?” I asked. “I could wait. It will be nice to live so near a college and join it--later,” I tremblingly ventured. “I didn’t come with the expectation of beginning studies right off, I thought I might go to work in the glass factory a while and then when I’d--”

“That would be a waste of time,” said Brock. “I think you’ll be able to start right away.”

“Excuse me--are--are you a professor--sir?” I enquired.

“No,” laughed Brock, “just a theologue, that’s all. I started late, you see.” Then he explained: “You’ll not be able to do any business here on Sunday. The President will see you the first thing in the morning; but you needn’t fear. There’s no turning of you off when you’ve come so far. Just remember that, Brother Priddy. Meanwhile, I think I might be able to place you at a job that will pay your board.”

With a wild leap of the heart, I gasped, thrilled,

“Oh, if you only could!”

“I’m head waiter in the dining-room,” he explained, “we have a place not filled yet. I’ll see you later about it. Better take him in with you,” he announced, turning to Thropper. “Yours is a double room. That’s where the President would put him, anyhow.”

“My, the gas does smell!” I announced, merely to say something as Thropper led me into the dimness of Pungo Hall. “Doesn’t it spoil the food, when it soaks in it?”

Thropper laughed.

“You won’t mind it, after a while. You’ll get so that you won’t notice it. Here’s the room, ‘9’. Come in, Priddy!”

I heard the scraping of a key against the lock, a frosty light overhead showed me where the transom was swung at an angle. Finally there came a click as the key snapped back the bolt, Thropper threw back the door and ushered me in my college room, a double room within a narrow compass of a few feet something. I swept a pair of greedy eyes over this, the first substantial step in my educational ambition.

_Chapter II. I Help a Real Poet to Sing his Hymn. My First Chance and How I Succeeded with it_

The double bed had two depressions plainly visible on the mattress where two previous occupants had maintained their respective sleeping rights. The double quilt, patterned after a gaudy Chinese puzzle, sank into the depressions of its own, warm weight.

“The best thing about that quilt,” explained Thropper, “is that when my eyes get weary with study or tired from writing, I look at the combinations of colors, and my eyes are rested. It’s great for that. By the way, I’ll call you Al if you’ll call me Jim,” he suggested.

That bed occupied the major portion of the floor. Its edge left just a narrow alley between it and two kitchen tables that were covered with black oil-cloth. One of the tables--farthest from the window, in the dim light,--was bare of books, and Jim said that it would be mine. The other had about a dozen text books on it, some scraps of paper, and an open Bible, marked with purple and red ink where Jim told me he was busy emphasizing all the texts that he might preach sermons from--some day.

The chair allotted me was a plain kitchen affair, as hard as a tombstone; but Jim’s was fearfully and wonderfully stuffed. There it stood like a parody on a fluffy Morris, library chair. It was a kitchen chair grotesquely stuffed and upholstered within a faded, torn, and highly colored bed comforter. When Jim noted that I took an interest in it, he said,

“Padding made quite a difference in that chair, Al. It’s real comfortable, though there isn’t much seat left; it’s so thickly padded. I was out in the fields one day, and near the fence I picked up a sheep’s skin of thick wool. I thought then that I could make good use of it, so I brought it back, left it on the clothes-line at the back of the building to let the air sweeten it, for it was pretty strong; then I came to the conclusion that I could use it to stuff the chair--real wool, you know. The comforter was left in the back room by a fellow and I used that, too. It’s a real comfortable chair; almost makes you fall asleep when you sit in it.”

“You didn’t manage to sweeten _all_ of the wool, did you, Jim?” I asked dubiously as I noted the dank odor that came from the chair; an odor that was reminiscent of a junk shop after a rain.

“Why,” replied Jim, in good humor, “I don’t notice it a bit. I think it must be your imagination.”

“Well,” I concluded, ungraciously, “probably it’s like the gas. You’ve got used to it.”

Between the gas stove and the wash stand stood a galvanized water pail, three-quarters filled and with a fuzzy growth on its oily surface.

“That ain’t drinking water, is it?” I asked in alarm.

“No,” laughed Jim. “That’s in case of fire. I ought to have changed that water two weeks ago, but I guess I’m getting lazy.”

By this time I had my coat off and had accepted Jim’s invitation to wash the train dust off my face.

For this purpose I scraped around in the soap dish until I had secured two thin wafers of soap, one a transparent reminder of perfumed toilet soap, the other a dull yellow, and odorous with naphtha, which I recognized as the remnant of a powerful disinfecting and wash-day soap; used by my Aunt to drive black oil from overalls. I had to rub these two antagonistic wafers together to make sufficient lather for washing. Then, too, I had to hurry my toilet, for the flowered wash bowl had a yellow crack on its under side, through which the water dripped rapidly while I washed.

Jim said,

“Until you get some, Al, you must use my towel.” He took it down from the wire behind the stove and let me have it, with the remark:

“There’s a dry corner, there near the fringe.”

The window was open, and while I was busy brushing the dust from my clothes, a gust of wind came in and I heard a rip on the wall followed by an exclamation from Jim,

“There it goes again! The wall will be going next!”

On examination I found that the wall paper, with its highly conventionalized lotus leaves, had lost its grip on the wall behind the gas stove and had uncovered a great area of plastered wall. Jim produced some tacks, and using a flat-iron for a hammer managed to return the paper to its place and to keep it anchored there through a liberal use of tacks.

He apologized, when he came down to the floor,

“All this is miserable enough, Al, and I don’t blame you for thinking so.”

“Uh,” I retorted, “I ain’t grumbling. Beggars can’t be choosers. Besides, I don’t see what more the college can do for ninety dollars a year, board, room, and teaching.”

“‘Tuition’ you ought to say,” corrected Jim. “I’m glad you’ve got the right spirit about this place, Al. You’re right, we can’t expect any more for ninety dollars! I don’t see how they can do for us what they can. It’s worth a mighty lot for you and me to get a chance, and if education should cost more, where would you and I be?”

“That’s just what I think!” I replied with spirit. “It is just the chance we want. Here I am, with only three dollars to begin on and a poor foundation for study in the bargain. What other place is there where I could be given a start on such easy terms?”

“A lot of fellows come here,” commented Jim, “who don’t look at the matter in that way--and they soon leave and don’t have any chance at all. I know you’ll appreciate the hard scrabble to get the education. Besides, poor buildings, poverty-stricken rooms, cheap board, and limited privileges ought to make us get the most out of our studies. That’s something.”

“But suppose they don’t let me begin?” I gasped; for up to this time I had not let a doubt of my acceptance at Evangelical University mar the afternoon.

“I don’t think they’ll let a fellow like you go begging, Al,” responded Jim. “You might as well count yourself one of us, right off.”

Just then, out in the upper end of the corridor, went up a high, lisping, effeminate voice, calling,

“Oh, Brother Thropper; Brother Thropper!”

Jim went to the door and replied,

“All right, Jason!” Then he turned to me and whispered,

“Hardwick is one of the smartest fellows in the University. He’s a poet, too. He’s got a hymn set to music in this book,” and he waved a much worn, manila paper covered Gospel hymn book. “It’s very popular; sung in many of the big revivals!”

With a throb of excitement I waited for the advent of this real poet. I had seen men who had called themselves poets in the mill; but their productions were local in theme, personal in lines, unpoetic in metre and never reached a further fame than insertion in the “Original Line” column of the papers. But I was now to view a real poet; one whose words were sung in churches. I was thoroughly subdued when I heard the poet’s fingers searching for the knob, outside.

He was all that the comic papers and the actors suggest for poets. There was not a bit of the world about his aspect. In reaching for the dwelling places of the muses he had lengthened out until his head, covered with a thick cluster of curls, roamed through the higher levels of the atmosphere. He had to incline his head in order to get through the doorway. His face had a poetic paleness and his lips were pulled out as if he were on the verge of inspired speech. He wore a clerical vest and all his clothes were of a very spiritual black. He carried a mandolin.

I was formally introduced and on my part, in acknowledging the introduction, I agreed that I was “right glad to know” Mr. Hardwick.

The poet had come to rehearse some hymns with Jim. The latter produced his guitar; both musicians sat on the edge of the bed before a nickel-plated music stand, the Gospel hymn book was put in place, and to the strumming of the instruments, the vocalists sang some revival hymns with such effect as to produce from me the comment, “My, that sounds fine!”

Then, growing bold through intimacy, I said,

“I wonder, Mr. Hardwick, if you will sing that song you wrote, please?”

The poet said that he would be pleased to sing it as a trio, and asked me, when he had found the place, if I could join in with the bass. I thought I could.

So the three of us, I between the two musicians, sat on the edge of the bed and sang the lilting reiterations of the hymn,

“There’s a welcome home,
There’s a welcome home,
There’s a welcome home,
For you and me.”

We were interrupted by the ringing of a bell, on the University tower, which, I learned, was the call to the Sunday afternoon preaching service. As my roommate was trying to urge me to attend, and while I was protesting that my clothes were not good enough, the head waiter came into the room and said,

“Priddy, I’m going to give you a try as a waiter at supper. Don’t go to the preaching service. I will try to rig you up with an apron and jacket.”

Oh, what inspiration those words had in them! It meant that the University was already willing to give me a chance to show what I could do. I should not have to get work in the glass factory. I should not have to wait before I could enroll myself in the University. My chance had come. I cried for joy; tears of which I was not ashamed, even though Brock, the head waiter, saw them.

“I’m only poor, and a big blunderer, without any manners,” I protested, “but if you give me a chance, I’ll do my utmost.”

At five o’clock Brock came into the room carrying on his arm a well-starched waiter’s jacket and a patched white apron.

“I had these on the side,” he announced. “They are worth forty cents. You may pay for them when you are able. Don’t be worrying about the matter. Be over at the dining-room at quarter past five.”

After that I moved as if in the midst of a grand dream. Was I actually in a dormitory, at a college? Was it true that in a quarter of an hour I should be trying to wait on a group of real students?

The dining-hall was a squat wooden bungalow with a great many windows in it. The front hall floor bent under my weight as I crossed it. I unlatched one of the double doors and viewed the roomful of tables with the dull reflector lamps hanging above them. White jacketed students were busy with plates and plated silver cutlery. Brock, himself in glorious white, came down the room with a word of greeting. I was introduced to the student-waiters, was told that I was on trial only, and that I should be carefully watched, as there were many trained waiters among the students who coveted the position. Brock indicated two tables near the door, the farthest away from the kitchen of all the tables.

“You will wait on them,” he said. “There will be ten to a table. When they come in, before the blessing, they will stand behind their chairs. You must go around, find out what they want to drink; hot water, tea or cold water, then you must go to the other end of the room, get one of the trays and fill it with twenty cups. Then you must get them served just as soon as you can. You will find plenty of chores to do when they are seated.”

With a wild, thumping heart, and with a maximum of terror, I heard the first of the students enter the outer hall. Brock stood at the opposite end of the room, near the slides that connected with the kitchen, his finger on a Sunday-school bell. The students, well-dressed young men and women, swept past me, crowded me, stared at me, stood at my tables; went to the different parts of the room chattering, bantering, laughing, and accosting one another familiarly with such abandon and effect that I felt like an intruder. No one spoke to me. The young men and women at my two tables commented about something in a low murmur. They cast doubting looks toward me.

For a minute I was in a panic, then, because I was tall, I could see Brock’s eyes telling me to do something. I went through the crowded aisles, around my tables, saying to each person, in a trembling, very English way,

“Will you ’ave ’ot, cold water, or tea, please?”

I received eighteen orders for hot water and tea and two orders for cold water. I came out from the ordeal of having addressed so many students and went perspiring to the upper end of the room where the urns and trays were. I put the weighty cups and the thick glasses on a tray the size of an ordinary five o’clock tea table, filled them by twisting the tray under the spigots of the urns, and with the weighty load raised as high as my long arms could exalt it, pushed my way nervously down the aisle, past the students whose backs were turned to me, and conscious that all the inquisitive and critical eyes in the world were watching me to see how I should manage. I was very fortunate in being able to squirm my way to the lower end of the room and to reach the vicinity of my own tables without accident. It helped me, too, to hear the students singing a hymn. It took their minds off me, the green mill boy trying to wait on college tables! Thus encouraged, I tried a bold thing, which I saw the other waiters doing. As there were no stand tables to rest our trays upon, while steadying mine against my body as it lay on the palm of my hand, I took off a cup of hot water from the lowered tray, and tried to reach the cup around the waist of the young woman who had called for hot water. The balance would have been maintained had not the person next to me suddenly drawn back, jolted the tray from my hand, and sent the hot liquids streaming down the skirts and shoes of those in the vicinity. There followed, too, the crash and thump as the heavy cups clattered to the floor. The two glasses splintered into bits, and while the students were sitting down, I found myself growing more and more conspicuous until the seated throng looked up from every part of the room, to see me furiously red, with tears gathering, and with untold chagrin over the mishap.

I waited, among the ruin, for Brock to come to me, get me by the scruff of the neck, hurl me outside to say,

“Get back to the mill. What right have you to pretend to know how to act among cultured people? You’re too green!”

I _imagined_, too, that the students at my table must be delegating one of their number to go to the head waiter to say,

“We don’t want that clumsy person bothering with us. He’s spoiled a couple of fine dresses and made a regular bothersome mess. Throw him out! Send him back to where he came from!”

But I had mistaken the temper of Evangelical University. Brock came down, and with great kindness patted me on the back and said, encouragingly,

“Don’t let a thing like that bother you, Priddy. I know how they crowd. Cheer up, old fellow.”

Then the student who had jolted the tray bent back and said,

“It was all my fault, Brock. He wasn’t to blame a bit. It was downright careless of me. I’m sorry.”

Then, after he had assisted me in bringing the hot water and other drinkables to the tables, Brock took pains to introduce me to the twenty young men and women, saying,

“Mr. Priddy, I hope, will see that you do not go hungry as much as you might!”

I walked on air after that; for the head waiter had called me, “Mr. Priddy!”

_Chapter III. Thropper’s Puff Tie. Sounds That Passed in the Night. The Possible Advantages of Speaking Tubes. The Scroll of Divine History. The Meditations of a Saint. How Thropper Lost his Pious Reputation_

Shortly after my return from the dining-hall, Thropper thundered into the room, in his impetuous way, jerked his arms out of his coat, tore at his collar and lifted up the lid of his tin-covered trunk with every evidence of excitement.

“What’s the matter--Jim?” I asked, from my seat near the window.

“Got a date on, that’s what,” he answered, half smothered in his trunk. “Miss Ebberd’s going--church--with me. Lucky--duck, that’s what! Going down the board walk to--New Light revival! Say,” he interrupted, holding up for my inspection a black, puff tie, with an opal stone nesting in the midst of its folds, “How would this go with a choker collar, Priddy?”

“Put it on first, Thropper,” I suggested.

He fastened it around his high choker collar: a collar whose pointed fronts might have been successfully used by Spanish Inquisitors to make heretics look up continually unless they wished to have holes punctured under their chins.

“The reason I wear this tie,” said Thropper, confidentially, “is because it blocks up my shirt bosom; hides it and saves washing, of course. You’ve got to get on to all those sort of tricks when you work your way through school, you’ll find, Priddy. Now, how do I look, eh?”

I thought him a very attractive Lothario indeed, although I did not venture so far with an expression of opinion. I merely said,

“You look slick!”

As he was leaving the room, Thropper suddenly turned and in a very apologetic tone said,

“I had planned, Priddy, to stay with you tonight, but you see how it is, don’t you, old fellow?”

“Why, certainly,” I agreed. “I wouldn’t like to have you miss this chance for anything, Thropper. Go ahead and good luck!”

“Thanks,” he said. “You can lock the door when you go to bed if I’m not back. You must be tired!”

“Yes, I am tired, Thropper. I’ll sit by the window--and think. Good luck to you!”

He was gone. As his feet echoed in the bare hall, I heard him humming, like a happy lover,

“There’ll be no dark valley!”

The evening shadows were gathering outside, as I sat near the window, looking out. From the village centre came the drawn out stroke of a church bell. Then the campus was alive with sounds. The whole University seemed astir. Some one raised up a window in the second story, over my head, and a quiet, vibrant voice called, “Hey, Brother Merritt?” The man in the next room stopped his strumming on a guitar, lifted up his window and replied, “What?” “Going to the service tonight, Brother Merritt?” To which my neighbor answered, “No, I’m afraid I can’t. I’m tired.” A door in the next house burst open and a trio of young women gathered on the porch. “That’s only the first bell,” said one. “We shan’t have to hurry.” “I’m glad of that,” replied another, “for the board walk is just simply terrible in places: full of holes that we might trip in if we had to run.” Then their pattering footfalls could be heard growing dimmer and dimmer in the distance on the board walk. Little groups of young men hummed hymns as they, too, passed Pungo Hall on their way to the revival. Others laughed and argued. I heard the fragment of one discussion in which three earnest-toned young men were indulging: “Saint Paul did make a failure in that Mar’s Hill speech!” said one, loudly. “It all depends on what you mean by ‘failure,’” replied his antagonist; “true, the Greeks might not have been strongly enthusiastic at the time, but it seems to me that God would use that speech for--No!” The argument was swallowed up in the twilight and the distance. A group of young women swept by the gloom which hung like a mystic veil between me and them. I heard only one sentence of their conversation, “Fried potatoes--ugh!” They were succeeded by a procession of late starters who slipped by shrouded in the gloom, a happy, familiar, shadowy procession ignorant of the lonesome lad who sat back of a window and envied them their evening’s excursion. The last of the footsteps died down on the board walk, as if the last of my generation had left me to occupy the world alone. But the stars came out for friendliness, ruling over the silences of the campus and rendering it more silent. The tolls of the church bell announced the beginning of the service. When the double stroke had been given for a last warning, the silence was about me once more. Suddenly the troubled cry of a sheep from the back pasture broke out on the night, a plaintive bleat as if a dog or some prowling beast of prey had been scented. Then, through an open window in the next house, I heard the voice of a girl as it read something, followed by a deeper voice which said, “Oh, yum, I’ve been dozing, Grace!” That was followed by a hand which drew apart the curtains, and soon two girls’ heads were outlined against the golden glow in the room, and one remarked, “Oh, what a stupid night!” I hurriedly dodged my head into the room, drew down the window shade and lighted the flaring, hissing blaze of gas.

The whole room was cheapened when the powerful gas light shone on it. The crowded space, filled with the tawdry effects of my roommate and myself: the rack of dusty photographs of people I had never seen, the stuffed chair, the bed quilt, the water bucket; all those things oppressed me. I turned off the light and threw myself on the bed determined not to undress till Thropper’s return. I felt the need of Thropper. It seemed to me that he would cheer me, hearten me, be a companion. I began to speculate about Thropper in a dreamy sort of way. Overhead, some one began to walk back and forth, back and forth, monotonously, humming a tune unknown to me. I listened for the melody hoping to discover that it would be something with which I was familiar, so that I could hum it too. But it was suddenly interrupted by a terrific yawn. Then the man upstairs said, “Oh, Oh-h-h!” and I heard the clatter as a pair of shoes fell on the floor. The man was going to bed. I began to wonder who it was that had been walking and singing and going to bed over my head. I also speculated on the social value of a speaking tube which should connect our rooms. Then a long, long silence, broken at last by a clatter in the hallway and at last Thropper’s cheery voice,

“Well, you couldn’t wait to undress, eh, Priddy?”

“Oh,” I mumbled, “got back?”

“Yes,” he laughed. “Isn’t it time?”

“What time is it?”

“Nearly ten.”