The Plastic Age · Chapter 11 (1/2)

XI

After the Sanford-Raleigh game, the college seemed to be slowly dying. The boys held countless postmortems over the game, explaining to each other just how it had been lost or how it could have been won. They watched the newspapers eagerly as the sport writers announced their choice for the so-called All American team. If Slade was on the team, the writer was conceded to “know his dope”; if Slade wasn’t, the writer was a “dumbbell.” But all this pseudo-excitement was merely picking at the covers; there was no real heart in it. Gradually the football talk died down; freshmen ceased to write themes about Sanford’s great fighting spirit; sex and religion once more became predominant at the “bull sessions.”

Studies, too, began to find a place in the sun. Hour examinations were coming, and most of the boys knew that they were miserably prepared. Lights were burning in fraternity houses and dormitories until late at night, and mighty little of their glow was shed on poker parties and crap games. The college had begun to study.

When Hugh finally calmed down and took stock, he was horrified and frightened to discover how far he was behind in all his work. He had done his lessons sketchily from day to day, but he really knew nothing about them, and he knew that he didn’t. Since Morse’s departure, he had loafed, trusting to luck and the knowledge he had gained in high school. So far he had escaped a summons from the dean, but he daily expected one, and the mere thought of hour examinations made him shiver. He studied hard for a week, succeeding only in getting gloriously confused and more frightened. The examinations proved to be easier than he had expected; he didn’t fail in any of them, but he did not get a grade above a C.

The examination flurry passed, and the college was left cold. Nothing seemed to happen. The boys went to the movies every night, had a peanut fight, talked to the shadowy actors; they played cards, pool, and billiards, or shot craps; Saturday nights many of them went to a dance at Hastings, a small town five miles away; they held bull sessions and discussed everything under the sun and some things beyond it; they attended a performance of Shaw’s “Candida” given by the Dramatic Society and voted it a “wet” show; and, incidentally, some of them studied. But, all in all, life was rather tepid, and most of the boys were merely marking time and waiting for Christmas vacation.

For Hugh the vacation came and went with a rush. It was glorious to get home again, glorious to see his father and mother, and, at first, glorious to see Helen Simpson. But Helen had begun to pall; her kisses hardly compensated for her conversation. She gave him a little feeling of guilt, too, which he tried to argue away. “Kissing isn’t really wrong. Everybody pets; at least, Carl says they do. Helen likes it but.⁠ ⁠…” Always that “but” intruded itself. “But it doesn’t seem quite right when⁠—I don’t really love her.” When he kissed her for the last time before returning to college, he had a distinct feeling of relief: well, that would be off his mind for a while, anyway.

It was a sober, quiet crowd of students⁠—for the first time they were students⁠—that returned to their desks after the vacation. The final examinations were ahead of them, less than a month away; and those examinations hung over their heads like the relentless, glittering blade of a guillotine. The boys studied. “College life” ceased; there was a brief period of education.

Of course, they did not desert the movies, and the snow and ice claimed them. Part of Indian Lake was scraped free of snow, and every clear afternoon hundreds of boys skated happily, explaining afterward that they had to have some exercise if they were going to be able to study. On those afternoons the lake was a pretty sight, zestful, alive with color. Many of the men wore blue sweaters, some of them brightly colored Mackinaws, all of them knitted toques. As soon as the cold weather arrived, the freshmen had been permitted to substitute blue toques with orange tassels for their “baby bonnets.” The blue and orange stood out vividly against the white snow-covered hills, and the skates rang sharply as they cut the glare ice.

There was snowshoeing, skiing, and sliding “to keep a fellow fit so that he could do good work in his exams,” but much as the boys enjoyed the winter sports, a black pall hung over the college as the examination period drew nearer and nearer. The library, which had been virtually deserted all term, suddenly became crowded. Every afternoon and evening its big tables were filled with serious-faced lads earnestly bending over books, making notes, running their fingers through their hair, occasionally looking up with dazed eyes, or twisting about miserably.

The tension grew greater and greater. The upper-classmen were quiet and businesslike, but most of the freshmen were frankly terrified. A few of them packed their trunks and slunk away, and a few more openly scorned the examinations and their frightened classmates; but they were the exceptions. All the buoyancy seemed gone out of the college; nothing was left but an intense strain. The dormitories were strangely quiet at night. There was no playing of golf in the hallways, no rolling of bats down the stairs, no shouting, no laughter; a man who made any noise was in danger of a serious beating. Even the greetings as the men passed each other on the campus were quiet and abstracted. They ceased to cut classes. Everybody attended, and everybody paid close attention even to the most tiresome instructors.

Studious seniors began to reap a harvest out of tutoring sections. The meetings were a dollar “a throw,” and for another dollar a student could get a mimeographed outline of a course. But the tutoring sections were only for the “plutes” or the athletes, many of whom were subsidized by fraternities or alumni. Most of the students had to learn their own lessons; so they often banded together in small groups to make the task less arduous, finding some relief in sociability.

The study groups, quite properly called seminars, would have shocked many a worthy professor had he been able to attend one; but they were truly educative, and to many students inspiring. The professor had planted the seed of wisdom with them; it was at the seminars that they tried honestly, if somewhat hysterically and irreverently, to make it grow.

Hugh did most of his studying alone, fearing that the seminars would degenerate into bull sessions, as many of them did; but Carl insisted that he join one group that was going “to wipe up that goddamned English course tonight.”

There were only five men at the seminar, which met in Surrey 19, because Pudge Jamieson, who was “rating” an A in the course and was therefore an authority, said that he wouldn’t come if there were any more. Pudge, as his nickname suggests, was plump. He was a round-faced, jovial youngster who learned everything with consummate ease, wrote with great fluency and sometimes real beauty, peered through his horn-rimmed spectacles amusedly at the world, and read every “smut” book that he could lay his hands on. His library of erotica was already famous throughout the college, his volumes of Balzac’s “Droll Stories,” Rabelais complete, “Mlle. de Maupin,” Burton’s “Arabian Nights,” and the “Decameron” being in constant demand. He could tell literally hundreds of dirty stories, always having a new one on tap, always looking when he told it like a complacent cherub.

There were two other men in the seminar. Freddy Dickson, an earnest, anemic youth, seemed to be always striving for greater acceleration and never gaining it; or as Pudge put it, “The trouble with Freddy is that he’s always shifting gears.” Larry Stillwell, the last man, was a dark, handsome youth with exceedingly regular features, pomaded hair parted in the center and shining sleekly, fine teeth, and rich coloring: a “smooth” boy who prided himself on his conquests and the fact that he never got a grade above a C in his courses. There was no man in the freshman class with a finer mind, but he declined to study, declaring firmly that he could not waste his time acquiring impractical tastes for useless arts.

“Now everybody shut up,” said Pudge, seating himself in a big chair and laboriously crossing one leg over the other. “Put some more wood on the fire, Hugh, will you?”

Hugh stirred up the fire, piled on a log or so, and then returned to his chair, hoping against belief that something really would be accomplished in the seminar. All the boys, he excepted, were smoking, and all of them were lolling back in dangerously comfortable attitudes.

“We’ve got to get going,” Pudge continued, “and we aren’t going to get anything done if we just sit around and bull. I’m the prof, and I’m going to ask questions. Now, don’t bull. If you don’t know, just say, ‘No soap,’ and if you do know, shoot your dope.” He grinned. “How’s that for a rhyme?”

“Atta boy!” Carl exclaimed enthusiastically.

“Shut up! Now, the stuff we want to get at tonight is the poetry. No use spending any time on the composition. My prof said that we would have to write themes in the exam, but we can’t do anything about that here. You’re all getting by on your themes, anyway, aren’t you?”

“Yeah,” the listening quartet answered in unison, Larry Stillwell adding dubiously, “Well, I’m getting C’s.”

“Larry,” said Carl in cold contempt, “you’re a goddamn liar. I saw a B on one of your themes the other day and an A on another. What are you always pulling that lowbrow stuff for?”

Larry had the grace to blush. “Aw,” he explained in some confusion, “my prof’s full of hooey. He doesn’t know a C theme from an A one. He makes me sick. He⁠—”

“Aw, shut up!” Freddy Dickson shouted. “Let’s get going; let’s get going. We gotta learn this poetry. Damn! I don’t know anything about it. I didn’t crack the book till two days ago.”

Pudge took charge again. “Close your gabs, everybody,” he commanded sternly. “There’s no sense in going over the prose lit. You can do that better by yourselves. God knows I’m not going to waste my time telling you boneheads what Carlyle means by a hero. If you don’t know Odin from Mohammed by this time, you can roast in Dante’s hell for all of me. Now listen; the prof said that they were going to make us place lines, and, of course, they’ll expect us to know what the poems are about. Hell! how some of the boys are going to fox ’em.” He paused to laugh. “Jim Hicks told me this afternoon that ‘Philomela’ was by Shakespeare.” The other boys did not understand the joke, but they all laughed heartily.

“Now,” he went on, “I’ll give you the name of a poem, and then you tell me what it’s about and who wrote it.”

He leafed rapidly through an anthology. “Carl, who wrote ‘Kubla Khan’?”

Carl puffed his pipe meditatively. “I’m going to fox you, Pudge,” he said, frankly triumphant; “I know. Coleridge wrote it. It seems to be about a Jew who built a swell joint for a wild woman or something like that. I can’t make much out of the damn thing.”

“That’s enough. Smack for Carl,” said Pudge approvingly. “Smack” meant that the answer was satisfactory. “Freddy, who wrote ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’?”

Freddy twisted in his chair, thumped his head with his knuckles, and finally announced with a groan of despair, “No soap.”

“Hugh?”

“No soap.”

“Larry?”

“Well,” drawled Larry, “I think Jawn Keats wrote it. It’s one of those bedtime stories with a kick. A knight gets picked up by a jane. He puts her on his prancing steed and beats it for the tall timber. Keats isn’t very plain about what happened there, but I suspect the worst. Anyhow, the knight woke up the next morning with an awful rotten taste in his mouth.”

“Smack for Larry. Your turn, Carl. Who wrote ‘The West Wind’?”

“You can’t get me on that boy Masefield, Pudge. I know all his stuff. There isn’t any story; it’s just about the west wind, but it’s a goddamn good poem. It’s the cat’s pajamas.”

“You said it, Carl,” Hugh chimed in, “but I like ‘Sea Fever’ better.

“I must go down to the seas again,

To the lonely sea and the sky.⁠ ⁠…

Gosh! that’s hot stuff. ‘August, 1914’ ’s a peach, too.”

“Yeah,” agreed Larry languidly; “I got a great kick when the prof read that in class. Masefield’s all right. I wish we had more of his stuff and less of Milton. Lord Almighty, how I hate Milton! What th’ hell do they have to give us that tripe for?”

“Oh, let’s get going,” Freddy pleaded, running a nervous hand through his mouse-colored hair. “Shoot a question, Pudge.”

“All right, Freddy.” Pudge tried to smile wickedly but succeeded only in looking like a beaming cherub. “Tell us who wrote the ‘Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.’ Cripes! what a title!”

Freddy groaned. “I know that Wadsworth wrote it, but that is all that I do know about it.”

“Wordsworth, Freddy,” Carl corrected him. “Wordsworth. Henry W. Wordsworth.”

“Gee, Carl, thanks. I thought it was William.”

There was a burst of laughter, and then Pudge explained. “It is William, Freddy. Don’t let Peters razz you. Just for that, Carl, you tell what it’s about.”

“No soap,” said Carl decisively.

“I know,” Hugh announced, excited and pleased.

“Shoot!”

“Well, it’s this reincarnation business. Wordsworth thought you lived before you came on to this earth, and everything was fine when you were a baby but it got worse when you got older. That’s about all. It’s kinda bugs, but I like some of it.”

“It isn’t bugs,” Pudge contradicted flatly; “it’s got sense. You do lose something as you grow older, but you gain something, too. Wordsworth admits that. It’s a wonderful poem, and you’re dumbbells if you can’t see it.” He was very serious as he turned the pages of the book and laid his pipe on the table at his elbow. “Now listen. This stanza has the dope for the whole poem.” He read the famous stanza simply and effectively:

“Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;

The soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,

Hath had elsewhere its setting

And cometh from afar;

Not in entire forgetfulness,

And not in utter nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory do we come

From God who is our home:

Heaven lies about us in our infancy!

Shades of the prison house begin to close

Upon the growing Boy,

But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,

He sees it in his joy;

The Youth who daily farther from the east

Must travel, still is Nature’s priest,

And by the vision splendid

Is on his way attended;

At length the Man perceives it die away,

And fade into the light of common day.”

There was a moment’s silence when he finished, and then Hugh said reverently: “That is beautiful. Read the last stanza, will you, Pudge?”

So Pudge read the last stanza, and then the boys got into an argument over the possible truth of the thesis of the poem. Freddy finally brought them back to the task in hand with his plaintive plea, “We’ve gotta get going.” It was two o’clock in the morning when the seminar broke up, Hugh admitting to Carl after their visitors departed that he had not only learned a lot but that he had enjoyed the evening heartily.