The Plastic Age Part 10

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. G.o.d knows I'm not going to waste my time telling you bone-heads what Carlyle means by a hero. If you don't know Odin from Mohammed by this time, you can roast in Dante's h.e.l.l 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. h.e.l.l!

how some of the boys are going to fox 'em." He paused to laugh. "Jim Hicks told me this afternoon that 'Philomela' was by Shakspere." 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 d.a.m.n 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 G.o.dd.a.m.n 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....

Gos.h.!.+ 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 cla.s.s. Masefield's all right. I wish we had more of his stuff and less of Milton. Lord Almighty, how I hate Milton! What th' h.e.l.l 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 t.i.tle!"

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 G.o.d 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.

The college grew quieter and quieter as the day for the examinations approached. There were seminars on everything, even on the best way to prepare cribs. Certain students with low grades and less honor would somehow gravitate together and discuss plans for "foxing the profs."

Opinions differed. One man usually insisted that notes in the palm of the left hand were safe from detection, only to be met by the objection that they had to be written in ink, and if one's hand perspired, "and it was sure as h.e.l.l to," nothing was left but an inky smear. Another held that a fellow could fasten a rubber band on his forearm and attach the notes to those, pulling them down when needed and then letting them snap back out of sight into safety. "But," one of the conspirators was sure to object, "what th' h.e.l.l are you going to do if the band breaks?" Some of them insisted that notes placed in the inside of one's goloshes--all the students wore them but took them off in the examination-room--could be easily read. "Yeah, but the proctors are wise to that stunt." And so _ad infinitum_. Eventually all the "stunts" were used and many more. Not that all the students cheated. Everything considered, the percentage of cheaters was not great, but those who did cheat usually spent enough time evolving ingenious methods of preparing cribs and in preparing them to have learned their lessons honestly and well.

The night before the first examinations the campus was utterly quiet.

Suddenly bedlam broke loose. Somehow every dormitory that contained freshmen became a madhouse at the same time. Hugh and Carl were in Surrey 19 earnestly studying. Freddy d.i.c.kson flung the door open and shouted hysterically, "The general science exam's out!"

Hugh and Carl whirled around in their desk-chairs.

"What?" They shouted together.

"Yeah! One of the fellows saw it. A girl that works at the press copied down the exam and gave it to him."

"What fellow? Where's the exam?"

"I don't know who the guy is, but Hubert Manning saw the exam."

Hugh and Carl were out of their chairs in an instant, and the three boys rushed out of Surrey in search of Manning. They found him in his room telling a mob of excited cla.s.smates that he hadn't seen the exam but that Harry Smithson had. Away went the crowd in search of Smithson, Carl and Hugh and Freddy in the midst of the excited, chattering lads.

Smithson hadn't seen the exam, but he had heard that Puddy Mcc.u.mber had a copy.... Freshmen were running up and down stairs in the dormitories, shouting, "Have you seen the exam?" No, n.o.body had seen the exam, but some of the boys had been told definitely what the questions were going to be. No two seemed to agree on the questions, but everybody copied them down and then rushed on to search for a _bona fide_ copy. They hurried from dormitory to dormitory, constantly shouting the same question, "Have you seen the exam?" There were men in every dormitory with a new list of questions, which were hastily scratched into note-books by the eager seekers. Until midnight the excitement raged; then the campus quieted down as the freshmen began to study the long lists of questions.

"G.o.d!" said Carl as he scanned his list hopelessly, "these d.a.m.n questions cover everything in the course and some things that I know d.a.m.n well weren't in it. What a lot of nuts we were. Let's go to bed."

"Carl," Hugh wailed despondently, "I'm going to flunk that exam. I can't answer a tenth of these questions. I can't go to bed; I've got to study.

Oh, Lord!"

"Don't be a triple-plated jacka.s.s. Come on to bed. You'll just get woozy if you stay up any longer."

"All right," Hugh agreed wearily. He went to bed, but many of the boys stayed up and studied, some of them all night.

The examinations were held in the gymnasium. Hundreds of cla.s.s-room chairs were set in even rows. Nothing else was there, not even the gymnasium apparatus. A few years earlier a wily student had sneaked into the gymnasium the night before an examination and written his notes on a dumbbell hanging on the wall. The next day he calmly chose the seat in front of the dumbbell--and proceeded to write a perfect examination. The annotated dumbbell was found later, and after that the walls were stripped clean of apparatus before the examinations began.

At a few minutes before nine the entire freshman cla.s.s was grouped before the doors of the gymnasium, nervously talking, some of them glancing through their notes, others smoking--some of them so rapidly that the cigarettes seemed to melt, others walking up and down, muttering and mumbling; all of them so excited, so tense that they hardly knew what they were doing. Hugh was trying to think of a dozen answers to questions that popped into his head, and he couldn't think of anything.