The Plastic Age Part 19

I want to ask a favor of you. Please leave women alone.

Keep straight, please. You don't know how much I want you to do that.

Thanks for all you've done for me.

CARL.

Hugh's eyes filled with tears when he read that letter. Carl seemed a tragic figure to him, and he missed him dreadfully. Poor old Carl! What h.e.l.l it must have been to tell his mother! "And he wants me to keep straight. By G.o.d, I will.... I'll try to, anyhow."

CHAPTER XVII

Hugh's depression was not continuous by any means. He was much too young and too healthy not to find life an enjoyable experience most of the time. Disillusionment followed disillusionment, each one painful and dispiriting in itself, but they came at long enough intervals for him to find a great deal of pleasure in between.

Also, for the first time since he had been transferred from Alling's section in Latin, he was taking genuine interest in a course. Having decided to major in English, he found that he was required to take a composition course the second half of his soph.o.m.ore year. His instructor was Professor Henley, known as Jimmie Henley among the students, a man in his middle thirties, spare, neat in his dress, sharp with his tongue, apt to say what he thought in terms so plain that not even the stupidest undergraduate could fail to understand him. His hazel-brown eyes were capable of a friendly twinkle, but they had a way of darkening suddenly and snapping that kept his students constantly on the alert. There was little of the professor about him but a great deal of the teacher.

Hugh went to his first conference with him not entirely easy in his mind. Henley had a reputation for "tearing themes to pieces and making a fellow feel like a poor fish." Hugh had written his themes hastily, as he had during his freshman year, and he was afraid that Henley might discover evidences of that haste.

Henley was leaning back in his swivel chair, his feet on the desk, a brier pipe in his mouth, as Hugh entered the cubbyhole of an office.

Down came the feet with a bang.

"h.e.l.lo, Carver," Henley said cheerfully. "Come in and sit down while I go through your themes." He motioned to a chair by the desk. Hugh muttered a shy "h.e.l.lo" and sat down, watching Henley expectantly and rather uncomfortably.

Henley picked up three themes. Then he turned his keen eyes on Hugh.

"I've already read these. Lazy cuss, aren't you?" he asked amiably.

Hugh flushed. "I--I suppose so."

"You know that you are; no supposing to it." He slapped the desk lightly with the themes. "First drafts, aren't they?"

"Yes, sir." Hugh felt his cheeks getting warmer.

Henley smiled. "Thanks for not lying. If you had lied, this conference would have ended right now. Oh, I wouldn't have told you that I thought you were lying; I would simply have made a few polite but entirely insincere comments about your work and let you go. Now I am going to talk to you frankly and honestly."

"I wish you would," Hugh murmured, but he wasn't at all sure that he wished anything of the sort.

Henley knocked the ashes out of his pipe into a metal tray, refilled it, lighted it, and then puffed meditatively, gazing at Hugh with kind but speculative eyes.

"I think you have ability," he began slowly. "You evidently write with great fluency and considerable accuracy, and I can find poetic touches here and there that please me. But you are careless, abominably careless, lazy. Whatever virtues there are in your themes come from a natural gift, not from any effort you made to say the thing in the best way. Now, I'm not going to spend anytime discussing these themes in detail; they aren't worth it."

He pointed his pipe at Hugh. "The point is exactly this," he said sternly. "I'll never spend any time discussing your themes so long as you turn in hasty, shoddy work. I can see right now that you can get a C in this course without trying. If that's all you want, all right, I'll give it to you--and let it go at that. The Lord knows that I have enough to do without wasting time on lazy youngsters who haven't sense enough to develop their gifts. If you continue to turn in themes like these, I'll give you C's or D's on them and let you dig your own shallow grave by yourself. But If you want to try to write as well as you can, I'll give you all the help in my power. Not one minute can you have so long as you don't try, but you can have hours if you do try. Furthermore, you will find writing a pleasure if you write as well as you can, but you won't get any sport just scribbling off themes because you have to."

He paused to toss the three themes across the desk to Hugh, who was watching him with astonishment. No instructor had ever talked to him that way before.

"You can rewrite these themes if you want to," Henley went on. "I haven't graded them, and I'll reserve the grades for the rewritten themes; and if I find that you have made a real effort, I'll discuss them in detail with you. What do you say?"

"I'd like to rewrite them," Hugh said softly. "I know they are rotten."

"No, they aren't rotten. I've got dozens that are worse. That isn't the point. They aren't nearly so good as you can make them, and only your best work is acceptable to me. Now show me what you can do with them, and then we'll tear them to shreds in regular fas.h.i.+on." He turned to his desk and smiled at Hugh, who, understanding that the conference was over, stood up and reached for the themes. "I'll be interested in seeing what you can do with those," Henley concluded. "Every one of them has a good idea. Go to it--and get them back in a week."

"Yes, sir. Thanks very much."

"Right-o. Good-by."

"Good-by, sir," and Hugh left the office determined to rewrite those themes so that "they'd knock Jimmie Henley's eye out." They didn't do exactly that, but they did interest him, and he spent an hour and a half discussing them with Hugh.

That was merely the first of a series of long conferences. Sometimes Henley and Hugh discussed writing, but often they talked about other subjects, not as instructor and student but as two men who respected each other's mind. Before the term was out Henley had invited Hugh to his home for dinner and to meet Mrs. Henley. Hugh was enormously flattered and, for some reason, stimulated to do better work. He found his talks with Henley really exciting, and he expressed his opinions to him as freely and almost as positively as he did to his cla.s.smates. He told his friends that Jimmie Henley was human, not like most profs. And he worked at his writing as he had never worked at anything, running excepted, since he had been in college.

The students never knew what to expect from Henley in the cla.s.s-room.

Sometimes he read themes and criticized them; sometimes he discussed books that he had been reading; sometimes he read poetry, not because contemporary poetry was part of the course but because he happened to feel like reading it that morning; sometimes he discoursed on the art of writing; and sometimes he talked about anything that happened to be occupying his mind. He made his cla.s.s-room an open forum, and the students felt free to interrupt him at any time and to disagree with him. Usually they did disagree with him and afterward wrote violent themes to prove that he was wrong. That was exactly what Henley wanted them to do, and the more he could stir them up the better satisfied he was.

One morning, however, he talked without interruption. He didn't want to be interrupted, and the boys were so taken back by his statements that they could find no words to say anything.

The bell rang. Henley called the roll, stuck his cla.s.s-book into his coat pocket, placed his watch on the desk; then leaned back and looked the cla.s.s over.

"Your themes are making me sick," he began, "nauseated. I have a fairly strong stomach, but there is just so much that I can stand--and you have pa.s.sed the limit. There is hardly a man in this cla.s.s who hasn't written at least one theme on the glory that is Sanford. As you know, I am a Sanford man myself, and I have my share of affection for the college, but you have reached an ecstasy of chauvinism that makes Chauvin's affection for Napoleon seem almost like contempt.

"In the last batch of themes I got five telling me of the perfection of Sanford: Sanford is the greatest college in the country; Sanford has the best athletes, the finest equipment, the most erudite faculty, the most perfect location, the most loyal alumni, the strongest spirit--the most superlative everything. Nonsense! Rot! Bunk! Sanford hasn't anything of the sort, and I who love it say so. Sanford is a good little college, but it isn't a Harvard, a Yale, or a Princeton, or, for that matter, a Dartmouth or Brown; and those colleges still have perfection ahead of them. Sanford has made a place for itself in the sun, but it will never find a bigger place so long as its sons do nothing but chant its praises and condemn any one as disloyal who happens to mention its very numerous faults.

"Well, I'm going to mention some of those faults, not all of them by any means, just those that any intelligent undergraduate ought to be able to see for himself.

"In the first place, this is supposed to be an educational inst.i.tution; it is endowed for that purpose and it advertises itself as such. And you men say that you come here to get an education. But what do you really do? You resist education with all your might and main, digging your heels into the gravel of your own ignorance and fighting any attempt to teach you anything every inch of the way. What's worse, you aren't content with your own ignorance; you insist that every one else be ignorant, too. Suppose a man attempts to acquire culture, as some of them do. What happens? He is branded as wet. He is a social leper.

"Wet! What currency that bit of slang has--and what awful power. It took me a long time to find out what the word meant, but after long research I think that I know. A man is wet if he isn't a 'regular guy'; he is wet if he isn't 'smooth'; he is wet if he has intellectual interests and lets the mob discover them; and, strangely enough, he is wet by the same token if he is utterly stupid. He is wet if he doesn't show at least a tendency to dissipate, but he isn't wet if he dissipates to excess. A man will be branded as wet for any of these reasons, and once he is so branded, he might as well leave college; if he doesn't, he will have a lonely and hard row to hoe. It is a rare undergraduate who can stand the open contempt of his fellows."

He paused, obviously ordering his thoughts before continuing. The boys waited expectantly. Some of them were angry, some amused, a few in agreement, and all of them intensely interested.

Henley leaned back in his chair. "What horrible little conformers you are," he began sarcastically, "and how you loathe any one who doesn't conform! You dress both your bodies and your minds to some set model.

Just at present you are making your hair foul with some sort of perfumed axle-grease; nine tenths of you part it in the middle. It makes no difference whether the style is becoming to you or not; you slick it down and part it in the middle. Last year n.o.body did it; the chances are that next year n.o.body will do it, but anybody who doesn't do it right now is in danger of being called wet."

Hugh had a moment of satisfaction. He did not pomade his hair, and he parted it on the side as he had when he came to college. True, he had tried the new fas.h.i.+on, but after scanning himself carefully in the mirror, he decided that he looked like a "blond wop"--and washed his hair. He was guilty, however, of the next crime mentioned.

"The same thing is true of clothes," Henley was saying. "Last year every one wore four-b.u.t.ton suits and very severe trousers. This year every one is wearing Norfolk jackets and bell-bottomed trousers, absurd things that flop around the shoes, and some of them all but trail on the ground. Now, any one who can't afford the latest creation or who declines to wear it is promptly called wet.

"And, as I said before, you insist on the same standardization of your minds. Just now it is not _au fait_ to like poetry; a man who does is exceedingly wet, indeed; he is effeminate, a sissy. As a matter of fact, most of you like poetry very much. You never give me such good attention as when I read poetry. What's more, some of you are writing the disgraceful stuff. But what happens when a man does submit a poem as a theme? He writes at the bottom of the page, 'Please do not read this in cla.s.s.' Some of you write that because you don't think that the poem is very good, but most of you are afraid of the contempt of your cla.s.smates. I know of any number of men in this college who read vast quant.i.ties of poetry, but always on the sly. Just think of that! Men pay thousands of dollars and give four years of their lives supposedly to acquire culture and then have to sneak off into a corner to read poetry.

"Who are your college G.o.ds? The brilliant men who are thinking and learning, the men with ideals and aspirations? Not by a long shot. They are the athletes. Some of the athletes happen to be as intelligent and as eager to learn as anybody else, but a fair number are here simply because they are paid to come to play football or baseball or what not.

And they are wors.h.i.+ped, bowed down to, cheered, and adored. The brilliant men, unless they happen to be very 'smooth' in the bargain, are considered wet and are ostracized.

"Such is the college that you write themes about to tell me that it is perfect. The college is made up of men who wors.h.i.+p mediocrity; that is their ideal except in athletics. The condition of the football field is a thousand times more important to the undergraduates and the alumni than the number of books in the library or the quality of the faculty.

The fraternities will fight each other to pledge an athlete, but I have yet to see them raise any dust over a man who was merely intelligent.

"I tell you that you have false standards, false ideals, and that you have a false loyalty to the college. The college can stand criticism; it will thrive and grow on it--but it won't grow on blind adoration. I tell you further that you are as standardized as Fords and about as ornamental. Fords are useful for ordinary work; so are you--and unless some of you wake up and, as you would say, 'get hep to yourselves,' you are never going to be anything more than human Fords.

"You pride yourselves on being the cream of the earth, the n.o.blest work of G.o.d. You are told so constantly. You are the intellectual aristocracy of America, the men who are going to lead the ma.s.ses to a brighter and broader vision of life. Merciful heavens preserve us! You swagger around utterly contemptuous of the man who hasn't gone to college. You talk magnificently about democracy, but you scorn the non-college man--and you try pathetically to imitate Yale and Princeton. And I suppose Yale and Princeton are trying to imitate Fifth Avenue and Newport. Democracy!