The Plastic Age Part 9

A few minutes before two, the Raleigh team ran upon the field. The Raleigh cheering section promptly went mad. When the Sanford team appeared a minute later, the Sanford cheering section tried its best to go madder, the boys whistling and yelling like possessed demons. Wayne Gifford brought them to attention by holding his hands above his head.

He called for the usual regular cheer for the team and then for a short cheer for each member of it, starting with the captain, Sherman Walford, and ending with the great half-back, Harry Slade.

Suddenly there was silence. The toss-up had been completed; the teams were in position on the field. Slade had finished building a slender pyramid of mud, on which he had balanced the ball. The referee held up his hand. "Are you ready, Sanford?" Walford signaled his readiness. "Are you ready, Raleigh?"

The shrill blast of the referee's whistle--and the game was on. The first half was a see-saw up and down the field. Near the end of the half Raleigh was within twenty yards of the Sanford line. Shouts of "Score!

Score! Score!" went up from the Raleigh rooters, rhythmic, insistent.

"Hold 'em! Hold 'em! Fight! Fight! Fight!" the Sanford cheering section pleaded, almost sobbing the words. A forward pa.s.s skilfully completed netted Raleigh sixteen yards. "Fight! Fight! Fight!"

The timekeeper tooted his little horn; the half was over. For a moment the Sanford boys leaned back exhausted; then they leaped to their feet and yelled madly, while the Raleigh boys leaned back or against each other and swore fervently. Within two minutes the tension had departed.

The rival cheering sections alternated in singing songs, applauded each other vigorously, whistled at a frightened dog that tried to cross the field and nearly lost its mind entirely when called by a thousand masters, waited breathlessly when the cheer-leaders announced the results from other football games that had been telegraphed to the field, applauded if Harvard was losing, groaned if it wasn't, sang some more, relaxed and felt consummately happy.

Sanford immediately took the offensive in the second half. Slade was consistently carrying the ball. Twice he brought it within Raleigh's twenty-five-yard line. The first time Raleigh held firm, but the second time Slade stepped back for a drop-kick. The spectators sat silent, breathless. The angle was difficult. Could he make it? Would the line hold?

Quite calmly Slade waited. The center pa.s.sed the ball neatly. Slade turned it in his hands, paid not the slightest attention to the mad struggle going on a few feet in front of him, dropped the ball--and kicked. The ball rose in a graceful arc and pa.s.sed safely between the goal-posts.

Every one, men and women alike, the Raleigh adherents excepted, promptly turned into extraordinarily active lunatics. The women waved their banners and shrieked, or if they had no banners, they waved their arms and shrieked; the men danced up and down, yelled, pounded each other on the back, sometimes wildly embraced--many a woman was kissed by a man she had never seen before and never would again, nor did she object--Wayne Gifford was turning handsprings, and many of the students were feebly fluttering their hands, voiceless, spent with cheering, weak from excitement.

Early in the fourth quarter, however, Raleigh got its revenge, carrying the ball to a touch-down after a series of line rushes. Sanford tried desperately to score again, but its best efforts were useless against the Raleigh defense.

The final whistle blew; and Sanford had lost. Cheering wildly, tossing their hats into the air, the Raleigh students piled down from the grand stand upon the field. With the cheer-leaders at the head, waving their megaphones, the boys rapidly formed into a long line in uneven groups, holding arms, dancing, shouting, winding in and out around the field, between the goal-posts, tossing their hats over the bars, waving their hands at the Sanford men standing despondently in their places--in and out, in and out, in the triumphant serpentine. Finally they paused, took off their hats, cheered first their own team, then the Sanford team, and then sang their hymn while the Sanford men respectfully uncovered, silent and despairing.

When the hymn was over, the Sanford men quietly left the grand stand, quietly formed into a long line in groups of fours, quietly marched to the college flagpole in the center of the campus. A Sanford banner was flying from the pole, a blue banner with an orange S. Wayne Gifford loosened the ropes. Down fluttered the banner, and the boys reverently took off their hats. Gifford caught the banner before it touched the ground and gathered it into his arms. The song-leader stepped beside him. He lifted his hand, sang a note, and then the boys sang with him, huskily, sadly, some of them with tears streaming down their cheeks:

"Sanford, Sanford, mother of men, Love us, guard us, hold us true.

Let thy arms enfold us; Let thy truth uphold us.

Queen of colleges, mother of men-- Alma mater, Sanford--hail!

Alma mater--Hail!--Hail!"

Slowly the circle broke into small groups that straggled wearily across the campus. Hugh, with two or three others, was walking behind two young professors--one of them, Alling, the other, Jones of the economics department. Hugh was almost literally broken-hearted; the defeat lay on him like an awful sorrow that never could be lifted. Every inch of him ached, but his despair was greater than his physical pain. The sharp, clear voice of Jones broke into his half-deadened consciousness.

"I can't understand all this emotional excitement," said Jones crisply.

"A football game is a football game, not a national calamity. I enjoy the game myself, but why weep over it? I don't think I ever saw anything more absurd than those boys singing with tears running into their mouths."

Shocked, the boys looked at each other. They started to make angry remarks but paused as Alling spoke.

"Of course, what you say, Jones, is quite right," he remarked calmly, "quite right. But, do you know, I pity you."

"Alling's a good guy," Hugh told Carl later; "he's human."

CHAPTER XI

After the Sanford-Raleigh game, the college seemed to be slowly dying.

The boys held countless post-mortems 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; s.e.x 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 c.r.a.p 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 s.h.i.+ver. 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 pa.s.sed, 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 c.r.a.ps; Sat.u.r.day 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 sc.r.a.ped 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 subst.i.tute blue toques with orange ta.s.sels 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 snow-shoeing, 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-cla.s.smen 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 cla.s.smates; 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 pa.s.sed each other on the campus were quiet and abstracted. They ceased to cut cla.s.ses. 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 G.o.dd.a.m.ned English course to-night."

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 "s.m.u.t" 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 d.i.c.kson, 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 s.h.i.+fting gears." Larry Stillwell, the last man, was a dark, handsome youth with exceedingly regular features, pomaded hair parted in the center and s.h.i.+ning 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 cla.s.s 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 att.i.tudes.

"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 rime?"

"Atta boy!" Carl exclaimed enthusiastically.

"Shut up! Now, the stuff we want to get at to-night 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 G.o.dd.a.m.n liar. I saw a B on one of your themes the other day and an A on another. What are you always pulling that low-brow 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 d.i.c.kson shouted. "Let's get going; let's get going. We gotta learn this poetry. d.a.m.n! I don't know anything about it.

I didn't crack the book till two days ago."