Part 13

"Fellows, this is my friend Symington, the prep.'" said Tucker; "Symington, this is de gang." Tucker tossed his cap and Symington's gracefully into the scrap-basket and pushed Charlie into a seat on the sofa. A fellow with spectacles began asking him what he thought of the afternoon's game. The prep. did not know the man's name, but that did not matter.

There were about a dozen fellows scattered about the room, but the thing that attracted Symington's attention was in the centre of it.

Two square-topped desks had been placed end to end. On these lay a table-cloth, or rather some sheets, and on them was stacked a pile of things good to look at and better to eat. The only reason the food did not immediately become part of the dozen fellows was because they were waiting with watering mouths for something to wash it down with. And this was being prepared as rapidly as Randolph and Ashley in the bedroom could do it. Perhaps they were trying to do it too rapidly, for Symington heard a voice exclaim, "Aw, look out, you ass, you're spilling it all over my bed."

While they were waiting, Dougal Davis and Reddy Armstrong and Harry Lawrence and Jim Linton and others came in. When the lounge, window-seat, chairs, tables, and coal-scuttle became crowded, the new-comers sat on the floor.

Presently the introductory strains of Mendelssohn's "Wedding March" came from the bedroom, followed by Randy and Dad Ashley and two assistants bearing aloft two basins, which seemed to be heavy. They strode in, swinging their feet far out in front in a stagey manner to the tune of the "Wedding March" which they shouted with their heads thrown back.

Hunter Ramsay jumped up and marched behind them. The rest thought this a good idea and did likewise, and all sang loud and stamped hard and made the poler growl in the room below, which did no good. Then after marching twice around the table they carefully set the bowls down at either end of it with the ice tinkling against the sides. One of the bowl-bearers remarked, "Maybe you don't think those things are heavy."

"Now then!" said Stehman the tackle, approaching the table. "Ah!" said Symington's friend Tucker. The others may have said things also. If they did not they looked them.

No one waited to be asked. Everyone was supposed to know without being told what was the object of white breasts of cold chicken with russet-brown skin, and rich Virginia ham with spices sticking in the golden-brown outside fat, and little, thin, home-made sandwiches and olives and jellies, Virginia jellies, you know, and beaten biscuit and chocolate cake and fruit cake, or black cake, as they call it in the South. As a matter of fact they all did seem to know, and this included Symington, who held his own with the others very well for a little prep. boy in training. He had forgotten to be sleepy now.

Thus began one of the greatest evenings in the life of Charlie Symington, and it lasted until two o'clock. It was an old-fashioned spread. There was no caterer with a gas-stove in the bedroom, or a table set with a bank of flowers down the centre, or properly attired waiters opening wine behind the chairs. Randolph's mother had sent up a lot of deliciously cooked stuff from the old place in Virginia. Randolph had said to some of the fellows, "I've got a box of grub. Can you come 'round this evening?" And by the looks of things most of them had found that they could as well as not.

Symington had the best time of them all, and, besides, he learned much. He noticed that quite as many fellows took lemonade as drank punch, and this was a matter of surprise to the prep. For his ideas of college men were largely drawn from would-be sportive young freshmen that drove through prep. school towns waving beer-bottles overhead and beating their horses into a gallop.

Nobody got drunk. Everyone became livelier and brighter and better, but that is the object of such gatherings, and those who confined their attentions to the lemonade end of the table were as noisy as the others. No one was urged to take the red fluid rather than the yellow. In fact no one observed which fellows visited which punch-bowl. No one but Symington. And he had been under the impression that at college a fellow's jaws were pried open with a baseball bat and rum was poured down his throat, while three other men held his legs and arms.

The room had now become beautifully hazy with smoke. Some of the fellows tipped their chairs back and put their feet up. The window-seat was full to overflowing. One man rested his head on another fellow's shoulder and asked him to muss his hair. The legs of the one having his hair mussed stretched out over the legs of two other fellows and intertwined with those of a third. Two men were sitting beside the oranges on the table. Some were on the floor with their backs against the wall. All had full stomachs and light jovial spirits. Symington was watching Dougal Davis blow rings.

Harry Lawrence started up "The Orange and the Black." They sang all the stanzas. Then they sang more songs, old songs which are still popular and new songs which were then popular and are now quite forgotten, probably. Everyone sang, whether he knew how or not. Symington sang too. The one he liked the best was a funny song beginning, "Oh, to-day is the day that he comes from the city." They sang that one over and over again. Then they sang it once more. They were all having a good time.

After a while the room became quiet and someone turned down the lights and they told ghost stories, which frightened the prep.

They wound up the evening by trooping downstairs in the dark, for the lights were turned out long ago, and marching up to the front campus, singing as they went. And there they danced about the cannon and sang and whooped and yelled until Bill Leggett came over with his lantern and said, in his gruff voice and good-natured manner, "Boys, it's nearly Sunday morning."

"All right, Bill," they answered. Then all said good-night and went to bed.

Tucker had a roommate some place, but Symington had his bedroom that night.

"If you want anything, just yell for me, Charlie. My room is right next, you know. Goodnight." Tucker was half undressed.

"I sha'n't want anything. Wait a minute, Tucker, please. I'm not sure about something, and it bothers me."

"Well?"

"Princeton won the football championship in '78, didn't we?"

"Say that again."

"Didn't we win in '78?"

"Yes, Charlie, we did."

Symington thought his friend Tucker was smiling at his ignorance. But that wasn't it.

THE MAN THAT LED THE CLASS

The Latin salutatory was finished. Dougal Davis bowed and took his seat and the applause began.

He had done well and he knew it, but he did not stop to dwell upon that now. There would be plenty of time to feel pleased with himself later on. At present his chief sensation was of jubilant relief at telling himself that the thing was over with at last.

Not many of his audience had understood much of what he had been saying, but that did not matter. The fellows smiled at the right time when he said something about _puellas pulchras_, and they nodded their heads knowingly when he made the reference to athletics, as he had told them beforehand to do. And he had gotten through without forgetting the paragraph beginning with "Postquam," as he feared he would.

He was mopping his good-looking brow. His nerves were still quivering, but he felt perfectly cool and unafraid of anything, and he sat very still with his eyes half closed, and felt the tension on his nerves soothingly relax. Then for the first time he heard the applause, and it occurred to him that all those many people out there were clapping their hands for him, and that for five minutes they had heard very little else but his voice, and he felt without glancing up that they were still looking at him and very likely thinking, "That is the man that led the class." He told himself all this with an inward smile of wonder at his own importance, and at his not being more impressed by it.

Then he slowly raised his eyes and moved his gaze around over the many fluttering fans to the right. He passed over it once without seeing it, then he found the face he was searching for. She was looking up at him with just the kind of a smile that he knew would be there, and when she caught his eye, the smile became radiant, and he fancied he saw a little look of triumph in it. This he answered with a shrug of his engowned shoulder and an almost imperceptible grimace, and quickly looked away again. No one else saw it, but she saw and she understood.

The applause had ceased, and the next man was introduced and the audience turned their attention to him.

Davis took a long breath and looked about him. There was a fat old lady fanning vigorously, and at every stroke of the fan a ray of light was reflected in his face. Over there on the right of the platform were the venerable trustees. Harry Lawrence's fine looking father, with the handsome head of gray hair, was in the front row, looking grave and indulgently interested. On the left were the faculty in their black gowns. They appeared more or less accustomed to all this. Down in front were his classmates, and back of these the many, many people closely crowded together. Their faces looked like little patches of white with dark marks for features, and nearly all of them seemed to be fanning.

He remembered the lining up under the elms this morning in front of North, and the band that played, and the girls that gazed, and the many classes calling "'82 this way!" and "'61 this way!" and the old-fashioned cheer that '79 gave. Then with the band taking a fresh hold on the air, how the long procession had begun its march under the trees toward the church, between the crowds of visitors who parted to either side and looked at them as they filed by.

First came that member of the faculty who is always grand marshal and carries an orange and black baton, then the august trustees followed by the faculty in their gowns and mortar boards, and behind these trooped the sons of Nassau; each class in the order of graduation, and last of all those who were about to become graduates, over whom all this fuss was being made, and who were somewhat impressed by it and by the length of their gowns.

He remembered the slow, dignified march led by the grand usher and his assistants up the aisle of the old church between the crowded pews of smiling fathers and proud mothers and the girls with bright-colored dresses. He recalled how amused and yet pleased he was at hearing a junior whisper to a girl beside him, "There he is--that's Davis, the one I was telling you about." This he remembered had interrupted the silent rehearsal of the sentence with the ablative absolute in it. But he did not have to rehearse it any more. All the salutatorian had to do was to sit still and hear what the other speakers had to say and feel good.

He was thinking about himself and the four years just past, and having a right good time at it. He recalled how he had been a nobody at the start, and he smiled as he remembered how some of these very fellows in the pews before him had looked down on him in freshman year, and how he had forced their respect and won their liking. He traced the progress of it from the first step when he gained the one freshman position on the _Princetonian_ board and overheard someone say, "What! that poler?" up to the present time when people pointed him out on the campus and said, "There goes Dougal Davis." Few ambitious men graduate with as much to be proud of and as little to regret.

First there was the prize for leading the class in freshman year, then came the sophomore essay prize, and the Washington's birthday debate, and the next year a classical prize and two or three Hall honors, including one of the four appointments for the inter-Hall junior oratorical contest, in which he had won first place, and a number of other prizes of which he did not stop to think in detail, and finally the appointment as first representative of his Hall in the Lynde debate which had taken place the night before, and the result of which would be announced to-day. Intermingled with these were other honors, such as the membership of an elective club, and the presidency of his class in junior year, and the class oratorship on Class Day, and then the Latin salutatory to-day.

You see he had just about all one man could get, and before he left the room he was going to hear his name read out before everybody, as the winner of still a few more honors. This was the culmination of a rather successful career, and he told himself that he did not care how conceited it was, he was going to enjoy it for all it was worth, for before the sun set he would be an undergraduate no longer, and there would be plenty of time to find how small he was.

Dougal Davis was the son of a foreign missionary, and he had entered college with the intention of making a minister of the Gospel of himself. He still had that intention. He was one of the most popular men on the campus.

When he began his course he was as bristling with prejudices and as redolent of sanctimony as many high-minded young men of noble purpose and little tact, but unlike some of them he had sense of humor enough to find out pretty promptly that he was a young prig.

He soon shed many of his prejudices, and he was fair-minded enough to let the good wholesome atmosphere of the campus air out his sanctimony. This is a way of saying that early in freshman year he took himself in hand and decided that if he and a number of other fellows looked at a number of things in vastly different ways it did not necessarily follow that the other fellows were dead wrong. He was in evidence at class prayer-meetings, but not more than at the meetings at the lamp-post in front of Reunion, with his hands doubled up under a sweater, gossiping with the crowd. That is the sort of a fellow he was.

Davis's father had a small salary and a large family, like all missionaries, and one of the girls had come back to the States when Dougal did to go to a school in Philadelphia. So young Davis earned the price of his education.

But this was not so hard as it sounds. Being a minister's son he had a scholarship, which saved his tuition bills, and he ran a club, so that his board cost nothing. Leading the class in freshman year not only brought him the prize of $200, but the best kind of advertising with the faculty as well, so that in sophomore year he had more tutoring sent around to him than he knew what to do with. Then he became Princeton correspondent for several papers, and dropped tutoring except on special occasions and at very special rates. He had such a reputation that he could have had any price he asked. "Go to Davis; he can put you through any examination," they used to say.

In junior year he enlarged his newspaper correspondence and began doing some syndicate work. He gained a bit of reputation with football writing, and in his senior year he used to sign his name to a column of it every week. "The joke of it is," Dougal used to explain, "I don't know beans about the game." This was not strictly true, for no one with eyes could go through four years of tramping down to 'varsity field without absorbing enough to enlighten the average sporting editor.

In short, before Davis was three-quarters of the way through his college course, he was paying his expenses and making a surplus which was considerably larger than that which poor young men who earn their way through college to preach the Gospel are supposed to have.

Now he might have sent a portion of it out to his hard-working parents in Persia, or have helped to defray the expenses of his ambitious sister at school. This would have been noble of him, but he did nothing of the kind. One does not need much money in Persia; there's nothing to spend it on. His people had a large, comfortable home with a dozen servants to look after it, and they seemed to have leisure enough to write articles for English and American magazines now and then. A rich aunt looked out for his sister, and she had the reputation of dressing more artistically than any girl in the Walnut Street school. The only thing he did for her was to send an occasional box of candy, or a book, like any other brother. Davis did not even save his money. He blew it in on himself and his friends, like any other natural young man. What do you suppose he worked so hard for if it were not to go in with the rest of the club for coaches at Thanksgiving games, and to take runs to Philadelphia over Sunday, and to give spreads in his room on Saturday nights, and to do the other things for which one has sore need of money and for which he goes broke for about twenty days of each month? If Davis had been a modern undergraduate he would perhaps have spent money on good-looking clothes, though I hardly think that of him.

The only disadvantage in his way of living was that it took time, so that he did not have as much of it to loaf in as he would have liked. Especially as he was mixed up in half-a-dozen outside interests of the college world, and had a provokingly high stand in class to maintain besides. For although the fellows used to say he kept on leading his class from force of habit, as a matter of fact it took considerable valuable time.

The worst of it was that he had to do his reviewing up regularly week by week, for he was of no account at cramming all night for exams, he said. Perhaps this was true. When the crowd used to gather in half-undressed condition with wet towels around their heads and wild looks on their faces, Dougal generally stretched out upon the divan and drummed on a banjo, with his eyes half closed and a pipe in his mouth, and listened to the others quizzing and getting excited, and at twelve o'clock, except on rare occasions, he said good-night, and went to bed and slept like a child, and the next day would saunter into Examination Hall as fresh as a spring term Sunday, and write the best paper in the class. It is in this way that many fellows remember him best.

The reason he never seemed to be especially rushed was that he had the knack of arranging his time, and had learned while still in college that there are a great many moments in twenty-four hours. He went to breakfast before chapel, and he crammed a great deal into those odd hours that come between lectures, which most fellows spend in making up their minds what to do, and he found he better appreciated a loaf on Saturday night if he put in most of the daylight in work. It was in that way he managed to find time to keep up his Hall work and attend to his _Princetonian_ duties and committee meetings and write orations and essays, besides managing one of the clubs and turning out an average of one thousand words of copy a day in time to catch the afternoon mail.

And it was in this way that he managed to keep from breaking down under it. When the bell in North struck five he always tossed aside his book and ran down the stairs three steps at a time and yelled, "Hello, Tommy Tucker," or "Billy Nolan," or somebody with all his might, and with him took a rattling hard walk--not down Nassau Street, but 'cross country--or else an hour's pull at the weights in the gymnasium with a cold shower-bath and a hard rub at the end of it, and then walked tingling with health and content to the club, when he ate the largest meal of anyone there--except when big Stehman was back from the training-table.

After this he stretched his legs far under the table and leaned his head against the back of the chair, and there lingered with the coffee and gossip, blowing beautiful smoke rings for an hour. He had been known to refuse a $5 tutoring offer for this hour, just as he had once sacrificed an elective course in Greek philosophy for the five o'clock one.

During the past year Davis had been making up his mind to a few things. One of them was that he would go out to the foreign field. He could not say that he felt himself called to it. He did not sign the pledge that was circulated about in the colleges at that time as the "Student volunteer movement."

Ever since he could remember he had intended to be a preacher, though there was a period, which came about the same time as his first pair of trousers, when he thought he would rather be a dragoman with a fierce mustache and big buttons. And now he came to the conclusion that he would become a foreign missionary, like his father.

He felt that he was pretty well suited to the work and would make a success of it. He had a strong constitution, a good voice, and adaptability to circumstances. He knew pretty well by nature how to get at people, and the summer spent slumming down in Rivington Street, New York, had taught him considerably more. Besides, he already had the language down fine, and could stumble along tolerably well with two of the low dialects.

What is more, he thought he would like it. He did not tell himself that it was noble to go and bury himself way out there, for there wasn't any burying about it. He liked the climate and expected to have a good time in Persia, with a man-servant to bow low and make his coffee in the morning, and to fill his big, long pipe every evening, and he pictured himself on a horse riding beside a certain blue river with peculiar big trees along the bank quite as often as saving souls.

At least this is the way he used to talk in pow-wows in fellows' rooms. But there were certain long-faced friends of his that misunderstood when he talked in this manner.

* * * * *

The salutatorian was not troubling himself about that just now, as he sat there on the stage resting his chin on one hand and fanning himself with a programme in the other. He had been idly listening to Nolan as he thundered and perspired about Purity in Politics. For his part he preferred gamey Billy Nolan, the all-round athlete, to earnest William the orator. Nervous little poler Stacy was now straining his lungs with his well-committed plea for the Greek Ideal. Davis was not following it very closely. He glanced down at his classmates in the front rows. He knew that before the day was over he was going to feel pretty sad. That was not troubling him very much now either. But every time he looked down there a certain thing bobbed up and spoiled the pleasant taste in his mouth. It was hardly worth getting uncomfortable over. This was the way it had begun, long ago last fall, as they sat around the table after dinner talking football. And you can see how ridiculous it was to worry about it.

Davis was holding forth at some length with considerable earnestness, as he had a perfect right to do, of course, and Jim Linton had not joined in the discussion. He seldom did. He was quietly sipping his coffee at the end of the table and looking quizzically interested.

Presently he interrupted. "Oh, Dougal," he said. He had arisen to go and was refilling his pipe.

Dougal stopped short. "Yes?" he said in an intense tone.

Linton looked at him a moment, folded up his pouch, put it in his pocket, and struck a match.

Then he said, between puffs, "I'd a little rather you would not get excited, Dougal," and started off for the billiard-room.

It was nothing but a bit of ordinary club chaff such as passes back and forth every day, and Linton forgot the occurrence before he finished chalking his cue. But Dougal's cheeks had flushed crimson, and before he knew what he was saying he had come out with a muttered remark in which the word "gentleman" was loud enough for all at the table to hear, and that is a very awkward word to handle sometimes.

That was the reason no one said anything for a moment. Silences were rare in that room. He did not go on with the discussion of the defective coaching system. Nor did the others.