The Seven-Branched Candlestick Part 5

His funeral was held in the school parlor the next morning. But it had been a night of terrors, of whispering groups, of Death's shadow over us all--and we were but children. His empty bed, his dress uniform tossed carelessly over the back of a chair, the knowledge of his insensible presence in the undertaker's shop at the other end of town ... brought fear and wakefulness to us all.

And as for me, I sat all night at the dormitory window and listening to the creak and groan of the old Revolutionary oak in the quadrangle, thought of many things: of the walks we had taken, of the hundred smiling adventures we had shared, of all the glad things he had taught me--and then, of the girl--and of the tragic face of her--as I had seen it last.

And I wished that he had lived only a few minutes longer so that I might have pleaded with him and shown him where he was wrong. And, perhaps, in those few minutes he would have reached out his hand to me, and begged forgiveness for having called me what he did--perhaps he might have done so--and oh, I wanted with all my heart to forgive him and tell him it did not matter--and to wish him G.o.d-speed.

But in a few days, when I summoned enough courage to go up the hilly road in search of the little old store, I found it closed. The cracked shades were down before the windows, and a "For Sale" sign was on the door. The father and daughter had moved away, I heard in the town; but no one knew where--or why.

But when I was back in the dormitory, I took the book of "David Copperfield" from under my pillow, and put it back in the library, and did not attempt to read further in it, then.

VII

FRESHMAN YEAR

New adventures must be prefaced by new hopes. My entering college meant the starting of a thousand new dreams, ambitions--and seemed to me an opening gate to a land stronger than any I had yet heard of: a land of real men, virile, courteous and kind, whose thoughts were never petty, whose breadth of mind unfailing.

It was only a few weeks after Sydney's death that I took my college entrance examinations. I had taken the "preliminaries" the year before, and I entered upon these "finals" low in spirit, disinterested, very much aware of how poor a training for them this last year at military school had given me.

Nevertheless, I managed to pa.s.s them. Not brilliantly, to be sure, but by a small margin which left no doubt but that I should be accepted in the freshman cla.s.s of the city's university.

I have not called my alma mater by any other name than this: I do not wish, out of a sense of loyalty, to define it more closely. You will say, before I am through, that I am perverse in that loyalty; perhaps so--but I do not wish to transgress upon it. Suffice it then, that my college days were spent at one of the two universities which New York has within its borders.

I shall never forget how my heart bounded when I received, through the mail, that little leather covered book which college men know as the "Freshman Bible." It is the directory of undergraduate activities issued by the university Y. M. C. A., and is sent to all members of the incoming cla.s.s. I read each little page and its small, fine print as if my life depended upon its reading. When I came to understand that freshman must wear a black, green-b.u.t.toned cap upon the campus, a deep awe of collegiate law and order came over me. When I saw the little half-tone prints of the chapel, the gymnasium, the baseball field, I felt that I was glimpsing, before my proper time, the sacred precincts of a land which would be magical, splendid with an eternal sunlight, peopled only with a chivalrous and knightly manhood. I suppose that college was to me, as to most subfreshman, a place of green swards and track meets and those musical harmonies which glee clubs can so throatily accomplish.

I was at the hotel in New Hamps.h.i.+re when this book arrived. The very same mail brought me the definite results of my college entrance examinations. I remember that I was just starting to walk down to the lake with my aunt when they arrived. I knew what was in the big ominous envelope--and I was afraid to open it. I crammed it into my coat pocket, careful not to let my Aunt Selina see it, and went on to the boat house, hired a boat and rowed her dutifully around the lake for a full two hours. She remarked upon my silence--but I did not tell her that my fate was in my pocket--and that I dared not look upon it.

But when I was back at the hotel, I went straightway to my room and opened the envelope, stripped out the blue, bank-note sheet and read--yes, I had pa.s.sed every examination. And I was a regularly enrolled student at the university.

I told my aunt of it at lunch, as if it were a casual thing--and she treated it as such, too. If I had had any doubts of her lack of genuine interest in me, I knew it now for certain. It was just a matter of course to her--this entrance into college--and to me, in turn, it meant so much: a new work, a new land, a life entirely new and shot through with hopes. I did not tell her that, but let her change the topic quickly. She was intent upon talking fas.h.i.+ons with Mrs. Fleming-Cohen.

I had hated to come to this hotel for another year. The people persisted in making things graciously unpleasant for us. I was beginning to be old enough to feel it keenly--and not old enough to overlook. I wonder, for that matter, if Jews are ever old enough to overlook it?

But Aunt Selina was dictatress of my destinies. She had declared I must either come along to the hotel or else I would not be allowed to enter college. In the face of such an alternative I had yielded quickly. But there had already begun between my aunt and me a chasm that grew daily wider, deeper, more hopelessly incapable of bridging. When one has been away for a year, one returns to find grim truths. I had met other people, seen other lives and other souls since I had been in boarding school: I was not clouded now by my blood relations.h.i.+p to Mrs. Haberman or by day after day of close but unintimate companions.h.i.+p. I saw her as she was: a shallow, flighty woman whose thoughts were always upon that sort of society which spells itself with a capital S, whose petulance found no ease--always restless, always ambitious for petty things, wanting only what she could not have--an idle woman, foolish in her idleness.

In spite of her taking it as a matter of course, she spent the whole day, after she had learned my news, in spreading it about the porch and parlors of the hotel. She seemed to imagine that it would interest every one--even Mrs. Van Brunt, the arbiter of elegance of the mountain clique, who, on hearing it, sniffed, patted her lorgnette with a lace handkerchief, and inquired if a great many Jews did not attend this particular university.

"Really, I should not think of sending any relative of mine there," she sniffed. "Not that I have a prejudice against Jews, of course--in fact, I consider myself very democratic. I have many Jewish acquaintances.

Many of my best friends are Jews."

My aunt, who had undoubtedly had to listen to these catchwords as often as any other Jew or Jewess must, attempted not to understand why Mrs.

Van Brunt had spoken them. A few minutes later she made a few unblinking and pointed remarks about having to attend a convention of Christian Science workers in the fall--as if to protest that Mrs. Van Brunt had made a grievous and embarra.s.sing error.

I asked my aunt, a few days later, if I was not to be allowed to live in one of the university dormitories. Whether or not his college is in his home town, every boy wants the full flavor of undergraduate life--wants to live on the campus, to throw himself heart and soul into the college games and customs. I could not see how college would mean anything to me if I were to go on living at home in that dull, comfortless apartment of Aunt Selina's.

Youth is always eager for emanc.i.p.ation--always a little too thoughtless in its eagerness.

Perhaps I was wrong in forgetting what I owed Aunt Selina. She took great offense at my wish. She spoke, her voice choked with tears, of the many years that she had cared for me, fostered me, guarded me from a world of foreign things--"ruffians and kikes and n.i.g.g.e.rs," was the way she described it.

At any rate, I remember that I spent a whole day in thinking it out for myself upon a lonely walk, and that, at the end of it, I came to tell her that she was right and that I was ashamed of wanting to leave her--that I would live home with her, and try to gain the best of college in that way. Privately, I knew that I could never gain as much--but I had made up my mind not to pain her, confident that it would be worth the sacrifice.

The days lagged slowly to the end of that summer. I was preparing in a hundred little ways for the great adventure: sending for all sorts of stereotyped books on the moral conduct of college men, on the art of making friends, on the history and traditions of my university. I was prepared to be its most loyal son. I could hardly wait for the stupid weeks at this mountain hotel to pa.s.s by, for the opening day to arrive.

And then, when the trees were beginning to fleck with scarlet and the summer heather streaked with goldenrod, we did depart for the city. It was only a week before college would begin.

Then five days, four days, three, two, one. And on the night before registration day, which would commence the college year, I sat for a long while at my table-desk, dreaming high things--hope and fear mingling with my dreams, charging them with an exquisite uncertainty, making them pulse with the things that were innermost in me.

I was old enough, I thought, to review all the past--to see myself with youth's over-harsh criticism of itself--to realize that, so far, I had made a miserable, cringing, cowardly botch of my conduct and convictions. Some day, soon, I seemed to feel, there would come a moment of crisis--a moment when all the shy, stammering manhood that I knew to be in my heart would fling itself suddenly into the open and make me strong and confident, helpful to myself and many others. I had always longed to be a leader--as every boy does--and so far I had been a slave--slave, most abjectly of all, to my own fears and prejudices. But it would be different at college: there would be something--I did not know what--which would fling courage into me, fill my veins with flame--and it troubled me to wonder what that thing would be. Had any one told me, then, that it would be Judaism, I should have either laughed or been insulted.

For I was just as much afraid as ever of what hards.h.i.+ps my religion might work for me at college. I had as much fear, as much abhorrence of the truth, in that regard. I wanted so much to forget it--to be one of the other sort, little caring for creed in any form, but wis.h.i.+ng I were safe in the comfort of having been born into the faith of the majority.

As I looked at it then, I was going into these new four years with a tremendous handicap scored against me. It seemed so unfair: I cared so little for Jewish things, yet I would have to be identified with them throughout my entire course. I had learned, by now, that I could not escape them.

I went into college with a deeper sense of the injustice of it all than I had ever had. I was going with the feeling that, come what may, I should have to bow before the inevitable stigma of my race--And yet, I hoped so yearningly that it would be otherwise. I hoped--and dreamed--and laughed at my dreams, and told myself that college men were only boys, after all: boys as bigoted, as cruel in their prejudices as any that I had met at high school or military academy.

And perhaps I was justified in this last opinion. For, when I appeared on the campus the next morning, headed for the dean's office to file my registration, I was met by a ratty, little soph.o.m.ore who made me buy a second-hand freshman cap from him at four times its original value.

And when he had my money in his pocket, and was a safe distance across the green from me, he began to laugh and shout:

"Oi, oi! oi, oi!"

So that this was my introduction into college life.

VIII

WITHIN THE GATES

This initial experience did not frighten me. I came up to the first day of college in the firm and joyous belief that here, if anywhere, that old bugbear of my past school days would be absent. I came into sight of buildings that were new to me, and oh, how stately to my freshman eyes!

I came across a campus that was golden with the autumn gra.s.s, where red leaves filtered down from old elms, and where, from heights, I caught glimpses of the university's private parks, still green and soft, and of the river beyond--and of the clean flanks of white stone buildings and marble colonnades, half hidden in the trees. It was all so beautiful. It was the promised land and I was within its gates.

The giddy knowledge of it buoyed me up and sent me across the campus humming to myself one of the alma mater songs which I had so religiously learned from that "Freshman Bible." I was on my way to my first cla.s.s.

Directly ahead of me was the broad, lofty door of the recitation building and, a little to the left, a fountain's water spilled itself singingly over into a shallow marble basin.

Suddenly a trio of soph.o.m.ores bounded out from behind a clump of bushes.

They came about me in a whooping circle, took me by the head and feet and tossed me into the fountain.

I clambered out, dripping, spluttering, but--be it said to my credit--still smiling. I had heard that this was the customary hazing which all freshmen must endure--and I knew enough to take it with as good a grace as they gave it.

I started on my way to the recitation hall again, my clothes leaving a trickling line behind me on the walk. But they pulled me back and thumped me into the water again. It happened a third time before they let me go. And then one of them--a big, stocky fellow who wore a thick, rolling sweater on which the college letter was emblazoned--laughed heartily and thwacked me on the back and roared that I was a good kid, even for a Jew!

The kindness of his remark was perhaps deeply meant. I've no doubt, he thought to be paying me a compliment--but I went away, wetter than ever, fast contracting a cold--and with a lump in my throat for which the cold was not at all responsible.

In the cla.s.s room I found a number of my new cla.s.smates in quite as damp a condition as I. I was glad to be among them, to know that I had not been singled out--and, being miserable, enjoyed their company. The instructor seemed to be making a point of paying no attention to our wetness. It made me wonder how the faculty felt about hazing. Evidently they shut their eyes to it.