The Adventures of a Freshman Part 7

Young kept silent.

"See here, you cheer, Deacon. Do as we tell you." This from Ballard, who bellowed.

Young looked around at the Soph.o.m.ores--there were twelve of them--and then glanced at the ca.n.a.l; he did not want to go in there again; he was s.h.i.+vering already.

"Hip--Hip!" said Ballard. Young gave a feeble cheer.

The man with the gla.s.ses said: "H'm, you'll have to do better than that.

Now then, a loud one."

Young cleared his throat and gave a loud, full cheer.

"That's the way to talk," they said, encouragingly.

"It won't hurt you, you see," said one of them, rather kindly, in a low voice.

"You are improving, Deacon Young," said Channing, patronizingly. "We'll make a man of you yet."

Thus began a new epoch in the life of William Young. During the next week or so of his college course he was hazed perhaps more than anyone in his cla.s.s, although from that first time he no longer resisted or tried to maintain his superiority.

Undoubtedly hazing, as Linton, the Junior, said, was a good thing for his system, as it is for any young man, but Young certainly did not need such severe doses nor so many of them.

Some of the fellows said so the third time he was taken to the ca.n.a.l.

"The old Deacon is all right now," they said; "why d'you give it to him so hard?"

But Channing was one of these small men that love to get power over big men; he loved to haze and he hated to have anyone call him little or mouthy, and Young had called him both. The next night he and Ballard, who, as will be seen later, had much of the bully in him, would bring around a different crowd and Channing would take out his pipe, shake it at Young and say to the others, "Now this old jay Deacon is innocent and meek enough to look at, but he is atrociously fresh at bottom--isn't he, Bally, you old horse?"

Young said nothing and took his hazing cheerfully and patiently, hoping they would soon get tired of it.

"I suppose," he said to himself, as he hurried back to his room to work until past midnight, in order to make up for lost time. "I suppose I must be very fresh, or they would not keep it up so long. I did not know I was so fresh."

But he told himself that if he were only well liked by his own cla.s.smates as he had expected to be, he would not care what his enemies thought of him. That he had not sprung into popularity, he decided, was due to that painful occurrence at his first recitation. It made him flush to think of it even now.

It was on the morning after the rush and after the Soph.o.m.ores had been turned out of his room. He went in to the Livy recitation for which he had prepared himself so thoroughly--he went over it four and a half times, you may remember--and took his seat, feeling strong and confident, and, "Mr. Young, please to translate," said the professor, before the cla.s.s was hardly settled in its seats.

It was in a low voice. Young was in the back of the room. He was not dreaming of being called upon first anyway, and he wondered why the fellow next to him was nudging him with an elbow. Young turned and looked at him inquiringly.

"Get up," whispered the man.

"What for?" whispered Young.

"Isn't Mr. Young present?" said the professor in a tone loud and clear, and Young fairly jumped out of his seat, exclaiming, "Yes, marm--yes, sir, I mean."

He added it quickly but it was too late. Everyone had heard and everyone was laughing, and even the professor joined in, though he did not mean it unkindly, and then they all laughed still more. The walls fairly echoed with it. Even after the professor had rapped for order and the laughter had quieted down, someone in the front row t.i.ttered and that set them all off again. A new cla.s.s is always somewhat hysterical. Some of those in the front rows turned and stared at him in their laughter.

It was a natural mistake. This freshman had prepared for college at a high school, and most of the High School teachers were women. Young should have joined in the laughter, but he only stood there, scarlet and serious-looking and wis.h.i.+ng he could disappear forever.

Finally the professor said, kindly, "Now then, Mr. Young."

But Mr. Young was confused, and though he had been over the pa.s.sage until he had it nearly by heart, he now became all tangled up and excited and finally took his seat dripping with perspiration and wis.h.i.+ng he had never come to college. Instead of being perfect his first college recitation was a flat failure. But the professor did not count this failure against him because he saw that the fellow was rattled and because the next time he came in he made the best recitation of the day.

But that was not the trouble. The fellows would not forget it and would not let up on it. "Thank you, marm," they whispered as he arose to recite, and "Thank you, marm," they shouted to him on the crowded campus. The Soph.o.m.ores took it up. It became a second nick-name.

The worst of it was--in fact the reason of it all was--that he took this as he did himself and everything else, with entirely too much self-importance. Instead of laughing or answering back he looked sullen and sedate when they said, "Thank you, marm," and naturally they said it then all the more.

It cut and hurt to have his own cla.s.smates--the men with whom he had stood shoulder to shoulder in the rush and at the cla.s.s meeting--treat him thus. If they had known that he was taking it so seriously, they would have stopped. But they did not know it. How should they? Most people have to suffer before they learn to be sympathetic.

So, altogether, with the Soph.o.m.ores who hazed and the cla.s.smates who guyed, Will Young decided that college life was not all it was cracked up to be. But you may be sure he did not let this opinion get into the letters he wrote home. Because he was discouraged was no reason for making his mother discouraged too. But, oh, it would have helped a lot, if he had only somebody to talk to about it all. He did not know how to make friends with the others, and the others did not seem to care to make friends, thank you, marm, with the sober-faced old Deacon.

It was all very well for a fellow like Linton to say that something of this sort was a good thing for a fellow like Young. But Linton was a Junior, with friends that loved him; and Juniors forget. Besides, sometimes we get too much of a good thing, and then it becomes a bad thing. If it had kept on this way Young might have become meek and backboneless, and such an extreme would be even worse than that of self-importance.

But it did not keep on. It all stopped one day quite suddenly.

CHAPTER VI

WORK--PLAY--"PROCS"

"PRINCETON, N. J., Sunday.

"DEAR MOTHER: Yes, the Soph.o.m.ores _have_ hazed me a good many times since I first wrote about it, but I do not mind it much now. Honestly I do not. They mean it all in joke.

You must not worry. I ought not to have told you anything about it. I am seldom homesick, and am very happy here at college."

And so he was. For each hour of discomfort there were many other hours that were exceedingly comfortable and satisfactory, for he was working with all his might at what he had always wanted to work--he was getting a college education. And when all is said and done there is nothing like hard work and a good digestion to make a fellow happy. That is if the work is congenial and the food is good; and they were.

His work was so congenial that his recitations sometimes made the fellows in the front rows turn and look at him, the same fellows that had turned and looked at him during that first frightful recitation; but their faces wore different expressions now. He was getting a reputation for being one of the "keeners" of his division.

And as for his food, it was good--and so were the table-mates, for now that the shyness was rubbing off he was beginning to enjoy meeting and sitting down at the table with those dozen cla.s.smates more than any part of the day, if only that long, thin fellow who was studying for the ministry would not say, solemnly, after Young had handed the bread, "Thank you, marm." However, he did not mind even that quite so much as at first, because he was learning how to take good-natured chaff now, and, more than that, to answer it. And that is something one is likely to be taught at college if he learns nothing else.

The letter continued:

"A Junior manages, or runs, our club; that is, he gathered in us twelve Freshmen during the first day or two of the term, and brought us to Mrs. Brown's table. I told you how several club managers asked me to join their clubs the first day? Most of them were too expensive, though. This boarding system is a good bargain for the ladies who supply the tables, for they cannot collect the students themselves, and a good bargain for the managers, for they get their board free, and so save the largest item of expense at college."

Young was finding out that there were, as the minister had told him, a great many fellows at college who had to consider items of expense seriously, but he was surprised to find it so hard to tell which ones did and which did not.

"Everybody talks as if he were 'dead broke' all the time, and you would think all were, to look at them. It is not the thing to dress well here. A student is made fun of if he tries it. I wear the black cut-away coat only on Sundays, as I used to, instead of every day, as you thought I should have to do. I did not have to buy a new hat. I bought a flannel cap instead, such as all the fellows wear."

At first Young was rather shocked at the slouchy way these college men dressed, and he made up his mind that he would not wear corduroy trousers when he became an upper-cla.s.sman. But there were not only many long months, but a very serious problem to go through with, before he became an upper-cla.s.sman, or even a Soph.o.m.ore. However, he had money enough in the bank to sc.r.a.pe along for awhile; the term was only just begun, and things might turn up before it ended, and meanwhile he did not want to think about that, because it always reminded him of his father's att.i.tude in the matter. "Huh! We'll see how long you stay there with those dudes."

A fellow does not like to feel that he is doing something his father does not approve of, no matter how old or independent he is. Mr. Young had not once written a line to Will at college, and through Mrs. Young had only sent the most formal messages. The Freshman concluded that his father hated him. There came a time when he found how mistaken he was.

One day, about a week after college opened--though it seemed to Young more like seven weeks than seven days, because he had seen and felt so many new things and, though he was not aware of it perhaps, because he had developed so much--at any rate, one afternoon just one week from the time he had first met Channing and his crew, Young heard about another new thing. This, too, resulted in developing him a good deal.

It was a Wednesday afternoon, and he was on the way across the quadrangle after "English," no longer feeling lost or out of place on the campus, for he knew by this time nearly all its nooks and crannies and the names of most of the buildings. "There are 225 acres in the grounds," he had written home to Charlie in another cheerful sounding letter, "and we have over thirty buildings." And he told with pride something of the Revolutionary history of Na.s.sau Hall, "the venerable brown building they called 'Old North,' once the largest building in this hemisphere and for a time the most important." But that was not the reason he felt so proud just now. It was because he was walking beside little "Lucky" Lee.