"I beg your pardon--my dear girl, then," said I. "I"ve come over to the bunch to confess. You"ve busted us. We"re on the mat nine points down and yelling for help. We don"t want to run things. We only want to be allowed to live. We surrender. We give up. We humbly ask that you prepare the crow and let us eat the neck. Isn"t there any way by which we can get a little something to keep us busy and happy? We"re in a horrible situation. Aren"t you even going to let us have the Athletic a.s.sociation next spring?"
"I was thinking of running that myself," said Miss Hicks thoughtfully.
I let out an impolite groan.
"But I"ll tell you what you might do," said Miss Hicks. "You boys might try to win my crowd away from me. You see, you"ve played right into my hand so far. You haven"t paid any attention to my supporters. Now, if you were to go after them the way you do the other girls in the college I shudder to think what might happen to me."
"You mean take them to parties and theaters?"
"Why not?" asked Miss Hicks. "You see, they"re only human. I"ll bet you could land every vote in the bunch if you went at it scientifically."
"But--"
"Oh, I know they"re not pretty," said Miss Hicks. "But they cast the most bee-you-ti-ful votes you ever saw."
"What you mean," I said, "is that if we don"t show those girls a superlatively good time this winter we won"t get a look at the election next spring?"
"They"d be awfully shocked if you put it that way," said Miss Hicks; "and I wouldn"t advise you to talk to them about it. Their notions of honor are so high that I had to pay for the lemonade for the independent men myself at the last election."
"Oh, very well," says I, taking my hat, "we"ll think it over."
"You might wear blinders, you know," she suggested.
"Oh, go to thunder!" said I as earnestly as I could.
"Come again," she said when she closed the door after me. "I do so enjoy these little confidences."
Honestly, Miss Allstairs, when I think of that girl I shrink up until I"m afraid I"ll fall into my own hat. It ought not to be legal for a girl to talk to a man like that. It"s inhuman.
We thought matters over for two weeks and tried one or two little raids on the enemy with most horrible results to ourselves. Then we gave in.
We put our pride and our devotion to art in cold storage and took up the politicians" burden. We gave those girls the time of their young-to-middle-aged lives. We got up dances and crokinole parties and concerts for them. We took them to see Hamlet. We had sleighing parties.
We helped every lecture course in the college do a rushing business. We just backed into the shafts and took the bit without a murmur. And maybe you think those girls didn"t drive us. They seemed determined to make up for the drought of all the past. They were as coy and uncertain and as infernally hard to please as if they"d been used to getting one proposal a day and two on Sunday. Let one of us so much as drop over to Browning Hall to pa.s.s the time of day with one of the real heart-disturbers, and the particular vote that he was courting would go off the reservation for a week. It would take a pair of theater tickets at the least to square things.
We gave dances that winter at which only one in five girls could dance.
We took moonlight strolls with ladies who could remember the moon of seventy-six, and we gave strawrides to girls who insisted on talking history of art and missionary work to us all the way. When I think of the tons of candy and the mountains of flowers and the wagonloads of latest books that we lavished, and of the hard feelings it made in other quarters, and of our loneliness amid all this gayety, and of our frantic efforts to make the prom a success, with ten couples dancing and the rest decorating the walls, I sometimes wonder whether the college was worth our great love for it after all.
But we were winning out. By April it was easy to see this. The Blanks thawed with the snow-drifts. They got real friendly and sociable, and after the warm weather came on we simply had to entertain them all the time, they liked it so. When I think of those beautiful spring days, with us sauntering with our political fates about the campus, and the nicest girls in the world walking two and two all by themselves--Oh, gee! Why, they even made us cut chapel to go walking with them, just as if it was a genuine case of "Oh, those eyes!" and "Shut up, you thumping heart."
[Ill.u.s.tration: Why, they even made us cut chapel to go walking with them _Page 280_]
All this time Miss Hicks wouldn"t accept any invitation at all. She just flocked by herself as usual, and watched us taking her votes away from her without any concern apparently. I always felt that she had something saved up for us, but I couldn"t tell what it was; and anyway, we had those votes. By the time the Athletic election came around there wasn"t a doubt of it.
I must say the women did pretty well during the year. They"d cleaned up the Oratorical debt, and somehow there was about three times as much money in the Athletic treasury after the football season as there had ever been before. But they"d raised a lot of trouble too. No pa.s.ses.
Dues had to be paid up. n.o.body got any fun out of the cla.s.s affairs.
They got up lectures and teas and made the cla.s.s pay for them. And, anyway, we wanted to run things again. We"d felt all year like a bunch of last year"s sunflowers. Besides, we"d earned it. We"d earned a starry crown as a matter of fact, but all we asked was that they give our little old Athletic a.s.sociation back and let us run it once more.
Miss Hicks announced herself as a candidate, and we felt sorry for her.
Not one of her gang was with her. They were enthusiastically for us.
We"d planned the biggest party of the year right after the election in celebration, and had invited them already. Election day came and we hardly worried a bit. The result was 189 to 197 in favor of Miss Hicks.
Every independent man and every bang-up-to-date girl in college voted for her.
Of course it looks simple enough now, but why couldn"t we see it then?
We supposed the real girls knew that it was a case of college patriotism. And, of course, it was a low-lived trick for Miss Hicks to float around the last day and spread the impression that we"d never loved them except for their votes. She simply traded const.i.tuencies with us, that"s all. Take it coming or going, year in or year out, you couldn"t beat that girl. I"ll bet she goes out to Washington state and gets elected governor some day.
I went over to Browning Hall the night after the election, ready to tell Miss Hicks just what everybody thought of her. I was prepared to tell her that every athletic team in college was going to disband and that anarchy would be declared in the morning. She came down as pleasant as ever and held out her hand.
"Don"t say it, please," she said, "because I"m going to tell you something. I"m not coming back next year."
"Not coming back!" said I, gulping down a piece of relief as big as an apple.
"No," she said, "I"m--I"m going to be married this summer. I"ve--I"ve been engaged all this year to a man back home, but I wanted to come back and learn something about politics. He"s a lawyer."
"Well, you learned enough to suit you, didn"t you?" I asked.
"Oh, yes," she said with a giggle. "Wasn"t it fun, though! My father will be so pleased. He"s the chairman of the congressional committee out at home and he"s always told me an awful lot about politics. I"ve enjoyed this year so much."
"Well, I haven"t," I said; "but I hope to enjoy next year." And then I took half an hour to tell her that, in spite of the fact that she was the most arrant, deceitful, unreliable, two-faced and scuttling politician in the world, she was almost incredibly nice. She listened quite patiently, and at the end she held up her fingers. They"d been crossed all the time.
No, that"s the last I ever saw of her, Miss Allstairs. She left before Commencement. She sent me an invitation to the wedding. I"ll bet she didn"t quite get the significance of the magnificent silver set we Siwash boys sent. We sent it to the groom.
That was the end of women dominion at Siwash. There wasn"t a rag of the movement left next fall. But we boys never entirely forgot what happened to us, and it"s still the custom to elect a co-ed to some Athletic office. They do say that the only way to teach a politician what the people want is to bore a shaft in his head and shout it in, but our experience ought to be proof to the contrary. Why, all we needed was the gentle little hint that Mary Jane Hicks gave us.
CHAPTER XI
SIC TRANSIT GLORIA ALL-AMERICA
How did the Siwash game come out Sat.u.r.day? Forget it, my boy. You"ll never know in this oversized, ingrowing, fenced-off, insulated metropolis till some one writes and tells you. Every fall I ask myself that same question all day Sat.u.r.day and Sunday, and do you suppose I ever find a Siwash score in one of those muddy-faced, red-headed, ward-gossip parties that they call newspapers in New York? Never, not at all, you hopeful tenderfoot from the unimportant West. After you"ve existed in this secluded portion of the universe a few years you"ll get over trying to find anything that looks like news from home in the daily disturbances here. And I don"t care whether your home is in Buffalo, Chicago or Strawberry Point, Iowa, either. Go down on the East Side and beat up a policeman, and you"ll get immortalized in ten-inch type. Go back West and get elected governor, and ten to one if you"re mentioned at all they"ll slip you the wrong state to preside over.
Excuse me, but I"m considerably sore, just as I am every Sunday during the football season. Here I am, eating my heart out with longing to know whether good old Siwash has dusted off half a township with Muggledorfer again, and what do I get to read? Four yards of Gale; five yards of Jarhard; two yards of Oh.e.l.l; and a page of Quincetown, Hardmouth, Jamhurst, Saint Mikes, Holy Moses College and the Connecticut Inst.i.tute of Etymology. Nice fodder for a loyal alumnus eleven hundred and then some miles from home, isn"t it? Honest, when I first hit this seething burg I used to go down to the Grand Central station on Sunday afternoon and look at the people coming in from the trains, just because some of them were from the West. Once I took a New Yorker up to Riverside Park, pointed him west and asked him what he saw. He said he saw a ferryboat coming to New York. That was all he had ever seen of the other sh.o.r.e. He called it Hinterland. That made me mad and I called him an electric-light bug. We had a lovely row.
But we"re blasting out a corner for the old coll., even back here. We"ve got things fixed pretty nicely here now, we Siwash men. Down near Gramercy Park there"s an old-fashioned city dwelling house, four stories high and elbow-room wide. It"s the Siwash Alumni Club. There are half a hundred Siwash men in New York, gradually getting into the king row in various lines of business, and we pay enough rent each year for that house to buy a pretty fair little cottage out in Jonesville. Whenever a Siwash man drops in there he"s pretty sure to find another Siwash man who smokes the same brand of tobacco and knows the same brand of college songs. We"ve got one legislator, four magazine publishers, two railroad officials, a city prosecutor and three bankers on the membership roll, and maybe some day we"ll have a mayor. Then we"ll pa.s.s a law requiring the boys and girls of New York to spend at least one hour a day learning about Siwash College, Jonesville, the big team of naughty-nix and the formula for getting credit at the Horseshoe Cafe.
We"ll make it obligatory for every newspaper to publish a full page about each Siwash game in the fall, with pictures of the captain, the coach and the fullback"s right leg. Hurrah for revenge! I see it coming.
Join the club? Why, you don"t have to ask to join it. You"ve got to join it. Ten dollars, please, and sign here. When we get a little huskier financially we won"t charge new-fledged graduates anything for a year or two, but we"ve got to now. The soulless landlord wants his rent in advance. You"ll find the whole gang there Sat.u.r.day nights. Just b.u.t.t right in if I"m not around. You"re a Siwash man, and if you want to borrow the doork.n.o.b to throw at a hackman you"ve a perfect right to do it.
I"ll tell you, old man, you don"t know how nice it is to have a hole that you can hunt in this hurricane town, when you"re a bright young chap with a glorious college past and a business future that you can"t hock for a plate of beans a day! Leaving college and going into business in a big city is like taking a high dive from the hall of fame into an ice-water tank. Think of that and be cheerful. You"ve got a nice time coming. Just now you"re Rudolph Weedon Burlingame, Siwash Naughty-several, late captain of the baseball team, prize orator, manager of two proms and president of the Senior cla.s.s. To-morrow you"ll be a nameless c.u.mberer of busy streets, useful only to the street-car companies to shake down for nickels. To-morrow you"re going around to the manager of some firm or other with a letter from some customer of his, and you"re going to put your hand on your college diploma so as to have it handy, and you"re going to hand him the letter and prepare to tell the story of your strong young life. But just before you begin you"ll go away, because the manager will tell you he"s sorry, but he"s busy, and there are fourteen applicants ahead of you, and anyway he"ll not be hiring any more men until 1918, and will you please come around then, and shut the door behind you, if you don"t mind.
Yep, that"s what will happen to you. You"ll spend your first three days trying to haul that diploma out. The fourth day you"ll put it in your trunk. I"ve known men to cut "em up for shaving paper. You"ll stop trying to tell the story of your life and in about a week you"ll be wondering why you have been allowed to live so long. In two weeks a clerk will look as big as a senator to you and you"ll begin to get bashful before elevator men. You"ll get off the sidewalk when you see a man who looks as if he had a job and was in a hurry. You"ll envy a messenger boy with a job and a future; you"ll wonder if managers are really carnivorous or only pretend to be. You feel as tall as the Singer Building to-day, but you"ll shrink before long. You"ll shrink until, after a long, hard day, with about nine turndowns in it, you"ll have to climb up on top of the dresser to look at yourself in the gla.s.s.
That"s what you"re going up against. Then the Siwash Club will be your hole and you"ll hunt it every evening. You"ll be a big man there, for we judge our members not by what they are, but by what they were at school.
You"ll sit around with the boys after dinner, and the man on your right, who is running a railroad, will be interested in that home run you made against Muggledorfer, and the man on your left, who won"t touch a law case for less than five thousand dollars, will tell you that he, too, won the Perkins debate once. And he"ll treat you as if you were a real life-sized human being instead of a job hunter, knee high to a copying clerk. You"ll be back in the old college atmosphere, as big as the best of "em, and after you"ve swapped yarns all evening you"ll go to bed full of tabasco and pepper and you"ll tackle the first manager the next morning as if he were a Kiowa man and had the ball. And sooner or later you"ll get old Mr. Opportunity where he can"t give you the straight arm, and if you don"t put a knee in his chest and tame him for life you haven"t got the real Siwash spirit, that"s all.
Funny thing about college. It isn"t merely an education. It"s a whole life in itself. You enter it unknown and tiny--just a Freshman with no rights on earth. You work and toil and suffer--and fall in love--and climb and rise to fame. When you are a Senior, if you have good luck, you are one of the biggest things in the whole world--for there isn"t any world but the campus at college. Freshmen look up to you and admire men who are big enough to talk with you. The Soph.o.m.ores may sneer at faculties and kings, but they wouldn"t think of sa.s.sing you. The papers publish your picture in your football clothes. You dine with the professors, and prominent alumni come back and shake you by the hand. Of course, you know that somewhere in the dim nebulous outside there is a President of the United States who is quite a party in his way, but none of the girls mention it when they tell you how grand you looked after they had hauled the other team off of you and sewed on your ear. They talk about you exclusively because you"re really the only thing worth talking about, you know.