When Commencement comes you move about the campus like some tall mountain peak on legs. The students bring their young brothers up to meet you and you try to be kind and approachable. They give you a tremendous cheer when you go down the aisle in the chapel to get your prizes. You are referred to on all sides as one of the reasons why America is great. The professors when they bid you good-by ask you anxiously not to forget them. Then Commencement is over and college life is past, and there is nothing left in life but to become a senator or run a darned old trust. You leave the campus, taking care not to step on any of the buildings, and go out into the world pretty blue because you"re through with about everything worth while; and you wonder if you can stand it to toil away making history eleven months in the year with only time to hang around college a few weeks in spring or fall. You"re done with the real life. You"re an old man, you"ve seen it all; and it sometimes takes you two weeks or more to recover and decide that after all a great career may be almost as interesting in a way as college itself. So you buck up and decide to accept the career--and that"s where you begin to catch on to the general drift of the universe in dead earnest.
Take a man of sixty, with a permanent place in Who"s Who and a large circle of people who believe that he has some influence with the sunrise and sunset. Then let him suddenly find himself a ten-year-old boy with two empty pockets and an appet.i.te for a.s.sets, and let him learn that it isn"t considered even an impertinence to spank him whenever he tries to mix in and air his opinions. I don"t believe he would be much more shocked than the college man who finds, at the conclusion of a glorious four-year slosh in fame, that he is really just about to begin life, and that the first thing he must learn is to keep out from under foot and say "Yes, sir," when the boss barks at him. It"s a painful thing, Burlingame. Took me about a year to think of it without saying "ouch."
The saddest thing about it all is that the two careers don"t always mesh. The college athlete may discover that the only use the world has for talented shoulder muscles is for hod-carrying purposes. The society fashion plate may never get the hang of how to earn anything but last year"s model pants; and the fishy-eyed nonent.i.ty, who never did anything more glorious in college than pay his cla.s.s tax, may be doing a brokerage business in skysc.r.a.pers within ten years.
When I left Siwash and came to New York I guess I was as big as the next graduate. Of course I hadn"t been the one best bet on the campus, but I knew all the college celebrities well enough to slap them on the backs and call them by pet names and lend them money. That of course should be a great a.s.sistance in knowing just how to approach the president of a big city bank and touch him for a cigar in a red-and-gold corset, while he is telling you to make yourself at home around the place until a job turns up. Allie Bangs, my chum, went on East with me. We had decided to rise side by side and to buy the same make of yachts. Of course we were sensible. We didn"t expect to crowd out any magnates the first week or two. We intended to rise by honest worth, if it took a whole year. All we asked was that the fellows ahead should take care of themselves and not hold it against us if we ran over them from behind. We didn"t think we were the biggest men on earth--not yet. That"s where we fell down.
We"ve never had a chance to since. You"ve got to seize the opportunity for having a swelled head just as you have for everything else.
It took us just six weeks to get a toe-hold on the earth and establish our right to breathe our fair share of New York air. At the end of that time neither one of us would have been surprised if we had been charged rent while waiting in the ante-rooms of New York offices to be told that no one had time to tell us that there was no use of our waiting to get a chance to ask for anything. Talk about a come-down! It was worse than coming down a b.u.mp-the-b.u.mps with nails in it. It was three months before we got jobs. They were microscopic jobs in the same company, with wages that were so small that it seemed a shame to make out our weekly checks on nice engraved bank paper--jobs where any one from the proprietor down could yell "Here, you!" and the office boy could have fired us and got away with it. If I had been hanging on to a rope trailing behind a fifty-thousand-ton ocean liner I don"t believe I should have felt more inconsequential and totally superfluous.
But they were jobs just the same and we were game. I think most college graduates are after they get their feelings reduced to normal size. We hung on and dug in, and sneaked more work into our positions, and didn"t quarrel with any one except the window-washer"s little boy who brought meat for the cats in the bas.e.m.e.nt. We drew the line at letting him boss us. And how we did enjoy being part of the big rumpus on Manhattan Island. We had a room--it wasn"t so much of a room as it was a sort of stationary vest--and we ate at those hunger cures where a girl punches out your bill on a little ticket and you don"t dare eat up above the third figure from the bottom or you"ll go broke on Friday. By hook or crook we always managed to save a dollar from the wreckage each week for Sunday, and say, did you ever conduct a scientific investigation into just how far a dollar will go providing a day"s pleasure in a big city? We did that for six months, and if I do say it myself we stretched some of those dollars until the eagle"s neck reached from Tarrytown to Coney Island. We saw New York from roof garden to sub-cellar. We even got to doing fancy stunts. We"d dig out our dress suits, go over to one of those cafes where you begin owing money as soon as you see the head waiter, and put on a bored and haughty front for two hours on a dollar and twenty cents, including tips. And what we didn"t know about the Subway, the Snubway and the Grubway, the Clubway, and the various Dubways of New York wasn"t worth discovering or even imagining.
We hadn"t been conducting our explorations for more than a week when a most tremendous thing happened to us. You know how you are always running up against mastodons in the big town. You see about every one who is big enough to die in scare-heads. Taking a stroll down Fifth Avenue with an old residenter and having him tell about the people you pa.s.s is like having the hall of fame directory read off to you. Well, one Sunday night when we were blowing in our little fifty cents apiece on one of those Italian table d"hote dinners with red varnish free, Allie looked across the room and began to tremble. "Look at that chap,"
says he.
"Who is he?" I asked, getting interested. "Roosevelt?"
"Roosevelt nothing," he says scornfully. "Man alive, that"s Jarvis!"
I just dropped my jaw and stared. Of course you remember Jarvis, the great football player. At that time I guess most of the college boys in America said their prayers to him. Out West we students used to read of his terrific line plunges on the eastern fields and of his t.i.tanic defense when his team was hard pushed, and wonder if any of us would ever become great enough to meet him and shake him by the hand. What did we care for the achievements of Achilles and Hector and Hercules and other eminent hasbeens, which we had to soak up at the rate of forty lines of Greek a day? They had old Homer to write them up--the best man ever in the business. But they were too tame for us. I"ve caught myself speculating more than once on what Achilles would have done if Jarvis had tried to make a gain through him. Achilles was probably a pretty good spear artist, and all that, but if Jarvis had put his leather-helmeted head down and hit the line low--about two points south of the solar plexus--they would have carted Ac. away in a cab right there, invulnerability and all.
That"s about what we thought of Jarvis. We had his pictures pasted all over our training quarters along with those of the other super-dreadnoughts from the colleges that break into literature, and I imagine that if he had suddenly appeared back in Jonesville we should have put our heads right down and kow-towed until he gave us permission to get up. And here we were, sitting in the same cafe with him. I"ll tell you, I had never felt the glory of living in the metropolis and prowling around the ankles of the big chiefs more vividly than right there in that room the night we first saw him.
We sat and watched Jarvis while our meat course got cold. There was no mistaking him--some people have their looks copyrighted and Jarvis was one of them. We would have known it was he if we had seen him in a Roman mob. After a while Bangs, who always did have a triple reenforced Harveyized steel cheek, straightened up. "I"m going over to speak to him," he said.
"Sit still, you fool," says I; "don"t annoy him."
"Watch me," says Bangs; "I"m going over to introduce myself. He can"t any more than freeze me. And after I"ve spoken to him they can take my little old job away from me and ship me back to the hayfields whenever they please. I"ll be satisfied."
"You ought to bottle that nerve of yours and sell it to the lightning-rod pedlers," says I, getting all sweaty. "Just because you introduced yourself to a governor once you think you can go as far as you like. You stay right here--" But Bangs had gone over to Jarvis.
I sat there and blushed for him, and suffered the tortures of a man who is watching his friend making a furry-eared nuisance of himself. There was the greatest football player in the world being pestered by a frying-sized sprig of a ninth a.s.sistant shipping clerk. It was preposterous. I waited to see Bangs wilt and come slinking back. Then I was going to put on my hat and walk out as if I didn"t belong with him at all. But instead of that Bangs shook hands with Jarvis, talked a minute and then sat down with him. When Bangs is routed out by the Angel Gabriel he"ll sit down on the edge of his grave and delay the whole procession, trying to find a mutual acquaintance or two. That"s the kind of a leather-skin he is.
Presently Bangs turned around and beckoned to me to come over. More colossal impudence. I wasn"t going to do it, but Jarvis turned, too, and smiled at me. Like a hypnotized man I went over to their table. "I want you to meet Mr. Jarvis," said Bangs, with the air of a man who is giving away his aeroplane to a personal friend.
"Glad to meet you," said Jarvis kindly.
"M-m-m-mrugh," says I easily and naturally. Then I sat down on the edge of a chair.
Well, sir, Jarvis--it was the real Jarvis all right--was as pleasant a fellow as you would ever care to meet. There he was talking away to us fishworms just as cordially as if he enjoyed it. He didn"t seem to be a bit better than we were. I"ve often noticed that when you meet the very greatest people they are that way. It"s only the fellows who aren"t sure they"re great and who are pretty sure you aren"t sure either, who have to put up a haughty front. Jarvis offered us cigarettes and put us so much at our ease that we stayed there an hour. It was a dazzling experience. He told us a lot about the city, and asked us about ourselves and laughed at our experiences. And he told us that he often dined there and hoped to see us again. When we got safely outside, after having bade him good-by without any sort of a break, I mopped my forehead. Then I took off my hat. "Bangs," said I, "you"re the world"s champion. Some day you"ll get killed for impudence in the first degree, but just now I"ve got ten cents and I"m going to buy you a big cigar and walk home to pay for it."
Incredible as it may sound, that was the beginning of a real friendship between the three of us. Jarvis seemed to take a positive pleasure in being democratic. And he was wonderfully thoughtful, too. He realized instinctively that we had about nine cents apiece in our clothes as a rule, and he didn"t offer to be gorgeous and buy things we couldn"t buy back. We got to dropping in at the cafe once a week or so and eating at the same table with him. Why on earth he fancied eating around with grubs like us, when he could have been tucking away cla.s.sy fare up on Fifth Avenue, we couldn"t imagine. Some people are naturally Bohemian, however. It seemed to delight Jarvis to hear us tell about our team, and our college, and our prospects, and how lucky we had been up to date, not getting stepped on by any financial magnate or other tall city monument. He wasn"t a talkative man himself. It was especially hard to pry any football talk out of him, probably because he was so modest.
When we insisted he would finally open up, and tell us the inside facts about some great college game that we knew by heart from the newspaper accounts. And he would mention all the famous players by their first names--you can"t imagine how much more alarming it sounded than calling a president "Teddy"--and we would just sit there and drink it in, and watch history from behind the scenes until suddenly he would stop, look absent and shut up like a clam. No use trying to turn him on again.
Presently he would bid us good night and go away. The first time we thought we had offended him and we were miserable for a week. But when we ran across him again he seemed as pleased as ever to see us. It was just moods, after all, we finally decided, and thought no more about it. Great men have a right to have moods if they want to. We admired his moods as much as the rest of him, and were only glad they weren"t violent.
It was a couple of months before we got up courage enough to ask him to drop in at our room. Even Allie got timid. He explained that he didn"t want to break the spell. But finally I braced up myself and invited him to drop around with us, and he consented as kindly as you please. Came right up to our little three by twice and wouldn"t even sit in the one chair. Sat on the bed and looked over our college pictures, and chatted until Allie asked him if he was going back for the big game that fall.
Then he said sort of abruptly that he couldn"t get away, and a few minutes afterward he went home. We thought we"d offended him again, but a week afterward he turned up and called on us--we"d asked him to drop in any time. We decided that he didn"t like to have too much familiarity about his football career and we respected him for it. It"s all right for a man like that to be affable and democratic, but he mustn"t let you crawl all over him. He"s got his dignity to maintain.
As the winter came on Jarvis dropped up to see us quite frequently. He never asked us to come and see him and we were really a little grateful--for I don"t believe I should have had the nerve to go bouncing into the apartments of a national hero and hobn.o.b with the mile-a-minute cla.s.s. Anyway we didn"t expect it or dream of it. And we didn"t ask him any more questions about himself. We didn"t care to try to elbow into his circle. If he chose to come slumming and sit around with us, we were more than content. We had seen enough of him already to keep us busy paralyzing Siwash fellows for a week when we went back to Commencement.
"Jarvis? Oh, yes. Fact is, he"s a friend of ours. Comes up to our rooms right along. We happened to meet him in a cafe. And say, he tells us that when he made that fifty-yard run--and so on." We used to practise saying things like this naturally and easily. We could just see the undergrads at the frat house sitting around in circles and lapping it up.
All this time we were plugging away down at the plant, early and late, with every ounce of steam we had. There"s one good thing about business in this Bedlam--when you break in you keep right on going. By the time Commencement rolled around we were getting checks with two figures on them, and had a better job treed and ready to drop. Ask for a vacation?
Why, we wouldn"t have asked for four days off to go home and help bury our worst enemy. That"s what business does to the dear old college days when it gets a good bite at them. There we were, one year out of Siwash, breaking forty-five reunion dates, and never even sitting around with our heads in our hands over it. This business bug is a bad, bad biter all right. Just let it get its tooth into you, and what do you care if some other fellow is smoking your two-quart pipe back in the old chapter house? And for that matter, what do you care about anything else until you get up far enough to take breath and look around? Sometimes, after a couple of weeks of extra hard work, I"ve taken my mind off invoices long enough to wag it around a bit and I"ve felt like a swimmer coming up after a long dive.
We landed those promotions in July and went right after another pair. I got mine in August--Allie in September. And along in December they called us both up in the office, where the big crash was. He said nice things to us about getting a chance to fire our own chauffeurs if we kept on tending to business, and first thing we knew we had offices of our own in the back of the building, with our names painted on the doors, and call-bells that brought stenographers and the same old brand of office boys that used to blow us out of the other offices along with their cigarette smoke. And we realized then that if we worked like thunder for thirty years more and saved our money and made it earn one hundred per cent, perhaps some of the real business kings would notice us on the street some day. That"s about the way the college swelling goes down.
All this time we hadn"t seen much of Jarvis. He"d stopped coming to the cafe and we"d really been so busy that we almost forgot about him. It"s simply wonderful the things business will drive out of your mind. It wasn"t until late in the winter that we realized that we"d probably lost track of Jarvis for good--that is, until we climbed up into his set and discovered him at some dinner that was a page out of the social register. We mixed around a lot more now. We went to the million-candle-power restaurants every now and then, and ate a good deal more than sixty-five cents" worth apiece without batting an eye; and we went to see a play occasionally and didn"t climb up into the rarefied atmosphere to find our seats, either. And whenever we broke in with the limousine crowd we kept a bright lookout for Jarvis. We wanted to see him and show him that we were coming along. We wanted him to be proud of us. I"d have given all my small bank balance to hear him say: "Fine work, old man; keep it up." I"ll tell you when a big chap like that takes an interest in you, it"s just as bracing as a hypodermic of ginger. Baccalaureates and inspirational editorials can"t touch it.
I was holding down the proud position of shipping clerk and Allie was my a.s.sistant the next spring, and it seemed as if we had to empty that warehouse every twenty-four hours and find the men to load the stuff with search-warrants. Help was scandalously scarce. We couldn"t have worked harder if we had been standing off grizzly bears with brickbats.
I"d just fired the fourth loafer in one day for trying to roll barrels by mental suggestion, when the boss came into my office.
"Can you use an extra man?" he asked me.
"Use him?" says I, swabbing off my forehead--I"d been hustling a few barrels myself. "Use him? Say, I"ll give him a whole car to load all by himself, and if he can get the job finished by yesterday he can have another to load for to-day."
"Now, see here," said the boss, sitting down; "this is a peculiar case.
This chap"s been at me for a job for months. There"s nothing in the office. He"s a fine fellow and well educated, but he"s on his uppers. He can"t seem to land anywhere. I"m sorry for him. He looks as if he was headed for the bread line. He"s too good to roll barrels, but it won"t hurt him. If you"ll take him in and use him I"ll give him a place as soon as I get it; let me know how he pans out."
"Just ask him to run all the way here," I said, and put my nose down in a bill of lading. After a while the door opened and some one said, "Is this the shipping clerk?" It was the ghost of a voice I used to know and I turned around in a hurry. It was Jarvis.
I don"t suppose it is strictly business to cry while you are shaking hands with a husky you"re just putting into harness at one-fifty per. I didn"t intend to do it, but somehow when your whole conception of fame and glory comes clattering down about your ears, and you find you"ve got to order your star and idol to get a hustle on him and load the car at door four damquick, you are likely to do something foolish. I just stood and sniveled and let my mouth hang open. Neither of us said a word, but presently I put my arm around his shoulders and led him out into the shipping room. "There"s the foreman," I said, in a voice like a wet sponge. "And you report here at six o"clock sharp." Then I went and hunted up Allie and for once we let business go hang in business hours.
We couldn"t work. We kept clawing for the solid ground and trying to readjust society and the universe and the beacon lights of progress all afternoon.
When quitting time came we waited for Jarvis. We didn"t say anything, but we loaded him into a cab and took him up to the old cafe. Then he told us his story, while we learned a lot of things about glory we hadn"t even vaguely suspected before. He was one of the greatest football players who ever carried a ball, Jarvis was. Of that there was no doubt. He admitted it himself then. I might say he confessed it. He"d come to his university without any real preparation--you know even in the best regulated inst.i.tutions of learning they sometimes get your marks on tackling mixed with your grades on entrance algebra. He"d spent two hours a day on football and the rest of his time being a college hero. He"d had to work at it like a dog, he said. How he got by the exams, he never knew. It seemed to him as if he must have studied in his sleep. By the time he graduated he"d had about every honor that has been invented for campus consumption. He belonged to the exclusive societies. All kinds of big people had shaken hands with him--asked for the privilege. He had a sc.r.a.pbook of newspaper stories about his career that weighed four pounds. He knew the differences between eight kinds of wine by the taste and he had a perfect education in forkology, waltzology, necktiematics, and all the other branches of social science.
He would never forget, he said, how he felt when he was graduated and the university moved off behind him and left him alone. It was up to him to keep on being a famous character, he felt. His college demanded it.
He had to make good. But there he was with a magnificent football education and no more football to play. His financial training consisted in knowing when his bank account was overdrawn. His folks had pretty nearly paralyzed themselves putting him through and he wasn"t going to draw on them any further. He went to New York because it seemed to be almost as big as the university, and he started all alone on the job of shouldering his way past the captains of finance up to the place where his college mates might feel proud of him some more.
The result was so ridiculous that he had to laugh at it himself. He lost five yards every time he bucked an office boy. His college friends kept inviting him out and he went until they began offering him help. Then he cut the whole bunch. He didn"t care to have them watch the struggle.
He"d been in New York two years when he met us, he said, and he hadn"t earned enough money to pay his room-rent in that time. There were times when he might have got a decent little job at twelve dollars per, or so, but he would have had to meet the boys who had looked up to him as a world-beater and somehow he just couldn"t tackle it. When we had come over and paid homage to him he saw we had taken him for a successful man of the world, as well as a member of the All-America team, and he hadn"t been able to resist the desire to let two human beings look up to him again. He hadn"t invited us to his room, he said, because part of the time he didn"t have a room; and he even confessed that once or twice he"d walked up to our rooms from downtown because he was crazy for a smoke and didn"t have the price.
I guess there never was a more peculiar dinner party in New York. Part of the time I sniveled and part of the time Allie sniveled, and once or twice we were all three all balled up in our throats. But after a while we braced up and I told Jarvis what the Boss had told me, and we drank a toast to the glad new days, and another to success, and another to Jarvis, the coming business pillar, and some more to our private yachts and country homes, and to Commencement reunions, and this and that. Then we chartered a sea-going cab and took Jarvis home with us. We made him sleep in the bed while we slept on the floor, and the next morning we loaned him a pair of overalls that we had honorably retired and we all went down to work together.
The next three months were perfectly ridiculous. We simply couldn"t order Jarvis around. Suppose you had to ask the Statue of Liberty to get a move on and scrub the floors? We couldn"t get our ingrained awe of that freight hustler out of our systems. Of course when any one was around we had to keep up appearances, but when I was alone and I had something for Jarvis to do I"d call him in and get at it about this way: "Er--say, Jarvis, could you help me out on a little matter, if you have the time? You know there"s a shipment for Pittsburgh that"s got to go out by noon. I think the car is at door 6. Those barrels ought to be put into the car right away, and if you"d see that they get in there I"d be very much obliged to you. I"d attend to it myself, but they"ve given me a lot of stuff to go over here."
Then Jarvis would grin cheerfully and hustle those barrels in before I could get over blushing. If you don"t believe football has its advantages in after life you ought to watch a prize tackle waltzing a three-hundred-pound barrel through a car door.
By day we ordered Jarvis about in this fashion, and made him earn his one-fifty with the rest of the red-shirted gang. But at six o"clock we dropped all that like a hot poker. Nights we were his adoring young friends again. We sat together in restaurants and said "sir" to him to his infinite disgust, and made him tell over and over again the stories of the big games and the grand doings of the old days. When his promotion came, three months later, and he went into a small job in the office, with a traveling job looming up in the offing, we held a celebration that set us back about half the price of a railroad ticket home. It meant more to us than it did to him. To him it was three dollars more a week, congenial work and a chance. But to us it was the release of a great man from grinding captivity--a racehorse rescued from the shafts of a garbage cart; a Richard the Lion-hearted hauled from the gloomy dungeon, where he had had to peel his own potatoes, and set on the road to kingly pomp and circ.u.mstance again. Excuse me for this frightful mess of language. I can"t help getting a little squashy with my adjectives when I think of that glorious banquet night.
I"m glad to say that Jarvis kept coming along after that. He developed into a first-cla.s.s salesman, and in a couple of years he came in from the road and took a desk in the house with his name on the side in gilt letters. When this happened we made him look up every one of his old college friends again. He hesitated a little, but we got behind him and pushed. We pushed him into his college club and back to Commencement, and we really pushed him out of our life--for every one was glad to see him, of course, and to his amazement he found that he was still a grand old college inst.i.tution among the alumni. So he trained with his own crowd after that, but even now we go over to his club and dine with him at least once a year--always on some anniversary or other. And for the last two years he has been sending his machine around for us.
Oh, no, you don"t! I"m paying for this lunch, young fellow. Don"t fight any one about paying for your lunch just because you still have the price. It"s a privilege we older chaps insist on with you newcomers anyway. And remember, there is always a bunch of us before the fire at the club Sat.u.r.day evenings, and we don"t talk business. While you"re waiting for that job, don"t you dare miss a meeting. And say--one thing more. Don"t be afraid of those blamed office boys. They"re all a bluff.
I"m getting so I can fire them without even getting pale.