Ann Arbor Tales Part 16

"What's the matter?" he asked sharply.

"The young man next door dropped Mary on the tar walk."

Catherwood clearly distinguished below the child's still frantic yells the grunt of the man who waited on the steps.

He was prompted to shout: "You lie; it was a drift," but a quick second thought restrained him.

As it was he took the stairs in the darkened hallway in three bounds and, rushing into his room, raved impotently. He kicked the legs of the Morris chair; he kicked the legs of the table; he kicked the backs of the books on the lowest shelf of the rack. He seized a pillow from the divan and proceeded to punch it violently, viciously. Then he flung himself face down upon the divan, and from the heart of the cushions came the m.u.f.fled words:

"I wish the confounded kid had never been born!"

After some minutes he rolled over and for a s.p.a.ce stared blankly at the ceiling. Then he rose, took a book from the rack and flinging himself into the Morris chair by the window opened it upon his knee.

It was a volume of the marvelous and enthralling adventures of the redoubtable Sherlock Holmes.

II

There are two kinds of hazing, as practiced by undergraduates at Ann Arbor; the plain and the ornamental.

The first may be a mere practical joke, as the "stacking" of a room, the kidnapping of a freshman toastmaster, or the "losing" of a fraternity initiate in the broad fields that lie between the town and the North Pole.

But ornamental hazing is quite a different thing. It is the sort most indulged in by practical hazers, professionals, as it were; by juniors; even by seniors; and as such is found to have many and varied forms.

Moreover it differs from the plain brand in that a genuine injury is, by its application, wrought upon the hazee. Thus, a man may be lost in a swamp and made to find his own way home by the tenets of the plain hazing code; whereas, if, in the swamp, he is "injured," that is to say if he is painted with iodine, if a broad pink parting is shaved across his scalp, or if his hair is cut off in scrubby patches, he may quite properly consider himself to have been allowed a taste of the ornamental sort.

It may be seen from these distinctions therefore, that plain hazing is really harmless; no one is hurt, unless, as not infrequently occurs, and justly, the hazers, themselves; and as a consequence of this the University authorities seldom concern themselves in these really feeble attempts to smirch the honor and destroy the valor of the freshman cla.s.s, which in most instances is sufficiently l.u.s.ty an infant to take excellent care of itself.

For instance, no excitement is created by the appearance on the campus, or even in the corridors of the recitation buildings, of a lanky youth in exceedingly snug knee breeches who drags about behind him by a long string a gaudy little horse on squeaking wheels. Indeed, men whose height reaches a flat six feet have not infrequently ridden to cla.s.ses on very small tricycles to the ecstatic delight of certain upper cla.s.smen and to the pitying sneers of their instructors.

As has been observed, the authorities of the University are not wont to interest themselves in such manifestations of under-cla.s.s idiocy.

But a hazing of the second sort!

That, truly, is a different matter.

There was the case of Cleaver, for instance, whose disappearance from Ann Arbor on a wet night in March six years ago was telegraphed to every paper of consequence in the country and which furnished a delectable topic of conversation at faculty dinners for the entire two months of his absence.

Hazed?

Of course he was hazed.

He was _persona non grata_ to the soph.o.m.ore cla.s.s as represented by the fraternity contingent and that contingent had simply done away with him temporarily. When he _did_ return it was a wan and haggard figure that he presented. The belief gained currency that his people had known his whereabouts, but no one ever knew to a certainty. As for Cleaver himself, he would not--or perhaps could not--tell what had been done to him or who had planned and carried out the adventure of his disappearance. The faculty was nonplussed. No one else had been missed.

Who, then, could have accompanied Cleaver to his dungeon, if dungeon had been his residence for two months? No one, to this day, has solved the mystery. As for Cleaver, he was given his credits and permitted to graduate in due time. And to-day whenever he speaks of a certain individual--now a lawyer in Syracuse--who was a soph.o.m.ore during his own freshman days, it is with a twinkle in his eyes. But he still keeps a sacred silence.

Ann Arbor was shaken to its foundations by the incident. Shaken, too, has it been by circus riots; but it is doubted if ever within the period of the University's establishment has it been so tremendously excited, for a little period, as it became over the case of Catherwood.

In the first place Catherwood had incurred the enmity of no one. A student of fair attainments and average record who, during his three years in the University, had taken but small part in undergraduate activities, he found himself, of a sudden, standing in the blinding lime-light of an official investigation. And an official investigation at the University of Michigan is not to be considered lightly. All over this broad land are men who have the questionable privilege of looking back upon a time when they were the unwilling subjects of such investigations.

Catherwood's case, to be sure, was different in that he was the sufferer from others' depredations, but the odium of partic.i.p.ation rested upon him nevertheless, and so delicate and shrinking was his nature that he was known to suffer miserably from the publicity of his position.

For three days he was conscious that every man's eye was upon him; that every finger pointed at him, that every tongue discussed him. An attempt was made to heroize him, but he withdrew to the seclusion of his room and would see no one. His, indeed, was a case to defy, in its solution, the most subtle reasoner, the most invincible logician on the faculty.

In detail it was as follows:

Mrs. Turner, Catherwood's landlady, a most estimable woman who had moved into town from a not-distant farm for the purpose of "putting Willie through school," was away from the house all the evening of February ninth. A "social" at the Congregational Church--socials were her chief, indeed, her only, diversion--on the arrangement committee of which she was most active, delayed her return until nearly midnight. Willie accompanied her to the church and at nine o'clock was put to bed in a pew up-stairs. Therefore Mrs. Turner could not know what had transpired in one of her second-floor rooms between the hours of seven-thirty and twelve on that momentous night. Moreover, as Mrs. Turner varied the monotony of house work with "plain sewing by the day" and was, all the morning of the tenth, at the Alpha Phi house "fitting" Miss Houston, she did not set about to "do the room work" until eleven-thirty.

At that hour, tired beyond measure,--Miss Houston had been so finicky about the hang of the skirt--she suddenly realized that if she did not make haste Mr. Catherwood would return from college to find his room in the condition of untidiness that he, presumably, had left it on going out.

So she dragged her leaden limbs up the stairs and from force of habit knocked on the door of the second room, back. There was no reply. She had expected none. She pushed open the door.

The scene of chaos that met her gaze defies description. The room had been completely and most effectively "stacked." Strewn about the floor were papers. The inverted waste-basket was c.o.c.ked rakishly upon an arm of the chandelier. Books from the rack were lying everywhere. The rack lay flat on the floor. The face of every hanging picture was turned to the wall, and the Morris chair, which had been carefully taken apart, was piled upon the writing table. Mrs. Turner at a single sweep of her eye noted these details and also certain splotches that were unmistakably ink spots on the walls and on the carpet.

The divan had reared itself and now stood upon one end. Three chairs were piled upon the bed.

These Mrs. Turner noted last.

She understood the meaning of the chaos. Someone, during his absence, had entered Mr. Catherwood's room and "stacked" it. And as she calculated the time necessary to complete a restoration of its usual neat appearance, the poor woman sighed deeply.

Suddenly she started.

Was it an echo of her sigh she heard? Surely she had heard a human sound. She peered, stooping.

"Mr. Catherwood!" she called; her face pale.

A distinct, graveyard moan was the answer.

The blood fled from Mrs. Turner's lips and her eyes bulged. She cautiously approached the bed, whence, seemingly, had come the moan. She peered between the legs of the chairs. Then, with a cry that rang through the house, she fled from the room, down the stairs and into the freezing out-of-doors.

As she ran down the walk, slipping, stumbling, the bells in the library tower rang out twice, musically clear on the frosty air--fifteen minutes past twelve. And approaching, she saw her neighbor, the a.s.sistant professor of history, returning from the examination.

Mrs. Turner flung herself heavily upon him. His spectacles slipped from his nose. The armful of thin "blue books" he was carrying littered the walk. He parried awkwardly with hands that were encased in gray-striped woolen mittens.

"Madame! Madame!" he cried, "what the--what is the matter--are you crazy?"

Mrs. Turner gasped--gasped like a pickerel dying on the gra.s.s. It was quite half a minute before she found her voice and when she spoke it was with many vocal quavers.

"Oh, Professor Lowe! Professor Lowe!" she wailed, "Mr. Catherwood--Mr.

Catherwood----"

"Well, well; what of him, madame, what of him?"

The a.s.sistant professor spoke sharply.

"_He's been murdered!_"

"WHAT!"

She seized him by the arm.