The Seven-Branched Candlestick Part 12

Next to Fallon lived Waters, a cheery, well-dressed little person, who had pink cheeks and no disturbing thoughts. Waters was a member of one of the minor fraternities; he spoke longingly of the day when he would be living in his "chapter lodge." Waters was easy company. He had four hundred "friends" around the campus, and when I met him was engaged in capitalizing on those friendships by canva.s.sing votes for his election to a team managership.

That perhaps is why he came into my room so often to sit and chat pleasantly, lightly, about almost every topic known to the college man.

He was very much of a type. There were at least thirty other men in that cla.s.s who were like him, no better nor worse, nor more nor less attractive than he was. Popularity was an end and a means with him. It was all he wanted of college.

"Well, how are you, old top?" was the greeting that came singing from his room, each time I pa.s.sed its open door. It was a door perennially open, lest some pa.s.serby might escape without the greeting.

"D'you know, old chap," he'd say, sweeping into my room in the midst of a study-hour and slumping down upon the divan with a great show of silk socks and shirtings, "it's high time you and I did something for that 'grind' across the hall."

He was tremendously interested in Fallon, it would appear. Not personally, he explained to me--but just because Fallon might become a valuable friend in time. A college man needed friends--and he, Waters, had only four hundred of them!

Fallon, however, had something of his own opinion about it. He went about the building with his book before him, bowing neither to me nor Waters nor any one else. It was dreadful to have to speak to him. He could scarcely answer; his big Adam's-apple would go juggling painfully up and down, and finally he would succeed in emitting a barely audible whisper. He would blush, stammer, clap his mouth shut, then hurry away.

That was Fallon, worst of "grinds." He was beginning to be the b.u.t.t of all sorts of miserable jokes. Even the freshmen over-stepped the line to make fun of him. For, like Waters and myself, he was a soph.o.m.ore.

In the guise of helping a cla.s.smate, Waters took charge of him. He gave him nightly lectures in cordiality, in self-confidence, in the bettering of one's appearance. Once, when I chanced to go by, I heard him delivering glib advice upon what "Fallon, old top" ought to eat, in order that he might grow stouter and more favorable to look upon. And Fallon sat through it all and clutched his bony knees and grinned the grin of the helpless.

But one day, the story goes, he surprised Waters by finding his voice--and a very full-toned, convincing voice it proved to be, not at all like his usual whisper. And he told Waters to keep out of his room in study hour; he told him that he did not care to have his chances of becoming cla.s.s valedictorian spoiled through having to divert his attention and listen to such superficial tommy-rot. And he told him to keep himself away, now and forever more, from his room and its owner.

"Oh, very well!" I heard the injured Waters say. A second later he had come across into my room and was pouring into my ear a complaint concerning the beggarly rudeness of that "grind, Fallon, who never would amount to anything in the college world, anyhow!"

He had just returned from a very important meeting, he told me, for the express purpose of having that heart-to-heart talk with Fallon--and the big, uncouth beggar didn't appreciate it at all. No wonder some fellows never did get along in college--and here he was, absent from this most important meeting, with no results at all.

He didn't mind telling me--(here his voice died down into an impressive whisper)--that it was from a fraternity meeting he had come. They were great things, these fraternity meetings. It was really too bad that I had never been able to join a fraternity--but then, of course, I must realize that fraternities had to draw the line somewhere! Now, I mustn't take that as a reflection on me personally--because it wasn't. I was all right, I was--and some day, he was sure, I was going to be a big man in the college world--bigger than he himself ever hoped to be. But Jews were a funny people--and I must admit, if I wanted to be fair, that some of them weren't fit to come to college at all, not to speak of joining fraternities.

And so he went on, until, thoroughly nauseated by the bland niceness of his speech, I followed Fallon's example and threw him out, though he refused to be insulted at this move, and promised to come around the next night and discuss the question of who should be elected our next football manager.

A little while after he was gone, Fallon came across the hall and knocked at my door. It was a timid, scared sort of a knock, and it needed a loud and repeated, "Come in," before he finally obeyed my summons.

He was pitifully wrought up over the incident. He had wanted to be polite to Waters, but he had had to study. He hadn't wanted to insult him, but somehow Waters never did understand how valuable time was, and what it would mean to Fallon's mother if he could come out a valedictorian at the end of our four years.

"Which would you rather have," I asked him, "a valedictory or a friend?"

He stammered a good deal over it. He knew that Waters was right about that: he did not have a single friend in the whole college--didn't know how to go about it--but he didn't want such men as Waters trying to teach him the way either.

That began my friendship for Fallon. I had acquaintances enough on the campus, but I was almost as friendless as he--for friendlessness, I think, is not so much a matter of other people's as of one's own habit of mind. And there was something so grotesquely miserable about his loneliness--something so like a grinning gargoyle, solitary in its elevation--that I was drawn to him without much conscious effort.

I began by taking him for long walks. It was the first exercise of any sort, outside of the required freshman gymnasium course, which he had had in college. At first he would not talk at all; would just walk beside me through the city's fringes into the half-suburban roads, his eyes drinking in the green vistas as if they were astounding novelties, his breath coming fast with exertion, his cheeks glowing with new color.

Gradually I urged him into talking--and, like all beginners, he talked of himself entirely. It was good for him. The more he spoke of himself, the more highly he thought of himself. He needed pride.

I had already been elected an editor of the college joke paper. I was qualified, therefore, to persuade Fallon to contribute what he could to that periodical. But he had not a jot of humor, and his contributions turned out to be very long and serious bits of verse in studied French rhyme schemes. I did not even risk reading them at a meeting of the board, but always turned them over to Trevelyan who could have them used in the coming issue of the other magazine, the literary monthly. This set Fallon writing entirely for the "lit," as we called it--and, as a result, when the elections to that paper were announced in the middle of the soph.o.m.ore year, Fallon's name and mine stood together.

But the happiest inspiration came to me one Sunday when at noon Fallon and I were resting atop the Palisades, whither we had gone upon an all-day tramp. I watched him pick up a flat rock and sent it sailing out and down through s.p.a.ce. His long thin arm gave the toss a surprising power.

I asked him, had he ever seen a discus. He said, "No."

The next day I had overcome all his scruples as to the immodesty of a track costume and had led him out upon the field to practice with the discus. It was hard work, because he was by far the clumsiest man I have ever known. Later on I interested the old coach on his behalf. Before Thanksgiving Fallon gave promise of becoming one of the college's best discus throwers.

When winter began, I took him down to the gymnasium. At first I had in mind only to keep him in good condition; but his handling of the heavy medicine ball gave me another idea. I put him to work with a basketball--and here the training I had given the young boys at the settlement served me in good stead. He was so tall, he need only swing up his arms to drop the ball into the basket. He was the ideal build for a "center," and our 'varsity team needed a center.

He did not make the 'varsity--not that year, anyhow. But he did make our cla.s.s team, and won his numerals.

Also when spring came in, he was chosen as one of the track team's discus throwers. Add to this the fact that he had lately been elected to the board of the literary monthly, and it will be seen that Fallon had had a skyrocket rise. No wonder that Waters, the genial, now forgot that autumn affront and paid nightly visits upon his particular friend Fallon. And Fallon, of course, having had his attention diverted into so many foreign channels, no longer cared so singularly for his studies, but was willing to receive Waters and such as Waters with an ever-increasing cordiality.

The inevitable happened. Fallon, exhibiting his latest development--a full-sized, roistering swagger--came into my room one evening and told me jubilantly that he was pledged to join Waters' fraternity.

"It's not the best in college," he admitted loftily, "but it'll tone up a bit when I get the track captaincy and Waters gets elected to a managership."

"And how about that senior year valedictory?" I asked him.

"Oh, I was a fool in those days, wasn't I?"

He mistook my silence. "Say, old chap," he went on, "this is no time for you to be jealous of me. I know well enough, you ought to be in a fraternity--in the very best one. I wish I could get you into ours--but, say, you know how it is about Jews."

Yes, I knew, I a.s.sured him, and gave him the heartiest hand-clasp I could manage.

"You know, my mother's going to be awfully proud of this," he exclaimed huskily.

But though Waters did succeed in winning himself a team managership, Fallon never became the captain of the track team. For his election to that fraternity meant his ruin. He lost his grip upon everything.

Perhaps it was his fellow-members, perhaps he had only himself to blame.

He began to drink. At the end of junior year he was expelled from college.

And I wondered if the mother, who had wanted him to be the cla.s.s valedictorian, was as proud of him as ever.

XVI

THE HUN'S INVASION

So far in my college course I had met with actually little outspoken insult. Once or twice in my freshman year some loutish soph.o.m.ore had not stopped at making comments upon my religion. There had been that incident at Trevelyan's fraternity house, too. But, generally speaking, the prejudice had been of a negative sort, restricting rather than driving--though none the less offensive and chafing on that account.

There was nothing on which I could actually lay my finger to complain. I had no actual proof that I had been kept off any college organization because of my religion. I might have had, had I cared at the time to follow up the favoritism shown in the dramatic society--but that was a small affair, by now, and I preferred to let it rest forgotten.

Otherwise, I was treated with a fair amount of kindness by almost all of the college. The members of my own cla.s.s, in which I was gradually acquiring such positions as work and merit could win me, had begun to show me a good, clean respect; and those in the cla.s.s above soon followed their lead. All that I asked was fair play, and the chance to overcome that handicap which I knew existed. This was easier, now that I lived at college, and I gave to the various activities in which I was interested, all the spare time which I could afford from my studies. I was beginning to realize what that preachment meant: "The college will give you back all that you give to it in work."

Thus, at the end of my soph.o.m.ore year, when I again went to the settlement for the summer, I was planning big and enthusiastic things for the autumn term.

Mr. Richards placed me in charge of one of the settlement's fresh-air camps, up the state. I had two other boys to help me in my work, and one of them was Frank Cohen. It had taken me a long time to overcome Frank's sensitiveness, after his encounter with my aunt; but we were fast friends again now, and it was good to have him with me where I could help him with his daily noon-time studying for his "preliminaries." When the fall came, he pa.s.sed them easily--and it was now definitely decided that he would enter my college when I was a senior.

My own return to the university, however, gave me an unpleasant shock. I had arrived a few days late, because I had wanted to help Mr. Richards with some of his coming year's programs. The campus was already alive and crowded, therefore, and the dormitory windows were all thrown open and overflowing with the rugs and chair cushions of autumn cleaning. The campus teemed with a thousand youths who grasped each other cordially by the wrist and went through all sorts of contortions to prove that they "were glad to see you, old man!"

But there was a difference! The first glimpse I had of it, I called myself a self-conscious fool. I tried to rea.s.sure myself, everybody's greeting had been as cordial as I could expect. Everybody had said he was glad to see me--and--yet!

Then, the second day that I was at college, I had my first proof of the truth of my suspicions. I had it through eavesdropping--but I was justified. For I heard little Waters, the genial popularist, talking of it to another cla.s.smate in front of the laboratory steps.

"It's a rotten shame," he was declaiming. "Haven't you noticed? I don't see how it could escape you! Jews and Jews! The freshman cla.s.s is just swarming with 'em!"

"What? Really?"