The Vision Splendid Part 5

"I suppose it does help, your being my cousin. But the thing depends on you. Unless you make a decided change you'll never get on."

"What change do you suggest? Item one, please?"

James looked straight at him. "You lack bedrock principles, Jeff."

"Do I?"

"Take your habits. Two or three times you've been seen coming out of saloons."

"Expect I went in to get a drink."

"It's not generally known, of course, but if it reached Prexy he'd fire you so quick your head would swim."

"I dare say."

The senior looked at him significantly. "You're the last man that ought to go to such places. There's such a thing as an inherited tendency."

The jaw muscles stood out like ropes under the flesh of Jeff's lean face. "We'll not discuss that."

"Very well. Cut it out. A drinking man is handicapped too heavily to win."

"Much obliged. Second count in the indictment, please."

"You've got strange, unsettling notions. The profs don't like them."

"Don't they?"

"You know what I mean. We didn't make this world. We've got to take it as it is. You can't make it over. There are always going to be rich people and poor ones. Just because you've fed indigestibly on Ibsen and Shaw you can't change facts."

"So you advise?"

"Soft pedal your ideas if you must have them."

"Hasn't a man got to see things as straight as he can?"

"That's no reason for calling in the neighbors to rejoice with him because he has astigmatism."

Jeff came back with a tag of Emerson, whose phrases James was fond of quoting in his speeches. "Whoso would be a man must be a non-conformist.

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind."

"You can push that too far. It isn't practical. We've got to make compromises, especially with established things."

Jeff sat up on the bed. Points of light were dancing in his big eyes.

"That's what the Pharisees said to Jesus when he wouldn't stand for lies because they were deep rooted and for injustice because it had become respectable."

"Oh, if you're going to compare yourself to Christ--"

"Verden University is supposed to stand for Christianity, isn't it?

It was because Jesus whanged away at social and industrial freedom, at fraternity, at love on earth, that he had to endure the Cross. He got under the upper cla.s.s skin when he attacked the traditional lies of vested interests. Now why doesn't Bland preach the things that Jesus taught?"

"He does."

"Yes, he does," Jeff scoffed. "He preaches good form, respectability, a narrow personal righteousness, a salvation canned and petrified three hundred years ago."

"Do you want him to preach socialism?"

"I want him to preach the square deal in our social life, intellectual honesty, and a vital spiritual life. Think of what this college might mean, how it might stand for democracy It ought to pour out into the state hundreds of specialists on the problems of the country. Instead, it is only a reflection of the caste system that is growing up in America."

James shrugged his broad shoulders. "I've been through all that. It's a phase we pa.s.s. You'll get over it. You've got to if you are going to succeed."

A quizzical grin wrinkled Jeff's lean face. "What is success?"

"It's setting a high goal and reaching it. It's taking the world by the throat and shaking from it whatever you want." James leaned across the table, his eyes shining. "It's the journey's end for the strong, that's what it is. I don't care whether a man is gathering gilt or fame, he's got to pound away with his eye right on it. And he's got to trample down the things that get in his way."

Jeff's eye fell upon a book on the table. "Ever hear of a chap called Goldsmith?"

"Of course. He wrote 'The School for Scandal.' What's he got to do with it?"

Jeff smiled, without correcting his cousin. "I've been reading about him. Seems to have been a poor hack writer 'who threw away his life in handfuls.' He wrote the finest poem, the best novel, the most charming comedy of his day. He knew how to give, but he didn't know how to take.

So he died alone in a garret. He was a failure."

"Probably his own fault."

"And on the day of his funeral the stairway was crowded with poor people he had helped. All of them were in tears."

"What good did that do him? He was inefficient. He might have saved his money and helped them then."

"Perhaps. I don't know. It might have been too late then. He chose to give his life as he was living it."

"Another reason for his poverty, wasn't there?"

Jeff flushed. "He drank."

"Thought so." James rose triumphantly and put on his overcoat. "Well, think over what I've said."

"I will. And tell the chancellor I'm much obliged to him for sending you."

For once the Senior was taken aback. "Eh, what--what?"

"You may tell him it won't be your fault that I'll never be a credit to Verden University."

As he walked across the campus to his fraternity house James did not feel that his call had been wholly successful. With him he carried a picture of his cousin's thin satiric face in which big expressive eyes mocked his arguments. But he let none of this sense of futility get into the report given next day to the Chancellor.

"Jeff's rather light-minded, I'm afraid, sir. He wanted to branch off to side lines. But I insisted on a serious talk. Before I left him he promised to think over what I had said."

"Let us hope he may."

"He said it wouldn't be my fault if he wasn't a credit to the University."