The Trail of the Hawk: A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life
time," and the odor of moth-balls got down into Carl's throat, while
in the golden Olympian atmosphere at the other end of the room Gertie
coyly pretended to slap the dentist's hand with a series of tittering
taps. "A long, _long_ time before either you or I were born, Carl, and
we can't very well set ourselves up to be wiser than the wisest men
that ever lived, now _can_ we?" Again the patronizing smile. "That
would scarcely----"
Carl resolved: "This 's got to stop. I got to do something." He felt
her monologue as a blank steel wall which he could not pierce. Aloud:
"Yes, that's so, I guess. Say, that's a fine dress Gertie 's got on
to-night, ain't it.... Say, I been learning to play crokinole at Ben
Rusk's. You got a board, haven't you? Would you like to play? Does the
doctor play?"
"Indeed, I haven't the slightest idea, but I have very little doubt
that he does--he plays tennis so beautifully. He is going to teach
Gertrude, in the spring." She stopped, and again held the scarf up to
the light. "I am so glad that my girly, that was so naughty once and
ran away with you--I don't think I shall _ever_ get over the awful
fright I had that night!--I am so glad that, now she is growing up,
clever people like Dr. Doyle appreciate her so much, so very much."
She dropped her crochet to her lap and stared squarely at Carl. Her
warning that he would do exceedingly well to go home was more than
plain. He stared back, agitated but not surrendering. Deliberately,
almost suavely, with ten years of experience added to the sixteen
years that he had brought into the room, he said:
"I'll see if they'd like to play." He sauntered to the other end of
the room, abashed before the mystic woman, and ventured: "I saw Ray,
to-day.... I got to be going, pretty quick, but I was wondering if you
two felt like playing some crokinole?"
Gertie said, slowly: "I'd like to, Carl, but----Unless you'd like to
play, doctor?"
"Why of course it's _comme il faut_ to play, Miss Cowles, but I was
just hoping to have the pleasure of hearing you make some more of your
delectable music," bowed the dentist, and Gertie bowed back; and their
smiles joined in a glittery bridge of social aplomb.
"Oh yes," from Carl, "that--yes, do----But you hadn't ought to play
too much if you haven't been well."
"Oh, Carl!" shrieked Gertie. "'Ought not to,' not 'hadn't ought to'!"
"'Ought not to,'" repeated Mrs. Cowles, icily, while the dentist waved
his hand in an amused manner and contributed:
"Ought not to say 'hadn't ought to,' as my preceptor used to tell
me.... I'd like to hear you sing Longfellow's 'Psalm of Life,' Miss
Cowles."
"Don't you think Longfellow's a bum poet?" growled Carl. "Bone
Stillman says Longfellow's the grind-organ of poetry. Like this: 'Life
is re-al, life is ear-nest, tum te diddle dydle dum!'"
"Carl," ordered Mrs. Cowles, "you will please to never mention that
Stillman person in my house!"
"Oh, Carl!" rebuked Gertie. She rose from the piano-stool. Her essence
of virginal femininity, its pure and cloistered and white-camisoled
odor, bespelled Carl to fainting timidity. And while he was thus
defenseless the dentist thrust:
"Why, they tell me Stillman doesn't even believe the Bible!"
Carl was not to retrieve his credit with Gertie, but he couldn't
betray Bone Stillman. Hastily: "Yes, maybe, that way----Oh, say,
doctor, Pete Jordan was telling me" (liar!) "that you were one of the
best tennis-players at the U."
Gertie sat down again.
The dentist coyly fluffed his hair and deprecated, "Oh no, I wouldn't
say that!"
Carl had won. Instantly they three became a country club of urban
aristocrats, who laughed at the poor rustics of Joralemon for knowing
nothing of golf and polo. Carl was winning their tolerance--though not
their close attention--by relating certain interesting facts from the
inside pages of the local paper as to how far the tennis-rackets sold
in one year would extend, if laid end to end, when he saw Gertie and
her mother glance at the hall. Gertie giggled. Mrs. Cowles frowned. He
followed their glance.
Clumping through the hall was his second cousin, Lena, the Cowleses'
"hired girl." Lena nodded and said, "Hallo, Carl!"
Gertie and the dentist raised their eyebrows at each other.
Carl talked for two minutes about something, he did not know what, and
took his leave. In the intensity of his effort to be resentfully
dignified he stumbled over the hall hat-rack. He heard Gertie yelp
with laughter.
"I _got_ to go to college--be worthy of her!" he groaned, all the way
home. "And I can't afford to go to the U. of M. I'd like to be free,
like Bone says, but I've got to go to Plato."
CHAPTER VI
Plato College, Minnesota, is as earnest and undistinguished, as
provincially dull and pathetically human, as a spinster missionary.
Its two hundred or two hundred and fifty students come from the
furrows, asking for spiritual bread, and are given a Greek root.
Red-brick buildings, designed by the architect of county jails, are
grouped about that high, bare, cupola-crowned gray-stone barracks, the
Academic Building, like red and faded blossoms about a tombstone. In
the air is the scent of crab-apples and meadowy prairies, for a time,
but soon settles down a winter bitter as the learning of the Rev. S.
Alcott Wood, D.D., the president. The town and college of Plato
disturb the expanse of prairie scarce more than a group of haystacks.
In winter the walks blur into the general whiteness, and the trees
shrink to chilly skeletons, and the college is like five blocks set on
a frozen bed-sheet--no shelter for the warm and timid soul, yet no
windy peak for the bold. The snow wipes out all the summer-time
individuality of place, and the halls are lonelier at dusk than the
prairie itself--far lonelier than the yellow-lighted jerry-built shops
in the town. The students never lose, for good or bad, their touch
with the fields. From droning class-rooms the victims of education see
the rippling wheat in summer; and in winter the impenetrable wall of
sky. Footsteps and quick laughter of men and girls, furtively flirting
along the brick walls under the beautiful maples, do make Plato dear
to remember. They do not make it brilliant. They do not explain the
advantages of leaving the farm for another farm.
To the freshman, Carl Ericson, descending from the dusty smoking-car
of the M. & D., in company with tumultuous youths in pin-head caps and
enormous sweaters, the town of Plato was metropolitan. As he walked
humbly up Main Street and beheld two four-story buildings and a marble
bank and an interurban trolley-car, he had, at last, an idea of what
Minneapolis and Chicago must be. Two men in sweaters adorned with a
large "P," athletes, generals, heroes, walked the streets in the
flesh, and he saw--it really was there, for him!--the "College Book
Store," whose windows were filled with leather-backed treatises on
Greek, logic, and trigonometry; and, finally, he was gaping through a
sandstone gateway at four buildings, each of them nearly as big as the
Joralemon High School, surrounding a vast stone castle.
He entered the campus. He passed an old man with white side-whiskers
and a cord on his gold-rimmed eye-glasses; an aged old man who might
easily be a professor. A blithe student with "Y. M. C. A. Receptn.
Com." large on his hat-band, rushed up to Carl, shook his hand busily,
and inquired:
"Freshman, old man? Got your room yet? There's a list of
rooming-houses over at the Y. M. Come on, I'll show you the way."
He was received in Academe, in Arcadia, in Elysium; in fact, in Plato
College.
He was directed to a large but decomposing house conducted by the
widow of a college janitor, and advised to take a room at $1.75 a week
for his share of the rent. That implied taking with the room a large,
solemn room-mate, fresh from teaching country school, a heavy,
slow-spoken, serious man of thirty-one, named Albert Smith, registered
as A. Smith, and usually known as "Plain Smith." Plain Smith sat
studying in his cotton socks, and never emptied the wash-basin. He
remarked, during the first hour of their discourse in the groves of
Academe: "I hope you ain't going to bother me by singing and
skylarking around. I'm here to work, bub." Smith then returned to the
large books which he was diligently scanning that he might find
wisdom, while Carl sniffed at the brown-blotched wall-paper, the faded
grass matting, the shallow, standing wardrobe.... He liked the house,
however. It had a real bath-room! He could, for the first time in his
life, splash in a tub. Perhaps it would not be regarded as modern
to-day; perhaps effete souls would disdain its honest tin tub, smeared
with a paint that peeled instantly; but it was elegance and the
Hesperides compared with the sponge and two lard-pails of hot water
from the Ericson kitchen reservoir, which had for years been his
conception of luxurious means of bathing.
Also, there were choicer spirits in the house. One man, who pressed
clothes for a living and carried a large line of cigarettes in his
room, was second vice-president of the sophomore class. As smoking was
dourly forbidden to all Platonians, the sophomore's room was a refuge.
The sophomore encouraged Carl in his natural talent for cheerful
noises, while Plain Smith objected even to singing while one dressed.
Like four of his classmates, Carl became a waiter at Mrs. Henkel's
student boarding-house, for his board and two dollars a week. The two
dollars constituted his pin-money--a really considerable sum for
Plato, where the young men were pure and smoked not, neither did they
drink; where evening clothes were snobbish and sweaters thought rather
well of; where the only theatrical attractions were week-stand
melodramas playing such attractions as "Poor but True," or the Rev.
Sam J. Pitkins's celebrated lecture on "The Father of Lies," annually
delivered at the I.O.O.F. Hall.
Carl's father assured him in every letter that he was extravagant. He
ran through the two dollars in practically no time at all. He was a
member in good and regular standing of the informal club that hung
about the Corner Drug Store, to drink coffee soda and discuss
athletics and stare at the passing girls. He loved to set off his
clear skin and shining pale hair with linen collars, though soft
roll-collar shirts were in vogue. And he was ready for any wild
expedition, though it should cost fifty or sixty cents. With the
sophomore second vice-president and John Terry of the freshman class
(usually known as "the Turk") he often tramped to the large
neighboring town of Jamaica Mills to play pool, smoke Turkish
cigarettes, and drink beer. They always chorused Plato songs, in
long-drawn close harmony. Once they had imported English ale, out of
bottles, and carried the bottles back to decorate and distinguish
their rooms.
Carl's work at the boarding-house introduced him to pretty girl
students, and cost him no social discredit whatever. The little
college had the virtue of genuine democracy so completely that it
never prided itself on being democratic. Mrs. Henkel, proprietor of
the boarding-house, occasionally grew sarcastic to her student waiters
as she stooped, red-faced and loosened of hair, over the range; she
did suggest that they "kindly wash up a few of the dishes now and then
before they went gallivantin' off." But songs arose from the freshmen
washing and wiping dishes; they chucklingly rehashed jokes; they
discussed the value of the "classical course" _versus_ the "scientific
course." While they waited on table they shared the laughter and
arguments that ran from student to student through Mrs. Henkel's
dining-room--a sunny room bedecked with a canary, a pussy-cat, a