“I’ve started you. Now stand on your own feet. Don’t look to me for help.”
For the rest of the practise he sat huddled in his sweater, waiting expectantly as each time Captain Dana passed down the line, calling out the candidates for trials in the brief scrimmages that took place. The afternoon ended without an opportunity coming to him, and he jogged home, in the midst of the puffing crowd, with a sudden feeling of his own unimportance.
He had barely time to get his shower, and run into the almost deserted eating club for a quick supper, when Gimbel appeared, crying:
“I say, Stover, bolt the grub and hoof it. We assemble over by Osborne.”
“Where’s the wrestling?”
“Don’t know. Some vacant lot. Ever do any?”
“Don’t know a thing about it.”
“We’re going to call out a chap called Robinson from St. Paul’s, Garden City, for the lightweight, and Regan for the heavy,” said Gimbel, who, of course, had been busy during the afternoon. “Thought of you for the middleweight.”
“Lord! get someone who knows the game,” said Stover, following him out.
“Have you thought of anyone you’d like to run for secretary and treasurer?” said Gimbel, locking arms in a cordial way.
“No.”
“I’ve got the whole thing organized sure as a steel trap.”
“You haven’t lost any time,” said Stover, smiling.
“That’s right—heaps of fun.”
“What are you going to run for?” said Stover, looking at him.
“I? Nothing now. Fence orator, perhaps, later,” said Gimbel frankly. “It’s the fun of the game interests me—the organizing, pulling wires, all that sort of thing. I’m going to have a lot of fun here.”
“Look here, Gimbel,” said Stover, yielding to a sudden appreciation of the other’s openness. “Isn’t this sort of thing going to get a lot of fellows down on you?”
“Queer me?” said Gimbel, laughing.
The word was still new to Stover, who showed his perplexity.
“That’s a great word,” added his companion. “You’ll hear a lot of it before you get through. It’s a sort of college bug that multiplies rapidly. Will politics ‘queer’ me—keep me out of societies? Probably; but then, I couldn’t make ’em anyway. So I’m going to have my fun. And I’ll tell you now, Stover, I’m going to get a good deal more out of my college career than a lot of you fellows.”
“Why include me?”
“Well, Stover, you’re going to make a sophomore society, and go sailing along.”
“Oh, I don’t know.”
“Yes, you do. We don’t object to such men as you, who have the right. It’s the lame ducks we object to.”
“Lame ducks?” said Stover, puzzled as well as surprised at this spokesman of an unsuspected proletariat opposition.
“ ‘Lame ducks’ is the word: the fellows who would never make a society if it weren’t for pulls, for the men ahead—the cripples that all you big men will be trying to bolster up and carry along with you into a senior society.”
“I’m not on to a good deal of this,” said Stover, puzzled.
“I know you’re not. Look here.” Gimbel, releasing his arm, faced him suddenly. “You think I’m a politician out to get something for myself.”
“Yes, I do.”
“Well, I am—I’m frank about it. There’s a whole mass of us here who are going to fight the sophomore society system tooth and nail, and I’m with them. When you’re in the soph crowd you mightn’t like what I’m saying, and then again you may come around to our way of thinking. However, I want you to know that I’m hiding nothing—that I’m fighting in the open. We may be on opposite sides, but I guess we can shake hands. How about it?”
“I guess we can always do that,” said Stover, giving his hand. The man puzzled him. Was his frankness deep or a diplomatic assumption?
“And now let’s have no pretenses,” continued Gimbel, on the same line, with a quick analytical glance. “You’re going with your crowd; better join one of their eating-joints.”
Stover was genuinely surprised.
“Have you already arranged it?” said Gimbel, laughing.
“Gimbel,” said Stover directly, “I’m not quite sure about you.”
“You don’t know whether I’m a faker or not.”
“Exactly.”
“Stover, I’m a politician,” said Gimbel frankly. “I’m out for a big fight. I know the game here. I wouldn’t talk to everyone as I talk to you. I want you to understand me—more, I want you to like me. And I feel with you that the only way is to be absolutely honest. You see, I’m a politician,” he said, with a laugh. “I’ve learned how to meet different men. Sometime I’m going to talk over things with you—seriously. Here we are now. I’ve got a bunch of fellows to see. McCarthy’s probably looking for you. Don’t make up your mind in a hurry about me—or about a good many things here. Ta-ta!”
Stover watched him go gaily into the crowd, distributing bluff, vociferous welcomes, hilariously acclaimed. The man was new, represented a new element, a strange, dimly perceived, rebellious mass, with ideas that intruded themselves ungratefully on his waking vision.
“Is he sincere?” he said to himself—a question that he was to apply a hundred times in the life that was beginning.
V
“Hello, there, Stover!”
“Stover, over here!”
“Oh, Dink Stover, this way!”
Over the bared heads of the bobbing, shifting crowd he saw Hunter and McCarthy waving to him. He made his way through the strange assorted mass of freshmen to his friends, where already, instinctively, a certain picked element had coalesced. A dozen fellows, clean-cut, steady of head and eye, carrying a certain unmistakable, quiet assurance, came about him, gripping him warmly, welcoming him into the little knot with cordial acknowledgment. He felt the tribute, and he liked it. They were of his own kind, his friends to be, now and in the long reaches of life.
“Fall in, fall in!”
Ahead of them, the upper classes were already in rank. Behind, the freshmen, unorganized, distrustful,
