“I say, Schley, you were Hotchkiss, weren’t you?”
“Eight mortal years.”
“Got a good crowd?”
“No wonder-workers, but a couple of good men for the line. What’s your Andover crowd like?”
“We had a daisy bunch, but some of the pearls have been sidetracked to Princeton and Harvard.”
“Bought up, eh?”
“Sure,” said the speaker, with the profoundest conviction.
“Big chance, McNab, for the eleven this year,” said Schley, in a thin, anemic, authoritative sort of way. “Play football yourself?”
“Sure—if anyone will kick me,” said McNab, who in fact had a sort of roly-poly resemblance to the necessary pigskin. “Lord, I’m no strength-breaker. I’m a funny man, sidesplitting joker, regular cut-up—didos and all that sort of thing. What are you out for?”
“A good time first, last, and always.”
“Am I? Just ask me!” said McNab explosively; and in a justly aggrieved tone he added: “Lord, haven’t I slaved like a mule ten years to get there! I don’t know how long it’ll last, but while it does it will be a lulu!”
“My old dad gave me a moral lecture.”
“Sure. Opportunity—character—beauty of the classics—hope to be proud of my son—you’re a man now—”
“That’s it.”
“Sure thing. Lord, we’ll be doing the same twenty-five years from now,” said McNab, who thus logically and to his own satisfaction disposed of this fallacy. He added generously, however, with a wave of his hand: “A father ought to talk that way—the right thing—wouldn’t care a flip of a mule’s tail for my dad if he didn’t. And say, by gravy, he sort of got me, too—damned impressive!”
“Really?”
“Honor bright.” A flicker of reminiscent convictions passed over McNab’s frolicking face. “Yes, and I made a lot of resolutions, too—good resolutions.”
“Come off!”
“Well, that was day before yesterday.”
The train started with a sudden crunching. A curious, excited thrill possessed Stover. He had embarked, and the quick plunge into the darkness of the long tunnel had, to his keenly sentimental imagination, something of the dark transition from one world into another. Behind was the known and the accomplished; ahead the coming of man’s estate and man’s freedom. He was his own master at last, free to go and to come, free to venture and to experience, free to know that strange, guarded mystery—life—and free, knowing it, to choose from among it many ways.
And yet, he felt no lack of preparation. Looking back, he could honestly say to himself that where a year ago he had seen darkly now all was clear. He had found himself. He had gambled. He had consumed surreptitiously at midnight a sufficient quantity of sickening beer. He had consorted with men of uncontrollable passions and gone his steady path. He had loved, hopelessly, madly, with all the intensity and honesty of which he was capable, a woman—a slightly older woman—who had played with the fragile wings of his boy’s illusion and left them wounded; he had fought down that weakness and learned to look on a soft cheek and challenging eye with the calm, amused control of a man, who invincibly henceforth would cast his life among men. There was not much knowledge of life, if any, that could come to him. He did not proclaim it, but quietly, as a great conviction, heritage of sorrow and smashing disillusionments, he knew it was so. He knew it all—he was a man; and this would give him an advantage among his younger fellows in the free struggle for leadership that was now opening to his joyful combative nature.
“It’ll be a good fight, and I’ll win,” he said to himself, and his crossed arms tightened with a quick, savage contraction, as if the idea were something that could be pursued, tackled, and thrown headlong to the ground.
“There’s a couple of fellows from Lawrenceville coming up,” said a voice from a seat behind him. “McCarthy and Stover, they say, are quite wonders.”
“I’ve heard of Stover; end, wasn’t he?”
“Yes; and the team’s going to need ends badly.”
It was the first time he had heard his name published abroad. He sat erect, drawing up one knee and locking his hands over it in a strained clasp. Suddenly the swimming vista of the smoky cars disappeared, rolling up into the tense, crowded, banked arena, with white splotches of human faces, climbing like daisy fields that moved restlessly, nervously stirred by the same expectant tensity with which he stood on the open field waiting for his chance to come.
“I like a fight—a good fight,” he said to himself, drawing in his breath; and the wish seemed but a simple one, the call for the joyful shock of bodies in fair combat. And life was nothing else—a battle in the open where courage and a thinking mind must win.
“I’ll bet we get a lot of fruits,” said Schley’s rather calculating voice.
“Oh, some of them aren’t half bad.”
“Think so?”
“I say, what do you know about this society game?”
“Look out.”
“What’s matter?”
“You chump, you never know who’s around you.” As he spoke, Schley sent an uneasy glance back toward Stover, and, dropping his voice, continued: “You don’t talk about such things.”
“Well, I’m not shouting it out,” said McNab, who looked at his more sophisticated companion with a little growing antagonism. “What are you scared about?”
“It’s the class ahead of you that counts,” said Schley hurriedly, “the sophomore and senior societies; the junior fraternities don’t count; if you’re in a sophomore you always go into them.”
“Never heard of the sophomore societies,” said McNab, in a maliciously higher tone. “Elucidate somewhat.”
“There are three: Hé Boulé, Eta Phi, and Kappa Psi,” said Schley, with another uneasy, squirming glance back at Stover. “They’re secret as the deuce; seventeen men in each—make one and you’re in line for a senior.”
“How the deuce did you get on to all this?”
“Oh, I’ve been coached up.”
Something in the nascent sophistication of Schley displeased Stover. He ceased to listen, occupying himself with an interested examination of the figures who passed from time to time in the aisle, in search of
