“It’s Allison!”
“No!”
“Yes.”
“What, they’ve left out Dudley?”
“Missed out.”
“Impossible!”
“Fact.”
“Hi, Jack, Dudley’s missed out!”
“Dudley, the football captain!”
“What the devil!”
“For the love of heaven!”
“Why, Dudley’s the best in the world!”
“Sure he is.”
“It’s a shame.”
“An outrage.”
“They’ve done it just to show they’re independent.”
Across the campus toward Vanderbilt, Allison and the last Bones man, in tandem, were streaking like water insects. Le Baron, holding on to Stover, was cursing in broken accents. But Dink heard him only indistinctly; he was looking at Dudley. The pallor had left his face, which was a little flushed; the head was thrown back proudly; and the lips were set in a smile that answered the torrent of sympathy and regret that was shouted to him. The last elections to Keys and Wolf’s-Head were forgotten in the stir of the incredible rejection.
Then someone shrieked out for a cheer, and the roar went over the campus again and again.
Dudley, always with the same smile and shining eyes, made his way slowly across toward Vanderbilt, hugged, patted on the back, his hand wrung frantically by those who swarmed about him. Stover was at his side, everything forgotten but the drama of the moment, cheering and shouting, seeing with a sort of wonder a little spectacled grind with blazing eyes shaking hands with Dudley, crying:
“It’s a crime—a darned crime! We all think so, all of us!”
For half an hour the college, moved as it had never been, stood huddled below Dudley’s rooms, cheering itself hoarse. Then slowly the crowd began to melt away.
“Come on, Dink,” said Hungerford, who had him by the arm.
“Oh, is that you, Joe?” said Dink, seeing him for the first time. “Isn’t it an outrage?”
“I don’t understand it.”
“By George, wasn’t he fine, though?”
“He certainly was!”
“I was right by him. He never flinched a second.”
“Dink, the whole thing is terrible,” said Hungerford, his sensitive face showing the pain of the emotions he had undergone. “I don’t think it’s right to put fellows through such a test as that.”
“You don’t believe in Tap Day?”
“I don’t know.”
Their paths crossed Regan’s and they halted, each wondering what that unusual character had thought of it all.
“Hello, Tom.”
“Hello, Joe; hello, Dink.”
“Tough about Dudley, isn’t it?”
“How so?”
“Why, missing out!”
“Perhaps it’s Bones’s loss,” said Regan grimly. “Dudley’s all right. He’s lucky. He’s ten times the man he was this morning.”
Neither Hungerford nor Stover answered.
“What do you think of it—Tap Day?” said Hungerford, after a moment.
“The best thing in the whole society system,” said Regan, with extra warmth.
“Well, I’ll be darned!” said Stover, in genuine surprise. “I thought you’d be for abolishing it.”
“Never! If you’re going through three years afraid to call your souls your own, why, you ought to stand out before everyone and take what’s coming to you. That’s my idea.”
He bobbed his head and went on toward Commons.
“I don’t know,” said Hungerford solemnly. “It’s a horror; I wish I hadn’t seen it.”
“I’m glad I did,” said Stover slowly. “They certainly baptize us in fire up here.” He remembered McCarthy with a new understanding and repeated: “We certainly learn how to take our medicine up here, Joe. It’s a good deal to learn.”
They wandered back toward the now quiet fence. All the crowding and the stirring was gone, and over all a strange silence, the silence of exhaustion. The year was over; what would come afterward was inconsequential.
“I wonder if it’s all worth it?” said Hungerford suddenly.
Stover did not answer; it was the question that was in his own thoughts. What he had seen that afternoon was still too vivid in his memory. He tried to shake it off, but, with the obsession of a fetish, it clung to him. He understood now, not that he would yield to the emotion, but the fear of judgment that swayed men he knew, and what Regan had meant when he had referred to those who did not dare to call their souls their own.
“It does get you,” he said, at last, to Hungerford.
“It does me,” said Hungerford frankly, “and I suppose it’ll get worse.”
“I wonder?”
He was silent, thinking of the year that had passed, wondering if the next would bring him the same discipline and the same fatigue, and if at the end of the three years’ grind, if such should be his lot, he could stand up like Dudley before the whole college and take his medicine with a smile.
XV
When Stover returned after the summer vacation to the full glory of a sophomore, he had changed in many ways. The consciousness of success had given him certain confidence and authority, which, if it was more of the manner than real, nevertheless was noticeable. He had aged five or six years, as one ages at that time under the grave responsibilities of an exalted leadership.
A great change likewise had come in his plans. During the summer Tough McCarthy’s father had died, and Tough had been forced to forego his college course and take up at once the seriousness of life. Several offers had been made Dink to go in with Hungerford, Tommy Bain, and others of his crowd, but he had decided to room by himself, for a time at least. The decision had come to him as the result of a growing feeling of restlessness, an instinctive desire to be by himself and know again that shy friend Dink Stover, who somehow seemed to have slipped away from him.
Much to his surprise, this feeling of restlessness dominated all other emotions on his victorious return to college. He felt strangely alone. Everyone in the class greeted him with rushing enthusiasm, inquired critically of his weight and condition, and passed on. His progress across the campus was halted at every moment by acclaiming groups, who ran to him, pumping his hand, slapping
