That figure was stranger to him than the stranger in his own entry. Together they sat looking into each other’s eyes, in shy recognition, while overhead on every quarter-hour the bell from Battell Chapel announced the march toward midnight. Several times, as he sat plunged in reverie, a knock sounded imperiously on the locked door; but he made no move. Once from the campus below he heard Dopey McNab’s gleeful voice mingling with the deep bass of Buck Waters:
“Oh, father and mother pay all the bills,
And we have all the fun.
That’s the way we do in college life.
Hooray!”
For a moment the song was choked, and then he heard it ring in triumphant crescendo as the two came up his steps, pounding out the rhythm with enthusiastic feet. Before his door they came to a stop, sang the chorus to a rattling accompaniment of their fists, and exclaimed:
“Oh, Dink Stover, open up!”
Receiving no response, they consulted:
“Why, the geezer isn’t in.”
“Let’s break down the door.”
“What right has he to be out?”
“Is there anyone else we can annoy around here?”
“Bob Story is in the next entry.”
“Lead me to him.”
“About face!”
“March!”
“Oh, father and mother pay all the bills,
And we have all the fun:
That’s the way we do—”
The sound died out. Upstairs a piano took up the refrain in a thin, syncopated echo. From time to time a door slammed in his entry, or from without the faint halloo:
“Oh, Jimmy, stick out your head.”
Dink, shifting, poked another log into place and returned longingly to his reverie. He could not get from his mind what Swazey had told him. His imagination reconstructed the story that had been given in such bare detail, thrilling at the struggle and the drama he perceived back of it. It was all undivined. When he had thought of his classmates, he had thought of them in a matter-of-fact way as lives paralleling his own.
“Wonder what Regan’s story is—the whole story?” he thought musingly. “And Pike and all the rest of—” He hesitated, and then added, “—of the fellows who don’t count.”
He had heard but one life, but that had disclosed the vista of a hundred paths that here in his own class, hidden away, should open on a hundred romances. He felt, with a sudden realization of the emptiness of his own life, a new zest, a desire to go out and seek what he had ignored before.
He left the fire suddenly, dug into his sweater, and flung a great ulster about him. He went out and across the chilly campus to the very steps where he had gone with Le Baron on his first night, drawing up close to the wall for warmth. And again he thought of the other self, the boyish, natural self, the Dink Stover who had first come here.
What had become of him? Of the two selves it was the boy who alone was real, who gave and received in friendship without hesitating or appraising. He recalled all the old schoolmates with their queer nicknames—the Tennessee Shad, Doc MacNooder, the Triumphant Egghead, and Turkey Reiter. There had been no division there in that spontaneous democracy, and the Dink Stover who had won his way to the top had never sought to isolate himself or curb any natural instinct for skylarking, or sought a reason for a friendship.
“Good Lord!” he said, almost aloud, “in one whole year what have I done? I haven’t made one single friend, known what one real man was doing or thinking, done anything I wanted to do, talked out what I wanted to talk, read what I wanted to read, or had time to make the friends I wanted to make. I’ve been nothing but material—varsity material—society material; I’ve lost all the imagination I had, and know less than when I came; and I’m the popular man—‘the big man’—in the class! Great! Is it my fault or the fault of things up here?”
Where had it all gone—that fine zest for life, that eagerness to know other lives and other conditions, that readiness for whole-souled comradeship with which he had come to Yale? Where was the pride he had felt in the democracy of the class, when he had swung amid the torches and the cheers past the magic battlements of the college, one in the class, with the feeling in the ranks of a consecrated army gathered from the plains and the mountains, the cities and villages of the nation, consecrated to one another, to four years of mutual understanding that would form an imperishable bond wherever on the face of the globe they should later scatter? And, thinking of all this young imagination that somehow had dried up and withered away, he asked himself again and again:
“Is it my fault?”
Across the campus Buck Waters and Dopey McNab, returning from their marauding expedition, came singing, arm in arm:
“Oh, father and mother pay all the bills,
And we have all the fun.
That’s the way we do in college life.
Hooray!”
The two pagans passed without seeing him, gloriously, boyishly happy and defiant, and the rollicking banter recalled in bleak contrast all the stern outlines of the lives of seriousness he had felt for the first time.
At first he revolted at the extremes. Then he considered. Even their life and their point of view was something unknown. It was true he was only a part of the machine of college, one of the wheels that had to revolve in its appointed groove. He had thought of himself always as one who led, and suddenly he perceived that it was he who followed.
A step sounded by him, and the winking eye of a pipe. Someone unaware of his tenancy approached the steps. Stover, in a flare-up of the tobacco, recognized him.
“Hello, Brockhurst,” he said.
“Hello,” said the other, hesitating shyly.
“It’s Stover,” said Dink. “What are you doing this time of night?”
“Oh, I prowl around,” said Brockhurst, shifting
