“It’s a little foolish, but what’s the harm?”
“The harm is that this mumbo-jumbo, fee-fi-fo-fum, high cockalorum business is taken seriously. It’s the effect on the young imagination that comes here that is harmful. Dink, I tell you, and I mean it solemnly, that when a boy comes here to Yale, or any other American college, and gets the flummery in his system, believes in it—surrenders to it—so that he trembles in the shadow of a tomblike building, doesn’t dare to look at a pin that stares him in the face, is afraid to pronounce the holy, sacred names; when he’s got to that point he has ceased to think, and no amount of college life is going to revive him. That’s the worst thing about it all, this mental subjection which the average man undergoes here when he comes up against all this rigmarole of Tap Day, gloomy society halls, marching home at night, et cetera—et ceteray. By George, it is a return of the old idol-worship idea—thinking men in this twentieth century being impressed by the same methods that kept nations in servitude to charlatans three thousand years before. It’s wrong, fundamentally wrong—it’s a crime against the whole moving spirit of university history—the history of a struggle for the liberation of the human mind.”
“But, Brocky, what would you have them do—run as open clubs?”
“Not at all,” said Brockhurst. “I would strip them of all nonsense; in fact that is their weakness, not their strength, and it is all unnecessary. This is what I’d do: drop the secrecy—this extraordinary muffled breathless guarding of an empty can—retain the privilege any club has of excluding outsiders, stop this childishness of getting up and leaving the room if some old lady happens to ask are you a Bones man or a Keys man. Instead, when a Bones man goes to see a freshman whom he wants to befriend, have him say openly as he passes the chapter house:
“ ‘That’s my society—Skull and Bones. It stands as a reward of merit here. Hope you’ll do something to deserve it.’
“Which is the better of the two ideas, the saner, the manlier and the more natural? What would they lose by eliminating the objectionable, unnecessary features—all of which you may be sure were started as horse play, and have curiously enough come to be taken in deadly earnestness?”
“I think you exaggerate a little,” said Stover, unwilling to accept this arraignment.
“No, I don’t,” said Brockhurst stubbornly. “The thing is a fetish; it gets you; it’s meant to get you. It gets me, and if you’re honest you’ll admit it gets you. Now own up.”
“Yes, I suppose it does.”
“Now, Dink, you’re fighting for one thing up here, the freedom of your mind and your will.”
“Why, yes,” Stover said, surprised at Brockhurst’s knowledge of his inner conflicts. “Yes, that’s exactly what I’m fighting out.”
“Well, my boy, you’ll never get what you’re after until you see this thing as it is—the unreasoning harm done, the poppycock that has been thrown around a good central idea—if you admit such things are necessary, which of course I don’t.”
“You see,” said Stover stubbornly, “you’re against all organization.”
“I certainly am—inherited organizations,” said Brockhurst immediately, “organizations that are imposed on you. The only organization necessary is the natural, spontaneous coming together of congenial elements.”
They had returned to the campus, and Brockhurst, by intent leading the way, stopped before the lugubrious bulk of Skull and Bones.
“There you are,” he said, with a laugh. “Look at it. It’s built of the same stone as other buildings, it has in it what secret? Go up, young Egyptian, to its mystery in awe and reverence, young idol worshiper of thirty centuries ago.”
“Damn it, Brocky, it does get me,” said Stover with a short laugh.
“Curious,” said Brockhurst, turning away. “The architecture of these sacred tombs is almost invariably the suggestion of the dungeon—the prison of the human mind.”
Stover’s conversation with Brockhurst did not at first trouble him much. Curiously enough the one idea he retained was that Brockhurst had spoken of him as a possibility for Tap Day.
“What nonsense,” he said to himself angrily. “Here, I know better!”
But the next afternoon, the thought returning to him with pleasure, all at once, following a boyish whim, he passed into his old entry at Lawrence, and, going down a little guiltily into the region of the bathtubs, came to the wall on which was inscribed the lists of his class.
On the Bones list, third from the top, the name Stover had been replaced and heavily underlined.
It gave him quite a thrill; something seemed to leap up inside of him, and he went out hastily. Then all at once he became angry. It was like opening up again a fight that had been fought and lost.
“What an ass I am,” he said furiously. “The deuce of a chance I have to go Bones—with Reynolds and Le Baron. Can the leopard change his spots? About as much chance as a ki-yi has to go through a sausage machine and come out with a bark.”
But, as he went towards Jean Story’s home, thinking of her and what she would want, the force of what Brockhurst had said began to weaken.
“Brocky is impractical,” he said artfully. “We must deal with things as they are, make the best of them. He exaggerates the effect on the imagination. At any rate, no one can accuse me of not taking a stand.”
He saw the old colonial home, white and distinguished under the elms, and he said to himself, hoping against hope:
“If I were tapped—it would mean a good deal to her. I’ll be darned if I’ll let Brocky work me up. I’m not going up against anything more! I’ve done enough here.”
He said it defiantly, for the courage of a man has
