“Are we to die like rats?” he said. “Are we to smother in a hole?”
“Damn!” said Elk Duncan, folding the big calfskin and cowering defensively behind it.
“Yes, that’s right, that’s right! Calm yourself. You are Napoleon Bonaparte and I’m your old friend, Oliver Cromwell. Harold!” he called. “Help! He killed the keeper and got out.”
“ ’Gene!” yelled Harold Gay, hurling a thick volume from him under the spell of Elk’s great names. “What do you know about history? Who signed Magna Charta, eh?”
“It wasn’t signed,” said Eugene. “The King didn’t know how to write, so they mimeographed it.”
“Correct!” roared Harold Gay. “Who was thelred the Unready?”
“He was the son of Cynewulf the Silly and Undine the Unwashed,” said Eugene.
“On his Uncle Jasper’s side,” said Elk Duncan, “he was related to Paul the Poxy and Genevieve the Ungenerous.”
“He was excommunicated by the Pope in a Bull of the year 903, but he refused to be cowed,” said Eugene.
“Instead, he called together all the local clergy, including the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Gay, who was elected Pope,” said Elk Duncan. “This caused a great schism in the Church.”
“But as usual, God was on the side of the greatest number of canons,” said Eugene. “Later on, the family migrated to California, and made its fortune in the Gold Rush of ’49.”
“You boys are too good for me!” yelled Harold Gay, getting up abruptly. “Come on! Who’s going to the Pic?”
The Pic was the only purchasable entertainment that the village afforded steadily. It was a moving-picture theatre, inhabited nightly by a howling tribe of students who rushed down aisles, paved with peanut-shells, through a shrapnel fire of flying goobers, devoting themselves studiously for the remainder of the evening to the unhappy heads and necks of Freshmen, and less attentively, but with roars of applause, indignation, or advice, to the poor flicker-dance of puppets that wavered its way illegibly across the worn and pleated screen. A weary but industrious young woman with a scrawny neck thumped almost constantly at a battered piano. If she was idle for five minutes, the whole pack howled ironically, demanding: “Music, Myrtle! Music!”
It was necessary to speak to everyone. If one spoke to everyone, one was “democratic”; if one did not, one was a snob, and got few votes. The appraisal of personality, like all other appraisal with them, was coarse and blunt. They were suspicious of all eminence. They had a hard peasant hostility to the unusual. A man was brilliant? Was there a bright sparkle to him? Bad, bad! He was not safe; he was not sound. The place was a democratic microcosmos—seething with political interests: national, regional, collegiate.
The campus had its candidates, its managers, its bosses, its machines, as had the State. A youngster developed in college the political craft he was later to exert in Party affairs. The son of a politician was schooled by his crafty sire before the down was off his cheeks: at sixteen, his life had been plotted ahead to the governorship, or to the proud dignities of a Congressman. The boy came deliberately to the university to bait and set his first traps: deliberately he made those friendships that were most likely to benefit him later. By his junior year, if he was successful, he had a political manager, who engineered his campus ambitions; he moved with circumspection, and spoke with a trace of pomp nicely weighed with cordiality:
“Ah, there, gentlemen.” “Gentlemen, how are you?” “A nice day, gentlemen.”
The vast champaign of the world stretched out its limitless wonder, but few were seduced away from the fortress of the State, few ever heard the distant reverberation of an idea. They could get no greater glory for themselves than a seat in the Senate, and the way to glory—the way to all power, highness, and distinction whatsoever—was through the law, a string tie, and a hat. Hence politics, law schools, debating societies, and speechmaking. The applause of listening senates to command.
The yokels, of course, were in the saddle—they composed nine-tenths of the student body: the proud titles were in their gift, and they took good care that their world should be kept safe for yokelry and the homespun virtues. Usually, these dignities—the presidencies of student bodies, classes, Y.M.C.A.’s, and the managerships of athletic teams—were given to some honest serf who had established his greatness behind a plough before working in the college commons, or to some industrious hack who had shown a satisfactory mediocrity in all directions. Such an industrious hack was called an “all-round man.” He was safe, sound, and reliable. He would never get notions. He was the fine flower of university training. He was a football scrub, and a respectable scholar in all subjects. He was a universal Two Man. He always got Two on everything, except Moral Character, where he shone with a superlative Oneness. If he did not go into the law or the ministry, he was appointed a Rhodes Scholar.
In this strange place Eugene flourished amazingly. He was outside the pale of popular jealousies: it was quite obvious that he was not safe, that he was not sound, that decidedly he was an irregular person. He could never be an all-round man. Obviously, he would never be governor. Obviously, he would never be a politician, because he said funny things. He was not the man to lead a class or say a prayer; he was a man for curious enterprise. Well, thought they benevolently, we need some such. We are not all made for weighty business.
He was happier that he had ever been in his life, and more careless. His physical loneliness was more complete and more delightful. His escape from the bleak horror of disease and hysteria and death impending, that hung above his crouched family, left him with a sense of aerial buoyance,
