A Princetonian/Chapter 7
CHAPTER VII.
A RETROSPECTION AND AN INTERRUPTION.
Hart was puzzling over a problem in geometry one evening when the door of his room was pushed open and, without knocking, Ned Bliss, one of his friends in the junior class, entered.
"I want to congratulate you, old man, on the great game you put up to-day. I say, you've got the 'Varsity sure if you keep on. Minton and Elliott were talking about it."
Hart shuffled his feet.
"Oh, I'm beginning to catch on, perhaps," he said, "but there is a lot to learn in everything; isn't there?"
"I suppose that's what we are here for," returned Bliss, "but upon my word, I can forget things quicker than any man I know. I hope all I've forgotten has done me some good.—You're going to the senior dance?"
"Hadn't thought of it," Hart answered. "What is it?"
"Oh; just a dance," said Bliss, taking a seat on a window-sill and drumming with his fingers on the glass. "You had better come. Lots of pretty girls. Care much for dancing?"
"Not much," replied Hart. "I can stumble through a quadrille, if some one calls off the figures."
Bliss smiled.
"I've got my sister's card here," he went on; "you know we fill them out in advance. Would like to put you down for something. We don't have a senior function every year."
He shoved a little card on Hart's desk. The latter blushed.
"I don't know that I would be much of a success," he said, looking at the array of waltzes and two-steps mostly filled with the names of upper-class men.
"There's a lancers," said Bliss, pointing out one of the few remaining blanks with his finger. "Put your sig down there."
"You will have to explain," said Hart, as he did so, "that I aint much of a dancer."
"Well, if you don't want to, you can sit it out," said Bliss. "Anyhow, I am glad to hear you are coming."
When the junior had left, Hart leaned back and rattled his pencil against his teeth and fell into what Terence Golatly might have called a "trance."
It was a fine night. The windows of the college rooms were open. The tinkle of a banjo and a snatch of a song occasionally wafted out on the air. Young men stopped before the buildings and hulloed up at the buildings. There was a constant chorus of this from all over the campus.
"Hull-l-l-o o, Charlie Jackson!" would come a shout; then "stick—your—head—out—of—the—window," in one long word.
This generally resulted in a conversation (in which any one was entitled to join) between the occupants of a second- or third-story room and some one on the ground.
Hart listened to it all with a sense of unreality. A year ago the idea that he could adapt himself to such a life as this would have seemed impossible. His thoughts travelled back to Oakland. He could smell the ham and combined odors of Van Clees & Jackson's store. He knew exactly how the square would look. It seemed very long ago and very far away. He felt that he had bidden farewell to it for good and all, and he began in his mind to go yet even farther back to the time he had lived with his father in the little claim shanty on the North Fork of the Platte. He recalled the first book he had read, Wood's Natural History, filled with cuts of wonderful birds and beasts. He remembered how he used to spell out the chapters while he attended to the sheep. He could hear now in his imagination the plaintive first bleats of the new-born lambs. And then the day of the freshet, which carried off almost all of the litttle herd and drowned out the corrals, came to him. Then the death of his father all alone in the sod-house, and the weary ride down to the town for help. The grave with the slab of shale for a head-stone, where they had laid the only relative he knew of in the world, to rest. The kindness that had been shown to him by a German family on the next half section was the next remembrance. Then came his apprenticeship to Mr. Van Clees; his attending public school; his growing to be a man, and the awakening of ambitions and desires for other things. Oh! It all seemed very long ago and very far apart, and toward what was he tending now? Life struck him as a very peculiar game in which little things turned the course of existence into unsuspected channels—a very non-original thought, but he dwelt on it.
"Hullo, Pop Hart!" rang out beneath his window.
The interruption had come just as his thoughts had reached the time when Mabel had first come to occupy his mind. He thrust back the letter that he had half taken from his pocket, addressed to him in Miss Van Clees's round, shaded hand, and walked to the window.
"Hullo!" he answered, squeezing through the window.
"Come out on the campus," was the rejoinder. "Save the midnight oil, cool your fevered brow, and breathe of liberty."
It was Terence Golatly, Congeve, and Jimmy James. The light of Mr. Golatly's cigarette gleamed like a firefly below as he waved it in time to his oration.
Hart turned down the light and put on his shabby wide-awake and joined Terence and the others below on the grass plot. They strolled over in the direction of Old North. Several young men whom he did not recognize in the half-light called Hart by name as they passed him; he limped slightly, he had received a wrench in the practice game of the morning.
"How is your ankle, old man?" inquired some one as they passed a group lying at the foot of one of the great elm trees.
"All right, thanks," he answered. But a thrill of pleasure went through his veins, for the inquirer was Minton, the half-back. He remembered feeling the same sensation when Sheriff Holly had congratulated him on the way Bord McGovern had been brought into town.