The Freshman (Holman)/Chapter 5

by Russell Holman

Chapter V

Henry Lamb expressed the opinion privately to his wife and son that Peter Thatcher had experienced an attack of softening of the brain.

Henry professed to have seen the steel magnate's malady coming for a long time. Peter's trip to Florida, Peter's journey to Europe, Peter's attempt to take up golf, all these, according to Henry, were symptoms. It had taken Harold's visit to Cleveland and the boy's mention of college to bring the symptoms to a head. Peter Thatcher was a gone goose, declared Henry. How else could one explain this crazy ofifer of the shrewd-minded, toilbred Peter to squander money assisting a boy not even his own son to waste four years of his own life?

At first Henry Lamb declared with considerable vehemence that he would not permit Harold to enter this scheme. He forbade his son to sell washing machines. It was undignified. It would not get him anywhere. Henry declared his intention of speaking to Walter Coburn in the morning about taking Harold permanently into the bank. Harold could forget the plan of entering the Thatcher Steel Works at all.

But against this arbitrary decision, Henry met sharp and concerted rebellion on the part of his son and—his wife. He had expected it from Harold and was prepared to handle it. But the angry and determined light that now flashed into the eyes of the usually meek Carrie Thatcher Lamb abashed him.

Mrs. Lamb unexpectedly flung down her knitting upon the table. She rose to her feet and faced her husband. Her quiet voice was unnaturally raised.

"You'll do nothing of the kind, Henry Lamb!" she cried. "If Peter wants to help Harold, that's Peter's business! Thank God he has the money and the generosity to do it. It isn't that he's going to make the boy a gift he won't earn. Harold will be working for it, every penny of it! If he's got the grit and gumption to warrant Peter's help, he's entitled to it.

"You let Harold alone. Let him get out and sell washing machines again. He did it before and he can do it again. See whether or not he can make enough money to go to college. If he can, it's our duty to let him go. It's a wonderful thing for a boy, and Harold deserves his chance. And, what's more, I, for my part, am going to help him get it."

She turned to Harold, something of her son's own burning ambition to go to college shining in her eyes, which were so nearly like his. "I know a number of members of the Ladies' Aid that are thinking of buying washing machines, Harold. Mrs. Todd, for one. And there are the farmers' wives out in the country districts that you've never tried to sell to before. You can take the Ford and call on them too."

So, bright and early the next morning Harold Lamb became again the Sanford agent for the Acme Washing Machine. He did not wait for a sample machine to arrive. He used his mother's as a demonstrator. He piled it into the tonneau of the Lamb family car and set out upon his rounds.

He spent an intensely busy, happy month. He was hard at work each day when it was hardly light. He came home, tired but unquenchable, each night, often long after dark. He called at every door in Sanford. He scoured the country districts, talking with toilbent rural housewives and then carrying the argument out to their husbands in the fields. He demonstrated his sample machine until it was nearly worn out. He took it apart countless times and put it together again for the benefit of doubting and mechanically minded customers.

He littered the county with the booklets obtained in a hurry from the Acme company's Cleveland branch.

And he sold washing machines—more of them than he had dared dream possible!

His heart was in the job. He was a good salesman, frank, eager, honest, convincing. He told his prospects that the money he earned was to send him to college, and they sympathized for the most part with his ambition. His commissions mounted rapidly. By the first of September he was able to write to Uncle Peter that he had written up business enough to net him $150. And this would be sufficient, augmented by the steel man's promised aid, to send Harold to Tate!

Peter Thatcher wrote back cautiously congratulating his nephew and suggesting that the youth mail to Tate an application to enter the Freshman class, along with his High School graduation certificate.

Harold sent the letter off that night.

The next morning Harold set out again upon his washing machine rounds, a new incentive spurring him on to even more strenuous efforts. Ten days later came the official-looking envelope bearing the name of the Registrar of Tate University. Harold opened it with hands that were all thumbs. But he need not have been so nervous. The letter enclosed stated that Harold Thatcher Lamb, as far as the Registrar's office could determine, was eligible to become a member of the Class of 1929 at Tate University. The college year, the letter went on, opened the twenty-first of September. A little red-backed book of suggestions for Freshmen was attached. This was known on the campus as the "Freshman Bible."

One belated Summer afternoon in mid-September Harold took his initial step into his new and eagerly awaited world. His father and mother escorted him and his new trunk and his hand bags to the railroad station at Sanford. Henry Lamb was now quite resigned to Tate. He had even bragged a little at the last Masonic meeting of his son's pending departure for college. In fact, Henry was quite the most cheerful of the three Lambs as they alighted from Dugan's bus at the station and went in search of "Sandy" Forbes, the station agent, to see about having the trunk checked. When old "Sandy" had rheumatically strapped the tag to the trunk handle and given the duplicate to Harold, the spirits of the Lambs sagged in unison. They sat down silently in the forlorn waiting room. Mrs. Lamb strove to keep her courage up by murmuring trivial admonitions to her son about continuing to drink his cup of hot water each morning before breakfast and the like. Fifteen minutes passed. Then there was a whistle down the tracks. The Lambs arose and sought the platform of the station. The Cleveland train steamed clangily in and wheezed to a stop. Harold's shiny new trunk was slid off the station truck into the yawning door of the baggage car by leathery hands as casually as if it made the trip every day.

"Good-by, dad," Harold gulped. Henry Lamb's lips quivered as he took his son's hand. "Good-by, mother," Harold trembled and he took her frail body into his long arms and kissed her many times. When he released her, they were both weeping frankly.

"You'll be a good boy, Harold," she quavered. "And you'll write me—as often as you can?"

"Every day," he promised, his shiny eyes trying to smile. "Don't worry, I'll be fine."

"All aboard," cried the impassive conductor.

Harold swung, waving his hand to the two small figures on the platform, up the car steps. He stood there waving, and waved to, until the train drew him out of sight. Then he gulped again, very deeply. He walked slowly into the car of the swaying train. Already he felt strangely alone and far from cheerful. He was leaving the only world he knew behind, the only two people in the world, aside from possibly Peter Thatcher, whom he loved. His father was a fine man. His mother was the world's best. What was he doing, abandoning them this way, making his mother cry? For an instant he wanted to jump off the train, to run back to them and cry, "I'm not going to college. I want to stay here with you."

But in the next moment he was asking himself if such weakness was worthy of a son of Old Tate. Imagine Chester Trask weeping as he set out for college! Harold's shoulders braced inside his sweater. As the train rolled out of Sanford, he stooped for an instant to gaze out of the window for a last glimpse of the little white Lamb house standing between Main Street and the tracks. Then he walked erectly into the smoking car and sat down.

On his way to college at last! Realizing the ambition and dream of a lifetime. He looked around at the laborers, traveling salesmen and other sojourners in the smoker with him and half expected them to crowd around him and congratulate him. Poor drab clods, little did they know the Paradise that awaited him at the end of his journey.

Uncle Peter had written that he would be unable to meet the sub-Freshman in Cleveland. He had, however, sent the promised check. Although Harold had never before contemplated a railroad trip in a sleeping car, he had no qualms. When the local train arrived in the Ohio metropolis, Harold lugged his new suitcase down to the street level of the station. He stood on the hot sidewalk, his hand luggage at his feet. It consisted of a worn and bulging suitcase, rescued from the Lamb garret, a new hand bag, golf bag, tennis racket and ukulele. He looked out into the cobble-stoned street at the steady procession of trolley cars clanging past him. He wished Uncle Peter could have been there to direct him. But Uncle Peter was out of town. Eventually he located a trolley car bearing the name of the station where he was supposed to board the express train for Tate. He hailed the car and struggled onto it with his luggage, earning the wrath of conductors and passengers as he bumped into them with his unwieldy burden.

Finally he reached his destination and bore his bags into the high-domed waiting room of the second station. He dropped down into a seat, draping his baggage around him. He mopped his brow. He had a whole hour to wait for his train. But he stayed there, taking no chances. He watched the milling crowds and fingered his Pullman tickets nervously.

And then, at last, the gates were flung open. The long, shiny train had slid into the station. Harold declined the porters' offers to tote his bags. He would have to economize, the sub-Freshman knew, and he might as well begin at once.

Harold confusedly sought Car V-6, and was awed by his first authentic glimpse of the inside of a Pullman car. There was a little preliminary bumping about as the train changed engines. Then smoothly it glided out of the train shed and within an hour Harold was further away from home than he had ever been in his life before.

For another hour or more he kept his face nearly glued to the window pane, gazing as intently upon the flat, uninteresting Ohio scenery as if it were the Grand Canyon. Then he turned to a contemplation of "College Comedy," a magazine which he had purchased at the Cleveland station. This consisted mostly of jokes reprinted from humorous student publications at the various universities. Many of the jokes and illustrations, Harold had to admit, were rather broad and approaching the risqué. He even noticed two or three of this character bearing the tag-line of the "Tate Totem Pole," the funny paper of his own alma mater. He remembered that Professor Gaines had mentioned this Tate publication, but had added that it was "frivolous and frequently censorable—nothing in it for you, Lamb."

Harold read two of the fiction stories in "College Comedy," written by college-educated professional humorists, and found them disconcertingly full of flappers, cocktails, "necking" and rather ribald dancing parties. He decided that "College Comedy" grossly misrepresented both college and comedy and tossed it on the floor. Goodness knows, he wasn't going to college for the things this magazine, with its Parisian lady on the cover, portrayed as being the chief ingredients of a college education. Such frivolities surely had no part in the life of a big, popular figure such as, for instance, Chester Trask.

Harold's meditations were interrupted by the entrance into the car of a white-coated colored gentleman who swayed down the aisle intoning monotonously, "First call for dinner. First call for dinner." Harold had never eaten in a railway dining car. He had an intuition that it would be a betrayal of his inexperience if he arose at once and followed this dark Mercury of the food gods, though he was hungry. He therefore kept his seat while several others in the car ambled out. If there was a "first call," he argued, there would be a second. His reasoning was sound. There was a second. Still Harold stubbornly retained his perch near the window. Then came the ominous announcement from the itinerant announcer, "Lawst call for dinner." Harold and the one remaining person in the Pullman got up with alacrity and made their way forward through the rolling train.

When he had attained the narrow passageway leading into the dining car past the efficiently compact kitchen, Harold discovered that the other last-minute diner had already secured a seat. The tables were apparently filled to capacity. Perspiring waiters were lurching in and out with trays raised perilously aloft. A multitude of mouths and arms were busy above the white napery of the tables with food and drink. The harassed head waiter spotted Harold and hurried toward him. He raised one finger. Harold finally gleaned that the gesture meant, "Have you only one in your party?" He nodded.

The head waiter looked around the car helplessly. At length he spied one vacant seat at a table set for four. On one side of the table sat an elderly, sour-faced couple. The remaining occupant was a girl—a strikingly pretty girl with dancing brown eyes and the softest, curliest brown hair you ever saw. She was about eighteen years old, slightly but lithely built and with the most adorable slightly retroussé nose in the world.

She was the kind of a girl your mother must have been.

As the head waiter approached her, a freckled-faced little train boy passing through the car suddenly paused beside her chair and hailed her cheerfully, "Hello, Peggy. Haven't seen you in a long time. Are you still helping your mother with the boarding house?"

The girl had a newspaper and her dessert spread on the table in front of her. She was manipulating a pencil with one hand and working a crossword puzzle; with the other hand she was conveying eatables daintily to her smooth, red lips.

She glanced up in friendly fashion at the train boy and, recognizing him as a youngster from her home town, answered, "Hello, Johnny Niles. Yes, I'm helping mother. And I have a new job at the Hotel Tate—in the check room."

When the train boy had passed on, the head waiter took heart. For the elderly couple seated opposite the girl arose and made their way out of the car. And the girl seemed so agreeable. The head waiter held up his hand and motioned Harold to come in and become the pretty girl's tablemate.

Harold slid timidly into the seat beside her without venturing to look at her further than to assure himself that she was a girl. He was girl-shy. As she continued to devote herself exclusively to her crossword puzzle and her dessert, he turned his head and glanced at her again. And this time his glance lingered. For, though he could see only her soft, curving neck, where the brown ringlets nestled, and her pretty profile, yet he could somehow sense that she was somebody wholly different from any kind of a girl he had ever met before. She made him feel warm inside. She seemed so nice, cozy and friendly.

Soon he was looking over her shoulder at the crossword puzzle she was so intent upon. Unconsciously his head drew nearer to her. She seemed to be groping for a solution of "19 vertical—a word for one you love." Harold's brow became knitted with thought in his effort to help her. Suddenly she turned her head toward him, grasped what he was doing and smiled pleasantly.

Harold, more at ease, volunteered, "I thinly I know the word for 19 vertical—"a name for one you love. It's 'sweetheart.'"

She shook her head.

"Darling!" he suggested.

That didn't seem to fit either.

"Dearest!" he cried triumphantly.

"Precious!" she countered.

"Honeybunch!"

"Sweetie!"

Then he felt a hand fall upon his shoulder and turned around. A sweet, motherly-looking, elderly lady from the next table had laid a hand upon him and another upon the amazed girl beside him and was saying in a blissful voice, "Isn't it wonderful to be in love?"

For an instant Peggy looked confused. It was enough for Harold, watching her. He realized how his words must have sounded and a panic seized him. Always bashful around girls, always timid with strangers, he blushed furiously.

He jumped to his feet and, with an exclamation and look of terror, rushed out into the aisle of the diner. Without a look ahead or behind he fled. Fled straight into the fat stomach of a husky waiter balancing a tray of eatables aloft, sending the waiter sprawling against an adjacent table and scattering the food all over the surrounding region of the car. The head waiter started into the car from the kitchen entrance and narrowly missed being rent asunder by the flying Harold. A pair of late diners waiting out in the narrow aisle by the kitchen were bumped into.

Not until he had reached what he was sure

A Harold Lloyd Corp. Production—A Pathé Picture.The Freshman.
Love at first sight.

was his own car did Harold's pace or fears slacken. And then his panic was renewed when he looked about him and wondered if, after all, this was his car. It was an entirely changed locale. The cushioned seats had given way to twin lines of hung green cloth with a narrow aisle running through them. He stood uncertainly for a moment, then walked down to where his seat must have been. The explanation of this strange transformation at length occurred to him. The porter had made up the berths while he was at dinner.

Harold parted a green curtain and quickly closed it again. A fat, grouchy-looking old man was sitting on the edge of a berth trying to extract tired feet from tight shoes. He next intruded upon a slim gentleman of similar irascible disposition. The berth following was Harold's, as proven by the presence of his new bag underneath it.

Harold lay down, but not to sleep. He was thinking of that embarrassing scene in the dining car. And, in spite of his panic, of his ignominious flight, he felt that he would like to see that girl again.

Harold had never been fond of girls. He had never experienced the youthful palpitations of puppy love, the high school dance flirtations and the like. Girls had never entered into his scheme of life. But somehow this girl seemed different. She was so fresh-looking, so pretty, so friendly-like. She was not at all like the giggling, silly, flirtatious young ladies that haunted the Sanford soda fountains and were met by slicked-up young swains Sunday evenings after church.

This girl looked like a person a fellow would like to talk to, to make a pal of. She stirred something vaguely warm within him, something that made him eager to know her name and see her again.

And, though he did not dream it, the girl was thinking of Harold too. Curled in her berth trying to become interested in a dry magazine, the girl was thinking of the scene in the dining car and her embarrassed tablemate. She was not angry with him. Neither did she feel like laughing at his discomfiture. There was something so frank, unspoiled, wholesomely attractive about his face. Something that appealed to the mother in her, as well as to something else. She wondered what his name was and when she would see him again.

After an hour of lying awake, Harold shook himself impatiently. Pleasant as it was, he couldn't be thinking of that girl all night. What else was there to do? Having noted the exact location of his sleeping place, he rolled down the rapidly moving train like a sailor on a storm-tossed ship. From the curtained compartment at the end of the car he saw tobacco smoke issuing and heard the sound of male voices within. In the five minutes that he stood outside, he saw three men issue from this place and two others enter. He concluded that it was public and walked boldly in.

He entered a region of metal wash-bowls, mirrors and leather-upholstered seats. Three men occupied the compartment. Two were young and seated together. Opposite them lounged a puffy, middle-aged man, coatless, wearing a shirt with huge alternate purple and white stripes and smoking a black, greasy cigar. Both of the young men were puffing upon pipes. Harold wondered if one had to smoke to be admitted here. He disliked the taste of tobacco intensely.

The youth who wasn't reading the leather-bound red book looked up as he entered and nodded slightly. His roving eyes had seen the copy of the Tate "Tattler," the last one Harold had received, the "Special Reunion Number," bulging in Harold's pocket. Harold, taking this nod for an invitation and desperately in need of company, nodded in return and sat down near the nodder.

"Are you a Tate man?" asked the latter promptly. He was husky, merry-faced youth with blond hair slicked down and parted neatly in the center. His pipe was marked 2T5.

"Yes," said Harold proudly.

"Freshman, eh?" his questioner grinned.

Harold wondered how he had learned that and why he considered it a little amusing.

"My name's Keay—Dave Keay," offered the merry one. He nudged his companion, whose tortoise-shelled glasses were deeply buried in his book. "Snap out of it, 'Shelley,'" chided Keay. "We've got company. An entering man." Keay turned to Harold. "The bookworm is Logan—Tom Logan, editor of the 'Lit.' All the boys call him 'Shelley' because he writes poetry, the poor nut. Now, what's your name, Freshman?"

"Harold Lamb," answered Harold Lamb.

"Lamb?" and for some reason Keay laughed out loud. "Get that, 'Shelley'—the name's Lamb. Well, well. What a swell name for a Freshman. Well, glad to know you, Lamb. So is 'Shelley' here when he gets through blinking and really sees there's somebody else here besides me. 'Shelley's' ruining his poor old optics reading Baudelaire in the original. What do you know about that for highbrowed nuttiness, hey? Well, Freshman, I hope it's Lamb by name and not by nature." Keay seemed to think this such a witty crack that Harold laughed with him just to be sociable.

Logan was a thin, esthetic-looking youth with dark circles under his pale green eyes and a mop of black hair straggling over his forehead. He and Keay came from the same town in Idaho and were really very good friends, though entirely dissimilar in temperament.

"Are you all set, Freshman?" Keay asked with condescending interest. "Got a dorm room and everything?"

"I don't think I understand," Harold asked, bewildered.

"I mean, are you going to live on the campus? Well, if you don't know, I guess you aren't. Did you pass all your entrance exams last Spring and get notified you were admitted without conditions? No? Well, then, you're rooming in town, kid—and Heaven help you! Those landlords out in town sure gyp the pants off the poor stoodents.

"'Shelley' and I got a swell break in the draw and are going to live in Coulter this year. That is, if we can stand each other. I've had tough luck with my roommates so far. Freshman year I roomed with a bird who walked in his sleep darned near every night and finally fell out of bed and twisted his spine and had to leave college. Sophomore year I hitched up with one of these darned politicians. He was out to bootlick the whole class, so he could get elected to things, and he had the room crowded all the time with ward-heelers smoking my tobacco and borrowing my shirts. Last year three bozos and I chipped in together and took a whole suite in Williams Hall. That's the place where President Madison roomed when he was in college. It's two hundred years old, I guess. The most terrible madhouse in the world. We staged a fight with the rats pretty near every night. And those three roomies of mine!—say, one of 'em was always staging a party and banging the piano when the rest of us wanted to study. It was terrible. I flunked two subjects and have to work like the dickens this year to make them up so I can graduate.

"That's why I picked out 'Shelley' here for a roommate. He'll be my good angel, see? He doesn't do anything but study and he does all his bickering down in the 'Lit' office. So I'll be able to work, see? He isn't a bad old egg at that, even though he's funny looking."

Logan, immersed in his French, paid no attention to this insult. Harold sat entranced at Keay's flood of words. He did not understand half the slang, but it seemed to the sub-Freshman that he was at last getting a taste of the real Tate. How he envied Keay his breezy self-assurance, his unobtrusive well-fitting clothes, his doggy pipe.

Keay held forth in a rollicking monologue for fifteen minutes or more. "Now, you take my advice. Freshman," said Keay at one stage, "and look for a room in one of those wooden joints on Clark Street. Lay off those private dorms on Hill Place. They'll take the gold right out of your teeth over there. And the guys that room there—say, all they bring to college is a brush apiece to paint the campus red with. Half of 'em flunk out in February the first year. A bunch of millionaire meat packers' darlings and sons of big potato chip men from Saratoga. Get a quiet room and study your first year. Freshman. That way you get a drag with all the profs and they'll let you get away with murder the rest of your college course. You've established a reputation, see?"

At eleven o'clock Harold retired to his berth stuffed to the ears with advice, good, bad and indifferent. He had begun to think that the Freshman Bible, which was supposed to contain all an entering man should know about Tate and which he carried safely in his inside pocket, should be reedited by David Keay, III.

Harold did not sleep well that night. It took him nearly half an hour to disrobe within the narrow confines of his lower berth. When he at last lay down, it seemed to him that his resting place was a slab of solid concrete, very thinly covered. He closed his eyes, but he snapped them open again as the racing engine emitted a sudden, shrieking blast, nearly startling him out of his berth. The locomotive continued to do this at five-minute intervals. The berth was intolerably stuffy. Harold raised a window and a blast of cold night air, mingled with cinders, struck him in the face. He closed the window again, preferring to suffocate. He lifted the shade on its rollers and looked out. The train was rushing at a terrific pace through a black void, here and there punctuated with bright lights as a town was entered and left behind almost at one swoop.

Harold lay awake for three-quarters of the night. When at last he dropped off to a; troubled sleep, his head was buzzing with the talk of Keay. In the back of his brain was the pleasing image of a very pretty girl with dark hair bordering on the Titian.

He was finally started out of his sleep by an object dropping to the floor beside his berth with the grace and lightness of a baby elephant. The traveling salesman in the berth above Harold was up for the day. Harold pushed the shade up cautiously. The bright sun of a new day flashed into his face. He dressed awkwardly and laboriously. Fully clothed at last, he invaded the region of the wash-bowls and found a battalion of half-clothed men shaving before the mirrors, sousing their faces in water, groping about with soap-filled eyes after towels and asserting profanely that the service on this particular railroad was going to pot. Harold meekly waited his turn.

He was one of the last in the dining car. He learned from the waiter that they would arrive at Tate within an hour. Returning to his car after the most meager of breakfasts, for he was terribly afraid he would not get ojff the train at the precious station, he discovered that the sleeping car had been transformed into a sitting car again. Moreover, Keay and Logan were lounging just three seats in back of him. He somewhat bashfully joined them.

"Gee, Freshman, you look as if you'd been pulled through a putty-blower," Keay called out cheerfully. "What's the matter? Didn't they tuck you under the sheets carefully enough last night? Golly, kid, if you don't sleep well on a train, wait till they get you into one of those boarding house iron-posted beds!"

By sitting with these two sons of Tate, Harold was rewarded forty minutes later by having Keay's excited voice point out to him across the rolling country to their left the tips of sun-glinted towers.

"There's the old joint now!" Keay sang out in a glad voice that belied the deprecating epithet he had bestowed upon his alma mater. "Look, 'Shelley,' old kid, you can see Coulter tower."

Even the sad-faced Logan looked and smiled.

Very calm and stately and formidable the spires of Tate University seemed to Harold as he envisaged them across three miles of neat farming country. They thrilled and chilled him at one and the same time. He suddenly felt quite small. Sanford and Henry Lamb seemed very many miles away.

But he had little time to think about this. Already the porter was gathering the luggage and piling it on the platform between the cars. Then Harold and his two now thoroughly excited companions were standing beside it as the train slowed down.

Harold was nearing Tate and glory at last.