The Freshman (Holman)/Chapter 8
"I have a fine room and am very comfortable," Harold wrote to his mother the next night. "Mrs. Sayre, my landlady, is very nice. You would like her. Her daughter is nice too. Just like Sanford folks. I have met most of my classmates and they seem to like me. I like them too. I have also met a number of upperclassmen. They came around to see me and made sure I bought the right kind of things. I have put my money in the bank here. There is one right on the corner. I have spent quite a lot of money already, but I have not been extravagant. A fellow has to get started right here. It takes a little money to do that."
He wandered into the plush-lined lobby of the Hotel Tate after dinner the night following, hoping to see Peggy. The Tate was a frightfully expensive place that offered food, lodgings and service vastly inferior to the prices it charged, Harold had been informed. The hotel was overornate, making an attempt to be New Yorkish and not knowing quite how. He with difficulty caught sight of Peggy behind the cigar counter. She was smiling as she handed out a box of stogies to a group of bantering Tatians on the other side of the counter. Many wealthy upperclassmen who for some reason or other were not members of fraternities took their meals at the Tate. Three or four of these were now being beguiled by the smile of Peggy. It was strictly business with Peggy, but Harold was deceived. He wondered if she was, after all, just a flirt. He walked out of the lobby without speaking to her, though she saw him at the last minute and waved to him to come over. His back was turned, however, and he never knew he had been observed.
He sought his room and, picking up the new set of text books just purchased at the University Store, selected the volume on trigonometry and started to study.
The Tate professors that opening day somewhat awed and puzzled Harold, accustomed to the dry-as-dust disciplinarians of the Sanford High School. The teachers here seemed to take so much for granted. They had a habit of skimming over things hurriedly in the classroom with the remark, "You men can puzzle that out for yourselves when you get to your rooms." There was none of the elaborate explaining and interchange of question and answer that the High School teachers deemed essential. Here the profs delivered lectures, evidently memorized long
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"Just be yourself, Harold—and you'll win!"
since and repeated year after year, in singsongy voices. One either took notes or didn't, as one chose. The classes were warned, however, that there would be stiff monthly tests to see how well the lectures had been absorbed by the listeners.
Harold found it somewhat bewildering. There was Dr. MacDonald, the trigonometry professor, who talked with such a Scottish burr that one could hardly distinguish one word from the other. He had a confusing habit of abbreviating everything, saying "coss" for "cosine" and "tang" for "tangent." As one of Harold's fellow classmen put it at the end of the first period, "Well, wouldn't that jar you? If that bird doesn't begin to talk English pretty soon, we're all sunk."
Then there was young Mr. Stoddard, the French instructor, a lanky ex-Rhodes scholar from Oxford. Stoddard didn't take his teaching seriously and was continually looking for ways of alleviating the tedium of his routine. He discovered one upon consulting the roll and finding Harold and a sad-faced farmer's son from South Dakota named Lyon in hisi class. Blithely disregarding the alphabetical order in which the classes were usually arranged, Stoddard put Harold in the first seat and Lyon in the last and then expected the roomful to be convulsed every morning when he called the roll and made the remark that the class "came in like a Lamb and went out like a Lyon."
Crashaw, the physics lecturer, was the one who made the public remark about Harold's speech on the opening day from the auditorium stage and started the grinning faces of the other four hundred Freshmen in the lecture hall twisting Harold's way. Crashaw was a fat, ruddy little man noted for his profanity, his severity in marking and his frank, rough treatment of students. Coming to Harold's name in the roll call, he paused and drawled, "We are honored to have the self-proclaimed 'Speedy' in our presence. I trust we shall be able to treat him in this course with the rapidity to which he is accustomed." Harold did not know whether he had been complimented or insulted. Few of his classmates knew either. They laughed from policy and stared from curiosity. And Harold turned very red.
As that hectic first week at Tate drew to a close, Harold was on the whole well pleased with himself. He was getting along. He had been too busy so far to get lonely. Moreover, his classmates seemed to fancy his company. They would cluster around him and he found it very easy to make them laugh. His most trivial remarks brought guffaws. He did not appreciate the mirth-provoking qualities of his Sanford accent and his rustic phraseology. Nor the stage-comedian effect of his appearance, what with his white turtle-neck sweater, his tiny Freshman cap perched upon the back of his head and his thick-lensed glasses with their immense tortoise-shell rims. He was continually piloting crowds to the Palace and blowing them to ice cream. His guests included not only Freshmen but also Sophomore friends of Sheldon and Garrity, the inseparable duo that claimed the credit for discovering "Speedy." Harold's greeting of new acquaintances with his funny little jig step, his Lester Laurel pose and his low-sweeping handshake became one of the sure-fire laughs of the Tate campus.
The first fortnight of college was an harassed period for the whole Freshman class. It was open season for hazing and the Sophomores were taking full advantage of their opportunities. Harold was possibly the favorite subject for this peculiarly collegiate notion of outdoor sport. There was always a shout of approval when a group of Sophomore scouts seeking victims nabbed him and brought him into the circle. He rowed stroke oar on a crew that sat in single file on the grass and used toothpicks for oars. He whistled "Yankee Doodle" with his nose plastered against that of another Freshman. He perched up in a tree opposite one of his classmates similarly situated and yelled "Katy did" while the other youth responded with "Katy didn't." This for ten solid minutes. He marched in innumerable hazing parades with his trousers rolled to his knees and his garters draped around his ears. In these processions there was always a leader who intoned erudite slogans such as "I'm the Sultan!" while the others in line shouted back, "We're his harem!"
But by the end of the second week, hazing was officially over, by edict of the Senior Council, and Harold's life slid into more of a rational routine. Standing outside of the main entrance of Commons after luncheon on Saturday, he discovered that for the first time since arriving at Tate he was alone and with nothing to do. This struck him as all wrong. If he wanted to get along, if he ever expected to be a big man like Chester Trask, he mustn't idle. He was making friends hand over fist. He must keep it up, strike while the iron was hot, no matter if these first two weeks had seemed to cost him a fearful lot of money.
His eyes shifted to a shiny new runabout that had drawn up to the curb in front of Commons. He recognized the occupants as Leonard Trask and Joe Bartlett, with the latter at the wheel. They were poking their heads out from under the top of the car, evidently looking for somebody. Harold made a gesture of greeting, but they either failed to see him or chose to ignore him. He flushed. It was slowly dawning upon him that there was something snobbish about these Westover graduates.
Then he heard Joe yell, "Hey, Don. Come on! We're waiting for you."
Harold turned to see young Haddon coming down the steps of Commons with two other Freshmen whom he did not know. At the sight of his friends, Haddon deserted his two companions without a word and, taking the rest of the steps in a single leap, jumped into the car with Leonard and Joe. With a roar and a spurt of black smoke out of its muffler, the powerful little car was off. Haddon's two deserted classmates stood staring after him, a look of chagrin upon their faces.
"They're prep school pals of his," Harold ventured to explain.
"He might have been a little more civil about ducking away from us," complained one of the boys.
"Probably they're going down to Lakeport and don't want to miss any of the fun," said the other. "Gee, it would be nice to drive down there and get a nice swim, eh? Some guys have all the luck."
"What's Lakeport?" Harold asked, interested.
Lakeport, it was explained to him, was a summer resort settlement on the shores of Lake Preston, fifteen miles from Tate. It had hotels, bath houses, cottages, a Casino and wonderfully nice sandy beaches leading into clear, cool water. One reached this Paradise by private car or by hiring a vehicle down at Thompson's Garage. The Freshman authority on Lakeport said he had lived in Tate all his life. His name was Talbott, his friend's name was Carter and what was Harold's name?
"Well, why don't we hire a car and drive down there, if it's such a wonderful place?" Harold asked. He believed at that moment that it was the regular custom at Tate for the undergraduate body to spend Saturday afternoons at Lakeport. He remembered now to have heard other groups discussing the prospects of a swim there. He seemed to have heard somebody mention girls and dancing in this connection also.
Harold turned as he distinguished somebody hailing him. The hailer was Dan Sheldon, who with the ever-present pal, Garrity, was joshing a bevy of Freshmen down under the elms of University Street. It might have occurred to a more astute observer than Harold that Sheldon spent a great deal of time alternately playing practical jokes upon Freshmen and impressing them with his knowledge of things Tatian. Also that Sheldon had a weak, rather foxlike face and was not popular with his own class.
"Ah, there, 'Speedy,'" Sheldon now hailed, "what's on the cards for this afternoon?" The question seemed to imply that the asker craved diversion and was hinting that the Freshman should provide it.
"We were talking about hiring a car and riding down to Lakeport," Harold complied.
"Good stuff," Sheldon agreed and came over and took hold of Lamb's coat sleeve. "Come along. I'll show you where you can get a car." His satellite Garrity fell in line with the other four and they hurried down University Street toward Thompson's Garage.
Jake Thompson came to the surface from under the automobile with which he was tinkering. His grease-smeared face made movements and his lips said that Lakeport and return would cost them ten dollars, with five dollars of this fee returned when the rented car was safely brought back.
"Aw, Jake, have a heart," protested Sheldon. "Did I ever fail to bring one of your pieces of junk back safely?"
"Yes," said Jake shortly. "Once."
Harold had expected that the others, of course, would chip in with him to pay for the car hire. But none of them made a move to accept or decline Jake's offer. He looked around vainly at their blank faces.
The Freshman gulped and then he said weakly, "Well, that sounds all right to me. We'll take a car."
"I'll drive her," Sheldon offered at once.
"I ought to raise the price then," Jake opined grimly. He walked over to a secondhand touring car and said, "This is her." But he did not permit them to enter the veteran vehicle until Harold had handed over ten dollars and received the receipt.
Sheldon proved to be a fast and reckless driver. They sped over ten or more macadam miles of scenery as flat and uninteresting as Harold's native landscape. The roads were clogged with cars, and Harold, seated in the front seat beside the nonchalant driver, saw eternity loom up before his affrighted eyes many times. But in about thirty minutes they entered the corporate limits of Lakeport as evidenced by the mammoth sign, "Welcome to Lakeport. The Lake Breeze Metropolis." Another five minutes and they were in sight of the sandy beach and the sparkling waters beyond. They parked the car and embarked in search of excitement.
It was an unusually warm afternoon for the end of September and the unanimous vote was for a swim at once.
"We can get bathing suits at Bailey's," offered Talbott, who was just recovering from being flung about the tonneau of the car during the fast ride over. "I worked there one summer drying towels. Maybe I can get us suits for nothing."
But Talbott's optimism proved groundless. Mr. Bailey was not in and the hatchet-faced woman in the office did not recall Talbott's former connection with the Bailey bathhouses. Nevertheless they all undressed in high glee in adjoining coops and donned badly fitting bathing suits. Harold's was in particular an abominable fit. He had a hard time keeping up with the others as they raced through the crowds littering the soft white sand down to the waves.
Talbott, Carter and Garrity proved to be water rats. They dived and swam like young porpoises, whooping it up in great style. Sheldon took a single dip and then confined his activities to ogling the girls on the sand. Harold, never keen for the water, plunged bravely in, but found the warm waves almost nauseating. He thereafter stayed near Sheldon.
"No class to the chickens here," that worthy complained. "All the nifty ones go to Spray Cove, up at the other end of the lake. This joint gets only the factory girls and small-towners. Say, some day we'll get one of Jake's swell 'busses and go to Spray Cove for some real fun."
At that moment he slid down beside two girls of about eighteen years each arrayed in flaming red bathing suits and sprawling idly out on the sand. Both had the usual city pallor and were quite evidently of not a very high social status.
Sheldon grinned boldly into the face of the one nearer him and greeted her effusively, "Well, imagine meeting you here! I haven't seen you since the Union State game. And your little friend here too! Well, well. Take a seat, 'Speedy.'"
Harold sat down awkwardly beside the other girl. He really believed Sheldon knew them until both girls turned the cold shoulder to the audacious Sophomore.
"Oh, come on, be nice to us, sisters," Sheldon cajoled. "We're just a couple of big bicycle men from Wheeling up to see the fair."
The girls giggled and one of them ventured, "You're college boys, ain't you?" Her voice was raspy and unattractive.
"Discovered!" Sheldon howled. "Well, to tell the truth, I'm Coach Cavendish of the Tate football team and this is our star quarterback, 'Speedy' Lamb. I've got three of the other varsity players with me. I thought the boys were getting a little stale, so I brought 'em down to give 'em a bath apiece. Do you mind if they use a little of your lake?"
But he got no further, for at that moment two hulking young men looking like blacksmiths appeared in front of them from the direction of the water. The newcomers, it was plain to be seen, belonged with the girls and were scowling at Sheldon and Harold, the intruders.
"These guys friends of yours?" growled one of the blacksmiths.
The girls had cooled remarkably toward the collegians. The one who had addressed Sheldon now turned upon him icily and said primly, "I should say not. They're just a couple of fresh guys that tried to pick us up."
"Our exit cue," muttered Sheldon to Harold and, leaping nimbly to his feet, ducked into the beach crowd. Harold followed as rapidly as he could, bewildered by the whole incident.
"That's what we get for mixing with the delicatessen trade," commented Sheldon airily. "Pick 'em right or don't pick 'em at all—that's my slogan from now on."
When the quintet from Tate had donned their street clothes again, Sheldon having provided diversion in the bathhouses by snapping the bare bodies of the others with his stinging wet towel, they sallied forth upon the crowded beach in search of further adventure. Sheldon amused them for a while by pinning on a Tate Town Gas Inspector badge, filched from somewhere, and pretending to be the officially appointed inspector of bathing suits. He would stand off and measure the length of some innocent person's bathing suit, then gravely approach him and inform him that he was guilty of violating the Lakeport regulations. In nine cases out of ten the victim looked frightened and fled for his bathhouse amid the roars of Sheldon's companions. Harold, strangely enough, did not catch the humor in this. Sheldon's practical jokes all seemed to share the quality of being slightly cruel.
They adjourned to the merry-go-round and took several whirls. To the discomfiture of the carousel proprietor, Sheldon produced a brass ring two rides out of three and was given a free encircling every time as a reward. Till he was detected pulling duplicate brass rings out of his pocket and the Tatians had to flee for their lives. Sheldon had spotted the rings in a box in the merry-go-round ticket office and, diverting the attention of the cashier elsewhere, had calmly purloined them.
Along about six o'clock, the group of merrymakers, having spent the afternoon in the fresh air and water, grew hungry. Talbott proposed that they dine at the Hotel Benton, Lakeport's newest and most expensive hostelry. When Carter protested that there probably wasn't enough money among the five put together to pay for the meals, Sheldon, who was feeling in excellent form, reassured them, "Just watch me handle the checks and it won't cost us a cent."
So they invaded the aristocratic dining room of the Benton and ate a full course dinner apiece. Having received separate checks, they looked toward Sheldon for the next move.
"Don't pay the waiter. Pick up your check and follow me," he ordered. The four, mystified but hopeful, trailed behind the bold Sophomore as he approached the stony-faced man behind the cashier's wicket.
"Put it on my room bill," said Sheldon in his haughtiest manner to the cashier and, flipping down the check, sailed augustly by. The three youths after him, quaking inwardly, followed his example. But by the time Harold, the last man in line, had reached his window, the cashier had recovered his poise.
"Wait a minute," he said sharply to the Freshman. "You people are not guests here. I've had this game worked on me before. Now pay up or I'll call the house detective."
Harold looked around for his friends, but they had completely disappeared. There was nothing else to do but pay all five of the checks, leaving him with scarcely ten dollars out of the twenty that he had brought to Lakeport.
When he had rejoined the others outside Sheldon consoled him by saying, "You've got to work faster, 'Speedy,' to get along in this town."
At Sheldon's suggestion, they invaded the Casino, where a jazz band was blaring and perspiring dancers were gyrating around the floor in numbers that approached the saturation point. Here the breezy Sophomore actually discovered two girls whom he knew. One was a blonde of uncertain age with frizzled bobbed hair and rather faded good looks. The other was slightly younger.
"Gosh, if it isn't the college widow," commented Sheldon and led his interested cohorts up to the belles, who were hovering unescorted on the edge of the dance floor.
"Grace, a salubrious evening to you," Sheldon bowed elaborately to the blonde. "May I present my gentlemen friends, Messieurs Lamb, Talbott, Carter and Clayton Bennington Garrity. Gentlemen—Miss Beach."
Grace Beach was the perfectly respectable daughter of the perfectly respectable leading paper-hanger of Tate, John Beach, and his colorless spouse. Grace had been a very pretty and modest girl in her day, which was about eight years before our story takes place. She was now twenty-six and her good looks were on the wane. She was suffering the fate of an erstwhile beauty who lives and has her social life in a college town. For ten years she had been escorted to dances and athletic games by Tate men. She had been engaged to a dozen of them. But when her fiancés graduated and left college, they seemed to have a discouraging habit of marrying other girls in other places. Grace was left behind.
Grace Beach was now trying to delude herself into believing that she was not confronting the specter of spinsterhood. She was only twenty-six, and yet already the younger brood of flappers in their 'teens were proving more attractive to Tate men than herself. Invitations to proms and football games came each year in fewer numbers. Grace had stepped out of her shell a little and became timidly flirtatious. She could not bring herself to emulate the boldness and frankness of the modern flapper. But, in a thoroughly respectable and conventional way, she had resolved not to be left out of Tate's social whirl, such as it was.
During the past week she had invited her cousin, Delphine Smythe, a babyishly pretty girl about five years younger than Grace, to visit her. Delphine, a small-town maiden and frankly flirtatious, though most conventional, had been attracted by the prospect of so many young men gathered in one relatively small spot. She had accepted Grace's invitation and come to Tate, much to the annoyance of Grace's parents, who did not like this cousin.
Grace now smiled a mechanical smile that she had been using for many, many years. She introduced the boys to Delphine, who tittered. Sheldon and Garrity immediately claimed the ladies for a dance. The two Sophomores held their consorts with the current exaggerated collegiate dancing grip, postures that would at once cause a scandal if perpetrated in Sanford, Harold was sure. When the two Sophomores released the girls, apparently none the worse for wear, Talbott and Carter resumed the task of whirling them around the floor. Harold's turn found him simply not up to it. He felt that he must
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Coach Cavendish calls Harold into battle.
learn to dance all over again before he ventured upon the floor another time.
"Thank my fluent tongue for the honor of these charming ladies' company on the long, lonely journey back to Tate," Sheldon announced glibly at about ten o'clock.
Half an hour later they started home, Grace squeezing in between Sheldon and Harold on the front seat and the other girl crowding into the tonneau. It soon developed that Miss Beach could talk the ears off a deaf man and was quite willing to do it. She and Sheldon exchanged repartee in the swift, slangy manner that was the custom at Tate and which Harold was sure he could never master. When Sheldon tired of her chatter and quieted down, on the pretense of paying stricter attention to his driving, she turned her conversational batteries upon Harold.
"I've heard of you," she smiled at him in the darkness. "You're that wonderfully generous boy they all call 'Speedy,' aren't you? I know you're going to be awfully popular. I don't suppose you'll ever have time to pay attention to poor little me."
She flooded him with further words. He detected her saying, among many other things, "I live with my parents down on Dinsmore Road. Perhaps you have already met my father. He's an interior decorator and often advises the college boys about their rooms. My parents and I love to have the boys drop in and see us. We especially like Freshmen. They're so unspoiled."
Half an hour later they dropped Grace and her cousin at the Beach door. Harold was introduced to the "interior decorator," a thin, sad-looking man who was watering the tiny lawn in front of the house, though it was late at night.
Grace explained that her father was so rushed with work now that he couldn't find time for his household duties in conventional hours. She added with attempted coyness, "Do come and see us, please, Mr. Lamb."
He was quite elated. Then, for some reason, the image of pretty Peggy Sayre flashed into his head and he was thoughtful. Well, Peggy had had a flock of men around her the last time he had seen her. He guessed he could look at another woman if he liked. And Grace Beach seemed like a very friendly soul. She had said she liked him.
They drove the car around to Thompson's Garage and had to pound on the door and wake up the proprietor in order to get in. Jake sleepily inspected the ancient vehicle, saw that it was all right and returned Harold his five dollars.
It struck the Freshman as rather odd that none of his companions had offered to share the expense of the trip with him. It made him a little uneasy too, for the afternoon's sport had cost him over fifteen dollars. His money was going with disturbing speed. He would have to economize.