"I got to go to college-be worthy of her!" he groaned, all the way home. "And I can't afford to go to the U. of M. I'd like to be free, like Bone says, but I've got to go to Plato."
CHAPTER VI
Plato College, Minnesota, is as earnest and undistinguished, as provincially dull and pathetically human, as a spinster missionary. Its two hundred or two hundred and fifty students come from the furrows, asking for spiritual bread, and are given a Greek root. Red-brick buildings, designed by the architect of county jails, are grouped about that high, bare, cupola-crowned gray-stone barracks, the Academic Building, like red and faded blossoms about a tombstone. In the air is the scent of crab-apples and meadowy prairies, for a time, but soon settles down a winter bitter as the learning of the Rev. S. Alcott Wood, D.D., the president. The town and college of Plato disturb the expanse of prairie scarce more than a group of haystacks. In winter the walks blur into the general whiteness, and the trees shrink to chilly skeletons, and the college is like five blocks set on a frozen bed-sheet-no shelter for the warm and timid soul, yet no windy peak for the bold. The snow wipes out all the summer-time individuality of place, and the halls are lonelier at dusk than the prairie itself-far lonelier than the yellow-lighted jerry-built shops in the town. The students never lose, for good or bad, their touch with the fields. From droning class-rooms the victims of education see the rippling wheat in summer; and in winter the impenetrable wall of sky. Footsteps and quick laughter of men and girls, furtively flirting along the brick walls under the beautiful maples, do make Plato dear to remember. They do not make it brilliant. They do not explain the advantages of leaving the farm for another farm.
To the freshman, Carl Ericson, descending from the dusty smoking-car of the M. &D., in company with tumultuous youths in pin-head caps and enormous sweaters, the town of Plato was metropolitan. As he walked humbly up Main Street and beheld two four-story buildings and a marble bank and an interurban trolley-car, he had, at last, an idea of what Minneapolis and Chicago must be. Two men in sweaters adorned with a large "P," athletes, generals, heroes, walked the streets in the flesh, and he saw-it really was there, for him!-the "College Book Store," whose windows were filled with leather-backed treatises on Greek, logic, and trigonometry; and, finally, he was gaping through a sandstone gateway at four buildings, each of them nearly as big as the Joralemon High School, surrounding a vast stone castle.
He entered the campus. He passed an old man with white side-whiskers and a cord on his gold-rimmed eye-glasses; an aged old man who might easily be a professor. A blithe student with "Y. M. C. A. Receptn. Com." large on his hat-band, rushed up to Carl, shook his hand busily, and inquired:
"Freshman, old man? Got your room yet? There's a list of rooming-houses over at the Y. M. Come on, I'll show you the way."
He was received in Academe, in Arcadia, in Elysium; in fact, in Plato College.
He was directed to a large but decomposing house conducted by the widow of a college janitor, and advised to take a room at $1.75 a week for his share of the rent. That implied taking with the room a large, solemn room-mate, fresh from teaching country school, a heavy, slow-spoken, serious man of thirty-one, named Albert Smith, registered as A. Smith, and usually known as "Plain Smith." Plain Smith sat studying in his cotton socks, and never emptied the wash-basin. He remarked, during the first hour of their discourse in the groves of Academe: "I hope you ain't going to bother me by singing and skylarking around. I'm here to work, bub." Smith then returned to the large books which he was diligently scanning that he might find wisdom, while Carl sniffed at the brown-blotched wall-paper, the faded grass matting, the shallow, standing wardrobe.... He liked the house, however. It had a real bath-room! He could, for the first time in his life, splash in a tub. Perhaps it would not be regarded as modern to-day; perhaps effete souls would disdain its honest tin tub, smeared with a paint that peeled instantly; but it was elegance and the Hesperides compared with the sponge and two lard-pails of hot water from the Ericson kitchen reservoir, which had for years been his conception of luxurious means of bathing.
Also, there were choicer spirits in the house. One man, who pressed clothes for a living and carried a large line of cigarettes in his room, was second vice-president of the sophomore class. As smoking was dourly forbidden to all Platonians, the sophomore's room was a refuge. The sophomore encouraged Carl in his natural talent for cheerful noises, while Plain Smith objected even to singing while one dressed.
Like four of his classmates, Carl became a waiter at Mrs. Henkel's student boarding-house, for his board and two dollars a week. The two dollars constituted his pin-money-a really considerable sum for Plato, where the young men were pure and smoked not, neither did they drink; where evening clothes were snobbish and sweaters thought rather well of; where the only theatrical attractions were week-stand melodramas playing such attractions as "Poor but True," or the Rev. Sam J. Pitkins's celebrated lecture on "The Father of Lies," annually delivered at the I.O.O.F. Hall.
Carl's father assured him in every letter that he was extravagant. He ran through the two dollars in practically no time at all. He was a member in good and regular standing of the informal club that hung about the Corner Drug Store, to drink coffee soda and discuss athletics and stare at the passing girls. He loved to set off his clear skin and shining pale hair with linen collars, though soft roll-collar shirts were in vogue. And he was ready for any wild expedition, though it should cost fifty or sixty cents. With the sophomore second vice-president and John Terry of the freshman class (usually known as "the Turk") he often tramped to the large neighboring town of Jamaica Mills to play pool, smoke Turkish cigarettes, and drink beer. They always chorused Plato songs, in long-drawn close harmony. Once they had imported English ale, out of bottles, and carried the bottles back to decorate and distinguish their rooms.
Carl's work at the boarding-house introduced him to pretty girl students, and cost him no social discredit whatever. The little college had the virtue of genuine democracy so completely that it never prided itself on being democratic. Mrs. Henkel, proprietor of the boarding-house, occasionally grew sarcastic to her student waiters as she stooped, red-faced and loosened of hair, over the range; she did suggest that they "kindly wash up a few of the dishes now and then before they went gallivantin' off." But songs arose from the freshmen washing and wiping dishes; they chucklingly rehashed jokes; they discussed the value of the "classical course" versus the "scientific course." While they waited on table they shared the laughter and arguments that ran from student to student through Mrs. Henkel's dining-room-a sunny room bedecked with a canary, a pussy-cat, a gilded rope portière, a comfortable rocker with a Plato cushion, a Garland stove with nickel ornaments, two geraniums, and an oak-framed photograph of the champion Plato football team of 1899.
Carl was readily accepted by the men and girls who gathered about the piano in the evening. His graceful-seeming body, his puppyish awkwardness, his quietly belligerent dignity, his eternal quest of new things, won him respect; though he was too boyish to rouse admiration, except in the breast of fat, pretty, cheerful, fuzzy-haired, candy-eating Mae Thurston. Mae so influenced Carl that he learned to jest casually; and he practised a new dance, called the "Boston," which Mae had brought from Minneapolis, though as a rival to the waltz and two-step the new dance was ridiculed by every one. He mastered all the savoir faire of the boarding-house. But he was always hurrying away from it to practise football, to prowl about the Plato power-house, to skim through magazines in the Y. M. C. A. reading-room, even to study.