Beyond the dish-washing and furnace-tending set he had no probable social future, though everybody knew everybody at Plato. Those immaculate upper-classmen, Murray Cowles and Howard Griffin, never invited him to their room (in a house on Elm Street with a screened porch and piano sounds). He missed Ben Rusk, who had gone to Oberlin College, and Joe Jordan, who had gone to work for the Joralemon Specialty Manufacturing Company.
Life at Plato was suspicious, prejudiced, provincial, as it affected the ambitious students; and for the weaker brethren it was philandering and vague. The class work was largely pure rot-arbitrary mathematics, antiquated botany, hesitating German, and a veritable military drill in the conjunction of Greek verbs conducted by a man with a non-com. soul, a pompous, sandy-whiskered manikin with cold eyes and a perpetual cold in the nose, who had inflicted upon a patient world the four-millionth commentary on Xenophon. Few of the students realized the futility of it all; certainly not Carl, who slept well and believed in football.
The life habit justifies itself. One comes to take anything as a matter of course; to take one's neighbors seriously, whether one lives in Plato or Persia, in Mrs. Henkel's kitchen or a fo'c's'le. The Platonians raced toward their various goals of high-school teaching, or law, or marriage, or permanently escaping their parents; they made love, and were lazy, and ate, and swore off bad habits, and had religious emotions, all quite naturally; they were not much bored, rarely exhilarated, always ready to gossip about their acquaintances; precisely like a duke or a delicatessen-keeper. They played out their game. But it was so tiny a game, so played to the exclusion of all other games, that it tended to dwarf its victims-and the restless children, such as Carl, instinctively resent this dwarfing. They seek to associate themselves with other rebels. Carl's unconscious rebel band was the group of rowdyish freshmen who called themselves "the Gang," and loafed about the room of their unofficial captain, John Terry, nicknamed "the Turk," a swarthy, large-featured youth with a loud laugh, a habit of slapping people upon the shoulder, an ingenious mind for deviltry, and considerable promise as a football end.
Most small local colleges, and many good ones, have their "gangs" of boys, who presumably become honorable men and fathers, yet who in college days regard it as heroic to sneak out and break things, and as humorous to lead countryside girls astray in sordid amours. The more cloistered the seat of learning, the more vicious are the active boys, to keep up with the swiftness of life forces. The Turk's gang painted the statues of the Memorial Arch; they stole signs; they were the creators of noises unexpected and intolerable, during small, quiet hours of moonlight.
As the silkworm draws its exquisite stuff from dowdy leaves, so youth finds beauty and mystery in stupid days. Carl went out unreservedly to practise with the football squad; he had a joy of martyrdom in tackling the dummy and peeling his nose on the frozen ground. He knew a sacred aspiration when Mr. Bjorken, the coach, a former University of Minnesota star, told him that he might actually "make" the team in a year or two; that he had twice as much chance as Ray Cowles, who-while Carl was thinking only of helping the scrub team to win-was too engrossed in his own dignity as a high-school notable to get into the scrimmage.
At the games, among the Gang on the bleachers, Carl went mad with fervor. He kept shooting to his feet, and believed that he was saving his country every time he yelled in obedience to the St. Vitus gestures of the cheer-leader, or sang "On the Goal-line of Plato" to the tune of "On the Sidewalks of New York." Tears of a real patriotism came when, at the critical moment of a losing game against the Minnesota Military Institute, with sunset forlorn behind bare trees, the veteran cheer-leader flung the hoarse Plato rooters into another defiant yell. It was the never-say-die of men who rose, with clenched hands and arms outstretched, to the despairing need of their college, and then-Lord! They hurled up to their feet in frenzy as Pete Madlund got away with the ball for a long run and victory.... The next week, when the University of Keokuk whipped them, 40 to 10, Carl stood weeping and cheering the defeated Plato team till his throat burned.
He loved the laughter of the Turk, Mae Thurston's welcome, experiments in the physics laboratory. And he was sure that he was progressing toward the state of grace in which he might aspire to marry Gertie Cowles.
He did not think of her every day, but she was always somewhere in his thoughts, and the heroines of magazine stories recalled some of her virtues to his mind, invariably. The dentist who had loved her had moved away. She was bored. She occasionally wrote to Carl. But she was still superior-tried to "influence him for good" and advised him to "cultivate nice people."
He was convinced that he was going to become a lawyer, for her sake, but he knew that some day he would be tempted by the desire to become a civil or a mechanical engineer.
* * * * *
A January thaw. Carl was tramping miles out into the hilly country north of Plato. He hadn't been able to persuade any of the Gang to leave their smoky loafing-place in the Turk's room, but his own lungs demanded the open. With his heavy boots swashing through icy pools, calling to an imaginary dog and victoriously running Olympic races before millions of spectators, he defied the chill of the day and reached Hiawatha Mound, a hill eight miles north of Plato.
Toward the top a man was to be seen crouched in a pebbly, sunny arroyo, peering across the bleak prairie, a lone watcher. Ascending, Carl saw that it was Eugene Field Linderbeck, a Plato freshman. That amused him. He grinningly planned a conversation. Every one said that "Genie Linderbeck was queer." A precocious boy of fifteen, yet the head of his class in scholarship; reported to be interested in Greek books quite outside of the course, fond of drinking tea, and devoid of merit in the three manly arts-athletics, flirting, and breaking rules by smoking. Genie was small, anemic, and too well dressed. He stuttered slightly and was always peering doubtfully at you with large and childish eyes that were made more eerie by his pale, bulbous forehead and the penthouse of tangled mouse-brown hair over it.... The Gang often stopped him on the campus to ask mock-polite questions about his ambition, which was to be a teacher of English at Harvard or Yale. Not very consistently, but without ever wearying of the jest, they shadowed him to find out if he did not write poetry; and while no one had actually caught him, he was still suspect.
Genie said nothing when Carl called, "H'lo, son!" and sat on a neighboring rock.
"What's trouble, Genie? You look worried."
"Why don't any of you fellows like me?"
Carl felt like a bug inspected by a German professor. "W-why, how d'you mean, Genie?"
"None of you take me seriously. You simply let me hang around. And you think I'm a grind. I'm not. I like to read, that's all. Perhaps you think I shouldn't like to go out for athletics if I could! I wish I could run the way you can, Ericson. Darn it! I was happy out here by myself on the Mound, where every prospect pleases, and-'n' now here I am again, envying you."
"Why, son, I-I guess-I guess we admire you a whole lot more than we let on to. Cheer up, old man! When you're valedictorian and on the debating team and wallop Hamlin you'll laugh at the Gang, and we'll be proud to write home we know you." Carl was hating himself for ever having teased Genie Linderbeck. "You've helped me a thundering lot whenever I've asked you about that blame Greek syntax. I guess we're jealous of you. You-uh-you don't want to let 'em kid you--"
Carl was embarrassed before Genie's steady, youthful, trusting gaze. He stooped for a handful of pebbles, with which he pelted the landscape, maundering, "Say, why don't you come around to the Turk's room and get better acquainted with the Gang?"