"When shall I come?"
"When? Oh, why, thunder!-you know, Genie-just drop in any time."
"I'll be glad to."
Carl was perspiring at the thought of what the Gang would do to him when they discovered that he had invited Genie. But he was game. "Come up to my room whenever you can, and help me with my boning," he added. "You mustn't ever get the idea that we're conferring any blooming favor by having you around. It's you that help us. Our necks are pretty well sandpapered, I'm afraid.... Come up to my room any time.... I'll have to be hiking on if I'm going to get much of a walk. Come over and see me to-night."
"I wish you'd come up to Mr. Frazer's with me some Sunday afternoon for tea, Ericson."
Henry Frazer, M.A. (Yale), associate professor of English literature, was a college mystery. He was a thin-haired young man, with a consuming love of his work, which was the saving of souls by teaching Lycidas and Comus. This was his first year out of graduate school, his first year at Plato-and possibly his last. It was whispered about that he believed in socialism, and the president, the Rev. Dr. S. Alcott Wood, had no patience with such silly fads.
Carl marveled, "Do you go to Frazer's?"
"Why, yes!"
"Thought everybody was down on him. They say he's an anarchist, and I know he gives fierce assignments in English lit.; that's what all the fellows in his classes say."
"All the fools are down on him. That's why I go to his house."
"Don't the fellows-uh-kind of--"
"Yes," piped Genie in his most childish tone of anger, his tendency to stammer betraying him, "they k-kid me for liking Frazer. He's-he's the only t-teacher here that isn't p-p-p--"
"Spit!"
"--provincial!"
"What d'you mean by 'provincial'?"
"Narrow. Villagey. Do you know what Bernard Shaw says--?"
"Never read a word of him, my son. And let me tell you that my idea of no kind of conversation is to have a guy spring 'Have you read?' on me every few seconds, and me coming back with: 'No, I haven't. Ain't it interesting!' If that's the brand of converse at Prof Frazer's you can count me out."
Genie laughed. "Think how much more novelty you get out of roasting me like that than telling Terry he's got 'bats in his belfry' ten or twelve times a day."
"All right, my son; you win. Maybe I'll go to Frazer's with you. Sometime."
The Sunday following Carl went to tea at Professor Henry Frazer's.
The house was Platonian without, plain and dumpy, with gingerbread Gothic on the porch, blistered paint, and the general lines of a prairie barn, but the living-room was more nearly beautiful than any room Carl had seen. In accordance with the ideal of that era it had Mission furniture with large leather cushions, brown wood-work, and tan oatmeal paper scattered with German color prints, instead of the patent rockers and carbon prints of Roman monuments which adorned the houses of the other professors. While waiting with Genie Linderbeck for the Frazers to come down, Carl found in a rack on the oak table such books as he had never seen: exquisite books from England, bound in terra-cotta and olive-green cloth with intricate gold designs, heavy-looking, but astonishingly light to the hand; books about Celtic legends and Provençal jongleurs, and Japanese prints and other matters of which he had never heard; so different from the stained text-books and the shallow novels by brisk ladies which had constituted his experiences of literature that he suddenly believed in culture.
Professor Frazer appeared, walking into the room after his fragile wife and gracious sister-in-law, and Carl drank tea (with lemon instead of milk in it!) and listened to bewildering talk and to a few stanzas, heroic or hauntingly musical, by a new poet, W. B. Yeats, an Irishman associated with a thing called the Gaelic Movement. Professor Frazer had a funny, easy friendliness; his sister-in-law, a Diana in brown, respectfully asked Carl about the practicability of motor-cars, and all of them, including two newly come "high-brow" seniors, listened with nodding interest while Carl bashfully analyzed each of the nine cars owned in Plato and Jamaica Mills. At dusk the Diana in brown played MacDowell, and the light of the silken-shaded lamp was on a print of a fairy Swiss village.
That evening Carl wrestled with the Turk for one hour, catch-as-catch-can, on the Turk's bed and under it and nearly out of the window, to prove the value of Professor Frazer and culture. Next morning Carl and the Turk enrolled in Frazer's optional course in modern poetry, a desultory series of lectures which did not attempt Tennyson and Browning. So Carl discovered Shelley and Keats and Walt Whitman, Swinburne and Rossetti and Morris. He had to read by crawling from word to word as though they were ice-cakes in a cataract of emotion. The allusiveness was agonizing. But he pulled off his shoes, rested his feet on the foot-board of his bed, drummed with a pair of scissors on his knee, and persisted in his violent pursuit of the beautiful. Meanwhile his room-mate, Plain Smith, flapped the pages of a Latin lexicon or took a little recreation by reading the Rev. Mr. Todd's Students' Manual, that gem of the alarm-clock and water-bucket epoch in American colleges.
Carl never understood Genie Linderbeck's conviction that words are living things that dream and sing and battle. But he did learn that there was speech transcending the barking of the Gang.
In the spring of his freshman year Carl gave up waiting on table and drove a motor-car for a town banker. He learned every screw and spring in the car. He also made Genie go out with him for track athletics. Carl won his place on the college team as a half-miler, and viciously assaulted two freshmen and a junior for laughing at Genie's legs, which stuck out of his large running-pants like straws out of a lemonade-glass.
In the great meet with Hamlin University, though Plato lost most of the events, Carl won the half-mile race. He was elected to the exclusive fraternity of Ray Cowles and Howard Griffin, Omega Chi Delta, just before Commencement. That excited him less than the fact that the Turk and he were to spend the summer up north, in the hard-wheat country, stringing wire for the telephone company with a gang of Minneapolis wiremen.
Oh yes. And he would see Gertie in Joralemon.... She had written to him with so much enthusiasm when he had won the half-mile.
CHAPTER VII
He saw Gertie two hours after he had reached Joralemon for a week's stay before going north. They sat in rockers on the grass beside her stoop. They were embarrassed, and rocked profusely and chattily. Mrs. Cowles was surprised and not much pleased to find him, but Gertie murmured that she had been lonely, and Carl felt that he must be nobly patient under Mrs. Cowles's slight. He got so far as to sigh, "O Gertie!" but grew frightened, as though he were binding himself for life. He wished that Gertie were not wearing so many combs stuck all over her pompadoured hair. He noted that his rocker creaked at the joints, and thought out a method of strengthening it by braces. She bubbled that he was going to be the Big Man in his class. He said, "Aw, rats!" and felt that his collar was too tight.... He went home. His father remarked that Carl was late for supper, that he had been extravagant in Plato, and that he was unlikely to make money out of "all this runnin' races." But his mother stroked his hair and called him her big boy.... He tramped out to Bone Stillman's shack, impatient for the hand-clasp of the pioneer, and grew eloquent, for the first time since his home-coming, as he described Professor Frazer and the delights of poesy. A busy week Carl had in Joralemon. Adelaide Benner gave a porch-supper for him. They sat under the trees, laughing, while in the dimly lighted street bicycles whirred, and box-elders he had always known whispered that this guest of honor was Carl Ericson, come home a hero.
The cycling craze still existed in Joralemon. Carl rented a wheel for a week from the Blue Front Hardware Store. Once he rode with a party of boys and girls to Tamarack Lake. Once he rode to Wakamin with Ben Rusk, home from Oberlin College. The ride was not entirely enjoyable, because Oberlin had nearly two thousand students and Ben was amusedly superior about Plato. They did, however, enjoy the stylishness of buying bottles of strawberry pop at Wakamin.