"You wouldn't," snapped Carl, and rammed his way out, making wistful boyish plans to go to Frazer with devotion and offers of service in a fight whose causes grew more confused to him every moment. Beside him, as he hurried off to football practice, strode a big lineman of the junior cla.s.s, cajoling:

"Calm down, son. You can't lick the whole college."

"But it makes me so sore----"

"Oh, I know, but it strikes me that no matter how much you like Frazer, he was going pretty far when he said that anarchists had more sense than decent folks."

"He didn't! You didn't get him. He meant----O Lord, what's the use!"

He did not say another word as they hastened to the gymnasium for indoor practice.

He was sure that they who knew of his partisanship would try to make him lose his temper. "Dear Lord, please just let me take out just one bonehead and beat him to a pulp, and then I'll be good and not open my head again," was his perfectly reverent prayer as he stripped before his locker.

Carl and most of the other subst.i.tutes had to wait, and most of them gossiped of the lecture. They all greedily discussed Frazer's charge that some member of the corporation owned saloon lots, and tried to decide who it was, but not one of them gave Frazer credit. Twenty times Carl wanted to deny; twenty times speech rose in him so hotly that he drew a breath and opened his mouth; but each time he muttered to himself: "Oh, shut up! You'll only make 'em worse." Students who had attended the lecture declared that Professor Frazer had advocated bomb-throwing and obscenity, and the others believed, marveling, "Well, well, well, well!" with unctuous appreciation of the scandal.

Still Carl sat aloof on a pair of horizontal bars, swinging his legs with agitated quickness, while the others covertly watched him--slim, wire-drawn, his china-blue eyes blurred with fury, his fair Norse skin glowing dull red, his chest strong under his tight football jersey; a clean-carved boy.

The rubber band of his nose-guard snapped harshly as he plucked at it, playing a song of hatred on that hard little harp.

An insignificant thing made him burst out. Tommy La Croix, the French Canuck, a quick, grinning, evil-spoken, tobacco-chewing, rather likeable young thug, stared directly at Carl and said, loudly: "'Nother thing I noticed was that Frazer didn't have his pants pressed. Funny, ain't it, that when even these dudes from Yale get to be cranks they're short on baths and tailors?"

Carl slid from the parallel bars. He walked up to the line of subst.i.tutes, glanced sneeringly along them, dramatized himself as a fighting rebel, remarked, "Half of you are too dumm to get Frazer, and the other half are old-woman gossips and ought to be drinking tea,"

and gloomed away to the dressing-room, while behind him the subst.i.tutes laughed, and some one called: "Sorry you don't like us, but we'll try to bear up. Going to lick the whole college, Ericson?"

His ears burned, in the dressing-room. He did not feel that they had been much impressed.

To tell the next day or two in detail would be to make many books about the mixed childishness and heroic fineness of Carl's partisanship; to repeat a thousand rumors running about the campus to the effect that the faculty would demand Frazer's resignation; to explain the reason why Frazer's charge that a Plato director owned land used by saloons was eagerly whispered for a little while, then quite forgotten, while Frazer's reputation as a "crank" was never forgotten, so much does muck resent the muck-raker; to describe Carl's brief call on Frazer and his confusing discovery that he had nothing to say; to repeat the local paper's courageous reports of the Frazer affair, Turk's great oath to support Frazer "through h.e.l.l and high water," Turk's repeated defiance: "Well, by golly! we'll show the mutts, but I wish we could _do_ something"; to chronicle dreary cla.s.ses whose dullness was evident to Carl, now, after his interest in Frazer's lectures.

Returning from Genie Linderbeck's room, Carl found a letter from Gertie Cowles on the black-walnut hat-rack. Without reading it, but successfully befooling himself into the belief that he was glad to have it, he went whistling up to his room.

Ray Cowles and Howard Griffin, those great seniors, sat tilted back in wooden chairs, and between them was the lord of the world, Mr.

Bjorken, the football coach, a large, amiable, rather religious young man, who believed in football, foreign missions, and the Democratic party.

"h.e.l.lo! Waiting for me or the Turk?" faltered Carl, gravely shaking hands all round.

"Just dropped up to see you for a second," said Mr. Bjorken.

"Sorry the Turk wasn't here." Carl had an ill-defined feeling that he wanted to keep them from becoming serious as long as he could.

Ray Cowles cleared his throat. Never again would the black-haired Adonis, blossom of the flower of Joralemon, be so old and sadly sage as then. "We want to talk to you seriously about something--for your own sake. You know I've always been interested in you, and Howard, and course we're interested in you as frat brothers, too. For old Joralemon and Plato, eh? Mr. Bjorken believes--might as well tell him now, don't you think, Mr. Bjorken?"

The coach gave a regally gracious nod. Hitching about on the wood-box, Carl felt the bottom drop out of his anxious stomach.

"Well, Mr. Bjorken thinks you're practically certain to make the team next year, and maybe you may even get put in the Hamlin game for a few minutes this year, and get your P."

"Honest?"

"Yes, if you do something for old Plato, same 's you expect her to do something for you." Ray was quite sincere. "But not if you put the team discipline on the b.u.m and disgrace Omega Chi. Of course I can't speak as an actual member of the team, but still, as a senior, I hear things----"

"How d'you mean 'disgrace'?"

"Don't you know that because you've been getting so savage about Frazer the whole team 's getting mad?" said the coach. "Cowles and Griffin and I have been talking over the whole proposition. Your boosting Frazer----"

"Look here," from Carl, "I won't crawl down on my opinion about Frazer. Folks haven't understood him."

"Lord love you, son," soothed Howard Griffin, "we aren't trying to change your opinion of Frazer. We're, your friends, you know. We're proud of you for standing up for him. Only thing is, now that he's practically fired, just tell me how it's going to help him or you or anybody else, now, to make everybody sore by roasting them because they can't agree with you. Boost; don't knock! Don't make everybody think you're a crank."

"To be frank," added Mr. Bjorken, "you're just as likely to hurt Frazer as to help him by stirring up all this bad blood. Look here. I suppose that if the faculty had already fired Frazer you'd still go ahead trying to buck them."

"Hadn't thought about it, but suppose I would."

"Afraid it might be that way. But haven't you seen by this time about how much good it does for one lone soph.o.m.ore to try and run the faculty?" It was the coach talking again, but the gravely nodding mandarin-like heads of Howard and Ray accompanied him. "Mind you, I don't mean to disparage you personally, but you must admit that you can't hardly expect to boss everything. Just what good 'll it do to go on shouting for Frazer? Quite aside from the question of whether he is likely to get fired or not."

"Well," grunted Carl, nervously ma.s.saging his chin, "I don't know as it will do any direct good--except maybe waking this darn conservative college up a little; but it does make me so dog-gone sore----"

"Yes, yes, we understand, old man," the coach said, "but on the other hand here's the direct good of sitting tight and playing the game.

I've heard you speak about Kipling. Well, you're like a young officer--a subaltern they call it, don't they?--in a Kipling story, a fellow that's under orders, and it's part of his game to play hard and keep his mouth shut and to not criticize his superior officers, ain't it?"

"Oh, I suppose so, but----"

"Well, it's just the same with you. Can't you see that? Think it over.

What would you think of a lieutenant that tried to boss all the generals? Just same thing.... Besides, if you sit tight, you can make the team this year, I can practically promise you that. Do understand this now; it isn't a bribe; we want you to be able to play and _do_ something for old Plato in a _real_ way--in athletics. But you most certainly can't make the team if you're going to be a disorganizer."

"All we want you to do," put in Ray Cowles, "is not to make a public spectacle of yourself--as I'm afraid you've been doing. Admire Frazer all you want to, and talk about him to your own bunch, and don't back down on your own opinions, only don't think you've got to go round yelling about him. People get a false idea of you. I hate to have to tell you this, but several of the fellows, even in Omega Chi, have spoken about you, and wondered if you really were a regular crank. 'Of course he isn't, you poor cheese,' I tell 'em, but I can't be around to answer every one all the time, and you can't lick the whole college; that ain't the way the world does things. You don't know what a bad impression you make when you're too brash. See how I mean?"

As the council of seers rose, Carl timidly said to Ray, "Straight, now, have quite a lot of the fellows been saying I was a goat?"

"Good many, I'm afraid. All talking about you.... It's up to you. All you got to do is not think you know it all, and keep still. Keep still till you understand the faculty's difficulties just a little better.

Savvy? Don't that sound fairly reasonable?"

CHAPTER X

They were gone. Carl was full of the nauseating shame which a matter-of-fact man, who supposes that he is never pilloried, knows when a conscientious friend informs him that he has been observed, criticized; that his enthusiasms have been regarded as eccentricities; his affectionate approaches toward friendship as impertinence.

There seemed to be hundreds of people in the room, nudging one another, waiting agape for him to do something idiotic; a well-advertised fool on parade. He stalked about, now shamefaced, now bursting out with a belligerent, "Aw, rats! I'll show 'em!" now plaintively beseeching, "I don't suppose I am helping Frazer, but it makes me so darn sore when n.o.body stands up for him--and he teaches stuff they need so much here. Gee! I'm coming to think this is a pretty rough-neck college. He's the first teacher I ever got anything out of--and----Oh, hang it! what 'd I have to get mixed up in all this for, when I was getting along so good? And if it isn't going to help him----"

His right hand became conscious of Gertie's letter crumpled in his pocket. As turning the letter over and over gave him surprisingly small knowledge of its contents, he opened it:

DEAR CARL,--You are just _silly_ to tease me about any bank clerk. I don't like him any more at all and he can go with Linda all he likes, much I care!