 CHAPTER VI PLATAL COLLEGE, MINISOTA IS AS EARNEST AND UNDISTINGUISHED AS PROVENTUALLY DULL AND PATHETICALLY HUMAN, AS A SPINCER MISSIONARY, HITS two hundred or two hundred and fifty students, come from the furrows asking for spiritual bread, and they are giving a Greek root. Red brick buildings designed by the architect of county jails are grouped about that high bear cupola crown gray stone barracks, the academic building, like red and faded blossoms about a tombstone. In the air is the scent of crab-apples and medowy prairies, for a time but soon settles down a winter bitterer of the learning of the Reverend S. Alcott Wood, D.D., the president. The town and college of Plato disturb the expanse of prairie scarce more than a group of haste-acts. 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 bedsheet, no shelter for the warm and timid soul, yet no windy peak for the bold. The snow wipes out all the summertime individuality of the place, and the halls are loner and dusk than the prairie itself. Far loner 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 classrooms of victims of education, see the rippling wheat in summer and in winter, the impenerable wall of the sky, footsteps and quick laughter of men and girls, furtively furlicking 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 Erickson, descending from the dusty smoking-car of the M&D Inn 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 what Minneapolis and Chicago must be. Two men and sweaters adorned with the large P. athletes, generals, heroes, walked the streets in the flesh and he saw. It really was there, for him, the college bookstore, whose windows were filled with leather-backed treatsies on Greek logic and trigonometry and finally he was gaping through a sandstone gateway at four buildings, each of them nearly as big as Girolam 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 eyeglasses, an aged old man who might easily be a professor. A Blythe student with Y. M. C. A. reception committee, large on his handband, 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 Academia, in Arcadia, in Elsium, 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 for $1.75 a week for his share of the rent. That implied taking with the room a large, solemn roommate, braced from teaching country school a heavy, slow-spoken, serious man of thirty-one named Albert Smith, registered as A. Smith and usually known as Plainsmith. Plainsmith 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 Academia, I hope you ain't going to bother me by singing and sky-locking 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 wallpaper, the faded grass matting, the shallow, standing wardrobe, he liked the house, however, and had a real bathroom. He could, for the first time in his life, splash in a tub. Perhaps it would not be regarded as modern today perhaps a feet' soles would disdain its honest tin tub smeared with a paint that peeled instantly. But it was elegance in the hisperities compared with the sponge and two large pales of hot water from the Erickson kitchen reservoir, which had for years been his conception of luxurious means of bathing. Also there were choicers' 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 dowrly forbidden to all plain atonians, the sophomore's room was a refuge. The sophomore encouraged Carl and his natural talent for stupeful noise 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 play-doh, where the young men were pure and smoke-not, neither did they drink, where evening clothes were snobbish and sweaters thought rather well of, where the only theatrical attractions were weak-stand melodramas, playing such attractions as Poor but True, or the reverend Sam J. Patkins' celebrated lecture on The Father of Lies, annually delivered at the I.O.O.F. Hall. His 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 out about the corner drug-store, drink coffee, soda, and to scuth athletics and stare at the passing girls. He loved to set off his clear skin and shining pale hair with linen collars. Those soft-rule collar shirts were in vogue. But 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 turkey cigarettes, and drink beer. They always chorused play-doh songs in long, drawn, close harmony, once they had imported English ale out of the bottle, 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 the hair over the range. She did suggest that they kindly wash up a few of the dishes now and then before they went gallivanting off. But songs arose from the freshman-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 pussycat, a gilded-rope potterie, a comfortable rocker with a plateau cushion, a garland stove with nickel ornaments, two geraniums, and an oak-famed photograph of the champion plateau football team of 1899. Carl was readily accepted by the men and girls who gathered about the piano in the evening, his graceful singing-body, his puppy-ish awkwardness, his quietly belligerent dignity, his eternal quest of new things, one him respect. Though he was too boyish to rouse admiration except in the breast of fat, pretty, cheerful, fuzzy-haired, candy-eating May Thurerson, May so influenced Carl that he learned to jest casually, and he practiced a new dance called the Boston, which May had brought from Minneapolis. Though his arrival to the waltz and the two-step, the new dance was ridiculed by everyone. He mastered all the severe fare of the boarding-house, but he was always hurrying away from it to practice football, to prowl about the plateau powerhouse, to skim through magazines in the YMCA reading-room, even to study. From the dishwashing and furnace-tending set he had no probable social future, though everybody knew everybody at plateau. Those immaculate upperclassmen, Murray Cowles and Howard Griffin, never invited him to their room in a house on Elm Street with a screen porch and piano sounds. He missed Ben Rusk, who had gone to Oberlin College and Joe Jordan, who had gone to work for the Jorleman Specialty Manufacturing Company. Life at plateau 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 venerable military drill in the conjunction of Greek verbs conducted by a man with a non-com soul, a pompous sandy-whiskered mannequin with cold eyes, and a perpetual cold in the nose, who had inflicted upon a patient world the four-millionth cometary on Xenophen. 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 neighbor seriously, whether one lives in Plato or Persia, in Mrs. Harnickle's kitchen, or a farcussel. The Platonians, raced toward their various goals of high school teaching or law or marriage, were permanently escaping their parents. They made love, they were lazy in eight, 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 rodwiche freshmen who called themselves the gang, and loathed about the room of their own official 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 debilatory, and considerable promise as a football-end. Most small local colleges, and many good ones, had their gangs of boys who presumably come honorable men and fathers. Yet who in college days regarded as heroic to sneak out and break things, and as humorous to lead contraside girls astray in sore demors. The more cloistered the seat of learning, the more vicious are the active boys to keep up with the swiftness of life-forces. The Turks 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 as the exquisite stuff from dowdy leaves, so youth finds beauty and mystery in stupid days. Carl went out unreservedly to practice 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. Bajorcan, a coach, a former University of Minnesota told him that he might actually make the team in a year or two. That he had twice as much chance as Ray Collins, 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 cheerleader 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, was sunset fuller and behind bare trees. The veteran cheerleader flung the horse-plato-routers into another defiant yell. It was the never-say-die of men who rose with clenched hands and arms outstretched to the despiring need of their college. Then Lord! They hurled up to their feet in frenzy as Pete Midland got away with the ball for a long run in victory. The next week, when the University of Kiukok whipped them forty to ten, Carl stood weeping and cheering the defeated Plato team till his throat burned. He loved the laughter of the Turk, May Thurston's welcome experiments in the physical laboratory, and he was sure that he was progressing toward the state of grace in which he might aspire to marry Gertie Cowells. 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 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, loving place in the Turk's room, but his own lungs demanded the open. With his heavy boots washing 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 Hewathamound, a hill eight miles north of Plato. At the top a man was to be seen crouched in a pebbly sunny aroyal, peering across the bleak prairie, a lone watcher. Ascending Carl saw that it was Eugene Field Linderbeck, a Plato freshman. Unmused him, he grinningly planned the conversation. Everyone said that Jeanne 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, found of drinking tea and a void of merit in the three manly arts, athletics, flirting, and breaking rules by smoking. Jeanne was small, anemic, and too well dressed. He stuttered slightly and was always peering doubly 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 wearing of the jest, they shattered him to find out if he did not write poetry, and while no one had actually caught him, he was still suspect. Jeanne said nothing when Carl called, Hello, son, and sat on a neighboring rock. What's trouble, Jeanne? You look worried. Why don't any of you fellows like me? Carl felt like a bug inspected by a German professor. What do you mean, Jeanne? 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, Erickson. Darn it! I was happy out here by myself on the mound, where every prospect pleases, and now here I am again, and being you. Why, son, I guess we admire you a whole lot more than we let on. Triple, 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 Ginny Linderbreck. You've helped me a thundering lot. Whenever I've asked you about that plain Greek syntax, I guess we're jealous of you. You don't want to let him kid you. Carl was embarrassed before Jeanne's steady youthful trusting gaze. He stooped for a handful of pebbles with which he pelted the landscape, mondering, Say, why don't you come around to the Turk's room and get better acquainted with the gang? When shall I come? Where? Why, thunder, you know, Jeanne just drop in at 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 Jeanne, but he was game. Come up to our 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 on, put in 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 tonight. I wish you'd come up to Mr. Frazier's with me some Sunday afternoon for tea, Erickson. Henry Frazier 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 litigants and communists. 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 reverend, Dr. S. Alcott Wood, had no patience with such silly fans. Carl Marrill. Do you go to Frazier's? Why, yes. I 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, Pipe Genie in his most childish tone of anger, his tendency to stammer-betraying him, kid me for liking Frazier. He's the only teacher here that isn't p-p-p-p-p-spit. Provincial. What do you mean by provincial? Narrow, villergy. Do you know what Bernard Shaw says? Never read a word of him, my son. Let me tell you that my idea of no kind of conversation is to have a guy spring half you read on me every few seconds and me coming back with no habit. Ain't it interesting? If that's the brand of converse at Prof Frazier's, you can count me out. Genie laughed. Think how much more novelty you'll get out of roasting me like that than telling Terry he's got bats in his bell-ray ten or twelve times a day. All right, my son, you win. Maybe I'll go to Frazier's with you some time. The Sunday following Carl went to tea at Professor Henry Frazier's. The house was plaitoning 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 ever seen. In accordance with the ideal of that era, it had mission furniture, with large leather cushions, brown woodwork, and tan oatmeal paper scattered with German color prints, instead of the patent rockers and carbon prints of Roman monuments which adorn the houses of the other professors. While waiting with Genie Linderbank for the Frazier 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 terracotta and olive green cloth, with intricate gold designs, heavy-looking, but astonishingly light to the hand. Books about Celtic legends and provincial junglers and Japanese prints and other matters of which he had never heard. So different from the stained textbooks and the shallow novels by brisk ladies which had constituted his experiences of literature that he suddenly believed in culture. Professor Frazier appeared, walking into the room after his fragile wife and gracious sister-in-law. And Carl drank tea, with lemonice and a milk in it, and listened to bewildering talk and to a few stanzas, heroic or hauntingly musical, by a new poet, W. B. Yates, and Irishmen associated with the thing called the Gaelic Movement. Professor Frazier had a funny, easy friendliness, his sister-in-law, a Diana in brown, respectfully asked Carl about the practicability of motorcars and all of them, including two newly-come highbrow 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 McDowell, and the light of the silken-shaded lamp was on a print of a very Swiss village. That evening Carl wrestled with the Turk for one hour, catches catch can on the Turk's bed and under it, and nearly out the window to prove the value of Professor Frazier in culture. Next morning Carl and the Turk enrolled in Frazier's optional course in Modern Poetry, a desolatory series of lectures, which did not attempt Tennyson and Browning, so Carl discovered Shelley and Keats and Walt Whitman, Swineburn and Rosetti and Morris. He had to read by crawling from word to word as though they were ice-cakes in a cataract of emotion. The elusiveness was agonizing, but he pulled off his shoes, rested his feet on the footboard of his bed, drummed with a pair of scissors on his knee, and persisted in his violent pursuit of the beautiful. Meanwhile, his roommate, Plain Smith, flapped the pages of a Latin lexicon or took a little recreation by reading the Reverend Mr. Todd's student's manual, that gem of the alarm clock, and Water Bucket Epic in American colleges. Carl never understood, Genie Linderbuck'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-myler 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 Chai Delta, just before commencement. That excited him less than the fact that they 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 Charlemagne. She had written to him with so much enthusiasm when he had won the half-mile. THE TRAIL OF THE HAWK By Sinclair Lewis, Chapter 7 He saw Gertie two hours after he reached Doroleum. 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 chatterly. 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' sight. He got so far as to say, oh, 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 pompadourd hair. He noted that he's rocker-creaked at the joints and thought out a method of straightening it by braces. She bubbled that he was going to be the big man on campus. He said, ah, 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 at Gravageddon Plateau, and that he was unlikely to make money out of all his runnin' races. But his mother stroked his hair and called him her big boy. He tramped out to Bone Stillman Shack, impatient for the hand-clasp of the pioneer, and grew eloquent for the first time since his homecoming, as he described Professor Fraser and the Delights of Poetry. A busy week Carl had in Jorolman, Adelaide Benner gave a porch supper for him. They sat under the trees, laughing while the dimly-lighted street-bicycle's word, and box-elters he had always known, whispered, that his guest of honour was Carl Erickson, come home a hero. The cycling craze still existed in Jorolman. 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 Walkman, 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 Plateau. They did, however, enjoy the stylishness of buying bottles of strawberry pop at Walkman. Twice Carl rode to Tamarack Lake with Gertie. They sat on the shore, and while he shied flat, skipping stones across the water, and flapped his old cap at the hovering horse-flies, he babbled of the Turk stunts, and the banker's car, and the misty hinterlands of Professor Frazier's lectures. Gertie appeared interested and smiled at regular intervals. But so soon as Carl fumbled at one of Frazier's abstract theories, she interrupted him with highly concrete Jerusalem gossip. He suspected that she had not kept up with the times. True, she referred to New York, but as the reference was one she had been using for two years, he still identified her with Chiroloman. He did not hold her hand, though he wondered if it might not be possible. Her hand lay so listlessly by her skirt on the sand. They rode back in twilight of early June. Carl was cheerful as their wheels crunched the dirt roads in a long, crisp hum. The stilly rhythm of frogs drowned the clank of their petals, and the sky was vast and pale and wistful. Gertie, however, seemed less cheerful. On the last evening of his stay in Chiroloman, Gertie gave him a hay-ride party. They sang, Seeing Nelly Home and Merrily We Roll Long and Shawani River, and my whole Kentucky home and my Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean, and in the good old summer time, under a delicate new moon and a sky of apple-green. Carl pressed Gertie's hand. She returned the pressure so quickly that he was embarrassed. He withdrew his hand as quickly as possible. Oppositely, to help with the unpacking of the basket of ginger ale, chicken sandwiches, and three cakes, white-frosted chocolate layer and banana cake. The same group said goodbye to Carl at the M&D station. As the train started, Carl saw Gertie turn away disconsolently. Her shoulders so drooping that her blouse was baggy in the back. He mourned that he had not been more tender with her that week. He pictured himself kissing Gertie on the shore of Tamarack Lake, enfolded by afternoon in the mystery of sex and a protecting reverence for Gertie's loneliness. He wanted to go back, back for one more day, one more ride with Gertie. But he picked up a Mechanics magazine glanced at an article on gliders, read in the first paragraph a prophecy about aviation, slid down in his seat with his head bent over the magazine, and the idol of Gertie in the afternoon was gone. He was reading the article on gliders in June 1905, so early in the history of air conquest, that its suggestions were miraculous to him. For it was three years before Wilbur Wright was to startle the world by his flights at Le Mans, four years before Berlois, was to cross the Channel, though indeed it was a year and a half after the Wright's first secret assent in a motor-driven aeroplane at Kitty Hawk, and fourteen years after Lydenthal had begun that equivocal series of glider flights, which was followed by the experiments of Pilcher and Junot, Langley and Montgomery. The article declared that if gasoline or alcohol engines could be made light enough, we should all be aviating to the office in ten years. That now was the time for youngsters to practice gliding as pioneers of the New Age. Carl guessed that flying would be even better than automobile-ing. He made designs for three revolutionary new airplanes, drawing on the margins of the magazine with a tooth-marked pitted pencil-scrub. Gertie was miles back, concealed behind piles of tri-planes and helicopters, and following surface monoplanes, which the wizard-inventor C. Erickson was creating and ruthlessly destroying. A small boy was squalling in the seat opposite, and Carl took him from his tired mother and lured him into a game of tic-tac-toe. He joined the Turk and the wire-stringers at a prairie hamlet, straggly rows of unpainted frame shanties, the stores with tin, conical, dulse fronts, that pretended to be two stories high. There were pig-pens in the door-yards and the single church that had a square, low, white steeple, like the paper cap which Labor wears in the posters. Farm wagons were hitched before a gloomy saloon. Carl was exceedingly glum, but the Turk introduced him to a University of Minnesota Farmersley School student who was with the crew during the vacation, and the three went cramping across breezy, flowered prairies. So began for Carl a galloping summer. The crew strung telephone wire from pole to pole all day. Playing the jokes of hearty men and on Sunday, Loth din haystacks recalling experiences from Winnipeg to El Paso. Carl resolved to come back to this life of the open, with Gertie after graduation. He would buy a ranch on time, or the Turk and Carl would go exploring in Alaska, or the Orient. Law? He would ask himself in monologues, Law? Me in a stuffy office? Not a chance. The crew stayed for four weeks in a boomtown of nine thousand, installing a complete telephone system. Southeast of the town lay rolling hills as Carl talked with the Turk and the Farmersley School man on a hilltop the first evening of their arrival. He told them the scientific magazine's prophecies about aviation, and noted that these hills were of the sort Lillianthol would probably have chosen for his glider flights. Say, by the great gem hill, let's make us a glider. He exalted, sitting up his eyelids flapping rapidly. Sure, said the Farmersley man. How would you, uh, make one? Why, uh, I guess you could make a frame on a willow. Have to. The willows, long the creeks here, are the only kind of trees near here. You'd cover it with varnished cotton. That's what Lillianthol did, anyway. But darned if I know how you'd make the planes curved, cambered, like he did. You've got to have it that way. I suppose you'd use curved stays, like a quarter barrel hoop. I guess it would be better to try to make a Chinook glider. Just a plain pair of superimposed planes, instead of one all comb-bobulated like, uh, bat's wings, like Lillianthol's glider. Or we could try some experiments with paper models. Oh no, thunder. Let's make a glider. They did. They studied with aching heads, the dry looking tables of lift and resistance for which Carl telegraphed to Chicago. Stripped to their undershirts, they worked all through the hot prairie evenings in the oil-smelling greasy engine room of the local powerhouse. In front of the dynamoes, which kept eagerly throwing out green sparks and rumbling the mystic syllable, to greet their modern magic. They hunted for three-quarters-inch willow rods, but discarded them for seasoned ash from the lumberyard. They coated cotton with thin varnish. They stopped to dispute furiously over angles of incidence, bellowing, Well, look here, then. You muttonhead. I'll draw it for you. On their last Sunday in the town, they assembled the glider, single-surfaced, like a monoplane, twenty-two feet in span with a tail and with a double bar beneath the plane by which the pilot was to hang, his hands holding cords attached to the entering edge of the plane, balancing the glider-byte movements of his body. At dawn on Monday, they loaded the glider upon a wagon and galloped with it to a forty-foot hill, as they stared down the easy slope which grew in steepness and length every second and thought about Lilienthal's death. Well, shivered the trick. Who tries it first? All three pretended to be adjusting the lashings, waiting for one another till Carl snarled. Oh, all right. I'll do it, if I got to. Of course, it breaks my heart to see you swipe the honor, the Turk said. But I'm unselfish. I'll let you do it. Brrr, it's as bad as the first jump into the swimming-hole at spring. Carl was smiling at the comparison, as they lifted the glider, with him holding the bars beneath. The plane was instantly buoyed up like a cork on water, as the fifteen-mile headwind poured under it. He stopped smiling. This was a dangerous, living thing he was going to guide. It jerked at him as he slipped his arms over the suspended bars. He wanted to stop and think this all over. Get her done. He snapped at himself and began to run downhill against the wind. The wind lifted the plane again. With a shock, Carl knew that his feet had left the ground. He was actually flying. He kicked wildly in the air, all his body strained to get balance in the air to control itself, to keep from falling, of which he now felt the world-old instinctive horror. The plane began to tip to one side, apparently irresistibly, like a sheet of paper turning over in the wind. Carl was sick with fear for a tenth of a second. Every cell in his body shrank before coming disaster. He flung his legs in the directions opposite to the tipping of the plane. With his counterbalancing weight, the glider righted. It was running on an even keel, twenty-five feet above the sloping ground, while Carl hung easily by the double bar beneath. Like a circus performer, with a trapeze under each arm, he ventured to glance down. The turf was flowing beneath him. A green and sunny blur, he exalted. Flying, the glider dipped forward, Carl leaned back. His arms widespread, a gust of wind struck the plane head on. Overloaded at the back, it tilted back and soared up, to thirty-five or forty feet. Slow, seeming, inevitable, the whole structure turned vertically upward. Carl dangled there against a flimsy sheet of wood and cotton, which, for part of a second, stuck straight up against the wind. Like a paper on a screen door. The plane turned turtle, slithered sideways through this air, and dropped, horizontal now, but upside down. Carl on top, thirty-five, forty feet down. Arm up against it, was his only thought while he was falling. The left tip of the plane smashed against the ground, crashing horribly, jarring, but it broke the fall. Carl shot forward and landed on his shoulder. He got up, rubbing his shoulder, wandering at the suspended life in the faces of the other two as they ran downhill toward him. Jiminy said. Glad the glider broke the fall. Wish we had time to make a new glider with wing warp. Say, we'll be late on the job. Better beat it, PDQ. The other stood gaping. A pile of shoes and nose guards and bicycle pumps and broken hockey sticks. A wall covered with such stolen signs as East College Avenue, and pants presser, ladies garments, carefully done. And Dr. Sloat's liniment for young and old. A broken back couch, with a red and green afghan of mangy tassels. An ink-spattered wooden table, burned in small black spots along the edges, a plaster bust of Martha Washington, with a mustache added in ink. A few books, an inundation of sweaters and old hats. And a large, expansive mouth-hargan. Such were a few of the interesting characteristics of the room, which Carl and the Turk were occupying as roommates for sophomore year at Plato. Most objectable sounds came from the room, constantly. The gang's song suggested blaster, imitations of cats and foals and foghorns. These noises were less ingenuous, however, than the devices of the gang for getting rid of tobacco smoke, such as blowing the smoke up the stove. Carl was happy. In this room he encouraged dammering Jeannie Lindermbeck to become adaptable. Here he scribbled to Gertie and Ben Rusk little notes decorated with badly drawn caricatures of himself loafing. Here with the Turk he talked out half the night, planning future glory in engineering. Carl adored the Turk for his frankness, his lively speech, his interest in mechanics, and in Carl. Carl was still out for football, but he was rather light for a team largely composed of 180-pound Norwegians. He had a chance, however, he drove the banker's car two or three evenings a week and cared for the banker's lawn and furnace and cow. He still boarded at Mrs. Henkel's, as did Jolly May Thurson, whom he took for surreptitious rides in the banker's car, after which he wrote extra long and pleasant letters to Gertie. It was becoming harder and harder to write to Gertie, because he had, in his freshman year, exhausted all things one can say about the weather without being profane, when in October a new bank clerk stormed meteor-like into the Jerusalem social horizon and became devoted to Gertie, as faithfully reported in letters from Joe Jordan. Carl was melancholy over the loss of a comrade. But he strictly confined his morning to leisure hours and with books, football, and chores. For the banker, he was a busy young man. After about ten days it was a relief not to have to plan letters to Gertie. The emotions that should have gone to her Carl devoted to Professor Fraser's new course in modern drama. This course was officially announced as a study of Bernard Shaw, Lisbon, Steinberg, Panero, Hopmanon, Studerman, Malarctic, Dionzio, and Ruston. But unofficially announced by Professor Fraser as an attempt to follow the spirit of today, wherever it should be found in contemporary literature. Carl and a Turk were bewildered but staunchly enthusiastic disciples of the course. They made every member of the gang enroll in it, and discouraged in attention in the lecture room by dexterous side-kicks. Even to his ex-rummate, Plain Smith, the grim and slovenly school teacher who had called him Bub, and discouraged his confidences, Carl presented the attractions of Professor Fraser's lectures when he met him on campus. Smith looked quizzical and guessed that plays and play-acting were useless, if not actually immoral. Yes, but this isn't just plays, my young friend, said Carl, with a hot turn new, but not exceedingly impressive to Plain Smith. He takes up all these new stunts, all this new philosophy of the stuff they have in London and Paris. There's something besides Shakespeare and the Bible, he added, intending to be spiteful. It may be stated that he did not like Plain Smith. What new philosophy? The spirit of brotherhood, I suppose, you're too orthodox for that. Oh, no, sonny, not for that, not for that. And it ain't so very new. That's what Christ taught. No. Sonny, I ain't so orthodox, but what I'm willing to have him show me anything that tries to advance brotherhood. Not that I think it's very likely to be found in a lot of New York plays. But I'll look at one lesson anyway, and Plain Smith clumped away, humming Greenland's icy mountains. Professor Fraser's modern drama course began with Lisbon. The first five lectures were almost conventional. They were an attempt to place contemporary dramatists with reflections on the box-office standpoint. But his sixth lecture began rather unusually. There was an audience of sixty-four in lecture rooming, earnest girl, students, bringing out notebooks and spectacle cases, frivolous girls feeling their black hair, and the men settling down with the cum. Let's get it over here. Or glowing up worshiply like Eugene Field Lunderbeck. Or determined not to miss anything like Carl. The capteous college audience, credulous, as two statements of fact, and heavily unresponsive to the spirit. Professor Fraser, younger than half a dozen of the plough-trained undergraduates, thin of hair, and sensitive of face, sitting before them, with one hand in his pocket, and the other nervously tapping the small reading-table, spoke quietly. I'm not going to be a lecturer today. I'm not going to analyze the plays of Shaw, which I assigned you. You're supposed to have read them yourselves. I am going to imagine that I am at T. in New Haven, or down in New York, at dinner in the basement of the old Rev. Root, talking with a bunch of men who are trying to find out where the world is going, and why, and when, and how, and asking who are the prophets who are going to show it the way. We'll be getting excited over Sean Wells. There's something really worth getting excited over. These men have perceived that this world is not a crazy quilt of unrelated races, but a collection of human beings, completely related, with all our interests, food, and ambitions, and a desire to play absolutely in common, so that if we should take thought altogether and work together, as the football team does, we would start making a perfect world. That's what socialism of which you're beginning to hear so much, and of which you're going to hear so much more, means. If you feel genuine impelled to vote the Republican ticket, that's not my affair, of course. Indeed, the Socialist Party of this country constitutes only one branch of international socialism. But I do demand of you that you try to think for yourselves. If you are going to have the nerve to vote at all, think of it, to vote how this whole nation is to be conducted. Doesn't that tremendous responsibility demand that you do something more than inherit your way of voting? That you really think, think hard. Why you vote as you do. Pardon me for getting away from the subject proper. Yet, am I actually? For just what I have been saying is one of the messages of Shaw and Wells. The great vision of the glory that shall be, not in one sudden millennium, but slowly advancing toward joys of life, which we can know more provision than the Arab original medicine man could imagine in X-ray. I wish that this were the time and the place to rhapsodize about that vision, as William Morris has done, in news from nowhere. You tell me that the various brands of Socialists differ so much in their beliefs about their future that the bewildered layman can make nothing at all of their theories. Very well. They differ so much because there are so many different things we can do with this human race. The defeat of death, the life period advancing to ten score years all crowded with happy activity. The solution of labor's problem, increasing safety and decreasing hours of toil, and a way out of the unhappy consumer who is ground between labor and capital. A real democracy, and the love of work that shall come when work is not relegated to wage slaves, but joyously shared in a community inclusive of the living beings of all nations. France and Germany, uniting precisely as Saxony and Prussia and Bavaria have united, and most of all, a general realizat, on that the fact that we cannot accomplish all these things at once does not indicate that they are hopeless. An understanding that one of the wonders of the future is the fact that we shall always, in all stages, have improvements to look forward to. Fellow students, object as strongly as you wage to the petty narrowness and vituperation of certain street corner renters, but do not be petty and narrow and vituperative in doing it. Now, to relate all this to the plays of Bernard Shaw, when he says, Professor Fraser's utterances seem tamely conservative nowadays, but this was in 1905 in a small, intensely religious college among the furrows. Imagine a devout pastor when his son kicks the family Bible and you have the middle state of half the students of Plato upon hearing a defensive socialism. Carl catching echoes of his own talks with Bones Dillman in the lecture, exultantly glanced about and found the class staring at one another with frightened anxiety. He saw the grim plain smith, not so much angry as ill. He saw two class clowns, snickering at the ecstasy in the eyes of Jeannie Linderbeck. In the corner drugstore, popularly known as The Club, where all the college bloods gathered to drink lemon phosphate, an excited old man, whose timeless collar was almost concealed by his tobacco-stained beard, pushed back his black slouch hat with the G.A.R. cord and banged his fist on the prescription counter shouting, half at the clerk and half at the student's matching pennies on the soda counter. I've lived in Plato, man and boy, for forty-seven years. Ever since it warn't nothing but a frontier trading post. I packed logs on my back and I trapped fifty-three miles to get me a yoke of oxen. I remember when the Indians went riding during the war in the cavalry rode here from St. Paul and this town has always stood for decency and law and order. But when things come to such a past that this fellow freezer or any of the rest of those infidels from one of those here eastern colleges is allowed to stand up on his hind legs in a college building and bray about anarchism and tell us to trample on the old flag that we fought for and none of these professors that call themselves reverents step in and stop them. Then let me tell you I'm about ready to pull up stakes and go out west. Where there's patriotism and decency still, and where they'd hang one of those foreign anarchists to the nearest lamppost. Yes, sir, and this fellow freezer, too, if he encouraged them in their crank notions. Got no right in this country, anyway. Better deport them if they ain't satisfied with the way we run things. I won't stand for preaching anarchism and never knew any decent place to wood. Never since I was a baby in Canada. Yes, sir, I mean it. I'm an old man, but I'll pull up stakes and go plugging down the Santa Fe Trail first. And I mean it. There's your bog bidders, Mr. Goff, said to clerk hastily as a passer-by was drawn into the store by the old man's tirade. Mr. Goff stocked out muttering in the college sports at the soda counter grinned at one another. But Gus Osberg of the junior class remarked to Carl Erickson. At that, though there's a good deal of what to old Goff says. Bet a hat proxy won't stand for prompt Frazier's talking anarchy. Fellow in the class told me it was fierce stuff he was talking. Regular anarchy. Rantz, it wasn't anything of the kind, protested Carl. I was there, and I heard the whole thing. He just explained what this Bernard Shaw that writes plays meant by socialism. Well, even so, don't you think it's kind of unnecessary to talk publicly, right out in the college elected room about socialism? Inquired a senior who was high up in the debating society. Well, thunder! was all Carl said. As the whole group stared at him, he felt ridiculous. He was afraid of seeming to be a crank. He escaped from the drugstore. When he arrived at Mrs. Henkel's boarding-house for supper the next evening, he found the students passing from hand to hand a copy of the town newspaper, the Plateau Weekly Times, which bore on the front page what the town regarded as a red-hot news story. Plateau Professor talks sedaciously. As we go to press, we learn that rumors are flying about the campus that the powers that be are highly incensed by the remarks of a well-known member of the local faculty praising socialism and other form of anarchy. It is said that one of the older members of the faculty will demand from the airing teacher an explanation of his remarks, which are alleged to have taken the form of a defense of the English anarchist Bernard Shaw. Those on the QV are expecting sensational developments and campus talk is so extensively occupied with the discussions of the affair that the important coming game with St. John's College is almost forgotten. While the Times has always supported Plateau College as one of the chief glories in the proud crowd of Minnesota learning, we can but illy stomach such news. It goes without saying that we cannot too strongly disapprove, express our disapproval of such incendiary utterances, and we shall fearlessly report the whole of this fair, let the chips fall where they may. There, Mr. Erickson said Mrs. Henkel, a plump, decent disapproving person who had known too many generations of great Platonians, to be impressed by anything. You see what the public thinks of your Professor Frazier? I told you people wouldn't stomach such news, and I wouldn't wonder if they strongly disapproved. This ain't anything but gossip, said Carl Feebley. But as he read the account in the weekly Times he was sick and frightened. Such was his youthful off-print. He wanted to beat the mossy-whiskered editor of the Times who always had white food stains on his lapels. When he raised his eyes, the coquette made Torsten tried to cheer him. It'll all come out in the wash, Erick. Don't worry. Those editors have to have something to write about or they couldn't fill up the paper. He pressed her foot on the table. He was chatty and helped to keep the general conversation away from the Frazier affair. But he was growing more and more angry, with a desire for effective action which expressed itself within him only by, I'll show him, makes me so sore. Everywhere they discussed, and rediscussed, Professor Frazier, in the dressing-room of the gym-nation where the football squad dressed in the sweat-reaking air, and shouted at one another, balancing each on one leg before small lockers, and rubbing themselves with brown, unclean Turkish towels, and in eight rooms of girl co-eds, with their banners and cushions and pink co-fitters, and, chafing dishes of nut-fudge and photographic postal cards, showing the folks at home, in the close, horse-smelling lamp-robe and whip-skattered office of the town livery-stable, where Mr. Gough droned with the editor of the Times. Everywhere Carl herde echoes and resolved, I've got to do something. Trail of the Hawk by Sinclair Lewis Chapter 9 The day of Professor Frazier's next lecture. A rain-sodden day at the end of October, with the stubble fields bleakly shelterless beyond the campus. The rain splashed up from pools on the worn brick walls, and dripped from trees and whipped about buildings, soaking the legs and leaving them itchingly wet, and the feet sloshingly uncomfortable. Carl returned to his room at one, talked to the Turk, his feet thrust against the side of their rusty stove. He wanted to keep three o'clock the hour of Frazier's lecture from coming. I feel as if I was in for a fight. Scared to death about it. Listen to that rain outside. Gee, but the old dame keeps these windows dirty. I hope Frazier will give it to them. Good and hard. I wish we could applaud him. I do feel funny like something tragic was going to happen. Uh, tie that dog outside, yonder Turk, staunch adherent of Carl, and therefore of Professor Frazier, but not imaginative. Come on, young girl. I'll play you a slick little piece on the mouth organ, eh? Oh, thunder, I'm too restless to listen to anything except a cannon. Carl stumped to the window and pondered on the pool of water, flooding the graying grass stems in the shabby yard. When was time to start Professor Frazier's lecture, the Turk blurted. When we stay away and forget about it. Get off your nerves. Let's go down to the bowling alley and work up a sweat. Not a chance, Turk. He'll want all the supporters he's got, and you'd hate to stay away as much as I would. Feel cheered up now. All ready for the scrap. Yep, come on. All right, Governor. I like a scrap all right, but I don't want to see you get all worked up. Through the rain across the campus, an unusual number of students in shining, cheap, black raincoats were hastening to the three o'clock classes, clattering up the stone steps of the academic building, talking excitingly, glancing up at the orange doors, though they expected to see something startling. Dozens stared at Carl. He felt rather important. It was plain that he was known as a belligerent, a supporter of Professor Frazier. As he came to the door of Lecture Room A., he found that many of the crowd were deserting their proper classes to attend the Frazier event. He bumped down into his own seat, gazing back super-seriously, at the outsiders who were edging into unclaimed seats at the back of the room or standing about the door. Students from the classes, town girls, young instructor in French, German, and music, a couple of town club women in glasses and galoshes, and woolen stockings, bunch of tangles. Everyone was rapidly whispering, watching everyone else, peeping often at the platform in the small door beside it, through which Professor Frazier would enter. Carl had a smile ready for him. But there was no chance that the smile would be seen. There must have been a hundred and fifty in the room, seated and standing, though there were but seventy in the course, and but two hundred and fifty-six students in the whole college that year. Carl looked back. He clenched his fist and potted the soft side of it on his thigh, drawing in his breath, puffing in and out a long, exasperated, hell. For the Greek professor, the commissized, sandy-whiskered marionette to whom nothing that was new was moral, and nothing that was old was to be questioned by any undergraduate, stalked into the room, like indignant Napoleon, posing before two guards and a penguin at St. Helena. A student in a back row, driftily gave the Greek god his seat. The god sat down with a precise nod. Instantly a straggly man with a cellulite collar left the group by the door, whisked over to the Greek professor, and fawned upon him. It was the fearless editor and owner, also a part-time typesetter, of the Plato Weekly Times, who dated back to the days of Washington, flatbed hand presses, and pure Jeffersonian politics, and feared neither man nor devil, though he was uneasy in the presence of his landlady. He obstinately flapped a wand of copy-paper in his left hand, and shook a spatter of ink-drops from a fountain pen as he interviewed the Greek professor, who could be seen answering pompously. Carl was hating them both, fearing the Greek as a faculty spy on Frazier, picturing himself kicking the editor when he was aware of a rustling all over the room, a general returning of heads toward the platform. He turned. He was smiling like a shy child, in his hero worship. Professor Frazier was inconspicuously walking through the low door beside the platform. Frazier's lips were together. He was obviously self-conscious, his motions were jerky. He elaborately did not look at the audience. He literally stumbled upon the steps up to the platform. His hands shook as he drew papers from a leather portfolio, and arranged them on the small reading-table. One of the papers escaped and sailed off the platform nearly to the front row. Nearly every one in the room snickered. Frazier flushed. A girl student in the front row nervously bounded out of her seat, picked up the paper, and handed it up to Frazier. They both fumbled it, and their hands nearly touched. Most of the crowd laughed audibly. Professor Frazier sat down in his low chair, took out his watch, with the twitching hand, and compared his time with the clock at the back of the room, and so closely were the amateur executioners observing their victim, that every eye went back to the clock as well. Even Karl was guilty of that imitation. Consequently, he saw the editor standing at the back, make notes on his copy-paper and smirk like an ill-bred hound, stealing a bone. And the Greek professor stared at Frazier's movements with a grim smugness, that indicated, quite the sort of thing I expected. The Greek's elbows were on the arm of the seat, and he held up before his breast a small red leather-covered notebook, which he supercellishly tapped with a thin pencil. He was waiting, like a judge of the Inquisition. Oh, Greek's going to take notes and make a report to the faculty about what Frazier says, reflected Karl. Fight go and get ahold of his notes and destroy them. Karl turned again. It was just three, Professor Frazier had risen. Usually he sat while lecturing. Fifty whispers commented on that fact. Fifty regular members of the course became self-important through knowing it. Frazier was leaning slightly against the table. It moved an inch or two with his weight. But by this time everyone was too high-strung to laugh. He was pale. He rearranged his papers. He had to clear his throat twice before he could speak. In the now silent, vultureously attentive room, smelling of wet second-rate clothes, the gusty rain could be heard. They all hitched in their seats. Oh, Frazier can't be going to retract, grown Karl, but he's scared. Karl suddenly wished himself away from all this useless conflict, outtramping the wet roads with the turk or sloshing through the puddles at thirty-five miles an hour in the banker's car. He noted stupidly that Ginny Linderbeck's hair was scarcely combed. He found he was saying, Frazier, flunk, flunk, flunk. He's going to flunk, flunk, flunk. Then Frazier spoke. His voice sounded harsh and unrhythmical, but soon swung in to the natural periods of a public speaker as he got into his lecture. My friends, said he, a part of you have come here legitimately to hear a lecture, a part to satisfy the curiosity aroused by rumors to the effect that I am likely to make in decorous and indecent remarks, which your decorum and decency make you wish to hear, and of which you will carry away evil and twisted reports to gain the reputation of being fearless defenders of the truth. It is a temptation to gratify your desire and shock you, a far greater temptation than to be repentant and reactionary. Only it occurs to me that this place and time are supposed to be devoted to a lecture by Henry Frazier, on his opinions about contemporary drama. It is in no sense to be given to the pulling defense of a martyr, nor to the sensational self-advertisement of either myself or any of you. I have no intention of devoting any part of my lecture aside from these introductory adembrations to the astonishing number of new friends whose bright and morning faces I see before me. I shall neither be so insincerely tactful as to welcome you, nor so frightened as to ignore you, nor shall I invite you to come to me with any complaints you have about me. I am far too busy with my real work. I am not speaking patiently. I am not patient with you. I am not speaking politely. Truly, I do not think that I shall much longer be polite. Wait. That sounds now in my ears rhetorical. Forgive me, and translate my indiscretions into more colloquial language. Though from rumours I have overheard, I fancy some of you will do that anyway. And now, I think you see where I stand. Now then, for such a view as have genuine interest in the brilliant work of Bernard Shaw, I shall first continue the animate visions on the importance of his social thought and endeavour to link it with the great and growing vision of H. G. Wells, novelist and not dramatist, though he is, because of the significance of his new book, Tips and Mankind in the Making, and point out the serious purpose that seems to me to underlie Shaw's sarcastic picture of life's shams. In my last lecture I endeavour to present the destructive side of present social theories as little as possible to dwell more on the keen desire of the modern thinkers for constructive imagination. But I judged that I was regarded as too destructive, which amuses me into which I shall apply the antidote of showing how destructive modern thought is and must be, whether running was subtly smoking torch of individuality in Bakunian or hissing in Nechti or laughing at Olympus in Bernard Shaw. My radicalism has been spoken of. Radical! Do you realise that I am not suggesting that there might possibly some day be a revolution in America, but rather that now I am stating that there is, this minute, and for some years has been an actual state of warfare between capital and labour? Do you know that daily more people are saying openly and violently that we starve our poor, we stuff our children with useless bookishness, and work the children of others in mills and let them sell papers on the streets in red light districts at night? And thereby prove our state nothing short of insane? If you tell me that there is no revolution because there are no barricades, I point out to actual battles at Homestead, Pullman, and the rest. If you say that there has been no declaration of war, open war, I shall read you editorials from the appeal to reason. Mind you, I shall not say whether I am enlisted for or against the revolutionary army, but I demand that you look about you and understand the significance of the industrial disturbances and religious unrest of the time. Never till then will you understand anything. Certainly not that Shah is something more than an effluent terrible. Ibsen, something more than a near old natured old man with dysphoria and a silly lack of interest in skating, then you will realize that in the most extravagant utterances of a red-shirted strike leader there may be more effevrant faith and honor, often times than in the virgin prayers of a girl who devoutly attends Christian endeavor, but presumes to call Emma Goldman that dreadful woman. Follow the labor reader, or fight him, good and hard, but do not overlook him. But I must be more systematic, when John Tanner's independent chauffeur of whom you have, I hope you have, read in Man and Superman, Karl looked about. Many were frowning a few leaning sideways to whisper to neighbors with a perplexed head shake that plainly meant, I don't quite get that. What feet were shifted carefully, breath caught quickly, hands nervously played with lower lips. The Greek professor was writing something. Karl's ex-roommate Plainsmith was rigid, staring unyieldingly at the platform. Karl hated Smith's sinister stillness. Professor Frazier was finishing his lecture. If it please you, flunk this course. Don't read a single play I sign to you. Be disrespectful, disbelieve all my contentions, and I shall be content. But do not, as you are living souls, blind yourself to the fact that there is a worldwide movement to build a wider new world, and that the world needs it, and that in Jamaica mills, on land owned by a director of Plato College, there are two particularly vile saloons, which you must wipe out before you disprove me. Silence for ten seconds, then. That is all. The crowd began to move hesitantly while Professor Frazier hastily picked up his papers and raincoat and hurried out to the door beside the platform. Voices immediately rose in a web of taut, mini-colored, hot-colored. Karl babbled to the man next to him. He sure had broad. He doesn't care whether they're conservatives or not. And some sensation at the end. Eh, what, him? The sophomore was staring, yes, why sure. What do you mean, demanded Karl? Well, and what do you mean, by broad? Sure, he's broad just like a razor-edge. Huh? Echoed the man down the row, AYMCA senior. Do you mean to say you liked it? Well, sure, why not, didn't you? Oh, yes, yes indeed. All he said was that scarlet women like Emma Goldman were better than a C.E. girl, and that he hoped his students would bluff the course and flunk it, and that we could find booze at Jamaica mills, and a few little things like that. That's all, sure. That's the sort of thing we came here to study. The senior was buttoning his raincoat with angry fingers. That's why the man was insane, and the way he denounced decency and—oh, I can't talk about it. Well, my gosh, of all the sputtered Karl, you and your YMCA, calling yourself religious and misrepresenting like that. You and your—why, you ain't worth arguing with. I don't believe you came to study anything. You know it all already. Passionate, but bewildered, trying not to injure the cause of Frazier by being nasty begged. Straight. Didn't you like his spiel? Didn't it give you some new ideas? The senior vouchsafed? No, me and my YM didn't like it. Now, don't let me keep you, Erickson. I suppose you'll be wanting to join dear Mr. Frazier in a highball. You're such a pet of his. Did he teach you to booze? I understand you're good at it. You apologize, or I'll punch your face off, said Karl. I don't understand Professor Frazier's principles like ought to, but I'm not fighting for them. Probably would have a new enough, but I don't like your face. It's too long. It's like a horse's face. It's an insult to Frazier to have a horse-faced guy listen to him. You apologize for having a horse-faced, see? You're bluffing. You wouldn't start anything here, anyway. Apologize, Karl's fist clenched, people were staring. Cut it out, will you? I didn't mean anything. You wouldn't snap, Karl, and rammed his way out, making wistful boys' plans to go to Frazier with devotion and offers of service and a fight whose causes grew more confused to him every moment. Beside him, as he hurried off to football practice, drove a big lineman of the junior class, cajoling. Calm down, son. You can't lick the whole college, but it makes me so sore. Well, I know, but it strikes me that no matter how much you like Frazier—he's gone pretty far when he said the anarchist had more sense than decent folks. He didn't—he didn't get him. He meant—oh, Lord, what's the use? He did not say another word as a 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 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? Karl and most of the other substitutes had to wait and most of them gossiped of the lecture. They all greedily discussed Frazier's charge that some member of the corporation owned saloon lots and tried to decide who it was, but not one of them gave Frazier credit. Twenty times Karl 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'd only make them worse. Students who had attended the lecture declared that Professor Frazier had advocated bomb-throwing and obscenity, and the others believing, marveling, well, well, well, well, with unsecuretous appreciation of the scandal. Still Karl 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 northskin 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 LaCroix, the French canuck, a quick, grinning, evil-spoken tobacco chewing rather likable young thug, stared directly at Karl and said loudly, Another thing unnoticed was that Frazier didn't have his pants pressed. Funny ain't it, that when even these dudes from Yale get to beat cranks, they're short on baths and tailors. Karl split from the parallel bars, he walked up to the line of substitutes, glanced sneerily along them. Dramatized himself as a fighting rebel, remarked, half of you were too dumb to get Frazier in the other half of her old women gossips and ought to be drinking tea, and gloomed away to the dressing-room. While behind him, the substitutes laughed and someone called, Sorry, you didn't like us, but we'll try to bear up. Going to lick the whole college, Ericsson, 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 Karl's partisanship. To represent a thousand rumors running about the campus to the effect that the faculty would demand Frazier's resignation. To explain the reason why Frazier's charge that a plateau director owned land used by saloons was eagerly whispered for a little while, then quite forgotten, while Frazier's reputation as a crank was never forgotten. So much does Muck represent the Muck Raker. To describe Karl's brief call on Frazier, and his confusing discovery that he had nothing to say. To repeat the local paper's courageous reports of the Frazier Fair. Turks great oath to support Frazier. Through hell and high water, Turks repeated defiance. Well, by golly, we'll show the muts, but I wish we could do something. To chronic old dreary classes whose dullness was evident to Karl now, after his interest in Frazier's lectures. Returning from Jeannie Lunderbeck's room, Karl found a letter from Gerty Cowles on the black walnut hand-rack. Without reading it, but successfully be fooling 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. Bajorgen, the football coach, a large, amiable, rather religious young man, who believed in football, foreign missions, and the Democratic Party. Hello. Waiting for me in the Turk, faltered Karl, gravely shaking hands all around. Just dropped up to see it for a second, said Mr. Bajorgen. Sorry the Turk wasn't here. Karl had an ill-defined feeling that he wanted to keep them from becoming serious as long as he could. Ray Cowles glurred his throat. Never again would the black hair Adonis blossom of the flower of Girolemon 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, of course, we're interested in you as Frat Brothers, too. For old Girolemon and Plataway? Mr. Bajorgen believes—might as well tell him now, don't you think, Mr. Bajorgen? The coach gave a rigidly gracious nod, hitching about on the woodbox Karl felt the bottom drop out of his anxious stomach. Well, Mr. Bajorgen 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 pee. Honest? Yes, if you do something for old Plato. Same as you expect her to do something for you. Ray was quite sincere. But not if you put the team discipline on the bum and disgrace will make a chime. Of course I can't speak as an actual member of the team, but still, as a senior, I hear things. I mean disgrace. Don't you know that because you've been getting so savage about Frasier, the whole team's getting mad, said the coach. Cowles and Griffin and I have been talking over the whole proposition. You're boosting Frasier. Look here, from Karl. I won't crawl down on my opinion about Frasier. Folks haven't understood him. Lord love you, son, spleuth Howard Griffin. We aren't trying to change your opinion of Frasier. We're your friend, you know. We're proud of you 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. Bajorkin, you're just as likely to hurt Frasier as to help him by stirring up all this bad blood. Look here, I suppose that if the faculty had already fired Frasier, 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 sophomore to try to run the faculty? It was the coach talking again but the gravely nodding Mandarin-like heads of Howard and Ray accompanying 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 old dude to go on shouting for Frasier. Quite aside from the question as to whether he is likely to get fired or not. Well, Grunekarl nervously massaging 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 darn 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 sublatern they call it. Don't they in a Kipling story a fellow that's under orders and is part of his game to play hard and keep his mouth shut and not to criticize his superior officers, ain't it? 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 trying 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 recalls, is not to make a public spectacle of yourself. As I'm afraid you've been doing, admire Frazier 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 some of the fellows, even in Omega Chai, have spoken about you and wondered if you really were a regular crank. Of course he isn't, you poor cheese, I had to tell them, but I can't be around to answer everyone 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 Sears rose, Carl timidly said to Ray, straight now, have quite a lot of fellows been in 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 at all. Keep still. Keep still till you understand the faculty's difficulties just a little better. Savvy? Don't that sound fairly reasonable? End of Chapter 9 Chapter 10 of the Trail of the Hawk This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Mike Vendetti, MikeVendetti.com Trail of the Hawk By Sinclair Lewis Chapter 10 They were gone. Carl was full of the nauseating shame which a matter-of-fact man, who supposes that he has never pilloried, knows when a conscientious friend informs him that he has been observed, criticised, and that his enthousiasms have been regarded as eccentricities. His affectionate approaches toward friendship as in pertinence. There seem to be hundreds of people in the room, nudging one another, waiting a gate for him to do something idiotic. A well-advertised fool on parade. He's talked about now shame-faced, now bursting out with a belligerent, all rats all shaw'em, how plentifully beseeching. I don't suppose I'm helping Frasier, but it makes me so darn sore when nobody 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've ever got anything out of and... Oh, hang it. One day 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. We are enjoying good health, though it is getting quite cold now, and we have the furnace running now, and it feels pretty good to have it. We had such a good time at Adelaide's party. She wore such a pretty dress, she flirted terribly with Joe Jordan. Though, of course, you'll call me a cat for telling you, because you like her so much better than me and all. Oh, I haven't told you the news yet. Joe has accepted a position at St. Hillary in the mill there. I have some pretty new things for my room, a beautiful hand-painted picture. Before Joe goes, there is going to be a party for him, it seeming is. I wish you could come, I suppose you have learned to dance well. Of course, you'd go to lots of parties at Plotto, with all the pretty girls, and forget all about me. I wish I was in Minneapolis, it is pretty dull here, and such good talks you and me had, didn't we? Oh, Carl, dear, Ray writes us you are sticking up for that crazy Professor Frazier. I know it must take lots of courage, and I admire you lots for it, even if Ray doesn't. But, oh, Carl, dear, if you can't do any good by it, I hope you won't get everybody talking about you without— it's doing any good. Will you, Carl? I do so expect you to succeed wonderfully, and I hope you won't blast your career, even to stand up for folks when it's too late, and won't do any good. We all expect so much of you. We are waiting. You are our knight, and you aren't going to forget to keep your armor bright, nor forget. Yours is ever, Gertie. Hmm, you mark, Carl? Don't know about this knight in armor business, and looks well. I would, with a washed boar layer and a few more tons of junk-on. Expect you to succeed wonderfully. Oh, I don't suppose I had ought to disappoint him. Don't see where I can help Frazier anyway, not a bit. The Frazier fair seemed very far from him, very hysterical. Two of the gang ambled in with noisy proposals in regard to a game of poker, penny-ante. But the thought of cards bored him, leaving them in possession, one of them smoking the Turk's best pipe, which the Turk had been so careless as to leave in sight. He strolled out on the street, and over to the campus. There was a light in the faculty room in the academic building, yet it was not a first and third Thursday dates on which the faculty regularly met. Therefore it was a special meeting, therefore. Promptly, without making any plans, Carl ran to the back of the building, shinnied up a water-spout humming just before the battle-mother, pried open a classroom window with his large jackknife of the variety technically known as a toad-stabber, changing his tune to onward Christian soldiers. Climbed in, tipped out through the room, stopping off and to listen, felt along the plaster walls to find the door. Eased the door open, calmly set down in the corridor, pulled off his shoes, and said, oh, it's cold on the feets. Slipped into another classroom in the front of the building, put on his shoes, crawled out of the window, walked along a limestone ledge one foot wide, to a window of the faculty room, and peeped in. All of the eleven assistant professors and full professors, except Frasier, were assembled with President S. Alcott Wood in the chair, and the Greek professor addressing them, referring often to a red leather-covered notebook. Mm, making a report on Frasier's lecture, said Carl, clinging precariously to the rough faces of the stones. A gust swooped around the corner of the building. He swayed, gripped the stones more tightly, and looked down. You could not see the ground. It was thirty-five or forty feet down, almost fell. He observed, gosh, my hands are chilly. As he peered in the window again, he saw the Greek professor, pointing directly at the window, while the whole gathering started, turned, steered. A young assistant professor ran toward the door of the room. Going to cut me off, dug on it, said Carl. They'll wait for me at the math room window. Hooray! I've started something. He carefully moved along the ledge to a point halfway between windows, and waited flat against the wall. Again he glanced down from the high, windy, narrow ledge. It'll be a long drop. My hands are cold. I could slip. Funny, I ain't really much scared, though. Say, where'd I do just this before? Oh, yes, he saw himself as little Carl, lost with gritty in the woods, caught by bone stillman at the window. He laughed out as he compared the bristly, verbal face of bone with the pasty face of the young professor. Seems almost as though I was back there doing the same thing right over. Funny, but I'm not quite as scared as I was then. Guess I'm growing up. Hello. Here's our cunning Spanish Inquisition, Rubbering out of the next window. The window of the mathematics classroom next to the faculty room had opened. The young professor, who was pursuing Carl, peppered the night with violent words, delivered in a rather pediographic voice. Well, sir, we have you. You might as well come and give yourself up. Carl was silent. The voice said, conversationally, he's staying out there. I'll see who it is. Carl half-made out a head thrusting itself from the window. Then heard this subtle voice. Can't see him. Loud again, the pursuing professor yapped. I see you. You're merely wasting time, sir. You might just as well come here now. I shall let you stay there till you do. Softly, hurry back into the faculty room and see if you can get him from that side. Bet it's one of the sneaking Frazier faction. Carl said nothing, did not budge. He peeped at the ledge above him. It was too far for him to reach it. He tried to discern the mass of the ground in the confusing darkness below. It seemed, miles down, he did not know what to do. He was lone as a mateless hawk. There on a ledge against the wall, whose stones were pinchingly cold to the small of his back and spread eagled arms. He swayed slightly, realized with trembling nausea what would happen if he swayed too much. He remembered that there was pavement below him, but he did not think about giving himself up. From the mathematics room window came, watch him, I'm going out after him. The young professor's shoulders slid out the window. Carl carefully turned his head and found that now a form was leaning from the faculty room window as well. Got me on both sides, darn it. Well, when they haul me up on the carpet, I'll have the pleasure of tolling them when I think of them. The young professor had started to edge along the ledge. He was coming very slowly. He stopped and complained to someone back in the mathematics room. This beastly ledge is icy, I'm afraid. Carl piped. Look out, you're slipping! In a panic the professor slid back into the window. As his heels disappeared through it, Carl dashed by the window running sidewise along the ledge. While the professor was cautiously risking his head in the night air outside the window again gazing to the left, where he had reason to suppose Carl would have the decency to remain. Carl was rapidly warming to the right. He reached the corner of the building, felt for the rainwater pipe and slid down it. With his coattail protecting his hands, halfway down the cloth slipped and his hand was burnt against the corrugated tin. Considerable slide. He murmured as he stuck down and blew softly on his raw palm. He walked away. Not at all like a metal-direct hero of a slide by night, but like a matter-of-fact young man, going to see someone about business of no great importance. He abstractedly brushed his left sleeve or his waistcoat now and then as though he wanted to appear neat. He tramped into the telephone booth of the corner drugstore, called up Professor Frazier. Hello, Professor Frazier? This is one of your students in modern drama. I've just learned I happened to be up on the academic building and I happened to find out that Professor Drude is making a report to the faculty, special meeting, about your last lecture. I've got a hunch he's going to slam you. I don't want to butt in, but I'm awfully worried. I thought perhaps you ought to know. Who? Oh, I'm just one of your students. You're welcome. Oh, say, Professor. Good luck. Good-bye. Immediately without even the excuse that some evil mind in the gang had suggested it, he prowled out to the Greek professor's house and tied both the front and back gates. Now the fence of that yard was high and strong and provided with shrunk pickets, and the professor was shortened dignified. Carl regretted that he could not wait for the pleasure of seeing the professor fumble with the knots and climb the fence, but he had another errand. He walked to the house of Professor Frazier. He stood on the walk before it. His shoulder straightened, his heels snapped together, and he raised his arm in a formal salute. He had saluted the greatness of Henry Frazier. He had saluted his own soul, he cried. I will stick by him as long as the Turc corineum. I won't let Omega Chi and the coach scare me, not the whole caboodle of them. I—oh, I don't think they can scare me. End of Chapter 10 Chapter 11 of The Trail of the Hawk This Libravox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Mike Vendetti. Mike Vendetti.com Trail of the Hawk by Sinclair Lewis Chapter 11 The students of Plato were required to attend chapel every morning. President S. Alcott Wood earnestly gave out two hymns and, between them, informed the Almighty of the more important news events of the past twenty-four hours, with a worried advisory manner which indicated that he felt something should be done about them at once. President Wood was an honest, anxious body. Something like a small, learned Scotch linendraper. He was given to being worried in advisory, and to sitting up till midnight in his unventilated library, grinding at the task of putting new wrong meanings into perfectly obvious statements in the Bible. He was a series of circles, round head, with smooth gray hair, that hung in a bang over his round forehead, round face, with round red cheeks, absurdly heavy gray mustache, that almost made a circle around his pure mouth, round button of nose, round heavy shoulders, round little stomach, in a gray sack suit, round dumplings of feet in congress shoes that were never quite fresh blacked or quite dusty. A heiress, honorable, studious, ignorant, humorless, joke-popping, genuinely conscientious thumb of a man. His prayers were long and intimate. After the second hymn he would announce the coming social events, class prayer meetings, and lantern-slide lectures by missionaries. During the prayer and hymns most of the students hastily prepared for first-hour classes, with lists of dates inside their hymn books, or they read tight-folded copies of the Minneapolis Journal or Tribune. But when the announcements began all pleatal colleagues sat up to attention, for Prexy Wood was very likely to comment on pedantic sarcasm on student pecadillos, on cards and v-neck gowns, and the unforgivable crime of smoking. As he crawled to the bare unsympathetic chapel, the morning after spying on the faculty room, Carl looked restlessly to the open field, sniffed at the scent of burning leaves, watched a thin stream of blackbirds in the windy sky. He sat on the edge of a pew, nervously jiggling his crossed legs. During the prayer and hymns, a spontaneously born rumour, that there would be something sensational in President Wood's announcements went through the student body. The President, as he gave out the hymns, did not look at the students, but sadly smoothed the neat green cloth on the reading-stand. His prayer, timid, sincere, was for guidance to comprehend the will of the Lord. Carl felt sorry for him. Poor man's fussed. ought to be. I'd be, too, if I tried to stop a ten-inch gun like Frazier. He's singing hard, announcements now. What's he waiting for? Gemini. I wish he'd spring it and get it over. Suppose he said something about last night. Me. President Wood stood silent. His glance drifted from row to row of students. They moved uneasily. Then his dry, precise voice declaimed, My friends, I have an unpleasant duty to perform this morning. But I have sought guidance in prayer, and I hope. Carl was agonizing. He does know it's me. He'll ball me out and fire me publicly. Sit tight, Erickson. Hold your nerve. Think of good old Turk. Carl was not a hero. He was frightened. In a moment now all the eyes in the room would be unwinkingly focused on him. He hated this place of crowding, curious young people and drab text-hung walls. In the last row he noted the pew in which Professor Frazier sat, infrequently. He could fancy Frazier there, pale and stern. I'm glad I spied on him. Might have been able to put Frazier wise to something definite if I could just have overheard him. President Wood was mincing on. And so, my friends, I hope in devotion to the ideals of the Baptist Church we shall strive ever onward and upward, and even our smallest daily concerns—Prespera, Atastera, Asta. Not in a spirit of materialism and modern unrest, but in a spirit of duty. I need not tell you that there has been a great deal of rumor about the so-called faculty dissensions. But let me earnestly beseech you to give me your closest detention when I assure you that there have been no faculty dissensions. It is true that we have found certain teachings rather out of harmony with the ideals of Plato College. The word of God in the Bible was good enough for our fathers who fought to defend this great land, and the Bible is still good enough for us, I guess, and I cannot find anything in the Bible about such doctrines as socialism and anarchism and evolution. Probably most of you have been fortunate enough to not have wasted any time on this theory called evolution. If you don't know anything about it, you have not lost anything. Absurd as it may seem, evolution says that we are all descended from monkeys, in spite of the fact that the Bible teaches us that we are children of God. If you prefer to be the children of monkeys rather than of God, well, all I can say is I don't. Laughter. But thou, O fellow Satan, is always busy going to and fro even in colleges, and the unrestrained, overgrown, secular colleges of the East, they have actually been teaching this doctrine openly for many years. Indeed, I am told that right at the University of Chicago, though it is a Baptist institution, they teach the same silly twaddle of evolution, and I could not advise any of you to go there for graduate work. But these scientific fellows that are too wise for the Bible fall into the pits they themselves have digged. Sooner or later, and they have been so smart in discovering new things about evolution, that they have contradicted almost everything that Darwin, who was the high priest of this abominable cult, first taught, and they have turned the whole theory into a hodgepodge of contradiction from which even they themselves are now turning in disgust. Indeed, I am told that Darwin's own son has come out and admitted that there is nothing to this evolution. Well, we could have told him that all along and told his father and saved all their time, for now they are all coming right back to the Bible. We could have told them in the first place that the Word of God definitely explains the origin of man, and that anybody who tried to find out whether we were descended from monkeys was just about as wise as the man who tried to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. Carl was settled down in his pew safe. President Wood was in his dry. All this evolutionary fad becomes ridiculous, of course, when a mind that is properly trained in clear thinking by the diligent pursual of the classic stripset of its pseudo-scientific rags and shows it straight out from the shoulder, in the fire of common sense and sound religion. And here is the point of my disquisition. On the self-same evolution this bombast of the self-pushing scientists are founded. All such un-christian and un-American doctrines as socialism and anarchism and the lust of feminism. With all their followers, such as Shaw and the fellow who tried to shoot Mr. Frick, and all the other atheists of the stripe that think so well of themselves, that they are quite willing to overthrow the grand old institutions that our forefathers founded on the Constitution, and they want to set up instead. Oh, they're quite willing to tell us how to run the government. They want to set up a state in which all of us who are honest enough to do a day's work shall support the lazy rascals who aren't. Yet they are very clever men. They can pull a wall over your eyes and persuade you, if you let them, that a universal willingness to let the other fellow do the work while you paint pictures of flowers and write novels about the abomination of Babylon is going to evalute a superior race. Well, when you think they're clever, this Shaw and this fellow wells, and all of them that copy Robert G. Angersaw, just remember that the cleverest fellow of them all is the old Satan, and that he's been advocating just such lazy doctrines ever since he stirred up rebellion and discontent in the Garden of Eden. If these things are so, then the teachings of Professor Henry Fraser, however sincere he is, are not in accordance with the stand which we have taken here at Plato. My friends, I want you all to understand me. Certain young students of Plato appear to have felt that the faculty have not appreciated Professor Fraser. One of these students, I presume it was one of them, went so far as to attempt to spy on faculty meetings last night. Who that man is, I have means of finding out at any time. But I do not wish to, for I cannot believe that he realized how dishonest was such sneaking. I wish to assure the malcontents that I yield to no one in my admiration of Professor Fraser's eloquence and learning in certain subjects. Only we have not found his doctrines quite consistent with what we are trying to do. They may be a lot more smart and new fangled in what we have out here in Minnesota, and we may be a lot of old fogies. But we are not narrow, and we wish to give him just as much right of free speech. We wish there is no slightest desire, in fact, to impose any authority on anyone. But against any pervasive doctrine we must, in all honesty, take a firm stand. We carefully explained this to Professor Fraser and permit me to inform those young men who have taken it upon themselves to be his champions, that they would do well to follow his example. For he quite agrees with us as to the need of keeping the Plato College doctrine consistent. In fact, he offered his resignation, which we reluctantly accepted. Very, very reluctantly. It will take effect the first of the month, and owing to illness in his family, he will not be giving any lectures before then. Students in his classes, by the way, are requested to report to the dean for other assignments. And so you see how little there is to the cowardly rumors about faculty dissensions. Liar, liar! Dear God, they've smothered that kind, straight frasier. Carl was groaning. Now, my friends, I trust you understand our position, and uh... President Wood drew a breath, slapped the reading stand, and piped angrily. We have every desire to permit complete freedom of thought and speech among the students of Plato. But on my word, when it comes to a pass where a few students can cause this whole great institution to forget its real tasks and devote all its time to quarreling about a fad like socialism, then it's time to call a halt. If there are any students here who, now that I have explained that Professor Frazier leaves us of his own free will, still persist in their stubborn desire to create trouble and feel that the faculty have not treated Professor Frazier properly or that we have endeavored to coerce him, then let them stand up, right here and now, in chapel. I mean, let them stop this cowardly running to and fro in secret gossip. Let them stand up before us in token of protest here and now, or otherwise hold their peace. So well trained to the authority of school masters were the students of Plato, including Carl Erickson, that they sat as uncomfortable as though they were individually accused by the plump pedant, who words weakly glaring at them, his round, childish hand clutching the sloping edge of the oak reading stand, his sackcoat wrinkled at the shoulders and sagging back from his low linen collar. Carl sighted back at Frazier's pew, hoping that he would miraculously be there to confront the dictator. The pew was empty as before. There was no one to protest against the outsting of Frazier for saying what he believed true. Then Carl was agitated to find that Carl Erickson, a backyard boy, was going to rise and disturb all those learned people. He was frightened again, but he stood up, faced the president, effectively folded his arms, hastily unfolded them, and put his hands in his pockets, one foot before the other, one shoulder humped a little higher than the other. The whole audience was staring at him. He did not dare peep at them, but he could hear their murmur of amazement. Now that he was up, he rather enjoyed defying them. Well, young man, so you are going to let us know how to run Plato, teetered the president. I am sure everybody will feel much obliged to you. Carl did not move. He was aware of Jeannie Linderbeck raising to his left. No one else was up, but with Jeannie's frail adherence Carl suddenly desired to rouse everyone to stand for Frazier and freedom. He glanced over at the one man whom he could always trust to follow him, the Turk. A tiny movement of Carl's lips, a covert uptoss of his head, warned the Turk to rise now. The Turk moved, started to rise slowly, as though under force he looked rather shame-faced. He uncrossed his legs and put his hands on the pew on either side of his legs. Shame, trembled of girl's voice in the junior section, sit down toward three voices of men softly snarled with a rustle of mob muttering. The Turk hastily crossed his legs and slumped down in his seat. Carl frowned at him imploringly, then angrily. He felt spiritually naked to ask support so publicly, but he had to get the Turk up. The Turk shook his head beseechingly. Carl could fancy him grunting. On thunder I'd like to stand up, but I don't want to be a goat. Another man rose. I'll be darned, thought Carl. It was the one man he would expect not to support the heretic Frazier. It was Carl's rustic ex- roommate, Plain Smith. Jeannie was leaning against the pew in front of him, but Plain Smith bulked more immovable than Carl. No one joined the three, although the chapel was an undertone of amazement, comment, and a constant low hissing of SIT DOWN. The President, facing them, looked strained. It occurred to Carl that S. Alcott Wood had his side of the question. He argued about the matter feeling detached from his stolidly defiant body. Then he cursed the President for keeping them there. He wanted to sit down. He wanted to cry out. President Wood was speaking. Is there anyone else? Stand up, if there is. No one else? Very well, young man. I trust that you are now satisfied with your heroism, which we have all greatly appreciated. I am sure. Laughter. Chapel dismissed. Instantly a swirl of men surrounded Carl questioning. What'd you do it for? Why didn't you keep still? He pushed out through them. He sat blind through the first hour quiz in physics with the whole class watching him. The thought of the Turk's failure to rise kept unhappy villagal in his mind. The same sequence of reflections ran round like midnight mice in the wall. Just when I needed him, after all his talk, and us so chummy sitting up all hours last night and then the Turk throws me down. When he'd said so many times he just wanted the chance to show how strong he was for Frasier. Damn coward. I'll go room with Genie, by Garsh. Oh, I got to be fair to the Turk. I don't suppose he could have done much real good standing up. Of course it does make you feel kind of a poor nut doing it. Genie looked. Yes, by the Jim Hill. There you are, poor little scrawny Genie. Oh yeah, sure. It was up to him to stand up. He wasn't afraid. And the Turk, the big stiff, he was afraid to. Just when I needed him. After all, our talk about Frasier sitting up all hours. Through the black whirlpool in his head, pierced and irritated, Mr. Ericsson, I said. Have you gone to sleep? I understand you were excellent at standing up. What is your explanation of the phenomenon? The professor of physics and mathematics, the same who had pursued Carl on the ledge, was speaking to him. Carl mumbled sullenly. Not prepared. The class sniggered. He devoted a moment to hating them as pariahs hate. Then, through his mind, went whirling again. Just wait till I see the Turk. End of Chapter 11