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The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life, a novel by Sinclair Lewis |
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Part 1. The Adventure Of Youth - Chapter 12 |
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_ PART I. THE ADVENTURE OF YOUTH _ CHAPTER XII A notice from the president's office, commanding Carl's instant presence, was in his post-office box. He slouched into the waiting-room of the offices of the president and dean. He was an incarnate desire to say exactly what he thought to the round, woolly President Wood. Plain Albert Smith was leaving the waiting-room. He seized Carl's hand with his plowman's paw, and, "Good-by, boy," he growled. There was nothing gallant about his appearance--his blue-flannel shirt dusty with white fuzz, his wrinkled brick-red neck, the oyster-like ear at which he kept fumbling with a seamy finger-nail of his left hand. But Carl's salute was a salute to the new king. "How d'you mean 'good-by,' Al?" "I've just resigned from Plato, Carl." "How'd you happen to do that? Did they summon you here?" "No. Just resigned," said Plain Smith. "One time when I was school-teaching I had a set-to with a school committee of farmers about teaching the kids a little botany. They said the three R's were enough. I won out, but I swore I'd stand up for any teacher that tried to be honest the way he seen it. I don't agree with Frazer about these socialists and all--fellow that's worked at the plow like I have knows a man wants to get ahead for his woman and himself, first of all, and let the walking-delegates go to work, too. But I think he's honest, all right, and, well, I stood up, and that means losing my scholarship. They won't try to fire me. Guess I'll mosey on to the U. of M. Can't probably live there as cheap as here, but a cousin of mine owns a big shoe-store and maybe I can get a job with him.... Boy, you were plucky to get up.... Glad we've got each other, finally. I feel as though you'd freed me from something. God bless you." To the dean's assistant, in the waiting-room, Carl grandly stated: "Ericson, 1908. I'm to see the president." "It's been arranged you're to see the dean instead. Sit down. Dean's engaged just now." Carl was kept waiting for a half-hour. He did not like the transference to the dean, who was no anxious old lamb like S. Alcott Wood, but a young collegiate climber, with a clipped mustache, a gold eye-glass chain over one ear, a curt voice, many facts, a spurious appreciation of music, and no mellowness. He was a graduate of the University of Chicago, and aggressively proud of it. He had "earned his way through college," which all tradition and all fiction pronounce the perfect manner of acquiring a noble independence and financial ability. Indeed, the blessing of early poverty is in general praised as the perfect training for acquiring enough wealth to save one's own children from the curse of early poverty. It would be safer to malign George Washington and the Boy Scouts, professional baseball and the Y. M. C. A., than to suggest that working one's way through college is not necessarily manlier than playing and dreaming and reading one's way through. Diffidently, without generalizing, the historian reports this fact about the dean; he had lost the graciousness of his rustic clergyman father and developed an itchingly bustling manner, a tremendous readiness for taking charge of everything in sight, by acquiring during his undergraduate days a mastery of all the petty ways of earning money, such as charging meek and stupid wealthy students too much for private tutoring, and bullying his classmates into patronizing the laundry whose agent he was.... The dean stuck his little finger far out into the air when drinking from a cup, and liked to be taken for a well-dressed man of the world. The half-hour of waiting gave Carl a feeling of the power of the authorities. And he kept seeing Plain Smith in his cousin's shoe-store, trying to "fit" women's shoes with his large red hands. When he was ordered to "step into the dean's office, now," he stumbled in, pulling at his soft felt hat. With his back to Carl, the dean was writing at a roll-top desk. The burnished top of his narrow, slightly bald head seemed efficient and formidable. Not glancing up, the dean snapped, "Sit down, young man." Carl sat down. He crumpled his hat again. He stared at a framed photograph, and moved his feet about, trying to keep them quiet. More waiting. The dean inspected Carl, over his shoulder. He still held his pen. The fingers of his left hand tapped his desk-tablet. He turned in his swivel-chair deliberately, as though he was now ready to settle everything permanently. "Well, young man, are you prepared to apologize to the president and faculty?" "Apologize? What for? The president said those that wanted to protest----" "Now we won't have any blustering, if you please, Ericson. I haven't the slightest doubt that you are prepared to give an exhibition of martyrdom. That is why I asked the privilege of taking care of you, instead of permitting you to distress President Wood any further. We will drop all this posing, if you don't mind. I assure you that it doesn't make----" "I----" "----the slightest impression on me, Ericson. Let's get right down to business. You know perfectly well that you have stirred up all the trouble you----" "I----" "----could in regard to Mr. Frazer. And I think, I really think, that we shall either have to have your written apology and your promise to think a little more before you talk, hereafter, or else we shall have to request your resignation from college. I am sorry that we apparently can't run this college to suit you, Ericson, but as we can't, why, I'm afraid we shall have to ask you not to increase our inefficiency by making all the trouble you can. Wait now; let's not have any melodrama! You may as well pick up that hat again. It doesn't seem to impress me much when you throw it down, though doubtless it was ver-ee dramatically done, oh yes, indeed, ver-ee dramatic. See here. I know you, and I know your type, my young friend, and I haven't----" "Look here. Why do I get picked out as the goat, the one to apologize? Because I stood up first? When Prexy said to?" "Oh, not at all. Say it's because you quite shamelessly made motions at others while you stood there, and did your best to disaffect men who hadn't the least desire to join in your trouble-making.... Now I'm very busy, young man, and I think this is all the time I shall waste on you. I shall expect to find your written----" "Say, honest, dean," Carl suddenly laughed, "may I say just one thing before I get thrown out?" "Certainly. We have every desire to deal justly with you, and to always give--always to give you every opportunity----" "Well, I just wanted to say, in case I resign and don't see you again, that I admire you for your nerve. I wish I could get over feeling like a sophomore talking to a dean, and then I could tell you I hadn't supposed there was anybody could talk to me the way you have and get away with it. I'd always thought I'd punch their head off, and here you've had me completely buffaloed. It's wonderful! Honestly, it never struck me till just this second that there isn't any law that compels me to sit here and take all this. You had me completely hypnotized." "You know I might retort truthfully and say I am not accustomed to have students address me in quite this manner. I'm glad, however, to find that you are sensible enough not to make an amusing show of yourself by imagining that you are making a noble fight for freedom. By decision of the president and myself I am compelled to give you this one chance only. Unless I find your apology in my letter-box here by five this evening I shall have to suspend you or bring you up before the faculty for dismissal. But, my boy, I feel that perhaps, for all your mistaken notions, you do have a certain amount of courage, and I want to say a word----" The dean did say a word; in fact he said a large number of admirable words, regarding the effect of Carl's possible dismissal on his friends, his family, and, with an almost tearful climax, on his mother. "Now go and think it over; pray over it, unselfishly, my boy, and let me hear from you before five." Only---- The reason why Carl _did_ visualize his mother, the reason why the Ericson kitchen became so clear to him that he saw his tired-faced mother reaching up to wind the alarm-clock that stood beside the ball of odd string on the shelf above the water-pail, the reason why he felt caved-in at the stomach, was that he knew he was going to leave Plato, and did not know where in the world he was going. * * * * * A time of quick action; of bursting the bonds even of friendship. He walked quietly into Genie Linderbeck's neat room, with its rose-hued comforter on a narrow brass bed, passe-partouted Copley prints, and a small oak table with immaculate green desk-blotter, and said good-by.... His hidden apprehension, the cold, empty feeling of his stomach, the nervous intensity of his motions, told him that he was already on the long trail that leads to fortune and Bowery lodging-houses and death and happiness. Even while he was warning himself that he must not go, that he owed it to his "folks" to apologize and stay, he was stumbling into the bank and drawing out his ninety-two dollars. It seemed a great sum. While waiting for it he did sums on the back of a deposit-slip: 92.00 out of bank Owe Tailor 1.45 "Golly! I could go to Europe, to Europe! now, if I wanted to, and have maybe two plunks over, for grub on the railroad. But I'd have to allow something for tips, I guess. Maybe it wouldn't be as much as forty dollars for steerage. Ought to allow----Oh, thunder! I've got enough to make a mighty good start seeing the world, anyway." On the street a boy was selling extras of the _Plato Weekly Times_, with the heading: PRESIDENT CRUSHES STUDENT Plato Demonstration for Anarchist Handled Carl read that he and two other students, "who are alleged to have been concerned in several student pranks," had attempted to break up a chapel meeting, but had been put to shame by the famous administrator, S. Alcott Wood. He had never seen his name in the press, except some three times in the local items of the _Joralemon Dynamite_. It looked so intimidatingly public that he tried to forget it was there. He chuckled when he thought of Plain Smith and Genie Linderbeck as "concerned in student pranks." But he was growing angry. He considered staying and fighting his opponents to the end. Then he told himself that he must leave Plato, after having announced to Genie that he was going.... He had made all of his decision except the actual deciding. He omitted his noonday dinner and tramped into the country, trying to plan how and where he would go. As evening came, cloudy and chill in a low wooded tract miles north of Plato, with dead boughs keening and the uneasy air threatening a rain that never quite came, the loneliness of the land seemed to befog all the possibilities of the future.... He wanted the lamp-lit security of his room, with the Turk and the Gang in red sweaters, singing ragtime; with the Frazer affair a bad dream that was forgotten. The world outside Plato would all be like these lowering woods and dreary swamps. He turned. He could find solace only in making his mind a blank. Sullen, dull, he watched the sunset, watched the bellying cumulus clouds mimic the Grand Canyon. He had to see the Grand Canyon! He would!... He had turned the corner. His clammy heart was warming. He was slowly coming to understand that he was actually free to take youth's freedom. He saw the vision of the America through which he might follow the trail like the pioneers whose spiritual descendant he was. How noble was the panorama that thrilled this one-generation American can be understood only by those who have smelled our brown soil; not by the condescending gods from abroad who come hither to gather money by lecturing on our evil habit of money-gathering, and return to Europe to report that America is a land of Irish politicians, Jewish theatrical managers, and mining millionaires who invariably say, "I swan to calculate"; all of them huddled in unfriendly hotels or in hovels set on hopeless prairie. Not such the America that lifted Carl's chin in wonder---- Cities of tall towers; tawny deserts of the Southwest and the flawless sky of cornflower blue over sage-brush and painted butte; silent forests of the Northwest; golden China dragons of San Francisco; old orchards of New England; the oily Gulf of Mexico where tramp steamers puff down to Rio; a snow-piled cabin among somber pines of northern mountains. Elsewhere, elsewhere, elsewhere, beyond the sky-line, under larger stars, where men ride jesting and women smile. Names alluring to the American he repeated--Shenandoah, Santa Ynez, the Little Big Horn, Baton Rouge, the Great Smokies, Rappahannock, Arizona, Cheyenne, Monongahela, Androscoggin; canyon and bayou; sycamore and mesquite; Broadway and El Camino Real.... He hurled along into Plato. He went to Mrs. Henkel's for supper. He smiled at the questions dumped upon him, and evaded answering. He took Mae Thurston aside and told her that he was leaving Plato. He wanted to call on Professor Frazer. He did not dare. From a pleasant gentleman drinking tea Frazer had changed to a prophet whom he revered. Carl darted into his room. The Turk was waiting for him. Carl cut short the Turk's apologies for not having supported Frazer, with the dreadful curt pleasantness of an alienated friend, and, as he began packing his clothes in two old suit-cases, insisted, "It's all right--was your biz whether you stood up in chapel or not." He hunted diligently through the back of the closet for a non-existent shoe, in order to get away from the shamefaced melancholy which covered the Turk when Carl presented him with all his books, his skees, and his pet hockey-stick. He prolonged the search because it had occurred to him that, as it was now eleven o'clock, and the train north left at midnight, the Minneapolis train at 2 A.M., it might be well to decide where he was going when he went away. Well, Minneapolis and Chicago. Beyond that--he'd wait and see. Anywhere--he could go anywhere in all the world, now.... He popped out of the closet cheerfully. While the Turk mooned, Carl wrote short honest notes to Gertie, to his banker employer, to Bennie Rusk, whom he addressed as "Friend Ben." He found himself writing a long and spirited letter to Bone Stillman, who came out of the backwater of ineffectuality as a man who had dared. Frankly he wrote to his mother--his mammy he wistfully called her. To his father he could not write. With quick thumps of his fist he stamped the letters, then glanced at the Turk. He was gay, mature, business-like, ready for anything. "I'll pull out in half an hour now," he chuckled. "Gosh!" sighed the Turk. "I feel as if I was responsible for everything. Oh, say, here's a letter I forgot to give you. Came this afternoon." The letter was from Gertie. DEAR CARL,--I hear that you _are_ standing for that Without finishing it, Carl tore up the letter in a fury. Then, "Poor kid; guess she means well," he thought, and made an imaginary bow to her in farewell. There was a certain amount of the milk of human-kindness in the frozen husk he had for a time become. But he must be blamed for icily rejecting the Turk's blundering attempts to make peace. He courteously--courtesy, between these two!--declined the Turk's offer to help him carry his suit-cases to the station. That was like a slap. "Good-by. Hang on tight," he said, as he stooped to the heavy suit-cases and marched out of the door without looking back. By some providence he was saved from the crime of chilly self-righteousness. On the darkness of the stairs he felt all at once how responsive a chum the Turk had been. He dropped the suit-cases, not caring how they fell, rushed back into the room, and found the Turk still staring at the door. He cried: "Old man, I was----Say, you yahoo, are you going to make me carry both my valises to the depot?" They rushed off together, laughing, promising to write to each other. The Minneapolis train pulled out, with Carl trying to appear commonplace. None of the sleepy passengers saw that the Golden Fleece was draped about him or that under his arm he bore the harp of Ulysses. He was merely a young man taking a train at a way-station. _ |
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