The Plastic Age by Percy Marks - HTML preview

CHAPTER XXIII

For several days Hugh was tortured by doubt and indecision: there were times when he thought that he loved Cynthia, times when he was sure that he didn't; when he had just about made up his mind that he hated her, he found himself planning to follow her to New Rochelle; he tried to persuade himself that his conduct was no more reprehensible than that of his comrades, but shame invariably overwhelmed his arguments; there were hours when he ached for Cynthia, and hours when he loathed her for smashing something that had been beautiful. Most of all, he wanted comfort, advice, but he knew no one to whom he was willing to give his confidence. Somehow, he couldn't admit his drunkenness to any one whose advice he valued. He called on Professor Henley twice, intending to make a clean breast of his transgressions. Henley, he knew, would not lecture him, but when he found himself facing him, he could not bring himself to confession; he was afraid of losing Henley's respect.
Finally, in desperation, he talked to Norry, not because he thought Norry could help him but because he had to talk to somebody and Norry already knew the worst. They went walking far out into the country, idly discussing campus gossip or pausing to revel in the beauty of the night, the clear, clean sky, the pale moon, the fireflies sparkling suddenly over the meadows or even to the tree-tops. Weary from their long walk, they sat down on a stump, and Hugh let the dam of his emotion break.
"Norry," he began intensely, "I'm in hell—in hell. It's a week since Prom, and I haven't had a line from Cynthia. I haven't dared write to her."
"Why not?"
"She—she—oh, damn it!—she told me before she left that everything was all off. That's why she left early. She said that we didn't love each other, that all we felt was sex attraction. I don't know whether she's right or not, but I miss her like the devil. I—I feel empty, sort of hollow inside, as if everything had suddenly been poured out of me—and there's nothing to take its place. I was full of Cynthia, you see, and now there's no Cynthia. There's nothing left but—oh, God, Norry, I'm ashamed of myself. I feel—dirty." The last word was hardly audible. Norry touched his arm. "I know, Hugh, and I'm awfully sorry. I think, though, that Cynthia was right. I know her better than you do. She's an awfully good kid but not your kind at all; I think I feel as badly almost as you do about it." He paused a moment and then said simply, "I was so proud of you, Hugh."
"Don't!" Hugh exclaimed. "I want to kill myself when you say things like that." "You don't understand. I know that you don't understand. I've been doing a lot of thinking since Prom, too. I've thought over a lot of things that you've said to me— about me, I mean. Why, Hugh, you think I'm not human. I don't believe you think I have passions like the rest of you. Well, I do, and sometimes it's—it's awful. I'm telling you that so you'll understand that I know how you feel. But love's beautiful to me, Hugh, the most wonderful thing in the world. I was in love with a girl once—and I know. She didn't give a hang for me; she thought I was a baby. I suffered awfully; but I know that my love was beautiful, as beautiful as—" He looked around for a simile—"as to-night. I think it's because of that that I hate mugging and petting and that sort of thing. I don't want beauty debased. I want to fight when orchestras jazz famous arias. Well, petting is jazzing love; and I hate it. Do you see what I mean?"
Hugh looked at him wonderingly. He didn't know this Norry at all. "Yes," he said slowly; "yes, I see what you mean; I think I do, anyway. But what has it to do with me?"
"Well, I know most of the fellows pet and all that sort of thing, and they don't think anything about it. But you're different; you love beautiful things as much as I do. You told me yourself that Jimmie Henley said last year that you were gifted. You can write and sing and run, but I've just realized that you aren't proud of those things at all; you just take them for granted. And you're ashamed that you write poetry. Some of your poems are good, but you haven't sent any of them to the poetry magazine. You don't want anybody to know that you write poetry. You're trying to make yourself like fellows that are inferior to you." Norry was piteously in earnest. His hero had crumbled into clay before his eyes, and he was trying to patch him together again preparatory to boosting him back upon his pedestal. "Oh, cripes, Norry," Hugh said a little impatiently, "you exaggerate all my virtues; you always have. I'm not half the fellow you think I am. I do love beautiful things, but I don't believe my poetry is any good." He paused a moment and then confessed mournfully: "I'll admit, though, that I have been going downhill. I'm going to do better from now on. You watch me."
They talked for hours, Norry embarrassing Hugh with the frankness of his admiration. Norry's hero-worship had always embarrassed him, but he didn't like it when the worshiper began to criticize. He admitted the justness of the criticism, but it hurt him just the same. Perching on a pedestal had been uncomfortable but a little thrilling; sitting on the ground and gazing up at his perch was rather humiliating. The fall had bruised him; and Norry, with the best intentions in the world, was kicking the bruises.
Nevertheless, he felt better after the talk, determined to win back Norry's esteem and his own. He swore off smoking and drinking and stuck to his oath. He told Vinton that if he brought any more liquor to their room one of them was going to be carried out, and that he had a hunch that it would be Vinton. Vinton gazed at him with round eyes and believed him. After that he did his drinking elsewhere, confiding to his cronies that Carver was on the wagon and that he had got as religious as holy hell. "He won't let me drink in my own room," he wailed dolorously. And then with a sudden burst of clairvoyance, he added, "I guess his girl has given him the gate."
For weeks the campus buzzed with talk about the Prom. A dozen men who had been detected flagrante delicto were summarily expelled. Many others who had been equally guilty were in a constant state of mental goose-flesh. Would the next mail bring a summons from the dean? President Culver spoke sternly in chapel and hinted that there would be no Prom the coming year. Most of the men said that the Prom had been an "awful brawl," but there were some who insisted that it was no worse than the Proms held at other colleges, and recited startling tales in support of their argument.
Leonard Gates finally settled the whole matter for Hugh. There had been many discussions in the Nu Delta living-room about the Prom, and in one of them Gates ended the argument with a sane and thoughtful statement.
"The Prom was a brawl," he said seriously, "a drunken brawl. We all admit that. The fact that Proms at other colleges are brawls, too, doesn't make ours any more respectable. If a Yale man happens to commit murder and gets away with it, that is no reason that a Harvard man or a Sanford man should commit murder, too. Some of you are arguing like babies. But some of you are going to the other extreme.
"You talk as if everybody at the Prom was lit. Well, I wasn't lit, and as a matter of fact most of them weren't lit. Just use a little common sense. There were three hundred and fifty couples at the Prom. Now, not half of them even had a drink. Say that half did. That makes one hundred and seventy-five fellows. If fifty of those fellows were really soused, I'll eat my hat, but we'll say that there were fifty. Fifty were quite enough to make the whole Prom look like a longshoreman's ball. You've got to take the music into consideration, too. That orchestra could certainly play jazz; it could play it too damn well. Why, that music was enough to make a saint shed his halo and shake a shimmy.
"What I'm getting to is this: there are over a thousand fellows in college, and out of that thousand not more than fifty were really soused at the Prom, and not more than a hundred and seventy-five were even a little teed. To go around saying that Sanford men are a lot of muckers just because a small fraction of them acted like gutter-pups is sheer bunk. The Prom was a drunken brawl, but all Sanford men aren't drunkards—not by a damn sight."
Hugh had to admit the force of Gates's reasoning, and he found comfort in it. He had been just about ready to believe that all college men and Sanford men in particular were hardly better than common muckers. But in the end the comfort that he got was small: he realized bitterly that he was one of the minority that had disgraced his college; he was one of the gutter-pups. The recognition of that undeniable fact cut deep.
He was determined to redeem himself; he had to, somehow. Living a life of perfect rectitude was not enough; he had to do something that would win back his own respect and the respect of his fellows, which he thought, quite absurdly, that he had forfeited. So far as he could see, there was only one way that he could justify his existence at Sanford; that was to win one of the dashes in the Sanford-Raleigh meet. He clung to that idea with the tenacity of a fanatic. He had nearly a month in which to train, and train he did as he never had before. His diet became a matter of the utmost importance; a rub-down was a holy rite, and the words of Jansen, the coach, divine gospel. He placed in both of the preliminary meets, but he knew that he could do better; he wasn't yet in condition.
When the day for the Raleigh-Sanford meet finally came, he did not feel any of the nervousness that had spelled defeat for him in his freshman year. He was stonily calm, silently determined. He was going to place in the hundred and win the two-twenty or die in the attempt. No golden dreams of breaking records excited him. Calvert of Raleigh was running the hundred consistently in ten seconds and had been credited with better time. Hugh had no hopes of defeating him in the hundred, but there was a chance in the two-twenty. Calvert was a short-distance man, the shorter the better. Two hundred and twenty yards was a little too far for him.
Calvert did not look like a runner. He was a good two inches shorter than Hugh, who lacked nearly that much of six feet. Calvert was heavily built—a dark, brawny chap, both quick and powerful. Hugh looked at him and for a moment hated him. Although he did not phrase it so—in fact, he did not phrase it at all— Calvert was his obstacle in his race for redemption.
Calvert won the hundred-yard dash in ten seconds flat, breaking the SanfordRaleigh record. Hugh, running faster than he ever had in his life, barely managed to come in second ahead of his team-mate Murphy. The Sanford men cheered him lustily, but he hardly listened. He had to win the two-twenty.
At last the runners were called to the starting-line. They danced up and down the track flexing their muscles. Hugh was tense but more determined than nervous. Calvert pranced around easily; he seemed entirely recovered from his great effort in the hundred. Finally the starter called them to their marks. They tried their spikes in the starting-holes, scraped them out a bit more, made a few trial dashes, and finally knelt in line at the command of the starter.
Hugh expected Calvert to lead for the first hundred yards; but the last hundred, that was where Calvert would weaken. Calvert was sure to be ahead at the beginning—but after that!
"On your marks.
"Set."
The pistol cracked. The start was perfect; the five men leaped forward almost exactly together. For once Calvert had not beaten the others off the mark, but he immediately drew ahead. He was running powerfully, his legs rising and falling in exact rhythm, his spikes tearing into the cinder path. But Hugh and Murphy were pressing him close. At the end of the first hundred Calvert led by a yard. Hugh pounded on, Murphy falling behind him. The others were hopelessly outclassed. Hugh did not think; he did not hear a thousand men shouting hysterically, "Carver! Carver!" He saw nothing but Calvert a yard ahead of him. He knew nothing but that he had to make up that yard. Down the track they sped, their breath bursting from them, their hands clenched, their faces grotesquely distorted, their legs driving them splendidly on.
Hugh was gaining; that yard was closing. He sensed it rather than saw it. He saw nothing now, not even Calvert. Blinded with effort, his lungs aching, his heart pounding terribly, he fought on, mechanically keeping between the two white lines. Ten yards from the tape he was almost abreast of Calvert. He saw the tape through a red haze; he made a final valiant leap for it—but he never touched it: Calvert's chest had broken it a tiny fraction of a second before.
Hugh almost collapsed after the race. Two men caught him and carried him, despite his protests, to the dressing-room. At first he was aware only of his overwhelming weariness. Something very important had happened. It was over, and he was tired, infinitely tired. A rub-down refreshed his muscles, but his spirit remained weary. For a month he had thought of nothing but that race—even Cynthia had become strangely insignificant in comparison with it—and now that the race had been run and lost, his whole spirit sagged and drooped. He was pounded on the back; his hand was grasped and shaken until it ached; he was cheered to an echo by the thrilled Sanford men; but still his depression remained. He had won his letter, he had run a magnificent race, all Sanford sang his praise—Norry Parker had actually cried with excitement and delight—but he felt that he had failed; he had not justified himself.
A few days later he entered Henley's office, intending to make only a brief visit. Henley congratulated him. "You were wonderful, Hugh," he said enthusiastically. "The way that you crawled up on him the last hundred yards was thrilling. I shouted until I was hoarse. I never saw any one fight more gamely. He's a faster man than you are, but you almost beat him. I congratulate you—excuse the word, please—on your guts."
Somehow Hugh couldn't stand Henley's enthusiasm. Suddenly he blurted out the whole story, his drunkenness at the Prom, his split with Cynthia—he did not mention the visit to Norry's room—his determination to redeem himself, his feeling that if he had won that race he would at least have justified his existence at the college, and, finally, his sense of failure.
Henley listened sympathetically, amused and touched by the boy's naive philosophy. He did not tell him that the race was relatively unimportant—he was sure that Hugh would find that out for himself—but he did bring him comfort. "You did not fail, Hugh," he said gently; "you succeeded magnificently. As for serving your college, you can always serve it best by being yourself, being true to yourself, I mean, and that means being the very fine gentleman that you are." He paused a minute, aware that he must be less personal; Hugh was red to the hair and gazing unhappily at the floor.
"You must read Browning," he went on, "and learn about his success-in-failure philosophy. He maintains that it is better to strive for a million and miss it than to strive for a hundred and get it. 'A man's reach should exceed his grasp or what's a heaven for?' He says it in a dozen different ways. It's the man who tries bravely for something beyond his power that gets somewhere, the man who really succeeds. Well, you tried for something beyond your power—to beat Calvert, a really great runner. You tried to your utmost; therefore, you succeeded. I admire your sense of failure; it means that you recognize an ideal. But I think that you succeeded. You may not have quite justified yourself to yourself, but you have proved capable of enduring a hard test bravely. You have no reason to be depressed, no reason to be ashamed."
They talked for a long time, and finally Henley confessed that he thought Cynthia had been wise in taking herself out of Hugh's life.
"I can see," he said, "that you aren't telling me quite all the story. I don't want you to, either. I judge, however, from what you have said that you went somewhere with her and that only complete drunkenness saved you from disgracing both yourself and her. You need no lecture, I am sure; you are sufficiently contrite. I have a feeling that she was right about sexual attraction being paramount; and I think that she is a very brave girl. I like the way she went home, and I like the way she has kept silent. Not many girls could or would do that. It takes courage. From what you have said, however, I imagine that she is not your kind; at least, that she isn't the kind that is good for you. You have suffered and are suffering, I know, but I am sure