The Plastic Age Percy Marks (read full novel txt) 📖

For an instant Hugh did have a wild desire to laugh. Part of the desire was caused by nervous relief, but part of it was caused by what seemed to him the absurdity of the situation: a big fellow like Morse blubbering, bawling for home and mother!

“You can’t know,” Morse went on, “how awful it is⁠—awful! I want to cry all the time. I can’t listen in classes. A prof asked me a question today, and I didn’t know what he had been talking about. He asked me what he had said. I had to say I didn’t know. The whole class laughed, and the prof asked me why I had come to college. God! I nearly died.”

Hugh’s sympathy was all captured again. He knew that he would die if he ever made a fool of himself in the classroom.

“Gosh!” he exclaimed. “What did you say?”

“Nothing. I couldn’t think of anything. For a minute I thought that my head was going to bust. He quit razzing me and I tried to pay attention, but I couldn’t; all I could do was think of home. Lord! I wish I was there!” He mopped at his eyes and paced up and down the room nervously.

“Oh, you’ll get over that,” Hugh said comfortingly. “Pretty soon you’ll get to know lots of fellows, and then you won’t mind about home.”

“That’s what I keep telling myself, but it don’t work. I can’t eat or sleep. I can’t study. I can’t do anything. I tell you I’ve got to go home. I’ve got to!” This last with desperate emphasis.

Hugh smiled. “You’re all wrong,” he asserted positively. “You’re just lonely; that’s all. I bet that you’ll be crazy about college in a month⁠—same as the rest of us. When you feel blue, come in and see Peters and me. We’ll make you grin; Peters will, anyway. You can’t be blue around him.”

Morse sat down. “You don’t understand. I’m not lonely. It isn’t that. I could talk to fellows all day long if I wanted to. I don’t want to talk to ’em. I can’t. There’s just one person that I want to talk to, and that’s my mother.” He shot the word “mother” out defiantly and glared at Hugh, silently daring him to laugh, which Hugh had sense enough not to do, although he wanted to strongly. The great big baby, wanting his mother! Why, he wanted his mother, too, but he didn’t cry about it.

“That’s all right,” he said reassuringly; “you’ll see her Christmas vacation, and that isn’t very long off.”

“I want to see her now!” Morse jumped to his feet and raised his clenched hands above his head. “Now!” he roared. “Now! I’ve got to. I’m going home on the midnight.” He whirled about to his desk and began to pull open the drawers, piling their contents on the top.

“Here!” Hugh rushed to him and clutched his arms. “Don’t do that.” Morse struggled, angry at the restraining hands, ready to strike them off. Hugh had a flash of inspiration. “Think how disappointed your mother will be,” he cried, hanging on to Morse’s arms; “think of her.”

Morse ceased struggling. “She will be disappointed,” he admitted miserably. “What can I do?” There was a world of despair in his question.

Hugh pushed him into the desk-chair and seated himself on the edge of the desk. “I’ll tell you,” he said. He talked for half an hour, cheering Morse, assuring him that his homesickness would pass away, offering to study with him. At first Morse paid little attention, but finally he quit sniffing and looked up, real interest in his face. When Hugh got a weak smile out of him, he felt that his work had been done. He jumped off the desk, leaned over to slap Morse on the back, and told him that he was a good egg but a damn fool.

Morse grinned. “You’re a good egg yourself,” he said gratefully. “You’ve saved my life.”

Hugh was pleased and blushed. “You’re full of bull.⁠ ⁠… Remember, we do Latin at ten tomorrow.” He opened the door. “Good night.”

“Good night.” And Hugh heard as he closed the door. “Thanks a lot.”

When he opened his own door, he found Carl sitting before a blazing log fire. There was no other light in the room. Carl had written his nightly letter to the “old lady,” and he was a little homesick himself⁠—softened into a tender and pensive mood. He did not move as Hugh sat down in a big chair on the other side of the hearth and said softly, “Thinking?”

“Un-huh. Where you been?”

“Across the hall in Morse’s room.” Then as Carl looked up in surprise, he told him of his experience with their redheaded neighbor. “He’ll get over it,” he concluded confidently. “He’s just been lonely.”

Carl puffed contemplatively at his pipe for a few minutes before replying. Hugh waited, watching the slender boy stretched out in a big chair before the fire, his ankles crossed, his face gentle and boyish in the ruddy, flickering light. The shadows, heavy and wavering, played magic with the room; it was vast, mysterious.

“No,” said Carl, pausing again to puff his pipe; “no, he won’t get over it. He’ll go home.”

“Aw, shucks. A big guy like that isn’t going to stay a baby all his life.” Hugh was frankly derisive. “Soon as he gets to know a lot of fellows, he’ll forget home and mother.”

Carl smiled vaguely, his eyes dreamy as he gazed into the hypnotizing flames. The mask of sophistication had slipped off his face; he was pleasantly in the control of a gentle mood, a mood that erased the last vestige of protective coloring.

He shook his head slowly. “You don’t understand, Hugh. Morse is sick, sick⁠—not lonesome. He’s got something worse than flu. Nobody can stand what he’s got.”

Hugh looked at him in bewilderment. This was a new Carl, someone he hadn’t met before. Gone was the slang flippancy, the hard roughness. Even his voice was softened.

Carl knocked his pipe