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

confused and more frightened. The examinations proved to be easier than he had expected; he didn’t fail in any of them, but he did not get a grade above a C.

The examination flurry passed, and the college was left cold. Nothing seemed to happen. The boys went to the movies every night, had a peanut fight, talked to the shadowy actors; they played cards, pool, and billiards, or shot craps; Saturday nights many of them went to a dance at Hastings, a small town five miles away; they held bull sessions and discussed everything under the sun and some things beyond it; they attended a performance of Shaw’s “Candida” given by the Dramatic Society and voted it a “wet” show; and, incidentally, some of them studied. But, all in all, life was rather tepid, and most of the boys were merely marking time and waiting for Christmas vacation.

For Hugh the vacation came and went with a rush. It was glorious to get home again, glorious to see his father and mother, and, at first, glorious to see Helen Simpson. But Helen had begun to pall; her kisses hardly compensated for her conversation. She gave him a little feeling of guilt, too, which he tried to argue away. “Kissing isn’t really wrong. Everybody pets; at least, Carl says they do. Helen likes it but.⁠ ⁠…” Always that “but” intruded itself. “But it doesn’t seem quite right when⁠—I don’t really love her.” When he kissed her for the last time before returning to college, he had a distinct feeling of relief: well, that would be off his mind for a while, anyway.

It was a sober, quiet crowd of students⁠—for the first time they were students⁠—that returned to their desks after the vacation. The final examinations were ahead of them, less than a month away; and those examinations hung over their heads like the relentless, glittering blade of a guillotine. The boys studied. “College life” ceased; there was a brief period of education.

Of course, they did not desert the movies, and the snow and ice claimed them. Part of Indian Lake was scraped free of snow, and every clear afternoon hundreds of boys skated happily, explaining afterward that they had to have some exercise if they were going to be able to study. On those afternoons the lake was a pretty sight, zestful, alive with color. Many of the men wore blue sweaters, some of them brightly colored Mackinaws, all of them knitted toques. As soon as the cold weather arrived, the freshmen had been permitted to substitute blue toques with orange tassels for their “baby bonnets.” The blue and orange stood out vividly against the white snow-covered hills, and the skates rang sharply as they cut the glare ice.

There was snowshoeing, skiing, and sliding “to keep a fellow fit so that he could do good work in his exams,” but much as the boys enjoyed the winter sports, a black pall hung over the college as the examination period drew nearer and nearer. The library, which had been virtually deserted all term, suddenly became crowded. Every afternoon and evening its big tables were filled with serious-faced lads earnestly bending over books, making notes, running their fingers through their hair, occasionally looking up with dazed eyes, or twisting about miserably.

The tension grew greater and greater. The upper-classmen were quiet and businesslike, but most of the freshmen were frankly terrified. A few of them packed their trunks and slunk away, and a few more openly scorned the examinations and their frightened classmates; but they were the exceptions. All the buoyancy seemed gone out of the college; nothing was left but an intense strain. The dormitories were strangely quiet at night. There was no playing of golf in the hallways, no rolling of bats down the stairs, no shouting, no laughter; a man who made any noise was in danger of a serious beating. Even the greetings as the men passed each other on the campus were quiet and abstracted. They ceased to cut classes. Everybody attended, and everybody paid close attention even to the most tiresome instructors.

Studious seniors began to reap a harvest out of tutoring sections. The meetings were a dollar “a throw,” and for another dollar a student could get a mimeographed outline of a course. But the tutoring sections were only for the “plutes” or the athletes, many of whom were subsidized by fraternities or alumni. Most of the students had to learn their own lessons; so they often banded together in small groups to make the task less arduous, finding some relief in sociability.

The study groups, quite properly called seminars, would have shocked many a worthy professor had he been able to attend one; but they were truly educative, and to many students inspiring. The professor had planted the seed of wisdom with them; it was at the seminars that they tried honestly, if somewhat hysterically and irreverently, to make it grow.

Hugh did most of his studying alone, fearing that the seminars would degenerate into bull sessions, as many of them did; but Carl insisted that he join one group that was going “to wipe up that goddamned English course tonight.”

There were only five men at the seminar, which met in Surrey 19, because Pudge Jamieson, who was “rating” an A in the course and was therefore an authority, said that he wouldn’t come if there were any more. Pudge, as his nickname suggests, was plump. He was a round-faced, jovial youngster who learned everything with consummate ease, wrote with great fluency and sometimes real beauty, peered through his horn-rimmed spectacles amusedly at the world, and read every “smut” book that he could lay his hands on. His library of erotica was already famous throughout the college, his volumes of Balzac’s “Droll Stories,” Rabelais complete, “Mlle. de Maupin,” Burton’s “Arabian Nights,” and the “Decameron” being in constant demand. He could tell literally hundreds of dirty stories, always having a new one on tap, always looking when he told it like a complacent