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

There were two other men in the seminar. Freddy Dickson, an earnest, anemic youth, seemed to be always striving for greater acceleration and never gaining it; or as Pudge put it, “The trouble with Freddy is that he’s always shifting gears.” Larry Stillwell, the last man, was a dark, handsome youth with exceedingly regular features, pomaded hair parted in the center and shining sleekly, fine teeth, and rich coloring: a “smooth” boy who prided himself on his conquests and the fact that he never got a grade above a C in his courses. There was no man in the freshman class with a finer mind, but he declined to study, declaring firmly that he could not waste his time acquiring impractical tastes for useless arts.

“Now everybody shut up,” said Pudge, seating himself in a big chair and laboriously crossing one leg over the other. “Put some more wood on the fire, Hugh, will you?”

Hugh stirred up the fire, piled on a log or so, and then returned to his chair, hoping against belief that something really would be accomplished in the seminar. All the boys, he excepted, were smoking, and all of them were lolling back in dangerously comfortable attitudes.

“We’ve got to get going,” Pudge continued, “and we aren’t going to get anything done if we just sit around and bull. I’m the prof, and I’m going to ask questions. Now, don’t bull. If you don’t know, just say, ‘No soap,’ and if you do know, shoot your dope.” He grinned. “How’s that for a rhyme?”

“Atta boy!” Carl exclaimed enthusiastically.

“Shut up! Now, the stuff we want to get at tonight is the poetry. No use spending any time on the composition. My prof said that we would have to write themes in the exam, but we can’t do anything about that here. You’re all getting by on your themes, anyway, aren’t you?”

“Yeah,” the listening quartet answered in unison, Larry Stillwell adding dubiously, “Well, I’m getting C’s.”

“Larry,” said Carl in cold contempt, “you’re a goddamn liar. I saw a B on one of your themes the other day and an A on another. What are you always pulling that lowbrow stuff for?”

Larry had the grace to blush. “Aw,” he explained in some confusion, “my prof’s full of hooey. He doesn’t know a C theme from an A one. He makes me sick. He⁠—”

“Aw, shut up!” Freddy Dickson shouted. “Let’s get going; let’s get going. We gotta learn this poetry. Damn! I don’t know anything about it. I didn’t crack the book till two days ago.”

Pudge took charge again. “Close your gabs, everybody,” he commanded sternly. “There’s no sense in going over the prose lit. You can do that better by yourselves. God knows I’m not going to waste my time telling you boneheads what Carlyle means by a hero. If you don’t know Odin from Mohammed by this time, you can roast in Dante’s hell for all of me. Now listen; the prof said that they were going to make us place lines, and, of course, they’ll expect us to know what the poems are about. Hell! how some of the boys are going to fox ’em.” He paused to laugh. “Jim Hicks told me this afternoon that ‘Philomela’ was by Shakespeare.” The other boys did not understand the joke, but they all laughed heartily.

“Now,” he went on, “I’ll give you the name of a poem, and then you tell me what it’s about and who wrote it.”

He leafed rapidly through an anthology. “Carl, who wrote ‘Kubla Khan’?”

Carl puffed his pipe meditatively. “I’m going to fox you, Pudge,” he said, frankly triumphant; “I know. Coleridge wrote it. It seems to be about a Jew who built a swell joint for a wild woman or something like that. I can’t make much out of the damn thing.”

“That’s enough. Smack for Carl,” said Pudge approvingly. “Smack” meant that the answer was satisfactory. “Freddy, who wrote ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’?”

Freddy twisted in his chair, thumped his head with his knuckles, and finally announced with a groan of despair, “No soap.”

“Hugh?”

“No soap.”

“Larry?”

“Well,” drawled Larry, “I think Jawn Keats wrote it. It’s one of those bedtime stories with a kick. A knight gets picked up by a jane. He puts her on his prancing steed and beats it for the tall timber. Keats isn’t very plain about what happened there, but I suspect the worst. Anyhow, the knight woke up the next morning with an awful rotten taste in his mouth.”

“Smack for Larry. Your turn, Carl. Who wrote ‘The West Wind’?”

“You can’t get me on that boy Masefield, Pudge. I know all his stuff. There isn’t any story; it’s just about the west wind, but it’s a goddamn good poem. It’s the cat’s pajamas.”

“You said it, Carl,” Hugh chimed in, “but I like ‘Sea Fever’ better.

“I must go down to the seas again,
To the lonely sea and the sky.⁠ ⁠…

Gosh! that’s hot stuff. ‘August, 1914’ ’s a peach, too.”

“Yeah,” agreed Larry languidly; “I got a great kick when the prof read that in class. Masefield’s all right. I wish we had more of his stuff and less of Milton. Lord Almighty, how I hate Milton! What th’ hell do they have to give us that tripe for?”

“Oh, let’s get going,” Freddy pleaded, running a nervous hand through his mouse-colored hair. “Shoot a question, Pudge.”

“All right, Freddy.” Pudge tried to smile wickedly but succeeded only in looking like a beaming cherub. “Tell us who wrote the ‘Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.’ Cripes! what a title!”

Freddy groaned. “I know that Wadsworth wrote it, but that is all that I do know about it.”

“Wordsworth, Freddy,” Carl corrected him. “Wordsworth. Henry W. Wordsworth.”

“Gee, Carl, thanks. I thought it was William.”

There was a burst of laughter, and then Pudge explained. “It is William, Freddy. Don’t let Peters razz you. Just for that, Carl, you tell what it’s about.”

“No soap,” said Carl decisively.

“I know,” Hugh announced, excited and pleased.

“Shoot!”

“Well, it’s this reincarnation business. Wordsworth thought