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

least one hockey or basketball game a week; later there were track meets, baseball games, and tennis matches; he had to attend Glee Club rehearsals twice a week; he ran every afternoon either in the gymnasium or on the cinder path; someone always seduced him into going to the movies; he was constantly being drawn into bull sessions; there was an occasional concert: and besides all these distractions, there was a fraternity dance, the excitement of Prom, a trip to three cities with the Glee Club, and finally a week’s vacation at home at Easter.

Worst of all, none of his instructors was inspiring. He had been assigned to a new section in Latin, and in losing Alling he lost the one really enjoyable teacher he had had. The others were conscientious, more or less competent, but there was little enthusiasm in their teaching, nothing to make a freshman eager either to attend their classes or to study the lessons they assigned. They did not make the acquiring of knowledge a thrilling experience; they made it a duty⁠—and Hugh found that duty exceedingly irksome.

He attended neither the fraternity dance nor the Prom. He had looked forward enthusiastically to the “house dance,” but after he had, along with the other men in his delegation, cleaned the house from garret to basement, he suddenly took to his bed with grippe. He groaned with despair when Carl gave him glowing accounts of the dance and the “janes.” Carl for once, however, was circumspect; he did not tell Hugh all that happened. He would have been hard put to explain his own reticence, but although he thought “the jane who got pie-eyed” had been enormously funny, he decided not to tell Hugh about her or the pie-eyed brothers.

No freshman was allowed to attend the Prom, but along with the other men who weren’t “dragging women” Hugh walked the streets and watched the girls. There was a tea-dance at the fraternity house during Prom week. Hugh said that he got a great kick out of it, but, as a matter of fact, he remained only a short time; there was a hectic quality to both the girls and the talk that confused him. For some reason he didn’t like the atmosphere; and he didn’t know why. His excuse to the brothers and to himself for leaving early was that he was in training and not supposed to dance.

Track above all things was absorbing his interest. He could hardly think of anything else. He lay awake nights dreaming of the race he would run against Raleigh. Sanford had three dual track meets a year, but the first two were with small colleges and considered of little importance. Only a point winner in the Raleigh meet was granted his letter.

Hugh won the hundred in the sophomore-freshman meet and in a meet with the Raleigh freshmen, so that he was given his class numerals. He did nothing, however, in the Raleigh meet; he was much too nervous to run well, breaking three times at the mark. He was set back two yards and was never able to regain them. For a time he was bitterly despondent, but he soon cheered up when he thought of the three years ahead of him.

Spring brought first rain and slush and then the “sings.” There was a fine stretch of lawn in the center of the campus, and on clear nights the students gathered there for a sing, one class on each side of the lawn. First the seniors sang a college song, then the juniors, then the sophomores, and then the freshmen. After each song, the other classes cheered the singers, except when the sophomores and freshmen sang: they always “razzed” each other. Hugh led the freshmen, and he never failed to get a thrill out of singing a clear note and hearing his classmates take it up.

After each class had sung three or four songs, the boys gathered in the center of the lawn, sang the college hymn, gave a cheer, and the sing was over.

On such nights, however, the singing really continued for hours. The Glee Club often sang from the Union steps; groups of boys wandered arm in arm around the campus singing; on every fraternity steps there were youths strumming banjos and others “harmonizing”: here, there, everywhere young voices were lifted in song⁠—not joyous nor jazzy but plaintive and sentimental. Adeline’s sweetness was extolled by unsure barytones and “whisky” tenors; and the charms of Rosie O’Grady were chanted in “close harmony” in every corner of the campus:

“Sweet Rosie O’Grady,
She’s my pretty rose;
She’s my pretty lady,
As everyone knows.
And when we are married,
Oh, how happy we’ll be,
For I love sweet Rosie O’Grady
And Rosie O’Grady loves me.”

Hugh loved those nights: the shadows of the elms, the soft spring moonlight, the twanging banjos, the happy singing. He would never, so long as he lived, hear “Rosie O’Grady” without surrendering to a tender, sentimental mood; that song would always mean the campus and singing youth.

Suddenly examinations threw their baleful influence over the campus again. Once more the excitement, but not so great this time, the cramming, the rumors of examinations “getting out,” the seminars, the tutoring sections, the nervousness, the fear.

Hugh, however, was surer of himself than he had been the first term, and although he had no reason to be proud of the grades he received, he was not particularly ashamed of them.

He and Carl left the same day but by different trains. They had agreed to room together again in Surrey 19; so they didn’t feel that the parting for the summer was very important.

“You’ll write, won’t you, old man?”

“Sure, Hugh⁠—surest thing you know. Say, it don’t seem possible that our freshman year’s over already. Why, hell, Hugh, we’re sophomores.”

“So we are! What do you know about that?” Hugh’s eyes shone. “Gosh!”

Carl looked at his watch. “Hell, I’ve got to beat it.” He picked up his suitcase, dropped it, shook hands vigorously with Hugh, snatched up his suitcase, and was