
A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook

Title:      Gideon Planish (1943)
Author:     Sinclair Lewis
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A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook

Title:      Gideon Planish (1943)
Author:     Sinclair Lewis






To MARCELLA POWERS who explained Carrie Planish and her friends to me.





1


The urgent whistle of the Manhattan Flyer woke the boy, and his
square face moved with smiling as in half-dreams he was certain
that some day he would take that train and be welcomed in lofty
rooms by millionaires and poets and actresses.  He would be one of
them, and much admired.

His present state, at the age of ten, in 1902, was well enough.
His father was not only a veterinarian but a taxidermist, a man who
had not done so badly in a city like this--for Vulcan, with its
population of 38,000, was the seventh city in the great State of
Winnemac.  The Planishes' red-brick house, too, was one of the most
decorated in that whole row on Sycamore Terrace, and they had a
telephone and a leather-bound set of the Encyclopedia Americana.  A
cultured and enterprising household, altogether.  But as the small
Gideon Planish heard the enticing train, he was certain that he was
going far beyond eagle-stuffing and the treatment of water-
spaniels' indigestion.

He would be a senator or a popular minister, something rotund and
oratorical, and he would make audiences of two and three hundred
people listen while he shot off red-hot adjectives about Liberty
and Plymouth Rock.

But even as the boy was smiling, the last whistle of the train,
coming across the swamps and outlying factory yards, was so lost
and lonely that he fell back into his habitual doubt of himself and
of his rhetorical genius; and that small square face tightened now,
with the anxiety and compromise of the prophet who wants both
divine sanction and a diet much spicier than locusts and wild
honey.  Gid already felt a little dizzy on the path that mounted
high above his father's business of embalming hoot-owls.  He could
feel a forecast of regret that life was going to yank him up to
greatness and mountain-sickness.



Into the office of the dean of Adelbert College hastened a chunky
young man with hair like a tortoise-shell cat.  He glared down at
the astonished dean, upraised a sturdy arm like a traffic officer,
and bellowed:

"'If they dare to come out in the open field and defend the gold
standard as a good thing, we will fight them to the uttermost!'
Huh?"

"Yes, yes," the dean said, soothingly.  He was an aging man and a
careful scholar, for Adelbert was a respectable small Presbyterian
college.  And he was used to freshmen.  But Gid Planish was
furiously going on:

"'Having behind us the producing masses of this nation and the
world, supported by the industrial interests--'"

The dean interrupted, "It's 'commercial interests,' not 'industrial
interests.'  If you must quote William Jennings Bryan, do be
accurate, my young friend."

Gid looked pained.  Through all of his long and ambitious life--he
was now eighteen--he had been oppressed by just such cynical
misunderstanding.  But he knew the Bryan speech clear to the end,
and he was a natural public leader, who never wasted any
information that he possessed.  He roared on:

"'--supported by the commercial interests, the laboring interests,
and the toilers everywhere, we will answer their demand for a gold
standard by saying to them:  "You shall not press down upon the
brow of labor this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind
upon a cross of gold,"' and look, Dean, I got to take Forensics and
Extempore Speaking, I got to, that's what I came to Adelbert for,
and I asked the prof--"

"The professor."

"Yuh, I asked the prof, and he said freshmen can't take Forensics,
but I got to take it."

"Don't you think that Freshman Rhetoric and a nice course of
Freshman English, Wordsworth and the daffodils, would satisfy you?"

"No, sir.  I guess maybe it sounds highfalutin, but I got a kind of
Message to deliver."

"And what is your message?"

Gid looked out at the waiting-room.  No one was there but the
dean's secretary.  He insisted, mounting on his own eloquence:

"It seems to me, what this country needs is young men in politics
that have higher standards of honesty and more profound knowledge
of history and, uh, well, of civics than the politicians of today,
and who will advance the unfinished work lying before us of leading
this country to uh, higher standards of Freedom, Liberty, Equality,
Fraternity, Freedom, and--well, I mean higher standards of--"

"Of Democracy."

"That's it.  Of Democracy.  So you see I GOT to take Forensics."

"How do you spell Forensics, young man?"

"I guess it's f-o-r-e-n-s-i-k-s.  Can I take it?"

"No."

"What did you say, sir?"

"I said no."

"You mean I can't take Forensics?"

"No."

Gid felt confused.  This business of preparing to lead the masses
seemed to be going around in circles.  And he was aware that a
fellow freshman, but a thin, tall, un-idealistic and devilish kind
of freshman, had entered the waiting-room, and was listening.  Gid
urged, more softly:

"I was the star on the debating team at Lincoln High, in Vulcan,
and that's the fifth biggest high school in the State."

"No.  It is a rule.  Public Speaking is reserved for upper-
classmen."

"And we debated with the Webster High team from Monarch on
'Resolved:  Flying-machines will never be useful in war,' and we
won."

"My young friend, your fervor is admirable, and so--"

"I can take it?  Forensics?  Bully!"

"You can not!  Please--go--away."

Gid went away, a little bewildered, as later in life he was so
often to be bewildered by the world's inappreciation of people who
want to help it.

The thin devil of a classmate leered at him as he crossed the
waiting-room.



At Doc's Bar-B-Q Lunch, Gid was taking refreshment, this late
afternoon of his second day at Adelbert College.  To his
disillusionment was added the stress of choosing between two
fraternities, the Philamathean Club and Tiger Head.  Meantime he
lived at Mrs. Jones's and endangered the nice fresh digestion that
the son of a veterinarian ought to have by dining at Doc's on
hamburger sandwiches and pickles.

Next to the broad-armed chair which was also his dining-table he
found the lean devil whom he had seen in the dean's office.

"How you makin' out?" said the devil.

"Oh, all right, I guess."

"Did you get in on the public-speaking course?"

"No, damn it."

"Why don't you try for the debating team?"

"Gosh, I've tried to try already.  I went and saw the captain, and
he told me you can't get on the team till you're a sophomore.
Gosh, I guess they don't WANT freshmen to be intellectual and
idealistic here!  But I don't suppose you care a darn about that."

"What makes you think so?"

"You look so--Say, what do they call you?"

"Hatch Hewitt, my name is."

"Gideon Planish, mine is."

"Pleasedmeecha."

"Pleasedmeecha."

"What makes you think, do I care can freshmen be idealistic in this
dump, Mr. Planish?"

"Well, I'll tell you, Mr. Hewitt; it's because you look like you'd
make fun of sentimentalists."

"Maybe I would, at that, Mr. Planish.  But that's because I AM an
idealist."

"Is that a fact, Hatch!  Well, well, is that a fact!  Say, I'm
tickled to death!  It would knock you for a row of small cottages
if you knew how few idealists I had to discuss things with, in a
factory town like Vulcan."

"That's how it is even in Chicago."

"Chi-cago?"  Gid was reverent.  "Do you come from Chicago?"

"Um-huh."

"Gosh!  What do you want with a half-sized place like this, then?"

"Low tuition."

"Wouldn't I like to see Chicago!  Holy mackerel!  I hear where
there's an auditorium there that seats six thousand people.
Imagine seeing a gang like that stretching out before you!  And I
hear where there's a big women's sufferage organization.  That's a
very fine cause.  Women had ought to have the vote, don't you think
so?  Don't you think we had ought to have women for their moral
effect in the purification of politics?"

"That isn't exactly my idea of what I want 'em for."

"I thought you said you were an idealist, Hatch!"

"I guess maybe I'm an idealist AGAINST.  I hate all this fakery.
I hate these rich women bossing clerks in department stores, and
these fat boys with cigars in the corner of their mouths, like
elongated warts, and I hate books like this Mrs. Barclay's The
Rosary, that they say is selling by the hundred thousand.  See how
I mean?"

"Me, I don't hate things so much--only it does kind of make me mad
when I hear about little kids working in cotton mills.  But I'm on
the positive side, you might say.  I want to kind of, you might
say, rouse people to the idea this nation, under God, shall have a
new birth of freedom.  I s'pose you think that's sentimental!"

"No--no!  Only, I just wish people wouldn't quote Lincoln or the
Bible, or hang out the flag or the cross, to cover up something
that belongs more to the bank-book and the three golden balls.  But
I envy you.  I wish I could trust human enthusiasm.  But I come
from across the tracks.  My dad was an awful smart drayman and he
could sing Harry Lauder songs and he was a good union man, but my
God, did he lap up the licker!  I went to work as a Western Union
messenger at twelve--one Christmas Eve I worked at the joyous Noel
business till four A.M.--and I wound up in the South Chicago bureau
of the Chronicle."

"Gosh!  A re-porter?"

"Yuh.  But I'm a lot older than you are.  God, I'm twenty-one!"

They both sighed at that senility, and Hatch went on:

"I got what education I could reading at the branch library.  I
don't think so much of colleges, but maybe I can learn some
economics here, and some vocabulary besides 'holocaust' and
'suspended sentence'."

"Maybe you and I can do something in politics together, some time."

Gid felt exultantly that perhaps he had, for the first time in his
life, a Friend.

He was a tail-wagging pup, and in high school he had always been
member of some respectable gang, but it had been only of baseball,
fudge, dances and swimming that he had been able to talk, while
deeply he desired a Real Friend, to whom he could confide his
intentions toward eloquence and justice and How to Get into the
Legislature.  He was jarred now when Hatch Hewitt shook his head,
and droned:

"No politics--no spieling.  I'm a reporter.  I do like Swinburne,
though--nice, smooth, slippery, marble words."

"My ideal is Bryan.  But I guess maybe you think Bryan does a lot
of spouting."

"He loves dogs and mothers."

"What's the matter with loving dogs and mothers?"

"I don't know.  I never had either.  Probably I'm just jealous of
you, Gid.  Maybe I wish I could hypnotize audiences too.  Go to it!
Sock em!  I'll write a speech for you, now and then."

"You bet, Hatch!  We'll do that!"

So he did have the friend.  But he did not intend to let even a
Hatch Hewitt write his speeches.  Himself, he might not be so
doggone poetic, but he didn't guess even a big journalist like
Hatch could turn out anything better than his own salutatory in
Vulcan:

"The fruits of the seven seas and the fruits of our broad fields
from the legendary East to the broad-bosomed West have been
garnered together by our illustrious princes of transportation and
who have lent themselves to enlightened barter not to merely expand
their own princely fortunes, so helpful, however, in benefactions
to colleges and hospitals, but first and foremost to fill the
hungry mouths of the clamoring multitude."

Beat THAT?

Hatch hinted, "Let's get out of here.  C'mon over to my room.  I
got an idea, and I don't want all these dopes listening."

Indeed the small lunchroom, with its faded green tin ceiling, its
faded blue plaster walls, its gallery of posters advertising gum,
was filling with young men yelping, "Hey, Bill!" and "Say, is this
History of Art stuff a gut course?" and the place smelled now of
ham and cabbage and fried onions.  As Gid wandered out with Hatch
Hewitt, he resembled a plump spaniel trotting beside a wolf hound.
Yet it was Gid, the comparatively prosperous, who was fashionably
sloppy and collegiate, in shaggy blue woolen sweater and corduroys
and thick brogans; Hatch who was fussily neat in the cheap gray
suit, the plain white shirt, the cautious blue bow tie, that he was
to wear for four years to come.

Hatch's room was a stable, Gid romantically found; an old small
stable built for a team of inconsiderable horses, leaning and
shaky, with hayseed caked about the windows.  But it was as orderly
as a widow's tea-room: a cot-bed in one stall, and in the other an
old wood-stove and a wooden table with a dozen exactly arranged
books.

"I do my own cooking here and just go to Doc's barbecue for a cup
of coffee and company.  With what I've saved, and a syndicate of
papers for college news that I'm working up, I'll get through,"
said Hatch.  "But this dump must look pretty messy."

"It's grand!  It's Bohemian!  Vie de Bohemia!"

"I hate Bohemians."

"Oh!"

"I like order and precision."

"Oh, you do!"  Gid was not too meek about it.

"You--I suppose you have a handsome apartment, with a fumed-oak
Morris chair."

"I have not!  I just got a stuffy room in a boarding-house till I
find out which frat I'll choose."

"So you're going to be a Greek--to join a select young gentlemen's
social club."

"Why not?"  Gid was admirably angry now; he was not much afraid of
other people, only of himself.  "I'm a social young gent myself.
Just too bad you don't like it!"

"Oh, I didn't mean--"

"You have such a hell of a time admiring yourself as a hater, and
I'm expected to sit at your feet--"

"No, no, Gid!  I guess I just have mental sour stomach.  You're
okay.  You're not content with this dumb world, the way it is,
either--you're not mediocre.  I don't think you are.  Forgive me."

So did Gid find his first friend, and they sat at the table
drinking Hatch's privately brewed coffee--very thin and bitter--
while Hatch glanced up at the small high window of the stable to
make sure the Secret Service wasn't listening, and admitted his
perilous secret.

"Gid, if you can't get into the debating club, why don't you--I'm
going to start a Socialist Society."

"What?  But socialism is against the home and marriage!"

"What of it?"

"Of course there's Gene Debs."

"Exactly."

"I hear he's a grand guy."

"Exactly.  And we'll have a lot of debates, and you can be in 'em.
Maybe we'll challenge the entire college to a debate."

"That would be swell.  I'd like to show up those galoots that
wouldn't take me in!  I sure would!  When do you start your
society?"

"It's just started this minute.  It only takes two fearless guys
like me and you to unsettle one little college."

"Let's go!"

That was the entire struggle involved in the conversion of Gideon
Planish to socialism.  His deconversion was to take longer, a
little longer.



A train was whistling, and Gideon Planish was lying awake.

He remembered that he had a friend now, not just a companion to go
walking with.  Between his brains and Hatch Hewitt's imagination,
there was nothing they might not do.  Probably he would never
really be President of the United States, but if he ever were, it
would be a pleasure to appoint Hatch Secretary of State--or anyway,
postmaster at Zenith.

But of course they must think first not of such glories but of the
good they could do.

Before the train had ceased its piping, he had built a glass and
marble hospital in every village in America, he had Christianized
China, he had stopped all wars forever by courts of arbitration, he
had given the vote to women--and they had been very grateful.  He
remembered the co-ed in the tight blouse whom he had noticed in
front of the Library, and he forgot his imperial benignity.



2


The first meeting of the Adelbert College Socialist League, with
all five members present, was held in Hatch's stable home.  It was
felt that it would be dangerous to meet in the libidinous
atmosphere of Tiger Head fraternity, where Gid Planish, as a newly
elected member, had a bed, a bureau, two chairs and a portrait of
Longfellow.

College had been coursing on its wild hunt of culture for two
weeks, and it was now September 20, 1910.  In those days, Adelbert
opened during the first week in September, and how innocent and
medieval the whole system was may be seen in the fact that students
came by train instead of in their private automobiles.

The five Socialists, in their awe at saving the world, gave up
clogging and all the kittenishness that was then considered proper
to freshmen.  They sat about Hatch's table on two chairs and three
boxes:  Hatch, Gid, young Francis Tyne, who was going to study for
the ministry, an iron-faced older man who had once been a labor
organizer, and David Traub, a handsome, precise lad from New York,
forerunner of the eager and rather heroic caravan who were later to
escape from too much racial discussion in New York, and emigrate
like their fathers.

Francis Tyne was a thin, earnest youth with a biggish head and fine
colorless hair.  He suggested their calling one another "Comrade,"
but it didn't go.  Gid and Hatch were still too close to the
horrors of being called "Brother" by loud evangelical pastors.

Gid looked them all over like a born chairman.  Back in Limbo,
before he was born, he must have presided over committees of the
Young Cherubim's Anti-Birth-Control Association.  He said merrily,
"We don't seem to have any girls with us.  We certainly ought to,
these days."

"Rot!" said the ex-labor organizer.  He was a solid man, named Lou
Klock.

"Why?" demanded Francis.

Klock growled, "Women are useful in all left-wing movements--
addressing factory rallies and addressing envelopes--but give 'em a
chance on the strategy and they'll have you wearing red neckties
and dancing on the green, instead of pounding the bosses for higher
wages."

"Wait now!" beamed Gid, with the conciliatory good-fellowship of
the professional presider.  "This ain't 1890, Lou.  No!  This is
1910!  The revolution has been won, except for a few details.  War
is finished, except as an instrument of protest, and women are
recognized by all thinkers as our equals--practically."

"Rot," said Lou.

"Well, let that pass, for the moment.  Frank Tyne, Comrade Tyne
here, has an outline of what he thinks we ought to do, and I vote
we hear from him."

Hatch Hewitt suggested, "By the way, don't you suppose it might be
a good idea if we elected a chairman?"

Gid felt pained and ill-used, for it had not occurred to him that
anybody save Gideon Planish could be chairman.  His hard-won glory
was already being questioned, and that by the one man whom he had
these many years trusted as his friend and partisan.  Somebody
snickered--probably Lou Klock--and all his life, however brave and
impassioned before an audience that hated him gravely, Gid would
always feel watery in the backs of his knees when anybody jeered.

David Traub snapped, "Don't be silly, Hewitt.  Of course Planish is
our chairman.  Or do YOU want to be?"

"Oh, no, no!"

"Then he's the goat."

Gid blossomed with glory.  He commanded, "Go to it, Frank.  Let's
hear your plan."

Francis Tyne produced a pack of small filing cards, dark with tiny
notations.  It was his moment.  For years, in his Sunday-school
classes, in a village where it was not kosher to admit any doctrine
more subversive than that women might with decency become rural
mail-carriers, he had pictured just this hour, when he should be
banded with desperate but talented comrades.  He looked up from his
notes with the eyes of a cocker spaniel, and Gid's tender heart was
touched and he was ready to go right off and build a barricade with
Francis, provided it should be finished in time for supper.

"Well, it's really awfully simple and reasonable, but I suppose
there will be objection to my program in privileged classes," said
Francis.  "First, of course, the Government has to take over the
ownership of all mines, water-power, agricultural land, and all
industries employing more than a hundred people."

None of them looked worried, and the newly converted collectivist,
Gid Planish, definitely glowed.

"But I don't think that's enough, Comrades.  There's a lot of these
foreign and European Socialists who go that far," said Francis.
"What would make a peculiarly American socialism would be to have a
state church."

"What?" shouted the others, while David Traub proposed, "How about
the Jewish faith?"

Francis protested, "No, no, Comrade Traub.  You don't understand
these things.  Our Savior started an entirely new dispensation.
But about the set-up of a true revolutionary church: of course the
Catholic Church and Christian Science and the Mormons are out, and
the Baptists are pretty doggone super--supererogatory with their
immersion, and it's against Scripture to have bishops, like in the
Methodist and Episcopal, and the Congregationalists come awful
close to verging on heresy and wishy-washiness, and so it seems to
me the true American model is the Presbyterian Church--which
happens to be my own, but merely by coincidence."

"Say, what is all this wordage about?" said Klock.

"God knows--maybe," said Hewitt.

"Now wait!  I never thought of it in that light, but he's
absolutely sound.  I'm a Presbyterian, too!" said Gid.



All of them were young--even Lou Klock was but twenty-six--and in
the ardent next two hours it was variously stated that:

Christianity is exhausted and a failure.

Christianity has never yet been given a chance.

The church is the trap wherein the Capitalist class nabs the
workers.

The church is the one union wherein all workers can defy the
heathenism of the Capitalists.

The Russians will have socialism first.

The Russians are lazy; they drink tea and read novels, and never
will have socialism.

Adelbert College is in a class with Abraham Lincoln, science,
football and the Packard car.

Adelbert College is snobbish and hasn't had a new idea since 1882.

With each of these opinions, Gid voluptuously agreed.  He felt that
they were having a fine, free, enlightening time, but at last he
pounded the table, with Hatch's dollar watch, and announced, "We're
beginning to see light in this discussion.  It's a sure-enough
round table, all right.  But before we try and go any further, it's
time to organize.  We got to decide on just who will map out each
department of our activities."

"That makes sense," said Hatch.

Francis begged, "Oh, not yet!  Let's spend a month or so searching
each other's minds and sort of inspiring each other."

As a professional, Gid was horrified.  "You mean go on chewing the
rag about all these mighty topics without OR-gan-iz-ing?"

"Why, yes.  The natural form of organization must grow out of what
we think and then decide to do."

Gid explained, with great sweetness and reasonableness:

"Never!  The kind of organization you set up, and who's on the
committees, decide what you can do, and what you do determines what
you think.  Honest, that's the straight goods; that's modern
psychology.  I know by experience.  You bet."  The veteran nodded
sagely.  "That's the way I've seen it work, for many years now--
ever since the Sixth Grade.  We started in to collect litter on the
school grounds, but do you know, we had such an active organization
that we improved the whole basic idea, and turned it into a co-
operative revolving fund to buy molasses popcorn.  Yessir!  And how
can we raise money unless we have the right organization--fearless
but flexible?"

"What do we want to raise money for?" they protested.

"So we can send out letters and do publicity and get more members."

Hatch suggested, "Then when we get more members, we can raise more
money so we can get still more members?"

"Why, certainly!  And then when we get a LOT of money, we can put
on a real campaign and get a whole LOT of members!  That's what
organization is.  That's how you progress, in THIS ole world!"

David Traub complained, "I don't see that.  If you want to promote
some reform, and not get all tangled up in jealousy and politics,
you want to avoid organizing for the sake of organizing."

"Oh, I agree with you, heartily," said Gid.

Some time during the evening there was an election of officers.
Gid had assumed that he would be president.

He was president.  Not only that, but, without the least
hesitation, he made an inaugural address:

However much they might disagree upon minor details, such as the
value of Christianity and of women, they stood shoulder to
shoulder, through fire and obloquy, an army small but determined,
invincible in their loyalty as in their enfranchised intellects and
their common determination to throw off their chains, a force to
make the blind monster of Capitalism look up from its prey in
terror, denouncing unsparingly the capitalistic tyranny of
Compulsory Latin and demanding lower prices on tennis balls at the
Co-op.

He, their leader, would retire for meditation and consolidate his
plans.  They must not Breathe a Word.  It would take some time to
win over the entire student body and, though on principle he was
opposed to Fabian tactics, it might be better to enlist the
undergrads before lining up the faculty and the president--and
particularly that damn dean--and giving them the choice of joining
the revolution or resigning.  As to immediate strategy, they must
decide whether their next step should be a mass meeting in the
college chapel, or the publication of a weekly magazine,
illustrated, and including articles by Eugene V. Debs and George
Bernard Shaw.  He himself would be willing to write to Comrades
Debs and Shaw and instruct them to shoot along the articles, quick.
But whatever they did, they might now say that socialism had
already triumphed at good ole Adelbert!

After this springing verbiage, Comrades Traub, Klock and Tyne filed
out, looking dazed.

Gid fretted, "Hatch, do you suppose we can trust those dubs to keep
our plot absolutely dark till we're ready to spring socialism on
the world?"

"Gid, do you think that pikers like me ought to have even a vote?
Does your sea-green radicalism go that far?"

"Oh, yes."

"What's your real plan?  To turn this thing into a rival of the
orthodox Debating Society?"

Gid brought out a smile that Hatch could not withstand.  "I haven't
any idea!  What do you think we ought to pull, Hatch?  Anyway, we
got to get rid of Frank Tyne.  Why, that goat would actually like
to overthrow the Republican Party!  But you're the brains in this
gang.  What shall we do with the League?"

"I'll think about it," said Hatch, in subjugation to a man whom he
liked and envied and despised.



3


The dean of Adelbert College said feebly, "You again?"

Gid's expression declared that they were old and helpful friends;
that he was fond of this aged pal, and glad to give him new vigor
and ideas.

"Yes, sir.  I thought you ought to know that I have founded a
secret Socialist club."

"Well?"

"I just thought, if it was forbidden to have revolutionary clubs,
I'd better report it, so it would be okay.  Gosh, I guess it must
be awful unusual to have secret juntas in Adelbert!"

"No, not unusual; a little annoying, perhaps, but not unusual.
Some years we have an anarchist club, and frequently a nihilist
club or an atheist club, and once we had a nudist club--I really
had to speak to the inaugurator of that one, a very nice young
fellow who is now assistant rector of St. Dimity's, in Philadelphia.
But with most subversive organizations, we don't do anything unless
they parade in nightshirts or trample the shrubbery.  But it is
somewhat rare for the chief instigator to come in and inform us."

"Would you like me to wind up the club, Dean?  I'd be glad to, if
you'd let me in on the course in Forensics.  And in the
circumstances, I guess I'd have to be taken into the debating
society, too."

"Please--go--away!"

"Well, sir, you'll remember I warned you."

"Just let me know well beforehand any particularly destructive
sabotage or direct action that you may plan.  I wouldn't foresee
them--my curious learnings are rather along theological and
ichthyological lines.  You'll let me know, won't you?"

"Oh, I couldn't do that, Dean.  I have to be loyal to my gang.  But
I think I may say I have a lot of influence, and I'll see they
don't perpetrate anything too dangerous.  And if you'll just think
over that Forensics course--"

"Please--go--away!"



Upon Gid's suggestion, the Socialist League challenged the college
debating society to a discussion of the government ownership of
railroads, and that official body accepted, with the notion of
having a practice match before the classic annual contest with the
great University of Winnemac.

Hatch Hewitt, who didn't really believe in government ownership of
anything except congressional spittoons, and whose idea of
socialism was that under it an enlightened young man could tell the
city editor to go to the devil; Gid, who hadn't believed in
government ownership until today; and Francis Tyne, who always had,
sat together in the college library, garnering statistics about
socialized railroads in Germany.  In 1910 that country, under the
enlightened and scholarly leadership of Kaiser William, was
universally known to be the brightest nation in the world.

As he was often to do in his later career as a professional
promoter of ideas, Gid nearly convinced himself of the truth of his
own crusade.  He was deciding to go out and nationalize all rails,
he was beginning to believe he had invented collectivism, when the
catastrophe struck them.

On October 2nd, they had the news that the plant of the Los Angeles
Times, which had been warring with union labor, had been blown up,
with nineteen deaths.  And the Adelbert Socialist League blew up
with it.

The League now had nine members.  Most of them would have preferred
to meet dramatically at Hatch's stable, in conspiratorial darkness,
but they were up against reality.  They weren't merely defying God
and the House of Morgan now; they were in danger of getting
demerits from the dean.  The executive committee gathered in a
corner of the Y.M.C.A. lounge at three o'clock on a bright
afternoon.

Gid panted, "Meancometorder.  Lissen, Comrades, I think we better
get the hell out of this Socialist club, or turn it into a literary
society."

"You're going to lay down and take it?  You mean you don't dare to
face the ruling class and defy 'em when there's something to defy
'em about?" demanded Hatch.

"Not at all!  We'll call our literary society the Walt Whitman
League.  That's defiant enough for anybody!  Whitman never went to
college!" explained Gid.  "There's nobody wants to hammer tyranny
more than I do, but this isn't the time for it."

All the rest of his life, in crises, Gideon Planish was to say,
"But this isn't the time for it."  It is the slogan of discreet
Liberalism, as profound as St. Francis's "The beasts are my
brothers," or Governor Alfred E. Smith's war-cry, "Slice it where
you will, it's still baloney."

Hatch Hewitt was demanding, "Why isn't it the time for it?"

"Because there may be a chance that these labor agitators, the
McNamara brothers, DID blow up the Times."

"Impossible!" protested Hatch, while Lou Klock challenged, "And
suppose they did?  Wouldn't you guys still support them?  Do you
know what WAR is?"  Unanswered, he walked out of the room, out of
the Socialist League and, in a few weeks, out of Adelbert College.

Hatch reflected, "I don't agree with Lou--yet.  But I see his idea.
Now, Gid, you run to the dean again and tell him we've ducked for
cover!"  And he followed Lou out of the Y.M.C.A., while Gid wailed
after him, "Me?  Run to the dean?  ME?"



That was the death of the Adelbert Socialist League, and for the
funeral there were no hymns, no flowers, and only such exhibits of
Christian resignation as were provided by Francis Tyne.

For a month Hatch looked at Gid with bleakness, and there were no
intellectual gallops in his stableyard.  But Hatch Hewitt was a
lonely young man; he loved people too much and he despised them too
much to have long and casual friendships.  When Lou Klock had gone
and Dave Traub had wandered on to the University of Chicago, Hatch
was left companionless, and by the end of their freshman year there
had been restored between him and Gid a flinching amiability.  They
sneaked over to a neighboring city and drank beer and discussed the
danger of war with Mexico.

"I don't think a country as big as what we are had ought to pick on
a neighboring state," said Gid, the old Liberal.

"Is that a fact?" marveled Hatch.



On the day after the decease of the Socialist League, Gid sought
out the secretary of the college debating society, reminded him
that it had been announced on all bulletin boards that the society
would debate with the Socialists, who had blown up the Times
personally, and suggested that the only way out of such a perilous
connection would be for the debating society to elect Gid a member.
Then, he might possibly think about killing off and generally
disowning the League.

The debating society met, in haste, changed its constitution so
that freshmen might be admitted, elected Gid, and thanked him for
something--they weren't quite sure what--that he had done to save
Adelbertan oratory from shame.  Late in the spring he was actually
on the debating team which invaded and conquered Erasmus College;
and the fame of Gideon Planish promised to be as firmly established
in the glorious annals of the college as that of Old Pug, for
eleven years the baseball mascot.  Erasmus College was in Eastern
Ohio, and Gid had never been so far East--almost into New York
State!

With his associate debaters, including a very large junior who sang
grand opera in Dakotan, he traveled on a day coach to Erasmus.
They had large stickers, "Adelbert Champion Debaters," on their
suitcases, and they talked in enormous voices about taxation, to
improve the minds of their fellow passengers.

They were met by a cheering crowd of nine, and put up at a fine
hotel: twenty-two rooms, twenty-two pitchers, and twenty-two bowls.
Gid had never before stayed at a hotel, except with his fussy
father and mother, who kept telling him about the fire-escape.  He
had a room of his own, and he proudly raised the shade, felt the
bed, as he had seen his mother do, demanded a luggage rack of the
cynical bellboy, and unpacked the two shirts, the chemistry
textbook and the shoeshine rag.

They were all dressing for the debate, in dark-blue suits--
practically in evening clothes, felt Gid.  He sat down to his
debate notes, not very nervously.  He might not be a William
Jennings Bryan, but he had worked hard, he was full of earnestness,
he had a great message for the student audience of Erasmus, and
there was no reason to suppose that God wasn't enthusiastically
with him.

They were entertained at dinner in the college, and when the
Adelbert heroes came into the Erasmus Commons, very modestly, just
one of them carrying a small banner lettered


                         Adelbert
                       \  /\  / ill
                        \/  \/  in


the student body clapped their hands, all six hundred hands, and
some of them threw bread in an affectionate way, while Gideon
Planish tasted the fiery brandy of public greatness and just
acclaim.

At the debate, in the college chapel, there wasn't as large a crowd
as he had hoped; in fact, there were less than a hundred--in fact,
there were less than seventy-five.  The hosts explained that it
just happened that there was also a basketball game tonight.  But
as Gid spoke, the crowd seemed to stretch out endless, and they
were all his, all looking at him, all listening to him, and his
power was on them.

For a moment he found it amusing that what he had to say was the
opposite of what he would have said for the Socialist League.  Then
it was the truth, and the only truth, and he had invented it.  He
maintained that the government ownership of railroads was not only
inefficient but naughty.  He played on figures as on cello strings,
and wound up his Message like a Beethoven finale:

"I think we have shown by the statistics of railroad operation in
New Kamchatka how wasteful is the political control of transportation.
But there is another aspect that is even more important: the
spiritual side of this economic crime against suffering mankind.

"How would you like it if you were one of our fine, honest toilers,
say, like a conductor on your own K Line here, a man who has
supported his family and paid his debts and his charities and his
lodge dues, and been loyal to his State, his country, his God, and
his company, and he finds that some apparently innocent passenger
is nothing but a snooper, a Government spy, put there on the train
by inimical politicians and bosses to see how many cash fares the
conductor knocks down?  Do you think any man could carry on, like
the fine, honest workmen ought to in our land of liberty, in that
atmosphere of political intrigue and distrust?  Oh, to ask that
question is to answer it!  And so, finally, do you know what that
kind of stuff is?  It is nothing less than that menacing, that
subversive, that most European doctrine--SOCIALISM!"

And Gid and God and the Adelbert team won the debate.



He came down the Erasmus Hotel corridor, broad, confident, shining
with youth and victory.

The night maid was a German woman of thirty, unmarried but not very
virginal, just from the farm, and lonely for her Otto.  She had a
radiant skin, and a smile for returning heroes.

"Well, you been out," she said.

"Yes!  I won a debate!"

"A debate?  Well!"

It was the first time that he had ever encountered a person who was
completely worldly-wise.  Marta had the sophistication that came
from seeing a mortgage foreclosed, a father killed by falling on a
scythe, a thousand animals bred and a hundred suitors smirking.  He
was overwhelmed, and he said, by her volition more than by his,
"Don't I get a kiss after winning the debate?"

"Yuh--maybe."

Her lips were as sweet as fresh-made johnnycake with honey.  He
unbuttoned her bodice, kissed her again and shakily unlocked the
door of his room.  She followed him in, cheerfully, and much later
she told him he was a fine young man--just like her Otto.

But as Gid went to sleep, quite happily, to the urgent whistle of
an express flying through town, he was thinking not of the dark
blind chasm of Marta's love, but of how the applause had marched
across his audience, and he muttered:

"Now, nothing can stop me!  United States Senator--why, I got it
cinched!"



4


All that summer after his freshman year, Gid went to sea and met
hairy men who had known fog and shipwreck.  He talked with
passengers who could toss you off a Capetown hotel or a Viennese
countess or a Saskatchewan fishing trip as easily as you could toss
off a game of checkers.

He was a waiter on a Great Lakes steamer, running from Buffalo to
Duluth, and he learned something about navigation and more about
beer and the surprising varieties of cheese.  He had time to think
of girls and religion and making money and all the things he could
do in the way of organizing the loose high spirits and good nature
of his fellow students.  Standing in darkness on the lowest of the
four sprawling open decks, he listened to the lake water singing
past him, and made two romantic vows.

He would be a Good Man, a bringer of Messages to the poor old
longing world--Messages about brotherhood and democracy and the
regular use of green (including yellow) vegetables.  He'd show 'em
that there was nothing to all this predatory vice.  He'd inform
them that the waiters and deck-hands who gambled and got drunk had
no bank accounts nor even much jollity to show for it.

Otherhand, he perceived that most of the Good Men, such as his
college instructors, had little to show for their virtue.  The
trouble, he decided, was that they fooled their time away, without
direction.

He selected virtue as his lot, but virtue had to be organized.

There were but few born organizers; few that had his gifted
combination of imagination, power and accuracy.  He wasn't sure but
that he was an even greater organizer than orator.  Among Good Men,
he would be the Most Good Man, and their chairman.

In some slight awe he perceived that this was probably Destiny
speaking, and not just his humble willingness to serve mankind.

As for girls, God, scenery, also family life and physical fitness,
he was glad to find that he considered them all very nice things.
He hoped that he would never refer to any of them in any speech
without saying, "God bless 'em!"  But for a devoted artist like
himself, he felt, they were important only as they could be
organized and so made available to mankind.



He returned to college with some acclaim.  The dean was almost
polite to him, and the debaters assured him that if he would be
patient, they would elect him their captain in another year.  The
football captain asked his advice as to whether there really was
anything to all this Reading that he kept hearing about in his
classes, and the leading bootlegger in the village gave Gid a box
of thirty Turkish cigarettes.

Diligently harkening to the voice of the Lord, the first Great
Organizer, Gid started on his new plans.

The pants-pressing situation in Adelbert was deplorable.  Pressing
was carried on, without co-ordination, by the village tailor shop,
by the janitor of a fraternity house, and by two students; the
elapsed-time factor was variable; and the prices ran anywhere from
fifteen cents to half a dollar, with collections, Gid estimated,
not over 67%.

He disliked the tailor shop--he had had words about his bill--so he
eliminated it from the blessed society of justifiable pants
pressers.  He called the janitor and the two student pants
craftsmen together; he smothered them with words, and set them all
up in the janitor's basement room, as The Adelbert Snappy Dressers'
Pantorium--Terms Cash.  He increased their joint business by
persuading the football captain to come out for pressedness instead
of manly sloppiness, he got sixteen co-eds to sign a vow not to be
"dated" by unpressed males, he coaxed the editor of the Weekly
Delbertan to run an article, written by Gid, stating that visitors
from Yale and Harvard were shocked by the normal state of the
Adelbert trouser, and he even tried to remember not to throw his
own clothes on the floor when he went to bed.

He spent joyful hours in the basement pressing shop, sniffing the
pleasant steaminess, watching the tailors' geese--or gooses--turn
wrinkled cloth into smooth elegance, and going over the account
book, looking like the founding Rothschild.  And the Pantorium
prospered and the rival tailor shop went gratifyingly bankrupt.
Gid collected twenty-five per cent of the Pantorium profits.  And
so, by April of his sophomore year, he was so busy and so expanded
that he was two hundred dollars in debt, and likely to be suspended
from college.

To set up the business, he had had to provide better irons and a
quicker furnace, to advance rent on the basement and, particularly,
to pay for the dodgers which communicated his first printed
messages to a surprised public.  It is doubtful if ever in his life
he was to be more forceful than in the hot rhetoric of "Hey,
fellows, do you want to look like college men or town muckers?  The
garment oft bespeaks the man.  Don't go around bespeaking that you
don't belong to the bon ton.  Co-eds' suits also pressed
scientifically.  Welcome, girls.  YE OLDE PANTORIUM.  Terms cash."

For this enterprise, which was in the true American tradition of
Jim Hill, the Rockefellers and Jesse James, Gid had borrowed three
hundred dollars from an aunt who read nothing but the Boston Cook
Book and who was deaf and pious, though she lived in the great city
of Zenith.  He had promised to repay her within a month.

But his student patrons interpreted the phrase "terms Cash" just as
Gid himself would have interpreted it: as somewhere between a poor
joke and a threat of horrid tyranny.  In five months, Gid was able
to pay back only one hundred dollars, and his doting aunt stopped
doting.  She wrote to his father on the same day on which the
Adelbert Sportshop reported to the dean that Gid owed them seventy-
two dollars.

Gid's father arrived, a melancholy veterinary insignificance with a
thin gray mustache, and while the dean listened with small smiling,
Gid's father explained to him that the worst of all sins, excepting
treason and the neglect of sickness among domestic animals, was
being in debt.  At the end of it all, Gideon cried out, as Gideon
Planish was so often to cry out, "It just seems like people don't
appreciate it when you try to do things for them."



He really got more credit for other enterprises which did not
require half the boldness involved in the Pantorium and which may
have brightened up the college public far less than a year of well-
pressed trousers.  He organized the first Sophomore Prom ever known
in Adelbert.  It is true that this Prom never did come off, but
there were weeks of splendid committee meetings, and, after them,
Gid was elected president of the class.  He then combined the
warring Student Volunteers and the Society for the Study of
Missions into one body, and he got the Zenith Electric Lighting
Company to invite the Social Conditions class to go up to the city
and inspect the plant, with free transportation and lemonade.

He seemed to have won back the friendship of Hatch Hewitt, who said
to him something which Gid never quite made out, but which he felt
to be complimentary:  "If I just stick around with you, I'll
understand all of American education and American benevolence."

Gid was glad to hear that, because one of the intelligentsia had
been complaining that though he was useful at starting great
cultural movements, like the evening class in Great Women of the
Bible, he was no true executive, and incapable of keeping his
crusades alive.

Well, by gosh, Gid reflected, if he could hold onto the worship of
an ole bandit like Hatch, he certainly was a better executive than
MOST people, by gosh!

And so he flashed on into junior year and senior year, as class
president, assistant chairman of the Junior Prom, business manager
of the baseball team, vice-president of the Y.M.C.A., vice-
fourflush of the Four Aces and Growler Association, and as a
scholar whose A's in Rhetoric and Forensics made up for his C's in
everything else.  He was a senior, and it was time for him and
Hatch to decide which of the rewards in the world outside college
they would prefer to pluck.

Gid's professor in the speech department had hinted that if he
would "settle down to work and quit trying to uphold the arms of
Moses and teach everybody on the campus how to go to the bathroom,"
he might become a fairly good teacher.  But Gid saw himself and a
whole armament of Messages in a larger arena.



"I suppose you still intend to go back to newspaper work," said
Gid.

"Sure.  And what mode of gracious living have YOU picked on this
morning?" said Hatch Hewitt.

"Say, I wish you wouldn't always try to kid me."

"I admire you, Gid.  I think you're cockeyed when you look in the
mirror and talk about 'doing something for humanity'--which usually
means giving 'em another excuse for getting into war.  But after
four beers, you have virtue.  What are you really going to apply it
to?"

"I'm still more tempted by politics than by anything else.  I tell
you, politics needs men with intellectual training.  I could be a
doctor, but I don't like sick people.  Or a lawyer, but I hate
sticking in an office.  Or a clergyman.  Yes, I been a lot tempted
by the ministry.  But I do like a glass of beer now and then, and
anyway, I don't know as I could work up the real feeling of instant
communion with God that I'd like to, if I was going to go around
doing a lot of public praying.  So, you see, I do really feel a
call to politics.

"Gosh, what I could put over!  Old-age pensions for every man,
woman and child, and scientific measures of free trade, and
adequate defense, which would be the surest guaranty of world peace
and--"

"Sure, sure, I know.  Which party do you feel yourself called upon
to revive?"

"I don't care a damn which it is, as long as it isn't the
Socialist.  Yuh, I got to hand both the major parties something.
I'm all for Jefferson, but then I think very highly of Lincoln,
too."

"Really?"

"Yes, I certainly do."

"Look, Gid.  The State Legislature is in session.  Why don't we get
a day off and go up and visit it?  I've been thinking about going
into political reporting myself."

(Years later, Gid explained to his wife that by taking Hatch to the
State capital, Galop de Vache, he had started him off as a
newspaperman.)

The dean gave them leave, and this time he said almost nothing
about beer.  He had come to feel that young Planish was a really
useful member of the college, and that, no matter what the
psychology professor said about the boy's "bumbling busyness," he
did have a fine, earnest interest in Christian missions.  The dean
was growing old.



Galop de Vache was a smallish town surrounding a State capitol
building, and the capitol was a jungle of marble corridors and onyx
pillars and cases of Civil War flags and marble ex-governors in
frock coats, together with eight or ten rooms in which the State
business was done.  The gaudiest of these was the senate chamber,
and when Gid, with Hatch, teetered down the steep stairs in the
visitors' gallery, he was impressed.

The chamber was lined with mahogany, save for the front wall,
which, in one vast mosaic splashed with rose and gilt and scarlet,
recalled the history of the State: pioneers beside their ox-teams,
tall river-boats with buckskin huntsmen, and Stephen A. Douglas
addressing a crowd, women in bright calico and men with beaver
hats, on this same spot where the capitol stood.  In front of the
mural was the Lieutenant-Governor's desk, upraised on yellow-and-
black marble, and over the chamber the vast skylight was jeweled
with the arms of every State in the Union.

Here was glory, here was high politics, here was marble, and Gid
wanted to be standing upon this lofty and burning stone.

But he noticed, as he settled down and looked for flaws--a college
senior has to be practical--that the thirty-six seats for senators
were nothing but mahogany school-desks.  And how sick he was of
schoolrooms and desks!

He had hoped for high oratory, about flags and eagles and the
brawny arm of labor, but a bald fat man was on his feet and, while
nobody seemed to listen, while one senator ate a sandwich and
another snapped spit balls, was mumbling:

"This bill--this 179--I know there's been some opposition to it--
the gentleman from Grolier County has been kicking about it--but
it's been pretty well talked over in committee and I guess it's a
sound bill, I don't know much about it--it's about muzzling dogs in
the southern tier of counties."

Gid groaned, "Good God!  So that's how senators trifle around when
we elect 'em to preserve our liberties!"

Down on the floor, a silver-haired man with schoolmaster spectacles
rose, yawned, handed a peanut to the senator who was speaking,
walked to the back of the chamber, and stood yawning again.

"That old fellow seems as much bored as we are," approved Gid.

"Yes, and I know who he is--he really is something--that's Senator
Kurtshaw, the minority leader," said Hatch.

The man on the throne, presumably the Lieutenant-Governor, said
something rapid and entirely incomprehensible about the dog-muzzle
bill, there was a growl from the caged senators, and the measure
seemed incredibly to have passed.  It wouldn't have if HE had been
a senator, Gid asserted.  But he was to hear still more abysmal
legislation slide through, presented in the reading clerk's furry
mumble--

"To amend the markets law in relation to the definition of 'limburg
cheese'."

"To amend the education law in relation to school camps for
children."

"To revive and extend the corporate existence of The Highlife
Brewing Company of Monarch."

It was on this last that the silvery Senator Kurtshaw yawned most
destructively, and walked out of the chamber.

"Now there's one representative of the people that seems to have an
idea what it's all about!" said Gid.  "Gosh, I wish I had a chance
to talk with him and ask him if we can ever really do anything with
this castiron political machine."

"Why don't we just butt in and do it?"

Gid appreciated the gall and ingenuity of his journalistic friend.
Some day he might give Hatch a newspaper of his own.

A doorman suggested that they might find Senator Kurtshaw in the
Financial Committee Room.  Unaware that senators themselves slip up
and down in small smelly elevators, the two young seekers descended
the Napoleonic flight of the Grand Staircase--the first persons
ever to do so except scrubwomen, sparrows and General Lew Wallace.
Gid was declaiming, "Certainly a swell lot of legislative junk our
guardians of liberty are fussing over, while widows starve and the
myrmidons, or whatever you call 'em, beat up protesting wage-
slaves!  'An act to tax the State for red paint for the noses of
brewery salesmen, to enchant, I guess it's enhance, the sales of
Old Dog Rover ales and lager.'  Now I know I GOT to go into
politics and clean up the mess!"

The Financial Committee Room was a bareness of plaster and steel
filing cabinets.  Senator Kurtshaw was at the end of a ponderous
table, reading the Zenith Advocate-Times--the sports page.

"How do you do, Senator?" said Gid.

"Huh?"

"We're a couple of college men, from Adelbert."

"Well?"

"I could see how amused you were by that Highlife Brewery Bill."

"What d' you mean, amused?  Very necessary bill.  What do you
want?"

"Well, to be frank, I wanted to talk about entering politics."

"Go ahead.  There's nothing to prevent you, if you're a citizen,
and twenty-one.  Why talk to me about it?"

"I thought I might find it a little complicated, as a college man
in politics."

"What about it?  I'm a college man in politics.  In fact, I once
taught in the university law school, and I suppose I was a
conceited damn skinny nuisance, just as you're a damn fat
nuisance."

"I am not fat!"

"You will be.  Now what do you expect to do in politics, with your
especial knowledge of Cro-Magnon tribal lore?"

Gid was becoming decently angry.  "I'd speak up for the people,
that's what I'd do, and get 'em shorter hours and longer wages,
more wages, I mean--but I mean, of course, without allowing any of
this tyranny of union labor.  I'd denounce all these consolidations
of predatory interests that--"

"What predatory interests you mean?  The farm-bloc or the Medical
Association or the Methodist Church or your Adelbert Athletic
Association?"

"You know what I mean!  Anyway, I'd do something about justice and
education and, well, I mean the Larger Issues, and not waste the
public time on a lot of tripe about dog-muzzles and limburger
cheese!"

"And just who do you think IS hired by the people to see they get
good limburger cheese, to see that we have food inspectors who know
cheese from Euclid?  Do you think these things get themselves done
by prayer and reading the Gettysburg Address and listening to
lectures by Emma Goldman?  If you get gypped on a street-car fare,
or your mayor appoints a chief of police that steals your shirt, or
your eggs are rotten, or your car breaks a spring on a bad road,
then who do you blame?  The State Legislature!  And then you don't
re-elect us.  We're not a bunch of actors playing Julius Caesar.
We're business men, and badly paid ones, trying to carry out what
the citizens want, or think they want, or some boy orator from the
River Platte, like you, tells 'em they want.  If you'd like to get
into politics--all right.  Go to your county committee, where they
know how good you are, and tell 'em you're fixing to step out and
save the country.  I'm sure they'll cry with delight--but don't
come and tell ME!  I didn't walk out on the session upstairs
because I was bored or 'amused'.  I had a toothache.  And it's
getting worse every minute!"



For ten miles, on the train to Adelbert, Gid was silent with a
silent Hatch.  Then he broke up:

"Say it!  I know.  He was right.  I'm just another college amateur.
AND fat!  I don't know one doggone thing about how a government is
carried on.  That senator has certainly knocked all the ambition
out of me!  And I haven't got any deep philosophy.  Why, this
question I noticed in the Zenith paper--if there was a fire and you
had to decide between saving the Mona Lisa and a two-year-old
child--I don't know which I'd save."

"Neither did the joker that wrote it."

"But it shows me I'm not so gosh-awful profound.  I guess I better
just get into the teaching game and hand out the correct-speech
guff, like my prof thinks I had ought to."  Then Gid became
cheerful.  "Maybe some day I'll be a college president and get the
alumni really lined up on contributions, and double the college
attendance.  I could do THAT, don't you think?"

"I'm sure of it," said Hatch.



5


He had a rich brown small beard, a good thick beard for a man of
twenty-nine.  He had grown it to give a more interesting look to a
certain commonplace squatness, and he had cultivated a trick of
glancing sharply at people who spoke to him, then casually looking
away, as though he had already learned everything about them.  He
wore brown tweeds and a bright-blue shirt and a loose purple bow-
tie.  He hoped that all the respectable people on the Pullman
chair-car would be puzzled and excited, and wonder whether he was a
college professor or the kind of Englishman you read about in H. G.
Wells, the kind who was intellectual but who rockgardened in front
of an artistic converted mill in Surrey.

And at twenty-nine, in 1921, he really was a college professor.  He
was Professor Gideon Planish, Dr. Planish, Ph.D. of the University
of Ohio, Professor of Rhetoric and Speech in Kinnikinick College,
Iowa.

That was a small college with beautiful elm trees, a faint
Episcopal flavor--esthetic but responsible--and a pleasant feeling
that scholarship and piety were good old historical principles but
shouldn't be overdone.  The college was attended by the sons and
daughters of manufacturers and physicians in Iowa, Minnesota and
the Dakotas, and it had football, but not too much, music, but not
too much, and co-educational flirtation, but not too public.

Professor Planish was well esteemed, in Kinnikinick.  He looked at
the athletes, he looked at girl students who came to beg him
prettily to raise their marks from C Minus to C, he looked at the
trustees and the new president, new since last Christmas, as though
he was on to all their charming little dodges, but was amused by
them and didn't mind.

He also did some teaching, in a fair routine way.

He did well at lectures to the women's clubs in Central Iowa, for
which he was often paid twenty-five dollars and expenses, with
attendance for tea at the banker's house obligatory.  The clubwomen
admired him, admired his beard, admired his merry eyes, admired his
trick of becoming moistly ecstatic as he recited W. B. Yeats, then
chuckling at himself and at them for their emotion.

Yet he was not quite happy.  He was, he felt, too young and strong
to go on sitting in classrooms.  He was a bachelor, and the girls
bothered him, their legs bothered him, their knees mocked him, and
he was obsessed and extremely annoyed by their sailor blouses.  He
was afraid that he wanted, even more than crowds and glory, to be
holding one of these sweet, collapsible little flappers in his
arms.  It seemed, he groaned, to be the Lord's incomprehensible
purpose that a pure and studious young man who took cold showers
regularly and played tennis and was willing to serve the people as
a United States Senator should keep having Evil Thoughts about the
flashy way in which these young women crossed their legs as they
sat in front of him.

Of course the way out, and the Biblical way at that, as suggested
by that wise old Y.M.C.A. man, St. Paul, was to be married.  But
Professor Planish had never yet found a young woman who combined
the three imperative elements: that she should be young and
curving; that she should appreciate his humanitarianism and his
gift for high hot wordings; and that she should have the bland
social talent that would help him to go higher.  He had not found
her as yet, but meantime he was able to control himself by his
early Christian training and by the constant availability of his
mistress.

She was Teckla Schaum, and she was really a good soul, with money
of her own.



He had spent the summer of 1921 in the Yale Library, being snubbed
by such professors as were not up in Vermont being snubbed by the
farmers or over in England being snubbed by the professors at
Oxford.  He believed that he had been trying to write a book on
what he called The Genius of American Orators: Webster, Lincoln,
Calhoun, Bryan, Ignatius Donnelly and all persons named Roosevelt.
He had done only two chapters of the book.  Years afterward, he
found them in a trunk, and turned them into a singularly useful
pamphlet which showed that True Americanism was synonymous with
extensive giving to uplift organizations.  But he had had good luck
with the daughter of his landlady, out on Orange Street, and he had
learned to appreciate lobsters, salt water and dancing cheek to
cheek.  He had spent a week in New York, and he could find his way
from the Grand Central Station to the Public Library to Billy's
speakeasy in Greenwich Village.

He was ready to take his place in the world of the Eastern
Seaboard, but those damned snobs of Columbia and Harvard and
Princeton and Yale, those high-voiced academic Pharisees, did not
encourage him.  Perhaps what he needed was a loving girl who would,
like a domesticated Joan of Arc, show him the path.



Professor Planish decided that the passengers on the chair-car from
Chicago to Kinnikinick hadn't even noticed him.  He looked gloomily
at his new tan-leather kit bag, with the grand gold letters GP.  It
didn't seem worth while to have paid so much for it.

He sighed, shook his head at the porter's "Brush you off, sir?" and
carried his own bag to the vestibule.

Kinnikinick was now galloping past the train: two fat-bellied oil
tanks, a yard littered with shattered old automobiles, two gangling
grain-elevators, one exclamatory in red and the other of gray
galvanized iron, standing raw against the faded prairie.  It all
seemed cluttered and flimsy to Professor Planish, after the shaded
security of New Haven, but he was comforted when, as he hitched
down the train steps, carrying the big bag, he was greeted by the
station agent with a hearty "Welcome back, Prof!"

He was home.  On the plank platform, by the small red frame
station, a pretty girl junior was evidently pointing him out to a
garland of still prettier freshmen--pointing at him and whispering,
while the girls all looked at him gravely, without giggling.  He
was home, and he was important, and the driver of the flivver
taxicab was calling, "Back again, Prof?  Can I drive you up to the
house?"

It was the custom at that time and place for the young men to paint
their ancient and derivative automobiles with such texts as "Pike's
Peak or Bust--Busted" or "How about it, Babe?"  None of these
amateur exhibits was so florid as this taxi, this open Ford touring
car, which was labeled "Kinnikinick's Komical Kommon Karrier," and
decorated with a mural of young men in white evening ties and
ladies in indiscreet evening gowns attending a rural picnic at
which was served nothing but bananas and hard-boiled eggs.
Professor Planish felt humiliated at having to come back from the
elms of Hillhouse Avenue to such frippery, and he sat in the
flivver glaring, his stout little beard straight out.

It all seemed better when they came to the campus.  On the bluffs
of the Kinnikinick River, which curved like a question mark, the
half-dozen gray Tudor buildings enclosed a quadrangle shady with
oak and maple, a place for contemplation.  Looking at it, young
Professor Planish exulted, "Not as big as Yale, maybe, but a lot
purer architecture and sounder scholarship--and a damn sight more
human!"

The flivver left him at his residence, a bedroom and a study in the
square white house of Mrs. Hilp, a widow woman whom no one ever
noticed and nobody has ever described.  She stood on the wide
screened porch, crying "Welcome home, Professor!" and heating up
his sense of his own importance.  He unpacked by throwing his
clothes on the bed and leaving them for Mrs. Hilp.  He was not a
particularly tidy man.

It was still warm enough for him to show off the new linen suit he
had bought in New Haven, and in that pale angelic glory he started
out on his errands--a man who was again wanted and needed.  He
looked into his private office, a grim and slate-floored coop in
the basement of the Administration Building, and looked at his
secretary, a lady who adored him but who was stringy and virginal.
She had answered all his mail, and he hadn't a thing for her to do,
so he patted her on the shoulder, to show that he was friendly but
also keeping his sharp eye on everything.

He went through the memorial gateway, ornamented with the shields
of nine New England colleges, and walked down Wallace Avenue to the
Kollege Klothes Korner, where he bought a bright green tie that he
didn't need, and to the Smokes & Book Co-op, where he bought a red
rubber eraser that he didn't like.  Thus he was able to receive
from the clerks, "Well, well, we missed you, Professor.  Glad
you're back with us."

He had planned his call upon Mr. W. C. Pridmore, president of the
Drovers' National Bank and Chairman of the Board of Trustees of
Kinnikinick College, for half-past three, when the bank would be
closed to the public--a caste to which he still referred as "the
hoi polloi."  At five he would call on the new president of the
college.  This expert schedule of weighty conferences would give
him, in between, three-quarters of an hour for the demands of love,
which just now concerned the slim person of Dr. Miss Edith Minton.

Mr. W. C. Pridmore sat near the entrance to the bank, in a
compartment railed with golden oak and of the general size of a
pigpen.  But neater, much neater.  He was a gentle, anxious man,
with a stubby mustache, and he was always sorry when he had to
foreclose a mortgage.  And as he thought that Professor Planish was
going to marry his widowed daughter, Teckla, and as he considered
Professor Planish to be the most book-read and eloquent young man
that he knew, yet with sound principles about the Republican Party
and with a decent salary, he rose from his steel desk--the look of
which gave money-borrowers a headache--he held out his shaky hand,
and cried, "Well, well!  Teckla and I missed you, Gideon.  You're a
sight for sore eyes!"

Professor Planish wondered if it really would take as much as ten
years for him to become president of the college.

He told Mr. Pridmore that there were fine bank buildings and large
factories in New Haven, also some scattered college buildings, but
as for him, he was mighty glad to be back among friends.

At five minutes to four, Professor Planish was at Lambda Lambda
Lambda House, slightly nervous, to call upon Dr. Edith Minton,
proctor of the House and instructor in English.  All summer he had
been thinking about her, remembering her as a quartz crystal, as a
doe with large eyes and tiny elegant hoofs.  What a mistake he had
made, this past school year, not to have seen more of her!

He had to wait in the Lambda reception-room, an apartment with
Maxfield Parrish prints, and throne chairs so straight and stiff
and hard that they caused you to wonder whether it was really the
heads of the crown-wearers that got so uneasy.

Edith Minton slipped in, and his bounding heart told him that here
was his true love wending; that Edith would be a credit to him and
adorn his dinner parties, no matter how great a magnifico he might
become.  He was a little touched by his own cleverness in having
recalled her so accurately: pale, reedy, erect, and undoubtedly
very soft and pleasing under that armor of gray suit and crisp lace
jabot.  He thought about trying to kiss her, but the Infinite shot
a warning to him.  He shook her hand, her thin strong hand, and
waved her to a chair--in her own house.

"You're looking fine, Edith.  Have a good summer?"

"Not bad.  I spent two weeks at a Wisconsin lake, but mostly I
stayed in Chicago and worked on Chaucer."

"Oh, I forgot to thank you for your card.  I enjoyed hearing from
you.  Well . . . You're looking fine.  You look as if you'd had a
good summer."

"Yes."

"Well, back to the mine."

"What do you mean?"

"Back to work."

She thought this over.  "Yes, that's so.  Back to work now."

"Yup.  On the job now."

"I suppose you liked New Haven better than here."

"I did not!  They want to see your passport and a certificate
signed by three respectable clergymen that you attended Hotchkiss,
before they'll say good morning.  No!"

"And yet you aren't content to be here, either!"

"A man has to keep on advancing, doesn't he?  But why am I being
jumped on, my dear?"

"Oh, I'm sorry, Gideon.  I forget you're my superior officer, don't
I!"

"Nonsense--nonsense--nonsense!  Academic democracy--all on the same
level--even undergraduates--in some respects.  But why so grouchy?"

"Oh, I've just had an afternoon of girl freshmen who couldn't make
up their minds whether they wanted to be scholars or women or have
careers.  I get a little cranky."

"You'll get over it!"  He arose in a superior sort of way and
patted her shoulder as chastely as he had that of his secretary.
"Now get a good rest.  See you soon."



"She doesn't think so doggone much of me.  She'd never be one to
appreciate me and help advance my career.  God but she's bloodless
and sexless and conceited! . . .  No, she's all right.  Maybe she
sees through me!  Maybe there isn't so much in me to appreciate,
except punchful words.  I'll have to realize that and profit by it--
study and do a lot of hard, quiet thinking," meditated young
Professor Planish.

He was clumping back to Administration Hall, his beard bright in
the September sun.  With his self-confidence and his determination
to make an impression on the new regime flowing back into him, he
walked boldly into the green-carpeted, portrait-fretted anteroom to
the president's office.

He was a full professor; he was kept waiting only five minutes and
admitted to the fervid cordiality of the Rev. Dr. T. Austin Bull,
the new president of Kinnikinick.

There are rambling and rustic fellows, beanpoles with long noses
and disordered hair, who prove to be suave Men About Town in New
York or London, polo players or editors of gossip magazines, up to
the latest thing in music and morals.  By contrary, there are
sleek, slender, quick-moving men, curly-headed and neat-featured,
who wear their clothes like popular actors, who are as quick as
cavalry captains and poised as infantry majors, but who prove to be
studious pastors, doctors of divinity, or teachers of manual
training.

Of these deceptive elegants was T. Austin Bull who, after a
Methodist boyhood, a decade as an eloquent and money-raising
Episcopal minister, and a couple of years as secretary of an
elephantine university, had, at forty-four, come to Kinnikinick as
president.

The business was under new management; the sales and advertising
departments were being reorganized; and the highest standards of
American business, piety, learning and manhood were to be advanced.
Dr. Bull was against sloth, debt, the teaching of Greek except in
graduate schools and the seduction of co-eds.

His handshake was virile, small though he was, and he greeted
Professor Planish in the best of glee-club tenors:

"Thank you for coming to call so early, Professor, but I'm not sure
but that I should have called on you.  I'm so new to this job that
I imagine I'll have to lean heavily on your experience.

"Let's see now: three years you've been at old Kinnikinick.  I
can't tell you what splendid reports I get of your splendid
teaching and your, uh, your splendid effect on the morale of the
students.  Oh, everywhere.  But--There is one thing, one small
detail, that I should like to take up with you--oh, more in a
spirit of asking advice than of giving it, perhaps.

"Will you have a cigar, Professor?  Of course as an ex-parson, I
don't smoke much, but I find that a really good cigar at once
cheers the heart and clears the head, provided it's a really good
cigar, I mean, not a five-cent one--and light, I mean.  Good!  Now
settle back in your chair, all comfy, and try and have the patience
to hear me out.

"What I've ventured to think about, in a very tentative way, is:
I'm sure you make every effort to shelter our darling girl
undergraduates just as much from yourself as from any other man,
but have you ever given thought to the somewhat disturbing position
of a strong, young, unmarried man among so many lovely girls?"

"Oh, yes, I've given thought to it!"

"I imagined perhaps you had.  And may I, in the most impersonal
way, ask if you have any plans for getting married?"

"I can't say anything definite just at this moment--only rash fools
tempt the gods by prophecy, you know."

"How true that is!"

"But I hope before long to have something very interesting to tell
you."

"That's fine, that's fine.  I'm very pleased, Professor."



To himself Professor Planish grunted, "Yeh, it WOULD be interesting
to know who the dickens this is that I'm going to marry!  And it
would be interesting to Prexy if he shadowed me for the next few
hours and found out why I'm not likely to be a menace to the cute
co-eds!"

So he tramped to the little gray widow's-house where lived Teckla
Schaum.

He knocked, instead of bursting in as he usually did.  It would be
a pleasure to see her tremblingly peeping out, in hope.  She'd be
at home, all right; hadn't he telephoned her that he was back!  She
would never spoil the perfect art of his return.

He knocked and rang the bell, and with perfect timing, as rehearsed
in his mind, there she was, edging the door open, then throwing it
wide as she whimpered, "Oh, Gid, you're here!"

"Me?  No!  I'm in New Haven.  You know--in Connecticut."

He closed the door behind him, to shut off the censorious eyes of
Kinnikinick, and kissed her profoundly, holding her small frail
figure close to him, conscious of her fine springy back.

"I've missed you so," she was sighing.

"Missed you, too.  Nobody I could talk to."

"But you must have met some wonderful people in New Haven."

"Sure.  Some swell English scholars--some real word-painters--make
Beowulf sit up and beg.  And boy!  What buildings and old New
England churches, and a very fine old town, Guilford, quite
convenient on the trolley, but--Jesus, Teckla darling, how I did
miss talking to you!  You know--natural."

He was relieved to find that he could, without straining, tell her
the truth.  He reflected that for all his talent, maybe genius, he
was a simple fellow who hated talking through pink gauze to Edith
Minton or President Bull.  He wondered if he might not actually be
a little in love with Teckla.  There was only one thing against the
theory--he didn't like her very much.

Teckla Pridmore Schaum, daughter of the head of the college
trustees, was four years older than Professor Planish.  For two
years she had been married to a promising young townsman, head of
the Power and Light Company, who had been killed when an automobile
turned over.  She was incessantly hungry for the smell of a man's
pipe, the horizon thunder of his grumbling.  All the past winter
she had been going to bed with Professor Planish, but she didn't
know much about him.  She thought he was a simple and friendly
young man who wanted to help his students.  She was four years
older, and thin, and she hadn't much of a complexion, nothing very
interesting in the way of hair or a nose or wit; nothing at all but
a rigid passion for him and an unquestioning joy when she could
comfort him and assure him that he was a superior man.  She knew
that he was not in love with her, but she went on convincing
herself that some day the darling boy would see the gold she gave
him.

"That's the sweetest new linen suit!" she adored.

"Like it?  From the East!  God-awful expensive!"

"It's so smart."

"Huh!  I bet you think President Bull dresses better than I do.  I
just saw him.  He wore a double-breasted gray suit with the waist
cut in like a chorus man, and damned if he wasn't wearing a red
carnation--the curly-headed dude!  Don't you think so?"

"Father and I always thought he was such a good scholar.  But now
you speak of it, I guess he is a little dandified.  You're so deep
and discerning about people."

"No, I just get around a lot."

"Dear, why don't you take your coat off?  It's terribly hot, for
September."

"That's not such a bad idea, at that."

"And I know you'd like a highball."

"That proposition certainly has a lot of merit in it."

With such delightful love talk and academic interchange of ideas,
they played along.

There was no Prohibition-era drinking at Kinnikinick, which was
moral though Episcopal.  There were no saloons in town; Holy
Communion was drunk in grape-juice; and at large public dinners,
the bishop and the football team were toasted in Coca-Cola.  The
students carried abstinence so far that they never drank in the
dormitories, except in the evening, and perhaps afternoons.  The
president had to be known as a teetotaler, and it was only in the
houses of the professors who had married money that there were any
very large private cellars.

Not having had a drink since he had left his rooms at Mrs. Hilp's,
the Professor chummily helped Teckla crack the ice, open the White
Rock bottle, and look over her Prohibition stock: four bottles of
Bourbon whisky, two of Scotch, twenty-seven gin, and a bottle of
rock-and-rye like an anatomical specimen in a museum.

Teckla had no servant, but her kitchen was nearly automatic, and
brutally handsome.  The electric stove resembled a mahogany hope
chest; the sink was of stainless steel; the cupboard of steel
enameled a pale blue; and off the kitchen was the "breakfast nook,"
a pair of cherry-red settees facing each other across a blue metal-
topped table, with wallpaper flourishing strawberries and
bluebirds.

In this metallic lovers' bower, where the rosebuds were pink
electric bulbs, Professor Planish and his Aspasia grew happily
drunk.  Before that, the Professor gloated, "You haven't asked
about my present for you."

"You don't mean you brought ME a present?"

"Ha, ha, who else would I bring a present to!"

He curvetted back into the living-room, which was in blue and
silver with an Arthur Rackham print, and from his coat pocket he
took a jewelry-box of the most elegant pasteboard, icy to the
fingers outside, with the most luxurious honey-colored satin
lining.  His left hand on her shoulder, leaning over her, he
flashed the bright costume-jewelry bracelet which he had anxiously
bought on Madison Avenue, in New York ($11.99 cash).

"Oh, darling, it's lovely, just lovely!  It shines so--like
diamonds!  You shouldn't of!"

He kissed her, and for some seconds he was almost certain that he
loved her.  But he was thirsty, and the ice and amber of his drink
lured him back to the settee across from her.

"Gideon, I think I've done something really useful for you this
summer."

"What's that?"

"I've been reading Trollope for you."

"Oh, yes--uh--Trollope."

"You know: Barchester Towers."

"Oh, I remember.  I tackled that guy once, but he was pretty strong
going.  Not even a shooting.  Too slow for me."

"Well, you know in your Rhetoric lectures, where you say an author
can have humor and excitement without falling into bad taste and
immorality, like all these young writers, Trollope would be a dandy
illustration.  I made some notes for you on his plots and moral
principles."

"Oh, swell!  Fellow busy as I am, trying to ram art and eloquence
down a lot of boneheads, to say nothing of all the work I do on
committees, he don't get time to do all the reading he'd like.
It's a great sorrow to me, sometimes, Teckla.  What I always say
is, there's no friend like a great book."

"Oh, I know how it is.  Gideon!  There's a hero in Trollope that's
so much like you--the same combination of learning and virility.
He's a clergyman, but he has a beard just like yours."

"Do you think I ought to go on wearing a beard?  I thought
President Bull looked at it kind of funny."

"Don't you ever dare take it off!  It makes you so distinguished.
Like that minister in the book."

"You know, I've worried a good deal, off and on, whether I hadn't
ought to gone into the ministry, instead of teaching.  Of course
what I always say is, a man can do as much good by training these
young minds in oratory as in purity, but I guess I'm kind of a
perfectionist--I'm funny that way--I can't seem to be satisfied
unless I follow the highest and noblest and no compromise, yes,
sir, and no matter how practical we are, still we had ought to
imitate the lives of the saints and sacrifice our all to humanity
without flinching and HOORAY, I feel wonderful!"

He had a quick one, without ice or soda.  Was he--he pinched his
mind, to see if it hurt--was he getting lit?  Oh, what the devil!
He had to celebrate his homecoming, didn't he?  And Teckla looked
at him with such admiration and surrender.  Pity she was so much
older than he.

She was breathing, "Oh, I know how you want to help and lift up
this poor bewildered world.  But I honestly don't see how you could
do any more good in a church than in your wonderful work of
teaching your students to write and orate so beautifully, and then
those of them that get a call to go out and influence mankind will
be just that much more gifted."

"Anyway, I'm not sure I've got the right kind of a voice for a
clergyman."

"Do you know the kind of voice you ought to have?"

"What?"

"Just the kind you got now, dear!"

"Oh . . .  But do you think it's deep enough?"

"It doesn't sound like a rainbarrel, if that's what you mean--thank
Heaven!  But listen, darling: you haven't told me one word about
New Haven.  Of course I understood perfectly that you were working
so hard you didn't have time for much letter-writing.  But now tell
me about it.  Did they offer you a position there?"

"I've got a more interesting idea than New Haven."  He rose.
"Come!"

Mutely she followed him into the living-room, sat on his lap,
fondly rubbed her cheek against his chest, while he stroked her
knee.

The Professor sighed to himself, "She's a good woman.  She's one
person that does appreciate what I am.  It's a darn shame that
she's so small-town and ordinary.  It wouldn't be fair to her to
take her off to New York and Washington and face those snobs and
intriguers."

She said, as though the words meant something quite different,
"Getting hungry?  I've got the nicest little steak for you."

"Don't you think that can wait a while, sweetheart?"

"Yes, maybe it can," she whispered.



6


Professor Gideon Planish was not satisfied with the workings of
Providence, at the beginning of this college year of 1921-22.  He
was not satisfied with Teckla Schaum.  Oh, she admired him, in her
shallow womanly way, but she did not understand the complications
of a statesman's career, did not even understand the problem of his
beard--how he looked rustic if he had one, and yet if he took it
off now, everybody would laugh.

She couldn't tell him how to jump from college to the Senate
chamber without going through a lot of sticky handshaking.  She
actually thought he might go on teaching, and yet she didn't see
how embarrassing it was for him to have, as rival star in his
department, a new English professor who had taken the advantage of
actually being English.

No, he was alone with his high dreams, no one to help him, no one
to hold his hand while he followed the road to the stars.

Damn it, he wasn't even quite sure that he ought to go on being
Teckla's lover.  Maybe it wasn't altogether moral.

One of his most prickly grievances was that in this small college,
with only thirty-one on the faculty, he had to take the huge
required freshman class in Introductory Rhetoric and Composition.
He was happy enough in his small seminars in inspirational subjects
like Argumentative Composition, Oral Interpretation of the Drama,
Persuasion, and Speech Psychology, but to process this knotty raw
material of almost a hundred freshmen of every state of sex and
unenlightenment was to pant and strain at an intellectual assembly-
line.  Yet all that Teckla said about it was, "You ought to feel
that it's a privilege to stir up all these young minds."

So it was with a shaky feeling of having been unjustly used that he
began his first lecture to the class in Freshman Rhetoric.

He came through the R. U. E. entrance into Atkinson Amphitheater,
carrying only a thin notebook.  He was proud that he was too well
organized to need the green bag or the pile of shaggy brown books
with which the old troupers among the faculty messed up their
unstylized entrances.

With stilled and waiting power he looked at the huge class--ninety-
seven of them, all green.  With most of them he hadn't even had
consultations.  Ninety-seven children from supercilious but
provincial households, all busy with apples, chocolate, tennis
rackets, newspapers, and with one another, boy drawn to girl
already, in the first week of college, in a jungle of young life
that was uninterested in professors--even those with rich beards.
If he did manage to stand there, looking a little amused, a symbol
of cold dominant wisdom, it was entirely an act and he an actor.
Inside, he felt lonely and, at best, he hoped they wouldn't find
him very funny or intolerably dull.

He gravely laid down his notebook, rapped his desk, and croaked:

"Young ladies and gentlemen, let us start this consortium, in which
we are compelled to be associated for the next nine months, nine
long long months [he did get a smile on that line], by firmly
understanding certain fundamental principles.  Doubtless some of
you are Shakespeares, piping your native woodnotes wild, but for
most of us, the magic art of Rhetoric is rules, rules, rules, and
yet more rules.

"It is discipline.  It is a humble and willing subjection to the
great formulae worked out for us long ago by the Masters.  We are
not here to show off or to think we are smart enough to do
everything in new ways.  I shall tell you, and I shall expect acute
attention when I tell you, what the Masters have decided, in all
such supreme mysteries as style, beauty, conciseness, aspirations
toward the Divine, the correct ratio, in fiction, of analysis and
narrative and description to dialogue, scientific paragraphing,
appeal to the nobler emotions such as love and patriotism, the
accepted punctuation and gosh--"

The last word had not been said aloud.

He couldn't be sure that her name did begin with an A or B, the
girl at the right end of the center section of the front row, for
the ushers had not yet assorted the class alphabetically.  Maybe
she was sitting there so close to him because she wanted to listen
to him.  But whether she began with an A or a B or a C or a Z, she
was his true love forever.

It was true that her shoulders, like his own, were menaced by
plumpness, but her legs were sleek, her ankles fairly thin, and if
her little paws, twisted together on the writing tablet of her
chair as she listened to him, were not so delicate, they were white
and sweet and shapely.  And her face was as amusing as a monkey's,
round and pert.  She had wise and lively eyes, astonishingly wise
and determined for a girl who couldn't be over nineteen, and her
friendly lips, not tight nor thin, kept moving with excitement.
Her high pride was her brown hair, shining like polished walnut
and, unusual here and now, not bobbed but flauntingly feminine.

He was already telling her, under the campus maples by moonlight,
that she must be careful with her diet and not get fat--lovely
child like her--while his outer voice was rolling on:

"--and take, for instance, the case of a novelist less known than
Dickens or Thackeray or Harriet Beecher Stowe, yet always to me one
of the lords of language, Andrew--ah, Jupiter nods, I mean of
course Anthony--Anthony Trollope.  Did a tremendous writer like
Trollope think the proper stunt was to go and live with a lot of
Bohemians and Frenchmen in an attic and try to invent a lot of new
rules?  He did not!  He was the soul of discipline.  While
constantly traveling as a--as a school inspector in a--in a number
of parts of England, he made himself sit down every day and write--
and write--and write, and all according to the accepted RULES!"



His girl in the front row nodded.  There was a serious-minded and
helpful young woman.  He could imagine her being witty at a soda-
fountain or bouncing in her seat at a high-ranking basketball game--
full of fun, a jolly companion, but with a heart that would
appreciate idealism and ambition.

He was explaining to the class that elegant language was useful not
only to preachers and editorial writers but also to businessmen.
Which, he put it to them, would sell a vacuum cleaner better: a
rich, full, mellifluous address (and he strikingly illustrated it,
playing both the salesman and a pleased housewife), or a mess of
crude language, as used by persons who didn't go to Kinnikinick and
love their Rhetoric class?

The girl's eyes forcefully agreed with him.

And for such of them as planned to enter politics--what was it that
elected Woodrow Wilson?  His titanic knowledge of history?  No,
never!  It was the discriminating way in which he laid words end to
end according to the rules.

The end of Professor Planish's discourse was somewhat in the style
of the courtroom scene in The Merchant of Venice.  He stopped dead,
he fixed them with the eye, he raised the hand, he gave with the
voice:  "Let me conclude in the words of Alexander Pope's immortal
translation from Horace."  He glanced at a slip filled with the
handwriting of Teckla Schaum.


     "Sages and chiefs long since had birth
      Ere Caesar was or Newton named;
      These raised new empires o'er the earth,
      And those, new heavens and systems framed.
      In vain they schemed, in vain they bled!
      They had no poet, and are dead!"


He wondered if, after all, he shouldn't have been a leading actor
instead of a senator or a college president.  Wouldn't his girl
down there have appreciated him even more?  He calculated that she
was near to weeping.  He looked at her knowingly, eye understanding
eye, heart snatched out of his body and joined to hers.  When all
the others had gone, after only half a hundred fool questions about
hours and assignments and at what sort of an establishment did one
accomplish the abnormal feat of buying a book, he saw that she was
still waiting, at one side of the room.

She came up to his platform-table.  Who said her shoulders were too
plump?  Why, they were lustrous and soft for a man to lay his head--

Professor Planish caught himself.  After all, he wasn't a mooncalf
any longer.  This was a jolly-looking young woman, but she was no
Theda Bara.  Seated with the table safely between them, she
standing humbly below, he looked at her like a judge.

"May I bother you a moment, Professor?"

"What is it?"

(These were, definitely, the first words between the celebrated
Romeo and Juliet of Kinnikinick.)

"I want to see if you'll let me take Oral Interpretation of the
Drama."

"That's an upper-class subject."

"I know.  I just want to take it as an auditor, without credit."

"Isn't your schedule full?"

"I'll say!"  She shuddered.

"Then why do you want to take it?"

"Oh, I think maybe I might be an actress and--"

"Yes?"

"And I'd like to have another class with you!"

She was delicately shameless, and he stiffened with interest.  He
marveled, "But why?"

"Oh, it was so stimulating today, and the other day I listened to
you in the hall--I was waiting for a vaccination appointment, in
front of C7, and I heard you talking to Professor Eakins.  He was
so sort of dry and cranky--they all are, all but you--and I've
snooped into a lot of classes and listened--they just grind out a
lot of information--gee, Professor, I guess maybe I'm being fresh,
but I'll bet you a billion dollars the rest of the faculty think
you're too dramatic, too exciting to listen to."

"My dear young lady--"  Then his flatulent academic tone changed
into a boyish demand:  "What's your name?"

"Peony Jackson.  From Faribault, Minnesota.  I was on the platform
when you got off the train."

He got back the professorial manner.  The self-protective
superiority.  The armor against the mirth of young women.

"Well, Miss Peony Jackson, from Faribault, Minnesota, I'm sure you
mean to be complimentary, but the fact is, the members of the
faculty, however much they may differ--"

Never again, in private, did he speak to her with this stage
burlesque of himself--not to Peony.  Raw and boyish again,
remembering that he was only ten years older than she, he cried,
"Let's sit in the front row--all these dumb freshmen gone now--come
on!"  They laughed; they sat side by side.  Probably to the eye
even of President T. Austin Bull they would have seemed decorous
enough, but Professor Planish felt as though he were holding her
hand.

"Peony--Miss Jackson--you don't want to take that Oral
Interpretation junk.  It's a lot of stupid analysis."

"Well, I came here to get educated, didn't I?"

He felt a tiny chill.  "Did you?"

"That's what they claim!"

"Don't give it a thought."

"I won't!"  They laughed, like freshmen, or very aged professors.
"Honestly, Professor, I just love the way you treat your students--
tell 'em they're a bunch of lil Socrateses one minute and then jump
right down their throats the next.  That would make even a dumb
bunny like me get busy and learn something--learn K-A-T, the cat,
sat on the M-A-T-T, mat.  I betcha I learn enough here so's the
court will let me get married."

"And who may this be that you are going to marry?"  Very coldly.

"I haven't got the slightest idea."

Was it possible that she was looking at him with appraisal?

"Look, Miss Jackson--Peony.  I've got the idea.  Forget the Oral
Interp.  Did you know that it's part of my job here to coach a
play, four times a year?"

"Swell."

"We'll have try-out for the first one, Poor Papa's Prize, in just a
few days now."

"Swell."

"And will you read for it?"

"Sw--You mean, try and see if I can act one of the parts?"

"Professionally, we call it 'read for a part'."

"I'll be glad to."  Her wrist-watch, he noted, was rather
expensive.  "Gee, I got to be skipping along now."

"Don't go yet!"

"I got a date."

"With some boy, I suppose!"

"Uh-huh."

He was writhing.  He was sick.  These blab-mouth freshmen boys!
Not human yet!

"Well, look, Peony, I'd like to have more chance--I mean now, at
the beginning of the year, when we're sort of making plans--I mean,
for the year--and I'm very interested--I mean in your reactions to
the different--you know, different styles and modes of instruction--
and it's so interesting to get your reactions and--"

"Aw, Professor, you don't want any reactions from a Problem Child."

"Give me some, and see if I don't!"

"Swell!"

"Where are you living?"

"At Lambda House."

"Um!  Well, look.  I'll be in Postum's drug store at exactly ten
o'clock tonight, buying a soda."  He remembered that he had an
engagement which might be expected to last all evening, but he
kicked out the thought.  He could not wait for forty-eight hours to
see Peony again.  "Exactly ten.  Suppose you happened to be there,
and had a soda with me?"

"I thought the co-edibles weren't supposed to have dates with the
faculty."

"They aren't.  But if you just happened to be dropping in there to
buy some talcum powder--"

"I got some talcum powder!"

"Are you going to be there or are you not?"

"Maybe so.  We'll see.  G' bye!"



He was nervous.  Had he given one of his natural enemies, an
undergraduate, a hold over him?

He was jealous.  Peony was off to meet some brash and unknown boy,
who had the worst of intentions, while he himself had nothing but
an innocent engagement with Mrs. Teckla Schaum.

Teckla's father, the banker and trustee, owned a one-room cottage
with a cook-stove and a two-story bunk, six miles out of town, on
Lake Elizabeth, to be reached by a sandy trail, on foot or with
horse and buggy.  The Pridmores had given him a key and told him to
call the shack his own; here he had worked undisturbed on his book
about the American Orators--it was, in fact, an excellent place for
catching up on sleep.  And here, this evening, while the early
autumn was still warm, he was to picnic with Teckla.

The road to the lake was deep in scrub oak and hazel-nut and sumac;
flies gyrated in a backward dream of summer; and the aged Pridmore
horse moved unambitiously.  The time should have been full of
contentment, but Professor Planish, driving, his shoulder bundled
against Teckla's, felt that he was wasting his talent.  He was
impatient even with the glimpses of the lake through networks of
brush, for he wanted to be undisturbed in his thoughts of Peony
Jackson.  Yet Teckla took this touchy time to chatter, looking at
him as though she owned him, as though she were his mother, his
true sweetheart.

"Did the Freshman Rhetoric go well, Gideon?  Was it a terrible
ordeal?"

"What do you mean, 'ordeal'?"

"You always say the freshmen are so stupid--"

"I never said anything of the sort!  I said some of 'em are.  But
some of 'em are mighty bright.  MIGHTY bright!  Keen, unspoiled
minds.  They're eager, not blase or fussy, like a lot of older
people."

"I suppose that's so--Did you use my stuff about Trollope?"

"No, I didn't!"

"Oh."

"Well, I used part of it.  And I had to go to the dentist's, this
noon."

"Oh, you poor darling!  Did he hurt you?"

"No, he didn't!"

"You sound so tired and cross, dear."

"Me?  I'm not tired!  OR cross!"

A vast silence, fringed with the tiny barbaric music of the flies
and the thump of reluctant hoofs.

Professor Planish was not a cruel man; at least, he had no definite
pleasure in giving pain, not even to those he loved.  He said
repentantly, "I'm sorry if I sound touchy.  I'm just worried--about
the students."

"About what are you worried about about them?"

"About their morals!  Freshmen girls making dates with unknown,
immature boys!  Very dangerous!"

"Is it?"

"Certainly it is!  And then I've got to make out a whole lot of
notes for--In fact I have to be back in town by 9:30 sharp
tonight."

"Oh, I'm sorry.  It's such lovely soft fall weather.  I was hoping
we might stay at the shack all night."

"I'd like that fine--nothing I'd like better--but tonight I just
can't make it.  Have to be back by 9:30 at the latest."

Silence.

She said slowly, "I wonder how long it'll be before some sweet
young thing that's lots younger than I am will take you away from
me."

He started to forswear himself, then felt honest.  He not
infrequently did.  He spoke affectionately--to the little mother:

"I don't know.  Maybe some time.  Not for a long time, let's hope.
But if that ever does happen, no girl can be half as tolerant of me
and all my fool talk about fool ambitions as you are."

"No, she won't be.  Kiss me!"



The Pridmore shack, unpainted but clean and trim, was of the same
autumnal golden-gray as the long rough grass upon the bluff above
the lake, which slept in a stilly haze.  Peace came upon the
Professor, and for seconds at a time he forgot Peony Jackson and
his need of her.  Stripped to trousers and thin ribbed undershirt
and looking, with his brown beard, like a Manet portrait of an
artist picnicking on the Seine, he ran along the pebbly edge of the
lake, and skimmed stones across the tender-colored water, savagely
breaking its pliant surface.  Teckla was happy because his
fretfulness seemed to be over, and happily she spread their supper
on a black-and-red tablecloth in front of the shack.  The lake was
half copper, half rose, now, and the western horizon exclamatory.

When she called him to supper, he felt young and gay.  But she was
looking at him with such possessiveness.  And she was always doing
things for him--oh, he liked to have things done for him, but he
certainly didn't like to have people think that he ought to think
that they were doing things for him.

She had brought out for him a canvas reclining chair, but she
herself squatted on the grass.

He raged to himself: that was how she'd try to hold him--by
pretending to be so thoughtful that he would try not to hurt her
feelings.  And she was so settled and routine.  He wanted
adventure.  "I'm going places," he vowed.  Yet he was surprised to
hear himself bawling at her, "Oh God, not hard-boiled eggs again!"

He would have thrown himself pettishly into the canvas chair, but
it just wasn't the kind of chair you threw yourself into--not
pettishly.  He lowered himself into it, as he went on, "You're
always kind to me, Teckla, but you haven't got one bit of
imagination."

Was this nice, to be hurting her like this?  No, maybe not; but
he'd better get it over, for keeps.  "Can't you ever think of
anything new?  You're in a rut, just like Kinnikinick College.
Wake up!"

She mutely turned her eyes away from his scolding.  She sat limp
and wordless, then crept up into his lap, softly kissing his cheek,
forgiveness-begging for whatever terrible thing it was that she
must have done.

He thought, gosh, this chair will collapse with the two of us, but
how can I tell her to get the hell off my lap, the poor darling,
the damn sentimentalist?

He thought, she's so hot and sticky, her hand feels sticky as fly-
paper, and it beats all get-out how heavy she is for such a thin
woman.

He thought, this Peony Jackson is so fresh and jolly and COOL.
Even if she is a little plump.  And so brainy.  Wouldn't have to
keep explaining and apologizing to HER all the time.

He said aloud, "Forgive me for being such an old sorehead today.  I
always am, the beginning of the school year.  Well, we better get
busy with the chow, or the cold eggs will get cold!"



He was at Postum's drug store at 9:56.

Miss Peony Jackson wiggled in at 9:59.  Without looking at him she
went to the cosmetics counter and said, "Have you a small box of
rice powder?"  She was even fresher and softer and more
miraculously special than he had remembered.

As she turned around, he said, "Oh, good evening, Miss Jackson."

She said, "Oh, good evening, Professor."

"Can I buy you a soda?"

"A soda?"

"Why, yes."

"Oh, a soda.  I'm afraid it's very late, Professor."

"No, do sit down and have a soda.  Or a sundae.  I want to ask your
opinion about--weekly themes."

"Well--"  Her voice was plain, but as she sat down her eyes seduced
him.



7


For a gentleman professor in Kinnikinick College to look upon a
maiden student as a human being was poorly thought of, and to meet
her over a dish of marshmallow, ground nuts, caramel and two kinds
of ice cream was as dangerous morally as it was dietetically.  Now
that he had once run that danger, he did not dare try to see her
except across the footlights in his Rhetoric class.

She was, by alphabetical arrangement, half-way back in the room
now, and when he started his second lecture, he looked about for
her flutteringly, and was reassured by her smile that said, "Yes,
here I am!"  Through his discourse, her attention told him that he
was good--but afterward she treacherously slipped away with the
rest of the class, and he was in a terror of uncertain love.

He knew that for the first time he was really in love.  In all his
life he would have only four or five people who would completely
know him and accept him.  Certainly Teckla Schaum did not.  For all
his warnings that he would be stepping out into glory, she thought
that he was really a born progenitor and mower of lawns, who would
settle blissfully into domesticity if she was but loving and
patient.  Of these four or five connoisseurs of Gideon Planish,
Peony would be the only seducible girl, and he no more intended to
lose her than to lose his life.

His chance to talk with her came at the Freshman Reception, held in
the gymnasium, which was decorated with red and green paper
streamers and an enormous sign "Welcome Class o' 1925."

The male costumes at the reception ranged from President Bull's
white tie and tails to old Professor Eakins's eccentric white
flannel suit and red bow, with Professor Planish soundly middle-
road in a dinner jacket.  The hundred freshmen, in the ancient
religious ceremony of the Reception Line, filed before the
president, the dean of men and the dean of women, and all the full
professors, complete with wives, fetishistically shaking hands as
though they really enjoyed the rite and from the magic touch gained
heroic strength.  The preceptorial priests themselves were
hypnotized and stood mystically flapping their arms and croaking
"Spleasure."  The only one who kept awake was Professor Planish,
and he only till after he had felt the firm warmth of Peony's young
paw.

Yet during the reception he was apparently devoted to Mrs. Bull,
the wife of the new president.  She was ten years older than
Professor Planish, but she looked sparkling; she wore a Chicago
dinner-gown and a Cedar Rapids hair-wave, and she liked young
professors.

Professor Planish felt that he might need influence at court very
soon, and he danced with Mrs. Bull twice, stepping high and
wiggling his plump behind and thrusting out his beard in an ecstasy
of social elegance, and telling her that on the entire Atlantic
Seaboard he had not found a lady with so light a foot and such
vital ideas about teaching domestic science.  In return, she gave
out everything about her son Eddie, aged eleven.

Just once he danced with Peony, and that far more sedately than
with Mrs. Bull.  But he had been watching her, in her cheery yellow
silk frock with a golden girdle, kicking up hoydenish heels with
unspeakable brutes of young freshmen.

Now he was talking to Peony; he was talking to a woman, not to a
social obligation:

"Why didn't you come up after class, last time?"

"I didn't want people talking about me."

"You mean about US!"

"Why, Professor Planish!"

"I'm not Professor Planish, and you know it.  I'm Gid."

"Gid!" mockingly.

"I've got to see you."

"It's so hard.  I'd like to, but people watch you.  You're too
popular, Gid!"

"Nonsense.  I'm just unmarried.  Listen!  You know that little park
across the tracks from the station?  Nobody from the college ever
goes there."

Mocking again:  "I suppose that's where you always have your dates
with co-eds!"

"I've never had a date with a girl there and you know it."

"How would I know it?"

"Because I just told you so, and I never lie--to you.  Can't you
feel that's true?  Don't you know it?"

"Maybe--yes!"

"Then be there in the park at ten tomorrow evening."

"I'll try."

"Do you like me, Miss Jackson?"

"I can't tell yet, Professor Planish.  I don't know how sound you
are on the gold standard."

They laughed.  That laugh was the only possible betrayal in a
tabby-looking conversation, and Professor Planish looked hastily to
see if Teckla and President and Mrs. Bull were observing.  No, he
was still safe.



With Teckla he danced only once.  She had been frozen in with the
chaperones, the faculty wives, who all had a fixed and smiling look
of intense distaste.

"Having a good time, Teckla?" he glowed.

"All right, but it's not much fun for me to sit back like a Mother
in Zion."

"I'll dance with you again, and I'll see you home, and now I'll
bring you a bottle of strawberry pop.  I know how you like
strawberry pop."

He did not dance with her again, but he did bring her a bottle of
that horrible drink, and he did "see her home."  He had always been
afraid of scandal for himself--he had sometimes gone so far as to
fear it for Teckla--and he rarely was to be seen entering her house
later than supper-time.  When she said, "Come on in for a while,"
he gurgled, "I don't really think I'd better.  Got to think of your
reputation, you know!"

Brightly.  Like a professor.

She snapped at him, "Oh, come IN!"

In the house, she held him with her hands on his shoulders.  "Is
there something wrong tonight, Gideon?"

"Course not!"

"Because if there is--Gideon, you never once looked at me.  When I
was dancing with you, I was dancing with a stranger--a stranger
that didn't like me very much.  Darling, it's awfully hard to see a
man that you know so well suddenly turn into a stranger right in
your arms, with the muscles and the way he moves all different.  I
knew something was distracting you--I really felt frightened."

"Oh, you just imagined--"

"Why do you ever lie to me?  I always catch you, you know.  Even
college professors or preachers oughtn't to lie unless they can get
away with it--So you fell pretty hard for her!  Didn't you!"

He was aghast.

"Oh, I could see it.  Gideon, she must be ten years older than you
are.  At least."

"R?"

"I know she's handsome, but after all, Gideon, Mrs. Bull IS the
president's wife--"

He hooted with noisy joy; he kissed her with fond brotherliness.
But his relief was not merely in being safe; it was equally in
being free from Teckla's understanding.  "She doesn't really know
me then.  She's never got through to me.  There's only one girl
that can, that ever will," he rejoiced to himself, as he palavered
aloud, "Mrs. Bull?  I don't even know she exists.  You don't know
how funny your jealousy is, Teck!  Matter of fact, my crime is much
worse than being after a married woman--my crime is that I was
making up to her in order to stand in with the president, and that
IS pretty low!"

"Yes, it is, you bad thing!"  She was delighted; she believed him.
"Do sit down, and I'll make you a cup of coffee."

"No, I got to be moving."

"Why?  It's not late.  And you won't do any more work this
evening."

"No, I just--"

"Gideon, I do love you so.  God knows why, but I do.  But you don't
have to make love to me, if you stay.  If you'll just go on being a
friend--You'll never have any idea what it can mean to a widow, a
young widow, who was so happily married, not to have a man around
the house to turn to and have him close the shutters and open the
bottles and be bossy.  It's terrible not to have anybody care
enough for you to boss you and--Oh, sorry I'm sentimental.  But
don't neglect me again the way you have at the reception all
evening."

(He was thinking, "Oh, all women are annoying--except one.  They
poison the very instincts that ought to lead a man on and up to a
clearer light.  Why don't I be honest with this female?  Go on, Dr.
Planish--can you ever be honest?  By God, I will!")

"Teck!  You've saved my life, out here in Kinnikinick," he
flowered.

"And I do give you coffee."

"Very fine coffee!  But now I'm going to be very serious, and this
may sound like a funny question, but do you think I'll have a
chance to be a leader of the United States Senate some day and
maybe even go higher--say a post in the Cabinet?"

"How can I--"

"Do you?"

"No!  Frankly, I don't.  I think you are a good teacher--you have a
sort of zest that makes up for what you lack in scholarship--"

"So I lack in scholarship!"

"--but I don't think you'd ever have the patience or the ideas to
become a political leader."

"Darling Teckla!  Oh, I don't mind.  But you don't really believe
in me."

"I think I love you--some!"

"That's sorta beside the point.  You're tired.  You lack the
enthusiasm of youth.  I shall certainly try to keep from it, but
I'm afraid that, as you yourself hinted recently, some day I'll
fall in love with some girl that's--oh, call it credulous, if you
want to."

"Have you fallen for one yet?"

"No, of course not!"  (He congratulated himself, "That's the only
lie I've had to tell her!")  "But I might.  And if I ever did, I
know that she and I would both turn to you as the wisest and
kindest woman living, as a woman--"

"Hey now, wait!  I'm only thirty-three, you know, not seventy-
three.  Oh, yes, I suppose I'd be kind and sensible--damn it!"

He had, then, to get through not over six minutes of farewells.

He felt, on his way home, that he had won a triumph, though he was
not quite sure what it was.  But it must have something to do with
keeping him free to advance the welfare of mankind.  He put on his
own halo, and it stuck there till he was asleep--a child in Vulcan,
hearing a distant train.



On that evening of early October there was neither harvest moon nor
the wine stains of afterglow, but only dusty air and an uneasy
brilliance from the arc light on the station platform.  Professor
Planish was wriggling on a bench in the sick little park, feeling
vaguely foolish yet trembling with the coming glory.  He tried to
look at a line of flat-looking flatcars, at a bumptious little
caboose, but he could really see nothing till, miraculously, Peony
was crossing the tracks, carefully stepping over the rails.  He
knew that it was she, but he couldn't believe it, for she was
grown-up and rich and courtly in a white-flannel cape with a gold-
braided military collar.

She said in a small voice, "Hello."

He slipped his arm under her coat, he whispered, "My girl--my
girl!" and he kissed her lips.  "Do you know that I'm in love with
you?"

She said comfortably, "Oh, you couldn't be."

"Well, darn it, I am!"

"That's good."

"Are you in love with me at all?"

"Sure.  I have been for almost a year.  Oh, yes.  I came down from
Faribault with Daddy, to see about my entrance, and we sneaked into
your Rhetoric class.  Dad said you were a great spellbinder."

"And what did YOU think?"

"I thought you were cute.  Oh, all right, all right, don't look so
cross.  I thought you were wonderful."

"You know, all this is extraordinary.  What are we going to do?"

"Do, Professor?  Why, as I seem to have led you captive already--
with practically no expense for lipstick--we might get married."

"Oh, yes.  Married."

"You've heard of it?"

"I certainly have, and we're going to be married, at the proper
time, but I want you to finish at least two years of college."

"Why?"

"Oh, to be prepared to take a great place in the world.  I'm not
going to stay in a dump like Kinnikinick all my life."

"I should hope not!  But why can't I be married and still go to
school?"

"Against the college rules here for an undergraduate to get
married."

"Why, the old meanies!  Anyway, there's no rule against being
engaged.  Will I do some ring-flaunting!  (I know where we can
borrow a dandy ring, if you're busted.)  Will I sit in class and
stare at you and embarrass you!  'Folks, meet Pee Jackson, the
fiancee of that charming Professor Planish, the poor dope!'  Poor
Professor!  Darling Professor!  Do I call you Gideon or Gid?"

"Gid, I guess.  But darling, look here--"

It had come to him that if Teckla heard of his being engaged, she
would be annoyed, and that her father was chairman of the
Kinnikinick Board of Trustees, who could make the place itchy for a
professor, contract or no.  He picked up Peony's hand and kissed it
and put it carefully back, and told her the whole story of himself
and Teckla--or enough of it for daily use.  It had never been so
nearly easy for him to be so nearly honest.  He asserted that
Teckla was a good and helpful soul, and Peony did nothing more than
snarl, "I don't trust ANY woman!" and, at the end, demand, "But now
you're not even going to have tea, call it tea, with that woman any
more, are you!"

Certainly he wasn't.  How could she think of such a thing?

"Gideon!  If her father and the trustees are likely to cut up--
maybe get us scandalized--why do we need to stay here?  Maybe it's
time for you to beat it, on and upward.  Excelsior!"

"Maybe it is, at that.  I'd like to have a job in Columbia
University."

"But I see you doing something more active than teaching, Gideon.
You're still so young--"

"Do I seem young to you?"

"A baby!  What you could do!  You're the kind could buck the
business world, say, like a banker or running a fifty-thousand-acre
farm.  And you're so eloquent I just love it, but why didn't you
take up economics instead of rhetoric?  Some day maybe you'll be
governor or a senator."

"Now isn't that strange, your speaking about that!  I've always had
a hunch I could do something big in politics--get to the top--and
of course do a lot of good for people."

"Yes--sure--do a lot for people."

"You really think I could?"

"Sure you could!  I know it!  Oh, Gideon, isn't it wonderful!  And
do you think I could help you?  I bet at dinner at the Governor's
Mansion, I could get all the old bags talking and laughing like a
son of a gun, don't you think so?"

"Sure you could!  I know it!  And it would make all the difference,
your believing in me, so I'd have self-confidence and be geared for
success.  That's what wins--being geared for success, don't you
see?"

"Yes, I can see that now."

"Not be willing to take anything but the best--in fame and
financial rewards and power--and the ability to do good--and be
friendly with all the big men, like the Rockefellers.  Have your
machine tooled for top-notch success and refuse to go on with poky
little jobs in places like Kinnikinick.  That's the formula!"

"Oh, yes!"

"And with you, I'll do it!  Darling!"

She kissed him to exhaustion.

"We are engaged then," he said.  "But can you keep it secret?"

"I'm the best Mata Hari in college--but of course a good Mata
Hari."

He scarcely dared to, but it was a critical question, and he
whispered, "How good?"

She whispered back, "That depends.  Not too good."  Then, loudly
and brashly, sounding like a freshman, she yelped, "Gracious!  It's
late!  I've got to skip."

She was gone before he could grasp her flying white cape, and he
didn't know when he was to see her again.

For weeks he agitatedly never did know when he was going to see her
again, except at Rhetoric class, where she looked up at him like an
amiable monkey.



8


Two weeks gone; they were in October, and he had a birthday and was
thirty years old.  Teckla gave a birthday party just for the two of
them, with cake and ice cream, and a bottle of Iowa corn whisky for
a present.  Still he could not tell Teckla, except by a cagy
flinching which told her too well, that his love had left her and
flown off to the wars.

Yet he was less afraid of Teckla than of Dr. Edith Minton.  It was
distinctly out of his way to pass Lambda House, where Dr. Minton
dragoned it and Peony lived in horrid security from seduction, but
he passed it, twice a day.  He tried to look like a real professor,
bustling along in strict devotion to paragraphing and suffixes, but
he could not help peering hungrily at the yellow wooden Ionic of
Lambda House.  It did seem reasonable that just once, at least, he
might see Peony up there in her room, shining in a chemise, but
what he more often saw was the eyeglasses of Dr. Minton.

She would probably rush out some day and grab him and haul him off
to President Bull.  Oh, he was a most harassed young professor!

He hated Dr. Edith Minton, he hated President Bull, he was afraid
of Teckla Schaum and her father, and he was done with college--
place of twittering and of marks.  He wanted to be out on the broad
highway, skipping hand in hand with Peony, and he was willing now
to take any highway--even an insurance agency.  He had written to a
dozen colleges about a brighter job, but his letters conveyed no
huge confidence in his own ability to go on tenderly leading Youth
amid the orchards of knowledge.

He who had often told his students, "An inspired business letter
can pull the heart-strings of the prospect just as well as the best
love lyrics by Shelley or James Whitcomb Riley"--he himself could
think of nothing more forceful to write than, Please, he would like
a new job.

He hadn't enough Boosters or Contacts, he decided.  He had no one
but President Bull to recommend him.  The authorities at Adelbert
College and the University of Ohio did not, he guessed, feel
strongly about him; in fact, they had distinctly stopped feeling
about him at all.  Somebody had said that Hatch Hewitt, his
sardonic classmate, was already a powerful newspaper reporter in
New York, but just where was he?

Professor Planish sighed, and wrote in his notebook, "In future
career shd cultivate hold onto friends more esp ones w influence,
big bankers, journalists, must be sure to do this, memo: ask P what
she thinks, she has so much sense."



He mustn't let himself get lost in the thicket of academic life, he
warned, and in a fury of contemporary research he read almost
entirely through a copy of the Nation--until he realized, from the
fact that it commented not too affectionately on Mr. Harding's
campaign, that it was a year old.

Professor Planish persuaded himself that he studied current events
as carefully as an undertaker.  But this autumn of Peony, he
noticed nothing except that Mr. Harding was a handsome, confidence-
showering man, and that, after Wilson's demands, it was "fine to be
back to Normalcy."  He stated this often at party dinners full of
the two kinds of faculty wives: those who sighed and were shabby
and talked about diapers, and those who were hard and flirtatious
and shiny, and talked about the latest shows in New York.  Of the
two sorts, the latter was the more provincial and more likely to
send him off yelling for Peony.



The casting and direction of the college play, to which he had
looked forward as an orgy of unacademic art and a much better
ground than classrooms for getting thick with the pretty girls,
proved, entirely on account of Peony, to be an embarrassing game of
hide and seek.

The play this time was a nasty little work called Poor Papa's
Prize, one of those farces (1 set, inter., 3 acts, 6 f. 5 m.)
jammed with references to Hoboken and mothers-in-law, which in 1921
were still the delight of provincial colleges that twenty years
later would be haughty with Saroyan and Sherwood and Maxwell
Anderson.  It was the idea in such colleges then, and often much
later, that the position of Professor of Speech and Rhetoric
automatically equipped the holder with a tricky and veteran art in
such matters as lights, make-up and stealing lumber for scenery,
and that a Professor Gideon Planish ranked with Belasco and Lincoln
J. Carter.

He agreed, and he considered Poor Papa's Prize as on the same level
with Aristophanes.  He thought it was a very funny scene when
Papa's prize turned out to be ten thousand plugs of tobacco, not
dollars.  He felt masterful about stage business and gestures, but
with all this wizardry he was overthrown by the fact that, even
with the grossest nepotism, there was no way of wedging Peony
Jackson into the cast.

She came faithfully to the try-outs, happy and handsome in the best
green sweater that ever came out of Faribault, Minnesota.  She read
in turn for the parts of the ingenue, the mother, the comic great-
aunt and the comic Swedish maid, and she read them all with the
same pleased smile, the same accent, and the same complete lack of
meaning.  Sitting back in the unlighted auditorium, his hat over
his eyes and his legs thrust way out, like a professional director,
Professor Planish pitied her and loved her for her lack of talent.

She stopped, looked down into the dark pit, smiled in unspoken
agreement, and said, "My, I am rotten, ain't I!  Do you suppose I
could do the props, Professor Planish?"

"You can!  You shall!" he shouted.

But before working the properties, she had first to acquire them,
which was a combination process of theft and brazen borrowing, and
though his one dream had been of snuggling beside her in the
darkness, she was rarely there at rehearsals.  He was cross about
it.  He scolded the actors, and they hated him; and all this time
the letters he was getting from other colleges in answer to his
petitions indicated that they thought he had too big a job already.

At last Professor Planish knew every one of the fine and racking
sorrows that glorify young lovers.



She was there for a moment after rehearsals, painting a pine box
which was going to impersonate a grandfather's-clock, and he gave
her the first of all his gifts.  In the window at Postum's College
Pharmacy he had seen a "Novelty Gift Make-up Kit" that had tickled
everything that was young and fanciful in him: a pink, leather-
covered box containing nail polish and drying cream and all the
feminine idiocies that seemed to him strange and luxurious; with a
mirror, inside the lid, that was shaped somewhat like a shield and
somewhat like a diamond and a good deal like the map of Africa.  It
cost $5.65, which was, except in the case of Teckla's bracelet,
$2.65 more than, on any grounds, even those of extreme passion, he
had hitherto ever been willing to pay as love's tribute.  He bought
it, but he had them wrap it in plain white paper.  Full-Professor
Planish did not wish to be seen going about with Novelty Gift Kits.

After rehearsal, back-stage, he was able to slip the package
covertly into Peony's hands.  She yanked off the wrapping, let the
paper slide to the floor--he picked it up--and opened the box.

"Oh!" she squealed, with an ecstasy that delighted and rewarded
him.  She would have made an excellent monkey to have around and
smile at, if her face had been thinner and less fair.  She picked
out each of the charming bottles, she studied them with pleasure,
she pinched them, she smelled them, and then she kissed him in the
double rapture of love and cosmetics.

Every night, without ever having quite agreed upon it, they headed
for that same dim bower behind a prop fireplace--every night until,
just as he scrambled over a saw-buck and a pile of flats to reach
her, he saw Dr. Edith Minton watching him from the shadows beside
the switchboard.

His talent for swift intrigue was considerable.  With no especial
stress he called, "Uh, Miss--Miss Jackson--when can you help Miss
Smidl