“I know something about the waste, the riot and the ruin that have followed in the wake of narrow-minded, selfish, uncultured and unsympathetic manufacturers, Thurber. If the college only manages to send out a hundred thousand graduates filled like you with this spirit of humane statesmanship, what a revolution would take place in labor conditions!”
“It would be the front door of God’s kingdom, Priddy,” affirmed Thurber, “sure enough!”
Throughout that year, from the seriousness with which Thurber asked questions in his classes, from the eagerness with which he was ready to talk about welfare work, from the diligence with which he fastened himself to the library alcoves marked: Economics and Sociology, and from the pervading seriousness of his manner, one might easily have guessed that in him one looked on a youth aflame with a consuming, zealous ambition to make his stewardship of men and his college culture yield the highest per cent of moral earnings. I felt proud to call him my friend.
Another of my companions during the senior year was “Quiet” Sanderson, the student who had introduced me to Quarles. “Quiet” was one of those illogical and fanciful appellations in which the students delighted, and was paradoxically twisted from Sanderson’s fluent tendencies.
Sanderson occupied a corner room in one of the newer dormitories. In it was a piano on which he played Beethoven and rag-time with equal ease. The mission bookcase was topped by a very large, felt college streamer and a “perpetual care” sign, which in his Freshman wildness he had taken from a cemetery. As he was a literary man with a pronounced taste for Poe and the French short story writers, there were various evidences of “atmosphere” in the orderings of the room. For instance, some old swords, which might have been discovered in the ruins of Troy, but which, in fact, were clever imitations bought for a song in Boston, hung over the door. A Turkish fez, which Sanderson would wear when company was present, usually hung from the clothes post in a corner of the room, over a quaint, full-length lounging robe made from scarlet cloth and embroidered with Mohammed’s crescent. An oriental scent lingered on those habits of dress; a scent which I have seen Sanderson compound from barks and minerals bought at the druggist’s and of which he would never give me the names. When he held a spread or a meeting of any sort, Sanderson’s room would be thick with the fumes of joss which he kept burning from a blue Chinese bowl. If any one complained, Sanderson would have no scruples in telling the complainant that perhaps the smoke would be even denser and more sulphurous in a later destination!
It was fortunate that I did not catch, like some insidious fever, Sanderson’s habit of procrastination, for while his dreams were in the present tense, real, and vivid, his deeds lingered in the nebulous future. Thus, one night while he lounged on his couch wearing his fez, he informed me that he had the plot of an exciting tale that a publisher might make a fortune by. There was a secret staircase in the first chapter, and between that and the twenty-eighth—a distance of eight thousand words, for he had measured them—enough blood was shed in the numerous duels, alley encounters and small riots with the watch, to stain a miniature Waterloo.
“What are you wasting your time with those blood and thunder yarns for?” I exclaimed, for the utmost frankness was the rule between us.
“Blood and thunder!” he echoed. “Why, it’s thoroughly exciting, whatever you may say about it, Priddy. In my best style, too. Racy, full of tender sentiment at the love passages, and written with an iron pen, whose tip was flaming hot!”
“Let me see this epic of thunder then,” I demanded. “I should like to look it over.”
“Oh,” yawned Sanderson, “I haven’t had time to put it on paper—yet. I have my studies you know!”