He would never forget, he said, how he felt when he was graduated and the university moved off behind him and left him alone. It was up to him to keep on being a famous character, he felt. His college demanded it. He had to make good. But there he was with a magnificent football education and no more football to play. His financial training consisted in knowing when his bank account was overdrawn. His folks had pretty nearly paralyzed themselves putting him through and he wasn't going to draw on them any further. He went to New York because it seemed to be almost as big as the university, and he started all alone on the job of shouldering his way past the captains of finance up to the place where his college mates might feel proud of him some more.
The result was so ridiculous that he had to laugh at it himself. He lost five yards every time he bucked an office boy. His college friends kept inviting him out and he went until they began offering him help. Then he cut the whole bunch. He didn't care to have them watch the struggle. He'd been in New York two years when he met us, he said, and he hadn't earned enough money to pay his room-rent in that time. There were times when he might have got a decent little job at twelve dollars per, or so, but he would have had to meet the boys who had looked up to him as a world-beater and somehow he just couldn't tackle it. When we had come over and paid homage to him he saw we had taken him for a successful man of the world, as well as a member of the All-America team, and he hadn't been able to resist the desire to let two human beings look up to him again. He hadn't invited us to his room, he said, because part of the time he didn't have a room; and he even confessed that once or twice he'd walked up to our rooms from downtown because he was crazy for a smoke and didn't have the price.
I guess there never was a more peculiar dinner party in New York. Part of the time I sniveled and part of the time Allie sniveled, and once or twice we were all three all balled up in our throats. But after a while we braced up and I told Jarvis what the Boss had told me, and we drank a toast to the glad new days, and another to success, and another to Jarvis, the coming business pillar, and some more to our private yachts and country homes, and to Commencement reunions, and this and that. Then we chartered a sea-going cab and took Jarvis home with us. We made him sleep in the bed while we slept on the floor, and the next morning we loaned him a pair of overalls that we had honorably retired and we all went down to work together.
The next three months were perfectly ridiculous. We simply couldn't order Jarvis around. Suppose you had to ask the Statue of Liberty to get a move on and scrub the floors? We couldn't get our ingrained awe of that freight hustler out of our systems. Of course when any one was around we had to keep up appearances, but when I was alone and I had something for Jarvis to do I'd call him in and get at it about this way: "Er—say, Jarvis, could you help me out on a little matter, if you have the time? You know there's a shipment for Pittsburgh that's got to go out by noon. I think the car is at door 6. Those barrels ought to be put into the car right away, and if you'd see that they get in there I'd be very much obliged to you. I'd attend to it myself, but they've given me a lot of stuff to go over here."
Then Jarvis would grin cheerfully and hustle those barrels in before I could get over blushing. If you don't believe football has its advantages in after life you ought to watch a prize tackle waltzing a three-hundred-pound barrel through a car door.
By day we ordered Jarvis about in this fashion, and made him earn his one-fifty with the rest of the red-shirted gang. But at six o'clock we dropped all that like a hot poker. Nights we were his adoring young friends again. We sat together in restaurants and said "sir" to him to his infinite disgust, and made him tell over and over again the stories of the big games and the grand doings of the old days. When his promotion came, three months later, and he went into a small job in the office, with a traveling job looming up in the offing, we held a celebration that set us back about half the price of a railroad ticket home. It meant more to us than it did to him. To him it was three dollars more a week, congenial work and a chance. But to us it was the release of a great man from grinding captivity—a racehorse rescued from the shafts of a garbage cart; a Richard the Lion-hearted hauled from the gloomy dungeon, where he had had to peel his own potatoes, and set on the road to kingly pomp and circumstance again. Excuse me for this frightful mess of language. I can't help getting a little squashy with my adjectives when I think of that glorious banquet night.
I'm glad to say that Jarvis kept coming along after that. He developed into a first-class salesman, and in a couple of years he came in from the road and took a desk in the house with his name on the side in gilt letters. When this happened we made him look up every one of his old college friends again. He hesitated a little, but we got behind him and pushed. We pushed him into his college club and back to Commencement, and we really pushed him out of our life—for every one was glad to see him, of course, and to his amazement he found that he was still a grand old college institution among the alumni. So he trained with his own crowd after that, but even now we go over to his club and dine with him at least once a year—always on some anniversary or other. And for the last two years he has been sending his machine around for us.
Oh, no, you don't! I'm paying for this lunch, young fellow. Don't fight any one about paying for your lunch just because you still have the price. It's a privilege we older chaps insist on with you newcomers anyway. And remember, there is always a bunch of us before the fire at the club Saturday evenings, and we don't talk business. While you're waiting for that job, don't you dare miss a meeting. And say—one thing more. Don't be afraid of those blamed office boys. They're all a bluff. I'm getting so I can fire them without even getting pale.