I did promise. And two days later I received a postcard from Trevelyan, telling me that it would hardly be worth my while to try for the college paper. He added, in the large, unruly handwriting which his near-sightedness made necessary:
"You may go on breathing, however, if you don't make a noise at it."
He supplemented this, a few nights later, when he and I were at our old places in his room. He threw down his pipe in the midst of talking about something carefully unimportant, and sat up with a laughably angry face.
"See here, 'fresh,'" he bawled out, "you're getting the rottenest deal I ever saw. You know why—so do I. And we're going to show them a thing or two. We're going to buck up against the strongest thing in the world—and that thing is prejudice. We're going to beat it, too. Do you understand? Were going to beat it out! Smash it to pieces!"
Yes, I understood, I said. I understood it all only too well. So well, indeed, that I knew there was no use trying to fight. I knew that prejudice of race and religion was the strongest shield of the ignorant and mean, that neither he nor I could fight it fairly—and that, if he came into the fight by my side, he would ruin his own chances of being one of the biggest men in the college world when his senior year arrived.
"A lot I care for being a big man in a place of little thoughts," he snapped back at me. "I'm ready to take the consequences, now and forever after."
"Have you thought of what your fraternity brothers might say about it?" I asked him.
"I don't care—I don't—well, if they—." His voice died away in perplexity. I had hit upon his weak spot. He was an easy-going, likeable chap; he hated a rumpus. If he made any sort of fight against the anti-Jewish prejudice, he would have his whole fraternity against him, he would perhaps be shunned by all his sworn brothers, by his best college friends. His enthusiasm became a little dulled, then died down into a great good-natured sigh.
"I suppose you're right, 'fresh,'" he admitted slowly. "I'm not of the fighting sort. And I have my fraternity to consider. That's the worst of belonging to a fraternity." He took up his pipe again and smoked in silence for a while. "I suppose you think you'll never be happy, now that you know you aren't going to be in a fraternity. Take my word for it, you're ten times luckier in having your freedom. Wait until you're an upperclassman and you'll agree with me."
It seemed a dreadful sacrilege for him to be saying it. Besides, I thought he was blaming his own lack of fighting power on his fraternity in too heavy and unjust a degree. I wasn't any more of a fighter than he—but I was disappointed, somehow, that his pugnacity had died out so readily.