T. Haviland Hicks, Senior

by James Raymond Elderdice

A cold, cheerless room, bare of carpet or pictures, with just the
study-table, bed, and two chairs. At the study-table, his huge bulk
sprawling on, and overflowing, a frail chair, they had found the massive
John Thorwald laboriously reading aloud the Latin he had translated,
literally by the sweat of his brow. The blond Colossus, impatient at the
interruption, had shaken his powerful frame angrily, and with no regard for
campus tradition, had addressed the upperclassmen in a growl: "Well, what
do you want? Hurry up, I've got to study."

And then, to state it briefly, they had worked with (and on) the stolid
Thorwald for two hours. They explained how his decision to play no more
football would practically kill old Bannister's hopes of the Championship,
would assassinate football spirit on the campus, and cause the youths to
condemn Thor, and to ostracise him. Waxing eloquent, Butch Brewster had
delivered a wonderful speech, pleading with John Thorwald to play the
game. He tried to show that obviously uninterested mammoth that, like the
Hercules he so resembled, he stood at the parting of the ways.

"You are on the threshold of your college career, old man!" he thundered
impressively, though he might as well have tried to shoot holes in a
battleship with a pop-gun, "What you do now will make or break you. Do you
want the fellows as friends or as enemies; do you want comradeship, or
loneliness and ostracism? You have it in your power to do two big things,
to win the Championship for your Alma Mater, and to win to yourself the
entire student-body, as friends; will you do that, and build a firm
foundation for your college years, or betray your Alma Mater, and gain the
enmity of old Bannister!"

Followed more fervid periods, with such phrases as, "For your Alma Mater,"
"Because of your college spirit," "For dear old Bannister," and "For
the Gold and Green!" predominating; all of which terms, to the stolid,
unimaginative Thorwald being fully as intelligible as Hindustani. They
appealed to him not to betray his Alma Mater; they implored him, for his
love of old Bannister; they besought him, because of his college spirit;
and all the time, for all that the Prodigious Prodigy understood, they
might as well have remained silent.

"I will tell you something," spoke Thor, at last, with an air of impatient
resignation, "and don't bother me again, please! I have come to Bannister
College to get an education, and I have the right to do so, without being
pestered. I pay my bills, and I am entitled to all the knowledge I can
purchase. I look from my window, and I see boys, whose fathers are toiling,
sacrificing, to send them here. Instead of studying, to show their
gratitude, they loaf around the campus, or in their rooms, twanging banjos
and guitars, singing silly songs, and sky-larking. I don't know what all
this rot is you are talking of; 'college spirit,' 'my Alma Mater,' and so
on. I do not want to play football; I do not like the game; I need the time
for my study, so I will not play. Both my father and myself have labored
and sacrificed to send me to college. The past five years, with one great
ambition to go to college and learn, I have toiled like a galley-slave.

"And now, when opportunity is mine, do you ask me to play? You want me to
loaf around, wasting precious time better spent in my studies. What do I
care whether the boys like me, or hate me? Bah! I can take any two of you,
and knock your heads together! Their friendship or enmity won't move me. I
shall study, learn. I will not waste time in senseless foolishness, and I
won't play football again."

T. Haviland Hicks, Jr. was silent as he stood by the window of his room,
gazing down at the campus where the collegians were gathering before
marching to the Auditorium for the nightly mass-meeting that would vainly
strive to arouse a fighting spirit in the football "rooters." That
blithesome, heedless, happy-go-lucky youth was capable of far more serious
thought than old Bannister knew; and more, he possessed the rare ability
to read character; in the case of Thor, he saw vastly deeper than his
indignant comrades, who beheld only the surface of the affair. They knew
only that John Thorwald, a veritable Colossus, had exhibited football
prowess that practically promised the State Championship to old Bannister,
and then—he had quit the game. They understood only that Thor refused to
play simply because he did not want to, and as to why their appeals to his
college spirit and his love for his Alma Mater were unheeded they were
puzzled.

But the gladsome Hicks, always serious beneath his cheerful exterior, when
old Bannister's interests were at stake, or when a collegian's career
might be blighted, when the tragedy could be averted, fully understood. Of
course, as originator of the Billion-Dollar Mystery, and producer of the
Prodigious Prodigy, he knew more about the strange John Thorwald than did
his mystified comrades. He knew that Thor, as he named him, was just a vast
hulk of humanity, stolid, unimaginative of mind, slow-thinking, a dull,
unresponsive mass, as yet unstirred by that strange, subtle, mighty thing
called college spirit. He realized that Thor had never had a chance to
understand the real meaning of campus life, to grasp the glad fellowship of
the students, to thrill with a great love for his Alma Mater. All that must
come in time. The blond giant had toiled all his life, had labored among
men where everything was practical and grim. Small wonder, then, that he
failed utterly to see why the youths "loafed on the campus, or in their
rooms, twanging banjos and guitars, singing silly songs, and skylarking."

"I must save him," murmured Hicks softly, for the others in his room were
talking of Thor. "Oh, imagine that powerful body, imbued with a vast love
for old Bannister, think of Thor, thrilling with college spirit. Why,
Yale's and Harvard's elevens combined could not stop his rushes, then. I
must save him from himself, from the condemnation of the fellows, who just
don't understand. I must, some way, awaken him to a complete understanding
of college life in its entirety, but how? He is so different from Roddy
Perkins, or Deke Radford."

It seemed that the lovable Hicks was destined to save, every year of his
campus career, some entering collegian who incurred the wrath, deserved or
otherwise, of the students. In his Freshman first term, T. Haviland Hicks,
Jr., indignant at the way little Theophilus Opperdyke, the timorous,
nervous "grind," had been alarmed at the idea of being hazed, had by a
sensational escape from a room locked, guarded, and filled with Sophomores,
gained immunity for himself and the boner for all time, thus winning the
loyal, pathetic devotion of the Human Encyclopedia. As a Sophomore, by
crushing James Roderick Perkins' Napoleonic ambition to upset tradition,
and make Freshmen equal with upperclassmen, Hicks had turned that
aggressive youth's tremendous energy in the right channels, and made him a
power for good on the campus.