"Gone are the days—the golden days I'm dreaming of,
I think I hear her softly calling (plunkety-plunk)
'Will you be back? Will you be back? (plunk-plunk)
Back to the Car-o-li-nah you love?'"(plunkety-plunk),
For three golden campus years T. Haviland Hicks, Jr., had gayly pursued the
even tenor (or basso, since he possessed a foghorn, subterranean voice)
of his Bannister career. He absolutely refused to take life seriously, and
he was forever arousing the wrath—mostly pretended, for no one could be
really angry with the genial youth—of his comrades, by twanging his banjo
and roaring out rollicking ballads at all hours. He was never so happy
as when entertaining a crowd of happy students in his cozy quarters,
or escorting a Hicks' Personally Conducted expedition downtown for a
Beef-Steak Bust, at his expense, at Jerry's, the rendezvous of hungry
collegians.
However, despite his butterfly existence, Hicks, possessed of a
scintillating mind, always set the scholastic pace for 1919, by means of
occasional study-sprints, as he characteristically called them. But when it
came to helping his beloved Dad realize a long-cherished ambition to behold
his only son and heir shatter Hicks, Sr.'s, celebrated athletic records, it
was a different story. T. Haviland Hicks, Jr., ever since he committed
the farcical faux pas of running the wrong way with the pigskin in
the Freshman-Sophomore football contest of his first year, had been a
super-colossal athletic joke at old Bannister.
His record to date, beside that reverse touchdown that won for the
Sophomores, consisted of scoring a home-run with the bases congested, on a
strike-out; of smashing hurdles and cross-bars on the track; endangering
his heedless career with the shot and hammer; and making a ridiculous farce
of every event he entered, to the vast hilarity of the students, who, with
the exception of Butch Brewster, had no idea his ridiculous efforts were in
earnest. In the high-jump, however, Hicks had given considerable promise,
which to date the grasshopper collegian had failed to keep.
Hicks, the lovable, impulsive, and irrepressible, with his invariable sunny
disposition, his generous nature, and his democratic, loyal comradeship
for everybody, was loved by old Bannister. The students forgave him his
pestersome ways, his frequent torturing of them with banjo-twanging and
rollicking ballads. His classmates idolized him, Juniors and Sophomores
were his true friends, and entering Freshmen always regarded this
happy-go-lucky youth as a demigod of the campus.
Big Butch Brewster, who was forever futilely lecturing the heedless Hicks,
thrust his head from the grub-shack window, fought down a grin, and sternly
arraigned his graceless comrade:
"Hicks, you frivolous, campus-cluttering, infinitesimal atom of nothing,
you labor under the insane delusion that college life is a continuous
vaudeville show. You absolutely refuse to take your Bannister years
seriously, you banjo-thumping, pillow-punishing, campus-torturing
nonentity. You will never grasp the splendid opportunities within your
reach! You have no ambition but to strum that banjo, roar ridiculous songs,
fuss up like a tailor's dummy, and pester your comrades, or drag them down
to Jerry's for the eats! You won't be earnest, you Human Cipher, Before you
entered Bannister, you formed your ideas and ideals of campus life from
colored posters, moving-pictures, magazine stories, and stage dramas like
'Brown of Harvard'; you have surely lived up, or down, to those ideals,
you—"
"Them's harsh words, Butch!" joyously responded the grinning Hicks,
unchastened, for he knew good Butch Brewster would not, for a fortune, have
him forsake his care-free nature. "Thou loyal comrade of my happy campus
years, what wouldst thou of me?—have me don sack-cloth and ashes, strike
'The Funeral March' on my golden lyre, and cry out in anguish, 'ai! ai!
'Nay, nay, a couple of nays; college years are all too brief; hence I
shall, by my own original process, extract from them all the sunshine and
happiness possible, and by my wonderful musical and vocal powers, bring joy
to my colleagues, who—Ouch, Butch—look out for that nail, you inhuman
elephant—"
Big Butch, at that juncture of Hicks' monologue, had effectively terminated
it by leaning from the window, grasping his unsuspecting comrade by the
scruff of the neck, and dragging him over the window-ledge, into the
grub-shack, and the presence of Coach Corridan and Deacon Radford.
Strenuous objection was registered, both by the futilely struggling Hicks,
and a nail projecting from the sill, which caught in the Palm Beach
trousers and ripped a long rent in them; fortunately, Hicks' anatomy
escaped a similar fate.
"A ripping good move, eh-what?" chuckled Hicks, twisting like a
contortionist, to view the damage done his vestiture, "Hello, what have we
here?—the German field-map, by the Van Dyke beard of the Prophet! I
bring the Kaiser's order, ham and eggs, and a cup of coffee. No, that's a
mistake. General Hen Von Kluck, lead a brigade of submarines up yon hill to
thunder the Russian fort! Von Hindering-Bug, send a flock of aeroplanes and
Zeppelins to the Allied trenches, the enemy is shooting Russian caviare
at—"