Princeton Stories

by Jesse Lynch Williams

In freshman year they say, "Are you ready to feed your face?" instead of "Are you going to dinner?" and at the eating clubs they call the milk-pitcher the "cow," and shout "Butter me, please," when they wish the butter handed to them. All their desires and opinions they express in variously bold and vulgar metaphors, which are witty. This is because there is no one to tell them they must not. The boy is a college man now. He is free from the restraint of home or school or both, and he doesn't know quite what to do with his liberty.

Like a young town horse turned loose for the first time in the open green of the country, he sometimes loses his head and frisks and snorts and kicks up his heels to an unbecoming degree. This is a way of saying that every once in a while some little boy (the strictly reared kind, usually), in his eagerness to show his fellows how reckless and devilish he is, goes so far that he never comes quite back. Others dissipate merely to the extent of cutting chapel twice in succession or pretending that they have not poled all night for an examination. In still others it breaks out in a different form, and they persuade themselves that they are naughty cynics or bold, bad agnostics. But that will do for that.

The point is this: Sooner or later, in some form or another, this spirit is bound to get hold of every young man who is worthy of the name, and, like measles or calf-love, it is better to have it sooner. In the very young it is interesting. After that it is not. And the older one is when it comes, the more he reminds the onlookers of the frolicksome antics of some ancient, misguided cow, or of a kittenish summer girl, aged twenty-eight. When seen in a poler it is pathetic.

At his first eating club in freshman year, H. Stacy felt himself snubbed from the start; and when the crowd, which was not slow, became well enough acquainted with one another and with the glorious freedom of college life to pour syrup down their neighbors' backs and to hurl fried eggs and coarse jokes about the table, little Stacy, although he always said, "That was a pretty good shot," and wiped the potato from his ear with a noisy laugh, saw that he was not in his own element, which he should have seen a month before, and got out.

He joined a club of a very different sort of freshmen, who were too busy speculating upon their chances at the approaching Divisional Examinations to invent names for tough beefsteak, or learn what was going on in Trenton at the theatres and other places.

This was his element. He drew in long, full breaths of freedom and sunshine, and told himself that now he knew what was meant by the Joy of College Life.

Here he settled down to the methodical poler habits he was intended for, and when the next catalogue was issued his mother and sister pointed out to the minister's wife the name of "Horatio B. Stacy, New Jersey," in the small group of names called "First Group," and said, "We knew he would do it." In his sophomore year he did it again and won a prize or two besides and became a minor light in the Cliosophic Society, and by this time he held in that Hall an office, the name of which was a secret, and could not be divulged even to his sister Fannie. He studied for high marks and was called a "greasy poler." But he got the high marks.

You must not think he had no friends. He made some firm ones. About these he could write home to his sister Fannie, telling what magnificent characters some of them were. Often of a Saturday night, if he had no essays to write or debates to prepare, he slipped off his eye-shades and pattered across the campus to his friends' rooms and knocked gently and said, "How do?" and conversed for an hour on the difficulty of taking notes when your neighbor is borrowing your knife, or about the elective courses for the next term. And down at the club they had great horse calling each other "Blamed Neo-Platonists" and "Doggoned Transcendentalists." Nor was it all shop. One of them thought himself in love. It was Stacy that used to wink at the others and bob his head and say, "I know some one who got a letter to-day." They had great fun at the club.

By reason of his freshman year's disgust he remained innocent, which was right, and ignorant, which was wrong, of much that he might have experienced, and he bade fair to graduate a typical poler with a bad breath and an eye on Commencement stage and special honors. Sometimes, to be sure, dark questions arose in his mind, strange, shameful yearnings that caused him to read whole pages without taking in a word of it. But then, all polers have wild moments when they feel that they would rather play on the team than win the Stinnecke Scholarship, so Stacy should not have been distressed.

But sometimes it seemed to him that even those classmates whom he knew only slightly and did not understand at all, those fellows who seemed to do nothing but loaf about the campus all day and sing and shout at night, while he was running his hands through his hair and his eyes through Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason," they, it seemed to him, were getting a poetry out of college life that he was missing. "But never mind," he would say to himself. "They will regret it some day. They will wish they had done as I am doing, instead of wasting golden opportunities which come but once and which glide by like ships upon the sea of life." Then he would pull his hair and start at the top of the page again. It is better to have First Group than the Glee Club.