But he did not want Lawrence to be like others. That was just the point. If it had been someone else he would not have cared. But for Harry Lawrence, Lawrence the superb, his Lawrence, there in that glaring place—jeered at and made a fool of—by that mob of muckers. It was all wrong.
"Well," he said to himself, as he went upstairs to his room, "I suppose I'm too much of a kid, and I'll have to get over my kid ways of looking at things. The sooner the better."
But all the same, it hurt, and when he was dropping off to sleep, he was startled into wakefulness again by one of those queer, sudden pangs which make one ask, "What is it I've lost?"
THE RESPONSIBILITY OF LAWRENCE
I
Many fellows seem to think that all an athletic officer has to do is to look important and travel about the United States with his team and make out a bill for expenses.
It's easy enough to carry a japanned tin box, and sell tickets through a hole where the wind blows, as treasurer. As president it is a fine thing to make frequent trips to New York, and attend conclaves that are secret, and make speeches in conventions and read your opinions next morning in the paper in fine long sentences prefixed with "President So-and-so said last night," and to be lunched by famous authorities and interviewed by rapacious reporters who think that because the public supports football they have a right to see all the inside workings of intercollegiate diplomacy. All this is the pretty part of it.
But like all greatness there is a deal of hard hustling and perspiration and discouragement and annoyance underneath. So much so, that one seldom has time to tell himself how fine a thing it is to wear a 'varsity blazer with the orange monogram on the breast-pocket. And this is usually heavy with bills to pay and memoranda of things to see to. Besides, the responsibility is tremendous.
H. Lawrence, Ninety Blank, had blood-shot eyes this morning, and he hurried down the clattering iron stairs of West College tying his neck-tie. As the ugly entry door slammed behind him he did not put his hands in his pockets and begin to whistle, as he used to do in under-classman days, because he was not sauntering over to Reunion to smoke a pipe, or down to Witherspoon to loaf until the next lecture. He glanced at the clock in old North tower and hit up his pace.
He had given orders to the team to be at the station with their grips packed at 9.38, and before that time he had to wire a member of the Graduate Advisory Committee, asking where he could find him that evening, and to an official of the Manhattan Athletic Club that he should not be able to consider his proposition at present, and to the manager of a Southern college football team that he regretted that all Princeton's open dates were now filled, and to the Jersey City Station restaurant to prepare a luncheon of training food for twenty men, and not to roast the beef to death this time. After that he would have to call upon the dean and find out whether the faculty had decided to let Harrison play football or not, and find and be nice to another member of the faculty who was indignant because seventeen grand stand tickets had not been saved for him and his wife's relatives at the last Saturday's game, and then hurry to the station by way of the bank, where he would ask if they had heard anything more about that protested check, while he was making a good one out for himself, and then see to it that all the team and subs were flocked together and pushed into the train and made to stay there until told to get out and play football. Some of which would have been more properly the duties of Sinclair, the treasurer, who was not catching on as rapidly as Lawrence thought he should.