Princeton Stories

by Jesse Lynch Williams

You see he had just about all one man could get, and before he left the room he was going to hear his name read out before everybody, as the winner of still a few more honors. This was the culmination of a rather successful career, and he told himself that he did not care how conceited it was, he was going to enjoy it for all it was worth, for before the sun set he would be an undergraduate no longer, and there would be plenty of time to find how small he was.

Dougal Davis was the son of a foreign missionary, and he had entered college with the intention of making a minister of the Gospel of himself. He still had that intention. He was one of the most popular men on the campus.

When he began his course he was as bristling with prejudices and as redolent of sanctimony as many high-minded young men of noble purpose and little tact, but unlike some of them he had sense of humor enough to find out pretty promptly that he was a young prig.

He soon shed many of his prejudices, and he was fair-minded enough to let the good wholesome atmosphere of the campus air out his sanctimony. This is a way of saying that early in freshman year he took himself in hand and decided that if he and a number of other fellows looked at a number of things in vastly different ways it did not necessarily follow that the other fellows were dead wrong. He was in evidence at class prayer-meetings, but not more than at the meetings at the lamp-post in front of Reunion, with his hands doubled up under a sweater, gossiping with the crowd. That is the sort of a fellow he was.

Davis's father had a small salary and a large family, like all missionaries, and one of the girls had come back to the States when Dougal did to go to a school in Philadelphia. So young Davis earned the price of his education.

But this was not so hard as it sounds. Being a minister's son he had a scholarship, which saved his tuition bills, and he ran a club, so that his board cost nothing. Leading the class in freshman year not only brought him the prize of $200, but the best kind of advertising with the faculty as well, so that in sophomore year he had more tutoring sent around to him than he knew what to do with. Then he became Princeton correspondent for several papers, and dropped tutoring except on special occasions and at very special rates. He had such a reputation that he could have had any price he asked. "Go to Davis; he can put you through any examination," they used to say.

In junior year he enlarged his newspaper correspondence and began doing some syndicate work. He gained a bit of reputation with football writing, and in his senior year he used to sign his name to a column of it every week. "The joke of it is," Dougal used to explain, "I don't know beans about the game." This was not strictly true, for no one with eyes could go through four years of tramping down to 'varsity field without absorbing enough to enlighten the average sporting editor.

In short, before Davis was three-quarters of the way through his college course, he was paying his expenses and making a surplus which was considerably larger than that which poor young men who earn their way through college to preach the Gospel are supposed to have.

Now he might have sent a portion of it out to his hard-working parents in Persia, or have helped to defray the expenses of his ambitious sister at school. This would have been noble of him, but he did nothing of the kind. One does not need much money in Persia; there's nothing to spend it on. His people had a large, comfortable home with a dozen servants to look after it, and they seemed to have leisure enough to write articles for English and American magazines now and then. A rich aunt looked out for his sister, and she had the reputation of dressing more artistically than any girl in the Walnut Street school. The only thing he did for her was to send an occasional box of candy, or a book, like any other brother. Davis did not even save his money. He blew it in on himself and his friends, like any other natural young man. What do you suppose he worked so hard for if it were not to go in with the rest of the club for coaches at Thanksgiving games, and to take runs to Philadelphia over Sunday, and to give spreads in his room on Saturday nights, and to do the other things for which one has sore need of money and for which he goes broke for about twenty days of each month? If Davis had been a modern undergraduate he would perhaps have spent money on good-looking clothes, though I hardly think that of him.

The only disadvantage in his way of living was that it took time, so that he did not have as much of it to loaf in as he would have liked. Especially as he was mixed up in half-a-dozen outside interests of the college world, and had a provokingly high stand in class to maintain besides. For although the fellows used to say he kept on leading his class from force of habit, as a matter of fact it took considerable valuable time.