When we from life shall part.
“Hooray!” yelled Jimmy Selden vociferously. “Pearly, you’re the shark on the warble. Now buck up and tell Mr. Lord how you saw the football game.”
Pearly was seized with shyness. “You fellows make a fool out of me,” he complained.
“No trouble at all,” Selden assured him.
“It’s this way, Mr. Lord,” the pink-faced, spectacled, good-humored songster confided. “All these chaps pretend they see extraordinary things and talk about ’em with queer words an’ things. An’ I don’t understand an’ I don’t think most of the others do. So I just tell ’em about how it looks to the eye of nature, an’ they think it’s funny. ’Tisn’t funny. I don’t think it’s funny. I went to that game an’ I ate my sandwiches in the open, on a shelf with more like me. Humans—rows of ’em—thirty thousand. The fellows trotted on, pitter-patter, lookin’ foolish, and all of us cheered—thirty thousand. Then the other fellows trotted on, lookin’ foolish, an’ we cheered. I knew precious little what they were doin’ in the game, but it was pleasant to know they were doin’ their best an’ that we had an object in bein’ there ’s long ’s they kept it up. They squatted and reflected an’ then they fell on each other, an’ then everybody rose and yelled and waved flags and Yale had the ball—or else Harvard had it. Then they scattered out, and Harvard’s red-head got hurt once in so often, and then twice somebody—I think Yale—kicked the ball over the shinto shrine at the end. Oh, this is truck”—he appealed to his confrères—“don’t make me tell any more,” he pleaded. And Trefethen shook with laughter as he had not shaken for years. “’S cruel to make sport of my infirmity,” reasoned Pearly. “But it looked that way to me, anyhow.”
The dinner was over; pipes came out of coat pockets. Elliot produced cigars for his guest of honor, and the military formation of the party “fell out” about the table; chairs grouped at every angle. Jimmy Selden pumped a profound sigh.
“Gosh! how Carl would have enjoyed them mushrooms!” he said sorrowfully.
Dick Elliot’s level black eyebrows drew into a frown. “I don’t know if we’d better talk about Carl to-night,” he said. “It’s a pretty melancholy subject to drag a visitor in on,” and he turned to Trefethen. “You see, Mr. Lord,” he explained, “the whole college is sore. Ruthven was popular with both the undergraduates and the faculty. Everybody was proud of him. He was just a miracle, you see. A whooping good fellow, a fine student, but no grind, and a tiptop athlete. The worst is the race in June. There’s nobody fit for his place. Harvard will likely smear us. It’s taken the heart out of the whole business. It’s hard on us all.”
Van Arden spoke in his nervous, graceful way. “It’s hardest on Dick, Mr. Lord. Ruthven was his roommate, and he and Dick had it arranged to go abroad after they graduated this summer. It’s been cut and dried for two years.”
“Yes, Dickey-bird’s chief mourner, all right,” Selden agreed sadly, and with that he burst forth: “If about four like us had Trefethen clasped inside these loving arms, we’d fit him for a career of sausage-meat pretty quick.”