[CHAPTER VIII]
JIM BUYS A FOOTBALL
As a room-mate Jim was, Clem soon decided, a very satisfactory chap. They got on together excellently. Jim was not monotonous as a companion, for while he might fairly be termed even tempered you couldn’t call him good-natured in the popular meaning of the term. If you expected to put anything over on Jim, relying on his good nature to get away with it, you were in for a surprise. Clem realized that without a demonstration. Jim would take a joke perfectly, but he had a sense of dignity that prohibited liberties. That he was capable of temper Clem didn’t doubt, although he held it well under control.
When Jim had declared in his letter to Clem that he was “neat about the place” he had, Clem soon decided, stated less than the facts. Clem himself was certainly not untidy, but his idea of neatness and Jim’s were wide apart. Jim looked after his part of Number 15 so carefully and minutely that Clem’s half of the room suffered badly by comparison. Clem said once: “You aren’t neat, Jim, you’re finnicky!” For a fortnight Clem really suffered from such excess of tidiness, for quite unconsciously Jim’s attentions were extended to his room-mate’s territory and the book tossed on the table in the morning had mysteriously disappeared by afternoon, to be discovered, after patient search, neatly hidden under a pile of others. If he left his cap on his bed, half an hour later it was gone. At first he used to look on the floor for it and under the bed. Later he learned to go directly to his closet and take it down from a hook. The second time this experience fell to him he said: “Hang it all, Jim, what’s the idea? Here it is in the closet. You must have put it there. I know I didn’t!”
“Really?” asked Jim, surprised. “I don’t remember touching it. I’m awfully sorry.”
“Oh, it’s all right,” answered Clem, “but do you know what I think? I think you must have been born in a filing cabinet!”
Jim looked slightly blank, and Clem went out without elucidating.
After some two weeks of life in Number 15 with Jim, Clem caught the habit. He never attained to such perfection of orderliness as the other’s, and doubtless to the end of their days together Jim secretly considered Clem just a trifle careless about the room, but, just as evidence of how thoroughly he had fallen under Jim’s spell, he once, having reached the door on his way to chapel, returned the length of the room to place his slippers more perfectly in alignment under the head of the bed. It is doubtful, however, if Jim would have given him any credit for that. Jim would have kept his slippers, had he owned a pair, in his closet!
At the beginning of the term the two were not together a great deal outside of sleeping and study hours. Jim foregathered frequently with certain members of the Maine-and-Vermont Club and Clem’s acquaintances were not yet Jim’s. They might have been, for Clem suggested more than once that his room-mate accompany him on his social excursions. But Jim invariably had an excuse. The latter did meet two or three of Clem’s circle of intimates, but the meetings were only casual. The school year was a fortnight old when Jim first blossomed out in society.
The occasion was a birthday party given by Arthur Landorf to Arthur Landorf and some of Arthur Landorf’s friends. Much assistance, however, was provided by Art’s parents, for they had sent a box holding practically all the requirements of a birthday celebration, including a frosted cake with seventeen pink candles. The affair was held in Number 20 Lykes, which room Art shared with Larry Adams. Art was a hockey and baseball man and Larry a member of the second eleven. When Art invited Clem he added: “And bring your room-mate, whatever his name is, if he cares to come.” So Clem delivered the invitation to Jim and Jim started to find an excuse, as usual. But Clem was fed up by now.
“Stop it!” he said sternly. “I don’t give a continental if you’ve got a dinner engagement with Doctor Maitland himself and are down to address the faculty afterwards! You’re going with me to Art’s blow-out and you might just as well make up your mind to it. Say, what’s the colossal idea, anyhow? Aren’t my associates good enough for you?”