Carl's work at the boarding-house introduced him to pretty girl students, and cost him no social discredit whatever. The little college had the virtue of genuine democracy so completely that it never prided itself on being democratic. Mrs. Henkel, proprietor of the boarding-house, occasionally grew sarcastic to her student waiters as she stooped, red-faced and loosened of hair, over the range; she did suggest that they "kindly wash up a few of the dishes now and then before they went gallivantin' off." But songs arose from the freshmen washing and wiping dishes; they chucklingly rehashed jokes; they discussed the value of the "classical course" versus the "scientific course." While they waited on table they shared the laughter and arguments that ran from student to student through Mrs. Henkel's dining-room—a sunny room bedecked with a canary, a pussy-cat, a gilded rope portière, a comfortable rocker with a Plato cushion, a Garland stove with nickel ornaments, two geraniums, and an oak-framed photograph of the champion Plato football team of 1899.
Carl was readily accepted by the men and girls who gathered about the piano in the evening. His graceful-seeming body, his puppyish awkwardness, his quietly belligerent dignity, his eternal quest of new things, won him respect; though he was too boyish to rouse admiration, except in the breast of fat, pretty, cheerful, fuzzy-haired, candy-eating Mae Thurston. Mae so influenced Carl that he learned to jest casually; and he practised a new dance, called the "Boston," which Mae had brought from Minneapolis, though as a rival to the waltz and two-step the new dance was ridiculed by every one. He mastered all the savoir faire of the boarding-house. But he was always hurrying away from it to practise football, to prowl about the Plato power-house, to skim through magazines in the Y. M. C. A. reading-room, even to study.
Beyond the dish-washing and furnace-tending set he had no probable social future, though everybody knew everybody at Plato. Those immaculate upper-classmen, Murray Cowles and Howard Griffin, never invited him to their room (in a house on Elm Street with a screened porch and piano sounds). He missed Ben Rusk, who had gone to Oberlin College, and Joe Jordan, who had gone to work for the Joralemon Specialty Manufacturing Company.
Life at Plato was suspicious, prejudiced, provincial, as it affected the ambitious students; and for the weaker brethren it was philandering and vague. The class work was largely pure rot—arbitrary mathematics, antiquated botany, hesitating German, and a veritable military drill in the conjunction of Greek verbs conducted by a man with a non-com. soul, a pompous, sandy-whiskered manikin with cold eyes and a perpetual cold in the nose, who had inflicted upon a patient world the four-millionth commentary on Xenophon. Few of the students realized the futility of it all; certainly not Carl, who slept well and believed in football.
The life habit justifies itself. One comes to take anything as a matter of course; to take one's neighbors seriously, whether one lives in Plato or Persia, in Mrs. Henkel's kitchen or a fo'c's'le. The Platonians raced toward their various goals of high-school teaching, or law, or marriage, or permanently escaping their parents; they made love, and were lazy, and ate, and swore off bad habits, and had religious emotions, all quite naturally; they were not much bored, rarely exhilarated, always ready to gossip about their acquaintances; precisely like a duke or a delicatessen-keeper. They played out their game. But it was so tiny a game, so played to the exclusion of all other games, that it tended to dwarf its victims—and the restless children, such as Carl, instinctively resent this dwarfing. They seek to associate themselves with other rebels. Carl's unconscious rebel band was the group of rowdyish freshmen who called themselves "the Gang," and loafed about the room of their unofficial captain, John Terry, nicknamed "the Turk," a swarthy, large-featured youth with a loud laugh, a habit of slapping people upon the shoulder, an ingenious mind for deviltry, and considerable promise as a football end.
Most small local colleges, and many good ones, have their "gangs" of boys, who presumably become honorable men and fathers, yet who in college days regard it as heroic to sneak out and break things, and as humorous to lead countryside girls astray in sordid amours. The more cloistered the seat of learning, the more vicious are the active boys, to keep up with the swiftness of life forces. The Turk's gang painted the statues of the Memorial Arch; they stole signs; they were the creators of noises unexpected and intolerable, during small, quiet hours of moonlight.
As the silkworm draws its exquisite stuff from dowdy leaves, so youth finds beauty and mystery in stupid days. Carl went out unreservedly to practise with the football squad; he had a joy of martyrdom in tackling the dummy and peeling his nose on the frozen ground. He knew a sacred aspiration when Mr. Bjorken, the coach, a former University of Minnesota star, told him that he might actually "make" the team in a year or two; that he had twice as much chance as Ray Cowles, who—while Carl was thinking only of helping the scrub team to win—was too engrossed in his own dignity as a high-school notable to get into the scrimmage.
At the games, among the Gang on the bleachers, Carl went mad with fervor. He kept shooting to his feet, and believed that he was saving his country every time he yelled in obedience to the St. Vitus gestures of the cheer-leader, or sang "On the Goal-line of Plato" to the tune of "On the Sidewalks of New York." Tears of a real patriotism came when, at the critical moment of a losing game against the Minnesota Military Institute, with sunset forlorn behind bare trees, the veteran cheer-leader flung the hoarse Plato rooters into another defiant yell. It was the never-say-die of men who rose, with clenched hands and arms outstretched, to the despairing need of their college, and then—Lord! They hurled up to their feet in frenzy as Pete Madlund got away with the ball for a long run and victory.... The next week, when the University of Keokuk whipped them, 40 to 10, Carl stood weeping and cheering the defeated Plato team till his throat burned.
He loved the laughter of the Turk, Mae Thurston's welcome, experiments in the physics laboratory. And he was sure that he was progressing toward the state of grace in which he might aspire to marry Gertie Cowles.
He did not think of her every day, but she was always somewhere in his thoughts, and the heroines of magazine stories recalled some of her virtues to his mind, invariably. The dentist who had loved her had moved away. She was bored. She occasionally wrote to Carl. But she was still superior—tried to "influence him for good" and advised him to "cultivate nice people."