I know now for a fact that I never learned, all the time I was there, quite what it was all about. I heard much talk of -ologies and -tries and -isms without quite grasping the fundamental fact that they were really dealing with plain, ordinary, everyday life—the forces about us. Somehow I had the vague uncertain notion that they did not concern ordinary life at all. I remember one brisk youth telling me that in addition to law, which he was studying, he was taking up politics, taxation, economics, and the like, as aids. I wondered of what possible use those things could be to him, and how much superior his mind must be to mine, since he could grasp them and I, no doubt, could not.

Again, the professors there were such a wondrous company to me, quite marvelous. They were such an outré company, your heavy-domed, owl-like wiseacres, who see in books and the storing up of human knowledge in books the sum and substance of life’s significance. As I look back on them now I marvel at my awe of them then, and at that time I was not very much awestricken either—rather nonplussed.

Suffice it to say that the one thing that I really wanted to see in connection with this college was a ground floor parlor I had occupied in an old, rusty, vine-covered house, which stood in the center of a pleasing village lawn and had for a neighbor a small, one-story frame, where dwelt a hoyden of a girl who made it her business to bait me the first semester I was there. This room I had occupied with a law student by the name of William or Bill Wadhams, center rush and almost guiding spirit of the whole college football team, and afterwards county treasurer of and state senator from an adjacent Indiana county. He was a romping, stamping, vigorous, black-haired, white-faced pagan, who cursed and drank a little and played cards and flirted with the girls. He could be so mild and so engaging that when I first saw him I liked him immensely, and what was much more curious he seemed to take a fancy to me. We made an agreement as to expenditures and occupying the same room. It did not seem in the least odd to me, at that time, that he should occupy the same bed with me. I had always been sleeping with one or the other of my brothers. It was more odd that, although he at once surrounded himself with the crême-de-la-crême of the college football world, who made of our humble chamber a conference and card room, I got along well enough with them all to endure it, and even made friends out of some of them. They were charming—so robust and boisterous and contentious and yet genial.

Through his personality or my own—I can never quite make out which—I was drawn into a veritable maelstrom of college life. I had no least idea what I wanted to study, but because I had been deficient in certain things in high school, I took up those,—first-year Latin, geometry, English literature, history and Old English. How I ever got along I do not know. I think I failed in most things because I never mastered grammar or mathematics. However, I staggered on, worrying considerably and feeling that my life, and indeed my character, was a failure. Between whiles, I found time and the mood for associating with and enjoying all sorts of odd personalities—youth of the most diverse temperaments and ambitions, who seemed to find in me something which they liked,—a Michigan law student, an Indiana minister’s son, a boy who was soon to be heir to a large fortune and so on and so on. I was actually popular with some, after a fashion, and if I had known how to make use of my abilities in this line—had I really craved friendship and connections—I might have built up some enduring relationships which would have stood me in good stead, commercially and socially, later. As it was, my year ended, I left college, dropping all but half a dozen youths from my list of even occasional correspondents, and finally losing track of all of them, finding in different scenes and interests all that I seemed to require in the way of mental and social diversion.

CHAPTER LIX
A COLLEGE TOWN

Bloomington, as we sped into it, did not seem much changed from the last time I had laid eyes upon it, twentyfive years before, only now, having seen the more picturesque country to the south of it, I did not think the region in which it lay seemed as broken and diversified as it did the year I first came to it. Then I had seen only the more or less level regions of northern and southern Indiana and the territory about Chicago, and so Bloomington had seemed quite remarkable, physically. Now it seemed more or less tame, and in addition, it had grown so in size and architectural pretentiousness as to have obliterated most of that rural inadequacy and backwoods charm which had been its most delightful characteristic to me in 1889.

Then it was so poor and so very simple. The court house square had been a gem of moss-back simplicity and poverty, more attractive even, rurally speaking, than that court house I just mentioned as being the charm of Paoli. Here, also, the hitching rail had extended all around the square. I saw more tumble-down wagons, rheumatic and broken-down men, old, brown, almost moss covered coats and thin, bony, spavined horses in the Bloomington of 1889 than I ever saw anywhere before or since. In addition to this, in spite of the smallness of the college, many of the six hundred students had considerable money, for Indiana was a prosperous state and these youths and girls were very well provided for. Secret or Greek letter societies and college social circles of different degrees of import abounded. There were college rakes and college loafers and college swells. At that time the university chanced to have a faculty which, because of force and brains, was attracting considerable attention. David Starr Jordan, afterwards President of Leland Stanford, was president here. William Gifford Swain, afterwards President of Swarthmore, was professor of mathematics. Rufus L. Green, a man who made considerable stir in mathematics and astronomy in later years, was associate in the chair of mathematics. Jeremiah Jenks, a man who figured conspicuously in American sociological and political discussion in after life and added considerable luster to the fame of Cornell, was occupying the chair of sociology and political economy. Edward Howard Griggs, a man who has carried culture, with a large C, into all the women’s clubs and intellectual movements of one kind and another from ocean to ocean, was occupying an assistant professorship in literature. There was Von Holst, called to the chair of history at the University of Chicago, and so on—a quite interesting and scintillating galaxy of educative minds.

The student body, of which I was such an unsatisfactory unit, seemed quite well aware of the character and import of the men above them, educationally. There was constant and great talk concerning the relative merits of each and every one. As Miss Fielding, my sponsor and mentor, had predicted, I learned more concerning the seeming import of education, the branches of knowledge and the avenues and vocations open to men and women in the intellectual world than I had ever dreamed existed—and just from hearing the students argue, apotheosize, anathematize, or apostrophize one course or one professor or another. Here I met my first true radicals—young men who disagreed vigorously and at every point with the social scheme and dogma as they found it. Here I found the smug conventionalists and grinds seeking only to carve out the details of a profession and subsequently make a living. Here I found the flirt, the college widow, and the youth with purely socializing tendencies, who found in college life a means of gratifying an intense and almost chronic desire for dancing, dressing, spooning, living in a world of social airs and dreams. There were, oddly enough, hard and chronic religionists even among the incoming class, who were bent upon preaching “the kingdom of God is at hand” to all the world. They seemed a little late to me, even at that day and date, though I was still not quite sure myself.

Catholicism had almost made heaven and hell a reality to me. And here were attractive and intellectual women—the first I had ever seen, really—who in those parliamentary and social discussions incidental to student class and social life as represented by professorial entertainments and receptions, could rise and discuss intelligently subjects which were still more or less nebulous to me. They gave me my first inkling of the third sex. Indeed, it was all so interesting, so new, so fascinating, that I was set agape and remained so until the college year was over.

I regained my health, which I had thought all but lost, and in addition began to realize that perhaps there were certain things I might intelligently investigate over a period of years, with profit to myself. I began to see that however unsuited certain forms of intellectual training and certain professions might be to me, they offered distinct and worthy means of employment to others. Though I had been aroused at first, now I began to be troubled and unhappy. I felt distinctly that I had wasted a year, or worse yet, had not been sufficiently well equipped mentally to make the most of it. I began to be troubled over my future, and while I was not willing to accept my sponsor’s kind offer and return the following year (I realized now that without some basic training it would do me no good), still, I was not willing to admit to myself that I was intellectually hopeless. There must be some avenue of approach to the intellectual life for me, too, I said to myself,—only how find it? I finally left unhappy, distrait, scarcely knowing which way to turn, but resolved to be something above a mere cog in a commercial machine. This proved, really, one of the most vitalizing years of my life.