Holworthy was late, too. As they were smoking with their coffee, the other men having gone, Rattleton asked if Rivers was not getting "stale" from his training.
"I think so, decidedly," answered Hollis. "I have spoken to Bender about it, but he is such a conservative old martinet that he won't break any of the canons of training until he is satisfied that a man is going into a rapid decline. I know a cigar once in a while would do Charlie more good than harm, but I can't make the conscientious beggar steal a smoke without permission from his tyrant. He is blue as indigo."
"Is he troubled about money matters?" asked Rattleton, hesitatingly coming now to what he wanted to find out. "Didn't his father leave him rather hard up? Excuse my asking, but I thought we might help him to find something to do, don't you know."
"That is a great deal of the matter with him," answered Holworthy, glad to see the tack on which Jack was steering. "You needn't apologize for asking about it. I wish to thunder we could find him a job. He is worrying all the time about what he is going to do after leaving college."
That night Rattleton wrote a letter to his father, who was president of a big corporation.
From this time on Rivers seemed to brace up in his mental, and consequently in his physical condition. This apparent improvement, however, did not deceive Holworthy, who saw that it was, in a way, unhealthy. Rivers had kept at his rowing and training patiently and doggedly before; but he now threw himself into it heart and soul as a distraction. He dreamed of the coming race night and day. He tried his best to seem cheerful and encourage the other men, and his plucky efforts succeeded very well. Bender was delighted, declared there was nothing like faithful training to keep a man in proper shape, body and mind, unless he was fool enough to fall in love, and concluded that he had suspected Rivers unjustly on that score.
The latter showed every now and then to his chum the intensity, almost fierceness, that lay under this apparently happy enthusiasm. One day he said that he must make a success of at least one thing before leaving college, and if that race were lost he should feel as though he were going to fail in everything he undertook all through life. Then Mentor Holworthy opened on him with all his batteries. He told him that he ought to be ashamed to make such a mere sport the test of his life; he descanted hotly on the subject of the athletic fever, and laughed scornfully at the fancied importance of such intercollegiate contests.
"I suppose," said he, "that Hancock and Adams and Emerson and Longfellow and all the rest of them will sleep more peacefully in their graves if we beat Yale, and if we get thrashed no doubt old Dr. Holmes will be sorry he ever came to Cambridge, and will at once go down to New Haven to take his entrance examination for the Freshman class there. Haven't you grown up yet, that you look on these things as a school boy? These overwrought struggles can do good in just one way, and you seem ready now to throw away even that advantage. Every time a thoroughbred gets licked it does him good. You have seen the men on our different teams get up after a thrashing and go at it as hard as ever the next year; you have yourself gone through a splendid school of defeat and disappointment, yet now you talk about lying down for all your lifetime if you lose a boat-race. It is true you cannot row against Yale again, but there is a bigger victory than that to be won. Have you for the first time lost all your heart after a failure? You of all men should not need to be told that a prize is never lost until won. At any rate lay up in reserve for yourself the consolation of having done your best. Charley, Charley, if you throw up the sponge after one knockdown, you are not the man I have always thought you."
Rivers listened to all this, with head bent. When Hollis stopped he raised his face again and said: "I know what you mean, old man, and you are right. I won't lie down like a cur. I'll pull it through to the finish, anyway. But in the meantime I must do like a man whatever I have taken up."
"Now you are talking like your old self," answered Hollis, "but don't forget that doing your duty like a gentleman is not confined to rowing a boat-race."