The Plastic Age, Percy Marks [best motivational novels .txt] 📗

come to play football or baseball or whatnot. And they are worshiped, bowed down to, cheered, and adored. The brilliant men, unless they happen to be very ‘smooth’ in the bargain, are considered wet and are ostracized.

“Such is the college that you write themes about to tell me that it is perfect. The college is made up of men who worship mediocrity; that is their ideal except in athletics. The condition of the football field is a thousand times more important to the undergraduates and the alumni than the number of books in the library or the quality of the faculty. The fraternities will fight each other to pledge an athlete, but I have yet to see them raise any dust over a man who was merely intelligent.

“I tell you that you have false standards, false ideals, and that you have a false loyalty to the college. The college can stand criticism; it will thrive and grow on it⁠—but it won’t grow on blind adoration. I tell you further that you are as standardized as Fords and about as ornamental. Fords are useful for ordinary work; so are you⁠—and unless some of you wake up and, as you would say, ‘get hep to yourselves,’ you are never going to be anything more than human Fords.

“You pride yourselves on being the cream of the earth, the noblest work of God. You are told so constantly. You are the intellectual aristocracy of America, the men who are going to lead the masses to a brighter and broader vision of life. Merciful heavens preserve us! You swagger around utterly contemptuous of the man who hasn’t gone to college. You talk magnificently about democracy, but you scorn the non-college man⁠—and you try pathetically to imitate Yale and Princeton. And I suppose Yale and Princeton are trying to imitate Fifth Avenue and Newport. Democracy! Rot! This college isn’t democratic. Certain fraternities condescend to other fraternities, and those fraternities barely deign even to condescend to the non-fraternity men. You say hello to everybody on the campus and think that you are democratic. Don’t fool yourselves, and don’t try to fool me. If you want to write some themes about Sanford that have some sense and truth in them, some honest observation, go ahead; but don’t pass in any more chauvinistic bunk. I’m sick of it.”

He put his watch in his pocket and stood up. “You may belong to the intellectual aristocracy of the country, but I doubt it; you may lead the masses to a ‘bigger and better’ life, but I doubt it; you may be the cream of the earth, but I doubt it. All I’ve got to say is this: if you’re the cream of the earth, God help the skimmed milk.” He stepped down from the rostrum and briskly left the room.

For an instant the boys sat silent, and then suddenly there was a rustle of excitement. Some of them laughed, some of them swore softly, and most of them began to talk. They pulled on their baa-baa coats and left the room chattering.

“He certainly has the dope,” said Pudge Jamieson. “We’re a lot of lowbrows pretending to be intellectual high-hats. We’re intellectual hypocrites; that’s what we are.”

“How do you get that way?” Ferdy Hillman, who was walking with Hugh and Pudge, demanded angrily. “We may not be so hot, but we’re a damn sight better than these guys that work in offices and mills. Jimmie Henley gives me a pain. He shoots off his gab as if he knew everything. He’s got to show me where other colleges have anything on Sanford. He’s a hell of a Sanford man, he is.”

They were walking slowly down the stairs. George Winsor caught up with them.

“What did you think of it, George?” Hugh asked.

Winsor grinned. “He gave me some awful body blows,” he said, chuckling. “Cripes, I felt most of the time that he was talking only to me. I’m sore all over. What did you think of it? Jimmie’s a live wire, all right.”

“I don’t know what to think,” Hugh replied soberly. “He’s knocked all the props from under me. I’ve got to think it over.”

He did think it over, and the more he thought the more he was inclined to believe that Henley was right. Boy-like, he carried Henley’s statements to their final conclusion and decided that the college was a colossal failure. He wrote a theme and said so.

“You’re wrong, Hugh,” Henley said when he read the theme. “Sanford has real virtues, a bushel of them. You’ll discover them all right before you graduate.”

XVIII

Sanford’s virtues were hard for Hugh to find, and they grew more inconspicuous as the term advanced. For the time being nothing seemed worth while: he was disgusted with himself, the undergraduates, and the fraternity; he felt that the college had bilked him. Often he thought of the talk he had had with his father before he left for college. Sometimes that talk seemed funny, entirely idiotic, but sometimes it infuriated him. What right had his father to send him off to college with such fool ideas in his head? Nu Delta, the perfect brotherhood! Bull! How did his father get that way, anyhow? Hugh had yet to learn that nearly every chapter changes character at least once a decade and that Nu Delta thirty years earlier had been an entirely different organization from what it was at present. At times he felt that his father had deliberately deceived him, but in quieter moments he knew better; then he realized that his father was a dreamer and an innocent, a delicately minded man who had never really known anything about Sanford College or the world either. Hugh often felt older and wiser than his father; and in many ways he was.

In March he angered his fraternity brothers again by refusing a part in the annual musical comedy, which was staged by the Dramatic Society during Prom week. Hugh’s tenor singing voice and rather