Stanford Stories: Tales of a Young UniversityIrwin, Will
General
Stanford Stories: Tales of a Young University
Irwin, Will
College stories, American; Short stories; Stanford (Calif.) -- Fiction; Stanford University -- Fiction
Crises occur properly at the end of a semester. On the evening of
Friday, the closing day, Roble gave an impromptu dance. Katharine made
Pellams come; it would be final evidence in their joke, since he was
known to dislike dances. He agreed to attend, adding his own emphasis to
the reason as stated. Katharine filled out his card for him, allowing
him three dances with herself. The evening began in misery for the
woman-hater, and ended in perturbation of spirit. There were girls,
oceans of them, and not one of them had any sense. Katharine was
different. These girls didn't know when they were joshed, and they
couldn't josh back. They were an uninteresting lot. She had filled his
card with them and he had to hunt them up and dredge his head for
conversation. It was an awful bore. Katharine was the only girl whom he
had ever seemed able to talk with easily, and he had only three little
dances with her. He was savage.
During the third dance, he was floundering through an absent-minded
conversation with a Freshman girl, whose eyelashes were pale pink, when
Cap Smith glided past him, waltzing with Katharine. They looked as
though they were having a very good time. Pellams felt that Cap, fine
fellow as he was, generally grew too familiar with girls. He noticed
with disapproval the man Katharine drew for the fourth dance, and she
had Cap again for the fifth. He went over after that dance and asked for
her program. Cap was down for two more dances. Pellams gave her back her
card. He laughed a joking sentence on another subject, then he slipped
down stairs and blundered out into the rainy night in a towering rage
at Katharine, at Smith, most of all at himself for being a certain
Thing.
Jimmy Mason had not attended the Roble dance. Instead, he sat at his
table in the Knockery, going over his accounts as laundry agent. He was
deep in these end-of-semester figures when Pellams burst in at the
window, like a storm-driven creature. People never stand on ceremony at
the Knockery. It is the corner room on the ground floor. The place has
always been the Knockery ever since Mason roomed there, just as the big
room over the old dining-hall will be the "Bull-pen" forever. It is the
universal avenue after the lights are out, and the doors locked. You
open the window as gently as you can and slide in. If the tenants are in
bed, you get through into the hall on tiptoe, if possible; if awake, you
stop and chat a bit by the way of courtesy; no one ever has to study in
this enchanted bower. Moreover, if you do not live in the Hall, if you
are an Alumnus visitor from town, if there are girls at your frat-house,
or if you dwell off the campus and are belated, there are extra blankets
under the lounge in the corner. Make up your own bed and turn in,
without waking the sleepers. You are not crowding anybody. Once a whole
baseball team, with the help of two extra mattresses, slept comfortably
in the Knockery--but that is history.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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