The yokels, of course, were in the saddle — they composed nine-tenths of the student body: the proud titles were in their gift, and they took good care that their world should be kept safe for yokelry and the homespun virtues.
Usually, these dignities — the presidencies of student bodies, classes, Y.M.C.A.‘s, and the managerships of athletic teams — were given to some honest serf who had established his greatness behind a plough before working in the college commons, or to some industrious hack who had shown a satisfactory mediocrity in all directions.
Such an industrious hack was called an “all-round man.”
He was safe, sound, and reliable.
He would never get notions.
He was the fine flower of university training.
He was a football scrub, and a respectable scholar in all subjects.
He was a universal Two Man.
He always got Two on everything, except Moral Character, where he shone with a superlative Oneness.
If he did not go into the law or the ministry, he was appointed a Rhodes Scholar.
In this strange place Eugene flourished amazingly.
He was outside the pale of popular jealousies: it was quite obvious that he was not safe, that he was not sound, that decidedly he was an irregular person.
He could never be an all-round man.
Obviously, he would never be governor.
Obviously, he would never be a politician, because he said funny things.
He was not the man to lead a class or say a prayer; he was a man for curious enterprise.
Well, thought they benevolently, we need some such.
We are not all made for weighty business.
He was happier than he had ever been in his life, and more careless.
His physical loneliness was more complete and more delightful.
His escape from the bleak horror of disease and hysteria and death impending, that hung above his crouched family, left him with a sense of aerial buoyance, drunken freedom.
He had come to the place alone, without companions.
He had no connections.
He had, even now, not one close friend.
And this isolation was in his favor.
Every one knew him at sight: every one called him by name, and spoke to him kindly.
He was not disliked.
He was happy, full of expansive joy, he greeted every one with enthusiastic gusto.
He had a vast tenderness, an affection for the whole marvellous and unvisited earth, that blinded his eyes.
He was closer to a feeling of brotherhood than he had ever been, and more alone.
He was filled with a divine indifference for all appearance.
Joy ran like a great wine through his young expanding limbs; he bounded down the paths with wild cries in his throat, leaping for life like an apple, trying to focus the blind desire that swept him apart, to melt down to a bullet all of his formless passion, and so, slay death, slay love.
He began to join.
He joined everything. He had never “belonged” to any group before, but now all groups were beckoning him.
He had without much trouble won a place for himself on the staff of the college paper and the magazine.
The small beginning trickle of distinctions widened into a gushet.
It began to sprinkle, then it rained.
He was initiated into literary fraternities, dramatic fraternities, theatrical fraternities, speaking fraternities, journalistic fraternities, and in the Spring into a social fraternity.
He joined enthusiastically, submitted with fanatical glee to the hard mauling of the initiations, and went about lame and sore, more pleased than a child or a savage, with colored ribbons in his coat lapel, and a waistcoat plastered with pins, badges, symbols, and Greek letterings.
But not without labor had his titles come.
The early autumn was lustreless and slack: he could not come from the shadow of Laura.
She haunted him.
When he went home at Christmas, he found the hills bleak and close, and the town mean and cramped in the grim stinginess of winter.
There was a ludicrous, a desperate gaiety in the family.
“Well!” said Eliza sorrowfully, as she peered above the stove, “let’s all try to be happy this time and enjoy a quiet Christmas.
You never know!”
She shook her head, unable to continue.
Her eyes were wet.
“It may be the last time we’re all together.
The old trouble!