Stover at Yale


by Owen Johnson
1911 The S.S. McClure Co.
1911.1912 McClure Publications, Inc.
1912 Little, Brown & Company
1940 Owen Johnson
Now in public domain
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CHAPTER 1
DINK STOVER, freshman, chose his seat in the afternoon express that would soon be rushing him to New Haven and his first glimpse of Yale University. He leisurely divested himself of his trim overcoat, folding it in exact creases and laying it gingerly across the back of his seat; stowed his traveling-bag; smoothed his hair with a masked movement of his gloved hand; pulled down a buckskin vest, opening the lower button; removed his gloves and folded them in his breast pocket, while with the same gesture a careful forefinger, unperceived, assured itself that his lilac silk necktie was in contact with the high collar whose points, painfully but in perfect style, attacked his chin. Then, settling, not flopping, down, he completed his preparations for the journey by raising the sharp crease of the trousers one inch over each knee -- a legendary precaution which in youth is believed to prevent vulgar bagging. Each movement was executed without haste or embarrassment, but leisurely, with the deliberate savoir-faire of the complete man of the world he had become at the terrific age of eighteen
In front of him spasmodic freshmen arrived, struggling from their overcoats in embarrassed plunges that threatened to leave them publicly in their shirt sleeves.
That they imputed to him the superior dignity of an upper classman was pleasurably evident to Stover from their covert respectful glances. He himself felt conscious of a dividing-line. He, too, was a freshman, and yet not of them.
He had just ended three years at Lawrenceville, where from a ridiculous beginning he had fought his way to the captaincy of the football eleven and the vice-presidency of the school. He had been the big man in a big school, and the sovereign responsibilities of that anointed position had been, of course, such that he no longer felt himself a free agent. He had been of the chosen, and not all at once could he divest himself of the idea that his slightest action had a certain public importance. His walk had been studiously imitated by twenty shuffling striplings. His hair, parted on the side, had caused a revolution among the brushes and stirred up innumerable indignant cowlicks. His tricks of speech, his favorite exclamations, had become at once lip-currency. At that time golf and golf-trousers were things of unthinkable daring. He had given his approval, appeared in the baggy breeches, and at once the ban on bloomers had been lifted and the Circle had swarmed with the grotesqueries of variegated legs for tile first time boldly revealed. He had stood between the school and its tyrants. He had arrayed himself in circumstantial attire -- boiled shirt, high collar, and carefully dusted derby -- and appeared before the faculty with solemn, responsible face no less than three separate times, to voice the protest of four hundred future American citizens: first, at the insidious and alarming repetition of an abhorrent article of winter food known as song-birds and sinkers; second, to urge the overwhelming necessity of a second sleighing holiday; and, third and most important, firmly to assure the powers that be that the school viewed with indignation and would resist to despair the sudden increase of the already staggering burden of the curriculum.
The middle-aged faculty had listened gravely to the grave expounder of such grave demands, had promised reform and regulation in the matter of the sinkers, granted the holiday, and insufficiently modified the brutal attempt at injecting into the uneager youthful mind a little more of the inconsequential customs of the Greeks and Romans.
The Doctor had honored him with his confidence, consulted him on several intimate matters of school discipline -- in fact, most undoubtedly had rather leaned upon him. As he looked back upon the last year at Lawrenceville, he could not help feeling a certain wholesome, pleasant satisfaction. He had held up an honest standard, he had played hard but square, disdained petty offenses, seen to the rigorous bringing up of the younger boys, and, as men of property must lend their support to the church, he had even publicly advised a moderate attention to the long classic route which leads to college. He had been the big man in the big school; what new opportunity lay before him?
In the seat ahead two of his class were exchanging delighted conjectures, and their conversation, coining to his ears clearly through the entangled murmur of the car, began to interest him.
"I say, Schley, you were Hotchkiss, weren't you?"
"Eight mortal years."
"Got a good crowd?"
"No wonder-workers, but a couple of good men for the line. What's your Andover crowd like?"
"We had a daisy bunch, but some of the pearls have been side-tracked to Princeton and Harvard."
"Bought up, eh?"
"Sure,"