Gilbert W. Gabriel

“ She had declared I must either come along to the hotel or else I would not be allowed to enter college. In the face of such an alternative I had yielded quickly. But there had already begun between my aunt and me a chasm that grew daily wider, deeper, more hopelessly incapable of bridging. When one has been away for a year, one returns to find grim truths. I had met other people, seen other lives and other souls since I had been in boarding school: I was not clouded now by my blood relationship to Mrs. Haberman or by day after day of close but unintimate companionship. ”

“ Then I remembered that it was Friday night—and I knew that this was a synagogue—a temple of the Jewish Faith.
At first realization, I moved a little away from it, down the street. A synagogue—and all that it brought to my mind was the memory of my parents. In former years they had been wont to take me with them when they went on Friday nights. And those had been dull, wearisome nights for me—but I had spent them at my parent's side. So that now, in the shadow of God's house, my loneliness for them came back to me in wild deluge, breaking the dam of reserve and doubts and petty limitations. ”

“ Had I had the pride, the devotion to my religion which is a Jewish heritage, those days would have meant less. Less in sorrow and bewilderment, that is, and infinitely more in the building up of my character.
There are those who go stolidly, brusquely through life without ever needing the comfort of religion. And there are those, like me, who lack the self-reliance ... who cannot be content with a confessed agnosticism, but who must take faith and strength from those rites and codes which satisfy their sense of the mystically sublime. ”

“ Here was I, a Jew, raised above all the other Jews who had ever entered this college ... raised among the highest, to be a power in the land, to be the champion of all those who had suffered, the winner through hardship and handicap, a vindicated Dreyfus, an example to all the lower classes.... For, at twenty-one, alas, we are our own best heroes, and none can take our place!
College closed in a blaze of glory for me. There was even a note from Aunt Selina Haberman, wishing me well of this new honor and informing me that "Mrs. Fleming-Cohen, when she heard it, was green with envy!" ”

“ VII FRESHMAN YEAR
New adventures must be prefaced by new hopes. My entering college meant the starting of a thousand new dreams, ambitions—and seemed to me an opening gate to a land stronger than any I had yet heard of: a land of real men, virile, courteous and kind, whose thoughts were never petty, whose breadth of mind unfailing.
It was only a few weeks after Sydney's death that I took my college entrance examinations. ”

“ In the quadrangle where we formed in line to march to the mess-hall, stood a huge oak tree, century-old, with twisted limbs and browning leaves. On one of those limbs, they told me, an American spy was hanged by the British in Revolutionary days—but it may have been only a fable. I have since learned that almost every military school along the Hudson has its Revolutionary oak—but, at the time, it made a deep impression on me, so that I could not bear to hear the creaking of the branches against my dormitory window. ”

“ I knew that prejudice of race and religion was the strongest shield of the ignorant and mean, that neither he nor I could fight it fairly—and that, if he came into the fight by my side, he would ruin his own chances of being one of the biggest men in the college world when his senior year arrived.
"A lot I care for being a big man in a place of little thoughts," he snapped back at me. ”

“ Outside the door, in the gymnasium, we could hear the joyful shrieks of a crowd of young boys playing basketball. From the upper floors came a scraping of feet to tell that the clubs were beginning to meet for the evening. From across the hall came the sound of young girls singing the parts of a cantata—and this was all planned, all created by Lawrence Richards who sat there at his desk and had a smile for each and everyone who came before him.
"Don't think you're different from all the other fellows at the university," he said to me. "You're not. You're all as much alike as a row of pins. ”

“ I asked, searching my brain for some reason for his change of attitude.
"The servants? Oh, no, of course not!" He picked up his suitcase and started for the street. "Well, goodby," he said. He stopped as if he wanted to explain, then thought better—or worse—of it, and went on. I was a little nettled by this time, and let him go.
As I went up in the elevator, it seemed to me a mighty mystery. But no sooner had I let myself into the apartment than I was due for a bigger surprise.
For there, blocking the hallway, a figure of offended pride, stood Aunt Selina. ”

“ You probably won all your college honors through standing aside. And now you have the audacity to ask me to do the same, lest you be made uncomfortable by the number of other Jewish boys at your college. You want me to stand aside, do you? Well, I wish I had a thousand Jewish boys to enter into your college's next year's class!"
He glared at me. "If you want to know the truth, I can't get a single boy in my school to go to your college, now. I wish I could. Because I'm training them to fight like men. They aren't the sort who win honors by allowing themselves to be classed as exceptions...." ”

“ He had summed up Trevelyan marvelously well in those few words. He saw my wonderment and smiled.
"I've only met him once or twice," he said, "but I have the faculty of knowing men. It's a faculty I have to have in this sort of work. It depends so much on the human equation. I meet thousands of young men and women every year—meet them, talk with them a little while, give them the best I have to give in that short space—and like to think that, even if I never see them again, I've helped them along a bit. That's all that a settlement can do, after all." ”

“ If you go through college shunning everyone, afraid of [Pg 105] your own shadow, surly to the approach of all who would be friendly to you, you will reap nothing but loneliness and a bitter 'grouch.' If you loaf and play cards and hang about the billiard parlors all day long, you won't make a friend worth having, you won't gain anything worth remembering. If you work at your studies only, you'll gain nothing but Phi Beta Kappa—and, for all its worth, that'll mean nothing to you unless it brings along with it the respect and good will of all the men from whom you wrested it. ”

“ The man for whom I now waited had always been the leader of my class; this year, he was the idol of the entire university. Captain of football, a 'varsity baseball man, he had the finest, sincerest character that I had ever known. He was not merely popular, in our undergraduate sense. Underclassmen worshipped him from afar, and upperclassmen, who knew him and the life that he led, loved him and respected him with a love and respect which few men can ever win. ”

“ There is a senior society worth 'making,' if you can. It would be something to be proud of to be the only Jew ever to have 'made' it. But it's more than an honor. That senior society practically governs the student body—molds its thought, holds sway over all campus opinion. Think what you could do if you were a member of it. You [Pg 104] could fight for the other Jewish boys, make things easier and fairer for them—could spare them the unpleasant things you had to bear. You could master all snobbery, could make the university a place of real American democracy and gentlemanliness. ”

“ Because, then, perhaps, you would have some knowledge and appreciation of what the last few months of my stay at the military school meant for me.
David Copperfield had his Steerforth. Every boy must have one. Certainly, I did. And I worshipped him with all the ardor and unquestioning devotion that could come fresh from a boy-heart which had never yet given itself to friendship. Steerforth was a villain; but in David's eye he was always, unalterably, a glorious hero. This is how it was, perhaps, with Sydney—though he was no villain, I am sure. ”

“ Fire can fight fire, perhaps—in proverbs, anyhow—but discrimination is not to be overpowered by a like amount of secularity. If Jewish college men objected to that unwritten rule of fraternities; if they contended that fraternities should be democratic; if they wanted equal rights in those fraternities ... how, then, were they justified in standing apart and founding a fraternity of their own—a brotherhood which should be open only to Jews? ”

“ I told him exactly how I felt: that I was growing impatient of all the tomfoolery of college; that I wanted work more sure of manly results, more broadening, more full of character. Then, too, I told him of what Trevelyan had said, and he laughed at it merrily.
"Trevelyan?" he said. "Oh, yes, I know him. He belongs to my fraternity, doesn't he? I've met him at one or another of our affairs. A good enough fellow—a little too much money, and a little too easy with himself in consequence. But he's a thorough gentleman at heart, isn't he?" ”

“ For the first year of my life with Aunt Selina I went to a nearby public school. There were a good many Jewish boys in my class—many more than there had been in the whole Brooklyn school—but I kept away from them as a matter of course. I made a few friends among the Gentiles—not many, because they were hard to make, and I could always feel, in my supersensitive fashion, that they were fashioning a sort of favor out of conferring their friendship upon me. ”

“ We did much more drilling than studying. Though nearly all of us intended to go to college, our school day was confined to about three hours at the most—and under teachers who were always surly, sneering and uncouth. The standard of work in the classroom was very low. At first I did not have any trouble at all in leading the entire school in scholarship; but gradually, under the careless and relaxed conditions, I grew unambitious, lazy—and found myself failing among a class of boys who, I secretly knew, were my mental inferiors. It is so much a matter of competition, of environment. ”

“ I asked my aunt, a few days later, if I was not to be allowed to live in one of the university dormitories. Whether or not his college is in his home town, every boy wants the full flavor of undergraduate life—wants to live on the campus, to throw himself heart and soul into the college games and customs. I could not see how college would mean anything to me if I [Pg 66] were to go on living at home in that dull, comfortless apartment of Aunt Selina's.
Youth is always eager for emancipation—always a little too thoughtless in its eagerness. ”

“ Three days after that he left college—and I, for one, was devoutly thankful for his resigning. He did not belong in our college, had done nothing to fit himself into its environment, had talked loudly, acted the cad and the coward—and had reaped the reward of such a person, Jew or Gentile, in whatever community.
The persecution—for it had taken on proportions worthy of that name—went forward, however. There was an annual "freshman parade," for instance, when the entering class was dressed in grotesque costumes and sent marching in and out a lane of laughing spectators to the football field. ”

“ The principal's mouth quivered with the smile he could hardly suppress:
"Episcopalian? The boy is a Jew, is he not?"
Mrs. Haberman sat up very straight. "His parents had Jewish affiliations, I believe. They are both dead."
"I see." And I am sure he really did see! For a moment later he put a deft end to the interview.
"Madam," he said, "this boy must take his chances like any other boy in the school. He must make his own friends from among his own sort. He must fight his own adversaries among those who are unlike him. That is the law of life as well as of every school. ”

“ Pictures of my public school days came up before me.... The class room and the big, crippled bully, Geoghen.... That finding of the Hebrew prayer book when the teacher was out of the room, and the hooting and mocking ... and then the teacher's return—and the fight.
It was Mr. Levi.
He smiled when he saw that I knew him, now. "I remembered you more readily," he said. "You have no beard to change your appearance." But it was more than his beard: there was a complete change in him from the dreamy, pale young man who had learned so harsh a lesson in those old days. ”

“ At college as much as in any business office a smile will beget a smile, willingness to work will reap willingness to reward—and Alma Mater, if only you prove your love for her by working for her, will return your love tenfold. ”

“ She said she never could understand how a man, as educated and broadminded as he was, could have had so simple and unquestioning a loyalty to these worn old costumes of the past. But she said wistfully that she thought he had died a much happier man because of his religion ... and that was what was hardest of all for her to understand.
Aunt Selina herself was a Christian. She put as little stock in Christian Science, though, as in Judaism. It was a fad for her, and an escape from the hindrances which connection with the Jewish faith would have entailed. ”

“ I had had my eyes opened, tonight, by some of the things that Mr. Richards had told me. I had learned that the city has its poor, its sick and wicked, its boys and girls embroiled in wrong environments, its lonely and unambitious, who must be comraded and wakened. ”

“ Old women, squatting on their doorsteps, their coarse wigs low upon perspiring foreheads, dozed and woke and gabbled to each other and dozed again. Old men, with long grey beards, long, tousled hair and melancholy eyes shuffled listlessly up and down, stopping only to make way for playing children or to pat them on the head. The gutters had their Jewish peddlers, each window its fat Jewish matron who leaned upon a cushioned window-sill and gazed apathetically at nothing. There was a Babel of Yiddish and Russian and guttural English. ”

“ So far in my college course I had met with actually little outspoken insult. Once or twice in my freshman year some loutish sophomore had not stopped at making comments upon my religion. There had been that incident at Trevelyan's fraternity house, too. But, generally speaking, the prejudice had been of a negative sort, restricting rather than driving—though none the less offensive and chafing on that account. There was nothing on which I could actually lay my finger to complain. I had no actual proof that I had been kept off any college organization because of my religion. ”

“ Mr. Richards smiled. "There it is, you see: the grim, sad faith of the Jewish people. It is all they have had in all their wanderings—but it is everything."
The cut across my forehead healed quickly. Resting from all tasks, my eyes regained their strength without relapse.
I had visitors. Several of the men from college came down each day. I had not known there were so many persons who cared. Braley was among them, once—and he sat and twisted his hat and said nothing. Whether or not his friendship is worth anything to me, I have made a friend of him. ”

“ Well, I worked blindly ahead at the things that college gave me to work at—the football team and the newspaper and all that—and soon enough I knew that I had been working into manhood by the only right road. Manhood is a matter of disposition, not of work. There's a place for manhood in your little college world. ”