Free Harbor (9781101565681) by Patrick (INT) Ernest; Chura Poole Page A

myself. For these genial companions of mine had laid a most decided taboo upon all topics of this kind. They did so because to discuss them meant to openly think and feel, and to think or feel intensely, about anything but athletics and other things prescribed by the crowd, was bad form to say the least.
    Bad form to talk in any such fashion of what we were going to make of our lives. Nobody cared to warm up on the subject. Many had nothing at all in sight and put off the whole idea as a bore. Others were already fixed, they had positions waiting in law and business offices, in factories, mines, mills and banks, and they took these positions as settled and sure.
    â€œWhy?” I would argue impatiently. “How do you know it’s what you want most?”
    â€œOh, I guess it’ll do as well as another.”
    â€œBut damn it all, why not have a look? We can have a big look now, we’ve got a chance to broaden out before we jump into our little jobs—to see all the jobs and size ’em up and look at ’em as a part of the world!”
    â€œOh, biff.” I got little or no response. The greater part of these decent likable fellows could not warm up to anything big, they simply hadn’t it in them.
    â€œWhy in hell do you want me to get all hot?” drawled one fat sluggard of a friend. “I’ll keep alive when the time comes.” And he and his kind set the standard for all. Sometimes a chap who could warm up, who had the real stuff in him, would “loosen up” about his life on some long tramp with me alone. But back in college his lips were sealed. It was not exactly that he was ashamed, it was simply that with his college friends such talk seemed utterly out of place.
    â€œLook out, Bill,” said one affectionately. “You’ll queer yourself if you keep on.”
    The same held true of religion. An upper classman, if he felt he had to, might safely become a leader of freshmen in the Y. M. C. A. But when one Sunday evening I disturbed a peaceful pipe-smoking crowd by wondering why it was that we were all so bored in chapel, there fell an embarrassing silence—until someone growled good-humoredly, “Don’t bite off more’n you can chew.” Nobody wanted to drop his religion, he simply wanted to let it alone. I remember one Sunday in chapel, in the midst of a long sermon, how our sarcastic old president woke us up with a start.
    â€œI was asked,” he said, “if we had any free thinkers here. ‘No,’ I replied. ‘We have not yet advanced that far. For it takes half as much thinking to be a free thinker as it does to believe in God.’ ”
    And I remember the night in our sophomore club when the news came like a thunderclap that one of our members had been killed pole-vaulting at a track meet in New York. It was our habit, in our new-found manliness, to eat with our hats on, shout and sing, and speak of our food as “tapeworm,” “hemorrhage,” and the like. I remember how we sat that night, silent, not a word from the crowd—one starting to eat, then seeing it wasn’t the thing to do, and staring blankly like the rest. They were terrible, those stares into reality. That clutching pain of grief was real, so real it blotted everything out. Later some of us in my room began to talk in low voices of what a good fellow he had been. Then some chap from the Y. M. C. A. proposed timidly to lead us in prayer. What a glare he got from all over the room! “Damn fool,” I heard someone mutter. Bad form!
    Politics also were tabooed. Here again there were exceptions. A still fiery son of the South could rail about niggers, rapes and lynchings and the need for disenfranchising the blacks. It was good fun to hear him. Moreover, a fellow who was a good speaker, and needed the money, might stump the state for either political party, and his accounts were often amusing. But to sit down and talk about the