Monk didn’t know what it was, but they all felt happy and elated and excited and raised up and inspired, and liberal and enlightened and in touch with life and the high truth; and getting at last what they had come to college for.
As for Jerry Alsop, he was simply content to wait and watch, his fat chuckle sounding out occasionally from one corner of the room, where he, too, would be engaged in conversation with a group of freshmen, and yet betraying just perceptibly, by the shadow of a little smile, a little moisture in the eye, an occasional quiet but observant glance out towards the center of the room, that he knew his beloved master was still there and functioning, and that this was all the glory he himself could ask.
And as Alsop would himself say later, when the last reluctant footsteps died away, and there were the last “good nights” upon the campus, and he stood there in the now deserted room, polishing his misty glasses, and a little husky in the throat:
“…It was puffectly delightful! Puffectly God-damned delightful! Yes, suh! That’s the only word for it!”
And it was.
CHAPTER 12
The Torch
Alsop had taken Monk Webber under his protective wing when the younger boy had arrived at Pine Rock in his freshman year, and for a period the association between them was pretty close. The younger one had quickly become a member of the coterie of devoted freshmen who clustered about their leader like chicks around a mother hen. For some months definitely he was sealed of the tribe of Alsop.
Evidences of what journalists call a “rift” began to appear, however, before the end of the first year—began to appear when the younger student began to look around him and ask questions of this small but new and comparatively liberal world in which, for the first time in his life, he began to feel himself untrammeled, free, the beginning of a man. The questions multiplied themselves furiously.
MONK HAD HEARD the president of the college, the late Hunter Griswold McCoy, described by Alsop not only as “the second greatest man since Jesus Christ,” but as a thinker and philosopher of the first water, a speaker of the most eloquent persuasion, and the master of a literary style which, along with that of Woodrow Wilson, by which he was undoubtedly strongly influenced, as unsurpassed in the whole range of English literature. Now, having, as most boys of that age do have, a very active and questioning mind, he began to feel distinctly uncomfortable when Alsop said these things, to squirm uneasily in his chair, to keep silence, or to mumble respectful agreements, while all the time he asked himself rather desperately what was wrong with him. Because, the truth of the matter was that “the second greatest man since Jesus Christ” bored him passionately, even at the tender age of seventeen.