Chapter XXXII How, Though — I Was Ready for Service, I Was Forestalled by a New Trouble, and the Very Interesting Plan Which Came Out of It
Then the reward of the years came to me: I had my whole time to give to my parish, I had my home in the parsonage and a wife—the “brown-haired young woman”—to preside over it. Though Evangelical University had nurtured narrow, dogmatic, and discontented versions of faith in me, and though the first months of instruction in the Seminary had witnessed the destruction of these versions of faith, finally had come the larger world of faith, without narrow bounds, with deeper reaches and a much brighter sky. Like Burner, I had been called upon to pass through skeptical valleys, and to climb over high walls which bruised the spirit, but it was only to climb to the top of a lofty faith, at last, in which I seemed to behold the world of men, spite of their common sins, tending towards the central place—God’s garden. I felt that I could go into the pulpit and preach on themes, which instead of arousing the hostility of men, as the doctrine of Evangelical University seemed destined to do, would by their breadth, optimism, and freedom from Phariseeism win the repentant consent of men. I had gone into the Seminary tutored by Evangelical University to be afraid to let the sun shine on religion’s chief doctrines, I had come from the Seminary believing that the flood of light intensified the beauty of religion. So, at last, I had the opportunity of testing on community life this doctrine which comforted me with an inexpressible comfort. I bent to my work, with my wife at my elbow, as proud of my chance as any king called suddenly from obscurity to a kingdom.
I occupied a study whose front window overlooked the trees and gave me an excellent view of the sailing ships and steamers which dotted the bay. I had my typewriter in one corner, my desk in the centre of the room, and an abundant supply of manuscript paper on which I intended writing years and years of sermons for that parish.
One day, in spring, my wife insisted that I consult a specialist about a throat affliction which had been interfering with my parish duties. I sought one out and had him make a thorough examination of me. Gravely he plied his tools and searched my throat, and gravely he announced,
“You will have to bring your pastoral work to an end, sir. Your throat will have to be cared for. You must go, immediately, to a dry climate, among the high hills, and use your throat for a year or two with great economy. That is all. There is no better remedy.”
I gazed on him with startled eyes.
“But I’ve just got settled down,” I insisted. “I have no money saved. I have just married. Is there no other remedy?”
“None,” he replied, “I am sorry to say. You will have to do as I prescribe or lose your voice altogether. It is very serious.”
Late that afternoon I appeared before my wife. She had been planting some old-fashioned flowers in the garden. She saw by my downcast countenance that I had bad news.
“What has he told you?” she enquired. “Don’t quibble with me, please!”
“We’ll have to say good-bye to this place,” I began, miserably. “It’s all at an end: this fine dream!”
“Have to leave?” she echoed, faintly. “Is that it?”
Then I reported to her what the specialist had told me.
“And we’ve planted the garden!” I concluded. “We shan’t be able to stay here long enough to reap it!”
There followed some moments of silence, during which the full shock of the news had time to hurt her, and then she proved herself to be one in that sisterhood of wives who in proposing a comfortable escape from a domestic difficulty bravely commit themselves to hardships: for she said, with a smile,
“There, now, this will give you a chance to get to college!”
I looked at her with great astonishment.
“But we cannot afford to go to college,” I protested.
“Oh, can’t we?” she smiled. “Well, I suppose it may be possible for you to get a little church to supply near a college, and I will stay at home through the week, keeping an eye on the parish work while you study for your degree.”
“I had never thought of that!”
“You will have to be idle if you go to a parish, you might as well use your time in getting a college degree,” she insisted.
In two weeks’ time I had written to the Dean of an old New England college, of great reputation, and, on the strength of my seminary study, was informed that I should be eligible to enter the junior class at the college the following fall. With that matter settled, I soon learned that I might supply a country church, some miles from the college, and let my wife occupy the parsonage. The financial end of college thus concluded, I resigned from the church: the church in which all the sentimental ties of student days, ordination, and marriage were merged.
An old seaman came and boxed my household goods, and as he worked, tried to blunt the sting of the task by reciting to me in great detail, how Moses, after becoming the wisest man among the Egyptians, likewise became the greatest war general of his time.
“How is that?” I asked.
“Well, you see,” said the seaman, “the ’Gyptians was allus goin’ over the sands of the desert to battle, and the sands of the desert was filled with biting snakes, and the men died by whole companies from the glare of the sun, so Moses, he invented some red umbrellas and give one to every soldier and took ’em onto the blazing, snake-ridden floor of the desert. Result was, when the snakes seen the glaring umbrellas they was scart off, and the men was covered from the hot blaze of the sun, and went into other lands and won big victories under that same Moses!”
“Where did you learn that?” I asked, in great curiosity.
He mumbled the name of some strange-sounding history, and then returned to his work, for which I was paying him twenty cents an hour. That legend had cost me fifteen cents; it had taken him a full three-quarters of an hour to recount it with its frills and the many interjections.
Then my wife and I, feeling like the first man and woman leaving Eden, bade a tearful good-bye to the house, to the parish, and went forth to a new educational adventure, one that would have its own peculiar hardships, pain, and pleasures.
Chapter XXXIII. Of a Village
where Locomotive Whistles
Sounded like Lingering Music: of
the Esthetic Possibilities in a College
Catalogue: of a Journey over
the Hills to the College where we
find, besides a Wonderful Array
of Structures, a Large Room and
the Junior with his Barnful of
Furniture
TO a bird the north New England hill country whither our adventure took us might have resembled in shape a crumpled pie crust. In one of the depressions lay our new parish: the horizons high and lifted up by reason of the hills which girt it closely about. All the exits from the village were over roads that sloped upward. Only the river had an even course as its shallow body bruised itself in rushing over the sharp, white rocks which tried to hold it back.
The village was composed of groups of neatly painted cottages branching from an elm-shaded green around which stood the town buildings: the drab-painted pillared church, the post-office and general store, the glaring red brick townhouse, the mill-like school building, the parsonage, the doctor’s residence, the postmaster’s house, and the farm of the first select-man.
The two fine contributions to the national reputation that a majority of our parishioners were sending into the markets, were golden bars of butter and finely-fed beef. Very quietly the people were giving themselves to these tasks, having but little touch with the great world outside.
It was difficult for me, in the midst of such rustic peace and isolated civilization, to realize that twelve miles back of the hills lay a famous college whose traditions had gone out into every part of the country during the century and a half of its existence. Its name had been reverently spoken in so far away a place as Evangelical University. The history of the United States cannot be written without mention and eulogy of some of its noted graduates. During those July days, while we were establishing our household goods in the parsonage, I caught myself sniffing the east wind, as if eager to slake my curiosity by catching the flavor of the college. My enthusiasm was unbounded over the possibility of at last attaining unto a college education: the trade-mark of American culture. My wife and I had promised ourselves to drive over the hills as soon as the house had been established, so that together we might have our first view of the institution and that I might confer with the dean and arrange my schedule of studies for the first term. I waited impatiently for that day to come.
Meanwhile, during the lulls in house settling, I took the college catalogue and selected a course of studies. It was an enticing feast before which I sat: I felt like a lad having to choose from fifteen nectar flavors of ice cream, only the courses of study from which I had the privilege of choosing went into the hundreds. Almost every theme of my desire was spread before me; explorations into literature, social life, fine arts, science, language, and economics. Old yearnings could be abundantly gratified at last: a formidable list of professors and a more formidable list of studies awaited my option. Evangelical University had given me the foundations of an education, the Seminary had given me the technical knowledge of my profession, at last I had come to the studies that should broaden my outlook, extend my habits of thought beyond the narrow groove of my vocation, and link me to the great world-thought. I put down Italian so that at last I might, with my own ears, hear Dante speak to me through his euphonious and inspired Cantos, and I chose a course in which Goethe should at last be met face to face. I also determined to test my theology in a science course to find out for myself if God and the forces of Nature were actually engaged in undying warfare. I chose, also, a course in composition, which had in it all the lure towards authorship and the fascination of literary creation. My technical studies in the Seminary had prepared me to secure from the college the highest inspiration I should ever receive from books.
Early in the month of August, my wife and I started from the village in a buggy for a drive over the hill roads to the college. My wife reminded me, during the drive, of the strangeness of the situation: of the fact that five years previously she had received her degree from her alma mater and that she was now on the way to witness the matriculation of her husband. Midway on the route we drove through an abandoned village, past a once commodious church, a mill, and several houses, all storm bent and in forsaken ruin. We rode along sand-rutted highways which seemed to take us farther and farther away from living creatures. We passed acres and acres of stumps showing where the axes and saws of woodsmen had left a permanent scar in the forestry of the back-roads. Then we emerged on the first street of a quaint, slumberous town whose green and drab-shuttered white houses hid demurely behind screens of elm and of maple. On the outskirts of this village we found ourselves on a sandy plain which sloped down towards a wide river. On the opposite bank, set like gleaming red and white flowers in a bed of green, were towers, windows, houses, chimneys: acres of them, a mile distant, scattered over a narrow elevated plain behind which rolled hills far to the North, to the East and to the South, their sky-lines lost in clouds.
“It’s the college!” I exclaimed, dropping the reins for further, excited contemplation. The patches of red and the hundreds of gleaming, sun-blazing windows, were dormitories and academic halls. The white blotches were innumerable houses surrounding the college buildings. One had to pick them out from the lavish clusters of shade trees whose leaves left cool, dark shadows on the buildings.
Fifteen minutes later our horse had dragged us toilsomely up a steep roadway on either side of which were a few scattered houses, the outposts of the college town, and brought us right into the midst of the college campus itself, a very green oasis surrounded by a hollow square of college structures. Yes, the Fence was there, a double line of it with the grass worn off where Seniors’ sacred feet had rubbed! just as in my boyish speculations I had always conceived a college with its Fence. Very near the green, too, lay a solid stone sarcophagus of a drinking fountain: just the sort which, in my boyish speculations and boyish reading, I had seen used for the baths of recalcitrant Freshmen and too obtrusive Sophomores. Over on the north side a snow-white meeting-house fronted us with a stiff, proud chest, and with its hexagonal bell-tower rising above the roof like the smoke-stack of a railway engine, made one expect to see it start puffing forward over the campus, with a very tiny, Greek-pillared vestry accompanying it, like a colt engine, destined, sometime later, perhaps, to grow into a meeting-house, like its companion. Across the street from where we had entered stood a brick tavern, under whose canopy an old coach waited equipped with glass doors, outside seats, and with thick leather straps to keep the pliant springs from sending the body of the coach leaping off the wheels at the “thank-you-ma’ams.” To the left we discovered a huge square brick structure with a fenced-in roof faced by a spacious walled-in porch, with pillar-supported roof which, we learned, was the combined college club and commons.
Screened by the arching trees and massed in companies of twos and threes, fives and sixes, were recitation halls, a Renaissance museum, a stone chapel, a power house, numerous dormitories, a snow-white observatory, a gymnasium, and last, a stone tower crowning a knoll and dominating the campus.
The dean gave me my papers, approved my courses of studies, and then sent my wife and me on an inspection of available dormitory rooms, for I should have to reside at the college six days out of seven.
After the penury of Evangelical University and the quaint compactness of the Seminary, the broad acres, costly, comfortable buildings and lavish size of the college gripped my imagination. We threaded our way past a set of dormitories, through a wooded road, and entered a rustic park where Commencement festivities were held every June. We passed sedate rows of professorial residences fronted by hedges and smooth-clipped lawns. Over to the south we viewed a fenced-in athletic field; a mass of green with ovals and straightaways of black cinders, and with bleachers and a grandstand at one end: the place where, fully as much as in the college buildings, the culture of youth went on: the culture of health, of muscular skill, and of moral temper.
A janitor—a young man with a broad forehead and gentle ways—extracted a bunch of keys and showed us into a very old dormitory where were single rooms, double rooms, quadruple and sextuple rooms; according to taste, but no room which met with my approval, especially when the dormitory bore such a sinister name as Demon Cottage, a corruption of Damon Cottage. The janitor, who turned out to be, himself, a graduate of the college, on learning that I was an aspirant for the ministry, promptly advised me to examine a room in the Christian Association building. This we did, and when he had guided my wife and me up three flights of stairs and thrown open the door of a massive, square room, with shop windows for light, I said,
“Isn’t this the college Socialistic Hall, or the band practise chamber?”
“No, this is merely a double, dormitory room,” he admitted. “Sixty dollars a year for each occupant with an extra bedroom over there and an enormous storeroom through that door.”
“Well,” I concluded, after some discussion, “a flat-full of furniture would hardly furnish the center of the room, but there’s sure to be a good circulation of air, and that is important. I think I’d better take it.”
When we returned to the campus we discovered a group of canvas-clad students punting a football while a group of Freshmen, with eyes bulging out of their heads, looked on in worshipful wonder, for Ellis, Barton, and Chipman, three of the Varsity team, were in the advance guard of athletes engaged in early practise.
The janitor had sent us to “Durritt’s Barn” where, he informed us, we should be able to pick up a team load of dormitory furniture at second-hand for very little money. “Durritt’s Barn” was actually a barn attached to a pleasant little house which had been transformed, by a very energetic Junior, into a second-hand furniture store. The Junior, whose name I learned was Garden, presented himself from behind a bewildering mass of dusty rugs, topsy-turvy mission chairs, and sectional book shelves, and picked his way to us through a narrow aisle made by massed heaps of bedsteads, mattresses, chiffoniers, tables, and desks. When we expressed amazement at his business audacity in having such a mass of second-hand furnishings on his hands, he informed us that we had not seen it all and then he led us up a stairway to the loft where we discovered another heaped up mass of material.
“I shall have it all sold by the time college has opened,” said the Junior. “In fact, I shall not have enough for the demand.”
“Where do you get the furniture?” demanded my wife.
“From the Seniors,” replied Garden. “They sell it for next to nothing during Commencement. It is a profitable business—while it lasts. It gives me an excellent chance for earning my way through the college. Now, how would that iron bedstead suit you, for your room, Mr. Priddy, and that felt mattress, which goes with it: three dollars for the whole?”
After informing him that he did not have in his stock a rug expansive enough to cover the floor of my spacious apartment in Association Hall, we compromised on a very limp, red carpet rug which would resemble a bandanna handkerchief when spread out on my room floor, but which was actually the broadest floor covering I could purchase. A half hour later I paid twelve dollars and a quarter for the bed, the rug, a chair, a small book shelf, and a tied-together chiffonier with most of its brass handles missing.
After having left the moving of the furniture in the hands of Garden, my wife and I were once more driving over those lonesome, sandy, rutted roads, in the midst of the profound silences of remote civilization. Again we passed through the deserted village. Two hours later we were back in the parsonage ready, next, to pack my trunk preparatory to the opening of college.
Chapter XXXIV. My Wife
Packs me off to College. The
Senior and I Stop at a Rock
for a Drink, Meet the Advance
Guard of Students, Plunge into a
Bedlam, and Witness the Labors
of the Freshmen. The Finger-study
of Quarles and my Apology Given
to the Retired Medical Man who
was Specializing in Hens
“HERE I am, in our honeymoon year, packing you off to college,” commented my wife, as she folded some towels and handed them to me to put in my trunk. “It takes me back to the day when my mother did it for me.”
“And you’re to have the hard end of the business,” I replied, “staying in this house alone and keeping an eye on the parish. Not much of a honeymoon to that through the long, winter days, while I am in the swirl of college events, with all the fellowship one can desire.”
“But there’ll be holidays and Saturdays at home, for you,” she answered. “I shall see you once a week at least, for you will have to preach here every Sunday. We’re working together, now,” she added, quietly. “If there’s any suffering, any hardship, any self-denial involved, I am willing to undergo it, else I would not have married you!”
In her voice ran an undertone of tragic feeling and for the first time I began dimly to realize, in the midst of my own opportunity for a college education, that in this little home, back over the hills, my wife would be waiting, and waiting, through the long hours of the day and night, for the two years’ study to be at an end: the study which would break up our home and separate us during the first days of our married life. I vowed then to give it all up: to plunge into the pastoral work: to send word to the college dean that he must not expect me.
“No, not that: not that!” protested my wife. “It is your chance, take it!”
As I descended from my pulpit the following Sunday morning, I was introduced to a quiet youth who was recommended to me as a Senior in the college. That afternoon my new acquaintance came down to the parsonage and willingly permitted me, in my curiosity, to question him concerning the traditions, the customs, and the personnel of the college. I asked him some very trivial and laughable questions, I remember, because, at the time, I had some very curious and perhaps too exalted notions concerning colleges, especially colleges of the high standard of the one in which I had just matriculated and to which I was to journey on the morrow.
After our conversation, the Senior promised to call for me next day and escort me to the college: a proffer which I was glad to accept.
That September Monday morning was a very pleasant one in the Northern country. The maple groves on the hill slopes made one think that God had let fall his color pots, for the leaves of the trees flamed with reds, with yellows, and with blacks. The mail wagon drove up to the parsonage door and collected myself, the Senior, and my trunk. My wife stood at the door telling me not to forget this and that, with true motherly solicitude. Then, with a dash through the dust, the wagon wheeled us on our way across the river to the train that should carry us to within four miles of college.
The Senior said, as we changed at a junction,
“The train that will get us to college does not go for some hours. Are you fit for a four-mile walk? We can eat lunch on the way. I have some in my suit-case.”
I agreed that I was ready for the walk, so we left the town precincts by walking through a lumber yard.
Our travel took us over a cinder path between the ties and switch rods of a railroad. At the right, far below us, flowed a very wide and swift river, whose surface twinkled through the shields of pine and white birch which lined the bluff. Here we met several young men walking slowly and engaged in earnest conversation.
“Those are students!” the Senior whispered, “out for a walk.”
When some mill whistles at a remote distance announced the noon hour, the Senior conducted me to a grove of stiff, tall pines where on the brown, fragrant needles he spread a lunch of sandwiches, jelly, and pears.
Then we took up the walk again, passing on into the wilderness of trees and rushing river. At a turn in the track we came to a high cliff whose outer surface was stained with moss and glistened with dampness. The Senior stopped before a niche out of whose cool interior spouted a stream of ice-cold water, bringing to mind the rock which Moses struck with his wand and which slaked the thirst of the children of Israel.
“Nearly every student who passes this way,” the Senior announced, “gets a drink of this water.”
Ten minutes later we walked into the station and I was amazed at the heaps of trunks that covered the platform. Drays were doing their best to reduce the pile by carting them away in enormous loads. As we made our way around the trunks there dashed into the station one of the coaches I had seen near the tavern on my previous visit; this time topped by a group of healthy-faced, shouting students, wearing tan shoes, flannel trousers, and flapping caps such as clowns, in the circus rings, wear with such comical effect. This coach was quickly followed by another, similarly loaded with students come down to greet the arrival of classmates and friends.
At last I was able to realize the task that was on my hands if I were to fit into the college life, for scores of students passed us or trailed after us as the Senior and I walked up the hill. How should I ever succeed in remembering their names, in entering into the acquaintance of a small number of all those students? And the trains were bringing more!
On top of the hill, just before entering the campus, some fraternity houses, lavishly appointed, had their verandahs filled with students, singing snatches of songs and bantering one another. Then there flashed into view again, the campus and the business street, only on this occasion it was a far different campus and a very different business street from what I had seen on my previous visit. The sidewalks were thronged with students, some leaning against shop windows, others sitting on steps, while others roamed along engaged in conversation. On the campus, keeping to the paths, were groups of Freshmen walking timidly enough past Sophomores in sweaters and negligee attire and past Seniors in graver dress and mien. On the front lawn of a dormitory four neatly-dressed youths were beating rugs and as their energetic actions continued they were half smothered in the clouds of dust.
“I should imagine that they would don rougher clothes while they dust rugs,” I commented to the Senior.
My companion smiled, knowingly,
“They have no chance to change clothes,” he replied. “They are Freshmen which some of the upper-classmen have picked up from the campus and compelled to do that work. It will be the Freshmen’s turn, next year, however, so that it isn’t much of an imposition. Now you’ll see some fun. Watch that football man with the sweater!”
The football man in the sweater had come out of the dormitory and had gone over to the Freshman who was working more energetically than his fellows, and said to him,
“Say, Freshie, what’re you sleeping on the job like that for, eh? Do you want the Sophs. to give you a black mark so soon?”
He glared with mock savagery at the bewildered Freshman, who replied,
“Please sir, I am working very hard, sir!”
“If you call that work, then,” stormed the football man, “I wonder what you do when you loaf? Die probably, eh?”
“I thought, sir—” persisted the Freshman, but he was cut short by the football man who said,
“Just carry that up to my room, put it straight, set the furniture in place, and then go to work and copy those marked extracts from the coach’s note-book which you’ll find on the desk. Hurry and have it done in two hours’ time!”
As the football man ended those savage orders, he turned away with an amused smile and as he came towards us he winked and said to the Senior,
“That young cuss’s got the making of a fine kid in him, even if he is the son of a several hundred thousand dollar Senator. Just watch him make the dust fly! Ain’t he a peacherino, though!”
The Senior informed me, after the football man had strolled away, that the fagging was in full force just then and that the Freshmen took it in good humor, and, in fact, would have considered themselves not actually at college had that feature been omitted.
The different noises that filled the air made a Babel. From dormitory windows came shouts, cornet practise, and various moanings which, at a quieter time, would have been differentiated as vocal trios and duets. Down the business street, from the upper floors where some of the fraternities had rooms, the sounds of clanging piano rag-time tried to merge with explosive bellowings of happy, singing fraternity men. On the College Club porch a jostling crowd of students could be seen, shaking hands, telling summer experiences, and knocking chairs about in the anxiety to get at one another. The shop windows were gay with college banners, souvenirs, books, picture cards, college photographs, and sporting goods.
I found the furniture I had purchased from Garden heaped before my door and a half hour later I had it scattered lonesomely over the floor of my large room. From my open window I could look down on the stir of life on the campus. Night deepened, and with it came an increase, rather than a quieting of the noises, as if Youth were bound to have one last, gleesome frolic before the sedate masters of Books curbed their liberties. In the darkness of the night, sitting at the window, exactly as I had done at Evangelical University six years previously, I had an alien feeling as I listened to the sounds which soared up to my ears from the gloom below. Demon yells, demon howls of acute misery, throbbings of mandolin strings, the hoarse tooting of a fish horn, a piercing falsetto voice under my window trying to sing,
“O, O, O! Dear, dear old days, love!”
the clanging of a hand bell and intermittent revolver shots. These were only a few of all the riot of sounds spreading through the night air, over the campus and bursting out of the dormitory windows on every side of me. While I sat wondering how a hundred or so of faculty could ever bring seriousness out of such a chaos of youthful energy, I heard a chug underneath my window as a truckman hurled a trunk to the sidewalk: my trunk. Immediately I went on the campus, discovered two Freshmen, and with all the abandon of a Junior that I could muster for the occasion, I coolly invited them to assist me in carrying the heavily loaded trunk up the three flights of stairs. So conformed to the fagging custom were the Freshmen, that when one of them unfortunately sliced his finger on a loose nail and I commiserated him on it, he said, keeping his grip on the trunk, meanwhile,
“Nothing at all, sir. Nothing at all.”
Next morning the trio of bell chimes, in the tower of the college chapel, hurled clanging, throbbing scales-of-three over the quiet campus. Immediately from the doorways of dormitories, boarding clubs, and the Commons, appeared chatting groups of students who took the paths across the campus towards the first chapel service. From the North, the South, the East and the West they hurried; hundreds and hundreds of well-dressed youths, arm in arm or four and five abreast as they walked.
The choir, transepts and gallery were soon crowded, almost to suffocation. The morning sun in trying to break through the windows into the dimness merely glorified the pictured saints, and prophets, shepherds and sheep. The gowned organist played a part of the grand finale of The Pilgrim’s Chorus. The gowned figure of the President arose and stood silent a second while a wave of reverent stillness swept through the chapel. Scripture followed hymn, and a simple prayer was followed by a general confession. Then the organ burst into a triumphant recessional, and the students noisily crowded down the aisles into the open air. The day’s work was begun, having had invoked on it the blessing from the Author of all Truth, and the Creator of that World which throughout the days and years, has had such fascination for students and professors, of Science, of Art and Faith.
In the confusion of the multitude of students, most of them strangers to me, I felt the futility of my social ambitions. In Evangelical University and in the theological seminary I had been in the midst of small groups of students, whose names, characteristics and acquaintance could be compassed in a few short weeks. But the vast procession of young men which blackened the greensward of the campus that morning dismayed me. It seemed that mere hand-shaking and saying to each individual member of it, “I am glad to know you!” would demand months and months of time. It was a new experience, too, after the simple democracy in my previous schools, to have those who were my classmates and college associates, pass me without a word of morning greeting, without a lift of the eyes.
But that was only the first day!
The second morning, as I sat in the chapel, I chanced to have my attention attracted by a curious fingering of paper. It was the student next to me who had some blank sheets of paper in his hands which he shuffled intermittently and over which he kept passing the ball of his forefinger. The organ had not ceased its prelude, and the students had not ceased entering the chapel, so I paid a stricter attention to the strange recreation of my companion. Though he shuffled his blank papers with great skill and fingered their surfaces with scientific regularity, his eyes—wide, staring ones,—were kept fixed on the President’s pulpit—never once did they turn on my inquisitiveness or towards the papers.
One of the students then slipped by me and took a vacant seat next to this shuffler of papers. As soon as he was seated, however, he bent forward and said, to me,
“Your name’s Priddy, isn’t it? I’m Sanderson, the monitor who keeps the attendance of this section. By the way, have you met Quarles? Quarles,” he said to the student who was shuffling the papers, “meet Priddy, your classmate!” Quarles, without taking his eyes from their fixed stare on the President’s pulpit, extended me his hand, and said, in a very quiet voice,
“I’m glad to meet you, Priddy! I’m blind, as you probably know.”
I expressed my amazement that he should be in college.
“Oh,” Sanderson exclaimed, “it doesn’t seem to bother him any. I notice that he’s getting on for Phi Beta Kappa. He makes us hump!”
“Then you are able to take the regular studies!” I gasped.
“Yes,” said Quarles, “the regular studies!”
“Of course,” I went on, “you omit mathematics, languages, and such things!”
“Why should I, Priddy?” asked Quarles turning toward me his expressionless eyes.
“Well, I really don’t see how you can manage—those subjects,” I explained.
“He manages all right,” interrupted Sanderson, “why, Priddy, he’s taken nineties in calculus, French and German and Greek, and is right there when it comes to such graft courses, as philosophy and English! Oh, you don’t need to pity him: rather pity me, who with my eyesight, am hardly able to pull through Fine Arts One!”
Quarles then explained to me how, before taking his courses, he had a student read to him the complete text which he translated into Braille with his blind-writing apparatus, on sheets of paper. He also used the same instrument, almost as quickly as we, with our sight, would use our pencils in the professor’s lectures. The leaves he had been shuffling that morning, formed a reading lesson in French.
Everybody was the friend of Quarles. He would be groping his way alone over a path to a class but a brief moment, for a student, playing ball, nearby would signal to his comrade, who would hold the ball, and then, throwing down his glove would hurry over, have a cheery word of greeting, ask Quarles whither he was bound, link arms with the blind student and guide him into a path where he could find his own way without need of piloting. In this way, Quarles must have felt the arm of nearly every upper-classman, for not only were they willing to straighten out his walks for him, and read to him, but they also took him with them on excursions, which he shared with excellent comradeship and proved to be as good a mountain climber as the best.
In this way, too, through walks, at meals, and in classes, I soon had the students differentiated and had a formidable list of friendships.
It was my custom, throughout the fall months when the highways were hard and untouched by snow, to ride weekly to and from college on a bicycle which I had bought for that purpose. On this twenty-mile excursion, along a winding river and through quiet, little hamlets, I had certain resting-places where I could breathe and refresh myself with a sup of water.
Doctor Floyd’s well, conveniently near the highway at the summit of a steep grade, had also a rustic bench near it, from which a most gratifying vista could be obtained, which included the view of a pyramidal mountain cone framed in a circular opening of twinkling poplar leaves, at whose foot a silvery dash of river curved under high, bush-lined banks, with now and then a cow or a colt completing the composition by standing in the river.
The Doctor, himself, whose permission to drink of the water and to seat myself on the bench for a rest I had taken pains to secure, was a short, stout, bald-headed man of about sixty, whose clean-shaven cheeks were always flushed by an excess of blood. He had retired from active practise and was engaged in the delightful, old age recreation of seeing how many eggs he could persuade a harem of Plymouth Rocks to lay through a most careful, scientific mixture of laying foods, use of germless drinking troughs, and adaptation to an expensive mode of existence.
One Saturday noon, as I sat on the bench puffing for breath, for the day was both dusty and hot, the Doctor, with the egg record for the week in his hands, which he came down to show me, sat down on the bench and said,
“Well, do those wild students know what they are in college for?”
“What do you mean?” I asked, puzzled by his sneer.
“Usually,” he explained, “more’n half of the students in the college over there don’t know why they’re there!”
“Oh,” I said, “there are a great number of my friends who are not certain what they are going to do in the world, after graduation, if that is what you mean, Doctor.”
He rubbed his fat hands in revengeful gratification.
“That’s just it! Just it!” he laughed, cynically. “It’s all a waste of good money and precious time. There’s no good can come of it. They don’t take their studies seriously enough. Let me see, how many subjects does a student have to select from under that new-fangled election system they have—study made easy, I call it—how many, now?”
“I think there must be in the neighborhood of a hundred different courses, a majority of which are elective, so far I know.”
“And the young lazybones pick out the easiest courses they can, independent of the good it’ll do ’em, eh?”
“Perhaps they do,” I replied, antagonized by his critical and belligerent tone. “But then, I don’t believe that a liberal education: a college course, has to do merely with giving a student a lot of technical information!”
The little man fussily remonstrated.
“What? I thought that colleges were in the world to fit men for their work, and that if they’re to be doctors, why, they’re to be taught medicine and nothing else!”
“That is the function of professional schools,” I agreed. “Take my case, for instance. I am a minister. I spent three years in a good theological seminary. While there I wanted technical information on my profession. I got it, and assimilated more or less—perhaps less. But when I came to college I did not come to add to my technical theological knowledge; not at all!”
“What did you come for, then,” he asked, with another sneer, “to get the degree, I suppose, like a lot of others?”
“I don’t think you give me credit for being a man of ordinary intelligence,” I replied, hotly, angered by his insinuation.
“Then what under heaven did you come to college for, if not to increase your theological information and whatever ability you might have as a preacher.”
“I came to college,” I replied, “to get the other man’s point of view. I reasoned with myself that a purely technical education tends to narrow a man unless supplemented by an education which might be entitled, ‘The Other Man’s Point of View.’”
“That’s a thrust at me,” replied the Doctor, “as if to say that I, because I took my medicine with old Dr. Desbrow, and never went to one of your colleges, was narrow. The idea!”
“I was not alluding to you, sir,” I responded. “I was merely making a generalization which seems provable. For instance, I have a friend who is an expert surgeon. He has been trained in some of the best clinics and has diplomas from the most reputable medical colleges. He has learned his profession well, in all its finer, technical points. But he never received any liberal education. The result is, that he is narrow in his tastes, caring for nothing which is not flavored by anaesthetics or redolent of carbolic acid. As there are among his friends those whose stomachs turn at the mention of an operation or at the whisper of anaesthetics, he has no way of interesting them on subjects in which they are interested. He imagines that because all the world is not poking steel points in ulcers and cancers, it had better be left alone. The result is, that when you mention the surgeon’s name to the townsfolk, you will hear words like these: ‘A fine surgeon, but as cranky and bitter as a hobby-rider.’ No one can get along with him. He loses business by it. He knows nothing but his profession!”
“Well,” demanded the doctor, “that’s a job big enough for any man with brains, isn’t it?”
“True,” I responded, “but the truly educated surgeon has not only to know his tools, his diagnoses, his operating methods, but along with that knowledge, his final success demands that he be liberally trained in human nature, that he have at least a faint idea of the subjects in which other people are interested. A liberal education, added to his professional education gives him that.”
“I’d like to know how?” demanded the Doctor.
“Well, take my case again, for instance. I am going to take a lot of studies which are not technically pertinent to sermons or doctrines: study of Dutch paintings, Italian, Chemistry, Anatomy of the Brain and Sense Organs, and others which I can’t mention at this time, because I have not decided just what they will be. Here is what I mean. After an introductory study of Italian, I shall learn just how the Italians think. It is good to know that, surely? Then after a brief course in chemistry, though I shall not care enough about it when I am through with the experiments, to carry off a test tube, tie it with baby ribbon and keep it for a souvenir, as some students do, I shall ever after realize that while I am swearing by theology, others, about me, have reason for being engrossed in chemical formulas and tests. Each study that I shall take, and each classroom that I shall visit, will form opportunities for me to get at the points of view which determine why Tom differs from Joe and why Joe differs from me. If the college can do that, Doctor, and not add a single jot to my theological knowledge, I shall feel more than repaid for the time I spend in it and the money I pay to it. So that is why I don’t think it either wasted time or an entirely hopeless situation, Doctor, if a large number of students in the college do not know why they are there. One thing is certain, they are getting trained in the other man’s point of view!”
The Doctor, evidently not at all in agreement with my explanation, after he had pooh-poohed to himself for a minute, thought to change the subject and for that purpose he said to me,
“I rather pity you, young man. I always did pity ministers. They don’t seem to do anything substantial; that’s why I don’t go near a church. It’s all up-in-the-air preaching, and darned little doing. Now, keeping pullets or mixing a sick draught—why, they are something worth while, now—but preaching and preachers—um!”
“The other man’s point of view, Doctor,” I laughed, as I mounted my wheel and started off.
A week later, the Doctor came out of the house, when I stopped at the well, and as he drew near he shouted,
“I drove over to the college, last Wednesday. What a lazy set of loafers you’ve got over there, to be sure. I was there in the afternoon and saw them reading papers, strolling around the campus and playing all sorts of games. I don’t think they’ll amount to much in the world if they go on at that rate. They seem so aimless! I heard one fellow, with turned up trousers and purple socks that would have given light at night, say to another student, something about throwing books and professors to the dogs—or some such stuff!”
“Yes,” I admitted, “I hear that every day. I know a good many students who care little about classes and text books.”
The doctor, evidently gratified with that admission grunted,
“Then what’s the good of the college—to them. Why doesn’t it send them into the world to be useful?”
“That’s what a good many people say, about us students,” I replied. “But books and professors and courses of study are only a part of what a student gets in our college, sir. It’s a very peculiar situation. I’m older than most of the students, and have had the advantage of a professional training, and so can look on the college through somewhat serious eyes. You would be astounded, for instance, at the tremendous education that the men receive from purely student affairs.”
“Going into the country, when the football team’s won over Princeton, for instance,” sniffed the Doctor, “and tearing down farm fences! Oh, yes, a wonderful education in student affairs? Like one of your boys that came into this village, and in broad daylight went up to the grocery store, there, on the main street, and deliberately took down and carried off a four-foot, patent-medicine thermometer, the folks all the while thinking him to be an agent fellow, come to mend it, or change it. Oh, yes, a wonderful education those fellows get among themselves!”
After the old man had frightened one of his pullets back into the rear of the house, I replied,
“No, I didn’t refer to isolated acts of mischief, Doctor, but to the student enterprises that create ability. Our college is nothing more than wheels within wheels. There are professors and classroom studies for the big, outside wheels, and for the inner wheels, whirling all the time, are the college newspaper, the college magazine, the athletic business, the writing and staging of plays, the dramatic clubs, the musical clubs, the social service enterprises, the political clubs and the religious work. Why, Doctor, those students conduct all those things practically without help from outsiders. You would be astounded at the amount of executive and administrative ability they demand. The students who run the monthly magazine, for instance, must be good editors, fair writers, and managers of astuteness, for it has to pay for itself, at least, and must express literary power. It is the same with the newspaper. That is a business in itself, yet, it is managed, financed and edited entirely by students, many of whom find it difficult to get interested in the routine of the college curriculum. When you multiply these business and serious activities, you find the students actually doing profitable and character-forming tasks outside of the classrooms which few critics of the college take the trouble to notice. Why, it was only a week ago, that a student came into my room and had a talk with me about a new college enterprise that seemed formidable. He was a student who did not care five toothpicks for his studies. He was in difficulties with his physics course, at the time, having failed in it twice, and seeming to be letting his third and last chance for his degree slip past without giving it a thought. The people on the campus, and the professors in the classrooms appraised this fellow as a ‘loafer’ and an ‘idler.’ Yet, that morning he came to me and said that he proposed to start a comic monthly, at ten cents a copy, himself to be editor-in-chief, and the jokes, poems, pictures, designs, the securing of advertisement and subscribers, to be under his general charge and apportioned to willing students. He went off for two days, at his own expense, secured over a hundred dollars’ worth of advertising, and only last week had newsboys selling on the campus a first-class, neatly printed, well-filled, artistically illustrated comic monthly, which, by this time has its regular staff of student artists, poets, joke writers, business managers, and board of editors; it’s a paper which promises to be one of the features of student life. No, Doctor,” I concluded as I felt of my tires, preparatory to taking up my journey towards home, “students may seem shiftless, indifferent, and unenthusiastic on the campus, but when you get behind the laziest of them you are liable to find that they are giving themselves to some sort of character-making work,—contrary to the posters which lead outsiders to think that college life consists of a place where the student sits in the sun on a fence, smoking a pipe with a leashed bull-pup at his feet!”
“Say,” called the Doctor, as I fitted the toe clips to my shoes, “my pullets did a hundred and sixty this week. Laying,—eh?”