Part 10 (2/2)
Pound. He was unconscious of the increasing hostility of his hearers.
When he stopped suddenly, it was not because the feet in the rear of the hall were shuffling a rising chorus of protest, despite the frantic signals of Judge Bundy and Doctor Todd's upraised hand. What he saw in his own ma.n.u.script checked him, for stepping back from the desk, he frowned at it. The corners of his mouth twitched in a pa.s.sing smile, and pouncing upon his handiwork, he held it at arm's length, dangling before the astonished eyes of the company.
”What rot!” he cried. ”What utter rot!”
A shout from the rear of the room evidenced the approval of his younger hearers. The elders glowered at what they thought a trick to catch their attention. But trick or not, he did catch their attention, and he held it; he ceased to be the utterer of pompous plat.i.tudes; dropping his paper to show that he had done with it, he leaned across the pulpit and brought his long arms into action. He became the caustic iconoclast of the valley.
”We all agree that what I have been reading is nonsense,” he said in a sharp-edged voice. ”But I am here in the place of Valerian Hara.s.san, and it seemed to me that I must give you what you were paying him for. I have been trying to say the kind of things he would have said. If you had been able to stand it a little longer, I should have told you that all the world's a stage and men and women but the players. I might even have attacked your risibles by anecdotes about my little boy at home and the southern colonel. Of course, I should have given you some inspiring thoughts, convinced you that life was a wonderful gift, something to be treasured and joyously lived, that work was a pleasure, that happiness came from accomplis.h.i.+ng a set task. It's all here in this paper. I wrote it--and it was easy enough to do--because that is the kind of stuff you pay for. But it is one thing to write what you don't believe; quite another to speak it face to face. And yet if I am to speak the truth as I see it on such a simple little subject as life, I guess I am here on a fool's errand.”
Doctor Todd and Judge Bundy seemed to be of the same mind, for they were whispering together; debating, I suspected, whether it were better to let him go on and try to talk fifty dollars' worth or to break abruptly into his discourse and end it. For so harsh a measure as the last they lacked courage, and the Professor hurled on, unconscious of the hostile stares with which they were stabbing him in the back.
Now, optimism was the foundation on which McGraw strove to build up character. Optimism permeated every part of our life there. From a narrow environment we looked out hopefully into broadening distances.
Every year some confident youth told us from the college rostrum in rounded sentences that life was worth living; that sickness, poverty, disappointment, the countless evils which dog our footsteps, were nothing in the scale against the boon of opportunity. Every morning in chapel the doctor voiced our grat.i.tude for the privilege of living and working.
And now over heads that moved in such charged airs the Professor cast his pall of pessimism. He took his text from Solomon, and found that all was vanity. It mattered little whether or not what he said was true. He believed it to be true, and for the moment at least his incisive voice and long forefinger carried with them conviction. He railed at the old dictum that man was G.o.d's n.o.blest work. The ordinary dog, he declared, was more pleasing to the eye than the ordinary man, and the life of the ordinary dog more to be envied than that of the ordinary man. Knowledge only lifted us above the animal to be more buffeted by a complexity of desires. The greatest thing in the world was self, and even the roots of our goodness burrowed down into the depths where the ego was considering its own comfort either in this world or the next. The proud man for whom the universe was made was nothing but a fragile thread of memories wrapped in soft tissue, packed away in a casket of bone, and made easily portable by a pair of levers called legs. After countless ages spent on earth seeking the true source of happiness men were still countless ages from agreement. One half sought by goodness to attain happiness in immortality; the other in Nirvana. One half found the shadow of happiness in inertia, in stupefaction, a mere satisfying of physical needs; the other in motion, joining in the mad procession which we call so boastfully Progress. By accident of birth we were of the progressive half and we paraded around and around, puffed up with pride of our little accomplishment, until we fell exhausted and another took our place.
Judge Bundy nudged Doctor Todd again. Doctor Todd shook his head and looked at the ceiling, as if to show that he found more of interest there than in the speaker's words, and he held them there defiantly as the Professor went on to controvert the optimistic philosophy which had been taught at McGraw for so many years. That knowledge was the greatest source of unhappiness was a bold dictum to hurl at a company of seekers after it, but Henderson Blight had little respect for mere persons. The ignorant animal did not exist, he argued; it was with knowledge that the plague of ignorance came to man. A draught of knowledge was like a cup of salt-water to the thirst, and the more we learned the less value we could place on the things for which we labored. A man worked a lifetime to obtain a peach-blow, and it crumbled to dust in his hands. What, then, should we strive for?
At this question Doctor Todd brought his eyes down from the ceiling and Judge Bundy lifted his from the red rug of the platform. The judge was our great authority on striving. He had qualified himself by years of successful labor. To us he was a living example of the rewards which come to endeavor, and so it was with evident self-consciousness that he now sat very erect, thinking, perhaps, that he would hear some views akin to his own.
”I was born in a narrow valley,” the Professor pursued, ”and perhaps I might have dozed there like the dogs, but I learned that beyond the mountains there was another valley, broader and richer. I longed to live there. One day I crossed the mountains to it and I found it all that I had heard. But it, too, had its wall of mountains and my eyes followed them, and I learned that beyond them was still another valley, broader and richer. And I went on. So it will be with you. There is a big nail factory down by the river--I saw it as I came in, and I am sure that to some of us to own that factory might be a life's ambition. How fine it would be when our work was ended to fold our hands peacefully and say: 'I have fought the good fight, I have run the race, I have made a million kegs of nails!'”
Judge Bundy half rose from his chair. Through the hall sounded a smothered murmur of applause, for it is always satisfying to hear a truth which hits another. Judge Bundy would have wholly risen from his chair, but he was checked by a hundred covert smiles and Doctor Todd laid a hand upon his quivering, indignant knee. All unconscious of the cause of this stifled mirth, and fired by it as in the old days he was fired when Stacy Shunk leered beneath the shadow of his hat, the Professor leaned far over the desk with both hands outstretched.
”I have failed utterly in my own living,” he cried. ”I have loafed and lagged. At times I have worked hard until I wearied myself chasing shadows. But in my failure I have learned a few things. We may live and doze in our little valley, but still we shall long for the broader and richer valley across the mountains. The yearning for that something better is born in us all. Shall we call it simply something more; shall we measure our service in kegs of nails or shall we seek for something really better? If we listen we can hear in the depths of our souls the divine drumbeat, and it is strange what cowards we are when we come to march to it. But we can march to it. We may not know why we go, nor where, but we can go straight. The country we travel may seem waste, but we cross it under G.o.d's sealed orders, given to us when we opened our eyes on life, and only when our eyes are closed again will they be opened to us.”
So it was that the Professor carried me again from my little valley! The great Judge Bundy standing at the platform's edge, brusquely dismissing us, had dwindled to pygmy height. He was a mere maker of nails. Life a moment since had been very simple, very concrete, a mere game in which the stake was food and clothes, a Queen Anne house, a clipped lawn and trotting horses. Now it was a mysterious expedition into the unknown.
With the Professor's last word I rose, ready to march, not knowing whither, but sure that it would not be to a conquest measured in kegs of nails. In this exalted mood Gladys Todd could have no part, for I knew that I could go faster and farther in light marching order, unhampered by impedimenta of any kind. Gladys Todd suddenly took her place with impedimenta. Her first act was to confirm this judgment of her, for as I was forcing my way down the crowded aisle, intent on reaching my old friend, she kept tugging at my sleeve and entreating me not to hurry.
Her remonstrances aroused my antagonism. Inwardly I was calling down maledictions on her head, for I saw the Professor's tall form receding through the door. I would have rushed after him; there were a thousand things I wanted to know, a thousand questions I had to ask him. But I was checked. I could not abandon Gladys Todd; nor had I the courage to present myself to him after so many years in the light of a youth given to sentimental dalliance. He would remember the boy who had come to him, cold and wet, from the depths of a mountain stream, the boy who had run miles in the early morning to warn him of the approach of the terrible Lukens, the boy whom he had called his only friend. He would see me dignified by a tail coat and beautified by a mauve tie, a white waistcoat and gleaming patent-leather shoes. He would remember me as I stood by the cabin door, a strong, rugged lad. He would see me a devotee of fas.h.i.+on, a dawdler after a pretty face. So it was with a feeling of relief that I saw the study door close after my friend. I intended to find him, but not until I was as free as on that day when I first came upon him in the clearing.
Gladys Todd was inclined to lag. There were a dozen persons to whom she wished to speak, but with rude insistence I hurried her away. Outside the rain fell heavily. I held my umbrella at arm's length now and abandoned my fine feathers to the storm. She feigned not to notice my changed demeanor and tried to talk pleasantly, but I answered only in monosyllables, and brusquely, I fear. The interminable journey ended.
From the steps of the president's house, with all the graciousness she could command, she asked me not to hurry away when we had so many things to talk over. My answer was a quick ”good-night,” and I ran as I had run years before to the mountains, with my heart in every stride.
When I entered the doctor's study I found him alone. Mr. Henderson, he explained, had gone to Judge Bundy's. Judge Bundy always entertained the lecturer, and he was too generous a man to make an exception even in this case. In speaking of the lecturer the doctor made a wry face. He could not understand how a man of Valerian Hara.s.san's reputation ever allowed such a mountebank to take his place. At McGraw we believed in life; we believed in ambition, and it was terrible--terrible, sir, to have to sit in silence and hear our dearest traditions a.s.sailed by one who admitted that he was a failure. Did Mr. Malcolm hear the brutal cut at Judge Bundy? Judge Bundy, sir, was----
I did not stop to hear the eulogy, nor did I consider how I might be prejudicing myself with the president by so rudely breaking from him.
But the Professor had come back to me. I cleared the college steps with a bound, and ran over the campus and down the hill into the town. I ran with all a boy's reckless waste of strength, so that when I had covered my half-mile course I had to lean for support against the iron fence which guarded the Bundy home. The great stone pile, with many turrets and a dominating cupola, with wide-spreading verandas and marble lions on the lawn, in the daylight comported itself with dignified aloofness, and now, when night exaggerated its size and a single lonely light flickered in all its vast front, it was forbidding. With something of that forced boldness with which years before I had braved the dark mountains, I made the gate ring a proper notice of my approach and groped my way about the door until I found the bell. The answer came from over my head.
Stepping back and looking up, I saw framed in a lighted window a white figure, coatless and collarless, not the distinguished jurist, but a portly man who had been interrupted in the act of preparing for bed.
Clothes go a long way toward making a man, and the lack of them brought the judge down to hailing distance.
”What do you want?” he demanded of me, addressing me as any disrobed plebeian might have done.
”I'm Malcolm, sir, David Malcolm,” I returned apologetically. ”I wish to see Mr. Henderson.”
”Henderson, eh?” The judge leaned over the window-sill, and he spoke less sharply. ”You'll find him at the station waiting for the night train out. I tried to persuade him to stay, but he wouldn't. How in the world, Mr. Malcolm, could Hara.s.san have sent such a fool in his place?
Did you ever hear such utter nonsense? I forgive him about the nails--that was inadvertent, but that stuff about ambition----”
I did not wait to hear the judge controvert my friend's pessimistic philosophy, but with a brusque ”good-night” hurried away. The window banged behind me, a sharp commentary on my rudeness. The iron gate clanged again, and I was off down the hill, running toward the lower town.
A shrill whistle stopped me. Looking into the valley I saw a chain of lights weaving their way along the river. They wound through the gap in the mountain, and I saw them no longer. I heard the whistle again, far off now, and it seemed to mock me.
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