A Master's Degree Part 1

A Master's Degree.

by Margaret Hill McCarter.

THE MEETING

...There is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth, When two strong men stand face to face, tho' they come from the ends of the earth!

KIPLING

IT happened by mere chance that the September day on which Professor Vincent Burgess, A.B., from Boston, first entered Sunrise College as instructor in Greek, was the same day on which Vic Burleigh, overgrown country boy from a Kansas claim out beyond the Walnut River, signed up with the secretary of the College Board and paid the entrance fee for his freshman year. And further, by chance, it happened that the two young men had first met at the gateway to the campus, one coming from the East and the other from the West, and having exchanged the courtesies of stranger greeting, they had walked, side by side, up the long avenue to the foot of the slope. Together, they had climbed the broad flight of steps leading up to the imposing doorway of Sunrise, with the great letter S carved in stone relief above it; and, after pausing a moment to take in the matchless wonder of the landscape over which old Sunrise keeps watch, the college portal had swung open, and the two had entered at the same time.

Inside the doorway the Professor and the country boy were impressed, though in differing degrees, with the ma.s.sive beauty of the rotunda over which the stained gla.s.s of the dome hangs a halo of mellow radiance.

Involuntarily they lifted their eyes toward this crown of light and saw far above them, wrought in dainty coloring, the design of the great State Seal of Kansas, with its inscription They saw something more in that upward glance. On the stairway of the rotunda, Elinor Wream, the niece of the president of Sunrise College, was leaning over the bal.u.s.trade, looking at them with curious eyes. Her smile of recognition as she caught sight of Professor Burgess, gave place to an expression of half-concealed ridicule, as she glanced down at Vic Burleigh, the big, heavy-boned young fellow, so grotesquely impossible to the harmony of the place.

As the two men dropped their eyes, they encountered the upturned face of a plainly dressed girl coming up the stairs from the bas.e.m.e.nt, with a big feather duster in her hand. It was old Bond Saxon's daughter Dennie, who was earning her tuition by keeping the library and offices in order. As if to even matters, it was Vic Burleigh who caught a token of recognition now, while the young Professor was surveyed with fearless disapproval.

All this took only a moment of time. Long afterward these two men knew that in that moment an antagonism was born between them that must fight itself out through the length of days. But now, Dr. Lloyd Fenneben, Dean of Sunrise, known to students and alumni alike as "Dean Funnybone," was grasping each man's hand with a cordial grip and measuring each with a keen glance from piercing black eyes, as he bade them equal welcome.

And here all likeness of conditions ends for these two. Days come and go, moons wax and wane, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter glide fourfold through their appointed seasons, before the two young men stand side by side on a common level again. And the events of these changing seasons ring in so rapidly, and in so inevitable a fashion, that the whole cycle runs like a real story along the page.

STRIFE

_With the first faint note out of distance flung, From the moment man hears the siren call Of Victory's bugle, which sounds for all, To his inner self the promise is made To weary not, rest not, but all unafraid Press on--till for him the paean be sung.

The song for the victor is sweet, is sweet-- Yet to the music a memory clings Of trampled nestlings, of broken wings, And of faces white with defeat!_ --ELIZABETH D. PRESTON

CHAPTER I. "DEAN FUNNYBONE"

_Nature they say, doth dote, And cannot make a man Save on some worn-out plan, Repeating us by rote: For him her Old-World moulds aside she threw, .............................

With stuff untainted, shaped a hero new_.--LOWELL

DR. LLOYD FENNEBEN, Dean of Sunrise College, had migrated to the Walnut Valley with the founding of the school here. In fact, he had brought the college with him when he came hither, and had set it, as a light not to be hidden, on the crest of that high ridge that runs east of the little town of Lagonda Ledge. And the town eagerly took the new school to itself; at once its pride and profit. Yea, the town rises and sets with Sunrise. When the first gleam of morning, hidden by the east ridge from the Walnut Valley, glints redly from the south windows of the college dome in the winter time, and from the north windows in the summer time, the town bestirs; itself, and the factory whistles blow. And when the last crimson glory of evening puts a halo of flame about the brow of Sunrise, the people know that out beyond the Walnut River the day is pa.s.sing, and the pearl-gray mantle of twilight is deepening to velvety darkness on the wide, quiet prairie lands.

Lagonda Ledge was a better place after the college settled permanently above it. Some improvident citizens took a new hold on life, while some undesirables who had lived in lawless infamy skulked across the Walnut and disappeared in that rough picturesque region full of uncertainties that lies behind the west bluffs of the stream. All this, after the college had found an abiding place on the limestone ridge. For Sunrise had been a migratory bird before reaching the outskirts of Lagonda Ledge. As a fulfillment of prophecy, it had arisen from the visions and pockets of some Boston scholars, and it had come to the West and was made flesh--or stone--and dwelt among men on the outskirts of a booming young Kansas town.

Lloyd Fenneben was just out of Harvard when Dr. Joshua Wream, his step-brother, many years his senior, professor of all the dead languages ever left unburied, had put a considerable fortune into his hands, and into his brain the dream of a life-work--even the building of a great university in the West. For the Wreams were a stubborn, self-willed, bookish breed, who held that salvation of souls could come only through possession of a college diploma. Young Fenneben had come to Kansas with all his youth and health and money, with high ideals and culture and ambition for success and dreams of honor--and, hidden deep down, the memory of some sort of love affair, but that was his own business. With this dream of a new Harvard on the western prairies, he had burned his bridges behind him, and in an unbusiness-like way, relying too much upon a board of trustees whom he had interested in his plans he had eagerly begun his task, struggling to adapt the West to his university model, measuring all men and means by the scholarly rule of his Alma Mater.

Being a young man, he took himself full seriously, and it was a tremendous blow to his sense of dignity when the youthful Jayhawkers at the outset dubbed him "Dean Funnybone"--a name he was never to lose.

His college flourished so amazingly that another boom town, farther inland, came across the prairie one day, and before the eyes of the young dean bought it of the money-loving trustees--body and soul and dean--and packed it off as the Plains Indians would carry off a white captive, miles away to the westward. Plumped down in a big frame barracks in the public square of twenty acres in the middle of this new town, at once real estate dealers advertised the place as the literary center of Kansas; while lots in straggling additions far away across the prairie draws were boomed as "college flats within walking distance of the university."

In this new setting Lloyd Fenneben started again to build up what had been so recklessly torn down. But it was slow doing, and in a downcast hour the head of the board of trustees took council with the young dean.

"Funnybone, that's what the boys call you, ain't it?" The name had come along over the prairie with the school. "Funnybone, you are as likely a man as ever escaped from Boston. But you're never going to build the East into the West, no more'n you could ram the West into the Atlantic seaboard states. My advice to you is to get yourself into the West for good and drop your higher learnin' notions, and be one of us, or beat it back to where you came from quick."

Dean Fenneben listened as a man who hears the reading of his own obituary.

"You've come out to Kansas with beautiful dreams," the bluff trustee continued. "Drop 'em! You're too late for the New England pioneers who come West. They've had their day and pa.s.sed on. The thing for you to do is to commercialize yourself right away. Go to buyin' and sellin' dirt.

It's all a man can do for Kansas now. Just boom her real estate."

"All a man can do for Kansas!" Fenneben repeated slowly.

"Sure, and I'll tell you something more. This town is busted, absolutely busted. I, and a few others, brought this college here as an investment for ourselves. It ain't paid us, and we've throwed the thing over. I've just closed a deal with a New Jersey syndicate that gets me rid of every foot of ground I own here. The county-seat's goin' to be eighteen miles south, and it will be kingdom come, a'most, before the railroad extension is any nearer 'n that. Let your university go, and come with me. I can make you rich in six months. In six weeks the coyotes will be howlin' through your college halls, and the prairie dogs layin' out a townsite on the campus, and the rattlesnakes coilin' round the doorsteps. Will you come, Funnybone?"

The trustee waited for an answer. While he waited, the soul of the young dean found itself.

"Funnybone!" Lloyd repeated. "I guess that's just what I need--a funny bone in my anatomy to help me to see the humor of this thing. Go with you and give up my college? Build up the prosperity of a commonwealth by starving its mind! No, no; I'll go on with the thing I came here to do--so help me G.o.d!"

"You'll soon go to the devil, you and your old school. Good-by!" And the trustee left him.

A month later, Dean Fenneben sat alone in his university barracks and saw the prairie dogs making the dust fly as they digged about what had been intended for a flower bed on the campus. Then he packed up his meager library and other college equipments and walked ten miles across the plains to hire a man with a team to haul them away. The teamster had much ado to drive his half-bridle-wise Indian ponies near enough to the university doorway to load his wagon. Before the threshold a huge rattlesnake lay coiled, already disputing any human claim to this kingdom of the wild.

Discouraging as all this must have been to Fenneben, when he started away from the deserted town he smiled joyously as a man who sees his road fair before him.

"I might go back to Cambridge and poke about after the dead languages until my brother pa.s.ses on, and then drop into his chair in the university," he said to himself, "but the trustee was right. I can never build the East into the West. But I can learn from the East how to bring the West into its own kingdom. I can make the dead languages serve me the better to speak the living words here. And if I can do that, I may earn a Master's Degree from my Alma Mater without the writing of a learned thesis to clinch it. But whether I win honor or I am forgotten, this shall be my life-work--out on these Kansas prairies, to till a soil that shall grow MEN AND WOMEN."

For the next three years Dean Fenneben and his college flourished on the borders of a little frontier town, if that can be called flourishing which uses up time, and money, and energy, Christian patience, and dogged persistence. Then an August prairie fire, sweeping up from the southwest, leaped the narrow fire-guard about the one building and burned up everything there, except Dean Fenneben. Six years, and nothing to show for his work on the outside. Inside, the six years' stay in Kansas had seen the making over of a scholarly dreamer into a hard-headed, far-seeing, masterful man, who took the West as he found it, but did not leave it so. Not he! All the power of higher learning he still held supreme. But by days of hard work in the college halls, and nights of meditation out in the silent sanctuary s.p.a.ces of the prairies round about him, he had been learning how to compute the needs of men as the angel with the golden reed computed the walls and gates of the New Jerusalem--_according to the measure of a man_.

Such was Dean Fenneben who came after six years of service to the little town of Lagonda Ledge to plant Sunrise on the crest above the Walnut Valley beyond reach of prairie fire or bursting boom. Firm set as the limestone of its foundations, he reared here a college that should live, for that its builder himself with his feet on the ground and his face toward the light had learned the secret of living.

Miles away across the valley, the dome of Sunrise could be seen by day.

By night, the old college lantern at first, and later the studding of electric lights, made a beacon for all the open countryside. But if the wayfarer, by chance or choice, turned his footsteps to those rocky bluffs and glens beyond the Walnut River, wherefrom the town of Lagonda Ledge takes its name, he lost the guiding ray from the hilltop and groped in black and dangerous ways where darkness rules.

Above the south turret hung the Sunrise bell, whose resonant voice filled the whole valley, and what the sight of Sunrise failed to do for Lagonda Ledge, the sound of the bell accomplished. The first cla.s.s to enter the school nicknamed its head "Dean Funnybone," but this gave him no shock any more. He had learned the humor of life now, the spirit of the open land where the view is broad to broadening souls.

And it was to the hand of Dean Fenneben that Professor Vincent Burgess, A.B., Greek instructor from Boston, and Vic Burleigh, the big country boy from a claim beyond the Walnut, came on a September day; albeit, the one had his head in the clouds, while the other's feet were clogged with the gra.s.s roots.

CHAPTER II. POTTER'S CLAY

_This clay, well mixed with marl and sand, Follows the motion of my hand, For some must follow and some command, Though all are made of clay_.

--LONGFELLOW

THE afternoon sunshine was flooding the September landscape with molten gold, filling the valley with intense heat, and rippling back in warm waves from the crest of the ridge. Dean Fenneben's study in the south tower of Sunrise looked out on the new heaven and the new earth, every day-dawn created afresh for his eyes; for truly, the Walnut Valley in any mood needs only eyes that see to be called a goodly land. And it was because of the magnificent vista, unfolding in woodland, and winding river, and fertile field, and far golden prairie--it was because of the unconscious power of all this upon the student mind, that Dr. Fenneben had set his college up here.

On this September afternoon, the Dean sat looking out on this land of pure delight a-quiver in the late summer sunshine. Nature had done well by Lloyd Fenneben. His height was commanding, and he was slender, rather than heavy, with ease of movement as if the play of every muscle was nerved to harmony. His heavy black hair was worn a trifle long on the upper part of his head and fell in ma.s.ses above his forehead. His eyes were black and keen under heavy black brows. Every feature was strong and ma.s.sive, but saved from sternness by a genial kindliness and sense of humor. Whoever came into his presence felt that magnetic power only a king of his kind can possess.

Long the Dean sat gazing at the gleaming landscape and the sleepy town beyond the campus and the pigeons circling gracefully above a little cottage, hidden by trees, up the river.

"A wonderful region!" he murmured. "If that old white-haired brother of mine digging about the roots of Greek and Sanscrit back in Harvard could only see all this, maybe he might understand why I choose to stay here with my college instead of tying up with a university back East. But, maybe not. We are only step-brothers. He is old enough to be my father, and with all his knowledge of books he could never read men. However, he sent me West with a fat pocketbook in the interest of higher education.

I hope I've invested well. And our magnificent group of buildings up here and our broad-acred campus, together with our splendid enrollment of students justify my hope. Strange, I have never known whose money I was using. Not Joshua Wream's, I know that. Money is nothing to the Wreams except as it endows libraries, builds colleges, and extends universities. Too scholarly for these prairies, all of them! Too scholarly!"

The Dean's eyes were fixed on a tiny shaft of blue smoke rising steadily from the rough country in the valley beyond Lagonda Ledge, but his mind was still on his brother.