Ann Arbor Tales Part 40

He held out his hand. He felt hers cold in his palm.

"Will you forgive me?" he asked simply,--"I should not have--I should not have cared for you. It was wrong. Forgive me----"

"There is nothing to forgive," she said, quite firmly. He drew away his hand then and hers fell limp at her side.

She stood motionless and watched his figure as it swung up the street.

Her heart bade her lips call out to him. But the million voices of the night bade her heart be still. And then, even as she watched, where he was, there was he not, but only blackness.

THE OLD PROFESSOR

(_A Portrait_)

I

Generally he was to be found in one of the galleries of the library, surrounded by tiers on tiers of books that formed for him a veritable barricade of erudition. Or it was as though he sat at the bottom of a well the bricks of which were the solid thoughts of men, themselves gone these many, many years. But there he would sit hour after hour and read, read, read, by the ragged light that filtered down upon him through the unscrubbed gla.s.s above. Always he was the first person the librarian met on the broad stone steps when he came over in the morning with his huge key to unlock the great, thick door and throw the building open for another day.

"Good-morning, sir," the old professor would say, in his dry, thin, little voice, and bow stiffly.

"'Morning," the librarian would respond, not so gruffly as characteristically, and bustle away.

Then, on tiptoe, the old professor would pa.s.s the swinging doors of baize and silently mount the gray iron stairs to the narrow galleries of the book-room where the life of his waking hours was lived among his unresponsive loves.

For he did love them, his books, whose friendship did not suffer change be the day gay or gray, and with them all about him--he the centre of the chaos of wisdom--he was happy. Among them he lived his simple life in sweet companionship and was joyous for the privilege, for without the books darkness would be his, whilst in them was light for his dim eyes and solace for his gently beating heart. So, day in, day out, in sunshine and in rain, in cold and snow and warmth, the old professor mounted, silently, the gray iron stairs in the childhood of the day, to come down again, as silently, when the lights were extinguished one by one and the broad campus without was wrapped in melancholy black.

Once he had been young. But that was in the day of hard work, when youth toiled to live. Then no lad was more sprightly than he. His early home was a long, low, rambling farmhouse in a southern state, where the flowers came early in the spring and bloomed and bloomed again late into autumn. There, to him, imaginative, dreaming, for all his boyish activity, the life out-of-doors was little less than partic.i.p.ation in a splendid pageant--the Pageant of Summer.

On the farm adjoining lived another boy and together they builded air-castles and procrastinated through the long, still evenings, when the work of the day was done. And of such sort were the castles that they lived in them, even as they worked afield, and sowed, and reaped, and sowed again.

Of all their dreams one was fairer than the others. It was of a college in the north where boys might go, and, once there, might learn the finer things. One day they resolved to make their goal that college. They toiled longer each day, then, until the red sun slipped below the wood-line to the west, and when the summer died they fared forth together.

Side by side they sat at lectures and at recitations. They lived together in a little room across the river where rooms were more cheaply to be had and where landladies were more accommodating and framed no loud objections to simple cooking on a smoky oil stove. Halcyon days those were to the lads, and the very experience of poverty whetted their appet.i.tes for the luxuries they dreamed one day would be for them.

Together they had from the hands of the president their diplomas, squares of sheepskin all written over in stately Latin--the golden fleece of their heroic quest.

He who later was to be the old professor, became the young professor then; and the friend of the four years in the little room across the river, where simple cooking was permitted, went away, nor ever came back again.

So near had been their lives that for a time the young professor was sad. A portrait on tin was all he had to recall the face of him who was gone, and frequently, of a Sunday afternoon which was set apart for a walk afield, he would seat himself beside the river and with the little portrait on his knee indulge in retrospections of the by-gone days when they were lads together on adjoining farms. Such fragrant reveries const.i.tuted the leaven needed in the young professor's life, for in the University circle he was much sought. He was a brilliant man; his ideas were "advanced" then, original and new. His conversation at dinner was sprightly, vivacious. He had the gallantry of generations of Southern gentlemen and was beloved of all the ladies. He was wont on occasion to pa.s.s the compliment with an almost Italian grace and he rejoiced in the tap of the fan upon his wrist which was his feminine reward.

"You must not fail us," a hostess would say, "you know Professor ---- will be here; such a brilliant man; such charming manners."

And the bidden guest would promise straightway, whilst the hostess would turn back from the door with a sigh, betokening, perhaps, a discontent that her Henry had not the graces of Professor ----. Then the children would cry to her from the nursery and she would forget----

Or--

"That is Professor ----," a fellow academician would say to a stranger on the campus as the erect, lithe-limbed young man veered round a corner. "A pillar, sir, a pillar of the inst.i.tution. The making of a great man, a great man, sir."

But all this was long before the advent of the old professor, long before the day when people ceased to seek him out, to fawn before his talent, and to cherish in memory the brilliant phrases that he was so apt in making. For when that day came he was no more noticed in his pa.s.sage to and fro across the campus than one of the rats that were wont to scamper from building to building in the dead hours of the night.

The transition from the young professor to the old professor was not sudden, but stealthily gradual. He loved the past, its doctrines and its methods. What had been _his_ youth should be, he thought, the youth for all time, and he never knew his error. Little by little, year by year, he became less often the honored guest at a faculty dinner. He clung to the manners of his youth and the younger wives called him an old fogey and smiled when his name was mentioned.

Thus it continued until he became a mere ghost of dead days, an occasional, living reminder of an ancient system of education or method of cla.s.s-room work long since relegated to that dusty storehouse where are heaped "old things" that have served their usefulness, flung aside to make room for _papier mache_ manikins and varnished maps of pasteboard with the mountains raised to scale and the winding streams indented.

And yet in the official circle of the inst.i.tution there lingered a certain reverence for the old professor. His sweetness of character, his gentleness of spirit, his humility, made it a sad duty to point the way to him; and so, from month to month, the president's request for his resignation was delayed, and then there occurred a little incident that secured for him, unknowing, another period of service.

The trembling country awaited application of the torch of war. In the college town a meeting was called and the citizenry swarmed into a church where the president of the University was to deliver an address.

On a bench at the front sat the old professor, his face uplifted, drawn with the pain that tore his gentle heart, for the South he loved was proving its disloyalty to the Union that he worshipped.

Through the open windows came a breeze of gentle April that moved the old professor's hair, and he lifted a trembling hand to his high smooth forehead.

Even as the president spoke there was heard a cry in the street that caused the faces of strong men to pale and their eyes to start.

"_Sumpter has been fired upon!_"

And at the cry right triumphed over wrong in the old professor's throbbing heart. Getting unsteadily upon his feet he raised his hand.

"Silence!" he called, and then, in the hush, he added, his voice trembling,

"I move that this meeting adjourn at once to Court House Square!"

A cheer was raised, and in the wake of the procession that was formed upon the instant the old professor marched--his head bowed, his eyes wet--to the open place where the speeches, now ablaze, with patriotic fervor, were resumed.

There were those who knew and somewhat understood what it had meant to the old professor to move that adjournment and when they spoke of him among themselves for many days thereafter it was with a little tremor of the voice and a certain mistiness of the eyes. And for three years he lived among them uncomplaining though stricken to the soul.

II

But the weeks became months and the months gathered into years, and after many years even the old professor himself forgot the incident save at such times as the appearance of a man in uniform recalled it to him.

At such times he was wont to close his book--his long slim finger marking the place--and let it fall upon his knee, whilst his mind galloped back across the desert of the years to hover an instant about the past's neglected grave.

Perhaps some ray of humor would creep in and part the clouds and the old professor's smile would reflect the glint of sunshine deeper in his heart. Then he would shake his head and sigh and open the book again, following the lines as he read, with that long, slim forefinger.

"A dream--a dream," he would murmur and forget.

And for a long time the memories of the dead days would sleep in his quiet mind.

He dwelt in peace in the midst of an active warring world; the peace that is the man's who feels that he has done his part, his little share, in making his world better. He knew his work was ended, that his time for rest had come, and knowing this he was satisfied to creep noiselessly and unnoticed into a dingy, unfrequented corner and there, with a book or two, a ream of pure white paper and a pen, to spend the time allowed him in the sweet society of his books.

Unhappy, you ask, this frail old man into whose thick hair the years had sprinkled many snowflakes?

All about him there was none happier.

Had you asked _him_, he would have said, no doubt, with that pale little smile of his: