Ann Arbor Tales Part 41

"I have my books. I live well. I have my room. I have my bed. I have my meals--and some of them I prepare myself. And I have a friend. Could a man ask more? As I grow older I find myself agreeing more and more with David Th.o.r.eau, who, you will remember, once said, as he pa.s.sed a tool box standing beside a railway, that he could not understand why a man should want a better home than such a box would make."

And he would laugh with himself at the philosophic quip.

His friend in his later years was another old man; not a scholar, but a man who had worked hard and lived hard, and at sunset took his rest. He too, had many graces.

On Sunday afternoons whenever the weather would permit the old professor sought him out and they walked afield, or by the river where the old professor had loved to wander as a boy. If their path were barricaded by a turnstile it always meant a lengthy parley as to whom should cross it first.

"After you, my friend," the old professor would say, bowing low.

Lifting a protesting hand, "No," the other would respond, "after you."

"I insist," the old professor would contend.

The other would indicate the turnstile with a gesture. "You first," he would repeat.

And so they would stand there bowing, insisting, until, neither seeing fit to give way, they would retrace their steps and seek a path that had no turnstile.

But once, filled with zeal to explore the wood beyond a certain stile, an ingenious plan occurred to the old professor which was immediately carried to a successful issue. Both clambered over the fence at one side of the opening and proceeded on their way.

And for a long time after each held the incident as a joke against the other.

The conversation of the friends on such occasions was of the life that lay before them, serious; never of the past. And they agreed in their philosophy at all points. They never argued.

"Well, friend," the old professor said one day, "when the time comes for us to go I hope we may go together--may continue our walk."

"I hope we may," the other answered.

"I have always thought," the old professor added with a twinkle in his eyes, "that there must be many a pleasant walk in heaven--after one has left the pavement."

III

Alike as they were, there was one joy that now and then came into the old professor's life that the other could not share.

It came to him when, at widely separated intervals, there crossed his path a man with hair almost as white as his own, who in the days long gone had sat before him on the benches of the cla.s.s-room as a student, and absorbed his wider wisdom. When such an one he met, the old professor's voice always caught in his throat and he sought to cover the confusion that he suffered by a closer pressure of his hand. Then, the emotion pa.s.sing, something of the old light would flame up in his eyes.

He would step back and exclaim: "Well! well! well!" Then the memories would surge back into his mind and he would gaze abstractedly without speaking.

"You remember me?" the other old fellow would ask, gaily.

"_Remember_ you!" the old professor would exclaim and nudge him, playfully. "Remember _you_? Well, well, I guess I couldn't _forget_ you if I tried! Why you were the scamp that tied the white mule to my desk-leg and left him there over night so I should be greeted by his bray when I entered the room in the morning! Remember _you_! Ha! ha!

I've been waiting all these years to get at you!"

Then he would stride upon the white haired "grad" with hand raised, ominously, but with the merry twinkle still lighting up his eyes; whilst the victim would quail mockingly, with a brighter twinkle in his own.

The old professor was known often to have kissed gray haired boys when they met on alumni day.

"I have always called you the mule-pupil," he would continue as, arm in arm they strolled back and forth along the broad main corridor.

"And do you remember what you said to the cla.s.s when you found that mule at your desk, in the morning?" the scamp would ask, with a chuckle, perhaps.

"No, what?"

"Ah, I remember it as though it were yesterday; how you came bustling into the room. You saw the mule. We were all boiling inside. You did not scowl. You did not rant. You did not call down upon our heads the venging hand of a just heaven. You just turned to us as calm as you are now...."

The old professor would gurgle here, with rare delight.

" ... and said, 'young gentlemen, I perceive that you have already been provided with an instructor quite competent to teach you all you will ever be able to learn!' And then you walked out of the room with a polite 'good-morning.'"

Here the former student would roar with laughter.

"You don't tell me," the old professor would exclaim. "You don't tell me I said _that_! Well, well, well; that _was_ rather hard on you boys, wasn't it? I'd forgotten all about it. I--I just remembered the _mule_!"

"And do you recall," the man who was a boy, again would ask, "how you found all the wood from the big wood-box in the south-wing corridor piled against your door?"

The old professor would wrinkle his forehead here and stare thoughtfully at the floor.

"No, I don't seem to recollect," he would say.

"Well you _did_; we boys had piled it there, of course. Must have been a cord at least. Then we hung around to see what you would do."

"And what _did_ I do?"

"You began to remove the pile, stick by stick, and to pack them all away in the great wood-box."

Here the old professor was always wont to shake with silent laughter.

"Well, we stood it as long as we could, and then Billy Green--you remember Billy Green; poor Billy, he was killed at Gettysburg. Billy went up to you, as brave as you please, and said: 'Professor, I don't know who _piled_ this wood against your door but _un-piling_ it is no work for you.' And then he shouted to us, 'come on, boys,' and we fell to and got the wood away from that door in about two jerks of a lamb's tail. But didn't we feel small! Professor, why didn't you have a few of us fired bodily?"

"Oh, no, no, my friend," the old professor would perhaps exclaim, quickly. "Expel a boy for being a boy! It is not for you or me, dear sir, to seek to improve upon the handiwork of G.o.d!"

And there would ensue another laugh, and many more in the three days to follow, and then commencement would be over and the old student would go back to Kansas City and the old professor to his books.

But for more than three days a subtle effect of the meeting would remain with him. For many days he would carry his head a bit higher. A color flush would show upon his hollow cheeks; his step would take on an unaccustomed elasticity. For a discriminating Fate had touched to the old professor's lips the cup of life and he had sipped of the contents, and another year was his.

IV

I remember him best as I saw him first. It was in the late afternoon of a golden day in mid-October. A companion pointed him out to me as we approached the ivy-green library. He was coming slowly down the steps, one arm encircling a great bundle of books, one hand fumbling at his neck scarf. The clothes he wore were of another day. The coat was full-skirted, long, and bulging at the breast. About his thin throat was twisted a black silk stock, frayed and rusty, over which the loose and unstarched collar rolled. On his broad-toed shoes his baggy trousers fell in folds. There was a seeming rigidity to the creases that induced the thought they must have been so always; like the wrinkles in the wrappings of a mummy. And yet, infinitely pathetic as the picture was, I knew that such a coat, such a stock, even such a round crowned, broad brimmed soft hat as that he wore, once had made the old professor a man of fashion--a quarter of a century before.

"That's the oldest professor on the campus," my companion said. "In college? No. He hasn't taught a cla.s.s for twenty years. He was an old fogey and they removed him, I'm told, to make room for a younger man.

He's only waiting for the end now. Every one says he'd give five years to get back on the faculty. You'll usually find him near the library, either just going in or just coming out. He hides himself all day among the books. The fellows call him 'The Ghost.' I've been told he saved a little from his salary every quarter and that now he lives in a little back room somewhere near the campus and cooks his own meals."

And whenever after that I saw him it was this last phrase that recurred to me with almost painful insistency ... "lives in a little back room somewhere ... and cooks his own meals."

It was hard for youth to realize that such could be humanity's reward to a man who had given a life of patience, forebearance, toil, and sacrifice, to make his little world the better for his having lived within it.

We stood apart and watched him as he came slowly down the broad, stone steps. At the last he stopped and looked up at the sky. We saw his face more clearly then. It was thin, pale, drawn about the mouth, but the eyes were infinitely tender. His lips trembled and seemed to form words that were not uttered. Then he walked on. Twice, before he turned the corner of the ivy-covered wall, he raised a hand to his face and pa.s.sed the dangling finger-tips of his black cloth glove across his eyes.