John Marvel, Assistant Part 1

John Marvel, a.s.sistant.

by Thomas Nelson Page.

I

MY FIRST FAILURE

I shall feel at liberty to tell my story in my own way; rambling along at my own gait; now going from point to point; now tearing ahead; now stopping to rest or to ruminate, and even straying from the path whenever I think a digression will be for my own enjoyment.

I shall begin with my college career, a period to which I look back now with a pleasure wholly incommensurate with what I achieved in it; which I find due to the friends I made and to the memories I garnered there in a time when I possessed the unprized treasures of youth: spirits, hope, and abounding conceit. As these memories, with the courage (to use a mild term) that a college background gives, are about all that I got out of my life there, I shall dwell on them only enough to introduce two or three friends and one enemy, who played later a very considerable part in my life.

My family was an old and distinguished one; that is, it could be traced back about two hundred years, and several of my ancestors had accomplished enough to be known in the history of the State--a fact of which I was so proud that I was quite satisfied at college to rest on their achievements, and felt no need to add to its distinction by any labors of my own.

We had formerly been well off; we had, indeed, at one time prior to the Revolutionary War, owned large estates--a time to which I was so fond of referring when I first went to college that one of my acquaintances, named Peck, an envious fellow, observed one day that I thought I had inherited all the kingdoms of the earth and the glory of them. My childhood was spent on an old plantation, so far removed from anything that I have since known that it might almost have been in another planet.

It happened that I was the only child of my parents who survived, the others having been carried off in early childhood by a scourge of scarlet fever, to which circ.u.mstance, as I look back, I now know was due my mother's sadness of expression when my father was not present. I was thus subjected to the perils and great misfortune of being an only child, among them that of thinking the sun rises and sets for his especial benefit. I must say that both my father and mother tried faithfully to do their part to counteract this danger, and they not only believed firmly in, but acted consistently on, the Solomonic doctrine that to spare the rod is to spoil the child. My father, I must say, was more lenient, and I think gladly evaded the obligation as interpreted by my mother, declaring that Solomon, like a good many other persons, was much wiser in speech than in practice. He was fond of quoting the custom of the ancient Scythians, who trained their youth to ride, to shoot, and to speak the truth. And in this last particular he was inexorable.

Among my chief intimates as a small boy was a little darkey named "Jeams." Jeams was the grandson of one of our old servants--Uncle Ralph Woodson. Jeams, who was a few years my senior, was a sharp-witted boy, as black as a piece of old mahogany, and had a head so hard that he could b.u.t.t a plank off a fence. Naturally he and I became cronies, and he picked up information on various subjects so readily that I found him equally agreeable and useful.

My father was admirably adapted to the conditions that had created such a character, but as unsuited to the new conditions that succeeded the collapse of the old life as a shorn lamb would be to the untempered wind of winter. He was a Whig and an aristocrat of the strongest type, and though in practice he was the kindest and most liberal of men, he always maintained that a gentleman was the choicest fruit of civilization; a standard, I may say, in which the personal element counted with him far more than family connection. "A king can make a n.o.bleman, sir," he used to say; "but it takes Jehovah to make a gentleman." When the war came, though he was opposed to "Locofocoism" as he termed it, he enlisted as a private as soon as the State seceded, and fought through the war, rising to be a major and surrendering at Appomattox. When the war closed, he shut himself up on his estate, accepting the situation without moroseness, and consoling himself with a philosophy much more misanthropic in expression than in practice.

My father's slender patrimony had been swept away by the war, but, being a scholar himself, and having a high idea of cla.s.sical learning and a good estimate of my abilities--in which latter view I entirely agreed with him--he managed by much stinting to send me to college out of the fragments of his establishment. I admired greatly certain principles which were stamped in him as firmly as a fossil is embedded in the solid rock; but I fear I had a certain contempt for what appeared to me his inadequacy to the new state of things, and I secretly plumed myself on my superiority to him in all practical affairs. Without the least appreciation of the sacrifices he was making to send me to college, I was an idle dog and plunged into the amus.e.m.e.nts of the gay set--that set whose powers begin below their foreheads--in which I became a member and aspired to be a leader.

My first episode at college brought me some _eclat_.

II

THE JEW AND THE CHRISTIAN

I arrived rather late and the term had already begun, so that all the desirable rooms had been taken. I was told that I would either have to room out of college or take quarters with a young man by the name of Wolffert--like myself, a freshman. I naturally chose the latter. On reaching my quarters, I found my new comrade to be an affable, gentlemanly fellow, and very nice looking. Indeed, his broad brow, with curling brown hair above it; his dark eyes, deep and luminous; a nose the least bit too large and inclining to be aquiline; a well-cut mouth with mobile, sensitive lips, and a finely chiselled jaw, gave him an unusual face, if not one of distinction. He was evidently bent on making himself agreeable to me, and as he had read an extraordinary amount for a lad of his age and I, who had also read some, was lonely, we had pa.s.sed a pleasant evening when he mentioned casually a fact which sent my heart down into my boots. He was a Jew. This, then, accounted for the ridge of his well-carved nose, and the curl of his soft brown hair. I tried to be as frank and easy as I had been before, but it was a failure. He saw my surprise as I saw his disappointment--a coolness took the place of the warmth that had been growing up between us for several hours, and we pa.s.sed a stiff evening. He had already had one room-mate.

Next day, I found a former acquaintance who offered to take me into his apartment, and that afternoon, having watched for my opportunity, I took advantage of my room-mate's absence and moved out, leaving a short note saying that I had discovered an old friend who was very desirous that I should share his quarters. When I next met Wolffert, he was so stiff, that although I felt sorry for him and was ready to be as civil as I might, our acquaintance thereafter became merely nominal. I saw in fact, little of him during the next months, for he soon forged far ahead of me. There was, indeed, no one in his cla.s.s who possessed his acquirements or his ability. I used to see him for a while standing in his doorway looking wistfully out at the groups of students gathered under the trees, or walking alone, like Isaac in the fields, and until I formed my own set, I would have gone and joined him or have asked him to join us but for his rebuff. I knew that he was lonely; for I soon discovered that the cold shoulder was being given to him by most of the students. I could not, however, but feel that it served him right for the "airs" he put on with me. That he made a brilliant exhibition in his cla.s.ses and was easily the cleverest man in the cla.s.s did not affect our att.i.tude toward him; perhaps, it only aggravated the case. Why should he be able to make easily a demonstration at the blackboard that the cleverest of us only bungled through? One day, however, we learned that the Jew had a room-mate. Bets were freely taken that he would not stick, but he stuck--for it was John Marvel. Not that any of us knew what John Marvel was; for even I, who, except Wolffert, came to know him best, did not divine until many years later what a nugget of unwrought gold that homely, shy, awkward John Marvel was!

It appeared that Wolffert had a harder time than any of us dreamed of.

He had come to the inst.i.tution against the advice of his father, and for a singular reason: he thought it the most liberal inst.i.tution of learning in the country! Little he knew of the narrowness of youth! His mind was so receptive that all that pa.s.sed through it was instantly appropriated. Like a plant, he drew sustenance from the atmosphere about him and trans.m.u.ted what was impalpable to us to forms of beauty. He was even then a man of independent thought; a dreamer who peopled the earth with ideals, and saw beneath the stony surface of the commonplace the ideals and principles that were to reconstruct and resurrect the world.

An admirer of the Law in its ideal conception, he reprobated, with the fury of the Baptist, the generation that had belittled and cramped it to an instrument of torture of the human mind, and looked to the millenial coming of universal brotherhood and freedom.

His father was a leading man in his city; one who, by his native ability and the dynamic force that seems to be a characteristic of the race, had risen from poverty to the position of chief merchant and capitalist of the town in which he lived. He had been elected mayor in a time of stress; but his popularity among the citizens generally had cost him, as I learned later, something among his own people. The breadth of his views had not been approved by them.

The abilities that in the father had taken this direction of the mingling of the practical and the theoretical had, in the son, taken the form I have stated. He was an idealist: a poet and a dreamer.

The boy from the first had discovered powers that had given his father the keenest delight, not unmingled with a little misgiving. As he grew up among the best cla.s.s of boys in his town, and became conscious that he was not one of them, his inquiring and aspiring mind began early to seek the reasons for the difference. Why should he be held a little apart from them? He was a Jew. Yes, but why should a Jew be held apart?

They talked about their families. Why, his family could trace back for two thousand and more years to princes and kings. They had a different religion. But he saw other boys with different religions going and playing together. They were Christians, and believed in Christ, while the Jew, etc. This puzzled him till he found that some of them--a few--did not hold the same views of Christ with the others. Then he began to study for himself, boy as he was, the history of Christ, and out of it came questions that his father could not answer and was angry that he should put to him. He went to a young Rabbi who told him that Christ was a good man, but mistaken in His claims.

So, the boy drifted a little apart from his own people, and more and more he studied the questions that arose in his mind, and more and more he suffered; but more and more he grew strong.

The father, too proud of his son's independence to coerce him by an order which might have been a law to him, had, nevertheless, thrown him on his own resources and cut him down to the lowest figure on which he could live, confident that his own opinions would be justified and his son return home.

Wolffert's first experience very nearly justified this conviction. The fact that a Jew had come and taken one of the old apartments spread through the college with amazing rapidity and created a sensation. Not that there had not been Jews there before, for there had been a number there at one time or another. But they were members of families of distinction, who had been known for generations as bearing their part in all the appointments of life, and had consorted with other folk on an absolute equality; so that there was little or nothing to distinguish them as Israelites except their name. If they were Israelites, it was an accident and played no larger part in their views than if they had been Scotch or French. But here was a man who proclaimed himself a Jew; who proposed that it should be known, and evidently meant to a.s.sert his rights and peculiarities on all occasions. The result was that he was subjected to a species of persecution which only the young Anglo-Saxon, the most brutal of all animals, could have devised.

As college filled rapidly, it soon became necessary to double up, that is, put two men in one apartment. The first student a.s.signed to live with Wolffert was Peck, a sedate and cool young man--like myself, from the country, and like myself, very short of funds. Peck would not have minded rooming with a Jew, or, for that matter, with the Devil, if he had thought he could get anything out of him; for he had few prejudices, and when it came to calculation, he was the multiplication-table. But Peck had his way to make, and he coolly decided that a Jew was likely to make him bear his full part of the expenses--which he never had any mind to do. So he looked around, and within forty-eight hours moved to a place out of college where he got reduced board on the ground of belonging to some peculiar set of religionists, of which I am convinced he had never heard till he learned of the landlady's idiosyncrasy.

I had incurred Peck's lasting enmity--though I did not know it at the time--by a witticism at his expense. We had never taken to each other from the first, and one evening, when someone was talking about Wolffert, Peck joined in and said that that inst.i.tution was no place for any Jew. I said, "Listen to Peck sniff. Peck, how did you get in?" This raised a laugh. Peck, I am sure, had never read "Martin Chuzzlewit"; but I am equally sure he read it afterward, for he never forgave me.

Then came my turn and desertion which I have described. And then, after that interval of loneliness, appeared John Marvel.

Wolffert, who was one of the most social men I ever knew, was sitting in his room meditating on the strange fate that had made him an outcast among the men whom he had come there to study and know. This was my interpretation of his thoughts: he would probably have said he was thinking of the strange prejudices of the human race--prejudices to which he had been in some sort a victim all his life, as his race had been all through the ages. He was steeped in loneliness, and as, in the mellow October afternoon, the sound of good-fellowship floated in at his window from the lawn outside, he grew more and more dejected. One evening it culminated. He even thought of writing to his father that he would come home and go into his office and accept the position that meant wealth and luxury and power. Just then there was a step outside, and someone stopped and after a moment, knocked at the door. Wolffert rose and opened it and stood facing a new student--a florid, round-faced, round-bodied, bow-legged, blue-eyed, awkward lad of about his own age.

"Is this number ----?" demanded the newcomer, peering curiously at the dingy door and half shyly looking up at the occupant.

"It is. Why?" Wolffert spoke abruptly.

"Well, I have been a.s.signed to this apartment by the Proctor. I am a new student and have just come. My name is Marvel--John Marvel." Wolffert put his arms across the doorway and stood in the middle of it.

"Well, I want to tell you before you come in that I am a Jew. You are welcome not to come, but if you come I want you to stay." Perhaps the other's astonishment contained a query, for he went on hotly:

"I have had two men come here already and both of them left after one day. The first said he got cheaper board, which was a legitimate excuse--if true--the other said he had found an old friend who wanted him. I am convinced that he lied and that the only reason he left was that I am a Jew. And now you can come in or not, as you please, but if you come you must stay." He was looking down in John Marvel's eyes with a gaze that had the concentrated bitterness of generations in it, and the latter met it with a gravity that deepened into pity.

"I will come in and I will stay; Jesus was a Jew," said the man on the lower step.

"I do not know him," said the other bitterly.

"But you will. I know Him."

Wolffert's arms fell and John Marvel entered and stayed.

That evening the two men went to the supper hall together. Their table was near mine and they were the observed of all observers. The one curious thing was that John Marvel was studying for the ministry. It lent zest to the jokes that were made on this incongruous pairing, and jests, more or less insipid, were made on the Law and the Prophets; the lying down together of the lion and the lamb, etc.

It was a curious mating--the light-haired, moon-faced, slow-witted Saxon, and the dark, keen Jew with his intellectual face and his deep-burning eyes in which glowed the misery and mystery of the ages.

John Marvel soon became well known; for he was one of the slowest men in the college. With his amusing awkwardness, he would have become a b.u.t.t except for his imperturbable good-humor. As it was, he was for a time a sort of object of ridicule to many of us--myself among the number--and we had many laughs at him. He would disappear on Sat.u.r.day night and not turn up again till Monday morning, dusty and disheveled.

And many jests were made at his expense. One said that Marvel was practising preaching in the mountains with a view to becoming a second Demosthenes; another suggested that, if so, the mountains would probably get up and run into the sea.

When, however, it was discovered later that he had a Sunday-school in the mountains, and walked twelve miles out and twelve miles back, most of the gibers, except the inveterate humorists like myself, were silent.

This fact came out by chance. Marvel disappeared from college one day and remained away for two or three weeks. Wolffert either could not or would not give any account of him. When Marvel returned, he looked worn and ill, as if he had been starving, and almost immediately he was taken ill and went to the infirmary with a case of fever. Here he was so ill that the doctors quarantined him and no one saw him except the nurse--old Mrs. Denny, a wrinkled and bald-headed, old, fat woman, something between a lightwood knot and an angel--and Wolffert.

Wolffert moved down and took up his quarters in the infirmary--it was suggested, with a view to converting Marvel to Judaism--and here he stayed. The nursing never appeared to make any difference in Wolffert's preparation for his cla.s.ses; for when he came back he still stood easily first. But poor Marvel never caught up again, and was even more hopelessly lost in the befogged region at the bottom of the cla.s.s than ever before. When called on to recite, his brow would pucker and he would perspire and stammer until the cla.s.s would be in ill-suppressed convulsions, all the more enjoyable because of Leo Wolffert's agonizing over his wretchedness. Then Marvel, excused by the professor, would sit down and mop his brow and beam quite as if he had made a wonderful performance (which indeed, he had), while Wolffert's thin face would grow whiter, his nostrils quiver, and his deep eyes burn like coals.

One day a spare, rusty man with a frowzy beard, and a lank, stooping woman strolled into the college grounds, and after wandering around aimlessly for a time, asked for Mr. Marvel. Each of them carried a basket. They were directed to his room and remained with him some time, and when they left, he walked some distance with them.

It was at first rumored and then generally reported that they were Marvel's father and mother. It became known later that they were a couple of poor mountaineers named Shiflett, whose child John Marvel had nursed when it had the fever. They had just learned of his illness and had come down to bring him some chickens and other things which they thought he might need.