The Mettle of the Pasture Part 13

"It is all food, Anna, edible and nourishing to different mouths and stomachs. Some very great men have lived on the roots of knowledge, the simplest roots. And here is poetry for dates and wild honey; and novels for cocoanuts and mushrooms. And here is Religion: that is for manna."

"What is at the very top?"

His eyes rested upon the highest row of books.

"These are some of the loftiest growths, new buds of the mind opening toward the unknown. Each in its way shows the best that man, the earth-animal, has been able to accomplish. Here is a little volume for instance which tells what he ought to be--and never is. This small volume deals with the n.o.blest ideals of the greatest civilizations. Here is what one of the finest of the world's teachers had to say about justice. Aspiration is at that end. This little book is on the sad loveliness of Greek girls; and the volume beside it is about the brief human chaplets that Horace and some other Romans wore--and then trod on. Thus the long story of light and shadow girdles the globe. If you were nothing but a spirit, Anna, and could float in here some night, perhaps you would see a mysterious radiance streaming upward from this shelf of books like the northern lights from behind the world--starting no one knows where, sweeping away we know not whither--search-light of the mortal, turned on dark eternity."

She stood a little behind him and watched him in silence, hiding her tenderness.

"If I were a book," she said thoughtlessly, "where should I be?"

He drew the fingers of one hand lingeringly across the New Testament.

"Ah, now don't do that," she cried, "or you shall have no dinner.

Here, turn round! look at the dust! look at this cravat on one end!

look at these hands! March upstairs."

He laid his head over against hers.

"Stand up!" she exclaimed, and ran out of the room.

Some minutes later she came back and took a seat near the door.

There was flour on her elbow; and she held a spoon in her hand.

"Now you look like yourself," she said, regarding him with approval as he sat reading before the bookcase. "I started to tell you what Harriet told me."

He looked over the top of his book at her.

"I thought you said you stopped the stream at its source. Now you propose to let it run down to me--or up to me: how do you know it will not run past me?"

"Now don't talk in that way," she said, "this is something you will want to know," and she related what Harriet had chronicled.

VIII

When she had left the room, he put back into its place the volume he was reading: its power over him was gone. All the voices of all his books, speaking to him from lands and ages, grew simultaneously hushed. He crossed the library to a front window opening upon the narrow rocky street and sat with his elbow on the window-sill, the large fingers of one large hand unconsciously searching his brow--that habit of men of thoughtful years, the smoothing out of the inner problems.

The home of Professor Hardage was not in one of the best parts of the town. There was no wealth here, no society as it impressively calls itself; there were merely well-to-do human beings of ordinary intelligence and of kindly and unkindly natures. The houses, constructed of frame or of brick, were crowded wall against wall along the sidewalk; in the rear were little gardens of flowers and of vegetables. The street itself was well shaded; and one forest tree, the roots of which bulged up through the mossy bricks of the pavement, hung its boughs before his windows. Throughout life he had found so many companions in the world outside of mere people, and this tree was one. From the month of leaves to the month of no leaves--the period of long hot vacations--when his eyes were tired and his brain and heart a little tired also, many a time it refreshed him by all that it was and all that it stood for--this green tent of the woods arching itself before his treasured shelves. In it for him were thoughts of cool solitudes and of far-away greenness; with tormenting visions also of old lands, the crystal-aired, purpling mountains of which, and valleys full of fable, he was used to trace out upon the map, but knew that he should never see or press with responsive feet.

For travel was impossible to him. Part of his small salary went to the family of a brother; part disappeared each year in the buying of books--at once his need and his pa.s.sion; there were the expenses of living; and Miss Anna always exacted appropriations.

"I know we have not much, but then my little boys and girls have nothing; and the poor must help the poorer."

"Very well," he would reply, "but some day you will be a beggar yourself, Anna."

"Oh, well then, if I am, I do not doubt that I shall be a thrifty old mendicant. And I'll beg for _you_! So don't you be uneasy; and give me what I want."

She always looked like a middle-aged Madonna in the garb of a housekeeper. Indeed, he was wont to call her the Madonna of the Dishes; but at these times, and in truth for all deeper ways, he thought of her as the Madonna of the Motherless. Nevertheless he was resolute that out of this many-portioned salary something must yet be saved.

"The time will come," he threatened, "when some younger man will want my professorship--and will deserve it. I shall either be put out or I shall go out; and then--decrepitude, uselessness, penury, unless something has been h.o.a.rded. So, Anna, out of the frail uncertain little basketful of the apples of life which the college authorities present to me once a year, we must save a few for what may prove a long hard winter."

Professor Hardage was a man somewhat past fifty, of ordinary stature and heavy figure, topped with an immense head. His was not what we call rather vaguely the American face. In Germany had he been seen issuing from the lecture rooms of a university, he would have been thought at home and his general status had been a.s.sumed: there being that about him which bespoke the scholar, one of those quiet self-effacing minds that have long since pa.s.sed with entire humility into the service of vast themes. In social life the character of a n.o.ble master will in time stamp itself upon the look and manners of a domestic; and in time the student acquires the lofty hall-mark of what he serves.

It was this perhaps that immediately distinguished him and set him apart in every company. The appreciative observer said at once: "Here is a man who may not himself be great; but he is at least great enough to understand greatness; he is used to greatness."

As so often is the case with the strong American, he was self-made--that glory of our boasting. But we sometimes forget that an early life of hardship, while it may bring out what is best in a man, so often wastes up his strength and burns his ambition to ashes in the fierce fight against odds too great. So that the powers which should have carried him far carry him only a little distance or leave him standing exhausted where he began.

When Alfred Hardage was eighteen, he had turned his eyes toward a professorship in one of the great universities of his country; before he was thirty he had won a professorship in the small but respectable college of his native town; and now, when past fifty, he had never won anything more. For him ambition was like the deserted martin box in the corner of his yard: returning summers brought no more birds. Had his abilities been even more extraordinary, the result could not have been far otherwise. He had been compelled to forego for himself as a student the highest university training, and afterward to win such position as the world accorded him without the prestige of study abroad.

It became his duty in his place to teach the Greek language and its literature; sometimes were added cla.s.ses in Latin. This was the easier problem. The more difficult problem grew out of the demand, that he should live intimately in a world of much littleness and not himself become little; feel interested in trivial minds at street corners, yet remain companion and critic of some of the greatest intellects of human kind; contend with occasional malice and jealousy in the college faculty, yet hold himself above these carrion pa.s.sions; retain his intellectual manhood, yet have his courses of study narrowed and made superficial for him; be free yet submit to be patronized by some of his fellow-citizens, because they did him the honor to employ him for so much as a year as sage and moral exampler to their sons.

Usually one of two fates overtakes the obscure professional scholar in this country: either he shrinks to the dimensions of a true villager and deserts the vastness of his library; or he repudiates the village and becomes a cosmopolitan recluse--lonely toiler among his books. Few possess the breadth and equipoise which will enable them to pa.s.s from day to day along mental paths, which have the Forum of Augustus or the Groves of the Academy at one end and the babbling square of a modern town at the other; remaining equally at home amid ancient ideals and everyday realities.

It was the fate of the recluse that threatened him. He had been born with the scholar's temperament--this furnished the direction; before he had reached the age of twenty-five he had lost his wife and two sons--that furrowed the tendency. During the years immediately following he had tried to fill an immense void of the heart with immense labors of the intellect. The void remained; yet undoubtedly compensation for loneliness had been found in the fixing of his affections upon what can never die--the inexhaustible delight of learning.

Thus the life of the book-worm awaited him but for an interference excellent and salutary and irresistible. This was the constant companionship of a sister whose nature enabled her to find its complete universe in the only world that she had ever known: she walking ever broad-minded through the narrowness of her little town; remaining white though often threading its soiling ways; and from every life which touched hers, however crippled and confined, extracting its significance instead of its insignificance, shy harmonies instead of the easy discords which can so palpably be struck by any pa.s.sing hand.

It was due to her influence, therefore, that his life achieved the twofold development which left him normal in the middle years; the fresh pursuing scholar still but a man practically welded to the people among whom he lived--receiving their best and giving his best.

But we cannot send our hearts out to play at large among our kind, without their coming to choose sooner or later playfellows to be loved more than the rest.

Two intimacies entered into the life of Professor Hardage. The first of these had been formed many years before with Judge Ravenel Morris. They had discovered each other by drifting as lonely men do in the world; each being without family ties, each loving literature, each having empty hours. The bond between them had strengthened, until it had become to each a bond of strength indeed, mighty and uplifting.

The other intimacy was one of those for which human speech will never, perhaps, be called upon to body forth its describing word.

In the psychology of feeling there are states which we gladly choose to leave unlanguaged. Vast and deep-sounding as is the orchestra of words, there are scores which we never fling upon such instruments--realities that lie outside the possibility and the desirability of utterance as there are rays of the sun that fall outside the visible spectrum of solar light.

What description can be given in words of that bond between two, when the woman stands near the foot of the upward slope of life, and the man is already pa.s.sing down on the sunset side, with lengthening afternoon shadows on the gray of his temples--between them the cold separating peaks of a generation?

Such a generation of toiling years separated Professor Hardage from Isabel Conyers. When, at the age of twenty, she returned after years of absence in an eastern college--it was a tradition of her family that its women should be brilliantly educated--he verged upon fifty. To his youthful desires that interval was nothing; but to his disciplined judgment it was everything.

"Even though it could be," he said to himself, "it should not be, and therefore it shall not."

His was an idealism that often leaves its holder poor indeed save in the possession of its own incorruptible wealth. No doubt also the life-long study of the ideals of cla.s.sic time came to his guidance now with their admonitions of exquisite balance, their moderation and essential justness.

But after he had given up all hope of her, he did not hesitate to draw her to him in other ways; and there was that which drew her unfathomably to him--all the more securely since in her mind there was no thought that the bond between them would ever involve the possibility of love and marriage.

His library became another home to her. One winter she read Greek with him--authors not in her college course. Afterward he read much more Greek to her. Then they laid Greek aside, and he took her through the history of its literature and through that other n.o.ble one, its deathless twin.

When she was not actually present, he yet took her with him through the wide regions of his studies---set her figure in old Greek landscapes and surrounded it with dim shapes of loveliness--saw her sometimes as the perfection that went into marble--made her a portion of legend and story, linking her with Nausicaa and Andromache and the lost others. Then quitting antiquity with her altogether, he pa.s.sed downward with her into the days of chivalry, brought her to Arthur's court, and invested her with one character after another, trying her by the ladies of knightly ideals--reading her between the lines in all the king's idyls.

But last and best, seeing her in the clear white light of her own country and time--as the spirit of American girlhood, pure, refined, faultlessly proportioned in mental and physical health, full of kindness, full of happiness, made for love, made for motherhood. All this he did in his hopeless and idealizing worship of her; and all this and more he hid away: for he too had his crypt.

So watching her and watching vainly over her, he was the first to see that she was loved and that her nature was turning away from him, from all that he could offer--subdued by that one other call.

"Now, Fates," he said, "by whatsoever names men have blindly prayed to you; you that love to strike at perfection, and pa.s.s over a mult.i.tude of the ordinary to reach the rare, stand off for a few years! Let them be happy together in their love, their marriage, and their young children. Let the threads run freely and be joyously interwoven. Have mercy at least for a few years!"