I attended Hilltop Academy until I was seventeen. Of course, I got a
good deal of instruction; of course, I grew. But it remains that
Gamaliel was for me the living point there. He had based his lever
upon an intention to see what was existence outside his father's
formula. His adventures upon that line were due to give him some
wounds and bruises, but he proceeded with the quest.
From June to September I kept to Restwell and more and more became a
farmer. There was need for all who could work to work. My
grandfather was now an old man. He had done and done largely his
part. More and more my mother and I helped him; took at last the
major part of effort. From September to June, in the short
afternoons, I worked still, in the fields, or with the stock, or at
the barn, or where not. Mandy's Jim, Ahasuerus, a hugely humorous
son of Africa named Bob, and I worked together. In the evenings came
book-work preparatory for next day's classes. All times and
countries the like has fallen to boys and girls. I, for one, do not
quarrel with what strenuousness there was.
And I remember many and many a strong splash of sunshine.
I graduated from the academy, John and Gamaliel and I together. I
led in some things, the others in others. Now stood out the question
whether my "education" should stop here, or whether I might be spared
and financed for the university. There was need of me at home, and
need of every dollar at home. If we could keep Restwell, it and my
profession lay in one before me. I should farm, with what help I
could employ, the three hundred acres.
I was a knower and lover of the country. I had, of course, often and
often again, dreams and longings, cloudy aspirations, passionate
tangential movements toward more or less vague otherwheres, other
spheres of action. But I loved home, I loved Restwell, I loved my
mother, my grandfather, Aunt Sarah, the colored folk, the animals,
trees and plants, sticks and stones. I could not see my grandfather
and Aunt Sarah happy elsewhere. My mother would take her Restwell
with her wherever she might be. But my grandfather was growing too
old to root elsewhere on this earth. And Aunt Sarah held to the
place like a trail of ivy.... Farming was a most useful profession.
So long as the world believed that it must have wheat and corn for
food, some part of the world must sow and tend and reap the same.
I told my mother, when we talked it over, on the door-step of the
summer-house in our old flowery tangle of a garden, that I thought I
had better take what education I had, and become what I already was,
that is, a farmer. I said that I shouldn't mind it; that, indeed,
there was much about it that I liked.
My mother listened, softly striking against her lips a piece of
honeysuckle. Then she said, "I want you to go to the university."
"How can I?"
"I've got the loan, Michael. Some day you'll pay it back to Carter
Warringer. I'm perfectly confident as to that!"
"But--"
"It's enough to let us hire Wilson Reynolds for the spring and fall
work. You'll be here, just the same, all the long summer. I want
you to go. I want you to be able to _choose_ whether you'll farm or
do something else. You'll take engineering. You want to do that,
don't you?"
"Yes, I want to. But--"
"Yes?"
"I do not know if it is what I shall do in the end."
"It will be part of what you do in the end. I fancy," said my
mother, "that there'll always be some kind of building roads and
driving tunnels and getting at mines and bridging rivers. Even when
we travel through the air!"
I went to the university--John and I, still together.
Gamaliel did not go. He was in trouble with his father. Doctor
Young wished him to continue with all the classics and become a
teacher. First he should be his father's assistant; then, when in
the course of nature that father passed on to his reward, there would
be for the son Hilltop, livelihood, usefulness, a great and dignified
profession.
"I do not want to teach," said Gamaliel. "Not, at least, until I
learn something."
"This is nothing to you then?" asked the father. His gesture
described a circle with himself seated in the middle.
Gamaliel answered: "I don't mean that. I love you, father, and I am
built on all that. But I want to stand on it all, and go on. You
want me to stay in it, and to be just _it_."
"You do not know what I want! You are simply selfish, ungrateful,
mulish--"
"If I could take chemistry or biology--"
"You will take the courses I indicate or none at all. Biology! That
is the way your Darwins and the like begin!"
Gamaliel turned pale. His mouth, his brows, made dark, straight
lines across his face. He spoke dryly, unemotionally. "I am not
going, father, to the university."
The other answered in a strangled voice: "Then you shall clerk it,
right here in Whitechurch! I hear that Walter Gilbert wants a youth
for the drug-store."
"May I go to see him about the job?"
"Yes!"
Gamaliel got up and said, "Thank you, father!" and left the study.
Doctor Young sat rigid in his chair. He saw his own anger before
him. He had intensity; he did not have breadth. He sat staring for
a long time, little by little relaxed. He put his head down upon the
desk and said a short prayer. Then, bolt upright again, he turned to
finish the letter before him. "Gamaliel" was the last written word.
Now he went on. "Gamaliel has always opposed me. Now he declares
that he will not go to the university. Very well! I am going to let
him find out his own mistake! I shall give him a year to work for
his own bread here in Whitechurch. I have just sent him to Walter
Gilbert, who, I hear, wants a clerk. A year, I have no doubt, will
teach the lesson. At eighteen he will be more amenable to reason and
my wishes than he is at seventeen. It will not be too late for him
then, though I should prefer that he went now. Of course, my pride
is hurt, but it is for the boy himself that I am anxious--"
So Gamaliel did not go with John and me to the university. Nor did
he go at eighteen.
He came to Restwell to tell me good-by. We went to the river and sat
on the bank above the old swimming-hole. "Don't you fellows forget
me!"
"We won't."
"Life's just a fight."
"We three don't fight."
"That's true. But fighting's such a sharp, close reality. It feels
realer--like pain! I've had a lot of pain."
We sat and threw small stones into the river. The rings widened.
"How's the old drug-store?"
"I don't mind it so much. I like the mixing things in the room
behind. Mr. Gilbert shows me a lot. I'm learning a lot. And I
never knew that he had all those books! My father doesn't know it
now. I'm there at night, you know. I take a book, and if any one
comes in to buy I sell. Then when the store's empty there's the book
again. And I like to get with my mind into the middle of all the
jars and things--the liquids and the powders and the grains and the
bark. But everybody that comes in seems to know that my father and I
have quarreled. I hate lectures and I hate pity!" He lifted a
good-sized stone and flung it. The water splashed, the rings spread.
"What are you going to do next year?"
"I don't know. What _are_ we, anyway? That's what I want to know!"
But I, no more than he, could answer that. We lay by the river, and
after a while we climbed the old fairy bank and coppice to the
graveyard, and passed through this, and so across the field to the
house and up to my room. And at the last it was again just:
"Don't you fellows forget me!"
"We won't!"
John and I went to the university. Major Dallas accompanied us, to
see us established, to show us his old haunts and my father's, to
introduce us to old professors. It was still in much the university
of the simpler Jeffersonian day. Uncle John left us; John and I
settled down. We felt strong men, and in the world!
We had rooms in one of the "ranges," all so cloister-like. But our
meals we took at Doctor X's house, Doctor X's wife being a cousin of
my mother's. We began to learn our fellow-students, to place
ourselves. We stood initiations. We sorted our friends and
no-friends....
The university was built upon a plan broad and free. A student had
great liberty. He might do or he might refrain from doing. Karma
piled in either case, but outside of some agreed-upon matters, none
attempted forcibly to mold karma. The student lived and took the
consequences.
In this year John and I skirted various obvious temptations. Twice
or thrice--perhaps oftener--we ceased to skirt them; we dived or
sank, we embraced them, mer-things in old depths.
But we are men of the air, not of the sea. That was an ancient home,
but we have parted from it. The sea is in our veins, but there comes
something other than the sea. It was hardly a question--or it was a
question, as you please--of virtue. Simply, we did not like the
taste, we turned, we revolted. Those ancient waters were no longer
for our thirst. John, here, came out first, and I followed him. We
stood upon the shore, we breathed the air. John said: "I don't see
any fun in all that. It's messy and dirty and small!"
So we came out and we found that we still had company.
We loved the university very well. For its outward appearance there
was the antique and beautiful simplicity that still sets it apart.
We had fondness for many who taught us. Even those we did not like
were no worse than stimuli. We liked the life, half free, half
bounded, the throng of our fellows, the friends we made, the
societies we joined. We liked our rooms, our independence. In
retrospect, those two years are thick, for me, with tastes, aromas,
touches, characteristic, endearing. Of course there were lassitudes,
dislikes, friction, and quarrels, stupidities, ugliness, hot heads
and hot hearts, tragic emotions. But these I let disintegrate. I
understand them and let them vanish. But the honey of the other I
conserve, and put it in its due cell in the great hive.
Out of the hundreds of our fellows, out of all the friendly sort, I
pick three. Royal Warringer, John's and my cousin, was there. I
admired then and pulled against Royal Warringer, and the doing both
persisted. His was the magnificent genius of material acquisition.
He knew all his life how to gather into barns, and it is a great
power. But he meant to live, just himself, and of course his wife
and children, his friends, his servants, his "court," upon the
wide-gathered store. Of course he gave gifts, but he regarded them
as gifts, and would direct where they fell. So I think that, in a
partial and temporary fashion, he was harmful, though he never saw
himself as harmful, and so was no hypocrite. And perhaps that is the
case with more of us than Royal. He was a little older and in the
year above John and me. He had the intention of being kind to us
because we were his kin. He had even then more money than had we.
He was a handsome fellow, with a large, dreamy, almost mystical face.
And there was Phillip Garrett who was born for political life in a
high sense. And Conrad Conrad who used to pass and repass, in the
dark or at dawn or sunset, the cell-like room of Poe. I think that
he tried to conjure Poe forth, to walk, cloaked, beside him.
Life flowed on, bright and strong.
I went home for Christmas. I went home for the summer, I went home
again at Christmas, and for three days to Flowerfield. I now began
to see Miriam as she will look and be in glory.