which not a day had been lost from his work. My favorites, I remember,
were the Tarascon stories. Ages and ages ago, when Paul Meyer was a
very young man, one of the brilliant pioneers in the study of Old
French, the municipal authorities of Tarascon employed him to come
and decipher the Town records, faithfully kept from the beginning of
time, but in their strange medieval scripts, with the abbreviations,
conventional signs, and handwritings of the past centuries, wholly
unintelligible to the modern Tarasconians. The young savant spent a
whole winter there, studying and copying out these manuscripts, a first
experience of the intense, bright pleasure such work was to give him
all his life long. The quick-hearted southerners in the town, loving
change and novelty, delighted to see the young, new face among them,
welcomed him with meridional hospitality, and filled his leisure hours
with the noisy, boisterous fun of Provence. He made friends there whom
he never forgot, and every year after that he made the long trip to
Tarascon to have a reunion with those comrades of his youth. But he
lived long, much longer than the quickly-consumed southerners, and one
by one, the friends of Tarascon were absent from the annual reunion.
They were fewer and fewer, older and older, those men used up by the
fever of living, and they fell away from the side of the vigorous man
who had chosen for his own the unchanging world of the intellect. “And
finally, last year,” said Professor Meyer on one occasion, “when I went
back, they were all gone. Every one! I had to go to the cemetery to
have a visit with them.”
As I gazed at him, astounded by the unbroken matter-of-factness of
his tone, no self-pity in it, he went on, his voice brightening into
enthusiasm, “So I went and had another look at the town records. Such a
glorious collection of scripts. Not one known style missing!”
He regretted deeply the death of the much-loved Gaston Paris, his great
colleague at the Collège de France, whose name was always linked with
his in the glory of the renaissance of Old-French studies, but his
lamentations were over the work unfinished, the priceless manuscripts
yet unedited. When the news came of the tragic family disgrace of one
of the greatest of German editors of Old-French texts, Paul Meyer was
moved almost to tears. They were not of sympathy with the sorrow of the
other scholar, but of exasperation that any man, especially one filled
with irreplaceable knowledge of his subject, could let so ephemeral a
thing as human relations distract him from the rich fields to be tilled
in the kingdom of words.
During the second trial of Dreyfus, Paul Meyer was called to testify
as a handwriting expert and gave his testimony in favor of Dreyfus,
the evidence, he said, being unmistakable. It was at the height of the
Dreyfus re-trial, when all France was throbbing with hate and suspicion
like an ulcer throbbing with fever. Professor Meyer was abominably
treated by the opposition, attacked in the streets, insulted,
boycotted, his classes filled with jeering young men who yelled him
down when he tried to speak. His bearing through this trial is one of
the momentous impressions of my life. He did not resent it, he made no
effort to resist it, he struck no melodramatic attitude, as did many
of the fine men then fighting for justice in France. He smothered the
flame out, down to the last spark by his total disregard of it. What
did he care for howling fanatics in one camp or another? Nothing! He
had been asked to pass judgment on a piece of handwriting and he had
done it. There was nothing more to be said.
I cannot forget the slightest shade of his expression as he stood
one day, on the platform of his classroom, chalk in hand, ready to
write out an outline on the blackboard, waiting, while the yelling
crowd of “_manifestants_,” mostly young men in flowing black neckties,
with straggling attempts at beards on their pimply faces, stamped
and hooted and shrieked out, “Dirty Jew! What were you paid? Shut
up! Shut up! What was your price, dirty Jew?” and other things less
printable. And yet, although I can shut my eyes now and see that
harsh, big-nosed, deeply-lined old face, with the small, bright eyes
under the bristling white eyebrows, I can not think of any words to
describe its expression--not scornful, not actively courageous, not
resentful, not defiant; rather the quiet, unexcited, waiting look of a
man in ordinary talk who waits to go on with what he has to say until
a pounding truck of iron rails has time to pass the windows. He stood
looking at his assailants, the chalk ready in his bony fingers, and
from him emanated so profound a sense of their entire unimportance, of
the utterly ephemeral quality of their emotion compared to the life
of the consonant he was about to discuss, that little by little they
were silenced. Their furious voices flattened out to an occasional
scream which sounded foolish even to their own ears. They looked at
each other, got up in a disorderly body and stamped out of the room.
The last one might have heard Professor Meyer’s high, squeaky voice
stating, “Thus in Picardy and in the north of Normandy, Latin _C_
before _a_ did not undergo the change noted in other provinces, and we
still find it pronounced....”
The pale, keen seminarists in their long, black gowns, and the American
girl, whipped out their notebooks and were at once caught up into the
Paul-Meyer world where no storms blew.
When, three or four years after the beginning of this friendship--it
was not precisely that, but I cannot think of another name to call
it--I made my final choice and stepped out of his safe, windless realm
into human life, it was with some apprehension that I went to tell him
that I was engaged to be married and would study Philology no more. I
might have known better than to be apprehensive. What did he care? What
was one more or less among the disciples of Philology, as long as the
words were there? Also, he laughingly refused to consider my decision
as final. He seemed to stand at the door of Philology, calling after me
with perfect good humor, as I walked away, “When you’re tired of all
that, come back. I’m always here.”
In the years after this, whenever we passed through Paris I went to see
him, stepping back into my girlhood as I stepped over the threshold of
the École des Chartes. Professor Meyer was very old now, but showed
not the slightest sign of weakness or infirmity. One evening when I
went hurriedly to say good-by before we sailed for home, I found him
in his study, in that rich, half-basement room, lined with books. The
green-shaded lamp burned clear and steady as though there were no wind
in the world to shake a flame. The gray, plain, old man looked up
from the yellow parchment he was deciphering, and in a sudden gust I
had a new revelation of the insatiability of the human heart. I was a
complete, fulfilled, vigorous woman, a happy wife, a writer beginning
to feel an intoxicating interest in creative work, joyously awaiting
the birth of my first child; but I knew for an instant there, the
bitterest envy of the lot of the old scholar, half buried though he was
in the earth, safe in the infinite security of his active brain.
The last time I saw him was two years later. We had been in Italy and
were to pass through Paris on the way home. My little daughter was
eighteen months old, a mere baby still, and I wrote Professor Meyer to
ask him if he could not for once reverse the usual procedure and come
to see me. He answered, setting a day, and informing me that he had
been and still was very ill. “I will give you details when I see you.”
When he came into the room I was shocked at his appearance, and
horrified when he told me what had happened to him. He had been as
usual in the summer, at Oxford, delving in the unclassified treasures
of the Bodleian, and had started home. The Channel steamer arrived late
at night at Boulogne, and he had chosen to sleep there, instead of
taking the night train to Paris.
He had gone to sleep apparently in his usual health, but when he woke
up in the morning he had lost his control of words. He could not bring
them into the simplest order. He could not command a single one to his
use. He could not say who he was, nor where he wanted to go, although
he knew these facts perfectly. The moment he tried to speak, there
swooped down between him and his meaning, a darkening throng of words.
All the words in the world were there, Greek, Sanscrit, Provençal,
Italian, Old-French, tearing furiously through his mind. But not the
simple words in his own language to say that he was Professor Paul
Meyer of the École des Chartes, who wanted to buy a ticket to Paris.
He stood there, helpless, facing the staring chambermaids, cut off
from them, from every one by this wild, invisible storm. They thought
him an idiot, escaped from his friends, and ran away from him. As he
told me about it, he looked sick and gray, and the sweat stood out on
his forehead.
It had lasted for three days. For three days and three nights he had
felt himself drowning in words, words that flooded up about him so that
he was fighting for air. Never for an instant was he able to take his
attention from their crazy flight through his mind, and never able to
stop one long enough to use it. He suffered, suffered more than he had
thought any human being could and retain consciousness, had after the
first day fallen into a high fever, so that they feared for his life.
Hour after hour he had lain on his bed, helpless, trying with all his
strength to fight away those words long enough to remember what he
wished to say.
And then, on the morning of the fourth day, click! Something snapped
into place inside his mind, and there he was, very worn, very weak, but
perfectly himself again, Professor Paul Meyer of the École des Chartes.
He had reached home safely, though strengthless and exhausted, and the
next morning had wakened again to that horror. It had lasted an hour
then, but it had come twice since--once as he was lecturing before his
class!
He never knew when it might be upon him. As he opened his mouth to
speak at any moment, he could not be sure that words would not burst
from his command again. Even as he told me this, he glanced at my baby
daughter, whom I had brought out to show him. For an instant his face
whitened in so terrible a glare of panic that I screamed and clutched
his arm. It was over. He was drawing a long breath and wiping his
shaking lips with his handkerchief. “For an instant as I looked at
her I could not think of the word ‘baby,’” he said pitifully. “It was
there, waiting to come on me again.”
It seemed to me that he was not fit to go about the streets alone, and
when he started to go away I asked him if he would not like to have me
take him home. He hung his proud old head and said nothing. I went to
get my hat and as no one happened to be at home with whom to leave the
baby, I took her on my arm.
We went silently through the familiar Paris streets, the stooping old
man towering on one side of me, the rosy baby heavy on my shoulder.
When we reached his door, his concierge saw us and came out to meet us,
nodding knowingly to me, and behind his back, tapping her forehead. I
took his great bony old hand for a last clasp and said good-by. He went
away up the stairs led by the concierge.
Three months after this I read in a newspaper a cabled notice of the
death of the distinguished scholar, M. Paul Meyer, founder and for many
years head of the École des Chartes. He died, so the notice said, “from
an obscure form of aphasia.”
“WHILE ALL THE GODS ...”
“_While all the gods Olympus’ summit crowned,
Looking from high to see the wondrous sight._”
ILIAD, XXII.
I was spading up the earth in the dahlia-bed, when the children came
up, a shouting band of them, just out of school, and noticed that
the angleworms were “out.” This first, indubitable sign of spring in
Vermont always suggests to adolescent Vermonters the first fishing
expedition. But ten-year-olds and under think of the early brood of
first-hatched chicks.
“Hey, Jimmy, _angleworms_!”
“Carl, run get a can!”
“Here’s a fat one!”
They swooped down on me and squatted along the edge of the spaded
earth, pecking and snatching and chattering like a flock of sparrows.
As I spaded on, I heard bits of their talk, “Won’t the chicks just love
them!” “First worms _those_ chicks ever saw.” “No, Carl, that’s too
few, let’s wait till we get a lot. It’s such fun to drop in a whole
bunch.” “They _love_ angleworms so!”
Then I heard the inevitable fanciful suggestion from the imaginative
one of the group, “I bet we seem to the chicks just like giants ... no,
giants are always mean ... like gods.”
They fell on this idea, chattering and snatching, as they had at the
worms: “_Let’s_ be gods! I’ll be Jupiter.”
“I want to be Mars.”
“Loki! Loki!”
“I want to be Thor!”
“No, _I_ want to be Thor!”
“I was just going to be Thor, myself!”
Everybody wanted to be Thor, it seemed. They trooped off to the
poultry-yard, still disputing the question.
When I passed the brooder-house a little later, a group of exasperated
gods hung over the low wire-netting, gesticulating and crying out on
the idiocy of chicks. They fell on me for sympathy, and from their
babbling account I made out that the chicks had acted just as chicks
always act and always have acted from the beginning of time.
The gods had proudly put down in the midst of the little world of their
beneficiaries the mass of angleworm wealth which they had gathered with
such good intentions of giving pleasure.
“All they had to do was to pitch right in and enjoy themselves,” cried
Jupiter, wrathfully.
And what had they done? Well, first of all they had been afraid,
running to look at the squirming heap of treasure, peeping shrilly
in agitation, and running frantically away with fluttering wings and
hearts.
The circle of omnipotents, hanging over the wire-netting had been able
to endure this foolishness with an approach to the necessary god-like
toleration of the limitations of a lesser race. One of the Thors, it
seemed, the six-year-old-one, had tried to hurry up the progress of
the race, by catching one of his pin-headed charges and holding him
firmly in a benevolent small hand, directly in front of the delicious
food, “where he couldn’t _help_ seeing how good it was, seems ’s if,”
explained Thor Number Three, to me.
But the chick had, it appeared, been perfectly capable of not seeing
how good it was, because his mind was entirely taken up With his terror
at being held. He had merely emitted one frenzied screech of horror
after another till the other chicks began to run about and screech
too, and the older, more experienced gods had sharply told young Thor
that he didn’t know so much about this god-business as he thought he
did, and that experience had told them the only thing to do was to let
the chicks alone till they got used to a new idea. That always took
forever, they informed their young colleague.
So after this they had waited and waited and _waited_, while the chicks
fluttered, and peeped and ran away from what they really wanted above
everything; from what the gods had so kindly put there for them to
enjoy.
“Gee _whiz_!” said Mars disdainfully. “Wouldn’t you think they’d know
enough for _that_! There was room for every last one of them to stand
around the pile, and eat all they wanted, without stirring a toe.”
Finally, one bold adventurer had struck his beak experimentally into
the pile, pulled out a tasty piece of meat, and turned aside to gobble
it down.
And _then_ what?
Did the other chicks follow his sensible example and begin at last to
profit by their opportunity.
“No! no! no!” A chorus of all the gods assured me that nothing like
that had happened. Instead, with shrill twitters of excitement, all the
twenty or more chicks had thrown themselves on that one, to wrest his
bit from him.
“Honest to goodness, they _did_!” Loki affirmed to me, passionately,
as if feeling that I could not possibly believe in such unreason if I
had not seen it.
The chick with the worm had taken to his heels, unable to swallow his
prize because of the hunt against him. Up and down the little world
of their yard, he had run frantically, wildly, and silently (because
of his mouth being full). And up and down, wildly, frantically and
vociferously (their mouths being empty) his fellow-chicks had pursued
him, bent on catching him and taking away from him whatever it was he
prized enough to try to possess. As he turned and doubled to escape
them, they turned and doubled in a pack, slipping, falling, and
trampling on each other in their blind fury.
Presently, “What do you _think_!” cried the oldest of the Thors. “He
got so rattled that he lost his piece of worm out of his mouth, but the
others didn’t give him time to tell them that. Anyhow, they’d yelled
and carried on so, they had him up in the air. He didn’t know by that
time what he _was_ doing; and he kept on legging it as hard as ever,
and they after him.”
By and by, this insane flight and agitation had so exhausted them
all that they were staggering feebly on their tiny legs, and unable
to emit more than hoarse squawks as they ran. Then, apparently by
chance, as he darted zigzag to and fro, he had run under a corner of
the brooder. Instantly ... ah-h-h, the grateful warmth and darkness had
suggested rest to his weary soul; with a long murmured “che-e-eep” of
utter relief, he had settled down against the wall of the brooder to
close his eyes. And each of his pursuers, as they dashed in after him,
had seized on the Heaven-sent opportunity for rest after the terrible
tension of the struggle for existence, imposed on them by a cruel fate,
and had with a sigh and a relieved, whispered twitter, given himself
over to sleep and dreams.
At the time when I came up, every chick was sound asleep in the
brooder, while outside in the middle of their world, lay the untouched
pile of angleworms, bare and open to view under the bright spring sky.
“Can you beat it!” said Mars contemptuously.
He turned away from such unimaginable imbecility to a new idea, “Say,
kids!” he bellowed, although they were all within touching distance of
him, “let's be cops and robbers!”
They flared up like tinder to a spark, “All right! I’ll be Chief of
Police!”
“I’ll be a detective!”
“I’ll be the robber captain ... cave’s under the hay, as usual.”
“No, _I_ wanted to be robber captain!”
“No, me, me!”
They all wanted to be robber captain, it seemed. They streamed away to
the barn, wrangling over this.
All but one. The youngest Thor, newer than the others to the
god-business, still hung over the wire-netting, grieving, “Seems ’s if
... if we could only _tell_ them! They _love_ angleworms so!” he said
pityingly. “If I could only think of some way to _teach_ them how to
stand around quietly, and each one get all he wanted to. They’d have
such a _good_ time!” he yearned over them.
As I said nothing, he asked of the world in general, “Why won’t they?
Oh, why _won’t_ they?”
I let fall insidiously, “I wonder how the angleworms like it?” The
little god stared at me with startled eyes; and then at the worms. He
looked at them as though he saw them for the first time. His tender
young face was fairly vacant with his surprise before a new idea.
Then he began slowly to climb over the wire-netting.
When I went back to the dahlia-bed, he was carefully burying the
angleworms again.
His young face wore an expression of puzzled bewilderment.
SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
When the elders of our family could think of nothing else to worry
about they put in their time to good advantage on little Cousin Maria
Pearl Manley. Yes--Maria Pearl--that was really the poor child’s name,
given in baptism. You can see that her troubles began early. That name
was symbolical of what her life was to be, sharply divided between her
mother’s family (they were the ones who insisted on the Maria) and
her father’s folks, who stood out for the Pearl. Her father had died
before she was born, and her mother lived only a few months after the
baby came, and was so mortally ill that no one thought of naming the
poor little girl. It was after her mother’s death, when the two hostile
families could collect themselves, that the long struggle over the
child began by giving her that name.
Thereafter she was Maria for six months of the year, the period when
she stayed with the Purdons; and Pearl the other half-year, when she
was with her father’s family, the Manleys. “The poor little tyke, not
even a fixed name of her own,” my grandmother used to say, pitying the
child’s half-yearly oscillations between those two utterly dissimilar
houses “where there’s nothing the way it should be in either one!” The
circle of compassionate elders used to continue, “Dear, dear! What
can the poor little thing ever learn, with such awful examples always
before her eyes.”
As I look back now, I must admit that such severe characterizations
were really not due to the natural tendency of all elders to be sure
that children are being badly brought up. Those two houses which
formed the horizon of Maria Pearl’s life were certainly extravagant
examples of how not to conduct life. The Purdon grandfather and
grandmother and aunt were the strictest kind of church people (the
kind who make you want to throw a brick through the church-windows),
narrow, self-righteous, Old-Testament folks, who dragged little Maria
(the “Pearl” was never pronounced inside their doors) to Church and
Sunday-School and prayer-meeting and revivals and missionary meetings,
and made her save all her pennies for the heathen. Not that she had
very many to save, for the Purdons, although very well-to-do, were
stingier than any other family in town. They loved money, it tore at
the very fibers of their being to part with it, and they avoided
this mental anguish with considerable skill. Although their competent
“management” allowed them to live comfortably, there were few occasions
which brought them to the point of letting any actual cash out of
their hands. The dark, plain, well-fitting garments which clothed
little Maria were never bought, but made over out of her grandmother’s
clothes; the soap which kept her clothes immaculately clean had cost
no money, but was part of the amazing household economies in which
old Mrs. Purdon was expert and into which she introduced Maria with
conscientious care. The child learned to darn and patch and how to make
soap out of left-over bits of fat, and how to use the apple-culls for
jelly and how, year after year, to retrim last season’s hat for this.
From morning till night she lived in a close, airless round of
intensive housekeeping and thrift. She spread newspapers down over the
rugs, so the sun should not fade them; she dried every scrap of orange
peel to use as kindling, she saved the dried beef jars to use for jams,
she picked berries all day long instead of playing, and then sat up
late with Aunt Maria and Grandmother, picking them over and canning
them, on the stove in the woodshed, to avoid litter in the kitchen.
She always wore gingham aprons, even to school, which no other children
did, and she was treated as though she had offended against the Holy
Ghost, if she forgot to wash her rubbers and put them in their place
in the closet under the stairs. She was rigorously held to a perfect
performance of her share of the housework, making up her bed with the
fear of the Lord in her poor little heart lest the corners be not
square enough, poking desperately at the corner of the windows she
washed and polished, and running her finger anxiously over the dishes
she wiped to be sure they had that glass-smooth surface which only
repeated rinsings in very hot water can give. Then when all was done,
her reward was to take her seat in their appallingly neat sitting-room
and, to the accompaniment of Aunt Maria’s reading aloud out of a church
paper, to set tiny stitches in the stout, unbleached cotton of which
her underwear was made. They were really dreadful, the six months she
passed with her mother’s people.