(_A Portrait_)
I
Generally he was to be found in one of the galleries of the library,
surrounded by tiers on tiers of books that formed for him a veritable
barricade of erudition. Or it was as though he sat at the bottom of a
well the bricks of which were the solid thoughts of men, themselves gone
these many, many years. But there he would sit hour after hour and read,
read, read, by the ragged light that filtered down upon him through the
unscrubbed glass above. Always he was the first person the librarian met
on the broad stone steps when he came over in the morning with his huge
key to unlock the great, thick door and throw the building open for
another day.
"Good-morning, sir," the old professor would say, in his dry, thin,
little voice, and bow stiffly.
"'Morning," the librarian would respond, not so gruffly as
characteristically, and bustle away.
Then, on tiptoe, the old professor would pass the swinging doors of
baize and silently mount the gray iron stairs to the narrow galleries of
the book-room where the life of his waking hours was lived among his
unresponsive loves.
For he did love them, his books, whose friendship did not suffer change
be the day gay or gray, and with them all about him--he the centre of
the chaos of wisdom--he was happy. Among them he lived his simple life
in sweet companionship and was joyous for the privilege, for without the
books darkness would be his, whilst in them was light for his dim eyes
and solace for his gently beating heart. So, day in, day out, in
sunshine and in rain, in cold and snow and warmth, the old professor
mounted, silently, the gray iron stairs in the childhood of the day, to
come down again, as silently, when the lights were extinguished one by
one and the broad campus without was wrapped in melancholy black.
Once he had been young. But that was in the day of hard work, when youth
toiled to live. Then no lad was more sprightly than he. His early home
was a long, low, rambling farmhouse in a southern state, where the
flowers came early in the spring and bloomed and bloomed again late into
autumn. There, to him, imaginative, dreaming, for all his boyish
activity, the life out-of-doors was little less than participation in a
splendid pageant--the Pageant of Summer.
On the farm adjoining lived another boy and together they builded
air-castles and procrastinated through the long, still evenings, when
the work of the day was done. And of such sort were the castles that
they lived in them, even as they worked afield, and sowed, and reaped,
and sowed again.
Of all their dreams one was fairer than the others. It was of a college
in the north where boys might go, and, once there, might learn the finer
things. One day they resolved to make their goal that college. They
toiled longer each day, then, until the red sun slipped below the
wood-line to the west, and when the summer died they fared forth
together.
Side by side they sat at lectures and at recitations. They lived
together in a little room across the river where rooms were more cheaply
to be had and where landladies were more accommodating and framed no
loud objections to simple cooking on a smoky oil stove. Halcyon days
those were to the lads, and the very experience of poverty whetted their
appetites for the luxuries they dreamed one day would be for them.
Together they had from the hands of the president their diplomas,
squares of sheepskin all written over in stately Latin--the golden
fleece of their heroic quest.
He who later was to be the old professor, became the young professor
then; and the friend of the four years in the little room across the
river, where simple cooking was permitted, went away, nor ever came back
again.
So near had been their lives that for a time the young professor was
sad. A portrait on tin was all he had to recall the face of him who was
gone, and frequently, of a Sunday afternoon which was set apart for a
walk afield, he would seat himself beside the river and with the little
portrait on his knee indulge in retrospections of the by-gone days when
they were lads together on adjoining farms. Such fragrant reveries
constituted the leaven needed in the young professor's life, for in the
University circle he was much sought. He was a brilliant man; his ideas
were "advanced" then, original and new. His conversation at dinner was
sprightly, vivacious. He had the gallantry of generations of Southern
gentlemen and was beloved of all the ladies. He was wont on occasion to
pass the compliment with an almost Italian grace and he rejoiced in the
tap of the fan upon his wrist which was his feminine reward.
"You must not fail us," a hostess would say, "you know Professor ----
will be here; such a brilliant man; such charming manners."
And the bidden guest would promise straightway, whilst the hostess would
turn back from the door with a sigh, betokening, perhaps, a discontent
that her Henry had not the graces of Professor ----. Then the children
would cry to her from the nursery and she would forget----