"Express train stalled in a snowdrift," said one. "The irascible old
white-haired gentleman in the Pullman smoker; the good-natured
travelling salesman; the wistful young widow in the day coach, with
her six-year-old blue-eyed little daughter. A coal-black Pullman
porter who braves the shrieking gale to bring in a tree from the
copse along the track. Red-headed brakeman (kiddies of his own at
home), frostbitten by standing all night between the couplings,
holding parts of broken steampipe together so the Pullman car will
keep warm. Young widow and her child, of course, sleeping in the
Pullman; white-haired old gentleman vacates his berth in their
favour. Good-natured travelling salesman up all night, making
cigar-band decorations for the Tree, which is all ready in the
dining car in the morning----"
* * * * *
"Old English inn on a desolate moor," said another. "Bright fire of
coals in the coffee room, sporting prints, yellow old newspaper
cutting framed on the mantelpiece describing gruesome murder
committed in the house in 1760. Terrible night of storm--sleet
tingling on the panes; crimson curtains fluttering in the draught;
roads crusted with ice; savoury fumes of roast goose, plum pudding,
and brandy. Pretty chambermaid in evident anxiety about something;
guest tries to kiss her in the corridor; she's too distrait to give
the matter proper attention. She has heard faint agonized cries
above the howling of the gale----"
* * * * *
"I like the sound of hymns," ventured a third. "Frosty vestibule of
fashionable church, rolling thunders of the organ, fringes of
icicles silvered by moonlight, poor old Salvation Army Santa Claus
shivering outside and tinkling his pathetic little bell. Humane
note: those scarlet Christmas robes of the Army not nearly as warm
as they look. Hard-hearted vestryman, member of old Knickerbocker
family, always wears white margins on his vest, suddenly touched by
compassion, empties the collection plate into Santa's bucket. Santa
hurries off to the S.A. headquarters crying 'The little ones will
bless you for this.' Vestryman accused of having pocketed the
collection, dreadful scandal, too proud to admit what he had done
with it----"
* * * * *
"Christmas Eve in the Ambrose Channel," cried a fourth. "A blizzard
blowing. The pilot boat, sheathed with ice, wallowing in the teeth
of the blinding storm, beats her way up to the lee of the great
liner. The pilot, suddenly taken ill, lies gasping on the sofa of
the tiny cabin. Impossible for him to take the great liner into
port; 2,000 passengers eager to get home for Christmas. But who is
this gallant little figure darting up the rope ladder with
fluttering skirts? The pilot's fourteen-year-old daughter. '_I_ will
take the _Nausea_ to her berth! I've spent all my life in the Bay,
and know every inch of the channel.' Rough quartermaster weeps as
she takes the wheel from his hands. 'Be easy in your mind, Captain,'
she says; 'but before the customs men come aboard tell me one
thing--have you got that bottle of Scotch for my Daddy?'"
* * * * *
"Big New York department store," insisted the fifth. "Beautiful
dark-haired salesgirl at the silk stocking counter. Her slender form
trembles with fatigue, but she greets all customers with brave,
sweet courtesy. Awful crush, every one buying silk stockings. Kindly
floorwalker, sees she is overtaxed, suggests she leave early. Dark
girl refuses; says she must be faithful to the Christmas spirit;
moreover, she daren't face the evening battle on the subway.
Handsome man comes to the counter to buy. Suddenly a scream, a thud,
horrified outcries. Hold back the crowd! Call a physician! No good;
handsome man, dead, murdered. Dark-haired girl, still holding the
fatal hat-pin, taken in custody, crying hysterically 'When he gave
me his name, I couldn't help it. He's the one who has caused all the
trouble!' Floorwalker reverently covers the body with a cloth, then
looks at the name on the sales slip. 'Gosh,' he cries, aghast, 'it's
Coles Phillips!'"
* * * * *
The gathering broke up, and the five men strolled out into the
blazing August sunshine. The sultry glow of midsummer beat down upon
them, but their thoughts were far away. They were five popular
authors comparing notes on the stories they were writing for the
Christmas magazines.
[Illustration]
IN MEMORIAM
FRANCIS BARTON GUMMERE
I often wonder what inward pangs of laughter or despair he may have
felt as he sat behind the old desk in Chase Hall and watched us
file in, year after year! Callow, juvenile, ignorant, and
cocksure--grotesquely confident of our own manly fulness of worldly
_savoir_--an absurd rabble of youths, miserable flint-heads indeed
for such a steel! We were the most unpromising of all material for
the scholar's eye; comfortable, untroubled middle-class lads most of
us, to whom study was neither a privilege nor a passion, but only a
sober and decent way of growing old enough to enter business.
We did not realize how accurately--and perhaps a trifle grimly--the
strong, friendly face behind the desk was searching us and sizing us
up. He knew us for what we were--a group of nice boys, too sleek,
too cheerfully secure, to show the ambition of the true student.
There was among us no specimen of the lean and dogged crusader of
learning that kindles the eye of the master: no fanatical Scot,
such as rejoices the Oxford or Cambridge don; no liquid-orbed and
hawk-faced Hebrew with flushed cheek bones, such as sets the
pace in the class-rooms of our large universities. No: we were a
hopelessly mediocre, well-fed, satisfied, and characteristically
Quakerish lot. As far as the battle for learning goes, we were
pacifists--conscientious objectors.
It is doubtful whether any really great scholar ever gave the best
years of his life to so meagrely equipped a succession of
youngsters! I say this candidly, and it is well it should be said,
for it makes apparent the true genius of Doctor Gummere's great
gift. He turned this following of humble plodders into lovers and
zealots of the great regions of English letters. There was something
knightly about him--he, the great scholar, who would never stoop to
scoff at the humblest of us. It might have been thought that his
shining gifts were wasted in a small country college, where not one
in fifty of his pupils could follow him into the enchanted lands of
the imagination where he was fancy-free. But it was not so. One may
meet man after man, old pupils of his, who have gone on into the
homely drudging rounds of business, the law, journalism--men whose
faces will light up with affection and remembrance when Doctor
Gummere's name is mentioned. We may have forgotten much of our
Chaucer, our Milton, our Ballads--though I am sure we have none of
us forgotten the deep and thrilling vivacity of his voice reciting:
O where hae ye been, Lord Randal, my son?
O where hae ye been, my handsome young man?
I hae been to the wild wood; mither, make my bed soon,
For I'm weary wi' hunting and fain wald lie doun.
But what we learned from him lay in the very charm of his
personality. It was a spell that no one in his class-room could
escape. It shone from his sparkling eye; it spoke in his
irresistible humour; it moved in every line of that well-loved face,
in his characteristic gesture of leaning forward and tilting his
head a little to one side as he listened, patiently, to whatever
juvenile surmises we stammered to express. It was the true learning
of which his favourite Sir Philip Sidney said:
This purifying of wit, this enriching of memory, enabling of
judgment, and enlarging of conceit, which commonly we call
learning, under what name soever it come forth or to what
immediate end soever it be directed, the final end is to lead
and draw us to as high a perfection as our degenerate souls,
made worse by their clay lodgings, can be capable of.
Indeed, just to listen to him was a purifying of wit, an enriching
of memory, an enabling of judgment, an enlarging of imagination. He
gave us "so sweet a prospect into the way as will entice any man to
enter into it."
He moved among all human contacts with unerring grace. He was never
the teacher, always the comrade. It was his way to pretend that we
knew far more than we did; so with perfect courtesy and gravity, he
would ask our opinion on some matter of which we knew next to
nothing; and we knew it was only his exquisiteness of good manners
that impelled the habit; and we knew he knew the laughableness of
it; yet we adored him for it. He always suited his strength to our
weakness; would tell us things almost with an air of apology for
seeming to know more than we; pretending that we doubtless had known
it all along, but it had just slipped our memory. Marvellously he
set us on our secret honour to do justice to this rare courtesy. To
fail him in some task he had set became, in our boyish minds, the
one thing most abhorrent in dealing with such a man--a discourtesy.
He was a man of the rarest and most delicate breeding, the finest
and truest gentleman we had known. Had he been nothing else, how
much we would have learnt from that alone.
What a range, what a grasp, there was in his glowing, various mind!
How open it was on all sides, how it teemed with interests, how
different from the scholar of silly traditional belief! We used to
believe that he could have taught us history, science, economics,
philosophy--almost anything; and so indeed he did. He taught us to
go adventuring among masterpieces on our own account, which is the
most any teacher can do. Luckiest of all were those who, on one
pretext or another, found their way to his fireside of an evening.
To sit entranced, smoking one of his cigars,[*] to hear him talk of
Stevenson, Meredith, or Hardy--(his favourites among the moderns)
to marvel anew at the infinite scope and vivacity of his
learning--this was to live on the very doorsill of enchantment.
Homeward we would go, crunching across the snow to where Barclay
crowns the slope with her evening blaze of lights, one glimpse
nearer some realization of the magical colours and tissues of the
human mind, the rich perplexity and many-sided glamour of life.
[* It was characteristic of him that he usually smoked _Robin
Hood_, that admirable 5-cent cigar, because the name, and the
picture of an outlaw on the band, reminded him of the 14th
century Ballads he knew by heart.]
It is strange (as one reviews all the memories of that good friend
and master) to think that there is now a new generation beginning at
Haverford that will never know his spell. There is a heavy debt on
his old pupils. He made life so much richer and more interesting for
us. Even if we never explored for ourselves the fields of literature
toward which he pointed, his radiant individuality remains in our
hearts as a true exemplar of what scholarship can mean. We can never
tell all that he meant to us. Gropingly we turn to little pictures
in memory. We see him crossing Cope Field in the green and gold of
spring mornings, on his way to class. We see him sitting on the
verandah steps of his home on sunny afternoons, full of gay and
eager talk on a thousand diverse topics. He little knew, I think,
how we hung upon his words. I can think of no more genuine tribute
than this: that in my own class--which was a notoriously cynical and
scoffish band of young sophisters--when any question of religious
doubt or dogma arose for discussion among some midnight group,
someone was sure to say, "I wish I knew what Doctor Gummere thought
about it!" We felt instinctively that what he thought would have
been convincing enough for us.
He was a truly great man. A greater man than we deserved, and there
is a heavy burden upon us to justify the life that he gave to our
little college. He has passed into the quiet and lovely tradition
that surrounds and nourishes that place we all love so well. Little
by little she grows, drawing strength and beauty from human lives
around her, confirming herself in honour and remembrance. The
teacher is justified by his scholars. Doctor Gummere might have gone
elsewhere, surrounded by a greater and more ambitiously documented
band of pupils. He whom we knew as the greatest man we had ever
seen, moved little outside the world of learning. He gave himself to
us, and we are the custodians of his memory.
Every man who loved our vanished friend must know with what
realization of shamed incapacity one lays down the tributary pen. He
was so strong, so full of laughter and grace, so truly a man, his
long vacation still seems a dream, and we feel that somewhere on the
well-beloved campus we shall meet him and feel that friendly hand.
In thinking of him I am always reminded of that fine old poem of Sir
Henry Wotton, a teacher himself, the provost of Eton, whose life has
been so charmingly written by another Haverfordian--(Logan Pearsall
Smith).