It was to Reed Opdyke's influence that Scott owed the encouraging
plaudits of his chemistry professor.
In an elective system which, at that time, was still left quite
unmodified, Scott had happened upon the chemistry class by way of
filling up his courses for his sophomore year. He had been going on
with it indifferently for some months, when Opdyke had been transferred
to his division. Up to that time, Scott had liked the class but
temperately; that is, although it had seemed to him a useless frill
upon the garment of his education, he did not dislike it in the least,
and he had made a fair showing in his recitations.
Opdyke's coming into his division had changed all that. At first, Scott
merely had been possessed by a fury of desire to shine before his
idol's eyes. A little later on, Opdyke's manifest, albeit rather
casual, interest in the subject had led Scott to revise his earlier
notions carefully, to decide that there might be something in it, after
all. By the beginning of his junior year, Scott had won the tardy
attention of the head of the department. By the beginning of the
Christmas holidays of that junior year, the head of the department had
felt it his plain duty to explain to Scott that the road ahead of him
was likely to be an open one and easy. If he kept on as he had begun,
in time he might be head of a department on his own account. Absurd for
a fellow with a mind like his to be spending his time over rhetoric and
the classics! Science was his line, pure science; above all, chemistry.
And Scott had listened in silence, at first too much astounded by the
unexpected verdict to make answer. Then, as the head of the department
left off predicting and fell to making plans, Scott plucked up courage
to tell of the ministerial career supposedly ahead of him. The
professor, downright and enthusiastic in his utterances, pooh-poohed
the entire ministerial idea. Nonsense! Absurd! Spoil a chemist to make
a parson! Preposterous! Any one could preach, if he tried. Not one man
in a dozen could even make a quantitative analysis tally up, and get
anywhere near as much material out of it as went in. Waste on
flourishing gestures those lithe hands that were so obviously created
for the manipulation of such delicate things as balances and test-tubes
and the like! It was impossible. Scott must take the other idea home
with him and think it over carefully, during the coming holidays.
And Scott did take the idea home with him; but, from the first, he
found it out of the question to think it over carefully. How could he,
when, within himself, he knew that his feeling for the profession laid
down before him by ancestral tradition and by his mother's constant
urgings: that his feeling for the ministry was a perfunctory affection,
a wholly different matter from the passionate desire that throbbed
within him at the thought of giving up his life to scientific study. To
preach ancient beliefs that no human power could verify, or to work on
steadily, helping to broaden the field of truth, and proving all things
as he went along: these were the alternatives. Obviously there could be
no comparison between them.
Scott took the idea home with him, as Professor Mansfield had advised
him. All those first days at home, he hugged the idea tight, tight,
caressed it, gloated over it in secret, but allowed no one, not even
Catie, to share it with him. Before he went back again to college, he
would show it to his mother, would allow her to share his ecstasy at
the new opportunity opened out before him. Not yet, however. For the
first time in all his life, Scott Brenton was seriously in love. He
gave to this new vision a fervent passion such as Catie had been
powerless to arouse; like all young lovers, he desired a little time to
revel in secret over the mere fact that he knew he was in love.
Of his mother's consent to the change of plan, Scott Brenton felt no
doubt. Little by little, with his growth towards manhood, Scott had
come to dominate his mother more than either of them realized. His very
repression, his subordination in all his other relationships, helped
towards this end. It was but a natural reaction from his servile
position when away from home that, once more at home, he should assert
himself as potential master of the house. His virile will was dormant,
crushed, but it was by no means dead. And his mother, adoring him and
idealizing him despite her maternal qualms on his account, yielded
herself readily enough to his domination. And then, all at once, her
yielding came to a sudden end against the bed rock of her character.
Her own ambition, Scott's ultimate salvation, alike forbade him to
renounce his ministerial career.
After all, though, it was one of the pitched battles that settle
themselves without the final appeal to arms. On that winter night when
Scott had come in, buoyantly alive and hopeful, to be met upon the
threshold by his mother's prayer, the boy had realized that the fight
was on. Next morning, over the plate of sausages, the crisis came, and
went. Contrary to all his expectations, Scott left the table
vanquished, his light of hope gone out for ever. It was a meagre
consolation that, in thinking back upon the matter afterwards, he could
take to himself the credit of having spoken no word which could ever
fester in his mother's mind.
He had gone up to his room to lock the door and then to stand long at
the window, staring with unseeing eyes down into the village street. By
good rights, he should have seen one future, if not the other, opening
out before him in ever-widening vistas. At nineteen or so, however, one
is not too imaginative. Scott merely saw a vagrant dog trying to paw
his way through a deep drift that lay across the road. He had a fellow
feeling for the dog, when he gave up his effort and, sitting down in
the ruins of his tunnel, abandoned himself to the contemplation of a
flea.
After a while, he gave up his moody drumming on the pane, turned his
back to the bleak perspective and, seizing his hat, departed in search
of Catie. He found Catie mending a tear in the new frock she had worn,
the night before, and unsympathetic in proportion to her discontent.
The hollowness of the world was all about him, when he went back to
college, three days later.
His first intention had been to throw over all his scientific study
once for all. Forbidden the whole loaf, why whet his appetite by
nibbling at the one slice offered him? His common sense, however, aided
by the urging of Professor Mansfield, restored him to his reason. Scott
had lost no time at all in making a clean breast of the matter to
Professor Mansfield: his mother's dreams for him, her prejudices, his
own choice and his renouncing of it all for the sake of what his mother
had already given up for him. To his colleagues, the old professor
expressed himself with plain profanity. To Scott, he took a gentler
tone, spoke with appreciation of a mother such as Mrs. Brenton must be,
spoke of the ministerial profession with an admiration he was far from
feeling, and then craftily suggested to his favourite student that the
preaching of the gospel should go hand in hand with scientific truth.
In these modern days, a clergyman should be fully abreast of scientific
thought. Best keep on with his chemistry. It might be useful to him,
later on. Even eternal brimstone was susceptible of analysis.
Then, an instant later, the old professor could have bitten out his
tongue for his unholy jest. His penitence was in no wise lessened by
the quality of Scott's answering laugh. Best leave those fellows to
their ministerial sackcloth, without questioning the quality of the
flax from which it was spun. A man of Scott Brenton's calibre would do
no harm by his preaching. What was the sense of seeking to upset any
orthodox beliefs he might happen to have inherited? Besides, as long as
Scott kept up his sciences, he was reasonably sure of keeping up his
common sense and, what was a long way more important, his perspective
and his sense of fun.
Despite his disappointed resolutions to dismiss the boy from his mind,
the old professor, going his chemical way, worried about Scott. It
seemed to him, according to his bald phrasing, to be a cruel waste of
good material to make a parson out of what might have been a great
explorer, for, to Professor Mansfield's mind, the incomplete and
lengthening list of elements was just as reasonable a field for
exploration as was the Antarctic Continent, or Darkest Africa. The
results, indeed, of such exploration were bound to be a great deal the
more useful. The professor worried. In time, he laid his worries on the
dinner table before Reed Opdyke whose father had been a classmate of
his own.
"It's an awful shame about young Brenton," he observed, when he and
Opdyke and the tobacco had been left to themselves.
"What about him?" Opdyke questioned carelessly, as he picked up a
match.
"That he has talents of his own, and a conscience that belongs to his
mother. I believe in mothers, Reed; yours is a wonderful woman. But, in
this case, I doubt the wonder, and I deplore the way she keeps her
thumb on Brenton."
"You think she does?"
"I know it. Her confounded theories of sanctity are putting a binding
around all his brain, a tight binding that is going to shrink and cause
a pucker. Brenton has a first-class scientific mind, granted it gets
the training. Left to himself and the divinity school, he'll turn into
a perfect ass as preacher."
Opdyke shook his head.
"Nothing so possible as that, I'm afraid," he contradicted. "He'll just
settle down on his heels, and shuffle along in----" He hesitated for a
finish of his phrase.
The professor supplied it, and ruthlessly.
"Mental carpet slippers. Precisely. And I could give him boots and
spurs."
"Why don't you do it, then?" Opdyke asked him bluntly.
In the interest of the subject, the old professor forgot that he was
talking to one of his students and about another.
"Because he's got the very devil of a conscience, and won't let me.
There is a widowed mother in the background, and a perfect retinue of
preaching ancestors, whole dozens of them and all Baptists, and they
have conspired to poison the boy's mind with the notion that it's up to
him to preach, too. It would be all right, if he had anything to say;
but he hasn't. He's tongue-tied and unmagnetic at the best; what's
more, he has learned too many things to let him flaunt abroad the old
beliefs as battle standards. He's gone too far, and not far enough. His
life is bound to be a miserable sort of compromise, a species of
battledore and shuttlecock arrangement between the limits of the deep
sea and the devil." And then the professor pulled himself up short.
"Know him?" he queried curtly, as he lit his match.
Opdyke nodded.
"As one does know people one never meets out anywhere," he said.
"What do you mean by that?" The question was still curt.
"He waits at my joint."
"Of course. And?"
Opdyke laughed.
"How do you know there is an _and_, Professor?" he asked easily.
"Because I know you, and because I've heard of 'Reed's parson.' You're
your father's own son, Reed. You never could get a starveling like
Scott Brenton out of sight of your conscience. How much have you seen
of him?"
"Not much." And Opdyke gave a few details.