Teed had a splendid mind for everything material and modern, but he
could not and would not master the languages he called dead. His
mistranslations of the classics were themselves classics. They sent the
other students into uproars; but Litton saw nothing funny in them. When
he received Teed's examination papers he marked them with a pitiless
exactitude.
Teed reached the end of his junior year with a heap of conditions in the
classics. Litton insisted that he should not be allowed to graduate
until he cleaned them up. This meant that Teed must tutor all through
his last vacation or carry double work throughout his senior year--when
he expected to play some patriotic or Alma-Matriotic football.
Teed had no intention of enduring either of these inconveniences; he
trusted to fate to inspire him somehow with some scheme for attaining
his diploma without delay. His future job depended on his diploma--and
his girl depended on his job.
He did not intend to be kept from either by any ancient authors. He had
not the faintest idea how he was going to bridge that chasm--but, as he
wrote his Fansy-pansy, "Love will find the way."
While Teed was taking thought for the beginning of his life-work Litton
was completing his--or at least he thought he was. With the splendid
devotion of the scholar he had selected for his contribution to human
welfare the best possible edition of the work least likely to be read by
anybody. A firm of publishers had kindly consented to print it--at
Litton's expense.
Litton would donate a copy to his own university; two or three college
libraries would purchase copies out of respect to the learned professor;
and Litton would give away a few more. The rest would stand in an
undisturbed stack of increasing dust, there to remain unread as long
perhaps as the myriads of Babylonian classics that Assurbani-pal had
copied in brick volumes for his great library at Nineveh.
Professor Litton had chosen for his life-work a recension of the
ponderous epic in forty-eight books that old Nonnus wrote in Egypt, the
labyrinthine Dionysiaka describing the voyage of Bacchus to India and
back.
A pretty theme for an old water-drinker who had never tasted wine! But
Litton toiled over the Greek text, added copious notes as to minute
variants, appallingly learned prolegomena, an index, and finally an
English version in prose. He had begun to translate it into hexameters,
but he feared that he would never live to finish it. It was hard enough
for a man like Litton to express at all the florid spirit of an author
whose theme was "the voluptuous phalanxes" of Bacchus' army--"the heroic
race of such unusual warriors; the shaggy satyrs; the breed of centaurs;
the tribes of Sileni, whose legs bristle with hair; and the battalions
of Bassarids."
He had kept at it all these years, however, and it was ready now for the
eyes of a world that would never see it. He had watched it through the
compositors' hands, keeping a tireless eye on the infinite nuisance of
Greek accents. He had read the galley proofs, the page proofs, and now
at last the black-bordered foundry proofs. He scorned to write the
bastard "O. K." of approval and wrote, instead, a stately "Imprimatur."
He placed the proofs in their envelope and sealed it with lips that
trembled like a priest's when giving an illuminated Gospel a ritual
kiss.
The hour was late when Professor Litton finished. He stamped the
brown-paper envelope and went down the steps of the boarding-house that
had been for years his nearest approach to a home. He left the precious
envelope on the hall-tree, whence it would be taken to the post-office
for the first mail.
Feeling the need of a breath of air, he stepped out on the porch. It was
a spring midnight and the college roofs were wonderful under the
quivering moon--or _tremulo sub lumine_, as he remembered it. And he
remembered how Quintus Smyrnaeus had said that the Amazon queen walked
among her outshone handmaidens, "as when, on the wide heavens, among the
stars, the divine Selene moves pre-eminent among them all."
He thought of everything in terms of the past; yet, when he heard,
mingled with the vague murmur of the night, a distant song of befuddled
collegians, among whose voices Teed's soared pre-eminent above the key,
he was not pleasantly reminded of the tipsy army of Dionysus. He was
revolted and, returning to his solitude, closed an indignant door on
the disgrace.
Poor old Litton! His learning had so frail a connection with the life
about him! Steeped in the classics and acquainted with the minutest
details of their texts, he never caught their spirit; never seemed to
realize that they are classics because their authors were so close to
life and imbued them with such vitality that time has not yet rendered
them obsolete.
He had hardly suspected the mischief that is in them. A more innocent
man could hardly be imagined or one more versed in the lore of evil.
Persons who believe that what is called immoral literature has a
debasing effect must overlook such men as Litton. He dwelt among those
Greek and Roman authors who excelled in exploiting the basest emotions
and made poems out of putridity.
He read in the original those terrifying pages that nobody has ever
dared to put into English without paraphrase--the polished infamies of
Martial; the exquisite atrocities of Theocritus and Catullus. Yet these
books left him as unsullied as water leaves a duck's back. They infected
him no more than a medical work gives the doctor that studies it the
diseases it describes. The appallingly learned Professor Litton was a
babe in arms compared with many of his pupils, who read little--or with
the janitor, who read nothing at all.
And now, arrived at a scant forty and looking a neglected fifty,
short-sighted, stoop-shouldered and absent-minded to a proverb, he cast
a last fond look at the parcel containing his translation of the Bacchic
epic and climbed the stairs to his bachelor bedroom, took off his shabby
garments, and stretched himself out in the illiterate sleep of a tired
farm-hand.
Just one dream he had--a nightmare in which he read a printed copy of
his work, and a wrongly accented enclitic stuck out from one of the
pages like a sore thumb. He woke in a cold sweat, ran to his duplicate
proofs, found that his text was correct--and went back to bed contented.
Of such things his terrors and his joys had consisted all his years.