The great factory to which Jimmy had been invited lies to the west of
Chicago, and at sunset its multitudinous windows make it look like a low
long crystal, flaming.
A few miles west of it lived a woman well known to Susan Endicott Hogg,
though they had long been separated. It was a woman who had thrown
herself away on a mere professor. In spite of Susan’s domineering will,
her dearly beloved Winifred had married a pauper nearly twice her own
age.
He was, to be sure, an authority on the decline of the Roman Empire.
There used to be many such authorities, but the fashion of inquiring why
Rome fell has rather gone out. And except for being known to scholars as
the editor of the definitive edition of Tacitus, this authority was
obscure. He was only Dr. Ambrose Rich, professor in Warrenville College,
and sixty-nine years old.
Warrenville College was itself obscure, if for no other reason than that
it had never succeeded in lopping off its preparatory department. It was
not like the bolts and screws in the Ferry factory, perfectly
standardized. And because it was not perfectly standardized it had no
share in the Carnegie pension fund or any other pension fund.
Nobody doubted that good work was done in the college, but after all the
home folks cared most for the academy.
The college commencement of 1915 was over, and the bachelors of arts had
gone off to forget their Greek, and academy commencement was at hand.
The whole village had eaten an early supper, and the mothers were
washing the dishes while the daughters were getting into their white
muslins.
The young president of the college put on his straw hat and wandered out
into the evening. The campus oaks rustled softly. From the little river
came the murmur of waters flowing past the ruins of the old mill, the
reminder of pioneer days when all the county brought its wheat to
Warrenville to be ground.
He wandered down to the mill and discovered there his best friend and
most valued counselor. Professor Rich was reclining on the bank of the
river. His form had a certain wiry ancient elegance. His thick white
hair was like a halo, but his beard was small and his features were
small, after the manner of certain old New England families.
“Good evening, doctor.”
“Sit down, Mr. President. Heaven has sent you. I am telling you that I
have got to quit.”
“No, Dr. Rich. You told me that last October, but you never taught
better than in the year that has just closed. I simply can’t consider a
resignation. Your health is good, your spirit is young, and your name is
our only glory.”
“My dear Charlie, when we elected you president, we did so partly
because your manner of speech is so ingratiating. It remains such. You
speak me fair and cover my ancient cheeks with blushes, but when you
open college in October I shall not be here.”
“Why?”
“For the same reason that I gave you in October. We are going to be
drawn into the war, and I’m too old to stand the strain. I served in one
war, but you can’t expect a man to pump up the proper amount of hatred
at sixty-nine.”
“I tell you we are not going to be drawn in.”
“Charlie, did my boy’s valedictory make so little impression on you?”
“Why, I don’t exactly form my political judgments by the opinions of
valedictorians.”
“But that wrath—Horatio’s wrath over the sunken Lusitania—might not that
be an index to the American heart?”
“I suppose so. It is barely possible. I’m wondering whether your other
valedictorian will follow the same line tonight.”
“Charlie, I have no more notion of what Jean will say tonight than if
she were not my child.”
“Doctor, why didn’t you marry till forty-six?”
“Charlie, I don’t know much science since Aristotle, but that excellent
authority on fish assures us that every event has at least four causes.”
“Doctor, you can’t throw dust in my eyes by quoting your classics. I’m
sure the cause was poverty, and I’m going to say as much to Elbridge
Gary and ask him to pension you.”
“Charlie, I forbid it. This everlasting begging from men who knew the
town as boys has gone far enough. I shall manage. I have some money
every year from the text-books and the Tacitus, and I have my garden,
and I have the St. Mary’s river with a few fish left in it.”
The president mused for a minute, while the DuPage rippled softly, and
across it were heard the strains of the academy orchestra rehearsing for
the last time.
“You will probably live twenty years more, doctor, and those text-books
may not hold out so long. But I’m powerless. It’s no use to appeal to
Asher Ferry. The last time I went to him he said that he would never do
anything for a college. He might, when the time came, endow a laboratory
for research, but he had no use for colleges.”
“What else could you expect? I never saw the man, but he is the living
embodiment of an illiterate age. Now about Jean. I shall wish her to
enter college next year.”
“You can’t wish it more than we do. Let us have her in our own family.”
“Will you accept board money?”
“Not a cent. Didn’t you lend me the money that put me through?”
“Did I? If so, where did I get it?”
They both laughed.
“Well, she shall be your guest for one year, but after that I shall
insist on paying. Now let me thank you for parting with me so
gracefully, and let’s go and get my Winifred and your Mary, and go and
hear the wisdom of triumphant children.”
The chapel bell was beginning to ring, and the two men arose.
An hour or so later, after the orchestra and the smiling principal had
properly introduced her, up sprang the valedictorian, Jean Winifred
Rich, and thus spake Jean:
“Friends of the class of 1915, it is certainly ridiculous that two
valedictorians should come from one family. In fact I guess it is a sort
of joke that was played on us. Anyhow the real reason why I was chosen
to say good-by was that I remembered a remark of my big brother. One
evening last summer we were looking at a star which the Greeks called
Phosphor in the morning and Hesperus in the evening, and I said that
Venus was a poor name to teach the seniors, because they have all they
can do to keep from falling in love, and that Venus is a planet, not a
star.
“Horatio answered that the dictionary lets us call any heavenly body of
light a star. Then he said that if we were on Venus, the earth would
look exactly like Venus, a steady point of white lightning.
“I told this tale at class one day, and they elected me valedictorian
right away, with instructions to tell you all that the class of 1915
knows about the earth. They thought that ten minutes would be enough.
“So every evening since then I have been obliged to think about the
earth as a star, and sometimes the other members of the class came up to
our house and helped me think. All this spring we have been doing it,
and the way we did it was to pick up the earth and throw it out into the
sky. There it would hang, and we could make it look as small as Venus or
as big as the moon. When it was about as big as the moon we loved it
very much.
“The first time all we could see was a great whirling thistledown. It
must have been a cloudy evening on the earth, and there were lovely
colors along the sunset line where the bright half met the dark half.
“Next evening the thistledown had changed into a soap-bubble half dark
and half bright, but all of it as pretty as a rainbow. Little flecks of
cloud kept rising from the equator, moving towards the poles, and then
returning.
“Next evening the atmosphere had all disappeared, and we saw only the
water, just a round whirling jewel, like a turquoise with white poles.
“Next evening we saw the places where the rock showed through. We have
learned to call them continents and islands. At first they looked like
rough pearl, or like the red earth of the planet Mars, but we soon saw
that they were covered with a soft green mist, thicker at the equator
and thinner as it spread towards the poles.
“Next evening we studied the green mist. Most of it is leaves, such as
lettuce and sequoias, which are coaxed out of the crumbled rock by the
sun, but it has veins of pink where leaves have turned into animals. The
mist of life was as thin as the bloom on a blueberry, but it was
wonderful.
“Hidden in that bloom were little babies so beautiful that they almost
make you cry. There were little boys who would die to protect their
sisters. There were lovers like Romeo, who didn’t have the sense he was
born with, but we couldn’t help liking him. There were sweet girls like
Mr. Hardy’s Tess, who was hanged because she couldn’t help loving. There
were strong men who work hard all their lives for their families or
their countries. There were beautiful old men who tell you important
things. There were mothers with faces so radiant that I guess that must
be where God shows through.
“But over in Europe we saw a bloody war going on, and none of us could
explain it. Some said it was the Kaiser’s doing, but at that distance he
looked so little that I could not believe it. It seemed to me that they
were fighting for food, and I came to the conclusion that if there are
more folks than our star can feed comfortably, why, people ought to stop
breeding boys to be shot down like rabbits.
“But when the valedictorian talked like this the whole class was ready
to mob her. They said she called them rabbits. They said that her dear
old father ought to be ashamed of such a spitfire.
“Those of you who heard Horatio last week remember that he thought the
United States ought to take a hand in this war. He said that the only
way to teach the Germans anything was to explode more nitrogen than they
exploded. You see, Horatio has studied chemistry, and I haven’t. Just
now he is smiling at me from the back of the room, waiting to see what a
little ignoramus who doesn’t know chemistry is going to say about war.
“Well, I am not going to say anything about it, because it stands to
reason that when the war is over, people are going to be hungry. I am
glad that my brother has his mind set on farming. I hope he will be a
very happy farmer, and that his sons will grow up to be farmers. It
seems to me that the world needs farmers a good deal more than it needs
chemists and electricians. Horatio says that there is enough electricity
in the air over any farm to run all the farm machinery. I am not very
fond of electricity, because I have seen it strike barns full of green
hay, but if Horatio wishes to use it to run his machinery, I have no
objection.
“And now the time has come to say good-by. We are very grateful to you,
our teachers, for giving us such a good time, and we shall try to
remember what you have taught us. And to you, our young friends who come
after us, we say, love your star. Love the earth, because it is very
beautiful, and try to love all of it. Of course you can’t possibly love
it all as much as you love the United States of America, and you can’t
love that wild foreign city called Chicago as much as you love
Warrenville, but you can practice loving the earth in general. It looks
like white lightning, but it isn’t really any such dreadful thing. It is
our home.”