I
The library of Middletown College had been founded, like the college
itself, in 1818, and it was a firm article of undergraduate belief that
the librarian, Mr. J.M. Atterworthy, had sat behind his battered desk
from that date on to the present time. As a matter of fact, he was but
just gliding down-hill from middle age, having behind him the same number
of years as the active and high-spirited president of the college. And yet
there was ground for the undergraduate conviction that "Old J.M." as he
was always called, was an institution whose beginnings dated back into the
mists of antiquity, for of his sixty years he had spent forty-four in
Middletown, and forty as librarian of the college.
He had come down, a shy, lanky freshman of sixteen, from a little village
in the Green Mountains, and had found the only consolation for his
homesick soul in the reading-room of the library. During his sophomore and
junior years, there had sprung up in the bookish lad, shrinking from the
rough fun of his fellows, the first shoots of that passionate attachment
to the library which was later to bind him so irrevocably to the old
building. In those early days there was no regular librarian, the
professors taking turn and turn about in keeping the reading-room open for
a few hours, three or four days a week. In his senior year, "J.M." (even
at that time his real name was sunk in the initials, the significance of
which he jealously concealed) petitioned the faculty to be allowed to take
charge of the reading-room. They gave a shrug of surprise at his
eccentricity, investigated briefly his eminently sober-minded college
career, and heaved a sigh of relief as they granted his extraordinary
request.
On the evening of Commencement day, J.M. went to the president and made
the following statement: He said that his father and his mother had both
died during his senior year, leaving him entirely alone in the world, with
a small inheritance yielding about fifty dollars a month. He had no
leaning to any profession, he shrank with all his being from the savage
struggles of the business world, and he could not bear to return to
Woodville, to find himself lonely and bereaved in the spot where he had
had such a cloudlessly happy childhood. In short, Middletown was the only
place he knew and liked, except Woodville, which he loved too poignantly
to live there with the soul gone out of things; and the library was the
only home he now had. If the president could get the trustees, at their
next meeting, to allow him the use of the three rooms in the library
tower, and if they would vote him a small nominal salary, say thirty
dollars a month, enough to make him a regular member of the college corps,
he would like nothing better than to settle down and be the librarian of
his _alma mater_ for the rest of his life.
The president of that date was, like all the other presidents of
Middletown College, a florid, hearty old gentleman with more red blood
than he knew what to do with, in spite of his seventy years. He was vastly
amused at the inexperienced young fellow's simple-minded notion, and,
clapping him on the shoulder, said with his cheerfully Johnsonian
rotundity: "Why, my dear young sir, your recent sad bereavement must have
temporarily deranged your mental faculties, that at your age you can
contemplate adopting such a desiccated mode of existence. Your
proposition is, however, a highly advantageous one to your college, and I
shall see that it is accepted. However, I am willing to lay a wager with
you that a year will not be out before you are asking to be freed from
your contract."
J.M., trembling in suspense, took in nothing of the president's speech
beyond the acceptance of his offer, and, pale with relief, he tried to
stammer his thanks and his devotion to his chosen cause. He made no
attempt to contradict the president's confident prophecies; he only made
the greatest possible haste to the tower-rooms which were to be his home.
His eyes filled with thankfulness at his lot as he paced about them, and,
looking out of the windows upon the campus, he had a prophetic vision of
his future, of the simple, harmless, innocent life which was to be his.
Of the two prophets he proved himself the truer. The head of his college
and one generation after another of similar presidents laughed and joked
him about the _Wanderlust_ which would some day sweep him away from his
old moorings, or the sensible girl who would some day get hold of him and
make a man of him. He outlasted all these wiseacres, however, watching
through mild, spectacled eyes the shifting changes of the college world,
which always left him as immovable as the old elms before the library
door. He never went away from Middletown, except on the most necessary
trips to New York or Boston on business connected with book-buying for the
library.
He explained this unheard-of stagnation by saying that the utter
metamorphosis of the village after the college life stopped gave him
change enough. Only once had he gone farther and, to one of the younger
professors who had acquired an odd taste for old J.M.'s society,
confessed hesitatingly that he did not go away because he had no place to
which he could go, except to his childhood home. He said he couldn't bear
to go there lest he find it so changed that the sight of it would rob him
of his old memories, the dearest--in fact the only possessions of his
heart. After a pause he had added to his young listener, who found the
little old secular monk a tremendously pathetic figure: "Do you know,
Layton, I sometimes feel that I have missed a great deal in life--and yet
not at all what everybody thought I would miss, the stir of active life or
the vulgar excitement of being in love. All that kind of thing seems as
distasteful to me now as ever."
There he stopped and poked the fire until the young professor, overcome
with sympathetic curiosity, urged him to go on. He sighed at this, and
said: "Why, fortune ought not to have made me an only child, although I
can't say that I've ever longed for brothers or sisters.... But now I feel
that I should like very much to have some nephews and nieces. I never
could have stood having children of my own--I should have been crushed
under the responsibility; but a nephew, now--a young creature with a brain
and soul developing--to whom I could be a help ... I find as I get older
that I have an empty feeling as the college year draws to a close. I have
kept myself so remote from human life, for fear of being dragged into that
feverish center of it which has always so repelled me, that now I do not
touch it at all." He ended with a gentle resignation, taking off his
glasses and rubbing them sadly: "I suppose I do not deserve anything more,
because I was not willing to bear the burdens of common life ... and yet
it almost seems that there should be some place for such as I--?"
The heart of his young friend had melted within him at this revelation of
the submissive isolation of the sweet-tempered, cool-blooded old scholar.
Carelessly confident, like all the young, that any amount or variety of
human affection could be his for the asking, he promised himself to make
the dear old recluse a sharer in his own wealth; but the next year he
married a handsome, ambitious girl who made him accept an advantageous
offer in the commercial world. With his disappearance, the solitary door
in the prison walls which kept J.M. remote from his fellows swung shut.
He looked so hopelessly dull and becalmed after this that the president
was moved to force on him a little outing. Stopping one day with his
touring-car at the door of the library, he fairly swept the sedentary
little man off his feet and out to the machine. J.M. did not catch his
breath during the swift flight to the president's summer home in a trim,
green, elm-shaded village in the Berkshires. When he recovered a little he
was startled by the resemblance of the place to his old recollections of
Woodville. There were the same white houses with green shutters, and big
white pillars to the porches, the same green lawns and clumps of peonies
and carefully tended rose-gardens, and the same old-New-England air of
distance from the hurry and smoky energy of modern commercial life.
He spoke of this to the president's wife and she explained that it was no
wonder. The village was virtually owned by a summer colony of oldish
people who had lived there in their youth and who devoted themselves to
keeping the old place just as it had been. "We haven't any children to
bother about any more," she said, laughing, "so we take it out in putting
knockers on the doors instead of bells and in keeping the grocery-stores
out of sight so that the looks of the village green shan't be spoiled."
After J.M. returned to deserted Middletown, he could not keep out of his
mind the vision of the village he had just left, and the thought of the
village like it which he had loved so well in his boyhood. It seemed to
him that if Woodville kept its old aspect at all, he would find it a
comfort to try to inspire the people now living there to preserve the
old-timey look of it, as the president was doing for his old home. There
was positively a thrill for J.M. in the thought of his possibly
influencing other people, and before he knew it the plan had made itself
the main interest of the interminably long, empty days of the summer
vacation. His vague feeling of a lack in his life crystallized about a
definite attempt at filling it. He was stirred from his inertia and,
leaving word with the registrar of the college, a newcomer who was not at
all surprised that the librarian should follow the example of all the rest
of the faculty, J.M. made the three hours' journey which had separated
him for so many years from the home of his youth.
As the train wound along the valley beside the river, and as the familiar
outlines of the mountains rose up like the faces of dear, unforgotten
friends, J.M. expanded and bloomed with delight in his new idea; but it
was a very shriveled and dusty little old scholar who finally arrived at
the farther end of the Main Street of Woodville and stood, in the hush of
the noon hour, gazing back with a stricken face at the row of slovenly
unlovely front yards separating the wretched old houses from the street.
He stood before the house that had been his home, and when he looked at it
he turned very pale and sat down quickly as though his knees had failed
him. Apparently the house had not been painted since his childhood, and
certainly it had not been repaired. Broken, dangling shutters gave it a
blear-eyed look which it made him sick to see, and swarms of untidily
pin-feathered chickens wandered about over the hard-beaten earth of the
yard, which was without a spear of grass, littered with old boxes and
crates and unsightly rags, and hung with a flapping, many-legged wash.
From the three rural mail-delivery boxes at the gate, he gathered that
three families were crowded into the house which had seemed none too large
for his father, his mother, and himself. He put on his glasses and read
the names shudderingly--Jean-Baptiste Loyette, Patrick McCartey, and S.
Petrofsky.
"Good heavens!" he observed feebly to the vacant, dusty road beside him,
and in answer a whistle from the big, barrack-like building at the other
end of the street screamed so stridently that the heavy August air seemed
to vibrate about him in hot waves.
At once, as if all the houses on the street were toy barometers, every
door swung open and a stream of men and boys in dirty shirts and overalls
flowed out through the squalid yards along the sidewalks toward the
factory. From the house before which the librarian of Middletown College
sat in a crushed heap of resentment came three men to correspond to the
three mail-boxes: one short and red-haired; one dark, thick-set, and
grizzle-bearded; and the third tall, clumsily built, with an impassive
face and dark, smoldering eyes. They stared at the woebegone old stranger
before their gate, but evidently had no time to lose, as their house was
the last on the street, and hurried away toward the hideous, many-windowed
factory.
J.M. gazed after them, shaking his head droopingly, until a second
eruption from the house made him look back. The cause of the hard-beaten
bare ground of the yard was apparent at once, even to his inexperienced
eyes. The old house seemed to be exuding children from a thousand
pores--children red-haired and black-haired, and tow-headed, boys and
girls, little and big, and apparently yelling on a wager about who owned
the loudest voice, all dirty-faced, barelegged, and scantily clothed.
J.M. mechanically set himself to counting them, but when he got as high
as seventeen, he thought he must have counted some of them twice, and left
off.
A draggle-tailed woman stepped to a door and threw out a pan of
dish-water. J.M. resolved to overcome his squeamish disgust and make a
few inquiries before he fled back to the blessed cleanliness and quiet of
Middletown Library. Picking his way gingerly through the chickens and
puppies and cats and children, the last now smitten into astonished
silence by his appearance, he knocked on the door. The woman who came to
answer him was dressed in what had been a black and purple percale,
wrapper, she had a baby on her arm, and was making vain attempts to fasten
up a great coil of hair at the back of her head. No, she told him volubly,
she couldn't remember the town when it was any different, though she and
Pat had lived there ever since they were married and came over from
Ireland, and that was the whole of sixteen years ago.
"Oh!" with a sudden gush of sympathy, "and so it was your old home! Isn't
that interring now! You must come in and sit awhile. Pat, git a chair for
the gentleman, and Molly, take the baby so I can talk better. Oh, _won't_
you come in? You'd _better_, now, and have a bite to eat and a sup of tea.
I've some ready made." Of course, she went on, she knew the house didn't
look so nice as in his day.... "It's all along of the children! Irish
people can't kape so tidy, now, _can_ they, with siven or eight, as
Yankees can with one--" But it certainly was a grand house, she didn't
wonder he came back to look at it. Wasn't it fairly like a palace, now,
compared with anything her kin back in Ireland had, and such a fine big
place for the children to play an' all.
J.M. broke in to ask a final question, which she answered, making vain
attempts to button her buttonless collar about a fat white neck, and
following him as he retreated toward the street, through a lively game of
baseball among the older boys. No, so far as she knew there wasn't one of
the Yankees left that had lived here in old times. They had gone away when
the factory had come in, she'd heard said. J.M. had expected this answer,
but when it came, he turned a little sick for an instant, and felt giddy
with the heat of the sun and lack of food and a desolation in his heart
sharper and more searching than any emotion he had known since his
boyhood. Through a mist before his eyes, he saw his hostess make a wild
warning gesture, and heard a yell of dismay from the crowd of boys, but
before he could turn his head, something cruelly hard struck him in the
side. In the instant before he fell, his clearest impression was utter
amazement that anything in the world could cause him such incredible pain,
but then his head struck heavily against a stone, and he lay quite still
in a little crumpled heap under the old elm which had sheltered his
boyhood.