to look things squarely in the face, he had not been long in seeing that
they were right. Things tired him now as they had not once tired him. He
had less zest at the beginning of the hour, more relief at the close
of it. He seemed stupid in not having seen it for himself, but possibly
many people were a little stupid in seeing that their own time was over.
Of course he had thought, in a vague way, that his working time couldn't
be much longer, but it seemed part of the way human beings managed with
themselves that things in even the very near future kept the remoteness
of future things.
Now he understood Gretta's troubled look and her tears. He knew how
those fine nerves of hers must have suffered, how her own mind had
wanted to leap to the aid of his, how her own strength must have
tormented her in not being able to reach his flagging powers. It seemed
part of the whole hardness of life that she who would care the most
would be the one to see it most understandingly.
What he was trying to do was to see it all very simply, in
matter-of-fact fashion, that there might be no bitterness and the least
of tragedy. It was nothing unique in human history he was facing. One
did one's work; then, when through, one stopped. He tried to feel that
it was as simple as it sounded, but he wondered if back of many of those
brief letters of resignation that came at quitting-time there was the
hurt, the desolation, that there was no use denying to himself was back
of his.
He hoped that most men had more to turn to. Most men of seventy-three
had grandchildren. That would help, surrounding one with a feeling of
the naturalness of it all. But that school had been his only child. And
he had loved it with the tenderness one gives a child. That in him which
would have gone to the child had gone to the school.
The woman whom he loved had not loved him; he had never married. His
life had been called lonely; but lonely though it undeniably had been,
the life he won from books and work and thinking had kept the chill from
his heart. He had the gift of drawing life from all contact with life.
Working with youth, he kept that feeling for youth that does for the
life within what sunshine and fresh air do for the room in which one
dwells.
It was now that the loneliness that blights seemed waiting for him....
Life _used_ one--and that in the ugly, not the noble sense of being
used. Stripped of the fine fancies men wove around it, what was it
beyond just a matter of being sucked dry and then thrown aside? Why not
admit that, and then face it? And the abundance with which one might
have given--the joy in the giving--had no bearing upon the fact that it
came at last to that question of getting one out of the way. It was
no one's unkindness; it was just that life was like that. Indeed, the
bitterness festered around the thought that it _was_ life itself--the
way of life--not the brutality of any particular people. “They'll
pension him--he's done a lot for the school.” Even the grateful memory
of Gretta's tremulous, scoffing little laugh for the way it fell short
could not follow to the deep place that had been hurt.
Getting himself in hand again, and trying to face this as simply and
honestly as he had sought to face the other, he knew that it was true he
had done a great deal for the school. He did not believe it too much to
say he had done more for it than any other man. Certainly more than any
other man he had given it what place it had with men who thought. He had
come to it in his early manhood, and at a time when the school was in
its infancy--just a crude, struggling little Western college. Gretta
Loring's grandfather had been one of its founders--founding it in revolt
against the cramping sectarianism of another college. He had gloried
in the spirit which gave it birth, and it was he who, through the
encroachings of problems of administration and the ensnarements and
entanglements of practicality, had fought to keep unattached and
unfettered that spirit of freedom in the service of truth.
His own voice had been heard and recognised, and a number of times
during the years calls had come from more important institutions, but he
had not cared to go. For year by year there deepened that personal love
for the little college to which he had given the youthful ardour of his
own intellectual passion. All his life's habits were one with it. His
days seemed beaten into the path that cut across the campus. The vines
that season after season went a little higher on the wall out there
indicated his strivings by their own, and the generation that had worn
down even the stones of those front steps had furrowed his forehead and
stooped his shoulders. He had grown old along with it! His days were
twined around it. It was the place of his efforts and satisfactions
(joys perhaps he should not call them), of his falterings and his hopes.
He loved it because he had given himself to it; loved it because he had
helped to bring it up. On the shelves all around him were books which it
had been his pleasure--because during some of those hard years they were
to be had in no other way--to order himself and pay for from his own
almost ludicrously meagre salary. He remembered the excitement there
always was in getting them fresh from the publisher and bringing them
over there in his arms; the satisfaction in coming in next day and
finding them on the shelves. Such had been his dissipations, his
indulgences of self. Many things came back to him as he sat there going
back over busy years, the works on philosophy looking down upon him, the
shadows of that spring afternoon gathering around him. He looked like
a very old man indeed as he at last reached out for the letter he had
written to the trustees, relieving them of their embarrassment.
Twilight had come on. On the front steps he paused and looked around
the campus. It was growing dark in that lingering way it has in the
spring--daylight creeping away under protest, night coming gently, as
if it knew that the world having been so pleasant, day would be loath to
go. The boys and girls were going back and forth upon the campus and the
streets. They could not bear to go within. For more than forty years
it had been like that. It would be like that for many times forty
years--indeed, until the end of the world, for it would be the end of
the world when it was not like that. He was glad that they were out in
the twilight, not indoors trying to gain from books something of the
meaning of life. That course had its satisfactions along the way, but it
was surely no port of peace to which it bore one at the last.
He shrunk from going home. There were so many readjustments he must
make, once home. So, lingering, he saw that off among the trees a girl
was sitting alone. She threw back her head in a certain way just then,
and he knew by the gesture that it was Gretta Loring. He wondered what
she was thinking about. What did one who thought think about--over there
on the other side of life? Youth and age looked at life from opposite
sides. Then they could not see it alike, for what one saw in life seemed
to depend so entirely upon how the light was falling from where one
stood.
He could not have said just what it was made him cross the campus toward
her. Part of it was the desire for human sympathy--one thing, at least,
which age did not deaden. But that was not the whole of it, nor the
deepest thing in it. It was an urge of the spirit to find and keep for
itself a place where the light was falling backward upon life.
She was quiet in her greeting, and gentle. Her cheeks were still
flushed, her hair tumbled from her game, but her eyes were thoughtful
and, he thought, sad. He felt that the sadness was because of him; of
him and the things of which he made her think. He knew of her affection
for him, the warmth there was in her admiration of the things for which
he had fought. He had discovered that it hurt her now that others
should be seeing and not he, pained her to watch so sorry a thing as his
falling below himself, wounded both pride and heart that men whom she
would doubtless say had never appreciated him were whispering among
themselves about how to get rid of him. Why, the poor child might even
be tormenting herself with the idea she ought to tell him!
That was why he told her. He pointed to the address on the envelope,
saying: “That carries my resignation, Gretta.”
Her start and the tears which rushed to her eyes told him he was right
about her feeling. She did not seem able to say anything. Her chin was
trembling.
“I see that the time has come,” he said, “when a younger man can do more
for the school than I can hope to do for it.”
Still she said nothing at all, but her eyes were deepening and she
had that very steadfast, almost inspired look that had so many times
quickened him in the class-room.
She was not going to deny it! She was not going to pretend!
After the first feeling of not having got something needed he rose to
her high ground--ground she had taken it for granted he would take.
“And will you believe it, Gretta,” he said, rising to that ground and
there asking, not for the sympathy that bends down, but for a hand in
passing, “there comes a hard hour when first one feels the time has come
to step aside and be replaced by that younger man?”
She nodded. “It must be,” she said, simply; “it must be very much harder
than any of us can know till we come to it.”
She brought him a sense of his advantage in experience--his riches. To
be sure, there was that.
And he was oddly comforted by the honesty in her which could not stoop
to dishonest comforting. In what superficially might seem her failure
there was a very real victory for them both. And there was nothing of
coldness in her reserve! There was the fulness of understanding, and of
valuing the moments too highly for anything there was to be said about
it. There was a great spiritual dignity, a nobility, in the way she was
looking at him. It called upon the whole of his own spiritual dignity.
It was her old demand upon him, but this time the tears through which
her eyes shone were tears of pride in fulfilment, not of sorrowing for
failure.
Suddenly he felt that his life had not been spent in vain, that the
lives of all those men of his day who had fought the good fight for
intellectual honesty--spiritual dignity--had not been spent in vain
if they were leaving upon the earth even a few who were like the girl
beside them.
It turned him from himself to her. She was what counted--for she was
what remained. And he remained in just the measure that he remained
through her; counted in so far as he counted for her. It was as if he
had been facing in the wrong direction and now a kindly hand had turned
him around. It was not in looking back there he would find himself. He
was not back there to be found. Only so much of him lived as had been
able to wing itself ahead--on in the direction she was moving.
It did not particularly surprise him that when she at last spoke it was
to voice a shade of that same feeling. “I was thinking,” she began, “of
that younger man. Of what he must mean to the man who gives way to him.”
She was feeling her way as she went--groping among the many dim things
that were there. He had always liked to watch her face when she was
thinking her way step by step.
“I think you used a word wrongly a minute ago,” she said, with a smile.
“You spoke of being replaced. But that isn't it. A man like you isn't
replaced; he's”--she got it after a minute and came forth with it
triumphantly--“fulfilled!”
Her face was shining as she turned to him after that. “Don't you see?
He's there waiting to take your place because you got him ready. Why,
you made that younger man! Your whole life has been a getting ready for
him. He can do his work be cause you first did yours. Of course he can
go farther than you can! Wouldn't it be a sorry commentary on you if he
couldn't?”
Her voice throbbed warmly upon that last, and during the pause the light
it had brought still played upon her face. “We were talking in class
about immortality,” she went on, more slowly. “There's one form of
immortality I like to think about. It's that all those who from the very
first have given anything to the world are living in the world to-day.”
There was a rush of tears to her eyes and of affection to her voice
as she finished, very low: “You'll never die. You've deepened the
consciousness of life too much for that.”
They sat there as twilight drew near to night, the old man and the young
girl, silent. The laughter of boys and girls and the good-night calls of
the birds were all around them. The fragrance of life was around
them. It was one of those silences to which come impressions, faiths,
longings, not yet born as thoughts.
Something in the quality of that silence brought the rescuing sense
of its having been good to have lived and done one's part--that sense
which, from places of desolation and over ways rough and steep and dark,
can find its way to the meadows of serenity.
THE END