The Professor's House Read online

  He started. What other future could Augusta possibly have expected? This

  disclosure amazed him.

  "Well, well, we mustn't think mournfully of it, Augusta. Life doesn't

  turn out for any of us as we plan." He stood and watched her large slow

  hands travel about among the little packets, as she put them into his

  waste-basket to carry them down to the cart. He had often wondered how

  she managed to sew with hands that folded and unfolded as rigidly as

  umbrellas--no light French touch about Augusta; when she sewed on a bow,

  it stayed there. She herself was tall, large-boned, flat and stiff, with

  a plain, solid face, and brown eyes not destitute of fun. As she knelt

  by the couch, sorting her patterns, he stood beside her, his hand on the

  lid, though it would have stayed up unsupported. Her last remark had

  troubled him.

  "What a fine lot of hair you have, Augusta! You know I think it's rather

  nice, that grey wave on each side. Gives it character. You'll never need

  any of this false hair that's in all the shop windows."

  "There's altogether too much of that, Professor. So many of my customers

  are using it now--ladies you wouldn't expect would. They say most of it

  was cut off the heads of dead Chinamen. Really, it's got to be such a

  frequent thing that the priest spoke against it only last Sunday."

  "Did he, indeed? Why, what could he say? Seems such a personal matter."

  "Well, he said it was getting to be a scandal in the Church, and a

  priest couldn't go to see a pious woman any more without finding

  switches and rats and transformations lying about her room, and it was

  disgusting."

  "Goodness gracious, Augusta! What business has a priest going to see a

  woman in the room where she takes off these ornaments--or to see her

  without them?"

  Augusta grew red, and tried to look angry, but her laugh narrowly missed

  being a giggle. "He goes to give them the Sacrament, of course,

  Professor! You've made up your mind to be contrary today, haven't you?"

  "You relieve me greatly. Yes, I suppose in cases of sudden illness the

  hair would be lying about where it was lightly taken off. But as you

  first quoted the priest, Augusta, it was rather shocking. You'll never

  convert me back to the religion of my fathers now, if you're going to

  sew in the new house and I'm going to work on here. Who is ever to

  remind me when it's All Souls' day, or Ember day, or Maundy Thursday, or

  anything?"

  Augusta said she must be leaving. St. Peter heard her well-known tread

  as she descended the stairs. How much she reminded him of, to be sure!

  She had been most at the house in the days when his daughters were

  little girls and needed so many clean frocks. It was in those very years

  that he was beginning his great work; when the desire to do it and the

  difficulties attending such a project strove together in his mind like

  Macbeth's two spent swimmers--years when he had the courage to say to

  himself: "I will do this dazzling, this beautiful, this utterly

  impossible thing!"

  During the fifteen years he had been working on his Spanish Adventures

  in North America, this room had been his centre of operations. There had

  been delightful excursions and digressions; the two Sabbatical years

  when he was in Spain studying records, two summers in the Southwest on

  the trail of his adventurers, another in Old Mexico, dashes to France to

  see his foster-brothers. But the notes and the records and the ideas

  always came back to this room. It was here they were digested and

  sorted, and woven into their proper place in his history.

  Fairly considered, the sewing-room was the most inconvenient study a man

  could possibly have, but it was the one place in the house where he

  could get isolation, insulation from the engaging drama of domestic

  life. No one was tramping over him, and only a vague sense, generally

  pleasant, of what went on below came up the narrow stairway. There were

  certainly no other advantages. The furnace heat did not reach the third

  floor. There was no way to warm the sewing-room, except by a rusty,

  round gas stove with no flue--a stove which consumed gas imperfectly and

  contaminated the air. To remedy this, the window must be left

  open--otherwise, with the ceiling so low, the air would speedily become

  unfit to breathe. If the stove were turned down, and the window left

  open a little way, a sudden gust of wind would blow the wretched thing

  out altogether, and a deeply absorbed man might be asphyxiated before he

  knew it. The Professor had found that the best method, in winter, was to

  turn the gas on full and keep the window wide on the hook, even if he

  had to put on a leather jacket over his working-coat. By that

  arrangement he had somehow managed to get air enough to work by.

  He wondered now why he had never looked about for a better stove, a

  newer model; or why he had not at least painted this one, flaky with

  rust. But he had been able to get on only by neglecting negative

  comforts. He was by no means an ascetic. He knew that he was terribly

  selfish about personal pleasures, fought for them. If a thing gave him

  delight, he got it, if he sold his shirt for it. By doing without many

  so-called necessities he had managed to have his luxuries. He might, for

  instance, have had a convenient electric drop-light attached to the

  socket above his writing table. Preferably he wrote by a faithful

  kerosene lamp which he filled and tended himself. But sometimes he found

  that the oil-can in the closet was empty; then, to get more, he would

  have had to go down through the house to the cellar, and on his way he

  would almost surely become interested in what the children were doing or

  in what his wife was doing--or he would notice that the kitchen linoleum

  was breaking under the sink where the maid kicked it up, and he would

  stop to tack it down. On that perilous journey down through the human

  house he might lose his mood, his enthusiasm, even his temper. So when

  the lamp was empty--and that usually occurred when he was in the middle

  of a most important passage--he jammed an eyeshade on his forehead and

  worked by the glare of that tormenting pear-shaped bulb, sticking out of

  the wall on a short curved neck just about four feet above his table. It

  was hard on eyes even as good as his. But once at his desk, he didn't

  dare quit it. He had found that you can train the mind to be active at a

  fixed time, just as the stomach is trained to be hungry at certain hours

  of the day.

  If someone in the family happened to be sick, he didn't go to his study

  at all. Two evenings of the week he spent with his wife and daughters,

  and one evening he and his wife went out to dinner, or to the theatre or

  a concert. That left him only four. He had Saturdays and Sundays, of

  course, and on those two days he worked like a miner under a landslide.

  Augusta was not allowed to come on Saturday, though she was paid for

  that day. All the while that he was working so fiercely by night, he was

  earning his living during the day; carrying full university work and

  feeding him
self out to hundreds of students in lectures and

  consultations. But that was another life.

  St. Peter had managed for years to live two lives, both of them very

  intense. He would willingly have cut down on his university work, would

  willingly have given his students chaff and sawdust--many instructors

  had nothing else to give them and got on very well--but his misfortune

  was that he loved youth--he was weak to it, it kindled him. If there was

  one eager eye, one doubting, critical mind, one lively curiosity in a

  whole lecture-room full of commonplace boys and girls, he was its

  servant. That ardour could command him. It hadn't worn out with years,

  this responsiveness, any more than the magnetic currents wear out; it

  had nothing to do with Time.

  But he had burned his candle at both ends to some purpose--he had got

  what he wanted. By many petty economies of purse, he had managed to be

  extravagant with not a cent in the world but with his professor's

  salary--he didn't, of course, touch his wife's small income from her

  father. By eliminations and combinations so many and subtle that it now

  made his head ache to think of them, he had done full justice to his

  university lectures, and at the same time carried on an engrossing piece

  of creative work. A man can do anything if he wishes to enough, St.

  Peter believed. Desire is creation, is the magical element in that

  process. If there were an instrument by which to measure desire, one

  could foretell achievement. He had been able to measure it, roughly,

  just once, in his student Tom Outland,--and he had foretold.

  There was one fine thing about this room that had been the scene of so

  many defeats and triumphs. From the window he could see, far away, just

  on the horizon, a long, blue, hazy smear--Lake Michigan, the inland sea

  of his childhood. Whenever he was tired and dull, when the white pages

  before him remained blank or were full of scratched out sentences, then

  he left his desk, took the train to a little station twelve miles away,

  and spent a day on the lake with his sail-boat; jumping out to swim,

  floating on his back alongside, then climbing into his boat again.

  When he remembered his childhood, he remembered blue water. There were

  certain human figures against it, of course; his practical,

  strong-willed Methodist mother, his gentle, weaned-away Catholic father,

  the old Kanuck grandfather, various brothers and sisters. But the great

  fact in life, the always possible escape from dullness, was the lake.

  The sun rose out of it, the day began there; it was like an open door

  that nobody could shut. The land and all its dreariness could never

  close in on you. You had only to look at the lake, and you knew you

  would soon be free. It was the first thing one saw in the morning,

  across the rugged cow pasture studded with shaggy pines, and it ran

  through the days like the weather, not a thing thought about, but a part

  of consciousness itself. When the ice chunks came in of a winter

  morning, crumbly and white, throwing off gold and rose-coloured

  reflections from a copper-coloured sun behind the grey clouds, he didn't

  observe the detail or know what it was that made him happy; but now,

  forty years later, he could recall all its aspects perfectly. They had

  made pictures in him when he was unwilling and unconscious, when his

  eyes were merely open wide.

  When he was eight years old, his parents sold the lakeside farm and

  dragged him and his brothers and sisters out to the wheat lands of

  central Kansas. St. Peter nearly died of it. Never could he forget the

  few moments on the train when that sudden, innocent blue across the sand

  dunes was dying for ever from his sight. It was like sinking for the

  third time. No later anguish, and he had had his share, went so deep or

  seemed so final. Even in his long, happy student years with the

  Thierault family in France, that stretch of blue water was the one thing

  he was home-sick for. In the summer he used to go with the Thierault

  boys to Brittany or to the Languedoc coast; but his lake was itself, as

  the Channel and the Mediterranean were themselves. "No," he used to tell

  the boys, who were always asking him about le Michigan, "it is

  altogether different. It is a sea, and yet it is not salt. It is blue,

  but quite another blue. Yes, there are clouds and mists and sea-gulls,

  but-I don't know, il est toujours plus na�f."

  Afterward, when St. Peter was looking for a professorship, because he

  was very much in love and must marry at once, out of the several

  positions offered him he took the one at Hamilton, not because it was

  the best, but because it seemed to him that any place near the lake was

  a place where one could live. The sight of it from his study window

  these many years had been of more assistance than all the convenient

  things he had done without would have been.

  Just in that corner, under Augusta's archaic "forms," he had always

  meant to put the filing-cabinets he had never spared the time or money

  to buy. They would have held all his notes and pamphlets, and the

  spasmodic rough drafts of passages far ahead. But he never got them, and

  now he really didn't need them; it would be like locking the stable

  after the horse is stolen. For the horse was gone--that was the thing he

  was feeling most just now. In spite of all he'd neglected, he had

  completed his Spanish Adventurers in eight volumes--without filing

  cabinets or money or a decent study or a decent stove--and without

  encouragement, Heaven knew! For all the interest the first three volumes

  awoke in the world, he might as well have dropped them into Lake

  Michigan. They had been timidly reviewed by other professors of history,

  in technical and educational journals. Nobody saw that he was trying to

  do something quite different--they merely thought he was trying to do

  the usual thing, and had not succeeded very well. They recommended to

  him the more even and genial style of John Fiske.

  St. Peter hadn't, he could honestly say, cared a whoop--not in those

  golden days. When the whole plan of his narrative was coming clearer and

  clearer all the time, when he could feel his hand growing easier with

  his material, when all the foolish conventions about that kind of

  writing were falling away and his relation with his work was becoming

  every day more simple, natural, and happy--, he cared as little as the

  Spanish Adventurers themselves what Professor So-and-So thought about

  them. With the fourth volume he began to be aware that a few young men,

  scattered about the United States and England, were intensely interested

  in his experiment. With the fifth and sixth, they began to express their

  interest in lectures and in print. The two last volumes brought him a

  certain international reputation and what were called rewards--among

  them, the Oxford prize for history, with its five thousand pounds, which

  had built him the new house into which he did not want to move.

  "Godfrey," his wife had gravely said one day, when she detected an

  ironical turn in some remark he made about the new house, "is there


  something you would rather have done with that money than to have built

  a house with it?"

  "Nothing, my dear, nothing. If with that cheque I could have brought

  back the fun I had writing my history, you'd never have got your house.

  But one couldn't get that for twenty thousand dollars. The great

  pleasures don't come so cheap. There is nothing else, thank you."

  Chapter 2

  That evening St. Peter was in the new house, dressing for dinner. His

  two daughters and their husbands were dining with them, also an English

  visitor. Mrs. St. Peter heard the shower going as she passed his door.

  She entered his room and waited until he came out in his bath-robe,

  rubbing his wet, ink-black hair with a towel.

  "Surely you'll admit that you like having your own bath," she said,

  looking past him into the glittering white cubicle, flooded with

  electric light, which he had just quitted.

  "Whoever said I didn't? But more than anything else, I like my closets.

  I like having room for all my clothes, without hanging one coat on top

  of another, and not having to get down on my marrow-bones and fumble in

  dark corners to find my shoes."

  "Of course you do. And it's much more dignified, at your age, to have a

  room of your own."

  "It's convenient, certainly, though I hope I'm not so old as to be

  personally repulsive?" He glanced into the mirror and straightened his

  shoulders as if he were trying on a coat.

  Mrs. St. Peter laughed,--a pleasant, easy laugh with genuine amusement

  in it. "No, you are very handsome, my dear, especially in your

  bath-robe. You grow better-looking and more intolerant all the time."

  "Intolerant?" He put down his shoe and looked up at her. The thing that

  stuck in his mind constantly was that she was growing more and more

  intolerant, about everything except her sons-in-law; that she would

  probably continue to do so, and that he must school himself to bear it.

  "I suppose it's a natural process," she went on, "but you ought to try,

  try seriously, I mean, to curb it where it affects the happiness of your

  daughters. You are too severe with Scott and Louie. All young men have

  foolish vanities--you had plenty."

  St. Peter sat with his elbows on his knees, leaning forward and playing

  absently with the tassels of his bath-robe. "Why, Lillian, I have

  exercised the virtue of patience with those two young men more than with

  all the thousands of young ruffians who have gone through my

  class-rooms. My forbearance is overstrained, it's gone flat. That's

  what's the matter with me."

  "Oh, Godfrey, how can you be such a poor judge of your own behaviour?

  But we won't argue about it now. You'll put on your dinner coat? And do

  try to be sympathetic and agreeable to-night."

  Half an hour later Mr. and Mrs. Scott McGregor and Mr. and Mrs. Louie

  Marsellus arrived, and soon after them the English scholar, Sir Edgar

  Spilling, so anxious to do the usual thing in America that he wore a

  morning street suit. He was a gaunt, rugged, large-boned man of fifty,

  with long legs and arms, a pear-shaped face, and a drooping, pre-war

  moustache. His specialty was Spanish history, and he had come all the

  way to Hamilton, from his cousin's place in Saskatchewan, to enquire

  about some of Doctor St. Peter's "sources."

  Introductions over, it was the Professor's son-in-law, Louie Marsellus,

  who took Sir Edgar in hand. He remembered having met in China a Walter

  Spilling, who was, it turned out, a brother of Sir Edgar. Marsellus had

  also a brother there, engaged in the silk trade. They exchanged opinions

  on conditions of the Orient, while young McGregor put on his horn-rimmed

  spectacles and roamed restlessly up and down the library. The two

  daughters sat near their mother, listening to the talk about China.

  Mrs. St. Peter was very fair, pink and gold,--a pale gold, now that she