In a Little Town Part 10

Litton had thenceforward been wedded to knowledge. He had read nearly everything ancient, but he must have forgotten the sentence of Publilius Syrus: "Even a G.o.d could hardly love and be wise." He felt no mercy in his soft heart for the soft-headed Teed. He was a wors.h.i.+per of language for its own sake and cast a vote accordingly.

"I do not question the propriety of the conduct of these young people,"

he said. "Mr. Teed claims to be engaged to the estimable young woman."

"Ah!" said Professor Mackail, delightedly.

Teed was the brightest pupil in his laboratory and he had voted for acquittal. His joy vanished as Professor Litton went on:

"But"--he spoke the word with emphasis--"but waiving all questions of propriety, I do feel that we should administer a stinging rebuke to the use of such appallingly infantile language by one of our students.

Surely a man's culture should show itself, above all, in the addresses he pays to the young lady of his choice. What vanity to build and conduct a great inst.i.tution of learning, such as this aims to be, and then permit one of its pupils to express his regard for a student from the Annex in such language as even Mr. Kraus was reluctant to quote: 'Mezie-wezie loves oozie-woozie bestest!'--if I remember rightly.

Really, gentlemen, if this is permitted we might as well change the university to a kindergarten. For his own sake I vote that Mr. Teed be given six months of meditation at home; and I trust that the faculty of the Woman's College will have a similar regard for its ideals and the welfare of the misguided young woman."

Professor Mackail protested furiously, but his advocacy only embittered Litton--for Mackail was the leader of the faction that had tried for years to place Webster University in line with others by removing Latin and Greek from the position of required studies.

Mackail and his crew pretended that French and German, or science, were appropriate subst.i.tutes for the cla.s.sic languages in the case of those whose tastes were not scholastic; but to Litton it was a religion that no man should be allowed to spend four years in college without at least rubbing up against Homer, aeschylos, Vergil, and Horace.

As Litton put it: "No man has a right to an Alma Mater who doesn't know what the words mean; and n.o.body has a right to graduate without knowing at least enough Latin to read his own diploma."

This old war had been fought with all the bitterness and professional jealousies of scholars.h.i.+p, which rival those of religion and exceed those of the stage. For yet a while Litton and his followers had vanquished opposition. He little dreamed what he was preparing for himself in punis.h.i.+ng Teed.

Teed accepted his banishment with poor grace, but a magnificent determination to come back and graduate. The effect of his punishment was shown when, after six months of rustic meditation, he set out for the university, leaving behind him his Fannie, who had been too timid to return to the scene of her discomfiture. Teed's good-by words ran something like this:

"Bess its ickle heartums! Don't se care! Soonie as Teedle-weedle gets graduated he'll get fine job and marry his Fansy-pansy very first sing."

Then he kissed her "Goo'byjums"--and went back with the face of a Regulus returning to be tortured by the enemy.

II

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 cla.s.sics were themselves cla.s.sics. 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 exact.i.tude.

Teed reached the end of his junior year with a heap of conditions in the cla.s.sics. 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 cla.s.sics that a.s.surbani-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 s.h.a.ggy satyrs; the breed of centaurs; the tribes of Sileni, whose legs bristle with hair; and the battalions of Ba.s.sarids."

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 b.a.s.t.a.r.d "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 cla.s.sics and acquainted with the minutest details of their texts, he never caught their spirit; never seemed to realize that they are cla.s.sics 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 n.o.body 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 enc.l.i.tic 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.

III

The next morning he felt like a laborer whose factory has closed. Every day would be Sunday hereafter until he got another job. In this unwonted sloth he dawdled over his porridge, his weak tea, and his morning paper.

Head-lines caught his eyes shouting the familiar name of Joel Brown--familiar to the world at large because of the man's tremendous success and relentless severity in business. Brown fell in love with one of those shy, sly young women who make a business of millionaires. He fell out with a thud and his Flossie entered a suit for breach of promise, submitting selected letters of Brown's as proofs of his guile and of her weak, womanly trust.

The newspapers pounced on them with joy, as cats pounce and purr on catnip. The whole country studied Brown's letters with the rapture of eavesdropping. Such letters! Such oozing mola.s.ses of sentiment! Such elephantine coquetry! Joel weighed two hundred and eighteen pounds and called himself Little Brownie and Pet Chickie!

This was the literature that the bewildered Litton found in the first paper he had read carefully since he came up for air. One of the letters ran something like this:

Angel of the skies! My own Flossie-dovelet! Your Little Brownie has not seenest thee for a whole half a day, and he is pining, starving, famis.h.i.+ng, peris.h.i.+ng for a word from your blus.h.i.+ng liplets. Oh, my Peaches and Cream! Oh, my Sugar Plum! How can your Pet Chickie live the eternity until he claspeths thee again this evening? When can your Brownie-wownie call you all his ownest only one? Ten billion kisses I send you from

Your own, owner, ownest

Pet Chickie-Brownie.

x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x

The X's, Flossie explained, indicated kisses--a dozen to an X.

The jury laughed Little Brownie out of court after pinning a twenty-five-thousand-dollar verdict to his coat-tail. The nation elected him the Pantaloon of the hour and pounded him with bladders and slap-sticks.

Professor Litton had heard nothing of the preliminary fanfare of the suit. As he read of it now he was too much puzzled to be amused. He read with the same incredulity he had felt when he heard the janitor quote Teed's remarks to his fiancee. Litton called his landlady's attention to the remarkable case. She had been reading it, with greedy glee, every morning. She had had such letters herself in her better days. She felt sorry for poor Mr. Brown and sorrier for the poor professor when he said:

"Poor Mr. Brown must have gone quite insane. n.o.body could have built up such wealth without brains; yet n.o.body with brains could have written such letters. Ergo, he has lost his brains."

"You'll be late to prayers," was all the landlady said. She treated Litton as if he were a half-witted son. And he obeyed her, forsook his unfinished tea and hurried away to the chapel. Thence he went to his cla.s.s-room, where Teed achieved some further miracles of mistranslation.

Litton thought how curious it was that this young man, of whom his scientific professor spoke so highly, should have fallen into the same delirium of amorous idiocy as the famous plutocrat, Joel Brown.

When the cla.s.s was dismissed he sank back in his chair by the cla.s.s-room window. It was wide ajar to-day for the first time since winter. April, like an early-morning housemaid, was throwing open all the windows of the world. Litton felt a delicious la.s.situde; he was bewildered with leisure. A kind of sweet loneliness fell on him. He had made no provision for times like these.

He sat back and twiddled his thumbs. His eyes roved lazily about the campus. The wind that fluttered the spa.r.s.e forelock on his overweening forehead hummed in his ears. It had a distance in it. It brought soft cadences of faint voices from the athletic field. They seemed to come from no place nearer than the Athenian Academe.