A Kansan at Large. Ii

I

HIGH above the clear, rock-rimmed Lake Winonscopomuck, and among the great wooded hills of northwestern Connecticut, stands the Hotchkiss School. It is a typical Eastern private boarding-school, and is attended by about two hundred wealthy boys who are preparing to enter the big colleges of New England.

Its founders were wise enough to establish a scholarship fund which enables the school to offer to a limited number of poor students each year practically the same educational advantages that the sons of the rich enjoy. An effort is made to secure scholarship boys whose moral influence will be good, and who are capable of doing good work in the classroom and in other activities of the school. Some scholarship boys grow sottish and parasitic, and the influence on the wealthy is not always salutary; but so long as schools train for life in a democracy like the American Republic, the plan, by and large, is a good one, and the school that adopts it is far and away ahead of the one that lacks such an arrangement.

Into this inexorable, standardizing drill-yard, Fate tumbled me—penniless, untutored, untamed, and, like a good many of the scholarship boys, three or four years older than most of my classmates. Although I was ex-president of everything in Emporia, no Y.M.C.A. delegation or other embassy met me at the station; and, moreover, no one seemed especially anxious to make my acquaintance. The first master I met had never even heard of William Allen White.

But these things did not worry me, for I knew that the school would soon realize what a prize it had landed and recognition would then come; moreover, I felt that I had a mission to perform among these listless sons of the hell-bound rich. The headmaster had written little about what he would expect of me; but talks with my Kansas friends had made my duties perfectly plain. The sons of the rich were, of course, a shifty, shiftless, spineless lot, and it was to be my privilege to set the example for industry and nobility of character. Incidentally, I was to continue to excel in class-work and be a leader in New England, as I had been in the bounding West.

In such a place, with such ideas, it is needless to say that I was soon more miserable than Ovid ever was in Pontus. The athletic director interviewed me. Modesty forbade my telling him how my plays had made the bleachers resound where a few of us, who liked to play football, practised when we chose and played as we liked; but I found ways to let him know that, if he put me on the right end, nothing would come around.

But the next day I found to my amazement that the idle rich were strenuous enough — in a football game, at least. These boys had grown up in camps and gymnasiums; they had been carefully trained; Ted Coy was their patron saint, and a college letter their chief aim in life. I fought desperately, but gradually saw that I was hardly fit to carry water to the second team; two days later, the dislocation of a shoulder luckily saved me the humiliation of going into the discard, but I knew that I had been completely outclassed, and nothing will ever cause me keener suffering.

I joined the Agora Debating Society, for there at least I knew I could star — had I not once won the gold medal while three thousand cheered, as I discomfited a whole team? But Satan again lay in wait — the question was Trust Regulation. Oft had I applauded others, and oft had I been applauded, for tirades against the soulless octopi, and in favor of the pec-pul. But that night my eloquence, like that of Father Æneas, ‘stuck to my jaws,’for there in the front row sat Cy McCormick, and in the third sat Philip Swift. It is easy vacuously to harangue a sympathetic crowd; but standing in a small room and looking the owner of a trust in the eye, one feels a desperate need of indisputable facts, and the ordinary platitudes and aphorisms of the press have an appallingly hollow ring. I sat down very ill-satisfied with myself.

Instead of its being a godless place, I found that Hotchkiss fairly sizzled with religious fire, which radiated from the meetings of St. Luke’s Society. As I sat and listened to the sincere, earnest boy speeches, I felt little like a missionary, but much like John when he said, 'I have need to be baptized of Thee.’

In due time I found out that rich boys are essentially just like poor boys. Some are industrious, studious, and manly; some are lazy and will cheat if they get a chance; some are snobs and some are selfish; but by an overwhelming majority they are generous and kind, and in earnest.

The ignorance of these boys amazed me. They knew nothing of United States history, and not enough geography to locate my native state with exactitude. They had traveled abroad, but having taken nothing with them, they had brought nothing back. They wrote illegible scrawls. Standard literature was positively a sealed book to them; but, on the other hand, they had been tutored toward college entrance examinations from childhood. The rudiments of Latin and Algebra had been drummed into them, and not a few spoke French. For me, a mature farmproduct, to compete with these fellows in learning languages was an impossible task. Therefore my final humiliation was to see myself easily beaten in the classroom.

The masters were simply drill sergeants. ‘You'd better remember that word, boys: you'll need it in June,’ was the oft-repeated remark of the indefatigable old German instructor; and it defined the pedagogical horizon of the whole staff. Their jobs depended on making their classes pass the college entrance examinations at the end of the year; and their everlasting, driving, barren, humdrum tutoring on the rudiments of languages and mathematics was anything but inspiring.

God had intended the Latin master to be a schoolteacher, but by some pass of fortune he had fallen into this drill-yard and was spending his days whipping awkward squads into shape. But besides doing his regular Simon Legree work, he illuminated every page with running comments which have since proved surprisingly valuable. In earning my bread as a toiler in this rough world, no school-work has served me better than the training that Edmund Barss gave us in Latin.

An individualistic Western farmer also found it extremely difficult to fit himself into the life of the school. The senior class were the people, and had to be respected. Athletic games must be attended and good plays cheered. A Western cowboy in a German regiment could not have felt more repressed and annoyed. But I made the best of it all, and, although my health became wretched, plodded doggedly on, because (1) all the Kansas boys who had preceded me had found that this road led to great things; (2) China must be saved; (3) I had found working one’s way in other schools next to impossible; and, finally, because letting my relatives and friends hear of failure was unthinkable.

Each week I wrote to mother, telling her of the beauty of the hills, of the sermons I heard, and so forth, but keeping my troubles to myself. Back to Emporia went the school-paper with contributions from my pen, and accounts of debates and literary contests; but at Hotchkiss I was very small potatoes, for among such a group of boys leadership depends more on swift legs and geniality than on knowledge and ink.

But working, playing, and cheering for the school finally made me love it sincerely; perhaps just as William James ‘saw a bear, ran, and then got scared.’ And one day, as graduation drew near, the headmaster told me that those cold-blooded, iron-edged masters, who were so unlike the pedagogical wet-nurses of the Middle West, had realized all the while the difficulties under which I labored, and that they were very well satisfied with what I had done. So I went off to Harvard College with a bounding heart, for there head rather than heels would win one his place.

II

Before I had been at Harvard two weeks I found that the object of that institution was to produce men like Arthur Beane. Beane was the finest all-round man I had ever met. He was large, genial, firm, virile, cultivated. As an undergraduate he had touched every phase of college life, and had bettered every one that he touched. After Mr. Beane graduated, the firm of Briggs, Fitch and Co.,¹ which has its headquarters in the Brooks Building, had hired him to stay and do Y.M.C.A. secretarial work and act as a model for succeeding academic generations.

They could not have made a better choice. The speeches that were made at the Freshman Reception by Mr. Beane, team-captains, class-officers, undergraduate able editors, and the rest, could all be summed up in these three words, Be a Beane. So toward that worthy goal we set our faces.

I still like to think that I might have succeeded if Fortune had been a bit propitious. But it is one of the unpleasant facts of life, that urbanity, social service, and general participation in community activities require some subsidizing. Had I been a crank athlete, a pipe-organ-player, an expert stenographer, or any one of twenty other things, I might have got into the band-wagon; but my earning power was small, and when my living was made by running boys' clubs and other low-pay work, I had little time and energy left with which to be a Beane.

However, I tried it — I heeled for a paper and not without some encouragement. Above all things I wanted a Phi Beta Kappa key, and I kept my marks up to the requirements. I did my uttermost to win the Sargent Prize for a translation from Horace. But, as good old Horace said to the Bandusian goat, it was all frustra — that is, in vain. When spring came, my name was sec-

ond rather than first on the translation list, so the glory missed my brow, and — what was worse — the cash missed my pocket. I was already in debt, but high marks would bring me a scholarship for the coming year and I ’d win out.

Two examinations went off well, but as I walked across the yard to take the third, I suddenly grew deathly ill; and when the college physician let me out of the infirmary, examinations were over and the game was lost. What I could earn in the summer vacation would not pay my debt at the college office; and the two hundred dollars tuition, plus board, room, laundry, books, and incidentals, which the next term would bring, presented an insurmountable barrier. My college days were over.

Oh, wisdom of the gods that made us! Oh, blessed incorrigibility of the human soul! When the dog-cart of life at which we tug mires utterly, we still can slip the collar. Spinning, reaping peoples can yell to hideous war! Suffering Byron can finally learn to laugh at Byron; and standing with the headsman at last, even serious Sir Walter can jest about the axe. All’s lost, naught’s had — so be it. If the sky falls, there still are larks to catch.

I bought a second-hand bicycle, took a farewell, wistful look at the volumes in the Harvard Library, and left for Maine, still half-sick, utterly beaten, and completely discouraged.

Education, the salvation of China, success in life, and all else that had kept me in the treadmill, could go to Hades. There’s not a joy the world can give like that it takes away. Oblivion is the land where freedom dwells. ‘The President has paid dear for his White House,’ says Ralph Waldo; but the vagabond may have traded a pack more galling than Christian’s, and a task more hopeless than that of Sisyphus, for companions such as Defoe and Stevenson loved; and for singing streams, and long, green roads which, like all others, lead to the end of the world and, mayhap, to the foot of the rainbow. ‘The voice of duty is the voice of God.’— Ah, my friend, very interesting! But just how do you know that?

At a cheap boarding-house near the coast, I met an able young ne’er-do-well who was selling maps. I went out with him next day. I decided that if he could thus make money enough in a day to keep him spending for a week, I could make that much every day and save it, too. My commissions for my third day’s work were thirty dollars. The college debt was soon paid. On September twelfth I had in my pocket four hundred and one dollars and thirty-one cents.

I went to Cambridge and with unfeigned indifference asked George Washington Cram² if I could try the examinations that my illness had made me miss. He said I could; and without turning a page for preparation, I tried. The marks in all were about the minimum for passing, and I decided to register for the coming year.

But I had lost the belief that the chief end of man is to be like Arthur Beane. In fact, I had lost belief in almost everything except that I could hold my own in the gouge game of life. I had found that, if I went into a village and sold my wares to those who needed them, then more than two thirds of the other residents would buy when they saw those names on my order-book. And it seemed to me that the majority of my classmates, who were straining for shingles in Beanedom, were very like these foolish people. Moreover, I had found out that if one has an absolutely thorough knowledge of his commodity, knows exactly what he wants, and goes straight for it as persistently as the tide saws the coast of Maine, few men or combinations of men can keep him from his goal. Therefore, others could be something at college, but I proposed, if possible, to learn something.

Like most farmers, I feared debt more than almost anything else. Several blocks from the college I rented a tiny attic room. Teaching three evenings a week in the Cambridge nightschools would pay my board. Diogenes was now in his tub, — he had four hundred and one dollars and thirty-one cents in his pocket, — so Alexander, Beane and Company might stand out of his study light.

I began to ‘apply mine heart to know, and to search, and to seek out wisdom and the reason of things,’as did the ancient Hebrew, and soon I found that Harvard was a vast deposit of information. And whenever the student is puzzled, there are professors who can, like the colored minister, ‘explain the unexplainable, make known the unknowable, and unscrew the inscrutable.’

Taussig and Munro took us behind the curtain and showed us all the ropes and pulleys and light controls of the world’s daily puppet-show. From the very source we drifted with Palmer down the wonderful river of human thought — among the singing Isles of Greece, past the Forum, where Epictetus dwelt a slave, and finally, fittingly or unfittingly, brought up with Friedrich Nietzsche in the madhouse. With Haskins we marched on every Crusade, and with A. B. Hart we unlearned our American history. Willie Keukentahl, the naturalist from Breslau, took us through the dead circus in Agassiz Museum, and dilated on Darwin and on whales. With Neilson and the rest, we traveled in the realms of gold, listened to the sages, and heard the minstrels sing. And as twenty or thirty of us were sailing past Scotland in one of Bliss Perry’s boats, I fell in with Thomas Carlyle.

Here was the man for me! This buffeted, baffled son of a peasant had, like his pet hero Mirabeau, ‘swallowed all formulas.’ He looked through things rather than at them, and could not be fooled by the painted cobwebs that glisten in the wire-grass pasture of Respectabilia. He was a bringer-of-menback-to-realities. He dealt with facts, and yet saw worth and beauty and glory in human life. At his torch I could relight my snuffed-out tallow dip.

At Harvard University, for the first time in my life, I found teachers who were not afraid of the truth, and who were willing to concede that my Creator knew more about what kind of a man I should develop into than they did. Here are the facts as nearly as I can get at them, and here are my conclusions. You can take them and do what you like with them, or leave them. This was the purport of the average lecture.

Diogenes, the tub-dweller, had friends, and after I left Beanedom I found that not all the interesting people at Harvard were to be found in such clubs as the one into which my Hotchkiss origin had caused me to be voted. For example, here was Weissbuch: born in Roumania; to America in the steerage; out of the gnawing poverty of the New York slums; self-prepared for college; penniless; exasperating; talented; unsinkable; kind and noble to the last degree.

And the Anglo-Saxon product of the farm found that this urban immigrant, like the confusion of tongues that attended the Cambridge night-school, was human and worth while, just as the rich boys at Hotchkiss had proved to be. If the classes in this country could get acquainted, it would not solve all problems, but it would save us a deal of trouble.

III

Going about in summer working as an agent, it was easy to see that many rural sections were on the decline. Occasional letters from Oklahoma showed that the community we had begun there with such high hopes was not getting anywhere. And when I went back to Kansas, I found that rents were higher, soil poorer, buildings no better, and life no more worth living in my home community than if had been ten years before. In my senior year I heard the lectures of Dr. James Ford and Professor Thomas Nixon Carver, and learned that such conditions prevailed pretty generally in rural America.

‘Many of these ignorant, penurious Maine farmers,’said Weissbuch one day, ‘are just about like the wretched peasants I used to see in southern Europe.’ The trouble was evidently not local, but general.

The nearer graduation came, the more it became apparent that there was mission work to be done among mine own people, which was quite as important, and perhaps more difficult than it would be to win China for Calvin. In China I'd probably speak and understand life about as well as Charlie Wing, my laundryman, did in America. On the other hand, life had forced me to know more about farms and farmers than many people can ever hope to learn.

‘ What’s the best way for one to get into country work?’ I once asked Professor Carver at the close of a lecture.

‘Why, you could be a country preacher or teacher; but in either case the field of endeavor is very small and the pay very meagre.’

As I walked away, I thought, ‘Well, if there is so much money for sending workers to foreign lands, why is n’t there some available for the work I want to do?’

Roger Treat, one of my classmates, had become interested in moving-pictures, which were just then being raised to a place of first magnitude. He believed that they had great didactic value. The more he talked, the more certain I became that he was right. Before long, we had incubated a plan for using movies in country work. The plan was quite Napoleonic, although to the uninitiated and unenthused it, of course, seemed decidedly quixotic. Just then came the news that Dr. Carver was to go to Washington, to create a Rural Organization Service.

‘The thing for us to do,’ I said, ‘is to go with him.'

Roger replied, ’ Yes, but may be he won’t —

I stopped him. 'You never sold maps, Treat. Our plan is a good one. He ’s got to have helpers. He can’t, get better ones. All we have to do is to go after him and stay after him.'

But the job was not an easy one. The wise, colossal, imperturbable customer admitted that the goods seemed valuable for certain purposes, but stated that he was not yet in the market, and also intimated that many plans which seem feasible enough fail when put into practice.

Treat and I retired for heavy repairs. The Austrians lost the battle of Wagram, Professor Johnston had said, ‘because they failed to come again.’ Treat and I decided not to lose our battle that way. After a consultation, Treat went off to Boston to secure five hundred dollars financial backing, while I went to young Edison, whom I had known at Hotchkiss, and got him to give us a moving-picture outfit.

My last college examination question was: ‘Describe the Battle of Austerlitz.’ As I wrote, I saw that fight. The canny Corsican had retreated to the ground that suited him. In spirit he had his army as tense as a football team. In the centre, hidden behind the hills, I could see the myriads of Frenchmen massed. The little man on the lookout watched with satisfaction as his stubborn marshal, Davout, was slowly driven back, and Russian regiments left the centre to help press the advantage on the right. And then, when that centre was weakened enough, Bernadotte’s hidden, close-packed French stormed out and up the hill and rolled the enemy either way, while the Old Guard, still in reserve, swore and wept and tore off its epaulets at being denied a part in the struggle. Vive l'Empereur!

Peace also hath its victories. Treat and I waged a vigorous campaign in rural districts with such pictorial equipment as we could get, and at the same time, kept bombarding Washington, D.C., with full accounts of what we were doing. Finally the Rural Organization Service wired for us to come for inspection and trial. The next year was spent in working under the direction of the Department of Agriculture.

IV

Frances is a very unusual person, who inventories thus: brown hair, great brilliant eyes, fresh, healthy cheeks, positive but good-natured expression, round arms, dainty hands, and small feet. She is very erect and alert, and is built after the bungalow style of architecture. By trade she is a professor of Home Economics and director of Girls' Canning Clubs. When I first saw her she was twenty-four years old — a penniless maid, sans pedigree.

After I met her, I wrote her a letter. She did not answer it. I determined to take no more notice of her, and as soon as I saw her again, insisted that she dine with me. Next day I went through the Mammoth Cave. She was in the party. All I remember about the cave is that it is lighted by very large blue eyes. From then on I wrote her many letters, and once in a while she wrote me one. She did not seem especially pleased with me, and I was certainly very much displeased with myself.

‘Fellow like you,’ said old man Mortin, as he and I started on a business trip south, ‘ought to be able to pick up a girl down here with a thousand acres of land.’

‘No, Mr. Mortin, there is nobody works as hard for his money as the man who marries for it. But, on the other hand, if I wanted to marry at all, you could bet your last dime I ’d never pay any attention to a girl unless she had some property. All my life has been a continual and desperate fight against poverty. Now I am just getting my nose above water, and I don’t propose to get into the flint mill again by saddling a poverty-stricken family on my back.’

At college, I had read the Essays of Francis Bacon no less than fifteen times, and I felt that I had got at the real facts regarding a good many subjects — matrimony included. Regarding marriage and the things thereunto appertaining, Lord Francis deposeth thus: ‘In the life of man love doeth much mischief, sometimes like a Siren, sometimes like a Fury. Great spirits and great business do keep out of this weak passion. Should man, made for the contemplation of all noble objects, do nothing but kneel before a little idol, and make himself a subject? You will perceive that the greatest foundations have proceeded from unmarried men, for whosoever esteemeth too much the amorous affections quitteth both riches and honor. By how much the more then ought men to beware of this weak passion, which looseth not only other things, but itself.’

But the more I thought of Frances the Queen of Clubs, the less I thought of Francis the Lord Chancellor. Bacon was a great philosopher; but as Othello intimated, there is such a thing as knowing too d—— much. Even Harvard University is n’t entirely above selling gold bricks to a farmer.

One day I went to see Frances. She enjoyed the interview a good deal more than I did. And then, just when things were looking utterly hopeless, she turned those great searchlight eyes on me and gave me the hardest examination that I have ever had to stand. Finally she said slowly, ‘ You are a perfect dear!’ And somehow I felt that the girl had spoken a great truth. At that moment I was a nobler, truer, handsomer man than Arthur Beane himself can ever hope to be.

When I got back to the hotel that night, Treat, my room-mate, sat up in bed like a Billiken.

‘Been to see ’er, Clyde?’

'Yes.’

‘Say, what’s the matter with you? Are you engaged?’

‘No, Treat, I’m not; but I’m awfully afraid I'm never going to be able to get disengaged.’

And when the clock struck one, two, three, four, and, later, five, Treat was sound asleep.

(The End)