'Twenty-Five Years Out'

I

GYPSY TEMPLETON rose from his chair at the head of the table, and rapped for order. He had been Class Secretory for a quarter of a century. But he was more than the Class Secretary: he was the Class. All of us, I suppose, would agree to that. Though we had lost, perhaps, a good share of our stage properties during our wanderings up and down that ‘wide, wide world’ we had loved to sing about in college days, there was one illusion that stayed with us all, namely, that Templeton was a ‘Prince.’

In stature, in feature, in personal style, he had only to appear and he took you captive, a captive for life. No one could explain this, and fewr cared to try.

And do you remember those two sisters of Templeton, who used to visit him at Wykeham each year in October? Especially I like to recall the elder, who always sat next her brother on the box of their four-in-hand as we rolled through crimson roadways like Markham Woods, and listened to the crickling of autumn leaves under the wheels. Her red cloak, dark hair, sweeping black ostrich-feather, and her flashing smile — still they hold defiance against the years. Unquestionably I was in love with her, and, for a mere mortal, my chances seemed fairly good. But Templeton brought me to ruin. He was the most unworldly soul to be found on the globe, and this is what I overheard him say about me: ‘Louise, you ought to take the Commodore; and I will support him.’ Somehow things changed directly after this, and for almost a year I groaned aloud whenever I thought of that idiotic stroke in fine diplomacy.

Templeton was one of those rare individuals who fall in love with an institution and never get over it; one of those to whom Alma Mater means also wife and children. Such men, found here and there throughout the United States, are never, in the ordinary sense, graduated from college. Their classmates graduate, but they themselves remain Juniors till they die. Like Gypsy Templeton, they form attachments, they become citizens ol the world, they may become familiar with Europe and the East; they are welcomed everywhere for their charm, or their wealth; but in reality the world without is merely a tavern to them. Alma Mater is their hearth.

Jim Sturgis put it rightly, put it better than he knew, when he said, ‘Gypsy Templeton is such a damned untroubled soul.’ Was he lacking in human sympathies? He was the exact opposite of that. He knew every man who had graduated and all the ‘sometime’ members of the class as well. These last he managed to fetch back to the reunions in equal proportions to the graduates. He knew just who had died in the quarter-century, and how it all happened, and in what condition they had left their families.

Once, at a former Commencement, as Gypsy and I were lying on a shady lawn beneath a great elm, an awkward small boy of thirteen stole up and asked: ‘Is this Mr. Templeton? because Mother said I was to find you and to tell you that it’s all right.’

Templeton rose to his feet, took the youngster by the hand, and together they sauntered off over the grass toward a syringa bush, where they talked a few minutes. When he came back, Gypsy resumed his quiet talk about a wonderful bargain he had found in London — a first edition of somebody I cannot now recall.

For Templeton was a collector. He loved books, old books, and he knew about them. He had a representative at every great sale in Europe. His treasures were said to be of unique importance. One thing he knew about them that nobody else knew: he knew their eventual destination.

In whatever places Templeton might pitch his tent during other months of the year, he could always be found at Wykeham during the month of May. He used to say there was nothing in the world like standing on a mountain road and watching slim white birches hiding way down in the leafing woods. And once, not long ago, he had won from me a small wager that the bobolinks would arrive at Wykeham on the night of the tenth of May. He refused to take his winnings, however, on the ground that he was betting on a certainty: he had observed the thing, he said smilingly, for almost thirty years.

On fine evenings of that magical month he would saunter down the village street, enjoying his quiet smoke, and sometimes I would join him; but never if he turned off sharp to the left, at the foot of the hill. This would mean that he was going to a silent place, sweet and removed, wherein stood a low cross above the grave of the old professor-friend who was supposed to have given Gypsy a soul. If Templeton had a religion at all, it got itself uttered here. Gilson, the gentle old professor of German literature, who had swung himself along on his crutch ever since a wrestling-match in his own far-off undergraduate days, had remained unmarried to the end; and he had loved Gypsy as he would have loved a son of his loins. Graven on the cross were these words: —

II

As Templeton came to the close of his brief but delightful introductory speech of welcome, Stanley Bankson solemnly rose, unannounced. ‘We are here,’ he began, ‘because we are here; but that is not the real reason.’ (Cries of ‘Good work, Stan!’ ‘Go it, old Ruat Cœlum!’ ‘We have with us to-night Mr. Ralph Waldo Emerson!’ etc., etc.) ‘The real reason is that the hands have been played, the game is up; and we may just as well come back to Wykeham and say so, frank and friendly, face to face, man to man. For here is the place where it ought to get said if the thing is worth saying at all.’

Gypsy Templeton looked uneasy, for he knew this mood of Bankson’s very well, and called it his ‘Vine and Verity’ mood. Stanley’s legs were very unsteady; but, heretical as this sounds to the present-day collegian, his legs were not the important part of him. Very little about the speech betrayed alcohol, save the ruthlessness of it.

‘Gentle brothers,’ continued Bankson, ‘we are forty-seven years old, and this is the Big Showdown. By this time we have, or we have not; we are, or we are not; here and now we quit bluffing; it’s the Big Showdown. We shall all make speeches to-night, but, trying never so hard to be honest, we shall none of us make a conscious disclosure. Our words will give about as real an expression of our actual lives as our cuff-links will give. And I have not the least doubt in the world that many of us will continue to support the delusion that this place has done something for us, or to us. Of all the delusions by which intelligence victimizes itself, the delusion of the “formative period” is the stupidest. Neither this place, with all its beauty, nor this college of good reputation has ever done anything more for any of us than to give us a comfortable lodging for a few nights. This class came here a Boy Camp on a hike. We ate for a while, we slept for a while, and when we left on a June morning, we carved with our jackknives a few initials on the pine door of the Hut. The same kit that we had on our backs when we pushed open the door we carried away; neither more, nor less, nor any wise different.’ And Stanley sat down. ‘Oh, the devil!’ growled Jim Sturgis to me; ‘let’s go home.’

Followed next the Reverend George Working. No one knew much about Working, for he lived in the Far West. None of us had ev er heard him preach, though it had once fallen to my lot to hear him read the service; and it reminded me of the curate described by Carlyle who read ‘with the moaning hoo-hoo of predetermined pathos.’ His eyes were of the mildest blue, his mouth wide, and his lips thin. The pallor we had noted in college days had never left him; this, with the round clerical collar that looked as if it had been thrown over his neck by the hazard of ringtoss, made him, as the female portion of his parish was accustomed to declare, ‘wonderfully spiritual.’ He sang his speech. The burden of it consisted largely in this: the greatly increased number of ‘celebrations’ in his parish church during the last five years.

Billy Brim ley, who was champagneserious, could n’t understand these ‘celebrations’ at all. He rose from the table, went up to Templeton’s chair, and insisted with great earnestness on Gypsy’s explaining the whole matter to him three times.

None of this, somehow, seemed to march with Working’s square jaw. This man, as I happened to know, had put up one of the stiffest fights in the whole industrial history of a Rocky Mountain state. He had fought like a bulldog for years, and had won. He had declared war on typhoid fever among the families of the miners. He had fought the mine-owners for a clean water-supply; then he had fought the union itself, whose leaders had been bribed by the company. Twice he had been shot at, and once his youngest child had been kidnapped for a week. Then he had carried his fight to the floor of the State Legislature, had been beaten for two sessions, and finally he had won on the closing day of the third. And here he was — singing his speech! And no word about saving the women and babies.

A noncollegian spectator, had he been present at this class banquet, would have thought it somewhat odd that we listened so impatiently to any talk that had to do with the subject of education, or the function of a college. Most of us consumed three times the amount of cigars we really wanted in the instinctive endeavor to raise a smoke-screen against foreign attack of this character.

One of our best men, who had lost an only child, a daughter, took up much of our valuable time by an earnest discussion of the proper education for a college boy in the present age of our modern world. He seemed to feel that a responsibility lay upon all of us to open college doors, and to procure a college life for all industrious, competent, promising youth. He said his belief was that well-to-do men, whose sons proved to be loafers by the time they had finished their Freshman year, should remove them from college, and be compelled to put in their places ambitious youths who, though without any means, had a hunger for higher training.

This notion was received with the contempt it deserved. Billy Brimley declared this was Socialism, and Socialism of the rankest kind, but, on being reminded by Jim Sturgis that he was a jackass, Billy subsided, yielding thus to the kind of argument he liked, and the only kind he could understand.

‘Anyhow,’ Jim whispered to me, ‘the speech is consistent enough, for he has maintained three hard-working boys in college for the last ten years.’

Then came a lament from Johnny Stimson about the disappearance of Greek. Johnny was a professor of chemistry somewhere in the Far West. He said that a man without imagination was n’t worth a nickel to himself, or to anybody else. What all this had to do with a liking for Greek I could not make out. There was a funny story about Stimson, however; it seems that he had produced a fertilizer that added eight millions of dollars in a single year to the yield of the fruit orchards of the Pacific Coast. When asked by a man out there why he had been unwilling to make any personal profit from this scientific discovery of his, he answered, ‘How could I? Why, I found my wife on this coast!’

III

One might suppose that a body of social phenomena, comprising less than one half of one per cent of the American people, could hardly be described as a really operative factor. Numerically the college graduate does not exist at all.

Yet romantically and ideally he is one of the saving graces of the national life. This makes a look across the tables on the occasion of the ‘Big Showdown ‘ such a tragi-comic business.

For here we all were, with our big failures and our little successes, exacting tolerance generously, according it somewhat too meagrely; rejoicing in our particular friendships that had lasted and grown through the years; proud and grateful as Wykeham men, though we found our difficulties with songs we thought we remembered.

Here were types to be found everywhere throughout the Alumnus Kingdom: the spare and worried clergyman who had given up his useful parishwork in the big textile town in order to reach ‘the larger audience’ with what is called ‘the pen.’ Here was the broad-shouldered physician, who was reached after by all sorts of people because he was human — because the vitalities in his soul were so much more healing than the things in his little black bag. He had outlived his illusions about the big-city practice without quitting the scientific studies that were being made by the big-city men. Here was the first scholar of the class who once talked to me in youthful rhapsody about his discovery of that ideal world of Lessing — now selling maps for a publishing-house in Chicago.

Here was our most gifted man, who had been a cabinet officer at Washington in a great administration, sitting, urbane and inscrutable, alongside a classmate who carried rural mail in Vermont.

And here was Matt Barclay, a broker on the Exchange, whose life had been bounded on the east by every town as far as Stamford, and on the west by every town as far as Morristown. His life was a constant jump after cheaper rent; now you could find it up the New Haven Road, now you came back to New York itself and tried it out there again for the third time. Some years a very early train; each year cheaper cigarettes.

But Barclay was happy and had a good wife; he complained a great deal about his children, however: ‘They never seem to do very well in the local schools.’

When I looked at Matt Barclay, I thought of his early background as it had been revealed to me on a summer visit during the college years. I recalled a great rich farming domain out in Central New York, a big square white house, stately red barns of enormous size, windmills whirling above deep artesian wells, and great maple trees full of rest and shade. His father, a graduate of Wykeham in the class of ‘66, was a handsome stalwart man with iron-gray hair and a hearty laugh; his mother, wholesome and attractive, always seemed to match her spirit with some sort of flower, a wild rose, or a bit of heliotrope.

I don’t know whether to laugh or to weep when I think of those first ten minutes in that ample home. For when Matt and I had carried our luggage up to his room, which commanded a view of a beautiful lake a mile away, he closed the door carefully, and said, in a subdued tone, ‘I don’t know whether I told you, Commodore, but both father and mother have some queer notions they like to talk about a good deal. Mother is awfully interested in the W. C. T. U. and Child-Labor laws; and Father is crazy over John Fiske.’

On week-days Barclay senior would spend most of his time working with his men. Toward four o’clock he would come back, take his tub, put on the gray suit, and go out to the old well to pull up his cigars, kept in a butter crock twelve feet down. This solemn ritual was never omitted. He would select, carefully, two of these Henry Clays, then lower the crock again into the cool depths, and betake himself into his study and to a new book by John Fiske. ‘He rejoiceth as a strong man to run a race,’ said Mr. Barclay, ‘and he makes you feel the same way, when you open a new work of his.’

On Sundays he went to this room directly from the breakfast table, and he stayed there all day. When his wife called out, ‘Henry, are n’t you going to church?’ he would give the same old reply: ‘ I think I won’t go this morning, my dear.’ ‘However,’ — I heard him say on one of these occasions, — ‘ I will send a good text to the dominie, if it is n’t too late in the morning: “What hath the Lord required of thee but to be interesting, to think honestly and to write clearly?'”’

Oh! the smell of the sunrise, and the sound of intelligent conversation, and the taste of the cream! And here was Barclay Junior, a broker on the Exchange. ‘One Hundred and Twentyfifth Street next! No stops!’

I asked after his father.

‘Dad’s well; they ‘re both well,’ said he very quietly, ‘and still at the ’producing end of the game.’

‘Pretty cold winters out in Central New York!’ said I.

‘Well,’ he answered, ‘their winters they have spent in Santa Barbara for many years. They are back home now and my wife had a letter from there last week. The old gentleman’s latest craze is a book by this English guy, H. G. Wells. He wrote that The Undying Fire was about the best thing on education he had read for a long time.’

It was growing late, and the banquet was drawing to a close. Little of vital importance remained save an informal discussion whether, as the twenty-fiveyear class, we ought to organize a movement toward ousting the Dean of the College, or whether we should wait for some reason for this. It was thought that our class, composed almost wholly of natural leaders, could not shirk responsibility in this matter. Some did not like the Dean because, it seemed, he was ‘always around.’ Others did not like him because, it seemed, he was ‘never there.'

Thus we voiced a great principle well understood throughout the Alumni world in the United States, the principle known as ‘the comprehensive view.’ For the Long-Distance, or Alumni, mind supplies the intellectual ‘attrition’ which keeps a college wholesome, happy, at work throughout the year; and without this an Alumni organization could hardly be said to possess any raison d’être at all. But we were sleepy and wanted to go to bed; so we postponed definite action, merely providing for ‘the publicity,’in case of further discussion.

IV

As a group of us climbed the hill by West College about three o’clock in the morning, whom should we overtake but Stubby Purdy, laboring up the path. His bald head glinted in the moonlight. He held his straw hat in his left hand, while from his right hung a long wilted collar, the third for the evening. With this collar he was slapping his knee, keeping time to a popular jazz-tune. He was radiantly happy, and had cut the class banquet, though he had come all the way from Denver — his first return in the twenty-five years.

‘ Where the deuce were you, Stubby?'”

I went to the Senior Ball,’ said he, without a trace of shame on his face. ‘You fellows danced all the way through college, when I did n’t know how, and when I used to look in through the windows. But you fellows are oldtimers now, and the dancing game is another kind of affair altogether. In your time it was rhythm. What we are going to do now is to break down rhythm, the way the prism breaks down light.’ Stubby’s enthusiasm mounted. ‘Now take this tango: there’s a philosophy to it — it’s a question of decomposition.’ I had never seen on his face such a look of fervent spirituality! ‘But I’m sorry about the dinner, Gyp, honest to goodness I am.'

‘You are forgiven,’ said Templeton; and he added, with that engaging laugh, as he put his hand on Stubby’s steaming shoulder, ‘Tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner.'

Among the letters posted at Wykeham next day, I may give two. The first was sent by a member who had become the head of an important and successful normal school in the Southwest.

‘DEAR GIRL, —
‘You were right! I feel ten years younger for having come back to W. It seemed a rather unnecessary expense to come so far, considering I was here for our Fifteenth; but I can never be thankful enough to you for insisting. And I guess it has settled the question in regard to Ned and Jimmy. They must come here to college if they have to walk from Missouri! It gets you, dear girl, it gets you. Several of the old Faculty are left and they all seemed so friendly — and they remembered. It sounds preposterous, yet it’s true. I don’t know why I stayed away in those early years, except that I never felt that I had made good. From the start you felt that I had, but you were the only one.
‘And the grip of the externals has loosened for the rest of my life. I can walk by the Fraternity houses now without a twinge. I guess, as a matter of cold fact, I was a pretty raw specimen when I first saw this wonderful place.
‘And what a generous human lot this class of ours is! Templeton made me sit right next him at the banquet, and he sent his kind regards to you. Where did you ever meet him?
‘P.S. Get the hat — you must — the one with the green feather I liked. We can afford it all right.’

The second letter was sent by one of our men to A Certain Woman.

‘DEAR SOVEREIGN, — ‘Everything here speaks of you, and you dominate the scene. Wherever I go, you, with your tall figure, are passing lightly over the lawns down the lengthening shadows. This little life here gets whatever reality it has from you, and all its value; and your signature is over everything. Lord! how narrow the place is, and how provincial. They don’t speak my language at all. They don’t register. I find the same old rot about service and citizenship and solidarity. The worst of it is, I feel that you yourself more than half believe in it all.
’Later. Your letter just arrived. Good Heavens! don’t come on here now! In a place like this people would n’t understand. It is not done.
‘You say you wish to share everything with me; that these four years so long ago (when I was only a boy!) make an intolerable gap in your life; that you are bound, somehow, to throw a bridge over that gap! But how many times have 1 begged you to eliminate the rhetoric? And we will talk about our difficult future when I get back. I am staying on a few days longer than I planned. I will let you know what day. Meet me at the south entrance of the Country Club. Will go there direct from the Twentieth Century Express, and you can dismiss your man.
‘P.S. Besides, my boy is here — taking his examinations for entrance.’

V

A day or two after Commencement, Templeton, in New York, was sitting in his favorite dark corner of the great room of the University Club that looks out upon the avenue. The heat outside was devastating, and by three o’clock the thermometer had climbed sullenly to one hundred degrees. A Columbia man was saying to Gypsy, ‘Did you have a good time at your Wykeham Reunion?’

‘The old place,’ answered Templeton, ‘was beautiful enough to make you cry; but seeing all the men again was Hell, simply Hell I’ll never go back to another reunion — until the next time.’

As his companion loosened his belt and disappeared, Gypsy took out of his pocket a dispatch just received from abroad, together with a little codebook, and worked out the message for the third time with the same old inscrutable smile.

’The Montaigne owned by Diderot for eleven thousand, cable.’