An Avatar at Wykeham

DURING my boyhood at Wykeham the town and the gown unconsciously rested in two great principles of science. The student body was strong for conservation of energy; the village, with its hinterland, revealed the centripetal force in obedience to which cranks and odd characters were drawn irresistibly into the being of the college.

But inasmuch as Wykeham was, essentially, not an institution at all, but rather a mystical force whose projections no man could measure or delimit, it possessed a subtile attraction for many persons of the greater world outside who, though varying in type from our local oddities, yet must be put into the grand category of crank. Being a native, I was wont to flatter myself that I knew how to tell the wild ones, and the cultivated varieties as well.

It must have been during the winter term of our second year in college that my classmate John Median and I became acquainted with Mr. O’Fayne. ‘Drop the Mister, my lads,’ he would say, ‘and call me just O’Fayne of Trinity Dublin.’

He was living at the Kellogg House, an old red rambling tavern near the head of the village street, where he had a sitting-room, an open fireplace, and an iron kettle for the heating of hot water. A stout man, with clear blue eyes and gold spectacles, he had a complexion resembling rye bread, lit up by a nose that told of rye whiskey. A marble-topped centre-table supported several volumes of Shakespeare withdrawn from the college library, and what he called a ‘Wemyss glass,’ which was a graceful round goblet exceedingly thick. In this reclined a heavy silver spoon of curious shape, used for tamping down sugar and lemon. It caused him the greatest irritation if this spoon got misplaced.

It seemed to me I had never heard so rich and vibrant a voice. On Sunday afternoons while the winter snows of Berkshire were driving past the windows, and when there was no more hot water in the kettle, he would open a volume of the great Elizabethans, or a play of Shakespeare (who, by the way, was really an Irishman, according to O’Fayne), and read to us Macbeth or give us his favorite ‘Falstaff” in a truly magnificent manner.

I had been informed on sure authority that O’Fayne made his living by writing dime novels. But I never mentioned this to John Median, for it would have broken his heart. I could hardly support the burden that I bore alone all that long winter. Our professors in the college were excellent men, but what were they when compared with O’Fayne of Trinity Dublin? Here was a sheer idealist. Here was a glorious Samson whom some Philistine publishing-house in New York was forcing to grind in tragical captivity. There was something unspeakably ignoble in this; and he so at home with the great spirits!

John Median’s father was proprietor of a very prosperous clothing-store in Syracuse. He was also vice-president of the street-car company. ‘Our company owns about four hundred horses,’said John. ‘Where do they all come from?’ I asked. ‘I don’t know; from Europe, I think,’ said John very quietly. Yet, with it all, he was simple and unpretending as a child. Also, I inquired why John never wore clothes from the family store, but patronized a very expensive tailor in New York. ‘Noblesse oblige,’ he answered. I did not know what this phrase meant, and I am confident John did not. I always intended to find out, in some book, the meaning of this expression, together with another word John often used, namely ‘apropos,’ but I never did.

On our way toward the Widow Green’s, after our first visit to O’Fayne, I remarked that it seemed pretty horrible to me that a brilliant man should drink so hard.

‘That’s not so strange,’ said John; ‘he is literary. All the great writers have done their best work when thoroughly drunk.’ I never contradicted John Median, for I had been brought up in a small village, while Median had lived all his life in the big world of Syracuse, and, as I have explained, was more or less in touch with Europe.

The Widow Green lived in a big white house with tall pillars, which stood beside a brook overhung by great willows. She was an adept in the subject of oyster soup; and this she dispensed in great bowls to the duly qualified, on winter nights at Wykeham. Seated by her big fireplace, the Widow knitting not far from us, we would close our eyes and grasp the fullest possible handful of so-called ‘animal crackers’ and deposit it in our steaming bowls of soup. I had invented this game and I still think it had human interest. A lion counted two, an elephant four, and a donkey ten. Who totaled the smaller sum paid for the soup of both. But the paying was a delicate business. One had to leave the exact amount on the tablecloth; for the Widow Green was peculiar, and was, as she said over and over again, indifferent to money. ‘I don’t do this,’ she would observe, ‘for what there is in it. I do it as a side issue. My husband was an Advent minister.’

There were only two rules at the Widow Green’s: the conversation had to be ‘general,’ and we had to leave at half-past ten. Many a time on moonlit winter nights, after a snowshoe tramp over the western hills, a tired procession would flop its way down through the burial ground and across the bridge, clattering the length of her front piazza, only to be met by the stern Widow at the half-opened door with ‘It’s quarter to eleven ! Was your comin’ here a programme or an afterthought?’ ‘Programme! Programme!’ we would all shout. But she would slam the door, nevertheless.

On the evening of our first Sundayafternoon visit to O’Fayne of Trinity Dublin, John Median was more pensive than usual. Finally he remarked: ‘Here we’ve been a year and a half at this college, and I tell you, Commodore, we’re not getting anything. I sort of wish, sometimes, I had gone to Cornell. Mother wanted me to.’ ‘Cornell!’ sniffed the Widow Green as her knitting-needles clicked ominously. ‘Let me tell you you’re a big sight better off where you be. Mr. Median, you’ve got to be more to home in this college, and you’ve got to be more resigned. This college, Wykeham, is like a heifer cow. Do you know how to milk, Mr. Median?’ ‘No, madam,’ answered John, ‘but I hope to learn sometime.’

‘Well,’ resumed the Widow, ‘this college is like a heifer cow; the earnester and the nervouser you act, the less she gives down to you. I have always noticed — but I prob’ly ought not to say this — that the loafers often git the most out of it.’ She here looked significantly at me. I bowed gravely. The Widow went on, ‘ What would you do without any mountains and brooks? ‘

‘Brooks! Brooks!’ John Median half-shouted. ‘Why, at Cornell they ‘ve got a magnificent brook that flows right through the campus and makes a tremendous waterfall.’

‘Yes!’ answered the Widow. ‘And they use it to run the college blacksmith-shop! My husband had a charge in York State and I know. Them two rules I gave you, Mr. Median, are the real ones for college, and for life, too. Wherever you be, be to home; and be resigned. That’s what I used to tell those two boys of my own.’

Very gently I pressed my foot upon John’s, underneath the table; but I was too late.

‘Where are they now?’ asked Median. She rose from her chair, straightened herself, and with a rapt look of pride and dignity answered splendidly, ‘Out in the world, and doing well.’

From my childhood I had remembered her excellent husband; but the two boys were wholly imaginary.

The next Sunday afternoon O’Fayne of Trinity Dublin was too ill to receive us; but on the Sunday following he was in wonderful form, though he uttered awful heresies that hurt and staggered me. John Median, on the contrary, listened with solemn approval, feeling firmly justified in his disappointment over what he was getting at Wykeham.

'’T is a rare thing,’ said O’Fayne, ‘to find an institution that lives so completely on holy buncombe as does this one. You talk and write and sing — yes, you even pray—about these mountains; and what are they, in God’s name? Windbreaks! Windbreaks! Windbreaks that shut out the real wurrld and all breath of the spirit that will be blowing!’

‘There ‘s something in it,’ said John. ‘Something in it, you say? I tell you there’s much in it! You boast that you have no contact with the wurrld; and you think that’s made up to you by another variety of small-college buncombe, namely that you do have grand contacts with learned professors. ‘T is I myself who witnessed one of these grand contacts the other evening. I was sitting in the library of one of these great men, whan a student came to the front door. The professor led him into the parlor across the hall. Awkward silence for three minutes. Finally the grand educator said, “ Well, Smith, what can I do for you?” “Oh,” said Smith, “nothing at all,” — the truest word he ever spoke, — “I only came to call.” “Ah, that’s very good,” returned the professor. “ I will go and summon my wife.” He went into the next room and quickly reappeared with Mrs. Jones. “ Mr. Smith has come to call,” said he to his good wife. “We are very glad to have this call, Mr. Smith,” said the admirable woman, and then, rising from her chair, she went out into the hall and led back by the hand little Susan, aged nine. “Susan,” said her mother, “Mr. Smith has come to call.” Susan made a very pretty curtsy, and after a minute or two went off upstairs to bed, stopping only to shout over the banisters to her older brother, “Bubbsy! Don’t go into the parlor! There’s a student in there making a call.”

‘A while longer the poor victim stayed; then Heaven opened and he escaped. The call was over. Twentyfive years from now he will return for the reunion of his class, and at the banquet he will say to them, “ Fellows! I want to tell you right here and now that the best thing I got out of college was the intimate social relations with the professors, in their homes, and all.”

‘Now,’ added O’Fayne, ‘in great universities like Trinity Dublin one cannot do this. I might, say there are none of these grand contacts. Though I would make no man discontented with his college, nor stir up rebellion against Alma Mater, — ‘t would be a horrible sort of matricide, — yet tell me this: What kind of a home of good learning is it, when two brilliant lads like yourselves have to fly to a foreign visitor like me if you ‘re to gain any real culture at all? Mr. Median is right. You’re not getting the least crumb at Wykeham College. Don’t count on it. It can never be.’

I was greatly relieved when he suddenly turned his batteries away from us poor Americans and pointed them against the English. It came about in this way.

‘When I finish this bit of lemon,’ said he, ‘we ‘ll talk of Biography. ‘T is the finest of the arts. Did ever you read a biography?’ John was painfully silent. Being an industrious youth possessed of a fine memory, he was what we called a high-stand man; but, being without curiosity and wholly devoid of imagination, he had never read any books other than textbooks.

‘One of the cardinal sins of your faculty here,’ O’Fayne had once told us, ‘is this: they call the sinners to repentance instead of the righteous. On the one hand they let the honest cash-boys believe themselves to be great merchants of goodly pearls; and on the other, too human to be humane, they show overanxiety for keeping the black sheep and the wayward within the fold. Education it is not; ‘t is more like Polar Relief!’

O’Fayne now repeated his question. ‘Mr. Median, did ever you read a biography?’ John shook his head, so I came forward with ‘I’m in the middle of one now — Dean Stanley’s Life of Arnold of Rugby.'

‘You’ll not finish it!’ said O’Fayne. ‘And why should you? Anglican Biography is not Biography at all; it’s Necrology.’

‘What does that word mean?’ asked John.

'’T is a fair question, Mr. Median, and a right question,’ returned O’Fayne. ‘I ‘ll best answer it by saying that in all this Anglican stuff Death controls Life — the tail wags the dog. Before ever they get a man out of his short pantaloons they begin measuring him for his shroud and preparing the wake. Hundreds of them have I read. Dawn is nothing, noon is nothing, twilight is all. They ‘re written, most of them, by widows — during the interim. I ‘ll give you a specimen: fictitious, of course, but God’s truth.’ He took a few turns about the room, steadily enough, and then announced with ringing solemnity, ‘Chapter Four Hundred and Nineteen. Last Illness and Death of the Bishop of Bathing Well. By His Poor Widow.’

It was the most ludicrous scene I had ever witnessed. Pulling a coverlet off his bed and throwing it around his shoulders, he began to improvise; and discarding every vestige of his rich Hibernian tone he wove the color and inflection of cloistered Anglican talk.

‘It was at the end of March,’ began O’Fayne, ‘it was at the end of March, though Mr. Snickscythe, the surgeon (a cousin once removed of Sir Limping Snickscythe of Cowstable Hay barn), thinks it was toward the beginning of April, that the dear Bishop, who had now reached the age of ninety-four, began to feel a premonition, as it were, of leg-ache. The question was, which leg of the two was affected, the Bishop himself insisting that the whole trouble lay with the calf of the left leg. But the surgeon could not see the matter in this light, and he insisted upon performing a rather serious operation upon the ligaments of the right leg.

‘That following summer the Bishop was compelled to give up the Matterhorn and the Jungfrau, though he did manage to climb the one peak of the Pyrenees he had left unmastered. Toward autumn he turned his face toward the States for the big-game shooting, and among the Blackfeet Indians of Montana he found some additional material for his book about the Lost Tribes of Israel. His edition of Euripides was, of course, his magnum opus; nevertheless he wished, before his life should end, to complete his researches along these Biblical lines. This autumn he added many new items of etymology which promised to prove important. For example, in the expression “hunkatobac, ” in common use among the Blackfeet during certain ceremonials, he was confident he had discovered a corruption of the Latin phrase nunc pro tunc; and other evidences that the primitives of Montana had been subjected, early in the period of discovery, to distinctly Romanizing influences.

‘But my dear husband the Bishop was growing weaker all the time; and two years from the following February, just as the extra services were coming on in Lent, he sent at last for the doctor, who had married the widow of the Dean of Hichester-Drawers, but who did not, I think, seize the Bishop’s case imaginatively. “The trouble with you is, Bishop,” said the doctor, “you are very old and very tough.” Just seven months later, as he was riding his bicycle into Oxford, he felt that his collar was growing tight, and it is my belief ‘ — here O’Fayne stopped and shouted ‘Where are you going?’

‘Evening Prayers!’ we yelled from the hallway. ‘Hear the Chapel bell? We’re late!’ And we bolted from the tavern up the village street. Toward the end of the President’s long prayer, Median nudged me, and whispered, ‘He has been going a long time, but how much have we gotten out of it?' Two or three weeks later, in the midst of a blizzard of whirling snow, we trudged our way through deep drifts to the old red tavern, and found O’Fayne in a state of great exaltation. He had attended for the first time our Sundaymorning chapel-service, and his spirit fairly reeked with disgust at it all.

‘I knew just what to expect,’ said O’Fayne, ‘ for that preacher with the white vest and the grand paunch had supper here last night. I watched the man. When I saw him pour a half-pint of cream over a big piece of hot mincepie, I knew the Gospel of the Holy God was not in him.’

‘Mr. O’Fayne,’ interposed John Median, ‘is that logical?’

‘’Tis not, Mr. Median,’ answered O’Fayne, ‘and ‘t is not in the race. But we have something higher than logic, and that’s insight. However, I’ll say this, to my sorrow, Mr. Median: that those who drink too much are always the most fierce against those that overeat. We reverse the saying of the Holy Book, for we who are born after the spirit persecute them that are born after the flesh.

‘But to go back to that sermon this morning, what a poor thing it was, and how sterile! As Mr. Median sometimes says, we were getting nothing at all. As soon as ever the preacher began about the man at the Pool of Bethesda, I could see clear to the end of his hard gravel road. So off went my mind with the same text and the same subject, “Another steppeth down before me!”

‘But lads, lads! What a difference! This sermon of mine, the first that ever I made, gives the freshness of an April evening, and the real tragedy of the wurrld. Listen awhile now. I will read it to you.’

O’Fayne took from the table some sheets of foolscap and began: —

‘Commonplace minds will make little of this tale of Bethesda Pool; and the hardy perennials of religion will find here naught but a case of good healing. Give but a name to the bodily paralysis and all the dull will be satisfied.

‘Here was a man who never was healed, for he was damned from his birth. The Grand Teacher had no confidence about him, for he took pains that he rarely took, and followed the man to the Temple and gave him fair warning of the worse things that might come to him.

‘Here was a man of no character, and without any germ of the same. He could look no man steady in the eye. And why do I say it? Because when first asked if he really wished to be healed he made no answer at all, but began to whine out his sad tale of hard luck. And I say he never was cured. Ten years later, when Saint Paul and Saint Barnabas came to Jerusalem with young Timothy the Greek, they found him back at the Pool again as helpless as ever he had been. He had not liked his mason-work, he said, and he had fallen into the custom of hanging around the old pool for the sake of the talk there was there.’

Here John Median interposed. ‘But where do you get all this, Mr. O’Fayne? It’s not in the Bible.’

For the only time that winter O’Fayne shot an impatient look at poor John and gave no heed at all to the protest.

‘“One day,” explained the man of Bethesda to Saint Paul, “as I was standing near the Pool, something gave way in my back and I found myself just what I had been before. So once more I made my living by tips, and got my pleasure by listening to strangers who told me that despite my infirmity I had a mind of great brilliance.”

‘“This is interesting!” said Timothy, but the Great Apostle turned to Barnabas and declared it was the most disgusting sight he had ever seen in his life. “However,” said Paul, “we need not worry about his going to Hell!” “Why is that?” laughed the young Greek. “ Because,” answered the apostle, “he is there already.”’

Suddenly O’Fayne stopped. Then a strange thing happened. Without any warning, without any reason, he broke down and cried like a little boy.

John Median and I were aghast. Then I made a quick sign and we stole down the stairs.

That was the last time we ever saw him, for two days later when we called he had gone! We asked the innkeeper in a startled way where O’Fayne had vanished. ‘EAST,’ he half-shouted, ‘and thank God!’ Our host took a jackknife from his trousers-pocket, impaled the butt of his cigar on one of the lesser blades, and added, ‘But I’ll say this, — and I won’t go back on it in no way, shape, manner, form, or degree,

— he paid me his bill. And that bill has been runnin’ for a consid’rable spell.’

We left him there in his mean little office as the darkness settled down, and I remember thinking how keenly that weed, almost consumed, must have felt the sharpness of the knife-blade.

On our way to the Widow’s neither John nor I spoke. We sat down, and the silly little game was a draw; no lions, no elephants, just a donkey apiece. ‘John,’ said I finally, ‘what do you suppose O’Fayne was — I mean, what was he really?’

‘ I think,’ answered John, ‘he was an Irish lord.’

‘But in the books,’ said I, ‘Irish lords are always borrowing money.’

‘That’s why I think he was one!’ replied Median.

‘Great Scott!’ I cried out in startled thrift, ‘you don’t mean to say that you

— how much?’

John looked around cautiously, and then answered, in that quiet gentlemanly voice, ‘Four hundred and fifty.’