It was an intense September noon — warm, windy, golden, with the smell of ripe grapes and drying vines in the air, and the lake rolling blue on the horizon. Scott McGregor, going into the west corner of the university campus, caught sight of Mrs. St. Peter, just ahead of him, walking in the same direction. He ran and caught up with her.
“Hello, Lillian! Going in to see the Professor? So am I. I want him to go swimming with me — I’m cutting work. Shall we drop in and hear the end of his lecture, or sit down here on the bench in the sun?”
“We can go quietly to the door and listen. If it’s not interesting, we can come back and sit down for a chat.”
“Good! I came early to overhear a bit. This is the hour he’s with his seniors, isn’t it?”
They entered and went along the hall until they came to number 17; the door was afar, and at the moment one of the students was speaking. When he finished, they heard the Professor reply to him. “No, Miller, I don’t myself think much of science as a phase of human development. It has given us a lot of ingenious toys; they take our attention away from the real problems, of course, and since the problems are insoluble, I suppose we ought to be grateful for distraction. But the fact is, the human mind, the individual mind, has always been made more interesting by dwelling on the old riddles, even if it makes nothing of them. Science hasn’t given us any new amazements, except of the superficial kind we get from witnessing dexterity and sleight-of-hand. It hasn’t given us any richer pleasures, as the Renaissance did, nor any new sins — not one! Indeed, it takes our old ones away. It’s the laboratory, not the Lamb of God, that taketh away the sins of the world. You’ll agree there is not much thrill about a physiological sin. We were better off when even the prosaic matter of taking nourishment could have the magnificence of a sin. I don’t think you help people by making their conduct of no importance — you impoverish them. As long as every man and woman who crowded into the cathedrals on Easter Sunday was a principal in a gorgeous drama with God, glittering angels on one side and the shadows of evil coming and going on the other, life was a rich thing. The king and the beggar had the same chance at miracles and great temptations and revelations. And that’s what makes men happy, believing in the mystery and importance of their own individual lives. It makes us happy to surround our creature needs and bodily instincts with as much pomp and circumstance as possible. Art and religion (they are the same thing, in the end, of course) have given man the only happiness he has ever had.
“Moses learned the importance of that in the Egyptian court, and when he wanted to make a population of slaves into an independent people in the shortest possible time, he invented elaborate ceremonials to give them a feeling of dignity and purpose. Every act had some imaginative end. The cutting of the finger nails was a religious observance. The Christian theologians went over the books of the Law, like great artists, getting splendid effects by excision. They reset the stage with more space and mystery, throwing all the light upon a few sins of great dramatic value — only seven, you remember, and of those only three that are perpetually enthralling. With the theologians came the cathedral-builders; the sculptors and glass-workers and painters. They might, without sacrilege, have changed the prayer a little and said, Thy will be done in art, as it is in heaven. How can it be done anywhere else as it is in heaven? But I think the hour is up. You might tell me next week, Miller, what you think science has done for us, besides making us very comfortable.”
As the young men filed out of the room, Mrs. St. Peter and McGregor went in.
“I came over to get you to go to the electrician’s with me, Godfrey, but I won’t make you. Scott wants you to run out to the lake, and it’s such a fine day, you really should go.”
“Car’s outside. We’ll just drop Lillian at the house, Doctor, and you can pick up your bathing-suit. We heard part of your lecture, by the way. How you get by the Methodists is still a mystery to me.”
“I wish he would get into trouble, Scott,” said Lillian as they left the building. “I wish he wouldn’t talk to those fat-faced boys as if they were intelligent beings. You cheapen yourself, Godfrey. It makes me a little ashamed.”
“I was rather rambling on today. I’m sorry you happened along. There’s a fellow in that lot, Tod Miller, who isn’t slow, and he excites me to controversy.”
“All the same,” murmured his wife, “it’s hardly dignified to think aloud in such company. It’s in rather bad taste.”
“Thank you for the tip, Lillian. I won’t do it again.”
It took Scott only twenty minutes to get out to the lake. He drew up at the bit of beach of St. Peter had bought for himself years before; a little triangle of sand running out into the water, with a bath-house and seven shaggy pine-trees on it. Scott had to fuss with the car, and the Professor was undressed and in the water before him.
When McGregor was ready to go in, his father-inlaw was some distance out, swimming with an over-arm stroke, his head and shoulders well out of the water. He wore on his head a rubber visor of a kind he always brought home from France in great numbers. This one was vermilion, and was like a continuation of his flesh — his arms and back were burned a deep terra-cotta from a summer in the lake. His head and powerful reaching arms made a strong red pattern against the purple blue of the water. The visor was picturesque — his head looked sheathed and small and intensely alive, like the heads of the warriors on the Parthenon frieze in their tight, archaic helmets.
By five o’clock St. Peter and McGregor were dressed and lying on the sand, their overcoats wrapped about them, smoking. Suddenly Scott began to chuckle.
“Oh, Professor, you know your English friend, Sir Edgar Spilling? The day after I met him at your house, he came up to my office at the Herald to get some facts you’d been too modest to give him. When he was leaving he stood and looked at one of these motto cards I have over my desk, DON’T KNOCK, and said: ‘May I ask why you don’t have that notice on the outside of your door? I didn’t observe any other way of getting in.’ They never get wise, do they? He really went out to see Marsellus’ place — seemed interested. Doctor, are you going to let them call that place after Tom?”
“My dear boy, how can I prevent it?”
“Well, you surely don’t like the idea, do you?”
The Professor lit another cigarette and was a long while about it. When he had got it going, he turned on his elbow and looked at McGregor. “Scott, you must see that I can’t make suggestions to Louie. He’s perfectly consistent. He’s a great deal more generous and public-spirited than I am, and my preferences would be enigmatical to him. I can’t, either, very gracefully express myself to you about his affairs.”
“I get you. Sorry he riles me so. I always say it shan’t occur next time, but it does.” Scott took out his pipe and lay silent for a time, looking at the gold glow burning on the water and on the wings of the gulls as they flew by. His expression was wistful, rather mournful. He was a good-looking fellow, with sunburned blond hair, splendid teeth, attractive eyes that usually frowned a little unless he was laughing outright, a small, prettily cut mouth, restless at the corners. There was something moody and discontented about his face. The Professor had a great deal of sympathy for him; Scott was too good for his work. He had been delighted when his daily poem and his “uplift” editorials first proved successful, because that enabled him to marry. Now he could sell as many good-cheer articles as he had time to write, on any subject, and he loathed doing them. Scott had early picked himself out to do something very fine, and he felt that the was wasting his life and his talents. The new group of poets made him angry. When a new novel was discussed seriously by his friends, he was perfectly miserable. St. Peter knew that the poor boy had seasons of desperate unhappiness. His disappointed vanity ate away at his vitals like the Spartan boy’s wolf, and only the deep lines in his young forehead and the twitching at the corners of his mouth showed that he suffered.
Not long ago, when the students were giving an historical pageant to commemorate the deeds of an early French explorer among the Great Lakes, they asked St. Peter to do a picture for them, and he had arranged one which amused him very much, though it had nothing to do with the subject. He posed his two sons-inlaw in a tapestry-hung tent, for a conference between Richard Plantagenet and the Saladin, before the walls of Jerusalem. Marsellus, in a green dressing-gown and turban, was seated at a table with a chart, his hands extended in reasonable, patient argument. The Plantagenet was standing, his plumed helmet is his hand, his square yellow head haughtily erect, his unthoughtful brows fiercely frowning, his lips curled and his fresh face full of arrogance. The tableau had received no special notice, and Mrs. St. Peter had said dryly that she was afraid nobody saw his little joke. But the Professor liked his picture, and he thought it quite fair to both the young men.