Through the school: The experiences of a mill boy in securing an education

“HERE I am, in our honeymoon year, packing you off to college,” commented my wife, as she folded some towels and handed them to me to put in my trunk. “It takes me back to the day when my mother did it for me.”

“And you’re to have the hard end of the business,” I replied, “staying in this house alone and keeping an eye on the parish. Not much of a honeymoon to that through the long, winter days, while I am in the swirl of college events, with all the fellowship one can desire.”

“But there’ll be holidays and Saturdays at home, for you,” she answered. “I shall see you once a week at least, for you will have to preach here every Sunday. We’re working together, now,” she added, quietly. “If there’s any suffering, any hardship, any self-denial involved, I am willing to undergo it, else I would not have married you!”

In her voice ran an undertone of tragic feeling and for the first time I began dimly to realize, in the midst of my own opportunity for a college education, that in this little home, back over the hills, my wife would be waiting, and waiting, through the long hours of the day and night, for the two years’ study to be at an end: the study which would break up our home and separate us during the first days of our married life. I vowed then to give it all up: to plunge into the pastoral work: to send word to the college dean that he must not expect me.

“No, not that: not that!” protested my wife. “It is your chance, take it!”

As I descended from my pulpit the following Sunday morning, I was introduced to a quiet youth who was recommended to me as a Senior in the college. That afternoon my new acquaintance came down to the parsonage and willingly permitted me, in my curiosity, to question him concerning the traditions, the customs, and the personnel of the college. I asked him some very trivial and laughable questions, I remember, because, at the time, I had some very curious and perhaps too exalted notions concerning colleges, especially colleges of the high standard of the one in which I had just matriculated and to which I was to journey on the morrow.

After our conversation, the Senior promised to call for me next day and escort me to the college: a proffer which I was glad to accept.

That September Monday morning was a very pleasant one in the Northern country. The maple groves on the hill slopes made one think that God had let fall his color pots, for the leaves of the trees flamed with reds, with yellows, and with blacks. The mail wagon drove up to the parsonage door and collected myself, the Senior, and my trunk. My wife stood at the door telling me not to forget this and that, with true motherly solicitude. Then, with a dash through the dust, the wagon wheeled us on our way across the river to the train that should carry us to within four miles of college.

The Senior said, as we changed at a junction,

“The train that will get us to college does not go for some hours. Are you fit for a four-mile walk? We can eat lunch on the way. I have some in my suit-case.”

I agreed that I was ready for the walk, so we left the town precincts by walking through a lumber yard.

Our travel took us over a cinder path between the ties and switch rods of a railroad. At the right, far below us, flowed a very wide and swift river, whose surface twinkled through the shields of pine and white birch which lined the bluff. Here we met several young men walking slowly and engaged in earnest conversation.

“Those are students!” the Senior whispered, “out for a walk.”

When some mill whistles at a remote distance announced the noon hour, the Senior conducted me to a grove of stiff, tall pines where on the brown, fragrant needles he spread a lunch of sandwiches, jelly, and pears.

Then we took up the walk again, passing on into the wilderness of trees and rushing river. At a turn in the track we came to a high cliff whose outer surface was stained with moss and glistened with dampness. The Senior stopped before a niche out of whose cool interior spouted a stream of ice-cold water, bringing to mind the rock which Moses struck with his wand and which slaked the thirst of the children of Israel.

“Nearly every student who passes this way,” the Senior announced, “gets a drink of this water.”

Ten minutes later we walked into the station and I was amazed at the heaps of trunks that covered the platform. Drays were doing their best to reduce the pile by carting them away in enormous loads. As we made our way around the trunks there dashed into the station one of the coaches I had seen near the tavern on my previous visit; this time topped by a group of healthy-faced, shouting students, wearing tan shoes, flannel trousers, and flapping caps such as clowns, in the circus rings, wear with such comical effect. This coach was quickly followed by another, similarly loaded with students come down to greet the arrival of classmates and friends.

At last I was able to realize the task that was on my hands if I were to fit into the college life, for scores of students passed us or trailed after us as the Senior and I walked up the hill. How should I ever succeed in remembering their names, in entering into the acquaintance of a small number of all those students? And the trains were bringing more!

On top of the hill, just before entering the campus, some fraternity houses, lavishly appointed, had their verandahs filled with students, singing snatches of songs and bantering one another. Then there flashed into view again, the campus and the business street, only on this occasion it was a far different campus and a very different business street from what I had seen on my previous visit. The sidewalks were thronged with students, some leaning against shop windows, others sitting on steps, while others roamed along engaged in conversation. On the campus, keeping to the paths, were groups of Freshmen walking timidly enough past Sophomores in sweaters and negligee attire and past Seniors in graver dress and mien. On the front lawn of a dormitory four neatly-dressed youths were beating rugs and as their energetic actions continued they were half smothered in the clouds of dust.

“I should imagine that they would don rougher clothes while they dust rugs,” I commented to the Senior.

My companion smiled, knowingly,

“They have no chance to change clothes,” he replied. “They are Freshmen which some of the upper-classmen have picked up from the campus and compelled to do that work. It will be the Freshmen’s turn, next year, however, so that it isn’t much of an imposition. Now you’ll see some fun. Watch that football man with the sweater!”

The football man in the sweater had come out of the dormitory and had gone over to the Freshman who was working more energetically than his fellows, and said to him,

“Say, Freshie, what’re you sleeping on the job like that for, eh? Do you want the Sophs. to give you a black mark so soon?”

He glared with mock savagery at the bewildered Freshman, who replied,

“Please sir, I am working very hard, sir!”

“If you call that work, then,” stormed the football man, “I wonder what you do when you loaf? Die probably, eh?”

“I thought, sir—” persisted the Freshman, but he was cut short by the football man who said,

“Just carry that up to my room, put it straight, set the furniture in place, and then go to work and copy those marked extracts from the coach’s note-book which you’ll find on the desk. Hurry and have it done in two hours’ time!”

As the football man ended those savage orders, he turned away with an amused smile and as he came towards us he winked and said to the Senior,

“That young cuss’s got the making of a fine kid in him, even if he is the son of a several hundred thousand dollar Senator. Just watch him make the dust fly! Ain’t he a peacherino, though!”

The Senior informed me, after the football man had strolled away, that the fagging was in full force just then and that the Freshmen took it in good humor, and, in fact, would have considered themselves not actually at college had that feature been omitted.

The different noises that filled the air made a Babel. From dormitory windows came shouts, cornet practise, and various moanings which, at a quieter time, would have been differentiated as vocal trios and duets. Down the business street, from the upper floors where some of the fraternities had rooms, the sounds of clanging piano rag-time tried to merge with explosive bellowings of happy, singing fraternity men. On the College Club porch a jostling crowd of students could be seen, shaking hands, telling summer experiences, and knocking chairs about in the anxiety to get at one another. The shop windows were gay with college banners, souvenirs, books, picture cards, college photographs, and sporting goods.

I found the furniture I had purchased from Garden heaped before my door and a half hour later I had it scattered lonesomely over the floor of my large room. From my open window I could look down on the stir of life on the campus. Night deepened, and with it came an increase, rather than a quieting of the noises, as if Youth were bound to have one last, gleesome frolic before the sedate masters of Books curbed their liberties. In the darkness of the night, sitting at the window, exactly as I had done at Evangelical University six years previously, I had an alien feeling as I listened to the sounds which soared up to my ears from the gloom below. Demon yells, demon howls of acute misery, throbbings of mandolin strings, the hoarse tooting of a fish horn, a piercing falsetto voice under my window trying to sing,

“O, O, O! Dear, dear old days, love!”

the clanging of a hand bell and intermittent revolver shots. These were only a few of all the riot of sounds spreading through the night air, over the campus and bursting out of the dormitory windows on every side of me. While I sat wondering how a hundred or so of faculty could ever bring seriousness out of such a chaos of youthful energy, I heard a chug underneath my window as a truckman hurled a trunk to the sidewalk: my trunk. Immediately I went on the campus, discovered two Freshmen, and with all the abandon of a Junior that I could muster for the occasion, I coolly invited them to assist me in carrying the heavily loaded trunk up the three flights of stairs. So conformed to the fagging custom were the Freshmen, that when one of them unfortunately sliced his finger on a loose nail and I commiserated him on it, he said, keeping his grip on the trunk, meanwhile,

“Nothing at all, sir. Nothing at all.”

Next morning the trio of bell chimes, in the tower of the college chapel, hurled clanging, throbbing scales-of-three over the quiet campus. Immediately from the doorways of dormitories, boarding clubs, and the Commons, appeared chatting groups of students who took the paths across the campus towards the first chapel service. From the North, the South, the East and the West they hurried; hundreds and hundreds of well-dressed youths, arm in arm or four and five abreast as they walked.

The choir, transepts and gallery were soon crowded, almost to suffocation. The morning sun in trying to break through the windows into the dimness merely glorified the pictured saints, and prophets, shepherds and sheep. The gowned organist played a part of the grand finale of The Pilgrim’s Chorus. The gowned figure of the President arose and stood silent a second while a wave of reverent stillness swept through the chapel. Scripture followed hymn, and a simple prayer was followed by a general confession. Then the organ burst into a triumphant recessional, and the students noisily crowded down the aisles into the open air. The day’s work was begun, having had invoked on it the blessing from the Author of all Truth, and the Creator of that World which throughout the days and years, has had such fascination for students and professors, of Science, of Art and Faith.

In the confusion of the multitude of students, most of them strangers to me, I felt the futility of my social ambitions. In Evangelical University and in the theological seminary I had been in the midst of small groups of students, whose names, characteristics and acquaintance could be compassed in a few short weeks. But the vast procession of young men which blackened the greensward of the campus that morning dismayed me. It seemed that mere hand-shaking and saying to each individual member of it, “I am glad to know you!” would demand months and months of time. It was a new experience, too, after the simple democracy in my previous schools, to have those who were my classmates and college associates, pass me without a word of morning greeting, without a lift of the eyes.

But that was only the first day!

The second morning, as I sat in the chapel, I chanced to have my attention attracted by a curious fingering of paper. It was the student next to me who had some blank sheets of paper in his hands which he shuffled intermittently and over which he kept passing the ball of his forefinger. The organ had not ceased its prelude, and the students had not ceased entering the chapel, so I paid a stricter attention to the strange recreation of my companion. Though he shuffled his blank papers with great skill and fingered their surfaces with scientific regularity, his eyes—wide, staring ones,—were kept fixed on the President’s pulpit—never once did they turn on my inquisitiveness or towards the papers.

One of the students then slipped by me and took a vacant seat next to this shuffler of papers. As soon as he was seated, however, he bent forward and said, to me,

“Your name’s Priddy, isn’t it? I’m Sanderson, the monitor who keeps the attendance of this section. By the way, have you met Quarles? Quarles,” he said to the student who was shuffling the papers, “meet Priddy, your classmate!” Quarles, without taking his eyes from their fixed stare on the President’s pulpit, extended me his hand, and said, in a very quiet voice,

“I’m glad to meet you, Priddy! I’m blind, as you probably know.”

I expressed my amazement that he should be in college.

“Oh,” Sanderson exclaimed, “it doesn’t seem to bother him any. I notice that he’s getting on for Phi Beta Kappa. He makes us hump!”

“Then you are able to take the regular studies!” I gasped.

“Yes,” said Quarles, “the regular studies!”

“Of course,” I went on, “you omit mathematics, languages, and such things!”

“Why should I, Priddy?” asked Quarles turning toward me his expressionless eyes.

“Well, I really don’t see how you can manage—those subjects,” I explained.

“He manages all right,” interrupted Sanderson, “why, Priddy, he’s taken nineties in calculus, French and German and Greek, and is right there when it comes to such graft courses, as philosophy and English! Oh, you don’t need to pity him: rather pity me, who with my eyesight, am hardly able to pull through Fine Arts One!”

Quarles then explained to me how, before taking his courses, he had a student read to him the complete text which he translated into Braille with his blind-writing apparatus, on sheets of paper. He also used the same instrument, almost as quickly as we, with our sight, would use our pencils in the professor’s lectures. The leaves he had been shuffling that morning, formed a reading lesson in French.

Everybody was the friend of Quarles. He would be groping his way alone over a path to a class but a brief moment, for a student, playing ball, nearby would signal to his comrade, who would hold the ball, and then, throwing down his glove would hurry over, have a cheery word of greeting, ask Quarles whither he was bound, link arms with the blind student and guide him into a path where he could find his own way without need of piloting. In this way, Quarles must have felt the arm of nearly every upper-classman, for not only were they willing to straighten out his walks for him, and read to him, but they also took him with them on excursions, which he shared with excellent comradeship and proved to be as good a mountain climber as the best.

In this way, too, through walks, at meals, and in classes, I soon had the students differentiated and had a formidable list of friendships.

It was my custom, throughout the fall months when the highways were hard and untouched by snow, to ride weekly to and from college on a bicycle which I had bought for that purpose. On this twenty-mile excursion, along a winding river and through quiet, little hamlets, I had certain resting-places where I could breathe and refresh myself with a sup of water.

Doctor Floyd’s well, conveniently near the highway at the summit of a steep grade, had also a rustic bench near it, from which a most gratifying vista could be obtained, which included the view of a pyramidal mountain cone framed in a circular opening of twinkling poplar leaves, at whose foot a silvery dash of river curved under high, bush-lined banks, with now and then a cow or a colt completing the composition by standing in the river.

The Doctor, himself, whose permission to drink of the water and to seat myself on the bench for a rest I had taken pains to secure, was a short, stout, bald-headed man of about sixty, whose clean-shaven cheeks were always flushed by an excess of blood. He had retired from active practise and was engaged in the delightful, old age recreation of seeing how many eggs he could persuade a harem of Plymouth Rocks to lay through a most careful, scientific mixture of laying foods, use of germless drinking troughs, and adaptation to an expensive mode of existence.

One Saturday noon, as I sat on the bench puffing for breath, for the day was both dusty and hot, the Doctor, with the egg record for the week in his hands, which he came down to show me, sat down on the bench and said,

“Well, do those wild students know what they are in college for?”

“What do you mean?” I asked, puzzled by his sneer.

“Usually,” he explained, “more’n half of the students in the college over there don’t know why they’re there!”

“Oh,” I said, “there are a great number of my friends who are not certain what they are going to do in the world, after graduation, if that is what you mean, Doctor.”

He rubbed his fat hands in revengeful gratification.

“That’s just it! Just it!” he laughed, cynically. “It’s all a waste of good money and precious time. There’s no good can come of it. They don’t take their studies seriously enough. Let me see, how many subjects does a student have to select from under that new-fangled election system they have—study made easy, I call it—how many, now?”

“I think there must be in the neighborhood of a hundred different courses, a majority of which are elective, so far I know.”

“And the young lazybones pick out the easiest courses they can, independent of the good it’ll do ’em, eh?”

“Perhaps they do,” I replied, antagonized by his critical and belligerent tone. “But then, I don’t believe that a liberal education: a college course, has to do merely with giving a student a lot of technical information!”

The little man fussily remonstrated.

“What? I thought that colleges were in the world to fit men for their work, and that if they’re to be doctors, why, they’re to be taught medicine and nothing else!”

“That is the function of professional schools,” I agreed. “Take my case, for instance. I am a minister. I spent three years in a good theological seminary. While there I wanted technical information on my profession. I got it, and assimilated more or less—perhaps less. But when I came to college I did not come to add to my technical theological knowledge; not at all!”

“What did you come for, then,” he asked, with another sneer, “to get the degree, I suppose, like a lot of others?”

“I don’t think you give me credit for being a man of ordinary intelligence,” I replied, hotly, angered by his insinuation.

“Then what under heaven did you come to college for, if not to increase your theological information and whatever ability you might have as a preacher.”

“I came to college,” I replied, “to get the other man’s point of view. I reasoned with myself that a purely technical education tends to narrow a man unless supplemented by an education which might be entitled, ‘The Other Man’s Point of View.’”

“That’s a thrust at me,” replied the Doctor, “as if to say that I, because I took my medicine with old Dr. Desbrow, and never went to one of your colleges, was narrow. The idea!”

“I was not alluding to you, sir,” I responded. “I was merely making a generalization which seems provable. For instance, I have a friend who is an expert surgeon. He has been trained in some of the best clinics and has diplomas from the most reputable medical colleges. He has learned his profession well, in all its finer, technical points. But he never received any liberal education. The result is, that he is narrow in his tastes, caring for nothing which is not flavored by anaesthetics or redolent of carbolic acid. As there are among his friends those whose stomachs turn at the mention of an operation or at the whisper of anaesthetics, he has no way of interesting them on subjects in which they are interested. He imagines that because all the world is not poking steel points in ulcers and cancers, it had better be left alone. The result is, that when you mention the surgeon’s name to the townsfolk, you will hear words like these: ‘A fine surgeon, but as cranky and bitter as a hobby-rider.’ No one can get along with him. He loses business by it. He knows nothing but his profession!”

“Well,” demanded the doctor, “that’s a job big enough for any man with brains, isn’t it?”

“True,” I responded, “but the truly educated surgeon has not only to know his tools, his diagnoses, his operating methods, but along with that knowledge, his final success demands that he be liberally trained in human nature, that he have at least a faint idea of the subjects in which other people are interested. A liberal education, added to his professional education gives him that.”

“I’d like to know how?” demanded the Doctor.

“Well, take my case again, for instance. I am going to take a lot of studies which are not technically pertinent to sermons or doctrines: study of Dutch paintings, Italian, Chemistry, Anatomy of the Brain and Sense Organs, and others which I can’t mention at this time, because I have not decided just what they will be. Here is what I mean. After an introductory study of Italian, I shall learn just how the Italians think. It is good to know that, surely? Then after a brief course in chemistry, though I shall not care enough about it when I am through with the experiments, to carry off a test tube, tie it with baby ribbon and keep it for a souvenir, as some students do, I shall ever after realize that while I am swearing by theology, others, about me, have reason for being engrossed in chemical formulas and tests. Each study that I shall take, and each classroom that I shall visit, will form opportunities for me to get at the points of view which determine why Tom differs from Joe and why Joe differs from me. If the college can do that, Doctor, and not add a single jot to my theological knowledge, I shall feel more than repaid for the time I spend in it and the money I pay to it. So that is why I don’t think it either wasted time or an entirely hopeless situation, Doctor, if a large number of students in the college do not know why they are there. One thing is certain, they are getting trained in the other man’s point of view!”

The Doctor, evidently not at all in agreement with my explanation, after he had pooh-poohed to himself for a minute, thought to change the subject and for that purpose he said to me,

“I rather pity you, young man. I always did pity ministers. They don’t seem to do anything substantial; that’s why I don’t go near a church. It’s all up-in-the-air preaching, and darned little doing. Now, keeping pullets or mixing a sick draught—why, they are something worth while, now—but preaching and preachers—um!”

“The other man’s point of view, Doctor,” I laughed, as I mounted my wheel and started off.

A week later, the Doctor came out of the house, when I stopped at the well, and as he drew near he shouted,

“I drove over to the college, last Wednesday. What a lazy set of loafers you’ve got over there, to be sure. I was there in the afternoon and saw them reading papers, strolling around the campus and playing all sorts of games. I don’t think they’ll amount to much in the world if they go on at that rate. They seem so aimless! I heard one fellow, with turned up trousers and purple socks that would have given light at night, say to another student, something about throwing books and professors to the dogs—or some such stuff!”

“Yes,” I admitted, “I hear that every day. I know a good many students who care little about classes and text books.”

The doctor, evidently gratified with that admission grunted,

“Then what’s the good of the college—to them. Why doesn’t it send them into the world to be useful?”

“That’s what a good many people say, about us students,” I replied. “But books and professors and courses of study are only a part of what a student gets in our college, sir. It’s a very peculiar situation. I’m older than most of the students, and have had the advantage of a professional training, and so can look on the college through somewhat serious eyes. You would be astounded, for instance, at the tremendous education that the men receive from purely student affairs.”

“Going into the country, when the football team’s won over Princeton, for instance,” sniffed the Doctor, “and tearing down farm fences! Oh, yes, a wonderful education in student affairs? Like one of your boys that came into this village, and in broad daylight went up to the grocery store, there, on the main street, and deliberately took down and carried off a four-foot, patent-medicine thermometer, the folks all the while thinking him to be an agent fellow, come to mend it, or change it. Oh, yes, a wonderful education those fellows get among themselves!”

After the old man had frightened one of his pullets back into the rear of the house, I replied,

“No, I didn’t refer to isolated acts of mischief, Doctor, but to the student enterprises that create ability. Our college is nothing more than wheels within wheels. There are professors and classroom studies for the big, outside wheels, and for the inner wheels, whirling all the time, are the college newspaper, the college magazine, the athletic business, the writing and staging of plays, the dramatic clubs, the musical clubs, the social service enterprises, the political clubs and the religious work. Why, Doctor, those students conduct all those things practically without help from outsiders. You would be astounded at the amount of executive and administrative ability they demand. The students who run the monthly magazine, for instance, must be good editors, fair writers, and managers of astuteness, for it has to pay for itself, at least, and must express literary power. It is the same with the newspaper. That is a business in itself, yet, it is managed, financed and edited entirely by students, many of whom find it difficult to get interested in the routine of the college curriculum. When you multiply these business and serious activities, you find the students actually doing profitable and character-forming tasks outside of the classrooms which few critics of the college take the trouble to notice. Why, it was only a week ago, that a student came into my room and had a talk with me about a new college enterprise that seemed formidable. He was a student who did not care five toothpicks for his studies. He was in difficulties with his physics course, at the time, having failed in it twice, and seeming to be letting his third and last chance for his degree slip past without giving it a thought. The people on the campus, and the professors in the classrooms appraised this fellow as a ‘loafer’ and an ‘idler.’ Yet, that morning he came to me and said that he proposed to start a comic monthly, at ten cents a copy, himself to be editor-in-chief, and the jokes, poems, pictures, designs, the securing of advertisement and subscribers, to be under his general charge and apportioned to willing students. He went off for two days, at his own expense, secured over a hundred dollars’ worth of advertising, and only last week had newsboys selling on the campus a first-class, neatly printed, well-filled, artistically illustrated comic monthly, which, by this time has its regular staff of student artists, poets, joke writers, business managers, and board of editors; it’s a paper which promises to be one of the features of student life. No, Doctor,” I concluded as I felt of my tires, preparatory to taking up my journey towards home, “students may seem shiftless, indifferent, and unenthusiastic on the campus, but when you get behind the laziest of them you are liable to find that they are giving themselves to some sort of character-making work,—contrary to the posters which lead outsiders to think that college life consists of a place where the student sits in the sun on a fence, smoking a pipe with a leashed bull-pup at his feet!”

“Say,” called the Doctor, as I fitted the toe clips to my shoes, “my pullets did a hundred and sixty this week. Laying,—eh?”