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

WHEN came the announcement of Spring, at college, after the lawns and the paths had dried, and when the evenings were filled with the throaty gurglings of hopping robins. A sign in front of the Commons announced, “Class Sing Tonight 7:30.” This is a “Sing;”

At seven o’clock the students gather by classes at four different parts of the campus: the seniors to sit on their double fence, the juniors to sit on the steps of the recitation hall, the sophomores to occupy the commodious steps of the Assembly Hall, and the freshmen to stand near the library.

Silence!

Suddenly the low, vibrating voices of the seniors fill the air with, “Harvest Moon.” On its completion, the three lower classes send snapping hand claps over to the fence.

Silence!

The juniors send across to the seniors the melodious, sentimental song, “Summer Days and Love, Love, Love!” over the triple trills of which the high-pitched tenors linger as if they would stop there and sound those musical half tones until out of breath. Led by the seniors, the underclassmen repeat the hand-clapping.

Silence!

With a sudden, flank attack, the sophomores, directed by a shirt-sleeved and very fat student fly into the midst of “Dolly Grey,” a stirring war ballad, and from the pathos which wells out of the sentimental passages, one can easily imagine those wild, irresponsible sophomores crying in harmony with it. Once more the three classes snap their applause.

Silence!

A longer silence this time, for the freshmen, making their first appearance in the rôle of class singers—a thick mass of them—cannot agree with their director as to what the premiere shall be. Soon the matter is settled. An arm is raised and then—a low rumble that dies down, followed by three giant laughs from three different points of the campus. The freshman leader has pitched the tune too low.

“Out with it, Freshies!” comes a mocking, cutting call across from the sophomores—traditional enemies of the freshmen.

One more try, and with the effect of an aeroplane getting its flight slowly, hesitatingly, the freshman song at last rises to a mighty, boyish, exultant rendering of “Old Black Joe!” for they dare not trust themselves with a recent melody.

After the songs, the cheers! the class cheers!

The seniors give one for the juniors, and the juniors applaud it.

The seniors give one for the sophomores, and the sophomores applaud it.

Then the seniors give a heartier one for the freshmen, and those boys almost split the heavens with their yellings.

Next the juniors make the rounds of the classes, with the same response of applause, save that their cheer for the seniors gets but scant and dignified applause, for the seniors must not be too boyish!

Then the sophomores and the freshmen have their turn and the cheering is over.

Silence. The night is deepening, and one hardly stirs. Four huge masses of shadow move in the direction of the campus centre. Then one hears a martial, drill-sergeant’s “Left, left, left!” as the classes catch the step. It is so arranged that, without a halt, the four classes merge into one mass in the middle of the green.

Silence again. Not a sound is heard, until the college song-leader hums a pitch. Then the Alma Mater hymn goes up with all the thrilling reverence in it of a song of love sung to the college mother. If one were near the singers, it would be possible to see, how, when the song deepens in theme, the sophomore unconsciously throws his arm over the shoulder of the freshman, and the senior throws his over the shoulder of the junior: all brothers as the melody unfolds itself.

The hymn ended, the cheer-leader moves to the side of the song-leader, says a few words, and then, as he takes the position of a prize-fighter, on guard, with his fist extended, he pulls out from the disciplined throats, a snappy, thundering crash of a college cheer. It is over. The crowd thins out over the star-lighted campus. Spring has come!

I was amazed, that year, at the amount of personal supervision the professors gave to the students, out of hours, amidst such large classes as they were called upon to instruct. It had been drilled into my mind at Evangelical University that only in the small college is it possible for the professors to “get next” to the student in a wise, helpful manner. So that when I came into the centre of the college life, in all its complexity, diversity and confusion, I actually expected to see the professors deliver their lectures, and then coldly leave us to ourselves, withdrawing themselves from the student life with academic aloofness.

But on Tuesday evenings the faculty were “at home” and welcomed such student visitors as cared to accept the courteous hospitality of their cheerful homes. After classes, and in their offices at certain hours, we could go to our teachers and be sure of receiving their most thorough attention on the matter in mind. Then, too, the professors were always eagerly seeking to align themselves to our life: to enter with us into the profitable ventures of a social, inspiring nature. Thus it came about that they served on athletic committees, religious boards, literary and social programs. It was because they possessed this spirit of fellowship with their students, that I was enabled to venture into a new world of opportunity. It was in this wise.

I had been spending the largest proportion of my time in literary composition, for my wife, my sermon critic, had found that in my pulpit address I needed rhetorical clearness, so I determined to discipline myself to that end. When the English professor gave out exercises, like editorials, descriptions, book reviews, or short stories, I resolved to put the burden of my time in such writings with no other thought than to remedy my pulpit faults. When some of these exercises were returned, after examination by the professor, I found red pencil notes, suggesting that this or that be submitted for publication in the college periodicals. These red pencil suggestions were common in the class, and gave great inspiration to the other students, as they gave inspiration to me. One day, when I arrived late at class, I found the professor reading aloud a description I had written. This was followed by a request for a conference in the teacher’s office.

“I have been watching your work,” said the professor, kindly, “and think that you might try for the junior essay prize and also for the prize offered for the best piece of college fiction. I have been advising several others in the class to compete, and hope that you will find time for the work. These prize competitions are real tests as to the value of classroom work. I hope you and the others will try!”

On account of the professor’s kindly suggestion, I began to work on the essay and the story, and kept my typewriter clattering hour after hour when not in class. For all the lure of authorship was before me. The lure of substantial prizes. The lure of contest. The lure of doing something, in composition, that seemed real.

When I entered upon this special literary adventure I found that I was part of a considerable fellowship, whose interest in the work was kept alive by the wise, far-seeing, personal interest of our different literary instructors. I found one student who confidentially informed me that he was making a special research in the library concerning some wild, unknown pirates who once infested the New England coast. He meant to write at length upon that subject for the gratification of his own literary curiosity. Another student was busy, like the youthful Stevenson, in imitating, deliberately, the styles of the world-famous authors, and just then, on our first acquaintance, was in the wild morals, but cameo-cut phrases of Maupassant!

By the end of spring, in fact, I found myself in as inspiring a literary atmosphere as, probably, ever an undergraduate experienced. For I had been made a member of the editorial board of the college magazine, and even wrote comic doggerel and attempts at descriptive wit for the now thoroughly established comic monthly. I have been in a magazine board meeting, held in a student’s room, when the conversation would rise into debatable heights, and would excite the whole company, over such questions as:

Not only did we have these conversations among ourselves, but one of the professors invited a group of us into his home, once a week, where seated in his snug library amid his choice editions, we would take up the technical study of literature, enter into interesting debates about it, and then sit back in our chairs as our generous host rang for the refreshments: a home touch which we appreciated thoroughly.

Another pleasurable surprise was the small number of text books that I found must be purchased. During my first term I bought only two books for seven classes. The professors regarded the college library as a sort of encyclopædic text book for over a thousand students: forming the standard work on history, economics, social science, literature and the various other departments of the curriculum. At last, I found, professors and students had broken loose from artificial authorities and took their history and economics not only from many treatises on the matter, but from current periodicals, the daily newspaper, catalogues, year books and similar vital, first-hand sources.

This method of study, in use throughout the college, made the library something more vivid than a stack of collected books, magazines and pamphlets: it vitalized it and made it the resort of hundreds of students every day. It linked our classroom work, the professors’ lectures and our own studies to hundreds and hundreds of books, periodicals and papers, where otherwise we should have been limited to a half-dozen omnipotent authorities. In place of reading selected Orations from a book of compilations, I was compelled to find the original oration in some yellowed book in which it was first printed. In studying the leading principles of Forensics I had to go to the records of the courts to read the original evidence and pleas in the case. A procedure like that appealed to the mind and made one alert in judgment. It also made the library the centre where the real, serious work of the student was accomplished, and where one could come in daily contact with the fellows who were after serious results during their four years’ residence in the college.

It was in the library that I first made one of my deepest and most valuable college friendships.

It chanced that one of my studies, the life and works of Goethe, took me to a particular section of the reference room where the shelves of Sociology and Economics filled considerable space. As I made my excursions into the section, I became accustomed to the presence of a serious-faced Senior who was constantly occupied with books and periodicals from those two departments. It became natural for us, as the term advanced, to ask one another the time or to borrow pencils or paper. Finally these approaches to intimacy developed into a friendship; into a ripe friendship which included visits to one another’s rooms, long walks, communings in the club-room and ante-class conversations: on all these occasions a true exchange of serious and most profitable confidences taking place.

Thurber, for that was my companion’s name, though the son of a very wealthy father and accustomed to the finer touches of society life, had undergone, in his contact with the college, one of those conscience awakening, ambition refining and ideal lifting experiences which our president informed us, time and time again, should be the final results of a true, college education.

Thurber’s father was one of that type of American men who boast that their success has been attained through self-improvement and self-education and who crystallize their own peculiar and fortunate experience into formal axioms, on which every one else must seek success. Thurber’s father had to his credit at the time a very large textile mill in a textile city in the South and it had been his supreme desire that his son, immediately on quitting High School, should go into the industry, work his way through it, and take charge of it in the end.

But Thurber had no inclination towards lint and the stifling heat of a cotton mill, and he had so informed his father. He also told him that nothing less than four years at a college, where he could meet fellows worth meeting, would please him.

“You can imagine the look my father gave me when I made that proposition, for it knocked to splinters his special pet theories concerning education,” said Thurber. “He stormed about ‘self-made men,’ and quoted Lincoln and some others from the classic list of non-college men: pointed to himself and the huge industry he had created without the aid of a college education, and, in all, gave me to distinctly understand that a college education would spoil a good employer: that it was a waste of time, and that if I was set on going to college, why I could go on my own funds—which I did not have—and be hanged! Of course I was lazy, undecided and youthful: just at the age when all life is a perpetual sunny day. I wanted to come to college to sport around and imagined my doom sealed when father emphatically refused to fund me, but mother—say Priddy, what would the spoiled children of the rich do without generous-hearted mothers?—my mother privately funded me and sent me here and still maintains me, even against father’s orders, for he will not relent and imagines me to be the fool of fools in taking the course I did.”

“The so-called ‘self-made men’ are usually very set men,” I replied.

“Set?” muttered Thurber, “even a vice, tight locked, is loose by comparison with the prejudices my father has against a liberal education. Well, I came this way and started in to sport it and expected to be tutored through my courses by the narrowest passing marks. I spent most of my time either in the fraternity house chugging at a piano or sitting in my room with my feet perched on the table gazing into space. Then I got the—the glimpse, Priddy, and that changed it all.”

“The glimpse, what was that?”

“Well, I can’t exactly define it or locate where it first began, but I do recall that one day, in the classroom—it was in Sociology—the professor set me thinking on a line I had never considered before. I can’t tell what it was that he said explicitly, but he implicitly suggested to my mind that there are such things as dividends-not-of-money. Of course having been used to the other sort of dividends all my life, I was attracted to the idea that there were other dividends. I kept thinking about it and one thing led to another. The president spoke one day, in chapel, of the educated man’s duty to his generation. I linked that to ‘dividends-not-of-money’ and worked it out to my satisfaction that there was for me, the son of a wealthy manufacturer, a place of usefulness and service in the world.”

“You had a call to the ministry, then, Thurber?” I demanded.

“Gracious, no: not that!” he exclaimed, in a tone that implied I had proposed something too extravagant for fancy. “I a clergyman! I respect the cloth, Priddy, and I am glad that you are making it your profession, but really, that’s not my line. Perhaps I’m not cut out for it. I know I’m not.”

“You planned to go into settlement or Y.M.C.A. work, probably,” I hinted, “so many college fellows give themselves to that form of service in these days, Thurber.”

“I know they do, Priddy, but I didn’t work it out in those directions, either, but in a more vital way: one that has aroused every bit of latent enthusiasm for service and helpfulness that might have been hidden away in so pampered a body as mine. It’s what I call the glimpse, Priddy. Want me to explain it?”

“Certainly I do.”

“Well, I really was put in a fix by so much talk in the classrooms from the faculty and in the chapel by the President about ‘moral leadership’ and all that, and really thought at first that they were asking me to go into definite self-sacrificing avocations like settlement work and the other forms of social service, and I had no hankering for that, either. I hated to leave father alone in his old age and wanted, eventually, to succeed him in the ownership and direction of his mills. I imagined myself a callow materialist, opposed to spiritual forms of influence, but I did not want to give up the business. You can probably imagine how heathenish I felt when I contrasted father’s industrial policy with the call to be a social servant. I began to think back to what father’s self-education had done for him and had done for his employees. I faced the truth for the first time: how his narrow-minded policy had brought him great wealth at the expense of his self-respect and the happiness of so many of the people who worked for him. For years and years and years, he had been just paying wages for work done: that was all. He had paid no attention to the moral or social welfare of his people: the hundreds of families under his control. He did not go to their church, attend their lodges, go into their homes, or ever make it his policy to inquire about their welfare. He was just simply using them as tools towards the securing of a fortune—for me, that was all. I saw it all, how he had been creating in his little corner of our American industry, labor hostility, unsanitary conditions, poor types of ignorant, drunken, loafing citizens until the tenements belonging to his firm formed a perfect slum. But he had not the eyes to see, nor has he yet; but he goes on in the darkness and in the groove of his own selfishness, intensifying the disloyalty of his employees and incidentally hurting his own reputation. Yet I could not bring myself to give up desiring to take on that industry. It was right then that the glimpse came.” Thurber paused for a moment and then continued:

“Like the breaking of day, it flashed into my soul one morning in Ethics class, that if I could only go to work in that industry and reform it, that I should be doing a public service: that I should be following the advice of the college and giving moral service. But I realized that I should have to train myself in the science of ethics and morals; the history of economics and the deeper things of social science in order to reform the business intelligently, constructively and profitably to myself and the employees.”

“Oh,” I commented, “you want to make your type of social service earn money?—is not that an unusual sort of social service?”

Thurber smiled and said:

“It does sound worldly, especially to a minister, Priddy, but the strange thing about it is, as I have figured it out, that if I do take an educated, intelligent, thoroughly scientific interest in my employees, and manage to clean up their tenements, their morals and their minds through welfare work, I shall, in the same stroke, be increasing their loyalty to the business, be redoubling their efficiency, be preparing a higher grade of workman: all of which will increase the earnings of my plant.”

“In other words, Thurber, you are going to work on the principle that humanity and welfare work are good business policy?”

“Yes,” nodded Thurber. “If you, as a minister, were phrasing it you would say, ‘Godliness is profitable in all things’—even in good industrial management—to mix in Shakspeare, it is ‘twice blessed, it blesseth him that giveth’—the employer—‘and him that receiveth’—the worker. That’s what I call ‘the glimpse’ and you may imagine how eagerly I am tugging at the strings in order to be working it out practically.”

“But it may turn out to be fine theory: mere dreaming, Thurber?”

“Oh no,” he protested. “Read the countless numbers of sociological works that I have and follow the countless numbers of experiments that have been made in this direction and you will agree that it is the most sane procedure.”

“College has meant something very definite to you, then, Thurber?”

“I should say it had. I tell you I believe I understand, now, the tremendous suggestion that lies behind the college emphasis that its students stand in their businesses and interests against mere commercialism and flood them with intelligent, moral service. Besides, think what significance lies in my studies now: the whole course seems bent to broaden me towards the intelligent, economical use of human beings: psychology will give me trained insight, a course or two in physiology helps me to understand the limits of workingmen’s endurance and wide reading in literature will aid me to intelligently work out a policy of self-culture in the workingmen’s libraries I shall form. Oh, I have come to realize that a business education is a thousand times more than learning bookkeeping, the names of the tools, and a little mathematics from which to compute wages. It demands, in my estimation, the broadest college culture and I mean to secure it.”

“Just the antithesis of your father’s theory,” I suggested.

“Yes, and think, too, how much he has lost by it. You would understand how enthusiastic I am about it, Priddy, if you could have one glimpse of the people and tenements around father’s mill. I feel that right there is my call.”

“I know something about the waste, the riot and the ruin that have followed in the wake of narrow-minded, selfish, uncultured and unsympathetic manufacturers, Thurber. If the college only manages to send out a hundred thousand graduates filled like you with this spirit of humane statesmanship, what a revolution would take place in labor conditions!”

“It would be the front door of God’s kingdom, Priddy,” affirmed Thurber, “sure enough!”

Throughout that year, from the seriousness with which Thurber asked questions in his classes, from the eagerness with which he was ready to talk about welfare work, from the diligence with which he fastened himself to the library alcoves marked: Economics and Sociology, and from the pervading seriousness of his manner, one might easily have guessed that in him one looked on a youth aflame with a consuming, zealous ambition to make his stewardship of men and his college culture yield the highest per cent of moral earnings. I felt proud to call him my friend.

Another of my companions during the senior year was “Quiet” Sanderson, the student who had introduced me to Quarles. “Quiet” was one of those illogical and fanciful appellations in which the students delighted, and was paradoxically twisted from Sanderson’s fluent tendencies.

Sanderson occupied a corner room in one of the newer dormitories. In it was a piano on which he played Beethoven and rag-time with equal ease. The mission bookcase was topped by a very large, felt college streamer and a “perpetual care” sign, which in his Freshman wildness he had taken from a cemetery. As he was a literary man with a pronounced taste for Poe and the French short story writers, there were various evidences of “atmosphere” in the orderings of the room. For instance, some old swords, which might have been discovered in the ruins of Troy, but which, in fact, were clever imitations bought for a song in Boston, hung over the door. A Turkish fez, which Sanderson would wear when company was present, usually hung from the clothes post in a corner of the room, over a quaint, full-length lounging robe made from scarlet cloth and embroidered with Mohammed’s crescent. An oriental scent lingered on those habits of dress; a scent which I have seen Sanderson compound from barks and minerals bought at the druggist’s and of which he would never give me the names. When he held a spread or a meeting of any sort, Sanderson’s room would be thick with the fumes of joss which he kept burning from a blue Chinese bowl. If any one complained, Sanderson would have no scruples in telling the complainant that perhaps the smoke would be even denser and more sulphurous in a later destination!

It was fortunate that I did not catch, like some insidious fever, Sanderson’s habit of procrastination, for while his dreams were in the present tense, real, and vivid, his deeds lingered in the nebulous future. Thus, one night while he lounged on his couch wearing his fez, he informed me that he had the plot of an exciting tale that a publisher might make a fortune by. There was a secret staircase in the first chapter, and between that and the twenty-eighth—a distance of eight thousand words, for he had measured them—enough blood was shed in the numerous duels, alley encounters and small riots with the watch, to stain a miniature Waterloo.

“What are you wasting your time with those blood and thunder yarns for?” I exclaimed, for the utmost frankness was the rule between us.

“Blood and thunder!” he echoed. “Why, it’s thoroughly exciting, whatever you may say about it, Priddy. In my best style, too. Racy, full of tender sentiment at the love passages, and written with an iron pen, whose tip was flaming hot!”

“Let me see this epic of thunder then,” I demanded. “I should like to look it over.”

“Oh,” yawned Sanderson, “I haven’t had time to put it on paper—yet. I have my studies you know!”

Thus it was not only with his literary dreams, but also with his studies. He never seemed to be in his books, but I knew that at some secret hour he must work hard, for his recitations were generally brilliant.

He was a sly fellow, at times, especially when he chanced to be back with work. It was his habit then to get me in his room, when he would yawn and say:

“Priddy, what did the professor conclude about that Lochner fellow?”

Stephen Lochner was one of the Dutch painters we were studying.

I would tell him as well as I could. Then he would drawl:

“Uh, I didn’t follow the professor at all when he said that the early Dutch school, Van Eyck and the others—let’s see, how many were there?”

I would tell him, exactly, with names and dates, and then he would drawl:

“Sure you got them all, Priddy?”

“Yes, I have.”

“I’ll bet you’re grafting the course, Priddy, and haven’t been near the references in the library, eh?”

“Sanderson, I’ve got every note of importance, and have worked up every single picture!”

Then the yawning fellow would turn over to me, lift up his fez in the politest manner and say, with his endearing smile:

“Oh, is that so! Then Priddy, I shan’t need to bother much myself, shall I? You can give me some fine dope on the course!”

Seeing that I was caught, there was no way out of it but to become the unofficial tutor to his lazy highness; a duty, however, which was pleasant enough, for we had so many things in common. There was a sense of embarrassment, however, in the fact that Sanderson would go into the examinations of the course, after I had prompted him, and by some freak of the angel of Providence, his guardian spirit, he would out-top me with marks!

One Monday morning I dropped into his room, on my way across the campus, when he came from his bedroom arrayed in his bath-robe, for he had been oversleeping, and he said to me,

“Congratulations, Priddy!”

“What’s this for?” I exclaimed.

“For the honorable winner of two literary prizes!” he exclaimed.

“Two?” I gasped.

“Yes, and firsts, my friend! I want to get in on the ground floor and get a college ice on the prize money,” he smiled.

“And how do you know this?” I asked.

“The announcements were posted Saturday, after you had left, Priddy.”

“Then you shall have the treat, Sanderson.”

The two prize checks—beautifully decorated with the college seal and ornamental borders—were used to pay for the winter’s supply of wood, at home, and to clear off a store bill. I felt that my first adventure into literature had amply repaid me in fellowships, discipline, and cash: a well-rounded reward.

When I arrived home, for the long summer vacation, I began to ride over the hills to outlying farm-houses in a canvass of fellowship among my parishioners, whom I had never seen in church. My bicycle rides exhausted me in this work, as the summer was excessively hot. Between the village services, on Sundays, I trundled my bicycle up a long hill until I came to a crossroad schoolhouse to which I had invited the isolated people, for services. The people who came to this service would not sing, so that part of the time they were treated to vocal solos by me, to which I had to play my own accompaniment on the little parlor organ I had secured. As my skill on the organ keys was limited to hymns up to the limits of two sharps or as many flats, my repertory, like that of a hand-organ, was easily exhausted. But the people seemed thankful for this interruption of the monotony of their back-road life, and though I never took up an offering or asked them to do anything more than attend the services, which they did with increasing enthusiasm, I knew from their thanks and their faces that it had been a profitable venture, an appreciated service.

But the strain of such a responsibility in addition to my college work was bound to ruin my health, so I resolved that the parish should be free to engage a permanent, resident pastor, and to that end I resigned and sought out a place nearer the college, where I could go through the next year as a pulpit supply and have my wife with me, in my own home, near the college campus.

My new parish, which I visited only on Sundays, was a most delightful village, where an unusual number of interesting people made their homes. Though, at first sight, the village appeared an isolated, sleepy place, yet a plunge into its activities and a catching of its spirit meant the discovery of a number of enterprising, intellectual, and social efforts, of which any large community would have been proud.

There was a village nature club. This club was composed entirely of the townspeople, yet one of the members had been the co-author with a scientist in the study of fresh-water algæ, another member had made an exhaustive study of grasses and minerals in such a scientific manner that his work had received the commendation of the state botanist. The club had expert bird students and a butterfly collector. Another of its members had discovered a rare fern, hitherto never found east of the Mississippi. The members of this club, surrounded as they were by the riches of summer and winter beauty, lived in a glorious world of adventure. When one family drove home, up the long road to its pine groves and isolated farm-house, it counted the varieties of flowers growing by the wayside and made a report of great interest to the other members of the society. Another member watched the stars and gave reports on the newer astronomical happenings.

Then, too, such intellectual interests reacted upon the social life of the little community, and a tennis court for the boys, clubs and sports for the girls, village improvement undertakings, and very interesting and rare lectures through the long winter, were the rule, backed by trained, interested people. This type of community, also, made the church a very desirable and interesting one, and made it easier for me to be away from Sunday to Sunday, for the social concerns were certain to go on under efficient and responsible management.

Meanwhile, my wife and I had brought our little boy to the college town, and had established ourselves in three rooms under the roof of a very tiny cottage. Though we had our dining-table near the kitchen stove and were otherwise crowded almost to discomfort, yet the last year of my educational career meant less anxiety and more inspiration because I could have my home in the midst of it.