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

I  LINKED myself to the following day’s life by clutching the gaudy comforter in both my hands while I sat up in bed, startled by a thundering that shook Pungo Hall.

“What’s—that?” I gasped, turning towards Thropper, expecting to discover that the vibrations had brought him up in alarm.

“It’s only ‘Budd’ doing his gymnastics,” he muttered, drowsily, “what time?”

“Six.”

“Better get up and go over to the dining-room at half-past,” he explained. “Say,” he added, lifting up his head, “you wouldn’t mind letting me know at twenty minutes past, would you, Priddy?”

“Not at all, Thropper.” He dropped half under the clothes and in a surprising manner was soon invested in all the dignity of thorough repose.

From that moment until the clamor of the rising bell, at half-past six, the heart of Pungo Hall was turned into a huge alarm clock, for first in this corner, then in that, on this floor and then on that, intermittent clatterings of clocks brought intermittent yawns and mutterings as the different students were signalled by their unsleeping timepieces. Every noise seemed to pierce from room to room as if it went through telegraphic sounding boards. Splashings, jumpings, muttered prayers, readings aloud, animated conversations: these increased as half-past six drew near. The Monday morning, with its new week of study, demanding a fresh enthusiasm after the Sabbath’s interruption, was not being approached in any business manner. Over the banister, leading to the top floor, a voice exclaimed, so that all could hear, “Say, Headstone, how fine you looked last night with Her!” To which an answer came from a suddenly opened door, “Thank you!” Then over that banister, into the laundry basket, in a dark corner of the hall, the bed wash was hurled accompanied by dull thuds.

“Got your quotation?” asked Thropper, as he dressed.

“Quotation?”

“Yes, Bible verse for the tables. You’ll probably be asked to give one. You see, it’s a sort of custom for Bible verses to go the rounds of the tables, in the morning. You don’t have to have one, but it fits in nicely, if you have one. Especially if you’re a waiter.”

“Oh, of course I’ll take one,” I said.

“Only just remember and not do what one waiter did, Priddy: take that verse and quote it: ‘Let your women keep silence in the churches.’ It would get you in wrong—with the young ladies.”

“Why?”

“Well, so many of them are going to be evangelists and ministers and missionaries: ever so many of them. You see how they would be liable to take it.”

“We had better keep on the good side of—the ladies,” I laughed.

Thropper winked.

“Betcher life,” he replied.

Just then the head waiter peeped in at the door to say,

“Brother Priddy, are you coming across to the dining-room? I’m going over.”

Eager to face my responsibilities of the day in the leadership of somebody I accompanied the tall German across the road and into the dining-room.

“Black for breakfast and supper. White for dinner,” announced Brock. “I mean the kind of coats that are to be worn,” he explained.

While I arranged my two tables for twenty people with plates, knives and forks, milk in granite-ware pitchers, sliced bread, corn bread left over from the previous night’s meal, tomato butter, and dishes of crisp, browned, fried potatoes, the other waiters came in and greeted me with hearty,

“Morning’s!” “Howdy’s!” and “Hello, Priddy’s!” which had the effect of making me feel in strong fellowship with them, although our acquaintance was but a day and a night old, at the utmost. Brock smiled at all these evidences of friendship, and whispered, as he showed me how to arrange the breakfast things,

“Things are going well, eh?”

“Yes,” I muttered, “if I can manage not to drop another tray!”

Then the breakfast bell brought the hurried, chattering, hungry crowd of young men and women into the room again, though, at this meal, they were less formidable in their every-day clothes. Some brought books, others writing pads. Fountain pens and pencils projected from the outer pockets of the men, and were stabbed in the hair of the women.

My tables were soon lined with students. They, too, seemed to have met me, long ago, in the remote past and to some of them I must have been at least a third cousin or present at a family party, so freely and lavishly did the greetings come: greetings that put me at my ease because I felt that they came from sincere hearts.

The floor was ready to bend under the weight of the crowd that stood waiting behind the chairs for Brock’s signal to sit. Like a stern, powerful, determining Ruler, the head waiter stood at the opposite end of the room, with his eye on his watch, not willing to press his thumb on the Sunday-School bell until the instant seven o’clock arrived. Eyes looked longingly on the hot, fried potatoes. It was no use. Seven o’clock was a minute off. Some rumbled the legs of the chairs. To no purpose. The German had patience. Finally the snap of the bell sent every man and woman to the table accompanied by the roar of scraping chairs, thumping feet, and expressions of satisfaction.

Near the head of my first table sat a very young, pink-cheeked Southern girl possessed of charming, gracious ways. Her “Mr. Priddy, please, a spoon,” was as musical as ever a request could be. It made me feel sorry that the spoon was not gold instead of German metal. Consequently, when she asked me for a third glass of water during the first five minutes of breakfast, it was no small happiness for me to secure it, as speedily as possible, for her. But on my return with the third glass her neighbor asked for one. On my return with that, the Southern girl had her glass emptied. So it went for ten minutes: each one of them drinking amounts of water sufficient for ducks or geese to swim in—it seemed to me. Finally, on picking up a fork some one had let fall on the floor, I saw several glasses, full to the brim with water, under the Southern girl’s chair. She had been initiating me. With a broad wink at the others, I very slyly sprinkled some pepper on the glass of water before her when her head was turned and then waited for results. They soon came. She reached for her glass, took a sip, and then commenced to choke.

“What is the matter, miss?” I asked, “will you have some more water?”

She looked at me in resentful astonishment, at first, and then seeing that the others at the table were laughing, she joined in with them, saying,

“Who peppered the water?”

“Was there pepper in the water?” asked one across the table.

There the matter ended, although, when in a spirit of boastfulness I recounted the experience at the waiter’s table, Brock chided me by saying,

“You will have to be careful. We must have discipline, brother Priddy!”

Thropper was waiting for me, after breakfast, when the call to chapel sounded: the first exercise of the day. We joined the procession of students which moved swiftly towards the central building. Into it the procession hurried, racing against the tolling of the bell. Then followed a tiresome climb up three pairs of stairs to the topmost room of all, used for a chapel. An attic room, square and dimly lighted by dormer windows. The roof girders overhead clung together like knitted arms bent on holding together such a load of humanity as trusted to them. Against the wall, opposite the door, spread a broad platform with a semi-circle of male and female faculty arrayed on it. Before it, and awed into respectful silence by it, spread a fan of students, sitting in chairs, by groups. I sat at the heart of Evangelical University. This chapel, in its plainness, its bareness, its poverty, formed the pivot on which the life of the University swung; for here the religious faith and doctrine which were the most eagerly sought gifts of the place were received. Here, in these simple chairs, was where men and women found God: the highest advertisement of the University.

The doors closed out late-comers. A hymn was sung. This has been said, and echoed many a time: that a hymn was sung. But this first hymn I heard, proceeding from over a hundred hearts, should not be plainly, unemphatically said to have been merely sung. If each word be trebly underscored and trebly emphasized, then, one may say, a hymn was sung that morning, for to me, the first bar of melody seemed to be the onrush of an Angelic symphony through a suddenly opened door of Heaven! Were they common men and women who were singing with such resonant exultation! The boarded ceiling and the huge square attic room throbbed with it. Rapture, adoration, victory, joy unspeakable weighted down each note as the melody unfolded itself. The reliant basses, anchored to the background of the melody—a resonant, manly anchorage—made sudden excursions into the higher realms of the theme, but not to displace the tenors whose shrill praises were the nearest to what a hammer stroke on a bar of silver would produce. The dulcet altos, as rich depths of throat as any one might expect, entwined themselves in and out of the sopranos’ soaring, singing as if to keep those higher voices from too suddenly darting past the doors of Heaven and surprising God. That was no mere singing of a hymn. It was a hymn for the love of the hymn; singing for the pure love of singing. Or, better, a spiritual exercise that could certainly be no more willingly or much better done in a morning rehearsal of the Court melodists!

“Wonderful!” I gasped to Thropper, whose tenor had added much to the dignity of that part.

“They do sing well, don’t they?” he commented.

A demure little woman in black, with a very set, white face, came to the reading desk and read a scripture lesson. Then the sober Dean, whose eyes knew every thought in that room and said so, gave some notices. There followed a prayer whose outstanding character was earnestness of expression, of theme, of length. Then the whole service was embroidered by three verses of another hymn, after which we fell in orderly lines and marched through the open doors, where an electric gong broke up the line into unorganized groups, scattering for the classrooms.

“Now for the President’s office,” announced Thropper, abruptly.

But a sudden pang of fear whipped across my thoughts.

“Oh, suppose I can’t enter, Thropper!” I exclaimed. “It has tasted so good, thus far!”

He patted me on the back, in his manly way, did Thropper, and heartened me by saying,

“Well, Priddy, if you like the first taste, I guess you’ll stay for the whole meal—if you are hungry!”

“Thanks, old fellow,” I said. “Take me to the President!”

He led me downstairs into a very busy office where some young women were typewriting, inscribing books, and where one dudish young man with up-combed, wavy hair, was flirting with a pretty, tan-cheeked girl who was supposed to be engrossed in the task of trimming a window shelf of geraniums.

Thropper was told that the President was engaged and that we should have to wait our turn. So we sat in high-backed chairs, in line with three others, where I waited with a palpitating heart that began to spell panic if my turn were delayed much longer. To increase this threatened panic of courage, Thropper began to whisper terrible things about the President: how he was a wonderful reader of books and had a mentality and memory so well disciplined that he was able to read an entire page at a mere glance and be able to pass an exacting examination on its contents a day afterwards! Thropper also whispered in an awe-struck voice,

“The President just feeds on learning! He can speak in ten different languages, read in fifteen, about, and think in twelve: so they say. You mustn’t fool with him or tell him any funny stories! He’d never get over it, Priddy. Now, come on, it’s your turn. I’ll introduce you and leave you with him!”

My sensitive imagination enkindled by all that Thropper had fed me on, in the waiting room, I appeared before the President considerably unnerved. He sat behind his desk, waiting for me: the embodiment of every austere report I had heard. His mouth twitched; twitched all the time. His eyes shone as brightly as those of an aroused lion from the dark mask of a cave. It was a race between his mouth and his eyes: the mouth slipped in and out, lip over lip, lip under and over lip, while those two small eyes snapped back and forth with electric suddenness. His gaunt features had the pallor of death. A world of woe, of hunger, of intellectual dissipation could be read in him. He tried to compose his features into a smile of welcome when he saw me, but it seemed so unusual a thing for those ascetic signs to be disturbed by the intrusion of anything pleasurable, that the first attempt ended in a sad failure. He did not try again. His voice was tired when he spoke. It had neither vibration nor health in it. I stood before that presence chilled, uninspired, while a strong temptation to flight pulled on my courage.

“Sir,” began Thropper, fingering his cap, “I’ve brought Mr. Priddy in. He came yesterday, and I’ve been letting him share my room till he saw you.”

“‘Had seen,’ you should say, sir,” corrected the President, “if you are after the proper tense of the verb. You may go.”

Thropper sighed deeply as he left, probably over the grammatical correction just imposed on him.

A seat was indicated and I was asked to place myself in it. Then the President said,

“Just tell your story in your own way till I interrupt you, young man.”

Thereupon I went into such minute details about myself, that I soon brought from the official a grunt of impatience.

“No,” he said, “I’m not a bit eager to know how many times your family has moved about the country. I want to know the salient things about you yourself.”

“I’ve been working in the mill till last week,” I said. “I always have been eager to get an education. I haven’t been able to save any money. I heard about this place. I came on. If you can’t take me, then please let me live here; just live here, it will do me good even if I don’t take any studies. I can work out and earn my board, I promise you. I have been earning my own living for a long time now, sir.”

“How much money have you brought?” he asked.

“Three dollars,” I said. “But you don’t need to take me in yet, sir,” I explained, hurriedly, for I felt that he would surely turn me off.

“A young woman came here, last year, with just four cents in her pocket and only her own strength to rely upon, young man,” replied the President. “Her own strength and God to rely upon, I should say, sir.”

“Yes?”

“There are several here who, at middle age, have arrived with wives and families and hardly more than enough to keep them a week, save their own strength and God’s.”

“Yes?”

“There is one student here who, at forty-five, has given up his position in business to begin in the lowest grade of study, with arithmetic, that he may receive an education.”

“Yes, sir.”

“So that you, with your youth, your three dollars, your opportunity, ought really to get along fairly well here.”

“If you take me, sir?”

“Do you think we would turn you off, young man?”

“You mean that you’ll give me a chance, then?” I cried, in great exultation at his quiet words.

At last a faint smile did untangle itself from his austere line.

“You are already earning your board in the dining-hall, I understand.”

“Yes, sir.”

“That leaves merely the small item of tuition and room rent. I think that you will be able to find enough work about the campus and in the village to arrange for the payment of that. If not, you should be able to earn enough next summer to do it.”

“Just the thing, sir,” I cried. “I’ll do it! Here is the first payment.” I handed him the three dollars.

He waved his hand.

“Keep them for necessities,” he said. “There is no hurry. God is back of us, young man, and will raise up friends for us. I want you to work hard and make of yourself a useful man in the world. We have no luxuries here. It is plain living and high thinking: the two essential equipments of manhood, I believe. If you will share our hardships faithfully and work hard, we welcome you to us. That is all. Now we will see about your list of studies.”

After fifteen minutes’ appraisement of my intellectual attainments and of my intellectual aim, the President made me out a list of subjects with such diverse studies on it as: Beginning Grammar, Church history, elementary arithmetic, Jevon’s Logic, elementary Latin, typewriting and zoölogy! I hurried from the office, with the card, to attend my first class, the first real step in my higher education, the class in Church history!