“Yes,” I remembered.
“Sometimes,” said another one of the women, “sometimes when we’re out here like this, it seems to me when I look up quick and glance out there in the dark, as though I could almost see him there now.”
After a time, some one else said, “’Twas a pity he never would come in.”
PROFESSOR PAUL MEYER
“Master of the Word.” I never could remember where I had read that phrase—perhaps as a child in an old story-book about enchanters; but I knew whom it described when I first saw Professor Meyer speaking to his class in the École des Chartes. Not in any metaphorical sense, but in the plain literal meaning of the phrase, was he Master of the Word. He made the title “Philologist” put on purple and gold.
The sallow young seminarists in their scant black gowns, keen, pale, young students who had come from Russia, Italy, Roumania, and Finland, sat motionless and intent, their eyes fixed on him unwaveringly for the two long hours of these daily lectures. Words were the living creatures in that room. They were born before our eyes in the remote childhood of the race, and swept down through the ages till there they were in our own language, issuing every day from our own lips, an ironic reminder that all the days of our lives were no more than an hour in the existence of those disembodied and deathless sounds.
From his youth the vigorous old man had transferred all his life to the world of words—and had found it an enchanted kingdom, something sure and lasting in the quicksands of human existence. From inside the walls of his safe refuge he watched the world outside suffer and despair and cry out and die. And he marveled at its folly. He himself knew none of these fitful moods. He was always of a steady, kind, and humorous cheerfulness, and always the most compelling of talkers. No impassioned orator declaiming on an emotional theme could hold more breathlessly attentive his listeners than this tall, stooping, plain old Jew, when in his rapid conversational staccato he traced out the life of a word, told the Odyssey of its wanderings in the mouths of men, so much less able to withstand death and time than this mere breath from out their mouths. He did this not with the straining effort of the orator, but as naturally as he breathed or thought. His mind was constantly revolving such cycles, and when he spoke he was but thinking aloud, always with the same zest, day after day, always alert, with never a flagging of interest, with never a moment of treacherous wonder about the value of anything. I knew him when I was passing through one of those passions of doubt which mark one’s entry into adult life, and I never could be done with marveling at him. I was grateful to him, too, for he showed the most amused sympathetic kindliness to the foreign girl, groping her way forward.