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!
Chapter V. Pungo Hall’s Occupants:
Estes Who Planned to Take
a Tent and Plant it in the Midst
of the World’s Sin; of the Little
Man Who Fled from the Chidings
of a ‘D. D.’: of Calloused Hands
and Showing How ‘Pa’ Borden
was Beaten by the Grass Widower
with the Long Hair
EVERY scar that a sin may leave, every phase of ambition made possible in a democratic world, every type of dramatic character: these I found in Pungo Dormitory. As to a shelter from the world’s temptations had come firm-lipped, tense-browed men in middle life. As to the door which led into serviceable adventures, had come stout-hearted, finely-fibred but poor youths. Evangelical University meant more than a place where one could get a formal education. To some it meant a haven from a rough sea: a sea so rough, indeed, that but for the harbor must have wrecked them inevitably.
The sea, for instance, on which Estes, in Number 18, had found such tempestuous experiences. To imagine Estes you have to think of two small, very glistening black eyes shining through a forest of beard like hut lights gleaming like faint stars in the midst of a dense grove. That was all you noticed, at first, about him, for his body was insignificant, unimportant. The little knobs of cheek that came between the eyes and the black beard shone with a dull red glow, like flesh that the winds and the frosts had hardened and tinted. When on the campus, Estes crowned his blackish head with a cow-boy’s sombrero, worn at a rakish, foppish slant, as if he were trying to be reminiscent of a Mexican señor. A man to be called merely a poseur when met on the campus or in the classroom, with his arithmetic, his grammar, his English history, and his black teacher’s Bible in the crook of his arm; a thirty-seven-year-old man with his foot on the first rung of the educational ladder. To most of the students he was known only in the rôle of “elementary student.” But in the confidence of his chamber, among his selected friends, when he opened his record, it was akin to the opening of furnace doors to show the furious white heat of a man’s sinful passion and the dark, twisting, sulphurous smoke of criminal deceit. He had betrayed men and women in selfish conspiracies; had drowned his wit in seas of alcohol; had abandoned his mother and family to the cruelties of poverty and illness; had stolen money and honor from his fellows; had mixed in the cheap and petty evil sports of sailors and tramps; had roamed through the land in the guise of an Indian doctor selling watery and greasy medicaments under a hissing, gasolene torch to confiding purchasers; had held responsible positions in shops; had—there seemed to be no end to his adventures in which the coloring always turned out to be the fact that in all of them he had introduced elements of sin, of criminality, of cruelty. They always ended against those grim stone walls! After walking through the pages of several high-strung romances of vagabondage and clap-trap he had turned to Evangelical University as to the mould for a new character which was to form him over, not only into a socialized being, but into a serviceable, spiritual servant; for after he should have had ingrained on him the elementary knowledge of Grammar, Bible, and History, he planned to take a tent into the world, set it in the midst of the slums for a season, and nightly exhort bad men to become good with the same fervid impulsiveness with which he had formerly exhorted them, under the yellow blaze of gasolene lamps, to buy pills and medicine-cure-alls.
In room “20” dwelt a student of an opposite type who embodied in an eloquent degree the strength and adventure to which ambition may attain. “Dr.” Upwell was a little north-of-Ireland Scotchman, past his forty-third summer: an ordained clergyman in an energetic denomination. He was one of those unfortunate men—of which there are a sad number in the pastorate—who, in a moment of illogical frailty had succumbed to the temptation which a letter offered, of securing for a trivial sum of dollars the dignified, honorary degree of “Doctor of Divinity.” At first the privilege of adding two capital “D’s” to his name, on his letter heads, his visiting cards, his church advertisements in the Saturday evening paper, and on the gold-lettered sign in front of his church, had been highly appraised. Those two “D’s” had added almost a furlong to his mental egoism. He felt himself admitted to the highest peak where dwelt the chosen theological giants. But finally, after much thinking—for Upwell was at heart an honorable man—conscience had asserted itself with a flaming manifestation that shrivelled up this mental egoism and left inside the poor man’s mind a mass of smoking, smouldering remorse which no amount of “Poohing” could quench. Conscience, in that sure way it has, and blunt, kept saying: “You are not worthy of the ‘D.D.’ In the first place, you are ill furnished with education. You have never been under the discipline of a school. What you have is merely the results of desultory home reading. You have never accomplished anything worthy of a ‘D.D.’ honor. You are minister to a handful of farmers, in an isolated community, in a church which pays a salary of five hundred and fifty dollars a year—when it does. You have never made more than four speeches in Conference, and they were in debate—remarks from the floor, in which the Chairman found you ‘out-of-order’ twice! You have played no heroic part in social reform or made any spiritual stir. The degree was purchased because you were selfishly ambitious. It was sold to you in cold blood by a college that funded itself, partly, by such sales. Suppose that Peter, when you came to the gates of Heaven, should ask you, ‘Upwell, give me name, dignities, and titles!’ what would you reply? ‘Chadworth Upwell, Doctor of Divinity!’ with a host of angels to laugh at you? Not so. You would feel cheap, miserable!”
Thus stung more and more into remorse, the little Scotchman had finally been driven out to seek a place where, at least, he could be worthy of his ill-gotten honorary degree. He had come to Evangelical University to fill the mind with theology, ethics, history, and literature, so that at the end of a year or two there might be some degree of merit and fitness when he placed “D.D.” after his name! Of course, Upwell did not put it in that bald way, but from the persistency with which he rolled the “D.D.” under his tongue, while criticizing the possession of it, it was not difficult to know that he would never bury it.
In Pungo Hall I came face to face with young men to whom the gates of educational privilege had been closed until they, like myself, were on the threshold of young manhood. They had come from the hearts of coal mines and breakers, bringing their life’s dreams with them, and an indomitable purpose. Every penny they spent for books and board had been earned by the sweat of their brow. They had come, many of them, from far-away farms and from the Southern mountain fastnesses where life’s expressions of hope and desire were to be seen in crude form; where they found that it took the “breath of an ideal to blow the dust off the actual.” Hands I shook, in fellowship, that were scarred from hard toil, calloused through contact with the tools of labor.
The comprehensiveness of the curriculum of Evangelical University was shown in the case of the Borden family. I became intimately acquainted with the head of the family, Julius Borden, while cutting sugar-cane on the University farm. Julius was a pale edition of Falstaff: fat, self-sufficient, self-important, with a scraggly yellowish moustache half screening his pouting lips, and with a triple chin constantly slipping like a worm back and forth over the folds of the points of his collar. Mr. Borden, even at forty-two, after the discipline of business, married life, and children, took himself too seriously. He spoke with hesitating precision, though not with grammatical fluency, as if he had predetermined that no word should ever come from the depths of his profundity that did not aptly fit into the seriousness of life. The merest word I flung at him became a challenge that could be answered only when the hoe had been put down, the moustache pulled, the brows contracted in thought, and the throat cleared. When I greeted him with a trivial, “How do!” he could not trust himself to reply with audible words; he wanted me to take his acquiescence for granted—I could see it by the surprised look in his eyes. As he had been a success at the grave-stone business, had been married the longest of any of the married students, and possessed the most children, he seemed to realize that these were tokens of superior power when compared to our bachelor, or the other married students’ bridal, limitations. He fairly withered our proffered suggestions or theories or criticisms, with his weighty authoritative, “I’ve seen so much, you see!” It was, in his own estimation, equal to a hurricane from the Talmud blowing on the chaff of the Apocrypha. By reason of this constantly paraded wisdom, Julius soon became current on the campus as “Pa” Borden.
He had given up his grave-stone business; had brought his money, his wife, and two children to the University for a “family fitting” as he termed it; much as a farmer goes to the general store with his family to be clothed, shoed, and candied. The wife, at her marriage, had just graduated from a high school, so that she entered the collegiate department of the University, on her way towards an A.B. to be earned outside of the chicken-raising in which she indulged. Jack, a quick-witted lad of twelve, found a place in the elementary classes, by the side of Estes, two Porto Ricans, a Japanese, a missionary’s little girl, and several other students who had to commence at the bottom of the educational scale. Edith, a romantic-eyed daughter, who wore Scotch-plaid dresses and Sis Hopkins’ braids, was plunging through the College Preparatory division close on the heels of her mother. The father, least of the family in school discipline, had to humble himself so low as to take his place with a backward grass widower in a “B” section of the grammar class because of his tendency to forget, after a day, the relations and distinctions between verbs and nouns and the various other members of the grammar family. But Julius saw to it that besides the baneful necessity of his humble place in the grammar class he came to a proper level in those studies in which he could express his preference. He revelled in the Bible class, the Historical and the Oratorical classes to his heart’s content, but though he shone creditably in them, he never could quite clear himself from the “B” section of the grammar class; grammar being his thorn in the flesh, as he testified in one evening’s prayer-meeting, when the Apostle Paul and his historic affliction was the lesson. Even the backward grass widower, who had a thick mass of shining curls and intended becoming a temperance “orator” finally graduated from the “B” section, thereby heightening the shame of poor Julius, who seemed predestined to do poorly with the science of speech, and forever linger in the shadow of the “poor-doers.”