Part 7

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.

I think he was sorry for me, for any one tempted to step into human and prosaic life. He stood at the door of his ordered, settled, established life, and called to me to construct one like it, to do as he had done, to turn away from the sordid comedy of personality, and step into the blessed country of impersonal intellectual activity. Many things turned me toward his path: the great weight of his mature personality (he was over seventy then and I was twenty), my immense admiration for his learning, my interest in his subject, my intuitive dread of the guessed-at strain of human emotions. You must not think that his world was austere or rarefied. He had found there, with no penalties to pay, all the amusement, the drama, the struggle, the rewards, the entertainment, which men find in the human world, and pay for so dearly. He never knew a bored or listless moment in his life, nor did any one in his company.

Every Tuesday and Thursday, after that two-hour lecture to the seminarists, there was a half hour intermission before the next class--eight or ten advanced students--met in his oak-paneled, half-basement office, rich with precious books, to discuss with him a curious Old-French manuscript which he had discovered in the library at Cassel.

I have never in my life known anything more sparkling and stimulating than those half-hour intermissions. The old man always clapped on his hat, talking incessantly as usual, and, stretching his long legs to a stride which kept me trotting like a little dog at his side, started up the Boulevard St. Michel towards the Odéon, to the pastry-shop which calls itself “of the Medicis.” As soon as his tall form showed in the distance, and the inimitable, high, never-to-be-forgotten squeak of his voice could be heard, one of the elegant young-lady waitresses bestirred herself--for the pastry-shop was proud of its famous patron. She always had _babas au rhum_ waiting for us, as this was the only pastry Professor Meyer considered worth eating. I do not like _babas au rhum_ myself, but who was I to set up my insignificant opinion against so great a man? So I ate the wet sop docilely, considering it a small price to pay for the stories that went with it, stories that blew the walls away from around us, and spread there the rich darkness of the Middle Ages. There were stories out of medieval manuscripts as yet unattributed and unedited, heaped in the upper rooms of the Ambrosiana at Milan, of the untold riches, unclassified and unarranged of the Bodleian, which Paul Meyer described with apostolic fervor; of priceless scripts discovered in impossible places, by incredible coincidences; of years of fruitless work on an obscure passage in the Grail-cycle, suddenly cleared up because a Greek priest in Siberia had discovered a manuscript bound in with an old Bible.

Or if he were in a playful mood, the mood the waitresses adored and hoped for, he would begin juggling with the names of things about us, the trim shoes on their feet, the brooches at their throats, the ribbon in their well-kept hair; and with a pyrotechnic display of laughing erudition, would hunt those words around and around through all the languages where they had tarried for a time, back through history--the Renaissance, the Middle Ages, the Dark Ages, Late Latin, the Empire--till they ended in the long-drawn sonorous Sanscrit chant of an early Aryan dialect, which Professor Meyer rendered with a total disregard of onlookers.

After one of these flights, we came to ourselves with a start, looking around with astonishment at our everyday dress and surroundings and bodies.

Or perhaps it was a story out of his life, his long, long life, of which not a day had been lost from his work. My favorites, I remember, were the Tarascon stories. Ages and ages ago, when Paul Meyer was a very young man, one of the brilliant pioneers in the study of Old French, the municipal authorities of Tarascon employed him to come and decipher the Town records, faithfully kept from the beginning of time, but in their strange medieval scripts, with the abbreviations, conventional signs, and handwritings of the past centuries, wholly unintelligible to the modern Tarasconians. The young savant spent a whole winter there, studying and copying out these manuscripts, a first experience of the intense, bright pleasure such work was to give him all his life long. The quick-hearted southerners in the town, loving change and novelty, delighted to see the young, new face among them, welcomed him with meridional hospitality, and filled his leisure hours with the noisy, boisterous fun of Provence. He made friends there whom he never forgot, and every year after that he made the long trip to Tarascon to have a reunion with those comrades of his youth. But he lived long, much longer than the quickly-consumed southerners, and one by one, the friends of Tarascon were absent from the annual reunion. They were fewer and fewer, older and older, those men used up by the fever of living, and they fell away from the side of the vigorous man who had chosen for his own the unchanging world of the intellect. “And finally, last year,” said Professor Meyer on one occasion, “when I went back, they were all gone. Every one! I had to go to the cemetery to have a visit with them.”

As I gazed at him, astounded by the unbroken matter-of-factness of his tone, no self-pity in it, he went on, his voice brightening into enthusiasm, “So I went and had another look at the town records. Such a glorious collection of scripts. Not one known style missing!”

He regretted deeply the death of the much-loved Gaston Paris, his great colleague at the Collège de France, whose name was always linked with his in the glory of the renaissance of Old-French studies, but his lamentations were over the work unfinished, the priceless manuscripts yet unedited. When the news came of the tragic family disgrace of one of the greatest of German editors of Old-French texts, Paul Meyer was moved almost to tears. They were not of sympathy with the sorrow of the other scholar, but of exasperation that any man, especially one filled with irreplaceable knowledge of his subject, could let so ephemeral a thing as human relations distract him from the rich fields to be tilled in the kingdom of words.

During the second trial of Dreyfus, Paul Meyer was called to testify as a handwriting expert and gave his testimony in favor of Dreyfus, the evidence, he said, being unmistakable. It was at the height of the Dreyfus re-trial, when all France was throbbing with hate and suspicion like an ulcer throbbing with fever. Professor Meyer was abominably treated by the opposition, attacked in the streets, insulted, boycotted, his classes filled with jeering young men who yelled him down when he tried to speak. His bearing through this trial is one of the momentous impressions of my life. He did not resent it, he made no effort to resist it, he struck no melodramatic attitude, as did many of the fine men then fighting for justice in France. He smothered the flame out, down to the last spark by his total disregard of it. What did he care for howling fanatics in one camp or another? Nothing! He had been asked to pass judgment on a piece of handwriting and he had done it. There was nothing more to be said.

I cannot forget the slightest shade of his expression as he stood one day, on the platform of his classroom, chalk in hand, ready to write out an outline on the blackboard, waiting, while the yelling crowd of “_manifestants_,” mostly young men in flowing black neckties, with straggling attempts at beards on their pimply faces, stamped and hooted and shrieked out, “Dirty Jew! What were you paid? Shut up! Shut up! What was your price, dirty Jew?” and other things less printable. And yet, although I can shut my eyes now and see that harsh, big-nosed, deeply-lined old face, with the small, bright eyes under the bristling white eyebrows, I can not think of any words to describe its expression--not scornful, not actively courageous, not resentful, not defiant; rather the quiet, unexcited, waiting look of a man in ordinary talk who waits to go on with what he has to say until a pounding truck of iron rails has time to pass the windows. He stood looking at his assailants, the chalk ready in his bony fingers, and from him emanated so profound a sense of their entire unimportance, of the utterly ephemeral quality of their emotion compared to the life of the consonant he was about to discuss, that little by little they were silenced. Their furious voices flattened out to an occasional scream which sounded foolish even to their own ears. They looked at each other, got up in a disorderly body and stamped out of the room. The last one might have heard Professor Meyer’s high, squeaky voice stating, “Thus in Picardy and in the north of Normandy, Latin _C_ before _a_ did not undergo the change noted in other provinces, and we still find it pronounced....”

The pale, keen seminarists in their long, black gowns, and the American girl, whipped out their notebooks and were at once caught up into the Paul-Meyer world where no storms blew.

When, three or four years after the beginning of this friendship--it was not precisely that, but I cannot think of another name to call it--I made my final choice and stepped out of his safe, windless realm into human life, it was with some apprehension that I went to tell him that I was engaged to be married and would study Philology no more. I might have known better than to be apprehensive. What did he care? What was one more or less among the disciples of Philology, as long as the words were there? Also, he laughingly refused to consider my decision as final. He seemed to stand at the door of Philology, calling after me with perfect good humor, as I walked away, “When you’re tired of all that, come back. I’m always here.”

In the years after this, whenever we passed through Paris I went to see him, stepping back into my girlhood as I stepped over the threshold of the École des Chartes. Professor Meyer was very old now, but showed not the slightest sign of weakness or infirmity. One evening when I went hurriedly to say good-by before we sailed for home, I found him in his study, in that rich, half-basement room, lined with books. The green-shaded lamp burned clear and steady as though there were no wind in the world to shake a flame. The gray, plain, old man looked up from the yellow parchment he was deciphering, and in a sudden gust I had a new revelation of the insatiability of the human heart. I was a complete, fulfilled, vigorous woman, a happy wife, a writer beginning to feel an intoxicating interest in creative work, joyously awaiting the birth of my first child; but I knew for an instant there, the bitterest envy of the lot of the old scholar, half buried though he was in the earth, safe in the infinite security of his active brain.

The last time I saw him was two years later. We had been in Italy and were to pass through Paris on the way home. My little daughter was eighteen months old, a mere baby still, and I wrote Professor Meyer to ask him if he could not for once reverse the usual procedure and come to see me. He answered, setting a day, and informing me that he had been and still was very ill. “I will give you details when I see you.”

When he came into the room I was shocked at his appearance, and horrified when he told me what had happened to him. He had been as usual in the summer, at Oxford, delving in the unclassified treasures of the Bodleian, and had started home. The Channel steamer arrived late at night at Boulogne, and he had chosen to sleep there, instead of taking the night train to Paris.

He had gone to sleep apparently in his usual health, but when he woke up in the morning he had lost his control of words. He could not bring them into the simplest order. He could not command a single one to his use. He could not say who he was, nor where he wanted to go, although he knew these facts perfectly. The moment he tried to speak, there swooped down between him and his meaning, a darkening throng of words. All the words in the world were there, Greek, Sanscrit, Provençal, Italian, Old-French, tearing furiously through his mind. But not the simple words in his own language to say that he was Professor Paul Meyer of the École des Chartes, who wanted to buy a ticket to Paris. He stood there, helpless, facing the staring chambermaids, cut off from them, from every one by this wild, invisible storm. They thought him an idiot, escaped from his friends, and ran away from him. As he told me about it, he looked sick and gray, and the sweat stood out on his forehead.

It had lasted for three days. For three days and three nights he had felt himself drowning in words, words that flooded up about him so that he was fighting for air. Never for an instant was he able to take his attention from their crazy flight through his mind, and never able to stop one long enough to use it. He suffered, suffered more than he had thought any human being could and retain consciousness, had after the first day fallen into a high fever, so that they feared for his life. Hour after hour he had lain on his bed, helpless, trying with all his strength to fight away those words long enough to remember what he wished to say.

And then, on the morning of the fourth day, click! Something snapped into place inside his mind, and there he was, very worn, very weak, but perfectly himself again, Professor Paul Meyer of the École des Chartes. He had reached home safely, though strengthless and exhausted, and the next morning had wakened again to that horror. It had lasted an hour then, but it had come twice since--once as he was lecturing before his class!

He never knew when it might be upon him. As he opened his mouth to speak at any moment, he could not be sure that words would not burst from his command again. Even as he told me this, he glanced at my baby daughter, whom I had brought out to show him. For an instant his face whitened in so terrible a glare of panic that I screamed and clutched his arm. It was over. He was drawing a long breath and wiping his shaking lips with his handkerchief. “For an instant as I looked at her I could not think of the word ‘baby,’” he said pitifully. “It was there, waiting to come on me again.”

It seemed to me that he was not fit to go about the streets alone, and when he started to go away I asked him if he would not like to have me take him home. He hung his proud old head and said nothing. I went to get my hat and as no one happened to be at home with whom to leave the baby, I took her on my arm.

We went silently through the familiar Paris streets, the stooping old man towering on one side of me, the rosy baby heavy on my shoulder. When we reached his door, his concierge saw us and came out to meet us, nodding knowingly to me, and behind his back, tapping her forehead. I took his great bony old hand for a last clasp and said good-by. He went away up the stairs led by the concierge.

Three months after this I read in a newspaper a cabled notice of the death of the distinguished scholar, M. Paul Meyer, founder and for many years head of the École des Chartes. He died, so the notice said, “from an obscure form of aphasia.”

“WHILE ALL THE GODS ...”

“_While all the gods Olympus’ summit crowned, Looking from high to see the wondrous sight._” ILIAD, XXII.

I was spading up the earth in the dahlia-bed, when the children came up, a shouting band of them, just out of school, and noticed that the angleworms were “out.” This first, indubitable sign of spring in Vermont always suggests to adolescent Vermonters the first fishing expedition. But ten-year-olds and under think of the early brood of first-hatched chicks.

“Hey, Jimmy, _angleworms_!”

“Carl, run get a can!”

“Here’s a fat one!”

They swooped down on me and squatted along the edge of the spaded earth, pecking and snatching and chattering like a flock of sparrows. As I spaded on, I heard bits of their talk, “Won’t the chicks just love them!” “First worms _those_ chicks ever saw.” “No, Carl, that’s too few, let’s wait till we get a lot. It’s such fun to drop in a whole bunch.” “They _love_ angleworms so!”

Then I heard the inevitable fanciful suggestion from the imaginative one of the group, “I bet we seem to the chicks just like giants ... no, giants are always mean ... like gods.”

They fell on this idea, chattering and snatching, as they had at the worms: “_Let’s_ be gods! I’ll be Jupiter.”

“I want to be Mars.”

“Loki! Loki!”

“I want to be Thor!”

“No, _I_ want to be Thor!”

“I was just going to be Thor, myself!”

Everybody wanted to be Thor, it seemed. They trooped off to the poultry-yard, still disputing the question.

When I passed the brooder-house a little later, a group of exasperated gods hung over the low wire-netting, gesticulating and crying out on the idiocy of chicks. They fell on me for sympathy, and from their babbling account I made out that the chicks had acted just as chicks always act and always have acted from the beginning of time.

The gods had proudly put down in the midst of the little world of their beneficiaries the mass of angleworm wealth which they had gathered with such good intentions of giving pleasure.

“All they had to do was to pitch right in and enjoy themselves,” cried Jupiter, wrathfully.

And what had they done? Well, first of all they had been afraid, running to look at the squirming heap of treasure, peeping shrilly in agitation, and running frantically away with fluttering wings and hearts.

The circle of omnipotents, hanging over the wire-netting had been able to endure this foolishness with an approach to the necessary god-like toleration of the limitations of a lesser race. One of the Thors, it seemed, the six-year-old-one, had tried to hurry up the progress of the race, by catching one of his pin-headed charges and holding him firmly in a benevolent small hand, directly in front of the delicious food, “where he couldn’t _help_ seeing how good it was, seems ’s if,” explained Thor Number Three, to me.

But the chick had, it appeared, been perfectly capable of not seeing how good it was, because his mind was entirely taken up With his terror at being held. He had merely emitted one frenzied screech of horror after another till the other chicks began to run about and screech too, and the older, more experienced gods had sharply told young Thor that he didn’t know so much about this god-business as he thought he did, and that experience had told them the only thing to do was to let the chicks alone till they got used to a new idea. That always took forever, they informed their young colleague.

So after this they had waited and waited and _waited_, while the chicks fluttered, and peeped and ran away from what they really wanted above everything; from what the gods had so kindly put there for them to enjoy.

“Gee _whiz_!” said Mars disdainfully. “Wouldn’t you think they’d know enough for _that_! There was room for every last one of them to stand around the pile, and eat all they wanted, without stirring a toe.”

Finally, one bold adventurer had struck his beak experimentally into the pile, pulled out a tasty piece of meat, and turned aside to gobble it down.

And _then_ what?

Did the other chicks follow his sensible example and begin at last to profit by their opportunity.

“No! no! no!” A chorus of all the gods assured me that nothing like that had happened. Instead, with shrill twitters of excitement, all the twenty or more chicks had thrown themselves on that one, to wrest his bit from him.

“Honest to goodness, they _did_!” Loki affirmed to me, passionately, as if feeling that I could not possibly believe in such unreason if I had not seen it.

The chick with the worm had taken to his heels, unable to swallow his prize because of the hunt against him. Up and down the little world of their yard, he had run frantically, wildly, and silently (because of his mouth being full). And up and down, wildly, frantically and vociferously (their mouths being empty) his fellow-chicks had pursued him, bent on catching him and taking away from him whatever it was he prized enough to try to possess. As he turned and doubled to escape them, they turned and doubled in a pack, slipping, falling, and trampling on each other in their blind fury.

Presently, “What do you _think_!” cried the oldest of the Thors. “He got so rattled that he lost his piece of worm out of his mouth, but the others didn’t give him time to tell them that. Anyhow, they’d yelled and carried on so, they had him up in the air. He didn’t know by that time what he _was_ doing; and he kept on legging it as hard as ever, and they after him.”

By and by, this insane flight and agitation had so exhausted them all that they were staggering feebly on their tiny legs, and unable to emit more than hoarse squawks as they ran. Then, apparently by chance, as he darted zigzag to and fro, he had run under a corner of the brooder. Instantly ... ah-h-h, the grateful warmth and darkness had suggested rest to his weary soul; with a long murmured “che-e-eep” of utter relief, he had settled down against the wall of the brooder to close his eyes. And each of his pursuers, as they dashed in after him, had seized on the Heaven-sent opportunity for rest after the terrible tension of the struggle for existence, imposed on them by a cruel fate, and had with a sigh and a relieved, whispered twitter, given himself over to sleep and dreams.

At the time when I came up, every chick was sound asleep in the brooder, while outside in the middle of their world, lay the untouched pile of angleworms, bare and open to view under the bright spring sky.

“Can you beat it!” said Mars contemptuously.

He turned away from such unimaginable imbecility to a new idea, “Say, kids!” he bellowed, although they were all within touching distance of him, “let's be cops and robbers!”

They flared up like tinder to a spark, “All right! I’ll be Chief of Police!”

“I’ll be a detective!”

“I’ll be the robber captain ... cave’s under the hay, as usual.”

“No, _I_ wanted to be robber captain!”

“No, me, me!”

They all wanted to be robber captain, it seemed. They streamed away to the barn, wrangling over this.