Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 375
Teaching so small a group, it was but natural that a professor should find himself from time to time walking down the avenue after the class with one or more of the students. At times Professor Kitter walked down with the student with the head like a bulb, and with him he talked astronomy; in fact, he simply went on with the lecture, the only form of conversation possible between a professor and a student. But sometimes he walked with Miss Marty and Miss Taylor, and once or twice by good fortune he walked with Miss Taylor alone.
Now, by this time he was well aware that there were other things than astronomy that he wanted to say to her ever so much. He wanted to tell her how pretty her cheeks looked in the bright, frosty weather, and how the sun seemed to glint from the snowflakes into her blue eyes, and how cosily the fur that she wore seemed to cling about her neck. This is what he wanted to say. But what he did say was to tell her that the revolution of the earth is not circular, but around one of the foci of an eclipse.
To which she said, ‘Oh, is it really!’
Once, as they happened to walk together thus, he had a real chance. ‘Isn’t it just lovely,’ Miss Taylor said, ‘to feel the spring coming?’
Here surely he might have said something real. For instance, he could have told her that to him she was the spring and the sunshine and the flowers all in one, some simple remark of that sort. A first-year student would have said it so easily. Just for a minute he turned and looked at her, and it seemed to Miss Taylor as if he were really about to say something. Perhaps he was. But when he found words what he said was:
‘The inclination of the earth upon its axis.’
And he knew that he had failed again.
Now, while the college session ran from autumn into winter, and from winter onward toward spring, various other things were happening in and around Concordia College which escaped the notice of Mr. Kitter. One was that Mr. Johnson rang the bell of the women’s dormitory — where Miss Marty and Miss Taylor lived — so often that even the hall porter who answered the bell was in no doubt as to why he came. Male students at Concordia were not allowed inside the women’s dormitory — except on set occasions as, for example, to listen to a lecture on Palaeontology, which their presence could not contaminate. But nothing prevented them from calling to leave notes or flowers or messages of invitation. In this college session Mr. Buck Johnson was incurring at a local florist’s a deferred debt on chrysanthemums that began to look like a German reparation account. Professor Kitter never dreamed of flowers. He would as soon have thought of sending fresh asparagus.
Moreover, Mr. Johnson appeared with unfailing regularity in company with Miss Marty and Miss Taylor at all college functions, at the Greek Letter dances, and at the lectures on Relativity and the Y.M.C.A. receptions and the other dissipations of college life.
‘The triangle,’ some gifted wit called them one evening.
‘Not much of a triangle about that,’ said another wiser one.
In the Christmas vacation Mr. Johnson and Maggie Marty went off on a train together to their home town, and for ten days Miss Taylor walked alone in the snow. Professor Kitter accidentally joined her as she walked thus, and had the pleasure of explaining to her the nature of the crystallization of the snowflake, which is, of course, nothing more than a simple illustration of the prismatic separation of light. In fact, there is nothing to it.
‘The snowflake. Miss Taylor,’ he said, ’is nothing more than a polyhedronal piece of transparent material.’
‘Oh, is it, indeed!’ said Miss Taylor.
As she said it the falling snowflakes were glistening in her yellow hair, and the professor realized again what a wonderful mind the girl had, and how rapidly she grasped scientific phenomena.
Long before, at least two months before the session ended, Professor Kitter knew that he fully intended to ask Miss Taylor to marry him, but he found it impossible to make a beginning. The astronomy had sunk in too deep. Once, when he took her home to the dormitory just at sundown, after hearing an extension lecture on the service of Babylon to the modern world, she stood a moment on the stone steps, her hand in his, to say good-night. And the professor said: ‘There’s something I’ve been wanting to say, Miss Taylor—’ He paused.
She looked into his face, her own illuminated beneath an arc lamp, and said: ‘Yes?’
He paused again, struggled, and finally added, ‘About the orbit of Halley’s Comet.’
On another occasion he actually began, ‘There are men, Miss Taylor, who—’ and again she said ‘Yes?’ but he only repeated, ‘Who, who—’ and trailed off into nothingness.
Thus the college year threatened to end with Professor Kitter’s love unspoken. But as the day of graduation — the end of all things — drew near, its very nearness gave him resolution. There appeared in prospect a particular occasion when he knew that at least he would have his opportunity, and he meant, at every cost, to use it.
Now the occasion in prospect was this. It had long been the custom of Professor Kitter to invite his class, hitherto consisting of men, to visit once a year at evening the observatory of Concordia College.
Everybody who knows anything about a college is aware that a class in Astronomy never needs to go out and look at the sky. They can if they want to. The sky is useful in modern astronomy, but it’s not necessary. Similarly a class in Dynamics does not need to go and look at machinery, and a class in Money never sees a cent. But it had been for many years the custom of Professor Kitter to invite his class once a year to visit at night the college observatory, of which he was ex officio the superintendent.
The observatory was a little, round building like a railway water tank and stood beside the Arts Building of Concordia College. In the top room of it there was, among other things, a big, revolving telescope that looked out through a hole in the roof at the sky. Here a man might sit in a moving chair circling slowly round against the rotation of the earth, his eye exploring into the depths of space, his mind lost in infinite. Hence he might see the silver desolation of the moon, and the satellites of Jupiter, and Halley’s Comet once in every seventy-six years, and the transit of Venus once or twice a century. In such surroundings he might attune his mind to the real values of life and to the great things and the little, and to what matters and to what does not.
Hitherto once a year came the class in Mathematical Astronomy, clumping up the wooden stairs, not knowing whether to talk in a hush or to laugh out loud. And it was the professor’s custom to show the astronomical instruments, to let each student look at the sky, and to repeat each year his regret that the next transit of Venus was not until the year 2004, but he could promise them a total lunar eclipse within sixteen years. Afterwards, as a surprise, he produced a tray, duly set and covered by a janitor, on which were sandwiches and ginger-ale and ice-cream — the surprise being no greater than such college ‘surprises’ are when repeated year by year for a generation. On the morning after such occasions the Daily Concordian always announced that Professor Kitter had entertained the fourth-year class in Astronomy in the tower of the observatory, and that a pleasant time had been had by all.
But this year, as the occasion approached, the professor realized that his fate was to be settled there and then. He would see to it that as they went down from the little tower building he would ask Miss Taylor to be his wife. Somehow the whole thing seemed clear to him beforehand. As if by some psychic process he could see himself in the half-lit curve of the clumsy, circular staircase, with Miss Taylor above, bending down, and he could hear as if by a sort of prescience the very words that he would be saying as he held her hand after she had said ‘yes’ to him.
‘I can’t tell you what this means to me, Irene. Up till now I never thought of marriage, but now my whole life seems changed.’
The little speech went round and round in his mind as if he were rehearsing it, or as if, strangely enough, he had heard someone else saying it — long ago and somewhere else — in a past existence perhaps. In the department of Psychology they talked about such things, and at least two of the professors said that this was possible.
And then, all in no time, the weeks and the days went by, and the evening was there, and Professor Kitter found himself leading his class up the stairway in the fading twilight of a spring evening and warning Miss Taylor — and even Miss Marty — against the dusk, and apologizing for the stairs, and apologizing for the half mist that might perhaps obscure some of the stars, and apologizing for the transit of Venus being still delayed by nearly a century — apologizing for so many things at once that it seemed odd even to the students.
In the big top room, shaped in a circle. Professor Kitter turned on the light and then showed the students the instruments and explained the rotation of the great telescope that stood in the centre of the floor pointed at a hole in the roof beyond which was the gathering darkness of the evening sky. And one by one the students of the class, according to annual custom, sat in the reclining chair and looked upward through the great glass in the depths of the sky and saw a star such as they had never seen before — a star with a face and a disc to it — as silver as a little moon. This, Professor Kitter explained, was Venus, now beautifully clear in the earlier part of the night, being in ‘partial opposition’ and distant only a mere 60,000,000 miles. He explained further, dropping in spite of himself into lecture style, that had it been daylight, and had it been about a hundred years later, and had the telescope been in Madagascar or in the Fiji Islands instead of at Concordia College, and had the atmosphere been suitable, they would have been witnessing a transit of Venus, the most interesting of all astronomical phenomena, in which the planet moves across the face of the sun.
After which Professor Kitter, with such ease of manner as he could assume, discovered his tray of sandwiches and his ginger-ale, and with a good deal of nervousness, invited the students to partake of them. So they sat around among the astronomical equipment or improvised seats, the little professor being greatly helped in his efforts by Miss Marty, who had that ease of manner in passing round and accepting sandwiches and drinks which belongs to those from a home town and know nothing of the higher sophistication of city hospitality. Meantime the men students exchanged such learned remarks as ‘That is certainly some telescope’ and ‘Venus is certainly some star’ and ate steadily and unceasingly, without haste but with no sign of ending.
Then came the end. The girls rose and moved toward the door, but the men of the class, or most of them, went down the dark stairs first to show the way and turn on the lights below. And Miss Taylor, just as Professor Kitter knew she would, went last of all. The professor lingered behind a moment to see that all was right in the observatory; there was still an instrument or two to readjust, and there were some readings to make — but these he could postpone till later. When he turned off the light and followed Miss Taylor down the stair, a minute or perhaps two had passed, and in two minutes ever so many things may happen. Certain it is that when Professor Kitter had groped his way down to the first circular landing, there stood on it Mr. Johnson and Miss Irene Taylor. And Mr. Johnson was holding the girl’s hand and was saying to her, ‘I can’t tell you what it means to me, Irene. Till now I never thought of marriage—’
But beyond that the little professor heard no more. He made his way up again to the tower room and waited for a few moments there in the dark, and when he came down again, the students were all down below on the grass outside the building, waiting for the professor to join them.
‘I think, if you will permit me, I will say good-night here,’ said the little professor. ‘I find I have some readings of the instruments to make, and I shall go back for a little while to the observatory.’
So they shook hands and thanked him, each in the same words, like a formula, ‘I certainly enjoyed it very much,’ and if there was a certain dreariness in the little professor’s voice as he said good-night, only one of the class was aware of it.
On which Professor Kitter went back to the tower, and he looked far and deep into the night sky where the things are that never alter and in contemplation of which certain eternal precepts of duty and obligation may be learned. He made his readings of his instruments, and he marked down on a chart his meteorological records of temperature and humidity and pressure. And as he did so, his dreams of the past winter seemed to thread out into thin mist, and he wondered that he had not sooner seen himself as he was, and felt that for him at least the transit of Venus had come and gone.
Professor Kitter went about his tasks of the closing session without hysteria and without complaint. There was for him nothing to say and no one to say it to. But there was still, at least, his work, and even if a man is close on forty, and small of size, and no fit companion for the life and gaiety of youth, there are still equations to be worked out left over from the last lunar eclipse, and by these navigation may be aided and human progress set a little further on. Professor Kitter knew nothing of such things as the ‘theory of duty’ and such ideas of the ‘subordination of self as a factor in social survival.’ These things were taught in another department and were optional even to students. But the professor worked at his lunar equations and went about his work, quiet and unnoticed.
Only once his mind was brought to a sudden and painful attention. It was on a certain day in graduation week, when the examinations were over and nothing was left but to wait till Commencement Day, while meantime each day was filled with student celebrations — valedictory meetings of classes, the presentation of an old English play out on the grass by the youngest of the graduates in English, afternoon receptions on the lawn of the President’s house, and dinners, so-called, where vast quantities of celery and ice-cream were consumed. It was in this week that the little professor, entering the committee room of the faculty, heard the head of his faculty, Dean Elderberry Foible, venting his opinions with his usual emphasis. And he was talking of student marriages such as happened now and then immediately after graduation.
‘Absolutely preposterous!’ said the Dean. ‘Ridiculous. Ought not to be allowed. Mere children’ — all students seemed children to Dean Foible— ‘getting married before they know the first thing of life. There should be something to forbid it in the curriculum, or it ought to need at least the consent of a vote of the faculty. And a young fellow like Johnson,’ the Dean went on, ‘why, he’s only twenty — three! just because his great uncle or somebody has left him a little money and he is able to get married — pooh! preposterous!’
Of that speech Professor Kitter heard no more. He gathered letters and left. Nor did he hear any more of the subject-matter of which the Dean spoke till the very afternoon of graduation day. But on that day he was walking up the avenue among the elms, and as he walked he encountered, fully and fairly and unavoidable, Miss Irene Taylor. Even a professor’s eye could see that she was dressed for an occasion. He would have raised his hat and passed, but she stopped him. It was plain that she meant to stop him.
‘Why, Professor Kitter!’ she exclaimed. ‘Aren’t you coming to the wedding?’
The professor stammered something. ‘Did you mean to say that you didn’t know?’ Miss Taylor went on.
The professor muttered something to the effect that he had heard something.
‘Oh, I thought everybody knew. Why, Maggie Marty and Mr. Johnson are to be married at three o’clock, and you know it’s just lovely! He’s come into quite a lot of money from some forgotten uncle or somebody, and they’re going to go to Paris and both study over there — I forget what it is that they are going to study, but they say that there are ever so many courses you can study now in Paris. Why, didn’t you know? He asked her on the way over to the observatory that night, and he told me all about it going down the stairs as we went out. Oh, you really must come down to the church anyway, even if you don’t go to the house. Maggie said they wrote and asked you. Do come!’
And with that she put her hand on the little professor’s arm and turned him in her direction.
What Professor Kitter said as they went down the avenue is not a matter of record. It may have concerned the altitude of the sun, which seemed all of a sudden to have leaped to a surprising height and brilliance, or it may not. But it at least was effective, and when, after the wedding and the ceremony that went with it, the two walked away together under the elm trees, it was understood that Miss Taylor, after an interval shorter than anything ever heard of before in astronomy, was to become the professor’s wife. And it transpired further that she had kept all her notes in class from the very start, and that she had copied a whole equation off the board because he wrote it, and that his letter about the proper motion of the sun had seemed to her the sweetest letter she had ever dreamed of.
All of which things rapidly become commonplace. Especially as Miss Taylor is now Mrs. Arthur Lancelot Kitter, and attends college teas, and reads little papers on Chinese Philosophy at the Concordia Sigma Phi Society — and, in fact, acts and behaves and seems much as any other professor’s wife.
MIGRATION IN ENGLISH LITERATURE - A STUDY OF ENGLAND AND AMERICA
ALL LOVERS OF Dickens will recall with delight, as readers of David Copperfield, the final destiny of Mr. Micawber as an emigrant to Australia. That unbeatable gentleman, always waiting for something to ‘turn up,’ found it at last turn up in the Antipodes. There is a triumphant passage in which is described, ‘the public dinner given our distinguished fellow-colonist and townsman, Wilkins Micawber, Esquire, Port Middlebay, District Magistrate.’ We are told that the dinner ‘came off in the large room of the hotel, which was crowded to suffocation, it being estimated that no fewer than forty-seven persons were accommodated with dinner at one time.’ We are told further that when Mr. Micawbcr’s health was proposed, ‘the cheering with which the toast was received defied description; again and again it rose and fell like the waves of the ocean.’ I don’t think that Charles Dickens himself knew whether this description of the ovation to Mr. Micawber was to be taken as burlesque or as poetic justice; whether he is laughing at Mr. Micawber, converted, after all his grandiose ideas, into a large toad in a small puddle, or exulting in the idea of his final vindication as a man of exception. If we could ask Dickens we should be no further on; he’d claim it both ways at once.
