“This is all very well,” the old man said, “and I can see that you are not cut out for business. But after all, a man must earn his way and your plans do not include this item.” Louis started to interrupt, then shut his lips firmly. “Behind you on the one side are generations of ministers, and on the other generations of physicians. Would neither of these honorable professions suit you?”
Louis considered. “No,” he decided, “but of the two I would rather be a famous doctor like Uncle Mathias.”
“Very well,” agreed his grandfather. “Mathias will come to Motier for the festival. Your parents and you,” as if he suddenly realized that the boy was his own best advocate, “shall discuss the matter with him and we will come to a conclusion.”
Louis leaned back with a deep satisfied breath. As far as he was concerned the matter was settled. He knew that he had Grandfather’s support, and Uncle Mathias always managed the parents. Louis realized shrewdly that money only was the reason for their hesitation and he was confident that he could earn the little that he would need. The study of medicine would not take him far afield from his intended direction. Yes, Louis was satisfied. He now prepared to enjoy the vendanges which would begin tomorrow.
“Grandfather, Auguste has a song and I have learned a new dance…” the future was bounded by tomorrow’s limits. Auguste came out from behind the big shoulder, and the small white horse pranced into the parson’s yard.
They were all there, a family which seized upon any excuse to gather together. Louis glowed with love for them all, especially his mother whose arms stayed around him perhaps a trifle longer than the shyer Auguste. Yet it was beside his uncle Mathias that Louis managed to secure a place when they drew their chairs up to the long supper table. And it was to him that he talked though he could not help noticing that the others listened, too. Once he left the table to bring a notebook that he might make clear his point to his uncle. There was hardly room to put it on the table so loaded was it with good Swiss food which Aunt Lisette, famous for her cooking, had helped to prepare. Louis did not allow his lecture to interfere with the satisfaction of an enormous appetite. His mother smiled affectionately at the vigorous attacks of his mind and his body.
Auguste, who was tired now, would have postponed the critical question of their future, but he knew no way to stop Louis once he had set out to overcome an obstacle. Anyway he seemed to need no help, and Auguste leaned sleepily against the shoulder of his uncle François. Whatever they decided would suit him, warmed and comforted by the good food. He heard them as from a long way off.
As Louis had intended, the real decision had been reached when they rose from the table. His doctor uncle had been genuinely impressed by the boy’s knowledge of anatomy and by his ability to classify what he knew. While Auguste climbed the stairs to his old cot under the eaves, Dr. Mathias and Louis swooped the cloth from the end of the table and made room for the rest of the notebooks. When they had finished Louis gave a mighty yawn and bade them all good night. He could safely leave the issue with Dr. Mathias who was even now talking earnestly with the parents. Grandfather nodded over his pipe but Louis was sure of his help if any difficulty arose. Lausanne with special work in anatomy from his uncle, who had an excellent practice in the city; it was settled. Louis slept soundly.
The fall days had shortened and the sky was still dark next morning when the windows of the parsonage shone yellow with lamplight. The whole household was astir making ready for the arrival of the grape laborers. Soon they would come pouring in from the cantons around the Lake of Neuchâtel and the picking and crushing of the grapes would begin. Even Louis was not ahead of Aunt Lisette in the kitchen this morning.
The clear edges of the mountains and the keenness of the frosty air gave promise of perfect grape weather. The women shooed the boys out of the great kitchen. Cooking on a large scale had begun, and Louis knew that already the cellar was well filled with bread and cakes and fresh cheeses and cold meats. He tested them while he waited for breakfast, and then ate with no dulled appetite the rolls and honey and chocolate. “It is no wonder that you grow fast,” his Aunt Lisette told him, but she poured him a special glass of rich milk.
With the gold bright dawn the dimmed lamps were put out and the first pickers came singing up the road from Berne. The boys heard them while they were still specks on the road and ran to meet them. “Has Carl, has Alex, has Max, has Emmy, has Anna yet come?” The road rang with their shouts. “Are we the first? Tell Mary to meet us in the lower vineyard.…” Even Louis with his genius for classification found it hard to put in order these groups of friends who perhaps saw each other only in vineyard time.
Soon the fragrance of the grapes hung sweet in the air. Soon great baskets of heavy fruit, purple, white, amber, ready for anyone filled shady corners. Soon pitchers of fresh grape juice cooled the thirsty laborers. Soon voices called greetings from vineyard to vineyard. Vendanges had swung into its rhythm. It swung to the rhythm of song and of laughter and of steady hands moving from vine to basket; to the gaiety of spirit which underlies the French-Swiss temperament. Grape picking was no more work than marching to the music of a stirring band.
Yet at the end of the long day everyone, even Louis, was ready to stop. For the last hour the savory odors from the kitchen and from the long board tables outside had won them away from the fragrance of the grapes. The parson always fed his guests well. When the horn yodeled down the long vineyard arches, there was sudden silence, and then the rush and scramble which mean that men are hungry.
Rose Agassiz would allow none of the women pickers to help. They were hungry and tired, too. Her two young daughters, Cecile and Olympe, sweet in their fresh clothes and with neatly braided hair, undisturbed by all the confusion, stood ready to serve the long tables. Girls from the village ran back and forth at their word. In the kitchen their mother directed her helpers with quiet competence, and Aunt Lisette commanded the great oven. Out in the yard the parson stood at his end of a long table with his two sons who had worked all day on either side of him while he offered grace over the bowed heads. Grandfather and Grandmother Mayor were serene and gracious at their table, and the two uncles kept spirits high wherever their voices could reach. Abundance of everything, good food and drink, friendliness, and well-being. Louis was glad through his hunger that he belonged with these people. He joined with a voice that shifted unexpectedly from high to low in the songs, and enjoyed his own singing as heartily as if he could depend upon it. Was it not a sign of coming manhood which had no indication in the high treble of Auguste across the table? He ate as if he would never be done!
The great platters were well emptied, the sky was darkening, the air tingled without chilling bodies warmed by good food and drink, when the real singing began. One by one, first a rich deep baritone, then the high soprano of a woman’s voice, answered to the calls of the crowd who joined zestfully with a chorus which seemed to rise to the black mountain peaks. The young treble of the boy, Auguste, ended the song-fest with its clear yodel. Louis listened pridefully. He knew that his turn would come later.
The frost in the air hurried them all into the big barn hung with dim lanterns, and sweet with new hay. The floor was brushed clean and from a great hayrick the musicians tuned up their strings. A startled cow lowed softly and stumbled to her feet, and under the floor a pig snorted. But soon no one could hear them through the shuffle of feet and the laughter. Even the lanterns swayed. Only the strong could have danced thus at the end of a day in the vineyards.
The parson’s children, Olympe, Cecile, even Auguste, had slipped away exhausted, but Louis was still stepping out with the prettiest of the village maidens when he saw the great ring begin to form about the barn. Hand in hand, sliding slowly in a wide revolving circle, calling his name. He sprang into the center of the moving ring and it slowed and stopped. A handsome, straight young figure on whom more than one village girl looked with favor, a boy of whom anyone might be proud. Louis was proud, himself, and full of
gaiety and zest no whit depleted by the long day. “Is the lad never tired?” his mother thought through weariness which lightened with her pride as she watched her son. His dance was like him, with a strong grace and fire which won a long hand of applause. Even Louis was satisfied with the response, though he would have gladly stayed on and danced to its tune with the girls for another hour.
But the floors of the barn and sheds were for sleeping now instead of dancing, and the haylofts turned into soft beds. Lanterns burned out, a horse snuffled comfortably at the quiet, the cow sank back again on her knees into her straw, the rhythm of the first day of vendanges had swung into silence.
4. GROWING UP
The Bienne experiment had proved successful. Both of the boys had waxed strong on hard work and plain living. For the first time Louis had been pitted against competitors who had some of his own vigor and quickness of mind. The lads from the Vaudois region were keen and active, too. If Louis stood high among them, he had to work for his place. Probably nothing better could have happened to him in the formative years from ten to fourteen. No longer could he carry his leadership unquestioned as it had been by the village boys. Louis had to be first, but now he kept his place through work on which he throve.
Again, as with his father, Louis had the benefit of what we call our modern ideas in education. Instead of settling down to five hours of heavy-footed work which end with fatigue and boredom, the boys at Bienne carried nine hours of study hardily with their intervals of play and freedom. They scarcely knew when they drifted from the one to the other. His preparation with his father made Louis at home with this kind of work, and placed him at once on a level with the rest of his class. He needed no handicaps given him after the years spent in the parson’s study at Motier.
Both Bienne and Lausanne stressed what were termed the classics, Latin, Greek, French, German, Italian. Louis was an expert with languages, a gift which had a good deal to do with his career. Because he could speak and use German like a native, he chose German universities where science was at its height. Without his Latin his passion for classification would have been thwarted. Louis made use of everything he knew. When he needed to find out something new, he wasted no time about it. The boys sometimes got discouraged by the way he always caught up with them. No lead was sure if Louis became interested in it!
Yet at the end of these four years at Bienne where the emphasis had been on the classics, the driving force which sent Louis on to Lausanne was the magic of natural history. Never could he find out enough about the earth, and the life of its land and sea. Never could he rest while their mysteries were unanswered. Never was he so alive, so completely himself, as when all of his power, like a strong searchlight, was turned on their solution. Yet never, and here probably was the characteristic which made him a great teacher, did he shut himself away to brood, as scientists have done, over discoveries. From his boyhood he shared his rich life, pouring out his gains and his losses with such enchantment that audiences waited breathless for Louis Agassiz. Too often, as his father had warned him, he was to leap so hard on a wrong conclusion that he would ache well. But no pain could teach him, boy or man, to be miserly with his gifts.
The Agassiz children were growing up. The girls needed no elaborate education, but Cecile was talented and should have some art training. Even in a small village like Motier a girl must have pretty clothes, something to set off her youth. The parson’s salary was small and often eked out with provisions instead of money. To continue to send the two boys to college meant constant planning, constant scrimping; it meant that a whole family must see ahead far enough to realize that the end was worth the struggle.
It was a wise and gentle family from which the vigorous Louis sprang. They all knew that it was reasonable to expect the eldest boy to help out as soon as possible. They all knew that no boy could have a better beginning than was offered Louis with his Uncle François. But they knew, too, through some alchemy by which Rose Agassiz transmuted her thoughts into theirs, that Louis was a genius, not a business man.
Louis himself never considered anything else than science which was fortunate in view of his light-hearted way of handling money all his life. What he had, he expected to share with anyone who needed it; what others had, he expected them to share with him if he needed it. When he was faced with any project which needed money, a microscope or a museum, he told people of his need and such was his conviction and his charm of manner, that the listener became convinced and, sometimes to his own amazement, gave the needed sum. For Louis Agassiz, money was of value only as he could spend it, not always wisely, on the urgencies of something so much greater than himself that he had no personal needs beside it. Not an asset for a business man! Not always for a man of science, but to all human beings, then and now, struggling out of the darkness of ignorance, an imperishable gift.
In their wisdom, then, the Agassiz family with Rose to lead them, pinched a little closer and worked a little harder now, that the eldest boy might prepare himself for the long future when he would repay their sacrifices, not to them, but to a world which needed it more. Because Auguste was too young for Uncle François, Louis’ power of persuasion won for him, too, a year or two more of school life. Perhaps Rose Agassiz saw how much her brilliant, hot-headed boy needed the balance of his brother.
Lausanne was settled for both boys, then. Louis, the country boy, country schooled, brought the freshness of his vision to a college where, for the first time, it could measure the work of real scientists. As so many of his professors were to do, Chavannes, the entomologist, took an immediate liking to the vivid, eager lad. Louis had never seen a real museum made by adults who considered with respect the business of collecting that so fascinated him. It was a small canton museum, directed by Professor Chavannes, and to Louis it was one of the wonders of the world. Find a director who will not respond to that feeling about his dear project! Chavannes gave Louis access to the museum at once, and never, so far as one knows, did he regret it.
Nor was Chavannes alone in his generosity. Again and again as Louis forged his way through universities, he was to meet this response to the magic of his personality, though doubtless his professors thought it due to his scholarship. But never, perhaps, did it count more toward his progress than during these early years when his career depended upon it. Jean de Charpentier, a fine and sensitive scholar, a man who had reverence for latent powers of a boy, encouraged Louis too in his convictions about his future. These men talked him over together, Chavannes, the uncle Dr. Mayor, and de Charpentier, talked him over, and talked with him. Louis knew now that he must become a naturalist. Life could offer him nothing else so rich.
It was quite another thing, he found, to make his family believe in that sort of riches. They could not, after all, be expected to contrive and scrimp all their lives in order that the eldest son, who by now should be adding to their small income, might enjoy digging up strange fossils or classifying odd fish. He was brilliant, to be sure, but the world needed brilliant physicians perhaps more than anything else unless it might be brilliant ministers of the gospel, though Pastor Agassiz knew well that other qualities had been of more use to him. These other qualities may have made his conviction the more unshakable that Louis should adopt a profession which would bring him an adequate income. He little knew that Louis was never to define the word income. It was always outgo with him.
The boy was reasonable. He understood his father’s point and his proud spirit resisted dependence. He suffered, too, from that handicap of most highly intelligent youngsters, he could do anything well. His uncle and his grandfather felt that here was a lad well equipped to honor the profession which had always belonged to his ancestors. Louis’ long sensitive fingers could make a dissection almost as perfect as Dr. Mayor’s when they worked together. The interest which Louis showed in anatomy, and his skill with its problems surely pointed to skill in medicine of which anatomy was the very foundation.
Somewhere in the equipment of genius res
ides a persistence which turns every opposition into an asset. It feeds itself with whatever it needs. It is an irresistible force which sacrifices everything to its own demands. It found without, perhaps, letting the boy know just yet, that anatomy and many other medical subjects would suit its ends better than most studies. It permitted Louis to agree with the proposition that he study medicine to provide himself with a proper career. And it allowed that decision in no way to interfere with its purpose. Louis was inescapably a naturalist, and nothing could deflect him.
Bienne, as Rose Agassiz expected, had served to direct the energies and interests of a mind which never in youth or age could limit itself in a truly scientific fashion. It trained her boy to the kind of hard work that made him unable all his life to tell where work left off and fun began, or how to enjoy the one more than the other. It treated him as an individual without spoiling him. It proved to the rest of the family, what she already knew, that Louis rated nothing less than the best. Just what that best would be, must largely be decided by the boy himself as, little by little, he found it out. The destiny of a whole life could not be settled by one ready-made plan. It must develop according to the need of that strange force which his mother may not have called genius but which she respected as such. At fifteen Louis was not ready for business; he was ready for Lausanne, and Lausanne he must have. When Lausanne was finished after two years more of brilliant records, the concept of Louis as a business man seemed to have been lost somewhere along the way. To be sure, since the boy was seventeen, he might reasonably be expected to consider a preparation for earning a living. But what more honorable and useful way of earning a living than ministering to the sick?
The Young Adult Award-Winners Megapack Page 14
