With no disagreement whatever, except from that hidden force within the boy which could bide its time and waste nothing, the whole family in all its generations agreed upon a medical training for Louis. A medical training meant the University of Zurich, a place which his mother must have felt well suited to his needs. Here he could see the world and realize a culture which was German in its foundation and broad in its scope. Here he would be especially equipped through his complete mastery of the German language to extract the best from the education he needed. Here he would find men who would stimulate him in the right direction. Though, right direction as Rose Agassiz saw it, pointed a different way from the implacable needle of the boy’s inner compass which always held him to its true north.
Louis, who was easily guided along a way he intended to go anyway, accepted Zurich thankfully. Perhaps it was a relief to him, torn by conflicts about his future, to have the next two years of it settled for him. Who was he at seventeen to argue with his elders about a means to an end? He had the inner security that all means could be turned toward his ends before he was through with them. As far as he knew he had the best intentions toward a doctor’s life when he entered Zurich. But meantime he had two long years to find out everything that Zurich could tell him about animals and plants and rocks which on the whole were much more interesting than diseases. Louis found the arrangement completely satisfactory especially as it included Auguste. The two boys could live together cheaply at a private house, though perhaps the landlady might have raised their rent if she had known that her pleasant room was to be turned into a zoo. Not that she ever complained. Louis probably made her so interested in his birds and beasts and fish that she wondered why she had not always used the room for a zoo. He taught by sharing his enjoyment with a sunny conviction of its value which proved irresistible to more than a landlady.
His seventeenth year, then, saw Louis settled in Zurich where the idea of medicine was to dim before the radiance of a natural world which offered endless exploration.
5. COLLEGE AND A GIRL
It was not often given to the University of Zurich to be surprised. The students knew what to expect of the professors and the professors knew what to expect of the students. They had mutual respect for each other, they all worked hard together, and among them made Zurich a solid, rather grim, seat of learning. It was German in its thoroughness, its tongue, and its conviction that no other nationality knew anything about science. The German-Swiss mind which did the thinking of the place plodded patiently, slowly, joylessly toward its goal, satisfied with the business of reaching it. That the way might be illuminated into radiance and quickened into gaiety was as yet an idea wholly unrelated to that of scholar. Zurich was due to get its surprise.
Louis Agassiz stepped into the classrooms, his proud head high, his dark eyes friendly, laughter on his lips. Heads bent over microscopes lifted, and stared a little stolidly. It was touch and go as to whether this light-hearted lad should be ignored as a superficial outsider, or allowed to share the learning which the University cherished. But when had Louis ever been ignored? When had any temperament refused to succumb to him? Zurich had no chance in the world against its outsider!
For not for one moment did Louis look upon himself as an outsider. Different, yes, but humble before achievement and honest in his need. If his thoughts brushed past theirs with the swiftness of wings, he was not consciously outstripping them. If his wit was sharp, it was not at their expense. His laughter was never at them and at last some of them learned to laugh, too. When they were over their astonishment!
Unhurried in their judgment, the students observed this strange creature methodically as if he were a new specimen under their microscope. Was he a playboy or could he really work? Here they came up against something which they never quite understood in Louis Agassiz. He could do both at the same time, or rather, he could be in a state of obvious enjoyment over something which seemed to them to call for nothing but the attitude of unremitting toil. But they discovered that, toil or play, he could spend more hours without tiring than they could, and that he managed to produce better results. A quality to which the German-Swiss willingly paid homage.
They began to wander over to his strange room at odd hours to smoke a pipe and to look with tolerant amusement at the newest addition to the room’s occupants. Not until they at last suspected that this hodge-podge of birds, beasts, fish, and rocks had some significance in its confusion did they give it real attention. Then and there began the first classroom of Louis Agassiz. With the boys lounging about, ready to challenge any statement, he produced the evidence for his latest idea and clarified it for himself as he made it clear for others; one of the rewards of teaching which the pupils seldom hear about. Then wondering whether they had been to a party or a lecture, the students would go back to the laboratory to try to quiet the exciting thoughts that raced between them and the slide under the microscope. Yes, this lad could work, but in what strange ways!
Could he, they went on with the business of sizing him up, hold a place among them in sports which they took almost as seriously as work? He was well grown, and he seemed to have enormous strength, but had he skill in using it? They rated fencing very highly, the older students speaking darkly of duels. In a short time Louis taught them new tricks of fencing, and the talk about duels became more and more vague. Yet they discovered that he would never hunt with them. He refused to shoot any of these animals or birds which so excited his curiosity, but human beings did well to dodge his rapier. He could also meet any of them on or in the water, and he could walk and climb endlessly. But nobody ever caught him on a horse, or a donkey, or indeed anything but his own sturdy legs. At Kommers no matter how early or how late students might drop in, Louis was still there eating and drinking as if he had just come. Yes, this boy seemed to have considerable capacity in every direction. The students finished with their speculations about him and began to try to keep up with him.
Nor were the professors unaware of the new member of their classes. They went about their own ways of sizing him up which were not unlike those of the students and which led to much the same conclusions. Professor Schinz watched the boy awhile and then gave him the key to his private library. In the whole University here was the man to whom Louis would most naturally gravitate, the man who held the chair of Natural History. Not medicine for his specialty, but birds! And Louis for whom birds had always been a recreation and delight, turned another labor into play. Outdoors, a new area to explore for identification; indoors, a collection which Professor Schinz had made complete and had put at his service. Again the magic of Louis was at its work!
Yet what schoolman would feel that he had been charmed into foolish generosity when he saw the dark head bent hour after hour over one of the books from his shelves while Louis, with help from willing Auguste, copied page upon page until the manuscript was complete? Louis had no money, but he had something which the old naturalist prized more, a quality which did well to underlie the charm.
The two boys still tramped the highways on their way home which was now in Orbe. They had a long distance to travel and it is not unlikely that they used a form of hitch-hiking. There is no evidence that it was a thumb which stopped a fine gentleman in a fine carriage one warm day. It may have been curiosity as to what two boys of that age could find so engrossing to talk about; it may have been wonder that such proud, high-stepping boys should be so dusty and travel-worn; whatever the motive, he drew his sleek horses up beside them and offered them a lift. And at the same time presented himself with a return far out of proportion to his generosity.
For then and there, this fine gentleman from Geneva found the kind of boy whom he would have liked for his son, liked so much, indeed, that he decided then and there to look into the matter. Louis was in good form, on his way home, excited about his university life, radiant with health and good will. He felt at once the warm interest of the stranger and responded with the unselfconscious friendliness which his elders
found so engaging. The man had an excellent lunch aboard and Louis was always hungry. The man was interested in what Louis did at the University, and what he intended to do when he had finished there. Louis always enjoyed talking about himself and his plans and his ideas. The two got along together admirably.
When the lunch was eaten, and the man probably had small enough share of it, while the talk still ran on unfinished, and the man had small enough share of that, the horses drew up before the parsonage and Louis sprang into his mother’s arms honestly forgetful of his fine friend. But Auguste gravely did the honors and when the carriage drove off down the road it took with it a man who had made several new friends.
A few days later Pastor Agassiz called his son into the study. Rose watched his gusty entrance and then dropped her eyes to her mending. If Louis had not been so engrossed in his plans for the day he might have felt the depression heavy in the room. His father passed an open letter to him, and his mother examined the heel of a sock. Louis ran rapidly through the letter, and now his mother watched him. She remembered how he had leaped at the chance to leave for Bienne. Would that eager young spirit leap at this new chance and leave her now in a deeper, more final way? She watched his face change as he read. Then he threw the letter on the old desk and laughed at their worried faces.
“Is the man mad!” he cried. “Why should I want to be adopted by anyone? Have I not two good parents?”
The pastor sighed. “Good perhaps, but not wealthy. We cannot dismiss this offer so lightly, my son.”
Nor did they dismiss it lightly. For hours they discussed it. And at the end came out where they went in. It was true that the adopted son of a rich, well-born man would have opportunities which Pastor Agassiz could never offer his brilliant son. But it was true, too, that a boy could not give up a pair of parents who loved and understood him without losing more than he gained. And it was true, wasn’t it, that he never would be bettered by a training for a station which could not be his own and for which he cared nothing? “Unless of course,” and Louis’ dark eyes gleamed at his mother, “unless you are tired of these too painful sacrifices?” Rose laughed back at him, and the pastor folded up the paper. He still looked grave but the worried wrinkles had gone with their laughter.
It gives one pause to think what might have happened if Louis Agassiz had grasped at this offer of adoption from a man who would have given him everything which his heart most desired, education, travel even to exploration, opportunity to write, freedom from concern over money matters, all the assistance which he desired and Louis demanded a great deal, anything which would forward a brilliant young man toward a brilliant career.
Probably nothing much would have happened except perhaps a brief financial release for the boy’s parents. In an incredibly short time neither Louis nor his foster-father would have had a cent or a sou. Even when Louis worked hard to gather a sum for a cherished project, he was always amazed to discover that it was spent just when he needed it most. If he had found himself with an apparently inexhaustible fund while he was still too young for definitely formulated plans, his career might have exploded into a shower of fireworks sparks. He seemed to need the stabilizing effect of poverty to teach him that a man could not give himself to every interest which life offered; that sometimes a channel had to narrow for depth. He seemed to need the struggle against poverty as an outlet for his vitality, his vigor, which might easily distract a rich man’s son. Unlike Darwin, whose fragile body would have broken if the burden of support had been laid upon it, and whose rare mind could not have squandered its riches in a clerk’s office and had strength left over for creative thinking, Louis needed just this challenge to his strength to keep him steady and true to his gifts. Nothing, probably, not even great riches, could have deflected his genius permanently, but the flowering of it might have been delayed.
But for Louis the matter of adoption needed no consideration whatever. The question was as simple for him as the classification of birds. A robin did not step out of its tribe to become a nightingale. Louis was born an Agassiz and he fully expected to stay an Agassiz and to beget sons who were true Agassizes. He had no notion of becoming a graft on the tree of somebody else. He went back to the business of copying the book which he needed without a thought of the easy dollar which might have bought it for him. He probably had little more thought for the man who would have given it to him so willingly, unless the mail brought a letter from him. Yet such was the effect that Louis made on that sunny morning tramping through the dust, that for as many years as the man lived his letters came regularly to the boy whom he would have liked for a son.
The two years at Zurich were over, finished so quickly that to Louis they seemed scarcely begun. The brothers cleared away their collections again, but this time sorrowfully for Auguste could go no further with Louis. They packed up the great rolls of paper on which they had copied the two volumes of Lamarck’s Animaux sans Vertèbres, and congratulated each other that now Louis would be able to use their learning when he went on to Heidelberg. Auguste had already forgotten their contents, but Louis could have lost all the manuscript he copied and still known its pages. They set their animal boarders free, and gave away their collections. They thought that they had cleaned up their room into a state of perfect orderliness but it is not unlikely that their good friend, the landlady, had a different opinion. Yet she grieved to see them go, two such good-tempered, honest boys, and kissed them on both ruddy cheeks when they left her. They could not wave when they looked back because their arms were so filled with odds from which it was impossible to part.
Of the two, it may have been Auguste who felt the separation more deeply. He was ready for business with his uncle, he had no further desire for learning, but his thoughts and desires had grown for so long from his brother’s needs that now his own must have seemed too shaky and newborn to furnish enough motive for action. It was time, indeed, that the younger boy had his chance!
Louis, even as he said good-bye to Zurich, had his face turned toward Heidelberg. He could not see how to get along without the brother who had been his very self, but if the future could not include Auguste, then he must learn to manage without him. Louis had a background and training which had made him profoundly religious. He had faith in God’s intentions in regard to himself as well as to the rest of the world. He never lost that faith.
Curiously enough, with that immovable core, he had an exterior which had a chameleon-like tendency to take on the color and flavor of the people closest to him. When Auguste left him, so, too, did his Swiss ways of thinking, speaking, feeling. He seemed to himself quite German as he identified himself with German university life, just as later he became thoroughly American. A happy faculty for one who was to belong to so many nations!
That year and a half at Heidelberg which carried Louis over the border of his twentieth year, bore him over other borders of life into broad distances which spread out fan-like and which he never finished exploring. Bereft of Auguste, he found himself acquainted with friendship. Rich with his growing maturity, he fell in love. Small wonder he left his boyhood behind him in Zurich.
All his life Louis was to go on making friends, and often losing them because his judgment was likely to be blurred by his enthusiasm, but he never made a sounder choice than when he walked into the botany lecture room that May morning in Heidelberg. He looked about for the young German whom Professor Tiedmann had mentioned the evening before in their interview. The lad had sounded like his sort. Over in the corner sat a quiet boy with a sensitive face and clear, intent eyes. Instead of scribbling down everything which Tiedmann said, he seemed to consider the words as they flowed past him and when they suggested a new idea he wrote it down. Most of the time he listened. Louis moved over next to him.
When the lecture was over they looked at each other. “You are Alexander Braun?” And, “You are Louis Agassiz?” Then as one, “Tiedmann told me about you,” and they walked out of the classroom together, not really to be separat
ed again during their lives. They moved on into the laboratory, discussing one of the few points which Alexander had written in his notebook. As they passed down the row of heads bent over microscopes, Alex plucked one from its observations by the thick hair on the crown.
“Louis Agassiz has come,” he said. “Give him greeting.” And Karl Schimper walked away from his microscope with them. The triumvirate was formed!
What was it that gave such zest to study in those days? Was it because so much offered itself for discovery that even a lad might contribute something new? That young Alex and Karl could experience the excitement of finding out a law which everyone knows now, the neat uncrowded arrangement of leaves called phyllotaxis? Was it because only boys who were driven by the terrible need to know what had been known, and to contribute more in payment, only such boys would cloister their youth behind academic walls? And are we now so discovered and so exploited that study has forever lost its excitement? And instead of struggling to push back heavy stone doors, are the boys ushered too easily by doormen into luxurious academic hotels? In all the world nothing can be so exciting as the discovery of something new, some small event of life which no one has known before, some great illumination of thought by which the old takes on a new form that clarifies the problems of the race. In those student days the boys knew that excitement and worked like young gods on offerings for the greater gods. Who sometimes were greatly amazed and looked warily to their own academic fame!
The three boys wandered through the spring woods together, the two botanists exchanging all they had for the zoology which Louis had to contribute. And it was a fair exchange. Alex wrote his father that here was a naturalist who knew all the mammals, could recognize a bird as far as he could hear it, and could name every fish that swam. A boy who would teach him how to stuff fishes and with him make a collection of every native kind. And that he was very happy now because he had found someone whose occupations were the same as his own. The hours spent preparing and mounting specimens were no longer dimmed by monotony; while one worked the other read aloud, physiology, zoology, anatomy, or they worked together exchanging what Braun called scientific matters in general. Listen to them. Echoes of freshman days from every university on earth with youth settling all of life’s problems. Yet from the fire of those discussions some warmth still lingers, and there is no reckoning the conflagrations which they started.
The Young Adult Award-Winners Megapack Page 15
