Leuckart, the zoologist, made his lectures far more interesting than did Tiedmann who was kind and often dull. The boys demanded extra lectures, and got them, though sometimes after waiting while the college clock struck seven and the five minutes after, they had to go in a hilarious body to Leuckart’s house and get him out of bed. Bischoff, the botanist, went off by day with his brilliant boys, and spent extra hours with them over the microscope giving them his skill in handling it. Bronn, the paleontologist, who knew so much that the time allotted the course bade fair to finish before he was well started on it, left his precious details in despair, and turned over to the boys such a collection of fossils as made the horizon of life stretch and expand itself into new aeons. With their eager minds shooting questions at him, drawing conclusions fresh at least to them, urging him on to new ones himself, the man must have quickened into amazed appreciation of the importance of his own work. More salvage from teaching which the student yields, unaware. Neither Louis nor his master could know that over thirty years later Agassiz was to teach American students from this same collection at Harvard, and deliver over to his boys, as he had received it, some of that high excitement of his youth.
They were geared to speed, those university boys! It was town against gown in old Heidelberg then just as it is today in Cambridge, or Hanover, or Oxford. The lifetime resident against the temporary visitor whose young insolence takes over all of a citizen’s privileges as well as many of his own. The town tolerates, scolds, and secretly holds its sides at its swaggering, shouting visitors. It sees them come and go, alike in the side presented to it, different only as the names come back in after years on scrolls of gold or black. To the town, Agassiz was probably only the name of another of those beer-drinking studenten, one of the three tall boys who arm in arm paraded the old streets, or sang German choruses ringing to the blackened rafters of the ancient taverns.
What the town did not know, never knows, is that this unending stream of youth has nothing transient about it. Inarticulate, but wise, the boys know it. They are, bone and marrow, a part of their university, leaving with it when they tramp away some of their strength on which it will grow. Ancient as the oldest stones on which they tramp, young as its latest device, they are the university. These boys, then, with all their forward look were part of the twelfth century when Heidelberg’s foundation was laid and the town grew around it. The transient householders who came and went with no strong bond to hold them together from century to century were the town. What college lad could resist swaggering over this splendid rank!
Just as the Harvard freshmen before classes begin, explore every foot of land and sea within radius of car or bus, so Louis and his new friends set out to discover the possibilities of Heidelberg. They climbed the hills, and scrambled over castle ruins, they fried liver and bacon over an open fire, and drank jugs of beer, they astonished an old woman so with their antics that she regretted the death of her husband because of the amusement he had missed. They wrote home to their parents about it, and probably roared with laughter as they wrote. They were nineteen, and on their own for the first time, and life was not all enclosed in the pages of a book.
The pace was set in that first week for all the work and all the fun that could be crowded into a twenty-four-hour day. And it continued until Louis, never missing anything, succumbed to a typhoid fever epidemic at the college and was bundled off to Alexander Braun’s home in Carlsruhe. By that time the call of medicine had become so faint that Louis had difficulty in recalling that he was supposed to become a physician. Nobody now could have deflected him from his straight course. The inflexible directing force of his genius held the rudder firm.
Louis, shaken with the weakness of typhoid, went back to the friendly house at Carlsruhe where he had spent weekends and vacations since home at Orbe was out of reach. Ill, but not too ill to realize the comfort and healing in the quiet hands and serene face of the girl who helped to nurse him. Men have ever been susceptible to the charms of the nurse who mothers and rules them into a state of childhood dependence. Louis, who had never been sick in his life, and who had never been without warmth in his heart for any girl from his mother to his least playmate, succumbed instantly to Cecile. No longer was she Alex Braun’s younger sister who had been handy to have around because she could make quick and accurate sketches of specimens when Louis needed them. She was Cily whose absence left him desolate and restless, and whose return brought him the oddly combined sense of being relaxed and invigorated, which is falling in love.
No illness could devastate the charm of Louis. Cily watched over him whenever her mother would permit, she made sketches for him whenever he demanded them. The sketches drifted away from insects to surreptitious outlines of a boy’s fine head with deep-set glowing eyes until at last when Louis was better, they became his first portrait and we see how he looked at nineteen to the girl who loved him. A bonny lad, even when unquickened by his laughter and his swift speech.
When it came time for Louis to travel back with Alex to his home at Orbe, he had no mind to leave his Cily unattached. With no money, his education only begun, no prospects of a home and settled future, Louis engaged himself to Cecile. And no one could reveal to her who parted from him so tenderly, so proudly, that he was never to have a real home for her or a settled future. Small difference it would probably have made if she had known!
6. BOYHOOD TAKES ITS DEGREE
Louis was to find for the first time in his life that his strong and splendid body could not respond to his merciless demands upon it. He had to recognize, with amazement but with final acceptance, that typhoid was something which you could not shake off like an annoying insect. Healing required time, and he, who begrudged time for anything but his work, must surrender it. Louis could not go back to Heidelberg.
It is a lonely and a heartburning experience for the young to have to step aside and watch others, less well equipped, march by. A year then is so long a time that there is no end to it. The unweakened spirit can scarcely endure its wait for the disabled body. Alex and Karl in those long months would surely climb beyond the reach and need of their young leader. Would that lost year ever be made up?
Louis may have felt this soreness of spirit when he first capitulated to the necessity of a year at home, but no matter how sore his spirit, it never lost its elasticity. All his life he could adjust to new and difficult situations because of this resilient quality which did not know how to recognize defeat. If he must stay in Orbe, he would make Orbe his university and extract from it the kind of degree which it offered.
It was no hardship to Louis to obey the command to stay out-of-doors. The family, so glad to have him back with them, saw little of him those days. His letters to Alex are so full of projects that they must have made university work within four walls seem a dull and musty undertaking. His experiments with tadpoles, one batch of which his family let die, as families will, gave some original contributions to Dr. Leuckart which interested him greatly. His jaunts to the mountain lakes furnished him with new fresh water fish all of which he preserved and noted carefully, the beginning of his great work about them. His explorations of the Jura Vaudois, while he thriftily visited all the pastors of the region, provided him the material for his first essay in natural history, a catalogue of all the plants of the countryside.
The year, so unwelcome, piled up riches for him: health, pleasure, knowledge. Unhurried, he could spend himself on the earth and get back from it all that he invested with such abundant interest that all his life he was tempted to no other speculation with his capital. He discovered new ways of work with new material during that year which proved as short as it promised to be long. And at the end of it he had progressed definitely in the direction toward which he was ever propelled by inner urge of his genius.
Nor had he drifted away from the two boys who must have missed the zest of the days when he drove them with his enthusiasms. They exchanged all through the year long letters of their astounding discover
ies accompanied by boxes of specimens to prove them. Louis writes a little wistfully that he supposes they continue to come together evenings, and begs them to make him a sharer in their discoveries. He need not have asked. No discovery was sure and complete without his comment upon it, and if many of them had already been worked out, or discarded, they served their vitalizing purposes. The triumvirate held together and throve on them.
So that when Alex wrote Louis in the late summer that he was leaving Heidelberg for Munich, and invited him to come along, it was with no sense of joining a stranger that Louis accepted. Practical about it, Alex was, too. The lectures were free, he told Louis, lodging and board as cheap as at Heidelberg, and beer plenty and good. The best of professors in natural history—he knew that this would win Louis—and, moreover, a future when, he prophesied, they would soon be friends with all of them. The finest of libraries, trips to the Alps, and—where shall he engage lodgings? Irresistible bait! All of it. At the end of October Louis in high excitement called for Alex at Carlsruhe, greeted and left his Cily with equal facility, and strode off to conquer Munich.
November is a dreary month, and after all, four walls are four walls. Louis had left behind him in that year at Orbe a certain sort of freedom which was the breath of his life. The university routine was a time-clock to him which he resented. From seven in the morning until nine at night, lectures with now and then an evening passed with a professor when, Louis wrote his sister, they discussed with might and main subjects of which they often knew nothing. Everybody too busy during these first weeks to recognize him as he liked to be recognized. A dreary November with letters home that worried his mother with their discontent. Well as she knew him, she did not realize that his mood would pass when he could again feel himself a leader. She scolded him as any mother would reprove such an irritating son. Was he not in exactly the position that he had chosen, and now why this distaste about the study of medicine? She proceeds to tell him just what the effect on his family and friends will be if he sets aside his medical profession, and when she has finished she has brought her errant son to terms. No longer does he waver. Certainly he will be a doctor, he promises her; he had no intention of being anything else. But as for getting married as she advises, he has no mind to bear confinement so soon. (Poor Cily!) But he knows a wonderful chance to go around the world at government expense, and please talk it over with papa. The naturalist within him sat back and smiled. Deflected for a little, perhaps, by Rose Agassiz, but small chance she had against him!
Small chance had papa either, though the idea of circumnavigating the globe threw him into what would have been a frenzy if he had not been a man of God. In a deeply disturbed letter he reminded his son of his mania for rushing full gallop into the future, and informed him that he would not hear of anything except a physician’s diploma for him. No more nonsense! said papa.
But the winter of Louis’ discontent was over by now. He had no desire to be anywhere except exactly where he was, at the head of his own selected group in the university. And if the elder Agassizes could have looked in upon him, they would have known that their cause was lost.
Munich was home already, his crowded rooms the center of his existence. Rose Agassiz would have been aghast at their disorder. Her eyes would have been blurred by the thick tobacco smoke, her ears confounded by the rumble of voices in splendid discord over some disputed statement usually made by her son. Her son, who dominated the disorder, the noise, the confusion of men and books, even the stray professor sitting in the corner. She would have swelled with pride, pastor’s wife or not, and the patient, imperturbable genius would have checked off another victory for itself. Perhaps it did, anyway, knowing that such a wise mother was bound to gather the substance of things in a mother’s wise ways.
The Little Academy was more exclusive than the most restrictive secret-letter society which a university ever produced. You could not wander through old Munich’s narrow streets to Sendlinger Thor No. 37, and knock at the door of that first-floor room, just because you had a pocket full of money to spend. Though those boys always had a project which needed money! Nor because you were a good fellow, or an athlete idol, or a poet, or a songster, or for any reason at all unless you were an outstanding person in your relation to science. Even if you were a professor you would not be welcome unless you had a contribution to make.
The professors kept an eye on No. 37, and some of them envied Dollinger because he had coralled this live group in his downstairs rooms, and some of them condoled with him. Just as they would today according to temperament. Professor Dollinger himself dropped in upon them at odd and welcome times with plants for Alex and advice for Louis when his mice would not breed true. Oken loved to confound them with a startling statement which agreed with nothing they had discovered, and then soothe them by telling them they must accept it on philosophical grounds. He gave them beer, and von Martius made them tea, and the zoologist, Michahelles, set up a menagerie of his own in competition with Louis and they exchanged Italian turtles for Swiss snakes.
Karl Schimper at the height of the brilliant promise of his unfulfilled youth completed the triumvirate again. Each gave his course, Louis natural history, Alex botany, and Karl on his arrival became their professor of philosophy. The Little Academy throve and in its audience sat many a speculative professor listening to these youngsters who made no secret of their intentions to become professors in very truth. The older men must have gripped their chairs tightly sometimes!
The zest of success filtered back through letters to papa. If travel was a source of anxiety at home, then no more about it. But how about this business of acquiring a professorship instead of a practice? Would his father consent, if Louis could produce just one work of distinction, to a year with natural history only and a professorship at the end of it? Louis never wavered in his confidence that the professorship would be produced. No, his father would not. Both he and the uncle congratulated the lad on his choice of evening recreation—recreation, indeed!—and continued to expect him to deliver the M.D. The genius in his son folded its hands again, but was not in the least discouraged.
Now life became so crowded that Louis could not even come home for vacations. An occupation, so secret that he could only hint at it to his brother, held him at Munich too closely even for an anticipated trip to the Tyrol. But secrets have most unexpected sources of leakage.
Dr. Schinz decided to represent Munich at the meeting of the Natural History Society in Lausanne. Louis watched him go wistfully. Some time he would go back, he promised himself, and when he went, Lausanne would not greet him as a prophet from his own country, or even as it would now greet the worthy and solemn Dr. Schinz. He returned to his room to work on his secret, never thinking to warn the professor that it was a secret.
But Pastor Agassiz and his brother-in-law had taken a little summer vacation trip, and ever anxious to improve their time, they dropped in to the convention at Lausanne. The grave doctor heard their names and walked up to them. Were they by any chance related to a brilliant young student of theirs in Munich? A lad by the name of Louis Agassiz?
They were! They were, indeed!
Then might he, one of the professors, congratulate them formally, as they congratulated themselves at the university, upon the assiduity and intelligence of this distinguished member of the Agassiz family?
He might, indeed! And perhaps he could tell them when they could expect to hear that Louis was now a qualified physician?
Oh, of that he knew nothing. But he could tell them that this son and nephew was at present engaged upon a project which in the very fact that he had been chosen for it carried the implication of great honor. And that such were his diligence and accuracy that the scientific world would recognize it when his work was finished.
Yes, yes, with dazed glances at each other. And what was this great work on which Louis was engaged?
So then they learned the cherished secret. How von Martius had turned over to his student all of th
e magnificent collection of fishes which he and Spix had brought back from Brazil, and for which ever since the unfortunate death of his friend, von Martius had searched to find someone worthy to carry on its natural history. And how Louis had hesitated to accept the honorable offer because of his devotion to his university work, but upon their urgent demand had accepted it. And what a magnificent piece of work he had achieved with forty colored folio plates and the text all in Latin!
Papa and Uncle Mathias drove home, still dazed, with the news. Nor was the mother surprised, or Auguste either! He promptly gave Louis’ latest letter to his uncle while his enthusiasm was high, and then spent the rest of the day reassuring the uncle’s newborn anxiety that he had not forgotten to forward the remittance which Louis asked for. No indeed, it was already in the mail! And with it a heartening note which Auguste did not mention that the stoutest antagonists of his natural history schemes had begun to come over to his side. The genius of Louis unfolded its hands and began to stir about. And Louis wrote back, “Will it not seem strange when the largest and finest book in papa’s library is one written by his Louis? Will it not be as good as to see his prescription at the apothecary’s?” Though he offset the practical effect by an airy addition to the effect that the effort would bring him in but little; nothing at all, in fact. Except a few copies of the book. Louis was beginning to find out about the rewards of literature! And his discovery was no help to his cause.
The Young Adult Award-Winners Megapack Page 16
