A summer of such full measure to everybody that its abundance has not been used up yet. Teachers went back to their schools filled with firsthand knowledge and loaded with specimens which would help them to teach as they had been taught. Never again would science be wholly an assignment in a book for a child. For a little leaven goes a long way. And a pupil of Agassiz’s would make a dozen pupils, and those a dozen dozen. All of his lectures over the country could not compass for the children what the summer at Penikese gave them.
College instructors went home and threw their dried specimens out of the windows. They freshened up their laboratories with specimens which were a good deal more work to collect than those at hand on their shelves but which seemed to carry over some of their own island excitement about them. They left their old lectures in the barrel and tried to meet the needs of their freshmen as Agassiz had met theirs. They found teaching less an academic profession, and more a sharing of ideas. The colleges had profit of that summer.
Then, here and there, the seeds of the original idea spread and took root. There would be no summer school again on Penikese because Agassiz could not come back to claim his island again. But across Buzzards Bay at Wood’s Hole such a school as he had never imagined would be founded, and whoever started it might well pledge to the health of Louis Agassiz. And whoever attended it, and used its adequate equipment, and listened to its scholarly discussions, might well look across the bay toward a dim outline and hail the low island called Penikese.
Now many states have marine laboratories where professors carry on the research which the busy winter of teaching will not allow. A man may have a quiet laboratory with his microscope and aquariums where he can grow the material he wants and have time to think about it. Outside he can dredge from a boat at his service; or swim and rest in the sun to go back invigorated into his laboratory. For a scientist is not unlike the rest of the world in working best with a mind at ease.
College students may settle in for six weeks of special work in the biology which interests them most; work, and, as life should be balanced for youth, plenty of fun. A short time ago I drove over to the summer exhibit of a small marine laboratory in Maine. Each student had chosen a project of reconstruction for himself, sea life at the high-tide line, at the low-tide, in the deep pools, on the pile of an old wharf, whatever he chose to use his portion of the laboratory for. A tanned girl or a boy, eager young showmen of their wares, stood by the exhibit and explained it to the visitor. Nor was it amateurish work, or child’s play. They knew their material as well as the professors, who lounged in the offing, and if you failed to understand them it was because you lacked their education. They were patient with you, but you might catch a deep glance from one to another in tolerant recognition of your ignorance; or if you understood their work, the quick fire of a mind which blazed as young minds should. No dead wood in that laboratory! Not a soul of them gave a thought to Louis Agassiz, but on the other hand, he had no need of their memory; his memorial was themselves.
The island of Penikese settled down to its quiet again. The students flocked back to their schools and became teachers again, but only they, and their classes, knew what different teachers. Louis Agassiz went to the mountains for the fresh vigor which they always gave him. In October he was back at his museum ready for a full year. The Legislature had been generous with twenty-five thousand dollars for his work there, and on his birthday he had been given one hundred thousand dollars more, with not a string tied to it about the way he could spend it. At last he was provided with all the money he could spend—perhaps not all—and plenty of time to spend it. The year ahead looked good to him.
He had part of it, and it was good. He lectured at the University, dictated to his patient secretary, Elizabeth, an article for the Atlantic Monthly, talked to the farmers in Fitchburg about the growth of their domesticated animals, and enjoyed his children and his grandchildren. Life was mellow and ripe, and it tasted sweet to him. He would probably have been bitterly angry if he had known that he must give it up when it was at its full. We spend our long years of struggle and when we have things arranged to suit us, we have to leave them. There is no answer to it, except that in the struggle lies the real well-being. A cushioned rest is a dull state, after all! There was no dullness for Louis Agassiz and for that privilege he would have foregone his anger. His laughter at the Sunday dinner with his grandchildren was as contagious as theirs. He smoked his cigars which the doctor had forbidden. He had a good time that Sunday afternoon.
The next morning he went over to the museum and looked with pride, as ever, at its growth. That he had no time to say farewell to it no one should regret. Good-byes are hard things to say, and futile at that. He felt a great weariness and came home soon to Elizabeth. He lay down in his room, tired but without pain, and drifted quietly into the rest from which no stirring project could again disturb him. If Death could come as gently to all men, they would cease to dread him.
The empty lives left behind somehow fill up. For Elizabeth was waiting the care of Alexander’s little family, left motherless within a week. Even as Rose had cared for her son’s children. For Alexander with his life so shattered, long journeys to strange places, and a life of devotion to the science which was part of his heritage. For students and for friends, a great emptiness for a while. Lowell walked home from the Saturday Club alone, and missed his friend.
At last, arrived at where our paths divide,
“Good night!” and, ere the distance grew too wide,
“Good night!” again; and now with cheated ear
I half hear his who mine shall never hear.
Yet he lies in a place which is not sad. Over his grave at Mount Auburn is a great Alpine boulder from the glacier of the Aar, a piece of his mountain to stay with him. “Born at Motier, Switzerland, May 26, 1807; died at Cambridge, Mass., December 14, 1873,” is all the record it needs. Around him are pine trees which grew above Neuchâtel. Near him lies his wife, Elizabeth. And out in the world where the sun still shines, something imperishable which was not there before Louis Agassiz lived in it.
THE WINDY HILL, by Cornelia Meigs
A Newbery Honor Book, 1922.
CHAPTER I
THE BEEMAN
The road was a sunny, dusty one, leading upward through Medford Valley, with half-wooded hills on each side whose far outline quivered in the hot, breathless air of mid-June afternoon. Oliver Peyton seemed to have no regard for heat or dust, however, but trudged along with such a determined stride that people passing turned to look after him, and more than one swift motor car curved aside to give him room.
“Want a ride?” inquired one genial farmer, drawing up beside him. “Where are you going?”
Oliver turned to answer the first question, meaning to reply with a relieved “yes,” but his square, sunburned face hardened at the second.
“Oh, I am just going down the road—a little way,” he replied stiffly, shook his head at the repeated offer of a lift, and tramped on in the dust.
The next man he met seemed also to feel a curiosity as to his errand, for he stopped a very old, shambling horse to lean from his seat and ask pointblank: “Where may you be going in such a hurry on such a hot day?”
Oliver, looking up at the person who addressed him and gauging his close-set, hard gray eyes and his narrow, dark face, conceived an instant dislike and distrust of the stranger. He replied shortly, as he had before, but with less good temper:
“I am going down the road a little way. And, as you say, I am rather in a hurry.”
“Oh, are you indeed?” returned the man, measuring the boy up and down with a disagreeable, inquisitive glance. “In too much of a hurry to have your manners with you, even!” He shot him a look of keen and hostile penetration. “It almost looks as though you were running away from something.”
He stopped for no further comment but went jingling off in his rattletrap cart, the cloud of dust raised by his old horse’s clumsy feet hanging long in the ai
r behind him. Oliver plodded forward, muttering dark threats against the disagreeable stranger, and wishing that he had been sufficiently quick of speech to contradict him.
Yet the random guess was a correct one, and running away was just what Oliver was doing. He had not really meant to when he came out through the pillared gateway of his cousin’s place; he had only thought that he would walk down the road toward the station—and see the train come in. Yet the resolve had grown within him as he thought of all that had passed in the last few days, and as he looked forward to what was still to come. As he walked down the road, rattling the money in his pockets, turning over his wrongs in his mind, the thought had come swiftly to him that he need no longer endure things as they were. It was three miles to the railroad station; but, once there, he could be whisked away from all the troubles that had begun to seem unendurable. The inviting whistle of a train seemed to settle the matter finally.
“It isn’t as though I were afraid of anything,” he reflected, looking back uneasily. “If I thought I were afraid I would never go away and leave Janet behind like this. No, I am only going because I will not be made to do what I hate.”
He told himself this several times by way of reassurance, but seemed always to find it necessary to say it again. There were some strange things about the place where he and his younger sister Janet had come to make a visit, things that made him feel, even on the first day, that the whole house was haunted by some vague disquiet of which no one would tell him the cause. His Cousin Jasper had changed greatly since they had last seen him. He had always been a man of quick, brilliant mind but of mild and silent manners, yet now he was nervous, irritable, and impatient, in no sense a genial host.
Janet, Oliver’s sister, had already begun to love the place, nor did she seem to notice the uneasiness that appeared to fill the house. She did not remember her cousin as well as did her brother and was thus less conscious of a change. So far, she had been spending her time very happily, being shown by Mrs. Brown, the housekeeper, through the whole of Cousin Jasper’s great mansion and inspecting all the treasures that it contained. It was a new house, built only a year ago.
“And a real calamity it was when the work came to an end so soon,” Mrs. Brown had said, “for it kept Mr. Peyton interested and happy all the time it was going on. We had hoped the south wing would be building these three months more.”
Janet thought the great rooms were very beautiful, but Oliver did not like their vast silence in which the slightest sound seemed so disconcertingly loud. He was not used to such a quiet house, for their own home was a cozy, shabby dwelling, full of the stir and bustle and laughter of happy living. Here the boy found that noises would burst from him in the most unexpected and involuntary manner, noises that the long rooms and passageways seemed to take up and echo and magnify a hundred times. Mrs. Brown was constantly urging him “not to disturb poor Mr. Peyton,” and Hotchkiss, the butler, who went about with silent footsteps, always looked pained when Oliver slammed a door or made a clatter on the stairs. He had never seen a butler before, except in the movies, so that he found the presence of Hotchkiss somewhat oppressive.
It was the change in his host, however, that had really spoiled the visit. Jasper Peyton was a cousin of his mother’s, younger than she and very fond of her and her children. At their house he was always a much-desired guest, for he had “the fairy-godfather gift,” as their mother put it, and was constantly doing delightful things for them. He was tall and spare, with a thin, sensitive face that, so it seemed to Oliver, was always smiling then, but that never smiled now.
The boy had noted a difference on the evening of their arrival, even as they drove up to the house through the warm darkness and the drifting fragrance of the June night.
“I can hardly remember how Cousin Jasper looks, but I think I will like his garden,” Janet had observed, sniffing vigorously.
Oliver nodded, but he was not listening. He was looking up at the lighted house where the door stood open, with Hotchkiss waiting, and where he could see, through the long windows facing the terrace, that Cousin Jasper was hurrying through the library to meet them in the hall. Even at that distance their cousin did not look the same; he walked slower, he had lost his erect carriage and his old energy of action. He seemed a thin, high-shouldered ghost of his former self, with all spirit and cheerfulness gone out of him.
Janet and Oliver were paying their first visit without their mother, and, to guests of thirteen and fifteen respectively, such an occasion was no small cause for excitement. For that reason they were very slow to admit that they were not enjoying themselves, but the truth at last could not be denied. Cousin Jasper, preoccupied and anxious, left them almost completely to their own devices, neglected to provide any amusement for them, and seemed, at times, to forget even that they were there.
You are a great comfort to him, my dears. He seems worried and distracted-like lately,” Mrs. Brown had told them. “He does not like to be in this great house alone.”
To Oliver it seemed that their presence meant very little, a fact which caused him to puzzle, to chafe and, finally, as was fairly natural, to grow irritated. After he and Janet had explored the house and garden, there seemed nothing left to do for Oliver but to stroll up and down the drive, stare through the tall gates at the motors going by, or to spend hours in the garage, sitting on a box and watching Jennings, the chauffeur, tinker with the big car that was so seldom used. Janet was able to amuse herself better, but her brother, by the third day, had reached a state of disappointed boredom that was almost ready, at any small thing, to flare out into open revolt. The very small thing required was the case of Cousin Eleanor.
They were all walking up and down the terrace on the third evening, directly after dinner, the boy and girl trying to accommodate their quick steps to Cousin Jasper’s slower and less vigorous ones. Their host was talking little; Janet, with an effort, was attending politely to what he said, but Oliver was allowing his wits to go frankly woolgathering. It was still light enough to look across the slopes of the green valley and to see the shining silver river and the roofs of one or two big houses like their own, set each in its group of clustering trees. Beyond the stream, with its borders of yellow-green willows, there rose a smooth, round hill, bare of woods, or houses, with only one huge tree at the very top and with what seemed like a tiny cottage clinging to the slope just below the summit.
“Where that river bends at the foot of the hill, there ought to be rapids and good fishing,” the boy was thinking. “Perhaps I might get over there to see, some day.”
He was suddenly conscious, with a flush of guilt, that Cousin Jasper was asking him a question, but had stopped in the middle of a sentence, realizing that Oliver was not listening.
“So,” he interrupted himself, “an old man’s talk does not interest you, eh?”
He followed Oliver’s glance down to the crooked river, and made an attempt to guess his thought.
“You were looking at that big stone house beyond the stream,” he said, “and I suppose you were wondering who lives there.”
He seemed to be making an effort to turn the conversation into more interesting channels, so that Oliver immediately gave him his full, but tardy attention.
“A cousin of mine owns the house. We are really all cousins or are related more or less, we who own the land in Medford Valley. But Tom Brighton is of closer kin to me than the others and I am very fond of him. We have both been too busy, just lately, to exchange as many visits as we used to do, but he has a daughter, Eleanor, just about your age, Oliver, a thoroughly nice girl, who would make a good playmate for both of you. I am neglecting your pleasure, I must have you meet her. You should see each other every day.”
The suggestion seemed to afford Janet great delight; but, for some reason, it had the opposite effect upon Oliver. Perhaps Cousin Jasper did not know a great deal about younger people, perhaps he had not been taking sufficient note of the ways and feelings of this particular two,
for it was quite certain that he had made a mistake. Oliver cared very little for girls, and to have this one thrust upon him unawares as a daily companion was not to his liking.
“It will be very nice for Janet,” he remarked ungraciously, “but I—I don’t have much to do with girls.”
Some pure perversity made him picture his Cousin Eleanor as a prim young person, with sharp elbows and a pinched nose and stringy hair. She would be lifeless and oppressively good-mannered, he felt certain. All the ill success of the last three days seemed to be behind his sudden determination to have none of her. But Cousin Jasper, having once conceived the idea, was not to be gainsaid.
“No, I haven’t been doing the proper thing for you. We will have Eleanor over to lunch tomorrow and you two shall go with Jennings in the car to fetch her. Don’t protest, it won’t be any trouble.”
Later, as they went upstairs, Janet pleaded and argued with a thunderously rebellious Oliver who vowed and insisted that he would have no unknown female cousin thrust upon him.
“It is all right for you, Janet,” he insisted, “but I won’t have Cousin Jasper arranging any such thing for me. When I told him I didn’t like girls, he should have listened. No, I don’t care if it is wrong, I am going to tell him, tomorrow, just what I think.”
The Young Adult Award-Winners Megapack Page 30
