How Does the College Change?
HANOVER REVEALED IN ITS NEW BUT FAMILIAR BEAUTY TOONE RETURNING FROM THE "LARGER WORLD"
THE LAST DAY that our delegation lived in the Castle, it was as though there were a corpse in the house. In the morning we walked out of the white church with Dr. Tucker's diploma under our arms. After lunch the juniors drew lots for our rooms—in an indecent haste to partition our goods before we were cold. The little squirt who drew my room started to hang up his pictures right away, and I had to take a walk outside, not to knock him pie-eyed.
Toward midnight we went over to Hamp Howe's corner to wait for Dudley's bus. It was a big night for the old rummy, and he had the little blacks, Nip and Tuck, as leaders. On the train down the river no one cared where he sat or what became of his baggage. We moved in a fog of incredulity. All the unanalyzed friendships, all the dumb and careless ways we had of thinking and acting together, were crumbling and dissolving beneath us. These experiences seemed to suddenly bulk larger than our whole previous lives. We had thought them as immovable as the rocky hills, but now that we needed them the most they weren't there.
To THE "WIDE, WIDE WOULD"
Dr. Tucker had said that a larger world awaited us, but we didn't want a larger world. We wanted no other existence than to be with the same old gang, in the old brick house on the corner, under the same swell old half-wit faculty. I can't remember that anyone said good-bye. There was an implied compact against it.
Thereafter, thirty-three years and one month passed before I again ascended Hanover Hill.
The car rounded the corner and I shut off the engine. It was one of those northern New England afternoons that the Creator saves for his pets. The sun was low, invisible behind the foliage. By some trick of refraction the green-gold light appeared to issue from the soil itself. The cultivated Greeks on the back seat of the car, with their inbred worship of balance and composition, sucked in their breath. Flashed upon the senses like that, without preliminary, the new Dartmouth is enough to make anyone's heart skip a beat.
Around the green table of the campus sat the guests. Those upon the one side wore virginal white, those upon the other a shadowy ruddiness. At the head of the table, presiding by intrinsic right, sat the exquisite tower and the supporting wings of the library. Not a sound interrupted the calm, not a blade of grass was misplaced, not a branch stirred in the double column of elms. It was serene, impeccable, uninhabited, instinct with potential force; a huge engine in repose, awaiting the engineer's signal.
The geometric buildings, the wine-glass trees, were as detached as enamelled toys upon a nursery background. No torn-up street, no yellowed patch of sod, no halfachieved building, no fault of taste broke the spell. It was as balanced and perfect, and as unreal, as the back-drop of a theatre. Rarely do the human senses receive an impression so flawless.
Driving north, past the rank of Georgian halls, still other Georgian halls looked out from behind them, and still other plantings of elms. The Greeks upon the back seat made polite murmurings of approval. "Ah, how solid and well-spaced." "The upkeep is wonderful, one would say that the shrubs are trimmed with nail scissors." "How hygienic, with all those windows for fresh air."
But when we halted before old Dartmouth, with its right and left bowers gleaming white in their frame of poignant vegetation and blue sky, our Greeks sat in silence. The glow in their eyes registered pure joy. Here, indeed, are the old thorough-breds. Dignified and unpretentious, they personalize the best in our colonial tradition. Severe in line, chaste in decoration, there is not an undisciplined brick in the whole aggregation. Sure of themselves, these old settlers court comparison with the Parthenon from where Eleazar's unknown architect borrowed their proportions.
The Georgian architecture of the new Dartmouth is impressive and commodious, and very beautiful. It may be duplicated, however, and perhaps surpassed, in its country of origin and in half-a-score of the wealthy land-grant universities that lie between the Hudson and Puget Sound. But our Dartmouth row of veterans is our own, and unique. Thirty-three years ago our class did not enjoy the opulent equipment of to-day's college, but we did have the gem of the collection. We did not possess the whole necklace, but we did possess its chief jewel.
To compensate for so long an exile, I tried to pass the major part of the first few days on or near the senior fence, absorbing the atmosphere and seeking to identify the changes. The innovations, in general, may be attributed to an improved mechanics. College life rolls on rubber. Posters offer a daily airplane transport to Boston in an hour and a half, for the sum of six dollars —about what Hungry Hoke got for his mileage on the rattler. Dud's bus has been promoted from the stable to the entry of Wilson Hall as a museum piece. It is agreeable to see old vehicles appreciated for the faithful old servants they are.
MORNING ROUTINE
Foot traffic in the village, as observable from senior fence, is negligible. Two or three servant girls make their pre-breakfast way into the bowers where the faculty dwell. Thereafter, the passage of pastel forms indicates that the lady secretaries and the librarians are arriving at their employment. At 10.30 o'clock Georgie D. Lord, toes well out, comes downtown for more newspapers. Professor Skinner, geniality untarnished by the decades, vibrates once or twice between Miss McMurphy's house and the provision store. It has been calculated that if the Professor were given a sweet potato for each time he has made this voyage, and if the potatoes were laid end to end, they would reach from Fire Island Light to Salt Creek, Idaho. The overall brigade who paint and garden and carpenter the college property ease themselves into their Packards and Buicks to go home for lunch. An eightyone year old professor slinks by in a long sleek car driven by himself. Among the emeriti canes and crutches are definitely out.
During the afternoon hardly a baker's dozen pass the fence upon their own legs, exception being made for those who are professionally engaged to conduct lawnmowers. The current of tourist machines flows steadily north and south through Main Street, guided by traffic lights, but affects village existence hardly more than the passage of the clouds overhead. At sundown, neighboring farmers, leaving their youngest daughters in charge of the milking machines, drive in to smoke a cigar on the curb and check up on the Spanish war.
CONSIDERABLE CHANGE
The prize question is always pertinent, the one we used to hold in smug reserve when talking with students of over-populated schools such as Harvard and Columbia. We were always able to reply, with an off-hand air of triumph, "Well, we do. We know every member of our class and of the faculty." So I asked a professor of history whether he knows a teacher of languages who has been at Hanover a mere four years. "No," he replied, "I don't think that I have run across him yet." And I inquired of Charlie Proctor, the still waspwaisted athlete, as to the widow of our favorite instructor in English. "Yes," he said, "She still lives here, in the same house, but I don't suppose I have seen her three times in the past twenty years."
Gil Frost's farm is the site of acre after acre of suburbs, inhabited by practicing members of the Garden Club. Evergreens, hydrangeas, and phlox make fully half the domiciles fit illustrations for the "Home Glamorous." Deacon Downing would get lost in his own cow pasture, particularly the far corner, which is the estate of our gifted pastor, Dr. Vernon. Original, prim Puritanism, which had an aversion to the decoration of one's dwelling as of one's person, as bordering upon the immoral, has left few mementos of its former bleak sway among the houses and lawns of today's Hanover.
STILL ON THE JOB
What is of infinitely more importance, however, is that the grand old men are still on the job, personalities like Charlie D. Adams, Professor Gerould, and Professor Hull. It is these men, with their younger associates whom our class did not know, who are the authentic foundation of the College. Plugging away at their experiments, oblivious to ballyhoo, they pursue truth just because it is truth. Painstakingly they segregate fact No. 18,604, and write it down beside fact No. 18,603, and record it in their ledgers as a day of glory. For they have snatched one further atom of truth from the limbo of ignorance. Any repentant profiteer can buy Georgian architecture. It takes a long time to break into the aristocracy of science..
When we were freshmen Professor Hull was weighing light rays and he is still pursuing the same studies. It is at present the summer vacation but each morning finds him at Wilder and his light does not blink out until midnight. It is evidently his idea of a party. What he is studying may not seem very practical to some of us groundlings—trying to find whether the curly ondes have cans tied to their tails, or something like that—but to the scientist it is worth a lifetime of devotion.
Characters of this sort compose an institution of learning. It is careers of this sort that earn respect for the name of Dartmouth in the laboratories of Munich and Edinburgh, and perhaps it requires an absence of thirty-three years to appreciate how much more valuable is this scientific good-repute than is the opinion of the platinum blondes of Brooklyn as to our team. Reflecting upon the scientist, exploring for his nugget of truth in the chaos of the unknown, can make some of our go-getter classmates feel about as inconsequential as Western Union messengers.
YOUTHFUL SPIRIT
To find Hanover so imperishably young, so bubbling with the self-assurance that knowledge imparts, so nippy on its toes, brings a gossamer film of melancholy to the eye of the case-hardened absentee. We aren't nippy on our toes any more. We aren't sure that we know much of anything. We had dreams, too, but somehow they have gone sour on us. We haven't accomplished a fraction of what we had planned. We have stepped out on the sideline for a breathing spell, to rub salve on our scars, and to study how we can prevent the tax-collector from taking what we have left. We are sort of prospecting for a likely corner where we can hold our tin cup. But there is no cause for any oldster, who may come limping back to this flux of futurity, to be envious. Make no mistake, ours were the golden days. Not one of us old birds has had his moment, when the warm blood of success and celestial promise pumped up in his heart, and he knew that he was the darling of the Gods. Let the past lie. We have no complaint. The girls whose pictures we tacked upon our walls wore starched shirt-waists and taught school, and played the piano with their own hands. But there hasn't been a vintage of young women since who could hold a candle to them for good-looks and good-sense.
THOSE OLD DAYS
Our Dartmouth must have been shabby, but no one noticed. We had spring practice in the ooze of the campus. It was nondescript in its architecture. We were unbathed and unbarbered to the alien eye. No one ever took a quick glance down to see whether we wore spats. Corduroys and sweaters emerged with the first snow-flake and did not really smell soap until the April thaw. But what fun we had. No class ever had such a sense of humor. Grand old scouts, all, not a yellowbelly in the lot.
I can't feel a mite of resentment or jealousy toward these boys who are enjoying all the elegance and wealth-smelling equipment that we didn't have. I know that we had the best of it. None of them will ever love the old place the way we did. I doubt whether any of them get as much out of college as we did. It may have been dressed like a hobo, and architecturally an orphan Annie, and culturally anaemic, but it took something warm out of its heart and put it in your heart. It was plain miracle. It takes a lot of knocking around, a lot of lying awake nights on cold fields, and being lonely, when the mind races over the oceans and continents and will not rest, to discover what a school and the men who were a part of yourself in that school have put in you forever and ever. Amen.
TIMELESS MEMORIES
Even now I can think back and describe the men of our class, squint-eyes, cowlicks, warts, everything. It is like a mother who has lost a young child. In her fondness, and in her memory, it stays forever a baby, ageless, untouched by the passage of years. Our class is like that to me. They may be obese and bald and tired-eyed. But not to me. I might not know them on the street. I have not seen them since we marched out of the White Church, on Commencement, their step elastic, the light of sunrise on their faces, confident that we had a precious contribution to make to society.
I am going back to my farm, on the bank of a foreign river. The portrait of Dartmouth has been re-painted. Among its thousand elms, it is a gracious and perfect creation. It hoards within itself what was of strength and moral beauty in our old college. And to my inner vision, within the frame of to-day's Dartmouth, walk and sing the unchangedly youthful figures of our class. They present no contradiction. Ever-young features harmonize with an ever-renewing school.
In our region the oxen walk slowly. As one follows the plow there is leisure to revive the antics of the pot-hole-eskers and the Hallgarten comedians, and to launch a throatful of companionable laughter into the sky. As one rides the mower one can summon them upon the screen, cleareyed and forever in smiles, those wearers of the green and shapeless sweaters that cover hearts of gold. If any of us contrive to squeeze into heaven it may turn out to be like that—to have a not-too-arduous manual work in the sunshine, accompanied by the presence of those whom we have cared about, unblurred and unharassed, throughout eternity.
BARE BRANCHES OF GREAT ELMS ON THE HANOVER SKYLINE
