The Professors House | Page 6

were doing or in what his wife was doing -- or he would notice that the
kitchen linoleum was breaking under the sink where the maid kicked it up, and he would
stop to tack it down. On that perilous journey down through the human house he might
lose his mood, his enthusiasm, even his temper. So when the lamp was empty -- and that
usually occurred when he was in the middle of a most important passage -- he jammed an
eyeshade on his forehead and worked by the glare of that tormenting pear-shaped bulb,
sticking out of the wall on a short curved neck just about four feet above his table. It was
hard on eyes even as good as his. But once at his desk, he didn't dare quit it. He had
found that you can train the mind to be active at a fixed time, just as the stomach is
trained to be hungry at certain hours of the day.
If someone in the family happened to be sick, he didn't go to his study at all. Two
evenings of the week he spent with his wife and daughters, and one evening he and his
wife went out to dinner, or to the theatre or a concert. That left him only four. He had
Saturdays and Sundays, of course, and on those two days he worked like a miner under a
landslide. Augusta was not allowed to come on Saturday, though she was paid for that
day. All the while that he was working so fiercely by night, he was earning his living
during the day; carrying full university work and feeding himself out to hundreds of
students in lectures and consultations. But that was another life.
St. Peter had managed for years to live two lives, both of them very intense. He would
willingly have cut down on his university work, would willingly have given his students
chaff and sawdust -- many instructors had nothing else to give them and got on very well
-- but his misfortune was that he loved youth -- he was weak to it, it kindled him. If there
was one eager eye, one doubting, critical mind, one lively curiosity in a whole
lecture-room full of commonplace boys and girls, he was its servant. That ardour could
command him. It hadn't worn out with years, this responsiveness, any more than the
magnetic currents wear out; it had nothing to do with Time.
But he had burned his candle at both ends to some purpose -- he had got what he wanted.
By many petty economies of purse, he had managed to be extravagant with not a cent in

the world but with his professor's salary -- he didn't, of course, touch his wife's small
income from her father. By eliminations and combinations so many and subtle that it now
made his head ache to think of them, he had done full justice to his university lectures,
and at the same time carried on an engrossing piece of creative work. A man can do
anything if he wishes to enough, St. Peter believed. Desire is creation, is the magical
element in that process. If there were an instrument by which to measure desire, one
could foretell achievement. He had been able to measure it, roughly, just once, in his
student Tom Outland, -- and he had foretold.
There was one fine thing about this room that had been the scene of so many defeats and
triumphs. From the window he could see, far away, just on the horizon, a long, blue, hazy
smear -- Lake Michigan, the inland sea of his childhood. Whenever he was tired and dull,
when the white pages before him remained blank or were full of scratched out sentences,
then he left his desk, took the train to a little station twelve miles away, and spent a day
on the lake with his sail-boat; jumping out to swim, floating on his back alongside, then
climbing into his boat again.
When he remembered his childhood, he remembered blue water. There were certain
human figures against it, of course; his practical, strong-willed Methodist mother, his
gentle, weaned-away Catholic father, the old Kanuck grandfather, various brothers and
sisters. But the great fact in life, the always possible escape from dullness, was the lake.
The sun rose out of it, the day began there; it was like an open door that nobody could
shut. The land and all its dreariness could never close in on you. You had only to look at
the lake, and you knew you would soon be free. It was the first thing one saw in the
morning, across the rugged cow pasture studded with shaggy pines, and it ran through the
days like the weather, not a