The Professors House | Page 7

thing thought about, but a part of consciousness itself. When
the ice chunks came in of a winter morning, crumbly and white, throwing off gold and
rose- coloured reflections from a copper-coloured sun behind the grey clouds, he didn't
observe the detail or know what it was that made him happy; but now, forty years later,
he could recall all its aspects perfectly. They had made pictures in him when he was
unwilling and unconscious, when his eyes were merely open wide.
When he was eight years old, his parents sold the lakeside farm and dragged him and his
brothers and sisters out to the wheat lands of central Kansas. St. Peter nearly died of it.
Never could he forget the few moments on the train when that sudden, innocent blue
across the sand dunes was dying for ever from his sight. It was like sinking for the third
time. No later anguish, and he had had his share, went so deep or seemed so final. Even
in his long, happy student years with the Thierault family in France, that stretch of blue
water was the one thing he was home-sick for. In the summer he used to go with the
Thierault boys to Brittany or to the Languedoc coast; but his lake was itself, as the
Channel and the Mediterranean were themselves. "No," he used to tell the boys, who
were always asking him about le Michigan, "it is altogether different. It is a sea, and yet it
is not salt. It is blue, but quite another blue. Yes, there are clouds and mists and sea-gulls,
but-I don't know, il est toujours plus na•f."
Afterward, when St. Peter was looking for a professorship, because he was very much in
love and must marry at once, out of the several positions offered him he took the one at

Hamilton, not because it was the best, but because it seemed to him that any place near
the lake was a place where one could live. The sight of it from his study window these
many years had been of more assistance than all the convenient things he had done
without would have been.
Just in that corner, under Augusta's archaic "forms," he had always meant to put the
filing- cabinets he had never spared the time or money to buy. They would have held all
his notes and pamphlets, and the spasmodic rough drafts of passages far ahead. But he
never got them, and now he really didn't need them; it would be like locking the stable
after the horse is stolen. For the horse was gone -- that was the thing he was feeling most
just now. In spite of all he'd neglected, he had completed his Spanish Adventurers in
eight volumes -- without filing cabinets or money or a decent study or a decent stove --
and without encouragement, Heaven knew! For all the interest the first three volumes
awoke in the world, he might as well have dropped them into Lake Michigan. They had
been timidly reviewed by other professors of history, in technical and educational
journals. Nobody saw that he was trying to do something quite different -- they merely
thought he was trying to do the usual thing, and had not succeeded very well. They
recommended to him the more even and genial style of John Fiske.
St. Peter hadn't, he could honestly say, cared a whoop -- not in those golden days. When
the whole plan of his narrative was coming clearer and clearer all the time, when he could
feel his hand growing easier with his material, when all the foolish conventions about that
kind of writing were falling away and his relation with his work was becoming every day
more simple, natural, and happy -- , he cared as little as the Spanish Adventurers
themselves what Professor So-and-So thought about them. With the fourth volume he
began to be aware that a few young men, scattered about the United States and England,
were intensely interested in his experiment. With the fifth and sixth, they began to
express their interest in lectures and in print. The two last volumes brought him a certain
international reputation and what were called rewards -- among them, the Oxford prize
for history, with its five thousand pounds, which had built him the new house into which
he did not want to move.
"Godfrey," his wife had gravely said one day, when she detected an ironical turn in some
remark he made about the new house, "is there something you would rather have done
with that money than to have built a house with it?"
"Nothing, my dear, nothing. If with that cheque I could have brought back the fun I had
writing my history, you'd never have got your