The Web and The Root (29 page)

The result was chaos. It might be likened, rather, to a few chips of truth swimming around in a sea of molasses. Alsop could grow lyrical in discussing and estimating the prodigious beauties of John Keats, of Shelley, Shakespeare, Chaucer, and Kit Marlowe; but he could also grow lyrical and ecstatic in the same way and to the same degree in estimating the prodigious beauties of Winnie the Pooh, Don Marquis, F.P.A., last night’s moving picture show, and the whimsical little Lamb-kins of a man named Morley:

“Sure damn genius—yes, suh!—sheer, damn, elfin, whimsical genius!” Here, he would read some treasured bit, cast his jowled head upward until light shimmered on the glasspoints of his misty eyes, and, with a laugh that was half-sob, and all compact of wonder and the treacle of his own self-appeasement, he would cry: “Lord God! Lord God—it’s sure damn elfin genius!”

Even in these early days of his apprenticeship at college he had begun to accumulate a library. And that library was an astounding picture of his mind and taste, a symbol of his inner chaos all congealed in the soothing and combining solvent of his own syrup:

It contained a large number of good books—books that one liked, others of which one had heard and would like to read, books that had been preserved and saved with the intelligence of a good mind and discriminating taste. Alsop was a voracious reader of novels, and his
bookshelves even at that Baptist college showed selective power, and an eager curiosity into the best of the new work that was being produced. It was astonishing in a man so young, and in such a place.

But his library also included a world of trash: towering stacks of newspapers, containing morsels of choice taffy that had appealed to him; great piles of magazines, containing pieces of whimsey or of sentiment that were preserved in the mothering fullness of his bosom; hundreds of newspaper clippings, embalming some sentiment that was particularly dear to him; as well as many other things which were really valuable and good, and showed a welter of bewildering contradictions—a good mind and a keen and penetrating sense of judgment swimming around upon a sea of slop.

Brought down to simple fact, “the more wholesome and well-rounded view of things” resolved itself into an utter acceptance of things as they were, because things as they were, no matter how ugly, wasteful, cruel, or unjust, were “life”—hence, inevitable, once one understood them “in their full perspective” and saw “how essentially fine and sweet” (a phrase that did him valiant service) “life” was.

T
HUS
J
ERRY
A
LSOP
became the devoted champion of the conventions, the accepted and established scheme of things. If a picture could have been made of his mind during the war and post-war years, it would have revealed the following record of faith and of belief:

The President of the United States, Woodrow Wilson, was not only “the greatest man since Jesus Christ,” but his career and final martyrdom—for so did Alsop speak of it—were also closely comparable to the career and martyrdom of Christ. The President had been the perfect man, pure in conduct, irreproachable in wisdom, and faultless in his management of affairs. He had been deceived, tricked, and done to death by villains—by unscrupulous and contriving politicians in his own land, jealous of his fame, and by the unprincipled charlatans of diplomacy in others.

“The second greatest man since Jesus Christ” was the president of
the college, a tall, pale man with a pure and suffering face, who got up in Chapel and agonized over his boys, making frequent use of such words as “service,” “democracy,” and “ideals of leadership”—all popular evidences of enlightened—nay, inspired!—thought, in the jargon of the time. What it all meant, reduced to concrete terms of conduct, was a little puzzling. “Character,” “education for the good life,” seemed to boil down in practice to a non-drinking, non-smoking, non-gambling, non-card-playing, non-fornicating state of single blessedness, leading up eventually to “the life of service and of leadership for which Pine Rock prepares a man”—namely, the eventual sacrament of matrimony with a spotless female, variously referred to in the lexicon of idealism as “a fine woman,” or “a pure, sweet girl.”

“An intelligent and liberal interest in the affairs of government and politics” seemed to mean supporting the Democratic or Republican tickets and voting for the candidates which the political machines that dominated these two parties put up at election time.

“A serious and enlightened attitude towards religion” did not mean hide-bound fundamentalism, for Pine Rock under its idealistic president prided itself on the liberalism of its thought. God, for example, might be understood as “a great idea,” or “an ocean of consciousness,” instead of the usual old gentleman with the long beard—but one went to church on Sunday just the same.

In fact, in spite of all this high-sounding talk about “service,” “ideals of leadership,” and “democracy,” one could not see that it made much actual difference in the way things were. Children still worked fourteen hours a day in the cotton mills of the state. Tens of thousands of men and women and children were born, suffered, lived, and died in damnable poverty, bondage, and the exploitation of the tenant farm. One million black inhabitants of the state, about a third of the entire population, were still denied the rights of free suffrage—even though “the second greatest man since Jesus Christ” frequently declared that that right was one of the proudest triumphs of Anglo-Saxon law, and of the nation’s own great Constitution. One million
black inhabitants of the state were denied the right to the blessings of the higher education—although “the second greatest man since Jesus Christ” often declared that it was for this ideal that Pine Rock College lived and had its being, and that the right of education would be denied to no fit person at old Pine Rock, “regardless of creed, color, race, or other distinction of any kind whatsoever.” In spite of the sounding phrases, the idealism, the martyred look, the inspired assurances, and all the rest of it, life went on according to the old formula, and in the old way, pretty much as it had always done. Class after class of pure young idealists marched forth from Pine Rock bearing the torch, prepared to bare their breasts and to die nobly, if necessary, at the barricades, no matter what sinister influences menaced them, or what overwhelming forces outnumbered them—in defense of monogamy, matrimony, pure sweet women, children, the Baptist Church, the Constitution, and the splendid ideals of the Democratic and Republican parties; aye, resolved furthermore, if they were challenged, so great was this, their devotion to the right, to die there at the barricades in the defense of the splendid institution of child labor, cotton mills, tenant farmers, poverty, misery, squalor, damnation, death, and all the rest of it—rather than recant for a moment, be recreant for a single second to the pure ideals that had been fostered in them, the shining star of conduct to which their youthful gaze had been directed by “the second greatest man since Jesus Christ.”

And in the idolatry of this reverence, Gerald Alsop, like his distinguished predecessor, Adhem, led all the rest.

“T
HE THIRD GREATEST
man since Jesus Christ” was a clergyman, pastor of the Pine Rock Episcopal Church, affectionately known to the boys as “Preacher” Reed. It was a name he had encouraged them to use himself. In a way, Jerry Alsop always looked upon Preacher as one of his own private discoveries. He certainly regarded him as another proof of his own liberalism, for Pine Rock was admittedly and professionally Baptist in its sympathies, but Jerry had been big enough to leap across
the wall of orthodoxy and to fold the new Messiah to his breast.

Not that Preacher would not have done very nicely for himself had he been left solely to his own devices. For his own devices were unusual ones. To the boys they seemed at first amazing, then sensational, finally enchanting—until there was hardly a student in the college who had not enthusiastically succumbed to them.

At the outset, one would have said that the odds were a thousand to one against Preacher’s getting anywhere. He was in Episcopalian—no one seemed to know quite what that was, but it sounded risky. He had just a little church, and almost no congregation. In addition to this, he was “a Northern man.” The situation looked hopeless, and yet before six months were out Preacher had the whole campus eating from his hand, and black looks and angry mutterings from every other preacher in the town.

No one knew exactly how he did it; he went about it all so quietly that the thing was done before they knew that it was done. But probably the greatest asset that he had was that from the very beginning no one thought of him as a preacher. And the proof of this was that they called him one. They would not have dared to take such liberties with any other clergyman in town. Besides this, Preacher didn’t preach to them; he didn’t sermonize in hour-long harangues; he didn’t pray for them in twenty-minute invocations; he did not thunder at them from the pulpit, nor did he work all the stops upon his ministerial vocal chords: he did not coo like a dove, roar like a lion, or bleat like a lamb. He had a trick worth six or eight of these.

He began to drop in to see the boys in their rooms. There was something so casual and so friendly in his visits that he put everyone at ease at once. In the most pleasant way he managed to convey to them that he was one of them. He was a well-conditioned man of fifty years, with sandy hair, and a lean face that had great dignity, but also a quality that was very friendly and attractive. In addition to this, he dressed in rather casual-looking clothes—rough, shaggy tweeds, grey flannel trousers, thick-soled shoes—all somewhat worn-looking, but
making the boys wish vaguely that they knew where he got them, and wonder if they could get some like them. He would come by and sing out cheerfully:

“Working? I’ll not stay if you are. I was just passing by.”

At this, there would be an instant scraping of chairs, the scramble of feet, and a chorus of voices assuring him most earnestly that no one was working, and would he please sit down.

Upon receiving these assurances, he would sit down, tossing his hat as he did so upon the top tier of the double-decker cot, tilt back comfortably against the wall in an old creaking chair, one foot hinged on the bottom round, and produce his pipe—a blackened old briar that seemed to have been seasoned in the forge of Vulcan—load it with fragrant tobacco from an oil-skin pouch, strike a match, and begin to puff contentedly, speaking in between the puffs:

“Now I—I—like—a pipe!”—puff, puff—“You—younger—blades”—puff, puff—“can—have—your—cigarettes”—puff, puff, puff—“but as for me”—he puffed vigorously for a moment—“there’s—nothing—that—can—give—me”—puff, puff puff—“quite the comfort—of this—old—briar—pipe!”

Oh, the gusto of it! The appeasement of it! The deep, fragrant, pungent, and soul-filling contentment of it! Could anyone think that such a man as this would fail? Or doubt that within a week half the boys would be smoking pipes?

So Preacher would have got along anyway without Jerry Alsop’s help, and yet Jerry surely played a part in it. It was Jerry who had largely inaugurated the series of friendly meetings in students’ rooms, in which Preacher took the leading and most honored role. Preacher, in fact, was one of those men who at the time were so busily engaged in the work of “relating the Church to modern life”—in his own more pungent phrase, of “bringing God to the campus.” His methods of doing so were, as Jerry said, “perfectly delightful.”

“Christ,” Preacher would begin in one of those charming gatherings in student rooms, which found eight or ten eager youths sprawled
around the floor in various postures, a half-dozen more perched up on the rickety tiers of a double-decker cot, a few more hanging out the windows, eagerly drinking in the whole pungent brew of wit, of humor, of good-natured practicality, life, and Christianity, through shifting planes of pipe and cigarette smoke—“Christ,” Preacher would continue, puffing on his pipe in that delightfully whimsical way of his, “was a fellow who never made a Six in philosophy. He was a fellow who started out on the scrub team, and wound up playing quarterback on the Varsity. But if He’d had to go on playing with the scrubs”—this was thrown out perhaps, as a kind of sop of encouragement to certain potentially permanent scrubs who might be within the range of hearing—“if Christ had had to go on playing with the scrubs, why,” said Preacher Reed, “He would have made a go of it. You see”—here he puffed thoughtfully on his seasoned pipe for a moment—“the point is, fellows—that’s the thing I want you to understand—Christ was a fellow who always made a go of everything. Now Paul”—for a moment more Preacher puffed meditatively on his blackened briar, and then, chuckling suddenly in his delightful way, he shook his head and cried—“now Paul! Ah-hah-hah—that’s a different story! Paul was a bird of a different feather! There’s a horse of quite another color! Paul was a fellow who flunked out.”

By this time the eager young faces were fairly hanging on these inspired words.

“Paul was a fellow who started out on the scrub team, and should have stayed there,” said Preacher Reed. “But he couldn’t stand the gaff! He was eating his heart out all the time because he couldn’t make the Varsity—and when there was a vacancy—when they needed a new quarterback, because, you see, fellow,” said Preacher quietly, “the Old One had died”—he paused for a moment to let this subtle bit sink in—“they put Paul in his place. And he couldn’t make the grade! He simply couldn’t make the grade. And in the end—what did he do? Well, fellows, I’ll tell you,” said Preacher. “When he found he couldn’t make the grade—he invented a new game. The old one was too tough.
Paul couldn’t play it—it was too much for him! And so he invented a new one he could play—and that’s where Paul flunked out. You see, fellows, Paul was a fellow who made a Six where Christ always made a One. That’s the whole difference between them,” Preacher said with the easy and informative manner of “Now it can be told,” and then was silent for a moment, sucking vigorously and reflectively on his old briar pipe.