PAGE 2
The Grand Cross Of The Crescent
by
“Here is a review of the history,” he would say–he always referred to it as “the” history–“that I came across in my TRANSCRIPT.”
In the eyes of Doctor Gilman thirty years was so brief a period that it was as though the clipping had been printed the previous after-noon.
The members of his class who were examined on the “Rise and Fall,” and who invariably came to grief over it, referred to it briefly as the “Fall,” sometimes feelingly as “the…. Fall.” The history began when Constantinople was Byzantium, skipped lightly over six centuries to Constantine, and in the last two Volumes finished up the Mohammeds with the downfall of the fourth one and the coming of Suleiman. Since Suleiman, Doctor Gilman did not recognize Turkey as being on the map. When his history said the Turkish Empire had fallen, then the Turkish Empire fell. Once Chancellor Black suggested that he add a sixth volume that would cover the last three centuries.
“In a history of Turkey issued as a text-book,” said the chancellor, “I think the Russian-Turkish War should be included.”
Doctor Gilman, from behind his gold-rimmed spectacles, gazed at him in mild reproach. “The war in the Crimea!” he exclaimed. “Why, I was alive at the time. I know about it. That is not history.”
Accordingly, it followed that to a man who since the seventeenth century knew of no event, of interest, Cyrus Hallowell, of the meat-packers’ trust, was not an imposing figure. And such a man the son of Cyrus Hallowell was but an ignorant young savage, to whom “the” history certainly had been a closed book. And so when Peter returned his examination paper in a condition almost as spotless as that in which he had received it, Doctor Gilman carefully and conscientiously, with malice toward none and, with no thought of the morrow, marked “five.”
Each of the other professors and instructors had marked Peter fifty. In their fear of Chancellor Black they dared not give the boy less, but they refused to be slaves to the extent of crediting him with a single point higher than was necessary to pass him. But Doctor Gilman’s five completely knocked out the required average of fifty, and young Peter was “found” and could not graduate. It was an awful business! The only son of the only Hallowell refused a degree in his father’s own private college–the son of the man who had built the Hallowell Memorial, the new Laboratory, the Anna Hallowell Chapel, the Hallowell Dormitory, and the Hallowell Athletic Field. When on the bulletin board of the dim hall of the Memorial to his departed grandfather Peter read of his own disgrace and downfall, the light the stained-glass window cast upon his nose was of no sicklier a green than was the nose itself. Not that Peter wanted an A.M. or an A.B., not that he desired laurels he had not won, but because the young man was afraid of his father. And he had cause to be. Father arrived at Stillwater the next morning. The interviews that followed made Stillwater history.
“My son is not an ass!” is what Hallowell senior is said to have said to Doctor Black. “And if in four years you and your faculty cannot give him the rudiments of an education, I will send him to a college that can. And I’ll send my money where I send Peter.”
In reply Chancellor Black could have said that it was the fault of the son and not of the college; he could have said that where three men had failed to graduate one hundred and eighty had not. But did he say that? Oh, no, he did not say that! He was not that sort of, a college president. Instead, he remained calm and sympathetic, and like a conspirator in a comic opera glanced apprehensively round his, study. He lowered his voice.
“There has been contemptible work here,” he whispered–“spite and a mean spirit of reprisal. I have been making a secret investigation, and I find that this blow at your son and you, and at the good name of our college was struck by one man, a man with a grievance–Doctor Gilman. Doctor Gilman has repeatedly desired me to raise his salary.” This did not happen to be true, but in such a crisis Doctor Black could not afford to be too particular.