FullReads

Knute admired Blevins, Ph. D. He was so tubbed and eyeglassed and terribly right. But most of Blevins’ lambs did not like Blevins. They said he was a “crank. ” They read newspapers in his class and covertly kicked one another.

In the smug, plastered classroom, his arm leaning heavily on the broad tablet-arm of his chair, Knute tried not to miss one of Blevins’ sardonic proofs that the correct date of the second marriage of Themistocles was two years and seven days later than the date assigned by that illiterate ass, Frutari of Padua. Knute admired young Blevins’ performance, and he felt virtuous in application to these hard, unnonsensical facts.

He became aware that certain lewd fellows of the lesser sort were playing poker just behind him. His prairie-trained ear caught whispers of “Two to dole,” and “Raise you two beans. ” Knute revolved, and frowned upon these mockers of sound learning. As he turned back he was aware that the offenders were chuckling, and continuing their game. He saw that Blevins, Ph. D. , perceived that something was wrong; he frowned, but he said nothing. Knute sat in meditation. He saw Blevins as merely a boy. He was sorry for him. He would do the boy a good turn.

When class was over he hung about Blevins’ desk till the other students had clattered out. He rumbled:

“Say, Professor, you’re a fine fellow. I do something for you. If any of the boys make themselves a nuisance, you yust call on me, and I spank the son of a guns. ”

Blevins, Ph. D. , spake in a manner of culture and nastiness:

“Thanks so much, Axelbrod, but I don’t fancy that will ever be necessary. I am supposed to be a reasonably good disciplinarian. Good day. Oh, one moment. There’s something I’ve been wishing to speak to you about. I do wish you wouldn’t try quite so hard to show off whenever I call on you during quizzes. You answer at such needless length, and you smile as though there were something highly amusing about me. I’m quite willing to have you regard me as a humorous figure, privately, but there are certain classroom conventions, you know, certain little conventions. ”

“Why, Professor!” wailed Knute, “I never make fun of you! I didn’t know I smile. If I do, I guess it’s yust because I am so glad when my stupid old head gets the lesson good. ”

“Well, well, that’s very gratifying, I’m sure. And if you will be a little more careful—”

Blevins, Ph. D. , smiled a toothy, frozen smile, and trotted off to the Graduates’ Club, to be witty about old Knute and his way of saying “yust,” while in the deserted classroom Knute sat chill, an old man and doomed. Through the windows came the light of Indian summer; clean, boyish cries rose from the campus. But the lover of autumn smoothed his baggy sleeve, stared at the blackboard, and there saw only the gray of October stubble about his distant shack. As he pictured the college watching him, secretly making fun of him and his smile, he was now faint and ashamed, now bull-angry. He was lonely for his cat, his fine chair of buffalo horns, the sunny doorstep of his shack, and the understanding land. He had been in college for about one month.

Before he left the classroom he stepped behind the instructor’s desk and looked at an imaginary class.

“I might have stood there as a prof if I could have come earlier,” he said softly to himself.

Calmed by the liquid autumn gold that flowed through the streets, he walked out Whitney Avenue toward the butte-like hill of East Rock. He observed the caress of the light upon the scarped rock, heard the delicate music of leaves, breathed in air pregnant with tales of old New England. He exulted: “‘Could write poetry now if I yust—if I yust could write poetry!”