“But they had built a good big fire, Mr. Rountree.”
“That doesn’t matter,” said Mr. Rountree, putting his glasses on again.
How nobly we can die for truth—in conversation.
“It was a very hot fire, Mr. Rountree. They’d have burned you if you hadn’t recanted.”
“Ah. I’d have let them burn,” said the martyred Rountree through moistening spectacles.
“I think it might be painful,” Vergil Weldon suggested. “Even a little blister hurts.”
“Who wants to be burned for anything?” said Eugene. “I’d have done what Galileo did—backed out of it.”
“So should I,” said Vergil Weldon, and their faces arched with gleeful malice over the heavy laughter of the class.
Nevertheless, it moves.
“On one side of the table stood the combined powers of Europe; on the other stood Martin Luther, the son of a blacksmith.”
The voice of husky passion, soul-shaken. This they can remember, and put down.
“There, if ever, was a situation to try the strongest soul. But the answer came like a flash. Ich kann nicht anders—I can’t do otherwise. It was one of the great utterances of history.”
That phrase, used now for thirty years, relic of Yale and Harvard: Royce and Munsterberg. In all this jugglery, the Teutons were Weldon’s masters, yet mark how thirstily the class lap it up. He will not let them read, lest some one find the rag-quilt of his takings from Zeno to Immanuel Kant. The crazy patchwork of three thousand years, the forced marriage of irreconcilables, the summation of all thought, in his old head. Socrates begat Plato. Plato begat Plotinus. Plotinus begat St. Augustine…. Kant begat Hegel. Hegel begat Vergil Weldon. Here we pause. There’s no more to beget. An Answer to All Things in Thirty Easy Lessons. How sure they are they’ve found it!
And to-night they will carry their dull souls into his study, will make unfleshly confessions, will writhe in concocted tortures of the spirit, revealing struggles that they never had. “It took character to do a thing like that. It took a man who refused
