THE SAINT AND THE SCHOLAR

(Professor Greg was an old hand at departmental politics, but he was also a great scholar. About to die, Greg decided to play a splendid little joke on the "academic community." The story, which carries a subtle overtone of Shavian irony, took place at a fictional university, but the characters are familiar: the smooth and politic department chairman, the impressive "Great Ideas" lecturer with little scholarship in his background, the pale, imitative young instructor. Perhaps the tale is not entirely uninteresting to officers and students of Harvard University...

I

Emeritus Professor Homer Greg was eighty-five, and so far as he or his doctor could tell, he might live to be one hundred and five. He was the despair of the business manager of the University, who month after month for twenty years, had mailed him a retirement check. The business manager himself was sixty-four, and, although he never allowed himself to say so, his having to make out checks for Professor Greg was a piece of unfinished business that he would like to see settled before he himself retired. The gray-haired woman who stamped the cards at the circulation desk in the library held similar sentiments. Three times a week Professor Greg came in with his green cloth book bag, the kind that had been carried by schoolboys in Boston, and took it away bulging with books. Professor Greg, she knew, was a world-famous scholar, but she couldn't understand why he was not content to rest on his laurels. He had several honorary degrees, and if he lived he probably would get even more. What did he want? He couldn't really hope to learn much more, and certainly there were enough young scholars coming along who should be allowed to carry on. When she put his books on the desk for him she used her professional smile in return for his polite bow. She liked the touch of the cosmopolite in his manner, but she did wish he would retire, really retire.

Graduate students in his field knew him. Sitting in cafeterias that bordered the campus or standing in one of the book-stores, they saw him go by, carrying the bag tightly under his right arm.... They knew he was a widower, and that he did his own cooking and his own housework. Occasionally one of the students rang his doorbell late in the afternoon and asked if Professor Greg was free to help him with a research problem on which he was working. Invariably he was invited in and given tea and macaroons, and from some invisible card file in his head Professor Greg listed all of the authorities who might prove useful....

Professor Greg was very thin, and his white skull seemed to be almost visible through the thin layer of skin. In looking at him, one might entertain the fancy that he was a life-like statue. Once a student had said that during his visit with Professor Greg he had somehow felt like posterity itself being able to talk with the living past. He had also said that listening to Professor Greg was like being inland and lying in bed at night listening to the subdued roar of the ocean. This latter remark had reference to the reputation Professor Greg had had as a controversialist. Many years earlier a local reviewer, after interviewing him on the eve of the publication of one of his books, had called him a minotaur who, with his book finished, was wearing his plumed pen gracefully behind his ear. This was journalistic excess, but it was true that Professor Greg had been a formidable antagonist. He was a gentleman, but where fact or a logical inference was concerned, he insisted on the exact truth.

Professor Greg's former department still drew students on the strength of his reputation. In the Graduate Study Room there was an oil painting of him. The face was stern, and one could study it without seeing in the eyes and in the set of the face a great devotion to duty. Beneath the portrait was a shelf of Professor Greg's books.

II

There was a departmental squabble behind the painting and hanging of the portrait and setting up the shelf of books. Both the portrait and the books had been there about ten years. The then, and still, chairman, Allen Briggs, was what is sometimes called an administrator rather than a scholar. Briggs was a dapper man, with a neat dark mustache. One would not have been surprised to learn he was a vice-president of a stocks and bonds company. For the public, or in addressing incoming graduate students, he stressed scholarly achievement; but in the in-fighting, some of it done in deadly silence, he was for what he called compromise, by which he meant giving promotions and substantial raises to the undeserving, so that everyone could attend each other's cocktail parties in the most amicable mood. He was a friendly man, and he wanted everyone to be happy and satisfied. Visiting on another campus or at a national meeting, he smilingly acknowledged the eminence of Professor Greg, but when, ten years earlier, two young assistant professors, admirers of Professor Greg, had suggested a subscription for the portrait and the shelf, he had privately deplored their lack of worldly mindedness.

The two men, John Hall and Charles Ford, were new appointees with brand new Ph.D.'s and with serious plans for their own scholarly achievements. Both men were tall and thin, and both were blond. If a colleague in another department did not know them very well, he might even have mistaken one for the other. During a department meeting, Hall had got up and made a brief but rather passionate speech about Professor Greg, saying he was world-renowned, how proud he was to be teaching a course that Greg had once taught, and how indebted to him everyone in their profession was. He had moved that the members of the department subscribe the necessary funds for a portrait and the shelf. Then he had put his hand through his thin hair and sat down; Ford got up next, made a similar but even briefer speech, seconded the motion, smiled at Hall, and sat down. It was evident they had planned the motion and seconding. A murmur had gone through the twenty-five members of the department, a part of it tense and whispered. Briggs, an old hand at such meetings, sensed a difficult situation. There were full professors present who would not have been full professors if Greg had remained on the staff, and Briggs knew the depth of their dislike and resentment; and they in turn, by innuendo and gesture, had communicated their sentiments to certain younger members of the department. Briggs knew it would not do to allow a discussion, or, above all, a vote. Smiling blandly, he asked Hall and Ford if they would allow him to appoint a committee to study their proposal. His actual words were, "a committee to adjudicate and possibly to implement your proposal." They readily agreed, and Briggs asked for and got a motion for adjournment.

Then there was a meeting of the seven full professors. Again, Briggs was on top of the situation. First he listened patiently to several reasons why the proposal did not make sense.... Brockberg, a stout and voluble man who lectured to large sophomore groups because he generalized easily and had a dramatic manner, said he had heard of a dissertation done at the University of Chicago which seriously questioned the thesis behind one of Greg's best known books. And Coombs, a dour and melancholy man who got his final promotion on the strength of a book he never managed to finish, said bluntly that it was just a sentimental gesture on the part of two overly earnest young men. After a silence, Dickinson, who had once been a student of Greg, spoke. He said quite wistfully that he wished he had been able to emulate Greg. Then with some acidity he added that there could be no question of denying Greg the honor. No one else asked to speak. Professor Briggs, after surveying the group, sighed, then breathed in deeply. "Gentlemen," he said, "I agree with Dickinson. Nor would it do if either the administration or the students learned that Professor Greg's former colleagues declined to pay him this homage. I trust that when the matter comes to a vote you will support it."

When the motion was reintroduced, it passed unanimously.... Walking back to his office, Briggs felt mildly elated. Perhaps Hall and Ford had had a good idea after all. Certainly it did the department no harm for the administration and even the public to know they wished to honor one to whom honor was due.

The ceremony was everything that Professor Briggs could have wished. The chancellor, all of the deans, all the members of the department, many from related departments, and eight visiting notables were present, all of them wearing their caps and gowns and brightly lined doctoral hoods. Three photographers were there flashing pictures. There were several speeches. When the portrait was unveiled, a delighted ripple arose from the group, and then there was prolonged clapping.... Tea and punch were served, Professor Greg was congratulated from all sides, and each of his former colleagues left feeling he had seen the end of an era.

III

Professor Greg did not entirely disappear from the consciousness of...Brockberg, Coombs, or Briggs, but they felt somehow more at ease about him. During one of his lectures, Brockberg found himself telling his sophomores that as cultivated citizens they should know the eminent men their University had produced, and, his tongue faster than his powers of restraint, he included Greg. The following semester he was more careful; his list included no professional scholars.

As the next few years went by, Professors Hall and Ford could be said to have become more knowledgeable.... During the next summer vacation, Ford sent Hall a long letter, saying he had been reading Shaw's Saint Joan. In the epilogue, Shaw had made it clear that the world was pleased enough to have the young lady in legend and in history, but it had no desire to have her or her kind live among them. Ford ended by saying he guessed the saint and the true scholar shared the same fate.

That fall the two of them began seeing more of Professor Greg. Earlier they had been too much in awe of him, but now, somehow, they were both more tolerant of their own limitations and less fearful that Greg would be critical of them. He welcomed them and, as the winter wore on, they often sat together in front of the fireplace in the high ceilinged parlor. Before it was time for them to leave, Greg served them brandy in huge brandy snifters. He was showing his age more, and sometimes he seemed to be looking backward down the years to scenes his younger friends could not quite envision. Sometimes he told them about meetings he had attended in Lausanne or Perugia, or something he had discovered, quite by accident, in the Bibliotheque Nationale.

They rarely told him about department politics, but one evening, after a second brandy, Ford found himself saying that at a cocktail party Brockberg had said to him that his friend Greg was, well, without sufficient humor. Ford had thought he could state it less explicitly than that, but halfway through his sentance he realized that Greg already knew what he was going to say. Greg's eyes lit up with a look of disinterested amusement. Walking down the snowy sidewalk together afterwards, Ford apologized to Hall for his gaucherie, and Hall told him not to worry; Greg understood Brockberg better than either of them could hope to do.

IV

The winter, the spring, the summer, and the fall went by, then still other winters and springs and summers. Ford and Hall both began to be aware of the way the years clicked off. New students came, and there were end-of-semester exams. Each of them had married, each had two children, and occasionally on a Sunday afternoon one or the other, family in tow, would walk up to the old three-story brick house and pay Professor Greg a visit.... Greg rarely said anything about what he was working on, or even whether he was working toward any specific goal; but Hall and Ford often ran into him in the library, saw him picking up his books and putting them into his green book bag, and students ringing his doorbell frequently had to wait until he came down the three long flights from his study.

Then one morning he was dead. He had come down his porch stairs, green book bag in hand, and fallen slowly onto the sidewalk. When a passing student had reached him he was already dead. It was an ironic season for him to die. Autumn had come, and registration for classes had just begun. There was a large funeral procession, which included the business manager of the University and the gray-haired librarian who worked at the circulation desk, as well as the entire department. Briggs, Ford, and Hall were among the pallbearers. Even after classes had been going for some weeks, Ford and Hall found themselves still depressed. Over coffee they talked about Greg and what he had meant to them. The truth was that his passing had left them feeling isolated and, as Hall said, somehow suddenly middle-aged. Each allowed himself a few jibes at those of Greg's colleagues who had not properly appreciated him.

During the third week in October, Briggs left messages in both of their letterboxes, requesting that they come to see him at eleven o'clock. They entered his office together, and he motioned for them to sit down. There was a letter on his desk, and he read it through at least twice before speaking to them. Finally he explained that he had received a letter from Greg's lawyer, the executor of his estate. During the past ten years Greg had worked steadily at what might prove to be the outstanding work of his career. It was substantially finished, but would require some editing, and, of course, it would have to be seen through to publication. The next point was a little more complicated, and he began this more slowly. As they might have expected, Greg had suggested the two of them to do the actual work, but he had also suggested one of the senior professors to act as a kind of supervising chairman. However, it was his own considered opion that--at which point Hall, unable to restrain himself, asked, "You mean Brockberg?" "As a matter of fact," Briggs responded, "Greg did suggest Brockberg, but as I started to say, it seems much to be preferred that all seven of the full professors constitute themselves a committee to oversee the publication. They won't interfere with either of you, to be sure. No one could object to this arrangement because, after all, it was Greg's valedictory to his profession and to his old department." Briggs paused, then added, "I'm sure you'll agree that there is no reason for Professor Brockberg to learn that Greg had suggested him. After all,..." and Briggs gestured with his right hand, as though to say the virtues in his plan were perfectly clear. He thanked them, said he had a meeting to attend right now, but perhaps later in the day they could get together about he matter.

They went down the corridor together silently, and into Ford's office. Hall spoke first. "Imagine Greg singling out Brockberg! I guess he wanted to assure us that he wasn't above playing a little joke."

"Yes, and too bad Brockberg will have to go on without knowing that there was such a joke. But what about this honorary committee stuff? Won't they feel that Briggs has arranged a shotgun marriage?"

"Maybe at first," Hall answered. "That was my first reaction, but my guess is that it came to Briggs in states. When he first read the letter from Greg's lawyaer, he must have said something like 'Jesus, Lord!,' but on thinking it over he could see there were real advantages. And he can make the others see the light."

"Of course," Ford said. It has all been properly adjudicated--and now for the implementation."

Both men laughed quietly."...an administrator rather than a scholar...brand new Ph.D."