“I see.” Hugh didn’t altogether see. Both college and life seemed more complicated than he had thought them. “I am curious to know,” he added, “just whom you consider the cream of the earth. That expression has stuck in my mind. I don’t know why—but it has.”
Henley smiled. “Probably because it is such a very badly mixed metaphor. Well, I consider the college man the cream of the earth.”
“What?” four of the men exclaimed, and all of them sat suddenly upright.
“Yes—but let me explain. If I remember rightly, I said that if you were the cream of the earth, I hoped that God would pity the skimmed milk. Well, everything taken into consideration, I do think that you are the cream of the earth; and I have no hope for the skimmed milk. Perhaps it isn’t wise for me to give public expression to my pessimism, but you ought to be old enough to stand it.”
“The average college graduate is a pretty poor specimen, but all in all he is just about the best we have. Please remember that I am talking in averages. I know perfectly well that a great many brilliant men do not come to college and that a great many stupid men do come, but the colleges get a very fair percentage of the intelligent ones and a comparatively small percentage of the stupid ones. In other words, to play with my mixed metaphor a bit, the cream is very thin in places and the skimmed milk has some very thick clots of cream, but in the end the cream remains the cream and the milk the milk. Everything taken into consideration, we get in the colleges the young men with the highest ideals, the loftiest purpose.”
“You want to tell me that those ideals are low and the purpose materialistic and selfish. I know it, but the average college graduate, I repeat, has loftier ideals and is less materialistic than the average man who has not gone to college. I wish that I could believe that the college gives him those ideals. I can’t, however. The colleges draw the best that society has to offer; therefore, they graduate the best.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” a student interrupted. “How about Edison and Ford and—”
“And Shakespeare and Sophocles,” Henley concluded for him. “Edison is an inventive genius, and Ford is a business genius. Genius hasn’t anything to do with schools. The colleges, however, could have made both Ford and Edison bigger men, though they couldn’t have made them lesser geniuses.”
“No, we must not take the exceptional man as a standard; we’ve got to talk about the average. The hand of the Potter shook badly when he made man. It was at best a careless job. But He made some better than others, some a little less weak, a little more intelligent. All in all, those are the men that come to college. The colleges ought to do a thousand times more for those men than they do do; but, after all, they do something for them, and I am optimistic enough to believe that the time will come when they will do more.”
“Some day, perhaps,” he concluded very seriously, “our administrative officers will be true educators; some day perhaps our faculties will be wise men really fitted to teach; some day perhaps our students will be really students, eager to learn, honest searchers after beauty and truth. That day will be the millennium. I look for the undergraduates to lead us to it.”
XXVI
The college year swept rapidly to its close, so rapidly to the seniors that the days seemed to melt in their grasp. The twentieth of June would bring them their diplomas and the end of their college life. They felt a bit chesty at the thought of that B.S. or A.B., but a little sentimental at the thought of leaving “old Sanford.”
Suddenly everything about the college became infinitely precious—every tradition; every building, no matter how ugly; even the professors, not just the deserving few—all of them.
Hugh took to wandering about the campus, sometimes alone, thinking of Cynthia, sometimes with a favored crony such as George Winsor or Pudge Jamieson. He didn’t see very much of Norry the last month or two of college. He was just as fond of him as ever, but Norry was only a junior; he would not understand how a fellow felt about Sanford when he was on the verge of leaving her. But George and Pudge did understand. The boys didn’t say much as they wandered around the buildings, merely strolled along, occasionally pausing to laugh over some experience that had happened to one of them in the building they were passing.
Hugh could never pass Surrey Hall without feeling something deeper than sentimentality. He always thought of Carl Peters, from whom he had not heard for more than a year. He understood Carl better now, his desire to be a gentleman and his despair at ever succeeding. Surrey Hall held drama for Hugh, not all of it pleasant, but he had a deeper affection for the ivy-covered dormitory then he would ever have for the Nu Delta House. He wondered what had become of Morse, the homesick freshman. Poor Morse. … And the bull sessions he had sat in in old Surrey. He had learned a lot from them, a whole lot. …
The chapel where he had slept and surreptitiously eaten doughnuts and read “The Sanford News” suddenly became a holy building, the building that housed the soul of Sanford. … He knew that he was sentimental, that he was investing buildings with a greater significance than they had in their own right, but he continued to dream over the last four years and to find a melancholy beauty in his own sentimentality. If it hadn’t been for Cynthia,
