It was a magnificent but terrible pageant of wrathful fire before whose onslaught row after row of regimented buildings melted away. As far as the eye could reach all was consuming fire, and dire devastation; an inferno, terrible and wonderful to look upon. Louis went here and there; retreating as the holocaust advanced ever northward. All the city seemed doomed, but it was not. All hope seemed lost, but it was not. The end came at last; courageous, weary and worn men triumphed, after agonies of hope and despair. What a terror, what a holocaust, what ruin of men, what downfall, what instant collapses of fortune, what a heavy load to meet and bear, what a trial and a test. Yet a proud spirit, the eternal spirit of man rose to the height of the call of calamity. The city was rebuilt. For Louis it was a terrifying experience; so sudden, so overwhelming, so fatalistic, so cruel.
When the ruins cooled Louis found it difficult to locate the streets. They seemed labyrinthine, lost in a maze of wreckage and debris; bit by bit he found his strange way about. At night he was put on guard duty as a member of the M.I.T. battalion. Clad in full uniform with Springfield rifle and fixed bayonet at right shoulder, he walked his beat from Tremont street to Pleasant street as far as opposite the tower of the Providence Depot, and return. For hours in the night, all alone, he walked his beat and saw not a soul. At first it was novel and exciting, but as nothing happened, he became weary from loss of sleep, bored by the monotonous to and fro, and glad to be relieved. He had two nights of this. Then came a show of order throughout the city and the great work of clearing and upbuilding, in due time began. He returned to his studies in Tech.
He had liked military drill; he had had two years of it at “High.” He liked the exercise, the sense of order and precision, the neat evolutions and the compact team work of the many cadets. But he considered it as discipline in play. He had no thought of war other than to loathe it, as the wild dream of madmen who stood safely behind the evil. For Louis long since had begun to sense and to discern what lay behind the veil of appearances. Social strata had become visible and clear, as also that hypocrisy of caste and cant and “eminence” against which his mother, time and time again, had spoken so clearly, so vehemently in anger and contempt. Her ideal she averred was a righteous man, sound of head, clean of heart, a truthful man too natural to lie or to evade. These outbursts of his mother sank deep into the being of her son; and in looking back adown the years, he has reason justly to appraise in reverence and love a nature so transparent, so pure, so vehement, so sound, so filled with a yearning for the joy of life, so innocent-ecstatic in contemplation of beauty anywhere, as was that of the one who bore him forth, truly in fidelity, to be and to remain life of her life. Thus the curtain of memory ever lifts and falls and lifts again, on one to whom this prayer is addressed. If Louis is not his mother’s spirit in the flesh, then words fail, and memory is vain.
Upon his entry into Tech Louis felt a marked change in atmosphere from that of “High.” It was now an atmosphere of laissez faire, of a new sort of freedom. Tuition paid, the rest he found was up to him. There was no special regularity of hours or of attendance. He might exert himself or not as he saw fit. He might learn as much or little as he chose. There was no discipline further than this: That one was expected to conduct himself with decorum and with a reasonable degree of application. It was broadly assumed that the student was there in his own interest and would apply himself accordingly.
The school was housed in Rogers Hall, adjoining, on the south, the Museum of Natural History, at Boylston and Berkeley streets. The quarters were pleasant and airy, the long drafting-room or atelier facing broadside to the south. There was also a Library and a Lecture Room. At this date the school was comparatively new, having been opened in 1865. Louis therefore was among its early students. This one building housed the Institute entire.
The School of Architecture was presided over by Professor William R. Ware, of the Boston architectural firm of Ware & Van Brunt. Among the important works of this firm were the Memorial Building at Harvard, and the large Railway Station at Worcester. Professor Ware was a gentleman of the old school; a bachelor, of good height, slender, bearded in the English fashion, and turning gray. He had his small affectations, harmless enough. His voice was somewhat husky, his polite bearing impeccable and kind. He had a precious sense of quiet humor, and common sense seemed to have a strong hold on him. Withal he was worthy of personal respect and affection. His attainments were moderate in scope and soundly cultural as of the day; his judgments were clear and just. The words amiability and quiet common sense sum up his personality; he was not imaginative enough to be ardent.
His assistant, Eugene Letang, was a diplomé of the École National des Beaux Arts, Paris, and specifically an ancien of the atelier libre of Emil Vaudremer, architect, a winner of the Grand Prix de Rome.
This man Letang was sallow earnestness itself; long and lean of face with a scanty student beard. Let us say he was thirty. He had no professional air; he was a student escaped from the Beaux Arts, a transplanted massier as it were of the
