“Going—going hell! I’m gone!” And he stormed out of the room, clutching the battered volume underneath his arm.
When he had gone the tumult broke out anew, the loyal cohorts gathering round their wounded chief. The end of it all, when the whole tumult of bitter agreement had quieted down, was summed up in the final dismissal of Alsop’s words:
“He’s just an ass! He’s just gone and played hell, that’s what he’s done! I thought there was some hope for him, but he’s just gone and made a complete damned ass of himself! Leave him alone! Don’t fool with him any longer, he’s not wuth it!”
And that was that.
“GET THE FACTS, Brother Webber! Get the Facts!”
The square Sphinx head, shaven, paunch-jowled, putty-grey; the grim, dry mouth, puckered with surly humor; the low rasp of the voice. He sat in squat immobility, staring at them ironically.
“I am a Research Man!” he announced finally. “I get the Facts.”
“What do you do with them after you get them?” said Monk.
“I put salt on their tails and get some more,” said Professor Randolph Ware.
His stolid, ironic face, iron lidded, enjoyed the puzzled worship of their stare.
“Have I any imagination?” he asked. He shook his head in solemn negation. “No-o,” he said with a long grunt of satisfaction. “Have I any genius? No-o. Could I have written King Lear? No-o. Have I more brains than Shakespeare? Yes. Do I know more about English literature than the Prince of Wales? Yes. Do I know more about Spenser than Kittredge, Manley, and Saintsbury put together? Yes. Do I know more about Spenser than God and Spenser put together? Yes. Could I have written The Faery Queen? No-o. Could I write a doctoral thesis about The Faery Queen? Yes.”
“Did you ever see a doctor’s thesis that was worth reading?” asked Monk.
“Yes,” said the implacable monotone.
“Whose was it?”
“My own.”
They answered with a young yell of worship.
“Then what’s the use of the Facts?” said Monk.
“They keep a man from getting soft,” said Randolph Ware grimly.
“But a Fact has no importance in itself,” said Monk. “It is only a manifestation of the Concept.”
“Have you had your breakfast, Brother Webber?”
“No,” said Monk, “I always eat after class. That’s to keep my mind fresh and active for its work.”
The class snickered.
“Is your breakfast a Fact or a Concept, Brother Webber?” He stared grimly at him for a moment. “Brother Webber made a One in Logic,” he said, “and he has breakfast at noon. He thinks he is another convert to Divine Philosophy, but he is wrong. Brother Webber, you have heard the bells at midnight many times. I have myself seen you below the moon, with your eyes in a fine frenzy rolling. You will never make a Philosopher, Brother Webber. You will spend several years quite pleasantly in Hell, Getting the Facts. After that, you may make a poet.”
Randolph Ware was a very grand person—a tremendous scholar, a believer in the discipline of formal research. He was a scientific utilitarian to the roots of his soul: he believed in Progress and the relief of man’s estate, and he spoke of Francis Bacon—who was really the first American—with a restrained but passionate wisdom.
George Webber remembered this man later—grey, stolid, ironic—as one of the strangest people he had ever known. All of the facts were so strange. He was a Middle-Westerner who went to the University of Chicago and learned more about English literature than the people at Oxford knew. It seemed strange that one should study Spenser in Chicago.
He was gigantically American—he seemed almost to foreshadow the future. George met few people who were able to make such complete and successful use of things as they are. He was a magnificent teacher, capable of fruitful and astonishing innovation. Once he set the class in composition to writing a novel, and they went to work with boiling interest. George rushed into class breathlessly three times a week with a new chapter written out on the backs of paper bags, envelopes, stray bits of paper. And Randolph Ware had the power of communicating to them the buried magic of poetry: the cold sublimity of Milton began to burgeon with life and opulent color—in Moloch, Beelzebub, Satan, without vulgarity or impertinence, he made them see a hundred figures of craft and rapacity and malice among the men of their time.