第3章 "DEAN FUNNYBONE"(1)

Nature they say,doth dote,And cannot make a man Save on some worn-out plan,Repeating us by rote:

For him her Old-World moulds aside she threw,...............................................

With stuff untainted,shaped a hero new.--LOWELLDR.LLOYD FENNEBEN,Dean of Sunrise College,had migrated to the Walnut Valley with the founding of the school here.

In fact,he had brought the college with him when he came hither,and had set it,as a light not to be hidden,on the crest of that high ridge that runs east of the little town of Lagonda Ledge.And the town eagerly took the new school to itself;at once its pride and profit.

Yea,the town rises and sets with Sunrise.When the first gleam of morning,hidden by the east ridge from the Walnut Valley,glints redly from the south windows of the college dome in the winter time,and from the north windows in the summer time,the town bestirs;itself,and the factory whistles blow.

And when the last crimson glory of evening puts a halo of flame about the brow of Sunrise,the people know that out beyond the Walnut River the day is passing,and the pearl-gray mantle of twilight is deepening to velvety darkness on the wide,quiet prairie lands.

Lagonda Ledge was a better place after the college settled permanently above it.Some improvident citizens took a new hold on life,while some undesirables who had lived in lawless infamy skulked across the Walnut and disappeared in that rough picturesque region full of uncertainties that lies behind the west bluffs of the stream.

All this,after the college had found an abiding place on the limestone ridge.For Sunrise had been a migratory bird before reaching the outskirts of Lagonda Ledge.As a fulfillment of prophecy,it had arisen from the visions and pockets of some Boston scholars,and it had come to the West and was made flesh--or stone--and dwelt among men on the outskirts of a booming young Kansas town.

Lloyd Fenneben was just out of Harvard when Dr.Joshua Wream,his step-brother,many years his senior,professor of all the dead languages ever left unburied,had put a considerable fortune into his hands,and into his brain the dream of a life-work--even the building of a great university in the West.For the Wreams were a stubborn,self-willed,bookish breed,who held that salvation of souls could come only through possession of a college diploma.

Young Fenneben had come to Kansas with all his youth and health and money,with high ideals and culture and ambition for success and dreams of honor--and,hidden deep down,the memory of some sort of love affair,but that was his own business.

With this dream of a new Harvard on the western prairies,he had burned his bridges behind him,and in an unbusiness-like way,relying too much upon a board of trustees whom he had interested in his plans he had eagerly begun his task,struggling to adapt the West to his university model,measuring all men and means by the scholarly rule of his Alma Mater.Being a young man,he took himself full seriously,and it was a tremendous blow to his sense of dignity when the youthful Jayhawkers at the outset dubbed him "Dean Funnybone"--a name he was never to lose.

His college flourished so amazingly that another boom town,farther inland,came across the prairie one day,and before the eyes of the young dean bought it of the money-loving trustees--body and soul and dean--and packed it off as the Plains Indians would carry off a white captive,miles away to the westward.

Plumped down in a big frame barracks in the public square of twenty acres in the middle of this new town,at once real estate dealers advertised the place as the literary center of Kansas;while lots in straggling additions far away across the prairie draws were boomed as "college flats within walking distance of the university."In this new setting Lloyd Fenneben started again to build up what had been so recklessly torn down.But it was slow doing,and in a downcast hour the head of the board of trustees took council with the young dean.

"Funnybone,that's what the boys call you,ain't it?"The name had come along over the prairie with the school.

"Funnybone,you are as likely a man as ever escaped from Boston.But you're never going to build the East into the West,no more'n you could ram the West into the Atlantic seaboard states.

My advice to you is to get yourself into the West for good and drop your higher learnin'notions,and be one of us,or beat it back to where you came from quick."Dean Fenneben listened as a man who hears the reading of his own obituary.

"You've come out to Kansas with beautiful dreams,"the bluff trustee continued."Drop 'em!You're too late for the New England pioneers who come West.They've had their day and passed on.

The thing for you to do is to commercialize yourself right away.

Go to buyin'and sellin'dirt.It's all a man can do for Kansas now.

Just boom her real estate."

"All a man can do for Kansas!"Fenneben repeated slowly.