Now the lesser peaks were conquered, and with each ascent the men grew more daring, more sure, more filled with iron strength. For the Jungfrau waited for them, and they needed all the endurance they could store into their muscles before Agassiz would allow them to take that final climb. He cared greatly, after all, for the safety of his men, and none who followed him was lost.
That must have been a trip which the twelve people who took it told to their children and their grandchildren. Even the guides, six of them, never forgot it, and one of them turned back finding the risks which they all took intolerable. Perhaps he was the only one who really had sense!
It was a two-day trip, and day meant from three in the morning which in late August was dark as night. Such was their insecurity that even the first day of travel across snow fields might have lost them all. For when they peered through strange flat windows in the snow, they saw beneath them a great blue grotto filled with a soft and lovely light which might well have poured over their stiffened bodies for the next æon if they had made a misstep. But they walked the crust with caution, and at evening arrived at Lake Meril, a weary day from the hospice of the Grimsel.
They were to start at three, but long before then the guide, Jacob, discovered that his ladder which had been stored there, was gone. A peasant had carried it off, nor had he any mind to give it up. The first messengers returned in the darkness without it. Then Agassiz rose and with him the whole party. If, they said, he does not return this ladder, we shall… And no peasant ever stood out against the things they promised to do. The ladder was returned. But two hours had been lost and it was now five in the morning and growing light. Jacob warned them of the added strain of a forced march, but no one seemed to think that the warning applied particularly to him, and all twelve started for the Jungfrau.
For miles they tramped through the usual deep snow, over hard crusts, across crevasses with the ladder, up and down, the same cautious progress to which they were hardened. But now the Jungfrau rose straight over them, protected from them by her great precipices, in shining confident isolation.
Even to Agassiz nothing more seemed possible. They huddled together, a few dark specks in the gleaming desolation, and stared up a way no man was meant to tread. But the guide, Jacob, who had perhaps in him something of the solitary hawk which circled above the peak, swept on, steady, sure, strong. Seven hundred steps they cut and climbed in an icy fog which suddenly blew around them, and threatened the whole final achievement. Seven hundred steps, and as suddenly the fog fell away like a rainbow stage curtain, and they were at the summit of the Jungfrau! With no living thing higher but the hawk which still swung its curious circles above them.
One at a time each man planted proud futile feet on the everlasting peak, and left it still unconquered. Jacob alone may have been given entrance to its fastness which he had challenged. To Jacob alone, it had capitulated.
Now, backing down the perilous highway, feeling for each step like a ladder-round until the seven hundred were all above their dizzy heads, they descended. Then if Jacob had not held them back, they would have burst into one of the Agassiz celebrations. It was growing dark and a moon cast queer shadows which might mean death. He held them still on a tight rein until they were past the open windows of the moonlit crust. Here through the stillness of the cold air, they heard that wild sweet call of the Swiss, the yodel.
Across the crust teetered a peasant with a great pail of fresh milk for them. They clustered about it, dipping into it, drinking until the pail was empty. It was nine o’clock, and it would be midnight before they reached Meril, but they were fine and strong now. They gathered together their instruments and strode off across the snow as gay and proud as if they had the Jungfrau in their pockets. The full moon was still high when they were back in their beds which they had left long before dawn. An Agassiz day!
12. A MAN NEEDS ROOM TO GROW
Perhaps, of all the factors which held Louis Agassiz to the little town of Neuchâtel, his chance to study the glaciers firsthand was the strongest. All over Europe and America scientists had caught up his theory, added their evidence, and passed it along. Even Darwin, settled now in England, came out of his absorption with his own problems to be stirred by the evidence of the ice cap in Wales. He felt the combination of delight and exasperation which comes when somebody points out an obvious truth. The Welch valley that had shown him eleven years ago only ordinary water and rock, now announced clearly a written history of the glacial period. Darwin found the truth, whoever discovered it, tremendously exciting, and Agassiz and his contribution now became part of his own equipment. It is not unlikely that if the two young men had been able to work together for a while, Darwin could have modified Agassiz’s conviction about special creation. For both of them sought the truth.
For five more years the glaciers held Agassiz in the mountains. The great boulder of Hôtel des Neuchâtelois split over his head, and its occupants checked out to take quarters in a log cabin which they built on the glacier. They regretted their old Hôtel, but like true scientists they proceeded to use its destruction to construct further proof of the progress of the glacier. They watched crevasses form under their eyes; they experimented with colored liquids and saw them stream like capillaries, threading their way through the ice; they surveyed the glacier, and tested its comparative movement, upper regions against lower, night motion against day; and they made maps which recorded what they saw. Louis writes about their discoveries with his fingers almost too cold to hold a pen, and water freezing by his bedside. Writes to the Prince of Canino that he can’t join him in sunlit Florence, or on a trip to America, because he must go to the bottom of this glacier question. And that he has no fruit or vegetables, nothing but everlasting mutton and rice soup. But no slightest intention of going to Italy where he could have them. And only wondering about America if it might be the kind of place where he could get a job that would pay him enough to publish his unhappy books, which, he agrees wistfully with other authors, do not meet the wants of the world.
About his home life he kept silence. When young Alexander was six, and his sister four, the baby Pauline was born. Quite enough of a household to take the time and strength of one woman. Cily struggled along, bringing them up, and keeping her own Hôtel des Neuchâtelois as best she could. When Louis was at home, he shut himself up in his laboratory where he pored over his microscope or wrote through the lonely night. When he packed his knapsack for the cabin on the glacier, she knew that she would not see him for weeks. When he began to think more and more definitely about that country across the sea where money was plentiful and the world was new, his thoughts did not include a wife and three small children by his side. Louis was finishing with Neuchâtel, and Cily, ironically enough, was at last part of Neuchâtel. The snail shell into which Louis Agassiz had moved and found so roomy, pressed tight about him now, and like the hermit crab who shares some of the qualities of a genius, he began to search uneasily for one which would allow him space to grow. When was America anything but a place where a man could grow to his full stature?
He thought about America, and talked about America, and corresponded about America. He considered a short trip as guest of the Prince of Canino, and when that plan failed he moved toward it in another direction. His destination was as inevitable as the end of the unwearied search of the hermit crab. Behind his search was a drive as implacable. When Louis Agassiz desired anything intensely, his genius was at work on him and neither he nor the obstacles in the way mattered in the least. Rose Agassiz learned that truth years ago.
She could perhaps even have prophesied some of the fortunes and misfortunes of her boy when he was no longer a boy but a man at the peak of his life. For proverbs are not made out of catchy phrases; they are the products of the hard experience of the human race. The boy is still, and always will be, the father of the man.
Rose Agassiz had sent her boy away to school to train him out of his tendency to leap from one splendid unfinished proj
ect to the next one which seemed more exciting. She had understood the power of his enthusiasms and knew that they must be focused for rich results. But neither school nor Rose Agassiz could quiet her quicksilver son. He would always slip away from where they expected to find him to gleam in some inaccessible spot with a new intention. Nor was his theory mistaken. A born leader should not work out the drudgery of his discovery, but a born leader without judgment about his assistants leaves behind him a long trail of unfinished work.
Louis filled his home with strange men who promised much, spent his money, and harassed his wife who wanted her children to grow up in the security of her religion and ideals. Dinkel, after all the years since Munich, left him and went to England to find work for himself. He apparently felt about the man Desor as Cily must have felt. But Cily could not go to England. The gentle Gressly disappeared and instead of returning to the jibes and taunts of winter in the laboratory, ended his life in a place which may have been more peaceful, an asylum. Vogt and Desor ruled the Agassiz household, and their rule spelled failure. For now after publishing twenty volumes of such perfection that only the rich could buy them, the Neuchâtel establishment went into insolvency. It had made the names of Neuchâtel and of Agassiz part of the vocabulary of the scientific world, and it could no longer pay its debts. The family helped, everyone helped who could, but the work was finished. An impulsive, brilliant youth had started it, and an impulsive, brilliant man was leaving it; for neither had judgment about people or money.
Louis was through with his glacier explorations now. His visits were brief, his records were published, finished. He had established the ice age. He made a last trip to his cabin to transfer his notes to another scientist who for sixteen years managed to find material for continued and faithful observation.
The great volumes on fossil fishes with their beautiful plates and careful text were finished. What they had cost, no man could compute. But money was the least of their expense. Yet of money there was none, and now there was no credit. Neuchâtel could swing no more costly enterprises; Agassiz had spent all of his inheritance from his father; his salary was gone before he drew it; his relatives were drained and unhappy. For himself Agassiz needed not one sou, but for his science his needs knew no end.
Make no mistake, though. Louis Agassiz was not leaving Switzerland a failure. He left behind him those useless rags, and strode away encumbered by nothing, equipped with the qualities of the boy which would now armor his new successful state. He carried away the power of his vitality which never failed him. He carried his magnetic charm which drew from the vitality and was as abiding. He took his love of laughter, and of praise, and of work, and of new people and new places. He wore the magic of his unselfconscious ways, and his friendliness which is of all passports the most useful. He brought to us in America a man of great sweetness and power whose genius would demand of us our interest, our affection, our money, and any other of our resources which he happened to need, and whose returns for our investments cannot be computed because they belong as much to the future as to us. The man whom the boy had fathered could still salvage more assets than one country could manage!
Louis Agassiz with no means of getting there, made up his mind to go to America. And the modern psychologist would tell us that this set of mind had practically bought his ticket. For having told himself that he was going, he then began to talk about it and to plan his life toward it. When the Prince of Canino heard the details of the Agassiz situation, he invited him to be his guest for a summer in America. But the Prince apparently had a less powerful set of mind for he was obliged to give up his trip. By the time he broke the news to Agassiz, it was no longer important. Louis had, as ever, confided his hopes to his old friend Humboldt who had bestirred himself, and now the King of Prussia offered him a grant of fifteen thousand francs to enable him to visit the United States. Agassiz wrote the Prince that he was sorry that they could not go together, but “whatever befalls me, I feel that I shall never cease to consecrate my whole energy to the study of nature; its all powerful charm has taken such possession of me that I shall always sacrifice everything to it; even the things which men value most.”
Nor was this an overstatement of Agassiz’s. He was not only prepared for such sacrifices but he made them, and among them he included his family. In the month of May when he was thirty-eight, he said good-bye to Cily and his two little daughters. His eldest, his son Alexander, was to stay in school at Neuchâtel where he might have the same kind of start in life that Rose Agassiz had given her son at ten. Cily took her girls and went back to the old Dr. Mayor house at Cudrefin to visit Rose before she returned to her own home in Carlsruhe. The two women must have talked long about this man who loved them both, and perhaps the elder woman tried to give the younger of her hard-earned wisdom. But a mother’s wisdom cannot, after all, solve a wife’s problems. The two must have understood each other or Cily would never have gone back to a place haunted by a childhood which his mother could hold intact in her heart while she was left bereft. A curious tribute to Louis Agassiz that Alexander Braun, who was taking his sister into the shelter of his home, was still his good friend, and that Cily could go to his mother with her grief. They must have understood that he loved them all, but that against the immolation of his life to science they had no chance.
Now, for once in his life, Louis determined upon putting his house in order. Before he left Switzerland where he probably knew he would never return, he would, he decided, finish up all of the odds and ends of his unfinished projects. Though, as Humboldt pointed out to him, “considering all that you have in your well-furnished brain beside your accumulated papers, half the contents of which you do not yourself know, your expression ‘aŭfräumen,’ to put in final order, is singularly inappropriate,” Nevertheless Louis worked as a Hercules for nearly a year at his housecleaning, and at the end of that time his affairs were probably more nearly in order than ever before or again in his life. Even the thousands of fossils which he had borrowed from over the world were packed up and shipped back to their owners with his polite thanks. Louis could indeed achieve almost anything, once he had set his mind to it!
He was ready at last, ready at two o’clock of a wild March night, and the quiet little village of Neuchâtel which was usually dark with sleep at that hour, glimmered like a meadow of fireflies with the torches carried by town and gown, at one in their loss of a great leader. “I will come back,” Louis promised them, but they knew, and he knew, that he would not. He shared their tears that black night, but when his stagecoach had left the post yard and its lanterns swung down the road toward Bâle, they put out their torches and went back into dark houses with the heavy awareness of something splendid gone forever from their lives. While Louis rode on through the night and quieted the honest ache in his heart with plans for Paris, until with the spring dawn he slept. So, when he had driven away to school at ten, he had almost forgotten to wave good-bye to his mother in his ardent reach for the new experience. It was nearly thirty years since that first departure of his boyhood, and the man followed its pattern. His genius rode with him, and he could not be lonely.
PART III:THE HEIGHTS
13. OUR DISTINGUISHED IMMIGRANT
Louis Agassiz was off for America. An inland lad, born and bred, he was to cross a great and stormy sea. A European, he was to adjust himself to an unknown people. He wound his way down from the mountains through the Europe he knew, and was to leave. If he cherished, with that great capacity for enjoyment which was his, the fragments of the old life, he was only human. Paris became his for the day. No longer was he, unknown and struggling, restricted to companionship of internes, though he still settled in his old quarters. That he chose the same old hotel near the Jardin des Plantes may have been an unconscious armor against the unknown future. Here in Paris, as in Neuchâtel, he would gather together the unfinished bits and try to make them whole. He would savor the quality of himself where he stood now, at thirty-nine, before he separated that
self from all that had nourished it, to plunge it into a new environment where it might or might not thrive. And who knew, he must have thought, as Paris filled his hands with honors, who knew but scientists might invite him, when these American lectures were over, to return to Paris and become a member of their sacred sect.
They took him to their hearts as only the French could, and he responded as only Agassiz could. It was April in Paris, with the spring and summer ahead of him there, with no ties to drag him back to the little Swiss town, with a great exciting adventure ahead of him. Famous people flocked about him, scientists listened gravely to his impassioned defense of his glacier theory and were convinced, rare private collections were hurried to him, Paris was his!
Now, on a bright morning, Louis strode across to the Jardin des Plantes, not as a poor student, but as if the place belonged to him. As indeed it did, temporarily. In the old gallery of zoology, the best room was barricaded off for him. From the crypts and storerooms came specimens which had never been unpacked for anybody. Guards and porters made excuses to bring them where they might peer in the door at this joyous god rejoicing in his handiwork. A new sea urchin, and he was as radiant as if he had created man. No saturnine scientist this, no glum superior scholar who could scarcely find a bon jour for them! There must be some magic in these dusty boxes and barrels, and they stared respectfully at the small gray shells which could arouse such rapture.
Louis plunged into ideas for new books, he met new people, he discovered new specimens, he made new friends and remade old ones; he lived once more in the state of high and joyous speed which was the breath of life to him. Paris loved him and admired him; it placed its resources at his feet, and in his hands laid the Physiological Prize which carried a useful three hundred dollars with it. But it did not offer him a position. Too much, perhaps, like capturing a new star from a strange sky with the hope of domesticating it. Louis Agassiz was welcome as a visitor, not as resident.
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