always it did when he visited Winslow Slade. With a morose smile Woodrow leaned over to run his fingertips over the chiseled inscription, saying, “ Here, Dr. Slade, I have no doubt that happiness abides; but at my home, and in the president’s office in Nassau Hall—not likely.”
During the conversation to follow, the fire in the fireplace blazed and waned; and blazed again, and again waned; until, without either man noticing, the logs collapsed in a crumbling of smoldering coals, like distant, dying suns, into darkness and oblivion which not even a belated poker-stirring, by the younger man, could revive.
AT THIS TIME, before the terrible incursions of the Curse would prematurely age him, Winslow Slade, partly retired from his longtime pastorship at the First Presbyterian Church of Princeton, was a vigorous gentleman of seventy-four, who looked at least a decade younger; as his visitor, not yet fifty, yet looked, with such strain in his face, and his eyes shadowed in the firelight, at least a decade older than his age.
Since the death of his second wife Tabitha some years before, Dr. Slade had remained a widower, and took what melancholy joy he could largely from his several grandchildren.
Though fallen now into quasi-oblivion, known only to historians of the era, Winslow Slade was, in the early years of the twentieth century, one of New Jersey’s most prominent citizens, who had served as a distinguished president of Princeton University, three decades before, in the troubled aftermath of the Civil War and into the early years of Reconstruction, when the academic state of the school was threatened, and Dr. Slade had brought some measure of academic excellence and discipline into the school; and, in the late 1880s, when Dr. Slade had served a term as governor of New Jersey, in a particularly tumultuous and partisan era in which a gentleman of Dr. Slade’s qualities, by nature congenial, inclined rather more to compromise than to fight, and in every way a Christian, found “politics” far too stressful to wish to run for a second term. In Princeton, a far more civilized community than the state capitol in Trenton, Winslow Slade was generally revered as a much-beloved pastor of the Presbyterian church and community leader; and how much more so, than Woodrow Wilson could ever hope to be!
Not that the younger man was jealous of the elder: he was not. But, quite consciously, he wished to learn from the elder.
Though very likely Winslow Slade knew a good deal of the animosity blooming between the university president and his most powerful dean, being the beneficiary of his wife’s network of local news, yet Winslow tactfully asked his young friend if it was a faculty matter, that was troubling him?—or, an undergraduate issue?
Woodrow’s reply was reluctantly uttered: “No, Dr. Slade. I think that I have won the boys over, after some initial coolness—they like me now. This generation is more concerned with making their own worldly way than I would wish, but we understand each other.” Half-consciously Woodrow rose to his feet, to pick up, from Winslow Slade’s desk, a brass letter-opener, and to turn it in his fingers. A thin smile distended his lips. “The mischief of boys I would welcome, Dr. Slade, at this point—if it could spare me this other.”
“ ‘This other’—?”
For an unsettling moment Woodrow lost the thread of his concentration: he was hearing a muted yet vehement voice daring to accuse him. The horror of lynching is, no one speaks against it. Behind the silvery glint of his glasses his eyes filled with tears of vexation. The little brass letter-opener slipped from his fingers to fall onto Winslow Slade’s desk. He said, “I’m speaking of—of certain underhanded challenges to my authority—as president of our university. You know, Dr. Slade, I take my responsibility to be—well, God-ordained; certainly I would not have had this exceptional honor bestowed upon me, if God had
Tracie Peterson, Judith Pella