On the campus work piled up.  He had promised to give a course on Employment Management, especially to train men to go into the lumber industries with a new vision. (Each big company east of the mountains was to send a representative.) It was also open to seniors in college, and a splendid group it was, almost every one pledged to take up employment management as their vocation on graduation—­no fear that they would take it up with a capitalist bias.  Then—­his friends and I had to laugh, it was so like him—­the afternoon of the morning he arrived, he was in the thick of a scrap on the campus over a principle he held to tenaciously—­the abolition of the one-year modern-language requirement for students in his college.  To use his own expression, he “went to the bat on it,” and at a faculty meeting that afternoon it carried.  He had been working his little campaign for a couple of months, but in his absence in the East the other side had been busy.  He returned just in time for the fray.  Every one knows what a farce one year of a modern language is at college; even several of the language teachers themselves were frank enough to admit it.  But it was an academic tradition!  I think the two words that upset Carl most were “efficiency” and “tradition”—­both being used too often as an excuse for practices that did more harm than good.

* * * * *

And then came one Tuesday, the fifth of March.  He had his hands full all morning with the continued threatened upheavals of the longshoremen.  About noon the telephone rang—­threatened strike in all the flour-mills; Dr. Parker must come at once. (I am reminded of a description which was published of Carl as a mediator.  “He thought of himself as a physician and of an industry on strike as the patient.  And he did not merely ease the patient’s pain with opiates.  He used the knife and tried for permanent cures.”) I finally reached him by telephone; his voice sounded tired, for he had had a very hard morning.  By one o’clock he was working on the flour-mill situation.  He could not get home for dinner.  About midnight he appeared, having sat almost twelve hours steadily on the new flour-difficulty.  He was “all in,” he said.

The next morning, one of the rare instances in our years together, he claimed that he did not feel like getting up.  But there were four important conferences that day to attend to, besides his work at college.  He dressed, ate breakfast, then said he felt feverish.  His temperature was 102.  I made him get back into bed—­let all the conferences on earth explode.  The next day his temperature was 105.  “This has taught us our lesson—­no more living at this pace.  I don’t need two reminders that I ought to call a halt.”  Thursday, Friday, and Saturday he lay there, too weary to talk, not able to sleep at all nights; the doctor coming regularly, but unable to tell just what the trouble was, other than a “breakdown.”