47 pages • 1 hour read
The Professor's House
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Part 2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2: “Tom Outland’s Story”
Part 2, Chapter 1 Summary
Part 2 consists of Tom Outland’s first-person account, as told to St. Peter, of the time he spent with Rodney “Roddy” Blake in New Mexico.
Tom meets Rodney at a railway workers’ poker game in Pardee, New Mexico. Rodney, a newcomer in the area, wins a large amount of money but is too drunk to look after it, so Tom helps him back to his lodgings and stays the night. In the morning, he refuses Rodney’s offer to split his winnings and insists on opening a savings account instead. Rodney and Tom become friends. When Tom gets pneumonia, his doctor recommends that Tom give up night work and find a job where he can work in the open air. Rodney finds them both jobs with the Sitwell Cattle Company.
Rodney and Tom herd cattle near a landmark named the Blue Mesa throughout the summer. Other settlers claim that the Blue Mesa is impossible to climb, but Rodney and Tom decide to attempt it. In October, the foreman, John Rapp, comes to take them to the winter cabin near the mesa.
Part 2, Chapter 2 Summary
As they prepare the cabin, Rapp gives Tom instructions for tending the cattle during the winter. Rapp comments that Tom and Rodney need to be especially careful around the mesa, since the cattle are known to escape there when they get “skittish.” Tom comments that he is interested in climbing the mesa, but Rapp warns him not to do so while working for the Sitwell Company. Throughout the fall, Tom and Rodney live in the mesa’s shadow, observing it a close range.
While out hunting for turkeys, Tom discovers an irrigation main and other artifacts that must have been left by an “ancient” Indigenous group, possibly the Taos or Hopis, who had lived in pueblo colonies, which only makes him more determined to scale the mesa.
Part 2, Chapter 3 Summary
In the December, Rapp brings with him a “castaway Englishman” named Henry Atkins, a cook and valet who had fallen on hard times. He cooks and keeps house for Rodney and Tom, vastly increasing the comfort of their lives. They begin to notice the wild cattle from the mesa, and soon a handful of cows and steers escape from the herd. Tom is adamant that he will get them back. Without telling Rodney, Tom crosses the river with his horse as Henry watches. He passes through the area they have started to call “cow canyon,” eventually encountering a box canyon, whose sheer sides stretch up nearly 1,000 feet. As he explores further on foot, Tom looks up and sees a village carved into the stone. He realizes that he “had come upon the city of some extinct civilization, hidden away in this inaccessible mesa for centuries, preserved in the dry air and almost perpetual sunlight like a fly in amber, guarded by the cliffs and the river and the desert” (120). When Tom tells the others about the village, they start to speculate about other ways in and out of the mesa. Tom and Rodney agree to leave the cattle herding job when their contract is up in May and devote their time to exploring the mesa.
Part 2, Chapter 4 Summary
In early May, Rodney and Tom find a way to the city carved in the cliff from the bottom of the box canyon. When they reach the abandoned stone village, they discover jars, bowls, mats, tools, clothing, and ovens. There is a spring of fresh and clear water, with the “beautifully shaped” water jugs still sitting alongside it. Throughout the spring and summer, they continue exploring and build a cabin on top of the mesa to use as their base for excavating the site. Tom and Rodney are awed by their findings, being both impressed by the workmanship of the people who built the city and stunned by the sublimity of the landscape. Eventually, they discover the skeletal remains of a young woman from the village, who they name Mother Eve. Later, they find three more skeletons of older people and deduce that they were elders left behind in the city during the farming season who died while the others were away.
Part 2, Chapter 5 Summary
In August, Henry dies from a snake bite. Tom’s mentor and father figure, Father Duchene, arrives to help them and encourages them to continue their work. Father Duchene uses his knowledge of the Indigenous people of the area to interpret some of the artifacts that Tom and Rodney have found. He speculates that the inhabitants of the village had most likely been killed by invaders while they were outside the mesa at their farms, thus accounting for the fact that “Cliff City” remains intact. Like Tom and Rodney, Father Duchene feels a “reverence” for the village in the mesa, seeing it as a testament to a human desire for order.
They spend a few more months working on the site with the intention of turning over to professional archaeologists. That winter, Tom sets out for Washington, DC, in the hopes of generating official interest in the site. Before his departure, he seals his diary of the expedition into a wall at Cliff City.
Part 2, Chapter 6 Summary
In Washington, Tom meets with the “Indian Commission,” but finds out that they deal with current events and issues, not historical sites. He then spends several days waiting for the director of the Smithsonian Institution. The director is interested in Tom’s discoveries, but after more weeks of going back and forth, the director ultimately doesn’t secure funding for an expedition.
After his demoralizing trip to Washington, DC, Tom returns to New Mexico to discover that Rodney has sold all their artifacts to a wealthy German. Tom is distraught and confronts Rodney at the mesa. He accuses Rodney of selling out his own country:
[T]hey weren’t mine to sell—nor yours! They belonged to this country, to the State, and to all the people. They belonged to boys like you and me, that have no other ancestors to inherit from. You’ve gone and sold them to a country that’s got plenty of relics of its own. You’ve gone and sold your country’s secrets (144).
They argue, with Rodney pointing out that if Tom had been more successful in Washington, DC, then Rodney would not have needed to sell the relics. Rodney urges Tom to use some of the money to go to college, but Tom refuses to accept it. Rodney leaves the cabin, never to return.
Part 2, Chapter 7 Summary
Tom regrets the argument with Rodney. He puts advertisements in newspapers across the country looking for him. Tom continues to work on the site and complete his own study, though he never retrieves his diary. A year after his break with Rodney, Tom arrives in Michigan to study at Hamilton.
Part 2 Analysis
Tom Outland’s first-person narrative traces his friendship with Rodney Blake, their discovery of an ancient Indigenous village, his subsequent journey to Washington to attempt to generate interest in the artifacts he found, and, finally, his break with Rodney. At several moments in the narrative, Tom references a “you” who is St. Peter, making clear that this is part of a conversation the two men once had. The first-person speech makes Tom appear more authentic, even more “real” than St. Peter and those around him, even though Tom’s voice is also understood to be speaking, in some sense, from beyond the grave.
Tom’s narrative emphasizes and deepens the themes of The Allure of the Unknown and the Thrill of Discovery alongside The Comforts and Constraints of Domesticity. Where St. Peter struggles in Part 1 with The Search for Meaning in a Changing World, the milieu that Tom describes of working men in the southwest US appears much simpler by comparison. Right and wrong are not difficult to understand, and Tom proves himself to be both perceptive and kind. Of Rodney, for instance, Tom says, “He was the sort of fellow who can do anything for somebody else, and nothing for himself. There are lots like that among working-men. They aren’t trained by success to a sort of systematic selfishness” (110). Where others might see Rodney as someone they can take advantage of, due to his capability and naivete, Tom values his friend’s unselfishness and takes pains not to exploit it.
Indeed, Tom’s narrative shows that he cares deeply he cares for other people, both those who, like Rodney and Henry Atkins, make up his domestic arrangement, and the ancient Indigenous people who left traces of their existence in the Blue Mesa. The winter cabin, where Tom, Rodney, and Henry plan their explorations of the mesa, represents an idealized masculine space, comfortable without any of the luxuries associated with female-dominated domesticity. Henry cooks and cleans as a matter of course, while Rodney and Tom tend to the cattle. When they begin to explore the mesa more fully, the men establish another campsite there, reproducing many of the relationships from the winter cabin—at least until Henry’s death. Even then, the domestic relationships remain markedly uncomplicated, allowing Tom in particular to focus on excavating and documenting the Cliff City: an implicit contrast with the more fraught arrangements that St. Peter has to make in Part 1.
Tom recalls having been moved by the discovery because “there is something stirring about finding evidences of human labour and care in the soil of an empty country. It comes to you as a sort of message, makes you feel differently about the ground you walk over every day” (116). Tom is awed and inspired by others, dead and alive. He draws motivation from other people and is vulnerable with his trust and feelings for others. His emotional response to finding the artifacts in Cliff City represents the purity of his search for knowledge for its own sake; Tom has no sense of what he might do to profit from his discovery. The awe he feels is enough. Thus, although Tom cannot help but function as an avatar of settler-colonialism, and holds certain attitudes about Indigenous people that were more acceptable a century ago, he approaches his work with exemplary humility and care:
Something had happened in me that made it possible for me to co-ordinate and simplify, and that process, going on in my mind, brought with it great happiness. It was possession. The excitement of my first discovery was a very pale feeling compared to this one. For me the mesa was no longer an adventure, but a religious emotion (149).
Tom’s devotion to his discovery, its recovery, its care, and its promotion all point to his genuine concern for preservation. Tom cares about his discovery for the sake of the discovery itself, not for his ego. This emphasizes his characterization as an admirable and courageous man who has surpassed superficiality or even ambition. Ironically, of course, Tom is put on a pedestal by other characters in this book because he pursues his interests for the love of them, not for the accolades.
The Blue Mesa presents a natural challenge to the world of mankind: “No wonder the thing bothered us and tempted us; it was always before us, and was always changing” (115). It is a domineering presence and marks a separation between human society and the overwhelming power and danger of the natural world. As he explores the Blue Mesa more, protecting the history of the stone village is of paramount importance to Tom because he sees the value in preserving culture and thereby honoring the past: “We didn’t want to make our discovery any more public than necessary. We were reluctant to expose those silent and beautiful places to vulgar curiosity” (122). Tom’s protectiveness of the Blue Mesa is indicative of his generosity of spirit and his ability to see the beauty where other people might see only opportunity. The Blue Mesa represents a bygone world that Tom values over the industrialized and capitalistic society he lives in. For this reason, he receives the news that Rodney has sold the artifacts to a German trader while Tom was on the East Coast as a profound, friendship-shattering betrayal.
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