Chapter IV: I

In late September a mob of freshman girls surged into the history amphitheatre where Professor Steele every year delivered the two general lectures which introduced first-year students to a prescribed diet of ‘history survey.’ Nora, sitting in the front row with the other members of the department, experienced a fresh stab of panic as each new group passed through the swinging doors. Out of this mass she was to build her future.

The first lecture was a dramatic and brilliant description of Rome before the barbarian invasions. In rapid summary Miss Steele presented the elements of its power, its political organization (which embraced a territory curiously similar, Nora observed, to the present possessions of the Allied armies, now that Russia was falling away), the amenities of life, the heights of culture reached by its citizens with their triumphs in architecture, sculpture, and literature. She then descended to the weakness of this apparently invincible empire; held together by no actual unity, dependent upon mercenary armies, forbidding political discussion, enjoying luxuries bought with slavery and the misery of the common people, sinking into a general intellectual decadence, indifferent to science, indulging in the vain shows of gladiatorial combats. A comparison of this ancient decay, concerning which none of the freshmen, with the bloom of health and home still upon them, seemed to be greatly excited, might have been made with Rome’s modern successor. But Miss Steele’s audience, not yet inured to the fatigue of hour-lectures, were beginning to look toward the clock.

On the following day Professor Steele devoted her time to a description of the modern states of Europe as they were before the barbarian invasions. West of the Rhine dwelt ‘Chaos and old Night.’ Italy, France, Spain, and England, even beyond Hadrian’s Wall, all possessed some of the culture emanating from Rome. Then the barbarians came. At the name of the Huns, so recently revived in popular memory, even the most indifferent of the note-takers lifted an inquiring head. Greece had fallen before Rome, Rome before the Vandals and the Huns. Miss Steele went no farther. If the painful building of a new civilization were to go the same way, the autumn of 1916 had not yet made clear.

The bell rang, the freshmen scrambled toward the door, breaking the silence with the scraping of chairs and the clatter of released tongues. The Roman schoolboy, informed of the approach of wild tribes from the North, was probably equally indifferent to the great catastrophe. Petersfield freshmen, involved in the intricacies of a crowded book-store and new subjects, and suffering general geographical bewilderment in strange scenes, had no time to contemplate the future of Europe.

After the two lectures, Nora was assigned her portion of the history flock. Professor Steele, who had no theories about coddling the apprentices in her department, stated that freshman history, making a general survey of the foundations of the modern world, was a liberal education for her young instructors, and she gave them four sections.

Twenty-five or thirty untamed girls tumbling into a classroom appeared to Nora not as human beings differing little from herself only four years ago, but as fillers of chairs, with feet that always moved, as rows of staring, sneering eyes in faces fixed in a succession of grimaces at the slightest possible excuse for amusement. Nora heard a high, unnatural voice going on and on by means of some kind of internal machinery she was not conscious of directing. To her surprise these meaningless and jumbled sentences were being taken seriously by the restless throng before her and transcribed into note-books. By the end of the first day she went to bed with pains shooting all over. By morning she collected her jaded powers and crawled through another day.

Across the hall Mr. Powys had gathered a fresh crop of sociological enthusiasts about him and was injecting into them his brand of hope for the world. When Nora reached a painful pause, she heard his voice ringing out with the old vigor she remembered.

Mr. Powys’s return was a surprise to all Petersfield. He was a drooping peace dove. His blond hair had a kind of limp dejection which reminded Nora of a young chick rescued from a hearty spring rain. From Mr. Powys she got no succinct information of the peace ship or its manœuvres. He had done his duty, and now he must have a moment or two to recover before he decided on the next desperate venture. He brightened only when Nora mentioned Ellen Standish.

‘Miss Standish has been wonderful—wonderful. So sympathetic. She made me feel that my coming back mattered—that I was really needed here. I couldn’t have returned without some such hope.’

Nora finished at last the agony of her first week of teaching, with the blessed interval of Saturday and Sunday for recovery. In the meantime fellow instructors took the burden of their jobs with a nonchalant toleration, conversing light-heartedly at meals, which they consumed with a normal quantity of enjoyment. They at least represented the promise of a brighter future.

In her room all of Saturday Nora sat bent over a table heaped with books dealing with the barbarian invasions. The volumes of Gibbon lay in a pile on the floor beside her. Each fresh tome brought new confusion to the task of reducing these spreading hordes within the confines of two recitations. It was like arranging an animated antheap in some kind of law and order.

Miss Ewing across the hall, a small dark woman from Georgia, with a sallow face which suggested perpetual malaria, frequently interrupted Nora’s labors.

‘Don’t work too hard, my dear,’ she warned her daily. ‘Take it all comfortable and easy.’

Miss Ewing herself viewed life as a race. She had a bounding step close to a run which carried her across the campus in a loping trot, precious to undergraduate humor. An intellectual eagerness brought a flush to her dark face, a sparkle to eyes of an otherwise commonplace grey, and drove her to accomplish a phenomenal amount of labor. She was a bacteriologist, with a love for science which gave her the solace of religion, even though it had cut her off from a sheltered life and the conventional marriage sacred to Georgian traditions.

She left her germs one Saturday afternoon to take Nora on a long country walk. She swung off with her characteristic speed, not halting in the ascent of the steepest hills. She darted into blackberry hedges to follow a strange bird and chased after the moths which fluttered in front of her.

When darkness settled upon the two, they stood on the brow of a hill many miles from Petersfield.

‘Good evening, Vega, my dear,’ Miss Ewing said, looking up toward a blue-white star above them. Then with a fine disregard of the sacredness of the dinner hour in Faculty Hall, she pointed out, as they trudged along, the serpents, dragons, dogs, kitchen utensils, and adventurous human beings in which stars conveniently arrange themselves. Nora went to sleep that night thinking of the Great Square of Pegasus in the northeastern sky.

But on the next morning began a fresh contest with the swift march of events in a history survey course. While the freshmen still followed the last straggling barbarian invader, their teacher was a lap ahead in the tangles of Christianity. In the distance of two or possibly three days loomed the great figure of Charlemagne and a powerful Papacy.

Nora, in a dash from her classroom to the library to anticipate other cub history instructors using the same books, collided one day with Professor Steele, who was writing another book and therefore gathering material with the greed of a squirrel carrying away nuts to his hole. The head of the department looked very cross at her newest instructor. The undergraduates had learned to give Professor Steele plenty of space in her blind plunges from her study to the library, and her classroom. She counted on their indulgence.

‘Well, Miss Deming,’ she snorted, straightening her hat.

Since her interview with Nora the preceding spring, she had given her neither advice nor assistance. In choosing Nora Deming, she had paid her the compliment of standing above the need of either.

But if Miss Steele had measured the despairing uncertainty of the shy young person who hurried away from her, she might have spared a minute from her documents. After the sureness of her powers a few months earlier, Nora had descended to a pitiful and feverish questioning of her ability to transcribe what she knew on the slippery surface of the freshman mind. After a glowing account of the salvation of learning by the Christian Church—and Nora was always glowing when she presented her latest mental conquest—a shaking hand had risen before her half-conscious gaze. ‘But isn’t this the Dark Ages we’re studying?’

It was Molly Abbott, with curly hair and a very charming smile, who had read history virtuously in the library the night before instead of attending freshman sing-song practice, for which act she was fined twenty-five cents. The freshman has a love for anti-climax, for a question which makes her appear to her instructor not as one of the herd, but as an individual.

How is that great chasm between the teacher and the learner to be bridged, especially where the one in authority is new in power and undisciplined in gauging the mental stretches of her victims? What young pedagogue has not started out with great intellectual ambitions, determined to admit no compromise, to make all who should learn burn with a zeal for learning? How does the spark strike fire?

Nora’s freshmen shook their heads and looked silly when she asked them searching questions. They complained that she worked them too hard, expected too much outside reading. Some of them cultivated for classroom use a sullen, rebellious expression. And before them, Nora knew, lay the peaks of the Renaissance and the Reformation. Nora was now grappling with the Crusades.

As her infant historians tumbled out of the classroom, she pondered over the state of their minds. Were they looking down upon the world with the detachment of an aviation photographer whose lens reproduced the exact proportions of hills and valleys? Or were they stuck in some morass of detail from which they could not escape without her help? What philosophy of history were they constructing for themselves? And what philosophy had she, herself, harassed by the thought of keeping a lesson or two ahead?

Did she want to go on? Did she like to teach? Sometimes at night, when she was very tired, so tired that she felt sure a few hours of sleep could never bring back the necessary vigor for a new day, she dreamed of an existence better than this fretful haste. Cool, deliberate joy—where did one find it? Reflection in sunny places?

Then she was very lonely. She still had the herd instincts of her undergraduate days, and her instructorship so elevated her above the student plane that even her old associates in the Socialist League examined her with an appraising eye. In her classes she had squeezed the humanity from the frigid young person the freshmen saw. They passed her over in their search for a deity, and found Mr. Powys and Miss Goodwin. All of her faculty contemporaries were as busy as she. Miss Ewing’s bacteria made her their slave. There was no companion for a chance interval.

Miss Abington, a next-door neighbor, attracted Nora. She was a shy woman who nodded to the new history instructor when she passed her in the hall, but for weeks went no farther. She looked very unhappy, unlike Miss Ewing, whom science completely satisfied. Miss Abington, who taught art, wore a green smock, moccasins of dull green suede, and her coils of blond hair were confined by green velvet bands. She was generally followed by her two cats, a huge Maltese and a tortoiseshell, against which the older members of the faculty muttered dangerous threats. But according to rumor Miss Abington possessed a special dispensation signed by the President to keep her pets as a preventive against the nervous depression she suffered from constant association with human beings.

Miss Abington finally invited Nora to tea one rainy Sunday afternoon. In her own rooms her shyness suddenly left her, and she was a delightful hostess. Her sitting-room wall was covered with her own work; portraits of cats principally, but also paintings of flowers, and of gardens full of sunshine, green spaces, flowers seen through tall grasses, with the suggestion of a cat lurking in the shadows.

‘Yes,’ Miss Abington admitted, as Nora walked soberly around the room, ‘my two passions are flowers and cats. First, cats.’ To reënforce her words the Maltese stalked out of Miss Abington’s bedroom toward Nora.

Nora backed toward the door, an uncomfortable chill passing down her spinal column. ‘But I don’t like cats,’ she had to confess. ‘I’d rather be in the room with a tiger.’

‘And this is Francis Bacon—a perfect gentleman.’ Miss Abington grabbed her pet. ‘There. He weighs twenty pounds. Tremendous. And here is my other child.’ The tortoise cat twisted itself over the rug. ‘Martin Luther. They have terrific battles. Science and religion. Eternal conflict. I named them first, and the pugnacity developed later.’

Nora now stood against the door, ready to spring out into the hall if either feline made friendly advances. Miss Abington gathered science and religion into the folds of her smock and carried them into her bedroom.

As they drank tea, Miss Abington confessed that the tragedy of life lay for her in the fact that she spent her time talking about painting instead of painting.

‘But you have painted a lot.’

‘Summers. And very badly. In three months one can do very little. And in this academic atmosphere one sacrifices the emotions to the intellect.’

‘But your intelligence doesn’t help you to paint?’

‘Oh, no. I know too much to be a good painter. So I chatter about art to crowds of girls who will clutter up museums and repeat my twaddle.’

The paintings of cats were beginning to have a delicate bloom of fame in New York galleries. Miss Abington confessed that she kept nineteen cats in her summer studio, none of them handsome, but all ‘so delightfully cat-like.’ She studied every changing expression with the ceaseless patience of a portrait painter until each animal had an individuality of feature and soul transferred to the canvas. But being a tactful and very kind woman, she kept cats out of her conversations with Nora. She herself had a similar aversion to moths, marked by an almost morbid sensitiveness to their destruction by frost as the autumn came on. As she passed a street lamp at night with the ghostly creatures still fluttering in steadily decreasing numbers about the light, she whispered to Nora, ‘No, I can’t stand it. I can’t watch them suffer.’ Rebellious against the slow methods of hard weather and starvation, she made wild plans of her own for their quick death; but it was difficult to circumvent Nature. ‘Even man goes the same slow way,’ she admitted. ‘But I shall take swift means to end myself. I don’t consider it a sin.’

The destruction of mankind in Europe was daily being accomplished by means other than famine and hard weather. Nora was now reading books on the Industrial Revolution. In England greedy squires had encouraged their laborers to have large families for the benefit of the estate. Mill workers viewed a numerous progeny as a means for larger aggregate earnings. High food and low wages fought the old battles. A surplus population spreading over a great empire had not afforded enough relief for the little island groaning under its burden of people. Was Malthus, whom Victorian sentimentalists had resented so violently, right after all, and must the world have these periodic checks of famine, pestilence, and war to keep down the swarming millions?

In the midst of Nora’s speculations came the news that the United States had declared war against Germany. The students, who since Nora’s time had vacillated between indifference and spasmodic sentiment, became martial overnight. The Socialist League gave up its last feeble flicker of pacifism. Nora’s freshmen grew restless and indifferent. In their schoolgirl circle was the prospect now of brothers and friends in officers’ training camps. The boys they had danced with at West Point a week ago were now glorified, heroic men. Among the faculty, enthusiasm for the war was somewhat tempered by sober considerations of the thousands of dead in Europe.

Amelia Donaldson was arrested in New York for making anti-draft speeches on the street. The professor of English literature, Miss Hays, had settled Amelia as a teacher in the New York Labor College which she had sponsored from its start. She told every one that Amelia was at last very happy. But with the declaration of war, Amelia saw the students she was giving economics and general culture snatched from her for bayonet practice. There was nothing for her, then, but soapbox oratory.

Petersfield got first-page headlines in the New York papers. Amelia in jail gave defiant interviews to all the reporters. Mr. Powys made a flying trip to New York to furnish bail. He rescued her from martyrdom. Amelia must be reserved for greater struggles.

His action divided campus opinion. The most excitable faculty members wanted a ‘dangerous alien’ removed. Several of the trustees got stirred up. But Miss Steele put aside her manuscripts for a few days to make a fight to save him. In action she was a forceful figure, with unexpected strategies in managing the trustees and a barrage of sarcasm to crumple her faculty foes. Miss Hays carried Amelia off to a labor colony for the summer with the hope that the problems of education would keep her from street-corner agitation.

II

By fall Petersfield had stepped in line to help win the war. Both faculty and students in a large room in the science building scraped bandages and prepared other hospital supplies. Red Cross drives consumed most of the undergraduate energy. Miss Goodwin was coaching a play, the proceeds to go to war relief. Every evening the faculty met in the parlor of Faculty House to learn to knit. Women who had previously spent all of their evenings in the laboratory or the library now bent over wooden needles held awkwardly, making clumsy stitches which generally had to come out. Mufflers in a variety of ripples and waves, sweaters too large or too small for the average soldier, socks that remained in the same indefinite stage of completion tumbled from under stiff professorial fingers. At the same time silly girls of eighteen or nineteen were achieving remarkable results in purling and fancy stitches with little effort. Intellectual and manual skill, sadly enough, seldom travel together.

Gradually the custom developed for one of the women to read while the others worked for their country. To convert the American public to a state of mind demanded by conflicts involving both hemispheres, amazing chronicles were appearing, combining the realism of wholesale destruction with a sentimental patriotic appeal. Soldier-authors, who described in detail the putrefaction of death on the battlefield, the torture of victims in barbed-wire entanglements, the wrecks of men in the hospital beds, also recorded the spiritual elation of war, the hopes of a new world, the glorious philosophy of death. War humor developed a little more slowly. Untainted realism was still far from advisable.

From these readings Miss Steele was notably absent. She gathered all war books into her phrase ‘garbage,’ declared she did not know how to knit, and was too busy to learn. Miss Abington stole quietly away from the first knitting meeting enlivened by war literature.

‘I can’t bear it,’ she whispered to Nora with a twisted, tortured smile. ‘I must try to think of other things.’

As the winter went on and the faculty staged grim contests in knitting the greatest number of sweaters and socks, needles clicked steadily through faculty meetings, Miss Steele looking on with scornful amusement. Unlike the other professors she did not permit students to knit in her classes. They quoted her as saying that a little information about the past was not amiss in these troubled times, which she refused to complicate further by the mental disease of divided attention. Clearly enough she was not a patriotic woman.

Petersfield girls were giving a large share of their time to being patriotic. They threw themselves whole-souled into each new drive and fad, were photographed in Red Cross uniform, cracked jests over the novelty of meatless and wheatless days, and made picturesque use of the latest mob developments. When the march of events dragged somewhat, they read war verse. Rupert Brooke had fallen before unworthy rivals truckling in cheap and hysterical emotion. There was much letter-writing, much pride in the possession of the photographs of potential heroes. The trains were crowded with girls going to New York to say good-bye to fathers, brothers, cousins, lovers, leaving for distant camps. Handsome uniformed boys on leave appeared on the campus.

The old life could not go on in the same way. The faculty looked on with a romantic sympathy for young love making holiday, blind to the consequences of lavish permissions granted the undergraduates to spend the day in New York. Not all went there to deliver tearful farewells to lovers embarking for France. Some consoled themselves for want of lovers by a day of change and adventure. They prowled about in strange places, investigated Amelia’s laboring classes, and ate at Greenwich Village restaurants, where they cultivated cigarette-smoking. They brought back to the campus an assertiveness which came out in meetings agitating greater undergraduate powers in college government. The bolder spirits broke rules, and their followers in a body supported them and clashed with faculty authority. Miss Steele refused to serve on a committee appointed to investigate the cause of this new spirit. With her book in full swing she had no time to waste on a committee searching for something under their very noses.

Nora, who had given up her struggles in knitting after the completion of a muffler rejected by the Red Cross, was also watching the rapid appearance of a new order. During her second year of teaching she was less driven by her subject. Her students ceased to be mere receivers of painfully acquired lecture material. They had become individuals, caught up in all the difficulties she had once suffered.

A freshman from the South confessed to Nora, as an excuse for inadequate information about the causes of the French Revolution, that she had stayed up all of the preceding night to argue with her room-mate from Boston.

‘There’s two things we’ve got to get settled right away,’ she explained—‘God and the Civil War.’

At the moment American soldiers were being killed in the front-line trenches. Miss Ewing was expecting to hear every day that her brother had landed in France.

‘The war doesn’t touch you,’ she reminded Nora. ‘You are very fortunate.’

In Miss Ewing’s words Nora detected an unconscious superiority. Elevated above the rest of Petersfield were those chosen ones who had relatives on the way to the front. In the parlor of Faculty House women like Miss Ewing of the inner circle of supreme devotion to their country drifted together. Nora, overhearing their talk of commissions, ports in England and France, the expectation of cablegrams, envied their intimate participation. She had not written to Father Stokesbury, who sent Cordelia letters full of humor from a French village not far from the front. When her students consulted her as an historian about the war, they were surprised to discover her bewilderment.

‘But I thought every one knew we were fighting to save Europe,’ one young thing commented.

‘Save from what?’

But such a question was too much for a mere freshman.

The President in his message to Congress had presented his Fourteen Points. They were read aloud, one by one, in the faculty parlor, during the knitting, each decorated with comment and debate. Miss Ewing, a good Southern Democrat, stood behind her President with a fervor which soon made him in her eyes a saint, the savior of a war-torn world.

‘He’s the great man of our age,’ she affirmed to Nora, ‘the great man.’

But the New England Republicans did not agree with Miss Ewing. They were violent in shouting a shrill warning to persons in danger of being duped by sickly idealism.

III

Ellen’s engagement to Michael Powys was precipitated into matrimony by Amelia Donaldson’s importunate passion for Michael. From the day he had rescued her from prison, Amelia had sent fervent epistles to her deliverer, beginning on the high plane of sociology, but soon declaring deathless love. Then she got ill. At last she threatened suicide. In this crisis Nora was hastily summoned to New York to see Ellen and Michael safely married.

When Nora returned to Petersfield, Cordelia’s letter was awaiting her. Father Stokesbury was dead.

Never for a moment had she thought he could be killed—that death could take any one—young, smiling, with a jest for everything. No, it couldn’t be.

Father Stokesbury was the only splendid man she had ever known. She could have loved him if——Why had she let those women keep her away? If he and she——Racking sobs tore at her throat. He was a stranger. She had never known him. No one in Maronac had pierced the enigmatic aloofness underneath his sparkling exterior. Now it was too late.

If she could have seen him before he left Maronac——A memory of his face in repose—the strained intensity—the troubled depths——What bitterness had taught him that persistent raillery—that humor edged with sadness? If she had talked to him—found out if he was sure he was embarking upon a holy mission——Or was he like her—full of doubt? If a man fought to save the world and his soul, the last moment would bring upliftment. But if he had gone reluctantly—urged on by a duty which society forced upon the young and the strong——There was the torment. She would never know.

The damning memory of the war books read in the faculty parlor—the loathsome pictures——She mustn’t—one would go mad thinking of it. If he, like some of them—slow death—not the swift proud end. No, she couldn’t think of it.

Why should this man bring to her what her mother—her wasted mother, with a sigh and a smile for her over the last struggling breath—had not brought? The relief to her, that strong childish memory. And this bitterness now.

At the end, if he had known some one loved him—some woman. If one is greatly loved, death is not complete annihilation. The memory in the other heart—a flitting, tenuous visitant in the midst of all the boring duties in the world—even that——If she had loved him—even if he hadn’t known—given him her best——But she had thrown away her chance. And for what? Even Cordelia had something precious left her.

In the next days Nora tried to bury herself in her historical studies. She found herself again and again staring at her book—not reading a word. She detected Miss Abington and Miss Ewing examining her with furtive, pitying glances. She knew what they were thinking. If it had only been that——

On the library steps, she met Professor Steele with an armful of books. ‘Have you settled on any particular line of study?’ the older woman inquired with her characteristic abruptness.

Nora informed her that she had almost decided to take eighteenth and nineteenth century English history for her province.

‘Very good, very good,’ murmured Miss Steele, her eyes fixed upon the library door. ‘Very inauspicious time. You’ll have to wait until after the war to go to England.’

A few days later, Nora received a formal announcement from the committee on scholarships that she had been awarded one for a year of graduate study. She went at once to Miss Steele’s office.

‘I don’t see what I’ve done to deserve it,’ she exclaimed breathlessly.

Miss Steele looked up calmly from a mass of papers she had been examining. ‘Good brains are scarce, Miss Deming. You really had very little to compete against.’ Then, when she had completed a crisply directed oration about Nora’s scholarly plans, she added: ‘Very bad time to study. Our universities are demoralized. But I was afraid if you stayed here much longer, you’d begin to think Petersfield was the world. It isn’t. Last year your black despair gave me no concern. But this year I’d begun to detect a tendency to be satisfied here—to settle down. A grave symptom in the young.’

Nora saw the mocking smile lurking beneath Miss Steele’s solemnity, and smiled too.

When she visited Knickerbocker University in New York to make plans for her studies there in the fall, she had a moment of terror. Petersfield had not prepared her for the crowded corridors and impersonal machinery of a university. But it was this intellectual stronghold she must try to conquer. She was like a nun, who, after running away from her cloister, looks back with longing to the security there. And yet in the tumult of the streets, with the confusion of traffic and the bright colors of the foreign uniforms which now made New York like a European capital on parade, she experienced what had never come to her in Petersfield. Excitement, novelty, change. Her eyes were blinded with tears as she made her uncertain way to the subway, nearly upsetting the box of a flower-vendor selling clusters of pansies on the sidewalk.

‘Flowas—nice flowas,’ he invited customers in a soft foreign voice.

She selected a bunch and fastened them on her coat, like a banner to give her courage as she made her first timid excursion out of that sacred grove for maidenhood which Petersfield had been. In the bewildering glare of sunshine, she blinked, hesitated an instant, and then plunged forward with a firm step, her flowers nodding before her.