THE GRAY SISTERHOOD
Elizabeth House was hospitable to male visitors, and Dan found Sylvia
there often on the warm, still summer evenings, when the young women of
the household filled the veranda and overflowed upon the steps. Sylvia's
choice of a boarding-house had puzzled Dan a good deal, but there were a
good many things about Sylvia that baffled him. For example, this
preparation for teaching in a public school when she might have had an
assistant professorship in a college seemed a sad waste of energy and
opportunity. She was going to school to her inferiors, he maintained,
submitting to instruction as meekly as though she were not qualified to
enlighten her teachers in any branch of knowledge. It was preposterous
that she should deliberately elect to spend the hottest of summers in
learning to combine the principles of Pestalozzi with the methods of
Dewey and Kendall.
The acquaintance of Sylvia and Allen prospered from the start. She was
not only a new girl in town, and one capable of debating the questions
that interested him, but he was charmed with Elizabeth House, which was
the kind of thing, he declared, that he had always stood for. The
democracy of the veranda, the good humor and ready give and take of the
young women delighted him. They liked him and openly called him "our
beau." He established himself on excellent terms with the matron to the
end that he might fill his automobile with her charges frequently and
take them for runs into the country. When Dan grumbled over Sylvia's
absurd immolation on the altar of education, Allen pronounced her the
grandest girl in the world and the glory of the Great Experiment.
Sylvia was intent these days upon fitting herself as quickly as possible
for teaching, becoming a part of the established system and avoiding
none of the processes by which teachers are created. Her fellow
students, most of whom were younger than she, were practically all the
green fruitage of high schools, but she asked no immunities or
privileges by reason of her college training; she yielded herself
submissively to the "system," and established herself among the other
novices on a footing of good comradeship. During the hot, vexatious days
she met them with unfailing good cheer. The inspiring example of her
college teachers, and not least the belief she had absorbed on the
Madison campus in her girlhood, that teaching is a high calling, eased
the way for her at times when--as occasionally happened--she failed to
appreciate the beauty of the "system."
The superintendent of schools, dropping into the Normal after hours,
caught Sylvia in the act of demonstrating a problem in geometry on the
blackboard for the benefit of a fellow student who had not yet abandoned
the hope of entering the state university that fall. The superintendent
had been in quest of a teacher of mathematics for the Manual Training
School, and on appealing to the Wellesley authorities they had sent him
Sylvia's name. Sylvia, the chalk still in her fingers, met his humorous
reproaches smilingly. She had made him appear ridiculous in the eyes of
her _alma mater_, he said. Sylvia declined his offer and smiled. The
superintendent was not used to smiles like that in his corps. And this
confident young woman seemed to know what she was about. He went away
mystified, and meeting John Ware related his experience. Ware laughed
and slapped his knee. "You let that girl alone," the minister said. "She
has her finger on Time's wrist. Physician of the golden age. Remember
Matthew Arnold's lines on Goethe? Good poem. Sylvia wants to know 'the
causes of things.' Watch her. Great nature."
At seven o'clock on a morning of September, Sylvia left Elizabeth House
to begin her novitiate as a teacher. Allen had declared his intention of
sending his automobile for her every morning, an offer that was promptly
declined. However, on that bright morning when the young world turned
schoolward, Harwood lay in wait for her.
"This must never happen again, sir! And of course you may not carry my
books--they're the symbol of my profession. Seventeen thousand young
persons about like me are on the way to school this morning right here
in Indiana. It would be frightfully embarrassing to the educational
system if young gentlemen were allowed to carry the implements of our
trade."
"You can't get rid of me now: I never get up as early as this unless I'm
catching a train."
"So much the worse for you, then!"
"There will be mornings when you won't think it so much fun. It rains
and snows in Indiana sometimes."
He still resented the idea of her sacrifice, as he called it, in the
cause of education. They were now so well acquainted that they were not
always careful to be polite in their talk; but he had an uneasy feeling
that she didn't wholly approve of him. All summer, when they had
discussed politics, she had avoided touching upon his personal interests
and activities. His alliance with Bassett, emphasized in the state
convention, was a subject she clearly avoided. This morning, as he kept
time to her quick step, he craved her interest and sympathy. Her plain
gray suit and simple cloth hat could not disguise her charm or grace. It
seemed to him that she was putting herself a little further away from
him, that she was approaching the business of life with a determination,
a spirit, a zest, that dwarfed to insignificance his own preoccupation
with far less important matters. She turned to glance back at a group of
children they had passed audibly speculating as to the character of
teacher the day held in store for them.
"Don't you think they're worth working for?" Sylvia asked.
Dan shrugged his shoulders.
"I suppose more lives are ground up in the school-teaching machine than
in any other way. Go on! The girl who taught me my alphabet in the
little red school-house in Harrison County earned her salary, I can tell
you. She was seventeen and wore a pink dress."
"I'm sorry you don't approve of me or my clothes. Now Allen approves of
me: I like Allen."
"His approval is important, I dare say."
"Yes, very. It's nice to be approved of. It helps some."
"And I suppose there ought to be a certain reciprocity in approval and
disapproval?"
"Oh, there's bound to be!"
Their eyes met and they laughed lightheartedly.
"I'm going to tell you something," said Dan. "On the reciprocal theory I
can't expect anything, but I'm lonesome and have no friends anyhow, so
I'll give you a chance to say something withering and edged with a fine
scorn."
"Good! I'll promise not to disappoint you."
"I'm going to be put on the legislature ticket to-day--to fill a
vacancy. I suppose you'll pray earnestly for my defeat."
"Why should I waste prayers on that? Besides, Allen solemnly declares
that the people are to be trusted. It's not for me to set my prayers
against the will of the pee-pull."
"If you had a vote," he persisted, "you wouldn't vote for me?"
"I should have to know what you want to go to the legislature for before
committing myself. What _are_ you doing it for?"
"To do all the mischief I can, of course; to support all the worst
measures that come up; to jump when the boss's whip cracks!"
She refused to meet him on this ground. He saw that any expectation he
might have that she would urge him to pledge himself to noble endeavor
and high achievements as a state legislator were doomed to
disappointment. He was taken aback by the tone of her retort.
"I hope you will do all those things. You could do nothing better
calculated to help your chances."
"Chances?"
"Your chances--and we don't any of us have too many of coming to some
good sometime."
"I believe you are really serious; but I don't understand you."
"Then I shall be explicit. Just this, then, to play the ungrateful part
of the frank friend. The sooner you get your fingers burnt, the sooner
you will let the fire alone. I suppose Mr. Bassett has given the word
that you are graciously to be permitted to sit in his legislature. He
could hardly do less for you than that, after he sent you into the arena
last June to prod the sick lion for his entertainment."
They were waiting at a corner for a break in the street traffic, and he
turned toward her guardedly.
"You put it pretty low," he mumbled.
"The thing itself is not so bad. From what I have heard and read about
Mr. Bassett, I don't think he is really an evil person. He probably
didn't start with any sort of ideals of public life: you did. I read in
an essay the other night that the appeal of the highest should be always
to the lowest. But you're not appealing to anybody; you're just
following the band wagon to the centre of the track. Stop, Look, Listen!
You've come far enough with me now. The walls of my prison house loom
before me. Good-morning!"
"Good-morning and good luck!"
That night Sylvia wrote a letter to one of her classmates in Boston.
"I'm a school-teacher," she said,--"a member of the gray sisterhood of
American nuns. All over this astonishing country my sisters of this
honorable order rise up in the morning, even as you and I, to teach the
young idea how to shoot. I look with veneration upon those of our
sisterhood who have grown old in the classroom. I can see myself reduced
to a bundle of nerves, irascible, worthless, ready for the scrap-pile
at, we will say, forty-two--only twenty years ahead of me! My work looks
so easy and I like it so much that I went in fright to the dictionary to
look up the definition of teacher. I find that I'm one who teaches or
instructs. Think of it--I! That definition should be revised to read,
'Teacher: one who, conveying certain information to others, reads in
fifty faces unanswerable questions as to the riddle of existence.'
'School: a place where the presumably wise are convinced of their own
folly.' Note well, my friend: I am a gray sister, in a gray serge suit
that fits, with white cuffs and collar, and with chalk on my fingers.
Oh, it's not what I'm required to teach, but what I'm going to learn
that worries me!"
Lüders's shop was not far from Sylvia's school and Allen devised many
excuses for waylaying her. His machine being forbidden, he hung about
until she appeared and trudged homeward with her. Often he came in a
glow from the cabinetmaker's and submitted for her judgment the
questions that had been debated that day at the shop. There was
something sweet and wistful and charming in his boyishness; and she was
surprised, as Harwood had been from the first, by the intelligence he
evinced in political and social questions. He demanded absolute answers
to problems that were perplexing wise men all over the world.
"If I could answer that," she would say to him, "I should be entitled to
a monument more enduring than brass. The comfort and happiness of
mankind isn't to be won in a day: we mustn't pull up the old tree till
we've got a new one planted and growing."
"The Great Experiment will turn out all right yet! Some fellow we never
heard of will give the lever a jerk some day, and there will be a rumble
and a flash and it will run perfectly," he asserted.
The state campaign got under way in October, and Harwood was often
discussed in relation to it. Allen always praised Dan extravagantly, and
was ever alert to defend him against her criticisms.
"My dad will run the roller over Bassett, but Dan will be smart enough
to get from under. It's the greatest show on earth--continuous
vaudeville--this politics! Dan's all right. He's got more brains than
Bassett. One of these days Dan will take a flop and land clean over in
the Thatcher camp. It's only a matter of time. Gratitude and
considerations like that are holding him back. But I'm not a
partisan--not even on dad's side. I'm the philosopher who sits on the
fence and keeps the score by innings."
It seemed to her, in those days and afterward, that Allen symbolized the
unknown quantity in all the problems that absorbed him. His idealism was
not a thing of the air, but a flowering from old and vigorous roots. His
politics was a kind of religion, and it did not prove upon analysis to
be either so fantastical or so fanatical as she had believed at first.
As the days shortened, he would prolong their walk until the shops and
factories discharged their employees upon the streets. The fine thing
about the people was, he said, the fact that they were content to go on
from day to day, doing the things they did, when the restraints upon
them were so light,--it proved the enduring worth of the Great
Experiment. Then they would plunge into the thick of the crowd and cross
the Monument plaza, where he never failed to pay a tribute in his own
fashion to the men the gray shaft commemorated. In these walks they
spoke French, which he employed more readily than she: in his high moods
it seemed to express him better than English. It amused him to apply new
names to the thoroughfares they traversed. For example, he gayly renamed
Monument Place the Place de la Concorde, assuring her that the southward
vista in the Rue de la Méridienne, disclosing the lamp-bestarred terrace
of the new Federal Building, and the electric torches of the Monument
beyond, was highly reminiscent of Paris. Sylvia was able to dramatize
for herself, from the abundant material he artlessly supplied, the life
he had led abroad during his long exile: as a youngster he had enjoyed
untrammeled freedom of the streets of Paris and Berlin, and he showed a
curiously developed sympathy for the lives of the poor and unfortunate
that had been born of those early experiences. He was a great resource
to her, and she enjoyed him as she would have enjoyed a girl comrade. He
confessed his admiration for Marian in the frankest fashion. She was
adorable; the greatest girl in the world.
"Ah, sometime," he would say, "who knows!"