The battle began Monday morning when Assistant Professor Clark seated
himself facing the President in the President’s office.
“I want permission,” said the lanky, trim-bearded young man, “for Vida
Martin, who is here raising money for the striking button-cutters of
Manistee, to speak in Assembly Hall.”
The President’s grey eyes opened a little wider, then narrowed
shrewdly. He swung a little in his swivel chair, and pulled his
graceful iron-grey moustache. Then he said gently: “Would you regard
it as proper for the University to take sides to that extent in an
industrial dispute?”
“We listened to Judge Graham’s Menace of Syndicalism.”
“An address which was general. This is a specific conflict.”
“Judge Graham talked about it.”
“In illustration of his general point. Miss Martin, I understand,
talks of nothing else. She is an extreme radical—a professional
firebrand. I am surprised to find a man of your standing in sympathy
with her ideas.”
“I’m not—altogether,” replied Clark. “That is scarcely a sufficient
reason for not listening to them. I want our students to hear her side
of the case—undistorted.”
“We cannot lend unsound cases the weight of university authority,”
said the President.
“Judge Graham’s case was thoroughly unsound,” said Clark. “Vida Martin
is, as you say, an extreme radical. But we have listened to an extreme
reactionary. If it is the policy of the University not to take sides,
it cannot invite him to speak and refuse to let her. Her subject, I
ought to say, is general—the Ideals of Syndicalism. As to her
soundness: she knows industrial unionism from the inside—her own
experience as organizer. She knows its leaders personally. All Judge
Graham knows is his own prejudice against labor and some newspaper
stories.”
The President swung back to his desk and arranged some papers.
Clark sat there looking irritatingly thorough.
“What made you take the responsibility of discussing this with Vida
Martin?” the President demanded.
“I met her on the train from Manistee last night. I used to know her
at Hull House. She spoke of the dismissal of Brooks and Gleason here
last year for insisting on their right to express their real ideas,
and made the sweeping claim that there is no free speech in any
American university. I said I’d disprove that by getting Assembly Hall
for her. If she can’t have it, it seems to bear out her charge against
us.”
“Haven’t you yourself enjoyed freedom of speech here?”
“Yes, I have. But frankly, I’m afraid I’ve never had anything to say
that was dangerous.”
“Afraid! Your talk with Miss Martin seems to have had a singular
effect on your point of view.”
“It has,” admitted Clark. “I never put such new life into the thinking
of any student as she put into mine last night. Six years ago in
Chicago she was not unlike me. If the labor movement makes her what
she is and the University makes me what I am—there’s something wrong
with the University. I think we should try to understand her.”
“By all means—those of us who have not already done so.”
Clark smiled.
“Understanding her is one thing,” said the President, nettled, “and
giving her violent doctrines such sanction by the University as you
propose is quite another. You’ve been carried off your feet. When you
regain your balance you’ll thank me for not granting this wild request
of yours. Is there anything further you wish to say?”
Clark rose to go. “Only that I regret this failure—of the
University.”
“It’s not the University that’s in danger of failing, Mr. Clark,” said
the President significantly.
Having sufficiently endangered his career to no purpose, Mr. Clark
strode out of the Liberal Arts’ Building, past the black bulletin
boards on which the announcement of Vida Martin’s lecture would not
appear. He marched down the old flagstone walk beneath the oaks and
budding maples and across to the hotel—a three-story brick building
painted slate-grey.
There, with a local labor leader and the editor of a Bohemian paper
who were helping her organize her meeting for the following night, he
found Vida Martin, a trim, strong woman of thirty, not yet at the
height of her vivid powers.
She handed Clark the first draft of a handbill. To his dismay it
announced as the place of her meeting—Assembly Hall.
“That’s gone to the printers,” she said casually.
“I—I’m sorry,” said Clark. “I have misled you. My confidence in the
University’s impartiality was misplaced. You must let me stand the
difference in your printing bill. You have been refused the use of
Assembly Hall.”
Vida Martin smiled at him the smile of a wicked minx. “You didn’t
mislead me a bit, dear Kenton Clark,” she said. “I have already
engaged the Opera House for to-morrow night.”
Dear Kenton Clark stared at the handbill. “Engaged the Opera House and
printed Assembly Hall on your dodgers!”
She nodded. “My æsthetic sense,” she explained. “I thought how nice it
would look to have a cunning red line through ‘Assembly Hall’ and
‘Opera House’ stamped on in red with a rubber stamp. Don’t you love to
use a rubber stamp?”
As the guile of the agitator dawned on him he started to disapprove.
“It’s just a shame,” she said, catching his expression, “for me to
come contaminating the innocent professorial mind with the spectacle
of fighting tactics.”
He laughed. “The professorial mind isn’t wholly infantile. The
University deserves what you’re going to give it. I shall announce
your meeting in my classes.”
“Have you something else to do when you lose your job? Do you know
that one of your Regents, H. P. Denton, owes his appointment to Steve
Treadley of the Manistee Button Factory?”
“Rather than be controlled by considerations like that I _will_
lose my job!” Clark replied hotly.
That was the mood in which he marched to his eleven o’clock lecture.
After it, at noon, he came down the central walk amid the sweaters and
corduroys and fresh-filled pipes of the gossiping throng which carries
books in straps, books in green bags, and books in spilly armfuls. His
friend Guthrie of the English Department overtook him.
“What’s this about Vida Martin?” Guthrie inquired. “They say you’re
lambasting the University because it won’t let her set up her soap-box
in Assembly Hall.”
“Subtract the cheap fling and you have the idea,” Clark answered.
Guthrie shook his fine, big head. “Well,” he reflected, “you’re
unmarried. But it isn’t a chip you have on your shoulder. It’s a log.”
“John,” said Clark, “your education is hideously defective. You’ve got
to meet Vida Martin and learn what a soapbox is. Come to lunch with
her now.”
Guthrie said he couldn’t because his wife was expecting him.
“Telephone her and come,” insisted Clark.
With an adventurous sense of breaking with routine and doing something
interestingly dangerous, Guthrie telephoned, and came.
Five minutes after he met her he was quarrelling like an old friend
with Vida Martin—over Thompson and Geddes’ “rustic reinterpretation”
of evolution. Vida would none of it, holding that Nature’s creative
centres are now great cities—where evolution is kept entirely too
busy making a new kind of soul in women to bother with bugs and
things.
Of the woman’s revolution Guthrie had a literary knowledge, but in his
cooped life Vida was the first who embodied it—the first who viewed
life with the unshockable tolerance of science, the first whose mental
background was wholly non-theological, the first even who was wholly
conscious of her economic independence and its implications. The new
ideas and feelings alive in her made him see the paleness of what he
had got from those plays, novels, and sociology books. The quiet
fearlessness with which she gave him and Kenton Clark to understand
that she had laid aside ready made morality, “the parasite code of
woman subordinate,” took his scholarly breath. She had replaced it, he
gathered, not with another code, but with a habit of discrimination
“confronting apparent good and evil with armed light—the Ithuriel
spear of woman free.” So unprofessorily the professor phrased it when
the thoughts she stirred in him began to sing. He was not aware of it,
but they sang the sooner because her heavy black hair had copper
glints in it and the joy of thinking made her eyes such wells of
light.
“I’ve been thirteen years here in my treadmill,” he said to her as he
was leaving. “You, from your wonderful cities, make me realize that I
have taught all the life out of my old knowledge. I need new contacts
with the life of to-day. I must have more significant things to teach.
I want to see all I can of you while you’re here, and then—it would
help to keep in touch with you and your world through letters.”
He started to ask her and Clark to dinner, but reflected that he must
first go home and lead up to that.
“There’s a living soul,” said Kenton Clark when Guthrie had gone.
“And with a flickering creativeness,” Vida added. “I wonder if
anything could gather the flickers into a flame?”
“A passion for a woman,” Clark surmised.
“Or a cause.”
Afterwards they remembered her saying that, and looking back it seemed
a premonition.