When he reached home that afternoon, Guthrie expended half an hour’s
skilled energy in overcoming Mrs. Guthrie’s instinctive objections to
the unusual, and the dinner invitation went over the telephone to
Clark and Vida Martin.
Guthrie’s mind was full of glow and movement. His impulse was to draw
in from Vida Martin as with a deep inhalation all the modernity he had
missed—not merely her thoughts but her way of thinking, her inner
feeling and her technique of conveying it. Her manner he felt to be
not her own unaided invention but a social growth—a collaboration of
many men and women moving in the same direction. He felt a need of
moving with them.
The most tangible thing for him was an accent of sincerity in Vida
which compelled her listener into an answering sincerity. He coveted
the secret of that social power—the power of being and doing that. It
rested down on a greater democracy than he had known—upon her sense
of oneness with others, her feeling of non-superiority, her
assumption: “You and I are fundamentally alike.”
He wanted to be with her long enough to catch that feeling, to have
and to use it, giving it forth in turn to others. What a power to fill
his students with! The teacher in him craved that secret of living. He
wanted it to transmit; he wanted it as seed to sow in a more human
seminar than he had yet conducted.
It meant scrutinizing, accepting and conveying the actual human truth
about one’s own feelings and motives—without thought of whether they
were or were not admirable. It meant the acceptance of one’s self as
the most authentic human document—a desire and firm resolution not to
embellish or in any way falsify that text in the mind of another.
One couldn’t do that and continue to set one’s self up professor-like
as an example to youth. The power could be exerted only by taking
youth completely into his confidence. Only one’s real, uncensored
thoughts and impulses as they sprang out of one’s own nature had that
quality he sought. He felt that he needed the help of Vida, with her
long habit of truthful self-revelation, in learning to read that
intricate, much disregarded text—himself.
In his new spirit he spoke to Mrs. Guthrie about the secret he wanted
to acquire from Vida Martin, hoping to rouse in Anna a desire to
acquire it for herself.
But Anna Guthrie was not prepared to take John’s grouping of himself
and her as two human beings who had something to learn from a third.
She was hurt that her husband should find in another woman something
valuable which she herself lacked, and she thought him perfectly
brutal in the bald way he came out with it. Things like that which
would hurt people ought to be concealed. She herself concealed such
things.
“Practising sincerity is like making a bargain,” Guthrie reflected.
“It takes two. Not everyone is ready for it.”
To Vida arriving with Clark for dinner, Mrs. Guthrie was
conventionally gracious—a manner she put on as she took off the
all-over apron which protected her next to best dress in the hot
kitchen. The green young Bohemian girl there was chiefly useful to
Mrs. Guthrie as a topic of heartfelt conversation.
Vida avoided it by starting some talk with Lucy and Harold, aged ten
and eight, who sat at a little table behind her. By the time she had
them laughing Mrs. Guthrie’s prejudice began to thaw.
Their father noted their expressiveness with Vida. “They get it too,”
he reflected. “They’re more human than I’ve realized. Anna and I have
had too much the ideal of a child as a little obeying machine.”
When Mrs. Guthrie heard that the evening paper had a story about
Vida’s exclusion from the University and Clark’s insubordination, she
was perturbed by the question: “What will the President’s wife say of
my having such a woman to dinner?”
The discussion which gave that dinner its importance sprang from
Guthrie’s deploring, _à propos_ of the danger of Clark’s dismissal,
the fact that a professor could not act in accordance with his own
judgment in such a matter without endangering his position. He gave a
dozen instances of tyranny which seemed to have created in him only a
sort of reflected personal resentment against particular presidents
and regents.
“Why do you scholars allow the power to remove you to be placed in the
hands of outsiders like the regents?” asked Vida, whose mind worked
promptly from individuals to the system they stood for.
“Oh, that can’t be changed,” said Guthrie, off-hand.
“Why not?” she challenged.
“It’s as natural as sunrise,” he said. “We’re all controlled through
bread and butter channels.”
“Other classes of workers are testing out ways of controlling their
own bread and butter. Bread and butter freedom is precisely what the
world now needs and seeks. Are university professors less capable of
thought than button-cutters?”
“No,” said Clark. “But less capable of concerted action. We’re too
confoundedly jealous and individualistic to work together.”
“How do you know that?” Vida demanded. “Have you ever tried it? With
things as they are you certainly can’t fulfil your social function.
You’ll either have to get together and secure your freedom or remain
in a position where you cannot really influence your students.”
“But they do influence them!” protested Mrs. Guthrie.
“About all the students look to us for,” said Clark, “is credits. A
credit costs on the average so much time and attention. A little more
and they resent your overcharge, a little less and they gloat because
they’ve been able to underpay.”
“Imagine their having such an attitude toward a live man dealing with
live ideas!” exclaimed Vida. “Toward Bernard Shaw, for instance,
lecturing on the necessity of extending to unmarried women the right
to have children!”
Mrs. Guthrie looked apprehensively at Lucy and then at the young
Bohemian girl who was bringing in the dessert. “Fortunately,” she
said, “our professors do not care to deal with things like that.”
“No,” said Vida, “they prefer to let society continue unwarned its
present insane treatment of illegitimacy.”
“There’s no question about our lack of freedom,” said Guthrie hastily,
“nor about our need of it. But what means do you suggest to us, Miss
Martin, for gaining it?”
“Well,” said Vida, “here’s Kenton Clark, one of the best economists in
the country, in danger of being kicked out for recommending my
lecture. Brooks and Gleason went the same way last year. Who kicks you
out?”
“The President,” said Guthrie. “He holds his authority, however, from
omnipotent Regents who can kick _him_ out—and frequently do.”
That idea seemed rather pleasant to Guthrie. He smiled at it.
“Why don’t you elect your own Regents and your own President—as
Americans should?” asked Vida. “Why not insist that you shall be
removable only by vote of your own colleagues? It’s absurd that a body
of men as highly trained as a university faculty should not be
self-governing.”
“Yes, yes,” said Guthrie, “it is absurd. But here’s the existing
system. What force is capable of transforming it?”
“Organization,” said Vida, fresh from her button-cutters. “How many
college teachers are there?”
“Twenty-eight thousand,” said Guthrie. “Five thousand of ‘em women.”
“But not five thousand of ’em men,” said Kenton Clark with a malicious
chuckle.
“They would be—with power,” said Vida. “I’d like to see it. The
scholar would become a real force. It would be good to see thinking
married again to doing, after the long divorce that has made them both
sterile.”
“There’s plenty of powder lying loose in discontented faculties,”
Clark mused. “If only it could be rammed together and—touched with
flame.”
“Be the flame!” cried Vida. “A movement nation-wide may sweep out from
John Guthrie and Kenton Clark.”
Mrs. Guthrie pushed back her chair energetically, indicating that
dinner was over. “Shall we go to the parlor?” she said. The three were
so absorbed they did not hear.
“Could we get a dozen men who’d hold together, Guthrie?” said Clark.
“There are more than a dozen—twice that many—radicals in the
faculty,” said Guthrie. “Whether they’d hold together——”
“The Regents would have to think a bit before they fired a dozen men,”
said Clark.
He and Guthrie tried to see how to get the substance of the labor
union idea without taking the name or the form. Vida told them the
name was immaterial, the form essential. “You can’t get the strength
of organization without organizing,” she said.
Their instinct was against applying the working-class method to their
profession. They raised the difficulty of equal pay for unequal work
and mulled around over it till Vida gave them up. “You’ve been too
carefully selected,” she said. “It’s temperamental. No real
revolutionist becomes a college professor.”
That set Clark and Guthrie persuading her of the advantages of the
union—which college teachers certainly had the brains to perceive.
“Yes,” said Vida, “but the will to achieve them, the spirit to fight
for them, the power to make sacrifices for them?”
Mrs. Guthrie sprang up. The movement, which drew all eyes to her,
placed her unintentionally near Vida. “I don’t want Harold and Lucy
sacrificed!” she cried.
Her primeval cry made Vida’s hand leap out and press hers for an
instant. Mrs. Guthrie wavered between hostility to Vida’s doctrines
and the attraction of that wave of sympathy which swept her like a
physical force.
“The wives of the button-cutters are facing that to-night,” said Vida,
her voice deepening. “Don’t you see why, Mrs. Guthrie? Through the
present danger they seek the children’s greater safety.”
“Sit down, Anna,” said Guthrie. “This talk is going to lead to
something.”
“It shouldn’t!” exclaimed Mrs. Guthrie. “It must not!” She turned to
Vida. “The men who take the first steps—they will lose their
positions. My husband’s salary is all we have. For a father of a
family—it would be criminal. We can live very well as we are, John,
as we always have. The Regents have even appointed a committee to see
about raising salaries.”
“Our despotism is benevolent,” said Clark, “—if we’re submissive
enough.”
“Our positions are insecure _now_,” said Guthrie. “To hold them
some of us have to sacrifice the best that’s in us.”
“If it’s that or the children——” said Mrs. Guthrie.
“Don’t worry, Anna,” said Guthrie. “If we go into this it will be
because we see it will make us more secure, not less.”
Mrs. Guthrie went to the children’s table, leaned over Lucy’s chair,
and drew the girl’s head against her breast.
“What do you think, Lucy?” asked Vida.
“Papa ought not to have to do his work wrong to get money for us to
live,” said Lucy. She rose and went to her father, who put his arm
around her and hugged her.
Harold made a dive for the other arm. “I’ve got six dollars in my
bank, Papa,” he said. “I’ll get along without the Indian suit and only
buy the bow and arrow.”