As they proceeded, more briskly now, she talked of her life in the Chicago
schools. She had taken the work when nothing else offered in the day of her
calamity. She described the struggle for appointment. If it had not been
for her father's old friend, a dentist, she would never have succeeded in
entering the system. A woman, she explained, must be a Roman Catholic, or
have some influence with the Board, to get an appointment. Qualifications?
She had had a better education in the Rockminster school than was required,
but if a good-natured schoolteacher hadn't coached her on special points in
pedagogy, school management, nature-study, etc., she would never have
passed the necessary examinations.
In an impersonal way she described the life of a teacher in a great
American school system: its routine, its spying supervision, its
injustices, its mechanical ideals, its one preeminent ambition to teach as
many years as it was necessary to obtain a pension. There were the
superintendents, the supervisors, the special teachers, the
principals--petty officers of a petty tyranny in which too often seethed
gossip, scandal, intrigue. There were the "soft places"; the deceitful, the
easy, the harsh principals; the teachers' institutes to which the poor
teacher was forced to pay her scanty dollars. There were bulletins, rules,
counter-rules. As she talked, Sommers caught the atmosphere of the great
engine to which she had given herself. A mere isolated atom, she was set in
some obscure corner of this intricate machine, and she was compelled to
revolve with the rest, as the rest, in the fear of disgrace and of hunger.
The terms "special teachers," "grades of pay," "constructive work,"
"discipline," etc., had no special significance to him, typifying merely
the exactions of the mill, the limitations set about the human atom.
Her manner of telling it all was unpremeditated, incoherent, and
discursive, and yet strangely effective. She described the contortions of
her kaleidoscope as they came to mind haphazard, with an indifference, a
precise objectivity that made the picture all the more real and universal,
not the special story of the special case.
"The first weeks I was nearly lost; the drawing teacher didn't like me, and
reported my room for disorder; the 'cat'--that is what they call the
principal--kept running in and watching, and the pupils--there were
seventy-five--I could barely keep them quiet. There was no teaching. How
could one teach all those? Most of our time, even in 'good' rooms, is taken
up in keeping order. I was afraid each day would be my last, when Miss
M'Gann, who was the most friendly one of the teachers, told me what to do.
'Give the drawing teacher something nice from your lunch, and ask her in to
eat with you. She is an ignorant old fool, but her brother is high up in a
German ward. And give the cat taffy. Ask him how he works out the
arithmetic lessons, and about his sassing the assistant superintendent, and
make yourself agreeable.'
"I did as I was told," she ended with a smile, "and things went better for
a time. But there was always the married teachers' scare. Every month or so
some one starts the rumor that the Board is going to remove all married
teachers; there are complaints that the married women crowd out the
girls--those who have to support themselves."
They both laughed at the irony of the argument, and their laugh did much to
do away with the constraint, the tension of their mood. More gayly she
mentioned certain farcical incidents.
"Once I saw a principal hurl a book at a sleepy teacher, who was nodding in
his lecture at the Institute. Poor woman! she is so nearly deaf that she
can hear nothing, and they say she can never remember where the lessons
are: the pupils conduct the recitations. But she has taught in that school
for twenty-three years, and she is a political influence in the ward.
Imagine it!"
They laughed again, and the world seemed lighter. Sommers looked at his
companion more closely and appreciatively. Her tone of irony, of amused and
impartial spectatorship, entertained him. Would he, caught like this,
wedged into an iron system, take it so lightly, accept it so humanly? It
was the best the world held out for her: to be permitted to remain in the
system, to serve out her twenty or thirty years, drying up in the thin, hot
air of the schoolroom; then, ultimately, when released, to have the means
to subsist in some third-rate boarding-house until the end. Or marry again?
But the dark lines under the eyes, the curve of experience at the mouth,
did not warrant that supposition. She had had her trial of that
alternative.
She did not question him, and evinced no curiosity about his world. She had
touched it on the extreme edge, and she was content with that, satisfied
probably that this unexpected renewal of their connection was most
casual--too fortunate to happen again. So she took him into a perfectly
easy intimacy; it was the nearness that comes between two people when there
is slight probability of a common future.
At last she turned into one of the streets that crossed the avenue at long
intervals. This one was more developed than those they had passed: a row of
gigantic telephone poles stretched along its side; two car tracks in use
indicated that it was a thoroughfare. At the corner there was an
advertising sign of The Hub Clothing House; and beneath, on one spoke of a
tiny hub, _This is Ninety-first Street_; and at right angles on
another spoke, _This is Washington Avenue_. He remembered vaguely
having seen a Washington Avenue miles to the north. The thing had been
drawn on the map by a ruler, without regard to habitations; on the map it
probably went on into Indiana, to the Ohio River,--to the Gulf for all he
knew.
Yet the cross-road was more promising than anything they had met: a truck
farm bordered one side; a line of tall willows suggested faintly the
country. Just beyond the tracks of a railroad the ground rose almost
imperceptibly, and a grove of stunted oaks covered the miniature hill. The
bronzed leaves still hanging from the trees made something like shade
beside the road.
"That is better," Sommers exclaimed, relieved to find a little oasis in the
desert of sand and weeds.
The woman smiled. "It is almost a forest; it runs south for a block. And
beyond there is the loveliest meadow, all tender green now. Over there you
can see the Everglade School, where I spend my days. The people are Swedes,
mostly,--operatives in the factories at Grand Crossing and on the
railroads. Many of the children can scarcely understand a word of
English,--and their habits! But they are better than the Poles, in the
Halsted Street district, or the Russians in another West Side district. And
we have a brick building, not rooms rented in a wooden house. And the
principal is an old woman, too fat to climb all the stairs to my room. So I
am left alone to reign among my young barbarians."
When they reached the grove, Mrs. Preston crossed the car tracks and
entered a little grassy lane that skirted the stunted oaks. A few hundred
feet from the street stood a cottage built of yellow "Milwaukee" brick. It
was quite hidden from the street by the oak grove. The lane ended just
beyond in a tangle of weeds and undergrowth. On the west side there was an
open, marshy lot which separated the cottage in the trees from Stoney
Island Avenue,--the artery that connects Pullman and the surrounding
villages with Chicago.
An old German had lived in it, Mrs. Preston explained, until his death a
year or two ago. He had a little chicken farm. As no one else wanted to
live in such a desolate place, so far from the scattered hamlets, she had
got it for a small rent. The house was a tiny imitation of a castle, with
crenelated parapet and tower. Crumbling now and weather-stained, it had a
quaint, human, wistful air. Its face was turned away from the road toward a
bit of garden, which was fenced off from the lane by arbors of grape-vines.
Sommers tied his horse to the gate post. Mrs. Preston did not speak after
they reached the house. Her face had lost its animation. They stood still
for some time, gazing into the peaceful garden plot and the bronzed oaks
beyond, as if loath to break the intimacy of the last half hour. In the
solitude, the dead silence of the place, there seemed to lurk misfortune
and pain. Suddenly from a distance sounded the whirr of an electric car,
passing on the avenue behind them. The noise came softened across the open
lot--a distant murmur from the big city that was otherwise so remote.
The spring twilight had descended, softening all brutal details. The broad
horizon above the lake was piled deep with clouds. Beyond the oak trees, in
the southern sky, great tongues of flame shot up into the dark heavens out
of the blast furnaces of the steel works. Deep-toned, full-throated frogs
had begun their monotonous chant.