THE NEW STEERAGE

THE NEW STEERAGEFrancis Byrne HackettElevenhundred of us, perhaps twelve hundred, were booked steerage from Liverpool to New York. We had been brought to the dock at noon, away from our friends, though we heard the vessel was not to leave till five. On the other side of a stone pier rose the hugeLusitaniawith her four funnels. Everyone on our tender moved expectantly forward. There was an official cry: “Britishers first!” The chosen of the Lord! But the horde of ignorant foreigners came surging ahead. Miscellaneously we crowded up the gangway. Another gangway sloped for us on to theLusitania. Several British policemen and stewards faced us to keep us in line. At so many guardian angels we began to feel depressed.Medical inspection. The instant we put foot on the deck of theLusitania, this was our first business.“Have your Inspection Tickets ready.” Before we could inquire what was going to happen, it was happening. We were passed in a slow trickle between two officials. “Take off your hat.” “Take off your glasses.” I stood blinking while the doctor deftly plucked up my eyelids. He waved me ahead, my ungranulated eyelids made harsh by the handling. Hundreds were before us on the deck, and those from behind began to press on our heels with the inevitable “myself first” impulse of human beings. We were a medley of races, Swedes, Greek, English and Welsh, Irish, Russian Jews, Poles, mute Lithuanian peasants, and men from a Northern race who turned out to be Finns. It was almost as cosmopolitan as the Third Avenue Elevated. We advanced with repeated hesitations and conscious slowness. A woman turned white in the crush and had to be helped to a seat near an open porthole. In front of me, a 12-year-old boy, dead beat, leaned against his big brother—and under his arm, if you please, wearily hugged a camp stool. “Why doesn’t he sit on the stool?” The mother, a thin, strained, admirable creature, whose face showed the fine wrinkles of a life too intent, allowed me to open the stool for him. From his low seat he rewarded me morethan once with a look of confidence and smiling good-nature. They had travelled by rail all night, the mother volunteered, from a town in Wales. They were on their way at last to join the father in California. “I have two more in California”—the mother pointed to her children, who cheerfully smiled.Women and children. During that weary wait I observed them here and there, standing submissively for three-quarters of an hour. At length, after the long halt, the tension was relieved, and we moved again, this time past another doctor. “Take off your hat.” The doctor had apparently to inspect the unnaturalized polls on which that morning we had paid a four dollar tax. He was a man of great perception, the doctor, and the actual examination was an affair of split seconds. On completing the circuit of the deck our yellow Inspection Tickets (given to us at the office in the morning when we had paid our $37.50 for the passage) received their first stamp. The Cunard Line accepted us as healthy live stock.My Inspection Ticket said Room H 22, and a steward took me there. There were seven other occupants. Most of them were taking their ease in their berths and smoking. They were all English or American. I responded to their cheery hello, but their carbonic gas was strong, and the portholes proved to be immovable. I sat down on a lower berth, bumped my head against the top one, and had hardly room for my knees in the aisle. My carbonic gas did not improve the air. I felt discouraged, and went out. Nearby I saw a most capacious 4-berth room, and there was a vacancy in it. Henri Bergson says that “life proceeds by insinuation.” I felt less gloomy. I found the bedroom steward and asked him whether I could be changed. He was amicable but not quite concrete, a bit of a Jesuit. About this time word flashed by that we were back at the Landing Stage for the cabin passengers: deferring the affairs of moment, I went on deck.We all pushed aft for a good view, only to find a rope stretched across the deck, and a grim sailor guarding it. “That’s all the scope you get.” We flattened back against one another. And they let down a beautiful canopied gangway for the upper classes.Braided officers stood in a row to receive, on a nice clear deck. All the stewards were lined up in fresh white coats. Against the sky line we studied the new angles of hat plumes. On they stepped with leisured gait, with an air of distinguished fatigue. “The daughters of Zion are haughty and walk with stretched forth necks, walking and mincing as they go.” Indifferently they handed their light burdens to the now demure stewards. I looked around at my comrades back of the rope. A child in arms next to me chortled as he bandaged his mother’s eyes. She gently removed the bandage, only to be blinded again. Behind me, a buxom Swede looked open-eyed at her feathered sisters abaft. Everywhere the interest was intense and simple. I turned again to envisage the daughters of Zion. As in another world they moved—a world where policemen are unnecessary, where stewards are spring-heeled, where officers stand in line, where eyelids are not officially scrutinized nor polls inspected, where the gangway has a canopy and weariness is consoled. I admired “the bravery of their anklets, and the cauls and the crescents; the pendants, and the bracelets and the mufflers.” Must it not be delightful, said I to myself, to merit so much attention from everyone, and to be so prettily arrayed? Must it not be pleasant to have eyelids so immune, and to have a quite uninspected poll?The last piece of first-class baggage rolled aboard. Giant hawsers strained, and were released. It was departure. From my coign at a deck porthole the Landing Stage came into focus. I confess I exclaimed. As far as the eye could reach, on the water and street levels, the glance of thousands on thousands was rivetted on the vessel as she cautiously edged away. It was a beautiful afternoon, the sky innocently blue. All indifferent to us in the background stood the massive city of Liverpool, concentrated on affairs, but no less indifferent to the city itself ranged this childlike, almost awestruck, army of curiosity, silently intent on us as we receded into the river. From our porthole (I was joined by a Syrian) we could not help a glow of pride. My companion was not able to vent his feelings in English, but he was quite moved. His was an Indian-like head—high cheekbones, thin lips, hard, beady eyes. He dwelt on the vast crowd, ejaculating “ah-ye-ye-ye,” and clucking his tongue. I smiled at hissolid wonderment. Then he craned out of the porthole to view the water far, far below. I followed suit. He pointed down, and gave a significant, cheerfully reckless laugh. I laughed, too. We were in for it, and no mistake.The steamer’s first evening was spent, doing nothing, out in the Mersey. The tide was in some way blameworthy. It seemed inefficient of nature, but as we lay opposite Liverpool the night-lights came out, definite and serene and friendly, and I took out my mental clutch.Time came for supper. I reserved for the morning the mysteries of the cuisine. I had earlier gone below to the pantry, after some talk with a humane steward, and to my surprise I had been allowed to help myself to a cup of tea.The first evening was one of extraordinary activity. Still in their best clothes, around our half of the entire deck poured streams and streams of passengers. It was almost impossible to tread one’s way. And in several places these streams turned themselves into dancing whorls, where volunteers with a concertina had appeared. I happen to like the concertina, and I enjoyed it during five entire days, though not so much the concertina as the movement of life which it promoted. There were never any deck sports, nor games, nor organized distraction. But, except for one awful seasick period, there was endless dancing and singing. On this first evening I stood in the rings that framed the waltzers, and my blood raced with their pleasure. The Swedes in particular took part much and well. They occasionally ventured on those new forms, but only for dancing reasons. When Swedes really want to hug each other, they do it openly and for its own sake.To increase the friendliness of the evening, everyone was willing to talk a little. I chatted with a Russian, a Greek, an Englishwoman and an Englishman. He was a young and unhappy Englishman, and in disgust at the ignorant foreigner. I later learned that he made up the difference and was allowed to go second class.At 9 p.m., tired of repeated searches for my bedroom steward (he was dishing out in the pantry most of the time), I went to the assistant chief steward of the third class to see if I could betransferred to the 4-berth room. He’d see, he said in a serious bass voice, he’d let me know. At 9.30 p.m. he again told me he’d see. Whether he has yet seen or not I have no means of discovering. At 10 p.m. I took the berth, with the consent of the other men in the cabin. I gave my tip to the bedroom steward, as I guessed he was the less Tammanyized. The assistant chief steward was a strong character, free from numerical superstition. He asked 13 cents for five penny stamps.In my room the bedding proved simple—a coarse white bag of straw for mattress, and one dark blue horse blanket for clothing. A small pouch of straw served as pillow. No linen, of course, and no frills of any kind. There was an iron spring frame. I found it ascetic but clean. The single blanket was not enough. I used my rug, and my fellow passengers used overcoats and rugs, too. The mattresses, I was told, serve just one trip. They are dumped overboard as soon as the steamer is out to sea on the return voyage. In my bed I was the only living creature present.Those who rose early had advantages. They had first use of the tin basin in their own room, or of the bowls in the general washing room. They had a bid for the solitary bath tub in male steerage. They were up in time to be allowed to walk all the way aft, and look down the wide lane of jade and white in the wake of theLusitania. And they were in time for the first sitting.Those who did not rise early had to listen to the tramplings that began long before sunrise. Despite this, I got up late. Fifty of us waited over half an hour outside an iron grill at the head of the dining room stairs. The dining room is quite inadequate, so there had to be four sittings—first come, first served. When we reached below we took seats where we could. There was an understanding, however, by which Britishers were grouped together. This was made effectual by stewards who stood where the ways parted, and thrust Jews and Poles and mid-Europeans to one side, and Britishers and Scandinavians to the other.On the whole, the food during the trip was edible. I could not eat the bacon or the beef. I did not try the eggs. The tea was vile and usually not very hot. The coffee was vile. But the bread, served in individual loaves, was most palatable. TheSwedish bread was excellent. The oatmeal was edible, even with the wretchedly thin condensed or dried milk. We had herrings and at another time sausages, and both were fair. The potatoes were always excellently boiled and good of their kind, but the browned potatoes were invariably overcooked and not fit to serve. The cold meats for supper could be eaten. The boiled rice was insipid. The stewed prunes and stewed apricots were palatable. I had very good baked beans and navy beans, good pea soup and fair broth. I had no complaints to make of the food. I never decided whether it was butter or margarine, but I ate it willingly. It certainly had not that callously metallic taste that margarine used to have.The service was on bold, wholesale lines. Twenty sat at each table, and there were two equipments of bread and butter, sugar, salt, pepper and vinegar. A disconsolate plant decorated each table. One steward took charge of each ten people. I sat at a different table practically every time, and most of my companions were delightfully obliging and unaggressive. Only those who so wished had to stand up and harpoon their bread roll. There were a few tiresome people who damned the food and failed to pass the salt. The stewards were elusive, or rather that one-tenth part of a steward who was your share. I regretted on one occasion to discover egg shells in my dessert, and the next day I was pained to find a knob of beef in my stewed apples. My sympathetic steward remarked: “Puts you a bit off, don’t it?” It do.From about five in the morning till eleven at night these stewards are working. Work is a good thing. It is strange that the stewards look unhealthy and fatigued. It is due to the inherent inferiority of stewards.Queenstown was the distraction for several hours on the first day out. The Cunard and White Star Lines have just discerned that the harbor is unsafe for big boats. At what point of profit, I wondered, would Queenstown harbor suddenly and miraculously become safe again?As we left the coast of Ireland there came an unctuous swell upon the sea. You would not think it could upset anyone, but when I ascended after dinner I was horrified. Rows of passengers lay where they were stricken, all too evidently ill, ghosts oftheir braver selves. The stewards were in the dining room and could not come, and did not come, for well over an hour. For well over an hour no effort at all was made to clean the decks. I now understood this grave disadvantage of third class, to which the company itself contributes. But there was much kindness to the decimated, and much tolerance. Later I admired immensely the work of the matrons. I seldom met three more splendid, capable, sympathetic women. There were superior passengers who despised the childishness with which simpler people gave in. I myself laughed when I saw a girl lying with complete abandon plumb on top of another girl. The grim sailor heard me and muttered: “Only an ignorant person’d laugh at anyone was seasick.”During this distressing hour a Russian came flying to the master at arms. “The doctor! the doctor!” “You can’t have the doctor,” said the man in blue, not unkindly. “We can’t help seasickness. It’s got to be expected.” “The doctor! Not seaseek! dead!” He made a ghastly face. “Oh, all right,” said the master-at-arms, and we went straight below.Terrific pleading calls shook the cabin. “Sonya! Sonya!” The master-at-arms walked right in, and emerged supporting a sack-like girl, very white and inert. “You could cut the air with a knife,” murmured the weary master-at-arms. He assisted her on deck, and she was wooed to consciousness.At this time, on the enclosed deck, there was much commotion. A striking red-haired Jewess, clad in green, had fainted and was put sitting on a bench. A venerable Jew appealed to her excitedly while an earnest young soul at the other side cried for water. It made me furious to see the limp woman propped up, but they were evidently playing according to the rules of a different league. The water at last came and much to my surprise the earnest soul put it to her own lips. But not to drink it. In her the Chinese laundryman had an efficient rival. She was the most active geyser I ever saw. After a time there was a feeble motion of protest, to the regret of the delighted spectators.On the open deck during this weather the Jews monopolized one corner. I counted thirty of them huddled inseparably together in their misery, like snakes coiled in the cold. As they beganto recover, a leg would wiggle from under one blanket, and a head be thrust out from under another. Later they sat up and drank their tea out of glasses, nibbling the sugar. They soon littered the place with apple peels and orange peels. After generations of inhibition they probably needed to be told that they were permitted by a merciful dispensation to use the sea as a waste basket.As the sea fell slumberously still, life recovered its audacity. Again the decks became clamorous, multitudinous. People thronged the promenade, or swarmed on the benches that do duty for deck chairs. They began smoking everywhere again, and out came the stewards and the Black Crowd to enjoy a sociable cigarette. There was little to do but talk, until the dancing began. The grim sailor looked pityingly on Babel, as he patrolled the Second Class partition. He was for smaller ships. “On a smaller ship,” he deigned to remark, “you can come up and throw your weight around.”Differences in manners obtruded. The third day out a youth emerged whom I took to be a swineherd from the beech forests of Croatia. He was not handsome. His fringe encroached upon his little eyes. His chin was unformed. Up over his trousers, as if he had just waded through the piggery, his socks were drawn. There he stood, plastic youth, a hand in his pocket, pivotting a heel, surveying the world through his own hirsute thatch. Suddenly, deliberately, he blew his nose Adam-like. A Swedish woman next me turned livid. “De dirty pig.” I felt myself the brother of a Swede. The Croatian saw us but beheld us not. His mouth ajar, he ruminated afresh on the fleshpots of Croatia. Raw material, simple even to the verge of our ancestral slime. I prayed “God be with thee,” and looked elsewhere.That evening amid the throng which waited for admittance to the dining room appeared a Greek. The glaring electric light concentrated on that swart face, flung-out chest, and bared neck. He was incredibly blasphemous and incredibly self-important. “Seventy-five dollars, see. American money!” He showed his money to us, and gave a chuckle. His lip curled. “They only Hunkies,” indicating his companions who connected themselves with him by slavish eyes. “I in America before, Christ, yes!”His eye roved boldly, and he showed his white teeth. “I got more money still, you bet your life. When I get over I marry no Hunkie. I marry Henglish girl. Yeh, Christ, you bet!” He antagonized us, and yet we watched him eagerly. He lapped up our interest. Overcome with the savor of attention, he incontinently spat. I drew away. “It’s a’ right,” he said half-obsequiously, “I know what I do. I no’ spit on American.” He felt too much kinship to spit on an American.So things happen, but only in the steerage. At the door of the café below, you will not find a Polish count informing the steward: “I marry a Henglish girl. No penniless Hunkie for me.” Nor will the first-class steward answer: “Who cares? Who’ll buy a beer?”In all these days, among all these peoples, there was no friction. Some youths did start to make boisterous fun of two barefooted Italian women, walking up and down in bright petticoat and kerchief. But the Italians smiled and skipped back and sat down, and there was no more “fun.” Between congruous people intercourse was easy and frank. The fresh-hued Scandinavians were exceptionally lively. A little English group revolved quietly together, with a private afternoon teapot for central sun. Another little group, including two girls in service, a cotton spinner and a grocery clerk, often sat in the prow and talked amiably about anything from the food on board to their notion of a God. They say that “sociability proceeds from weakness.” Steerage, at any rate, is highly sociable. In some cases it was also frankly amatory. The attractive girls, so soon well known, seemed to have no fear of the predatory males. They took each other lightly. But at 9.30 p.m., all the feminine kind, even the rebellious, had to leave their conquests and go below. This rule was enforced to the letter.Two days before landing we had another medical experience. We learned that American citizens in the third class were immune from smallpox and need not be troubled on that score, but that aliens in the third class must all be vaccinated. It was said there were ways of evading this, but I found none. For several hours we were assembled while the women filed in. After an hour in line, our turn came to enter the surgery improvised in the companionway.On a table flamed a number of small spirit lamps, over which the stewards sterilized the metal scrapers. I bared my arm, as per orders from a pasty youth. The doctor answered my queries by taking my arm, scraping it gently and applying the lymph. “It is not our law,” he said politely. “Take this chap,” motioned a bullet-headed assistant, and I was shoved to another group. “Rub it off,” whispered a friendly scullion, but I let it stay, out of curiosity. The new group crowded around another big table. An additional hour’s standing brought up my turn to answer the clerk’s questions. He recorded on the manifesto that I was destined for Brooklyn and had friends. This was added to the facts I had provided when I engaged passage. I was now catalogued for Ellis Island.The day before landing there was, I believe, another medical inspection. We got in line for it, but the crowd simply disregarded the stewards, and I never even saw the doctor. On that evening the barriers were partly down, and the Goths and Huns invaded two decks.It was Friday morning before we came into the yellow waters of the harbor, and passed under the cliffs of Manhattan. Already a fissure had appeared in the steerage. On one side, separated from us more and more, went the naturalized citizens, each armed with his papers. On the other, we aliens congregated, to be shipped in due time to Ellis Island.It was an inhuman morning, a morning of harrowing strain and confusion. Though the inspection of baggage amounted to nothing in itself, especially as there had been no preliminary declaration, there was the uncertainty, and the three hours’ delay. Searching for baggage, waiting for inspectors, hectored and shouted at, the poorer immigrants reminded one of Laocoön. And then we had to wait for the boat to Ellis Island, and we had to lug our hand baggage with us for the hours that were to come. This fact alone made the day an ordeal for all except the strongest, a brute ordeal to which wealthier folk would not submit for two successive days.On the Ellis Island boat we were crammed like cattle. “Move up, I say, move up. God! move UP, you damned kike!” So spoke our burly exemplar of American citizenship.We “moved up” until the last square foot of floor was shut off from sight by close-packed bodies. We coöperated with the U. S. Government as well as we could to provide conditions for another Slocum disaster. When such a disaster does occur on one of these old boats, every editor in the country will demand with magnificent emphasis: “Fix the responsibility!” Let us by all means wait till the steed is stolen.Ellis Island basked in the sun. It was handsome and trim and restful, after the swarming pier. We entered the fine examination building single file, always lugging our suitcases and bundles and bags and wraps and boxes and babies.Medical inspection, a real inspection this time. We passed through a cleverly arranged aisle, and at each angle a new doctor in khaki sought for blemishes. I finally impinged on a man who asked me if I could see well without my glasses. I answered: “Not at all.” He leaned over, and made two crosses in blue chalk on my raincoat. At the exit from this trap an attendant wrote another little piece on my raincoat, “Vis.,” short for vision. I was allowed to lay down my bags, and sit and wait for half an hour.When the special examiners were ready, we were led up a corridor and shown into a bright room. Around the walls were men and boys in all stages of dress and undress, as at a bathing beach.“Ken you read English?” I said yes. “Read that over there.” A familiar oculist test card hung on the wall. Being already so tired that I would have welcomed deportation, I resentfully choked out: “B, T B R, F E B D,” and so on. “All right, doc.,” said the attendant, and a civil man at a high desk silently handed me an initialled slip. Outside this was taken, and my dilapidated Inspection Ticket was stamped “Specially Examined.” I had passed the test, and went back for my baggage to the ante-room. A woman there, flushed and petulant, commented on her being examined. The attendant turned away contemptuously. “Aw, she’s ben hittin’ the pipe, or somethin’.”Up the steps into the great hall I proceeded. It resembled a big waiting room, where to my delight benches ran the length of the room. It was now nearly three, and I had neglected to eatanything all day. In the particular bench decided by my Inspection Ticket, I emphatically sat down.At the far end of these benches ran a long screen at right angles. In that screen were a number of gates. Each gate was guarded by a seated official with our manifestoes on the desk before him. Through those gates we immigrants were being sieved into the United States.At last I was in the sieve. The guardian of the gate was kind of voice. “You have a brother in Brooklyn, eh?” “How much money have you got?” I was not asked to show it. “All right, pass on. No, there is nothing further. You can go as far as you like now!” Two of us from theLusitaniawhipped down the steps, bags and all, and delivered up our Inspection Tickets at a last, final door. The sun shone outside. The air was fresh. The light danced on the sea. There were no more policemen, stewards, masters-at-arms, doctors, baggage examiners, attendants, inspectors. I drew a deep breath, and tried to forget the benefits of civilization.On the ferry to New York there mingled future Americans from the Anchor Line and the Red Star Line, as well as from the Cunard. Already I could find only a few of my former companions. Some had gone before. Some were still on the Island. In the present crowd they were absorbed, obliterated. The little world of theLusitaniawas already annexed by America, as a little meteor is annexed by the burning star. I regretted this absorption, this obliteration. For six days I had belonged to them, and they had belonged to me. I thought of their geniality, their simplicity, their naturalness, their long-suffering. I was sorry to say good-bye.

Francis Byrne Hackett

Elevenhundred of us, perhaps twelve hundred, were booked steerage from Liverpool to New York. We had been brought to the dock at noon, away from our friends, though we heard the vessel was not to leave till five. On the other side of a stone pier rose the hugeLusitaniawith her four funnels. Everyone on our tender moved expectantly forward. There was an official cry: “Britishers first!” The chosen of the Lord! But the horde of ignorant foreigners came surging ahead. Miscellaneously we crowded up the gangway. Another gangway sloped for us on to theLusitania. Several British policemen and stewards faced us to keep us in line. At so many guardian angels we began to feel depressed.

Medical inspection. The instant we put foot on the deck of theLusitania, this was our first business.

“Have your Inspection Tickets ready.” Before we could inquire what was going to happen, it was happening. We were passed in a slow trickle between two officials. “Take off your hat.” “Take off your glasses.” I stood blinking while the doctor deftly plucked up my eyelids. He waved me ahead, my ungranulated eyelids made harsh by the handling. Hundreds were before us on the deck, and those from behind began to press on our heels with the inevitable “myself first” impulse of human beings. We were a medley of races, Swedes, Greek, English and Welsh, Irish, Russian Jews, Poles, mute Lithuanian peasants, and men from a Northern race who turned out to be Finns. It was almost as cosmopolitan as the Third Avenue Elevated. We advanced with repeated hesitations and conscious slowness. A woman turned white in the crush and had to be helped to a seat near an open porthole. In front of me, a 12-year-old boy, dead beat, leaned against his big brother—and under his arm, if you please, wearily hugged a camp stool. “Why doesn’t he sit on the stool?” The mother, a thin, strained, admirable creature, whose face showed the fine wrinkles of a life too intent, allowed me to open the stool for him. From his low seat he rewarded me morethan once with a look of confidence and smiling good-nature. They had travelled by rail all night, the mother volunteered, from a town in Wales. They were on their way at last to join the father in California. “I have two more in California”—the mother pointed to her children, who cheerfully smiled.

Women and children. During that weary wait I observed them here and there, standing submissively for three-quarters of an hour. At length, after the long halt, the tension was relieved, and we moved again, this time past another doctor. “Take off your hat.” The doctor had apparently to inspect the unnaturalized polls on which that morning we had paid a four dollar tax. He was a man of great perception, the doctor, and the actual examination was an affair of split seconds. On completing the circuit of the deck our yellow Inspection Tickets (given to us at the office in the morning when we had paid our $37.50 for the passage) received their first stamp. The Cunard Line accepted us as healthy live stock.

My Inspection Ticket said Room H 22, and a steward took me there. There were seven other occupants. Most of them were taking their ease in their berths and smoking. They were all English or American. I responded to their cheery hello, but their carbonic gas was strong, and the portholes proved to be immovable. I sat down on a lower berth, bumped my head against the top one, and had hardly room for my knees in the aisle. My carbonic gas did not improve the air. I felt discouraged, and went out. Nearby I saw a most capacious 4-berth room, and there was a vacancy in it. Henri Bergson says that “life proceeds by insinuation.” I felt less gloomy. I found the bedroom steward and asked him whether I could be changed. He was amicable but not quite concrete, a bit of a Jesuit. About this time word flashed by that we were back at the Landing Stage for the cabin passengers: deferring the affairs of moment, I went on deck.

We all pushed aft for a good view, only to find a rope stretched across the deck, and a grim sailor guarding it. “That’s all the scope you get.” We flattened back against one another. And they let down a beautiful canopied gangway for the upper classes.

Braided officers stood in a row to receive, on a nice clear deck. All the stewards were lined up in fresh white coats. Against the sky line we studied the new angles of hat plumes. On they stepped with leisured gait, with an air of distinguished fatigue. “The daughters of Zion are haughty and walk with stretched forth necks, walking and mincing as they go.” Indifferently they handed their light burdens to the now demure stewards. I looked around at my comrades back of the rope. A child in arms next to me chortled as he bandaged his mother’s eyes. She gently removed the bandage, only to be blinded again. Behind me, a buxom Swede looked open-eyed at her feathered sisters abaft. Everywhere the interest was intense and simple. I turned again to envisage the daughters of Zion. As in another world they moved—a world where policemen are unnecessary, where stewards are spring-heeled, where officers stand in line, where eyelids are not officially scrutinized nor polls inspected, where the gangway has a canopy and weariness is consoled. I admired “the bravery of their anklets, and the cauls and the crescents; the pendants, and the bracelets and the mufflers.” Must it not be delightful, said I to myself, to merit so much attention from everyone, and to be so prettily arrayed? Must it not be pleasant to have eyelids so immune, and to have a quite uninspected poll?

The last piece of first-class baggage rolled aboard. Giant hawsers strained, and were released. It was departure. From my coign at a deck porthole the Landing Stage came into focus. I confess I exclaimed. As far as the eye could reach, on the water and street levels, the glance of thousands on thousands was rivetted on the vessel as she cautiously edged away. It was a beautiful afternoon, the sky innocently blue. All indifferent to us in the background stood the massive city of Liverpool, concentrated on affairs, but no less indifferent to the city itself ranged this childlike, almost awestruck, army of curiosity, silently intent on us as we receded into the river. From our porthole (I was joined by a Syrian) we could not help a glow of pride. My companion was not able to vent his feelings in English, but he was quite moved. His was an Indian-like head—high cheekbones, thin lips, hard, beady eyes. He dwelt on the vast crowd, ejaculating “ah-ye-ye-ye,” and clucking his tongue. I smiled at hissolid wonderment. Then he craned out of the porthole to view the water far, far below. I followed suit. He pointed down, and gave a significant, cheerfully reckless laugh. I laughed, too. We were in for it, and no mistake.

The steamer’s first evening was spent, doing nothing, out in the Mersey. The tide was in some way blameworthy. It seemed inefficient of nature, but as we lay opposite Liverpool the night-lights came out, definite and serene and friendly, and I took out my mental clutch.

Time came for supper. I reserved for the morning the mysteries of the cuisine. I had earlier gone below to the pantry, after some talk with a humane steward, and to my surprise I had been allowed to help myself to a cup of tea.

The first evening was one of extraordinary activity. Still in their best clothes, around our half of the entire deck poured streams and streams of passengers. It was almost impossible to tread one’s way. And in several places these streams turned themselves into dancing whorls, where volunteers with a concertina had appeared. I happen to like the concertina, and I enjoyed it during five entire days, though not so much the concertina as the movement of life which it promoted. There were never any deck sports, nor games, nor organized distraction. But, except for one awful seasick period, there was endless dancing and singing. On this first evening I stood in the rings that framed the waltzers, and my blood raced with their pleasure. The Swedes in particular took part much and well. They occasionally ventured on those new forms, but only for dancing reasons. When Swedes really want to hug each other, they do it openly and for its own sake.

To increase the friendliness of the evening, everyone was willing to talk a little. I chatted with a Russian, a Greek, an Englishwoman and an Englishman. He was a young and unhappy Englishman, and in disgust at the ignorant foreigner. I later learned that he made up the difference and was allowed to go second class.

At 9 p.m., tired of repeated searches for my bedroom steward (he was dishing out in the pantry most of the time), I went to the assistant chief steward of the third class to see if I could betransferred to the 4-berth room. He’d see, he said in a serious bass voice, he’d let me know. At 9.30 p.m. he again told me he’d see. Whether he has yet seen or not I have no means of discovering. At 10 p.m. I took the berth, with the consent of the other men in the cabin. I gave my tip to the bedroom steward, as I guessed he was the less Tammanyized. The assistant chief steward was a strong character, free from numerical superstition. He asked 13 cents for five penny stamps.

In my room the bedding proved simple—a coarse white bag of straw for mattress, and one dark blue horse blanket for clothing. A small pouch of straw served as pillow. No linen, of course, and no frills of any kind. There was an iron spring frame. I found it ascetic but clean. The single blanket was not enough. I used my rug, and my fellow passengers used overcoats and rugs, too. The mattresses, I was told, serve just one trip. They are dumped overboard as soon as the steamer is out to sea on the return voyage. In my bed I was the only living creature present.

Those who rose early had advantages. They had first use of the tin basin in their own room, or of the bowls in the general washing room. They had a bid for the solitary bath tub in male steerage. They were up in time to be allowed to walk all the way aft, and look down the wide lane of jade and white in the wake of theLusitania. And they were in time for the first sitting.

Those who did not rise early had to listen to the tramplings that began long before sunrise. Despite this, I got up late. Fifty of us waited over half an hour outside an iron grill at the head of the dining room stairs. The dining room is quite inadequate, so there had to be four sittings—first come, first served. When we reached below we took seats where we could. There was an understanding, however, by which Britishers were grouped together. This was made effectual by stewards who stood where the ways parted, and thrust Jews and Poles and mid-Europeans to one side, and Britishers and Scandinavians to the other.

On the whole, the food during the trip was edible. I could not eat the bacon or the beef. I did not try the eggs. The tea was vile and usually not very hot. The coffee was vile. But the bread, served in individual loaves, was most palatable. TheSwedish bread was excellent. The oatmeal was edible, even with the wretchedly thin condensed or dried milk. We had herrings and at another time sausages, and both were fair. The potatoes were always excellently boiled and good of their kind, but the browned potatoes were invariably overcooked and not fit to serve. The cold meats for supper could be eaten. The boiled rice was insipid. The stewed prunes and stewed apricots were palatable. I had very good baked beans and navy beans, good pea soup and fair broth. I had no complaints to make of the food. I never decided whether it was butter or margarine, but I ate it willingly. It certainly had not that callously metallic taste that margarine used to have.

The service was on bold, wholesale lines. Twenty sat at each table, and there were two equipments of bread and butter, sugar, salt, pepper and vinegar. A disconsolate plant decorated each table. One steward took charge of each ten people. I sat at a different table practically every time, and most of my companions were delightfully obliging and unaggressive. Only those who so wished had to stand up and harpoon their bread roll. There were a few tiresome people who damned the food and failed to pass the salt. The stewards were elusive, or rather that one-tenth part of a steward who was your share. I regretted on one occasion to discover egg shells in my dessert, and the next day I was pained to find a knob of beef in my stewed apples. My sympathetic steward remarked: “Puts you a bit off, don’t it?” It do.

From about five in the morning till eleven at night these stewards are working. Work is a good thing. It is strange that the stewards look unhealthy and fatigued. It is due to the inherent inferiority of stewards.

Queenstown was the distraction for several hours on the first day out. The Cunard and White Star Lines have just discerned that the harbor is unsafe for big boats. At what point of profit, I wondered, would Queenstown harbor suddenly and miraculously become safe again?

As we left the coast of Ireland there came an unctuous swell upon the sea. You would not think it could upset anyone, but when I ascended after dinner I was horrified. Rows of passengers lay where they were stricken, all too evidently ill, ghosts oftheir braver selves. The stewards were in the dining room and could not come, and did not come, for well over an hour. For well over an hour no effort at all was made to clean the decks. I now understood this grave disadvantage of third class, to which the company itself contributes. But there was much kindness to the decimated, and much tolerance. Later I admired immensely the work of the matrons. I seldom met three more splendid, capable, sympathetic women. There were superior passengers who despised the childishness with which simpler people gave in. I myself laughed when I saw a girl lying with complete abandon plumb on top of another girl. The grim sailor heard me and muttered: “Only an ignorant person’d laugh at anyone was seasick.”

During this distressing hour a Russian came flying to the master at arms. “The doctor! the doctor!” “You can’t have the doctor,” said the man in blue, not unkindly. “We can’t help seasickness. It’s got to be expected.” “The doctor! Not seaseek! dead!” He made a ghastly face. “Oh, all right,” said the master-at-arms, and we went straight below.

Terrific pleading calls shook the cabin. “Sonya! Sonya!” The master-at-arms walked right in, and emerged supporting a sack-like girl, very white and inert. “You could cut the air with a knife,” murmured the weary master-at-arms. He assisted her on deck, and she was wooed to consciousness.

At this time, on the enclosed deck, there was much commotion. A striking red-haired Jewess, clad in green, had fainted and was put sitting on a bench. A venerable Jew appealed to her excitedly while an earnest young soul at the other side cried for water. It made me furious to see the limp woman propped up, but they were evidently playing according to the rules of a different league. The water at last came and much to my surprise the earnest soul put it to her own lips. But not to drink it. In her the Chinese laundryman had an efficient rival. She was the most active geyser I ever saw. After a time there was a feeble motion of protest, to the regret of the delighted spectators.

On the open deck during this weather the Jews monopolized one corner. I counted thirty of them huddled inseparably together in their misery, like snakes coiled in the cold. As they beganto recover, a leg would wiggle from under one blanket, and a head be thrust out from under another. Later they sat up and drank their tea out of glasses, nibbling the sugar. They soon littered the place with apple peels and orange peels. After generations of inhibition they probably needed to be told that they were permitted by a merciful dispensation to use the sea as a waste basket.

As the sea fell slumberously still, life recovered its audacity. Again the decks became clamorous, multitudinous. People thronged the promenade, or swarmed on the benches that do duty for deck chairs. They began smoking everywhere again, and out came the stewards and the Black Crowd to enjoy a sociable cigarette. There was little to do but talk, until the dancing began. The grim sailor looked pityingly on Babel, as he patrolled the Second Class partition. He was for smaller ships. “On a smaller ship,” he deigned to remark, “you can come up and throw your weight around.”

Differences in manners obtruded. The third day out a youth emerged whom I took to be a swineherd from the beech forests of Croatia. He was not handsome. His fringe encroached upon his little eyes. His chin was unformed. Up over his trousers, as if he had just waded through the piggery, his socks were drawn. There he stood, plastic youth, a hand in his pocket, pivotting a heel, surveying the world through his own hirsute thatch. Suddenly, deliberately, he blew his nose Adam-like. A Swedish woman next me turned livid. “De dirty pig.” I felt myself the brother of a Swede. The Croatian saw us but beheld us not. His mouth ajar, he ruminated afresh on the fleshpots of Croatia. Raw material, simple even to the verge of our ancestral slime. I prayed “God be with thee,” and looked elsewhere.

That evening amid the throng which waited for admittance to the dining room appeared a Greek. The glaring electric light concentrated on that swart face, flung-out chest, and bared neck. He was incredibly blasphemous and incredibly self-important. “Seventy-five dollars, see. American money!” He showed his money to us, and gave a chuckle. His lip curled. “They only Hunkies,” indicating his companions who connected themselves with him by slavish eyes. “I in America before, Christ, yes!”His eye roved boldly, and he showed his white teeth. “I got more money still, you bet your life. When I get over I marry no Hunkie. I marry Henglish girl. Yeh, Christ, you bet!” He antagonized us, and yet we watched him eagerly. He lapped up our interest. Overcome with the savor of attention, he incontinently spat. I drew away. “It’s a’ right,” he said half-obsequiously, “I know what I do. I no’ spit on American.” He felt too much kinship to spit on an American.

So things happen, but only in the steerage. At the door of the café below, you will not find a Polish count informing the steward: “I marry a Henglish girl. No penniless Hunkie for me.” Nor will the first-class steward answer: “Who cares? Who’ll buy a beer?”

In all these days, among all these peoples, there was no friction. Some youths did start to make boisterous fun of two barefooted Italian women, walking up and down in bright petticoat and kerchief. But the Italians smiled and skipped back and sat down, and there was no more “fun.” Between congruous people intercourse was easy and frank. The fresh-hued Scandinavians were exceptionally lively. A little English group revolved quietly together, with a private afternoon teapot for central sun. Another little group, including two girls in service, a cotton spinner and a grocery clerk, often sat in the prow and talked amiably about anything from the food on board to their notion of a God. They say that “sociability proceeds from weakness.” Steerage, at any rate, is highly sociable. In some cases it was also frankly amatory. The attractive girls, so soon well known, seemed to have no fear of the predatory males. They took each other lightly. But at 9.30 p.m., all the feminine kind, even the rebellious, had to leave their conquests and go below. This rule was enforced to the letter.

Two days before landing we had another medical experience. We learned that American citizens in the third class were immune from smallpox and need not be troubled on that score, but that aliens in the third class must all be vaccinated. It was said there were ways of evading this, but I found none. For several hours we were assembled while the women filed in. After an hour in line, our turn came to enter the surgery improvised in the companionway.On a table flamed a number of small spirit lamps, over which the stewards sterilized the metal scrapers. I bared my arm, as per orders from a pasty youth. The doctor answered my queries by taking my arm, scraping it gently and applying the lymph. “It is not our law,” he said politely. “Take this chap,” motioned a bullet-headed assistant, and I was shoved to another group. “Rub it off,” whispered a friendly scullion, but I let it stay, out of curiosity. The new group crowded around another big table. An additional hour’s standing brought up my turn to answer the clerk’s questions. He recorded on the manifesto that I was destined for Brooklyn and had friends. This was added to the facts I had provided when I engaged passage. I was now catalogued for Ellis Island.

The day before landing there was, I believe, another medical inspection. We got in line for it, but the crowd simply disregarded the stewards, and I never even saw the doctor. On that evening the barriers were partly down, and the Goths and Huns invaded two decks.

It was Friday morning before we came into the yellow waters of the harbor, and passed under the cliffs of Manhattan. Already a fissure had appeared in the steerage. On one side, separated from us more and more, went the naturalized citizens, each armed with his papers. On the other, we aliens congregated, to be shipped in due time to Ellis Island.

It was an inhuman morning, a morning of harrowing strain and confusion. Though the inspection of baggage amounted to nothing in itself, especially as there had been no preliminary declaration, there was the uncertainty, and the three hours’ delay. Searching for baggage, waiting for inspectors, hectored and shouted at, the poorer immigrants reminded one of Laocoön. And then we had to wait for the boat to Ellis Island, and we had to lug our hand baggage with us for the hours that were to come. This fact alone made the day an ordeal for all except the strongest, a brute ordeal to which wealthier folk would not submit for two successive days.

On the Ellis Island boat we were crammed like cattle. “Move up, I say, move up. God! move UP, you damned kike!” So spoke our burly exemplar of American citizenship.We “moved up” until the last square foot of floor was shut off from sight by close-packed bodies. We coöperated with the U. S. Government as well as we could to provide conditions for another Slocum disaster. When such a disaster does occur on one of these old boats, every editor in the country will demand with magnificent emphasis: “Fix the responsibility!” Let us by all means wait till the steed is stolen.

Ellis Island basked in the sun. It was handsome and trim and restful, after the swarming pier. We entered the fine examination building single file, always lugging our suitcases and bundles and bags and wraps and boxes and babies.

Medical inspection, a real inspection this time. We passed through a cleverly arranged aisle, and at each angle a new doctor in khaki sought for blemishes. I finally impinged on a man who asked me if I could see well without my glasses. I answered: “Not at all.” He leaned over, and made two crosses in blue chalk on my raincoat. At the exit from this trap an attendant wrote another little piece on my raincoat, “Vis.,” short for vision. I was allowed to lay down my bags, and sit and wait for half an hour.

When the special examiners were ready, we were led up a corridor and shown into a bright room. Around the walls were men and boys in all stages of dress and undress, as at a bathing beach.

“Ken you read English?” I said yes. “Read that over there.” A familiar oculist test card hung on the wall. Being already so tired that I would have welcomed deportation, I resentfully choked out: “B, T B R, F E B D,” and so on. “All right, doc.,” said the attendant, and a civil man at a high desk silently handed me an initialled slip. Outside this was taken, and my dilapidated Inspection Ticket was stamped “Specially Examined.” I had passed the test, and went back for my baggage to the ante-room. A woman there, flushed and petulant, commented on her being examined. The attendant turned away contemptuously. “Aw, she’s ben hittin’ the pipe, or somethin’.”

Up the steps into the great hall I proceeded. It resembled a big waiting room, where to my delight benches ran the length of the room. It was now nearly three, and I had neglected to eatanything all day. In the particular bench decided by my Inspection Ticket, I emphatically sat down.

At the far end of these benches ran a long screen at right angles. In that screen were a number of gates. Each gate was guarded by a seated official with our manifestoes on the desk before him. Through those gates we immigrants were being sieved into the United States.

At last I was in the sieve. The guardian of the gate was kind of voice. “You have a brother in Brooklyn, eh?” “How much money have you got?” I was not asked to show it. “All right, pass on. No, there is nothing further. You can go as far as you like now!” Two of us from theLusitaniawhipped down the steps, bags and all, and delivered up our Inspection Tickets at a last, final door. The sun shone outside. The air was fresh. The light danced on the sea. There were no more policemen, stewards, masters-at-arms, doctors, baggage examiners, attendants, inspectors. I drew a deep breath, and tried to forget the benefits of civilization.

On the ferry to New York there mingled future Americans from the Anchor Line and the Red Star Line, as well as from the Cunard. Already I could find only a few of my former companions. Some had gone before. Some were still on the Island. In the present crowd they were absorbed, obliterated. The little world of theLusitaniawas already annexed by America, as a little meteor is annexed by the burning star. I regretted this absorption, this obliteration. For six days I had belonged to them, and they had belonged to me. I thought of their geniality, their simplicity, their naturalness, their long-suffering. I was sorry to say good-bye.

THE C. T. U.George Cram CookThebattle 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’slecture 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 Iwilllose 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 hadlaid 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.IIWhen 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 conveyingit. 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 hecame 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 proposof 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 kickhimout—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 methodto 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 insecurenow,” 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.”IIIIn one of his classes next day Professor Guthrie,à proposof a literary-historical question of intellectual freedom, talked of the survival in American university government of the heretic-expelling machinery of the theocratic seventeenth century college. He said no professor who had a mind and spoke it was safe, and recommended the lecture of the syndicalist leader Vida Martin that night as promising to develop some new ideas on academic freedom.It had never occurred to the students, accepting things as they found them, that it did not exist.Vida’s handbills appeared with the cunning red line through “Assembly Hall.” Groups of students on the steps talked of the button-cutters’ strike, of syndicalism, of Judge Graham and Vida Martin. There was hot denunciation and defence of Professor Guthrie’s daring new ideas. He had stated the argument in the preface of Shaw’sGetting Married. The insulation between the university and the thought of the living world was broken.A newspaper clipping about Vida Martin’s activity in university circles reached Regent H. P. Denton of Manistee, who caught a train from there that afternoon and called upon the President.Some of the professors in the Opera House that night were furious at Vida Martin’s attack—the contrast she drew between striking button-cutters and submissive professors—her characterization of them as thinkers who dare not think. It seemed unjust to them because their submissiveness was a life-long habit and unconscious.Some who realized this said it was stinging but salutary.Hostile or friendly they felt the speaker’s personal force—the unfamiliar union in her mind of carefulness and fire.During the lecture one ambitious assistant professor left to inform the President that he had been attacked in an alleged exposure of a connection between factory owners of Manistee and the Board of Regents.The student president of the Y. W. C. A. who had recently acquired a taste for being shocked was disappointed because Vida advanced none of the ideas she was supposed to entertain regarding free love.Mrs. Guthrie was in the dress circle with her husband and Clark. Reporters were watching them as the probable centre of a new storm in the faculty.When Vida came to that “militant union which can restore the scholar’s dignity and through the fearlessness of freedom make the university teacher a living force as in the days of Abelard,” she surprised Clark and Guthrie by relating it closely to the syndicalist ideal. The organized college teachers should ultimately form a section of that part of the “one big union” which controlled education—a body of six hundred thousand teachers. She looked ahead to a far, fine goal. “Aside from its present, practical, fighting advantages,” she said, “this organization is a necessity as germ of a social organ essential to the future. It should be the crown of the crafts composing industrial society, not aloof from the working-class in disdainful superiority, but understanding its solidarity with all—free but responsible, governed not from without as now by the economic control of another class represented by Regents, but from within by the high technical conscience of the guild.” There a bigger vision of it opened to her unexpectedly. She spoke as awed by something mystic in her own unforeseen words. “The Scholars’ Guild,” she repeated. “It might become the central organ of the world’s new mind!”That closed her lecture religiously. While the bulk of the audience was moving out—full of little explosions of argument—a number of instructors and young professors gathered around the lecturer near the stage door under the balcony. She foundthem surcharged with facts, and feelings, about the way they were governed.When Mr. and Mrs. Guthrie reached the group, Sanders of the sociology department was talking energetically about recent magazine criticism of universities. “It’s unpenetrative,” he said. “They seem unable to see anything but undemocratic student fraternities. They don’t get in as far as the fundamental undemocracy of unelected governing bodies—much less to the revolutionary idea of a craft organization of teachers.”“The last is new,” said a statistics man. “The editor ofSciencehas been hammering for years on election of president by faculty.”“The University of Washington has a big committee working on undemocratic government,” said Hastings the mathematician.“So’s Illinois,” said some one.“Cornell’s talking of letting full professors vote for a third of its board of trustees,” said a professor of engineering.“Wouldn’t it be better,” said Vida, “if you put yourselves in a position to compel such an elementary right as self-government, instead of waiting to have a third of it bestowed—perhaps?”“Certainly,” said the engineer. “The right is only secure if based on our own power to get and hold it.”“We ought to have got together last year when Brooks and Gleason were fired,” said Hastings.“Better late than never,” muttered Sanders. “We might save the next man.”“Yes,” said Searles of the French section, “but what some of us want to know is why we have not heard of this militant union. It’s all right in the right hands. But who’s responsible for the idea? When and where did it start? Whom can one write to about it? Why isn’t it represented in our own faculty?”Vida set her lips and looked at Clark and Guthrie. The iron was hot.Clark struck. “It started in this faculty last night,” he said.The attention of the group, which included two newspaper men, centred upon him. “I was one of those present.”There was a little thrill at the courage of his declaration. Vida loved him for it.“I was another,” said Professor Guthrie.Mrs. Guthrie caught his arm. “John!” she exclaimed beseechingly. The word filled the group with a sense of drama and danger.“As senior in that discussion,” said Guthrie, unshaken, “I regard it as my duty now to invite others who feel possibilities in a movement for freer government to meet and consider plans.”“When?” asked Searles promptly.“And where?” Two or three spoke at once.Mrs. Guthrie turned away despairingly and sank down in a theatre seat. The thing was going.“I suggest my rooms now,” said Clark.“I will join you there as soon as I have taken Mrs. Guthrie home,” said Guthrie. The footsteps of the pair echoed in the emptied auditorium as they went out.The college teachers asked Vida Martin to give them the benefit of her organizing experience, and nine of them went to Clark’s rooms.There two of them, one a specialist on the American revolution, cautiously declined to commit themselves to any action at that time, but the revolutionists increased their number from two to seven.They threshed their way through a lot of instinctive, irrational objections to formal organization, and planned to dragnet the faculty for members. In a few days, as things were going, they could make their position impregnable.That the organization they sought was essentially a union of their craft became so clear that a scorn of disguising names like league, association, and federation prevailed even against the statistician’s sarcastic suggestion that they dub themselves “Brain Workers, No. 1.”“Professors’ Union” was rejected, not on account of its openness to ridicule, but because it did not include instructorsand assistants. In order not to exclude small institutions “college” prevailed over “university.”When they went home that night, glowing with their new communal hope, Guthrie was chairman and Clark secretary of the first local of the C. T. U.IVThe brunt of battle fell next day on Guthrie. His eleven o’clock lecture was interrupted by a messenger with a note asking him to call at the President’s office at noon.When he faced the Ruler in his swivel chair, that representative of things as they are was friendly of manner but meant business.“I want to talk to you about you and Clark,” he said. “I have asked for Clark’s resignation, and I am extremely anxious not to have to ask for yours.”“Clark dismissed!” exclaimed Guthrie. He realized that the President was striking too quickly for them, and groped for defence.“I warn you fairly that the Regents are behind me,” said the President. “You have your choice of severing with that preposterous organization formed in Clark’s rooms last night or with the University.”“You may not find it so simple a matter to dismiss teachers merely because they choose to form an organization,” said Guthrie, stiffening. “It is an open acknowledgment that freedom of action does not exist. Moreover, it is not two men you dismiss, if any, but—a considerable number.”“I have reason to think not,” replied the President.Guthrie was weakened by his lack of information, and by the fear that his colleagues had gone to pieces.“Make no mistake,” said the President. “I am prepared to dismissseven—if necessary. There are other reasons for your own dismissal. You supported Clark in his insubordination with regard to Vida Martin.”“Since you did refuse to let her speak in the University what was there wrong in saying so?”“Clark’s tone. And yesterday you came out astonishingly for sex-radicalism. The student president of the Y. W. C. A. came to me and protested, saying a professor in this institution had no right to corrupt the youth of the State with any such doctrine as unmarried motherhood.”“Because I presented Shaw’s argument!” exclaimed Guthrie indignantly. “If you are going to adopt this girl’s point of view you will be compelled to maintain the position that the ideas of the most conspicuous living English writer shall not be mentioned to students of English in this University!”“Well, Guthrie, you must know where the fathers and mothers of this State would stand in a fight about that. You cannot expect the University to rise higher than its source, and its source is the community.”“The University has no reason for existence unless it rises higher than the rest of the community,” said Guthrie. “It is nothing if it is not able to lift itself out of the community’s inertia and maintain itself against the community’s prejudice. If you had not condemned without inquiry that organization formed last night, you might find that it contains the possibility of raising the faculty into precisely that commanding position.”“I know the purpose of your organization, Professor Guthrie. Its success would mean the end of all directing authority. An executive could not discipline men upon whose votes he was dependent for continuance in his position.”“That is absurd,” said Guthrie scornfully. “An English premier, dependent upon a parliamentary majority, possesses power enough to govern the British Empire. He is not able to dismiss members of Parliament. There’s no reason why the head of a university should have any such power. There is altogether too much disciplining of teachers for acting on their own honest convictions.”“I won’t argue that matter of opinion,” said the President. “The fact is plain that you have placed yourself at the head of an organization directed squarely against the legally constituted authority of this University, and unless you drop it you go.”Guthrie sat silent, facing what he felt must be a vain sacrifice of himself—and nothing gained for his cause. He heardthe rushing click of typewriters through the closed door of an adjoining office. Their frequent tiny bells of warning gave him a sense of time moving too fast, events crowding too close.The President rose and walked slowly up and down the room. “Can you afford it, Guthrie?” he said kindly. “How about your life insurance? Will it lapse if you stop payment? How about your house? Still paying for it?”“You are remarkably well informed as to my private affairs,” said Guthrie coldly.“You have given me reason to be. Your children are approaching their most expensive years. How about their education? Do you want Harold and Lucy Guthrie to sink back into the untrained, ignorant class?”“That’s the fiendish cruelty of this!” cried Guthrie. He saw the eager face of Harold offering to sacrifice his little Indian suit. “That’s where you’ve got me,” he said despondently. “No wonder one of the Regents offered to double Clark’s salary if he would marry. There’s something hellish in a system that makes a slave of a man through the needs of his children!”“It is doubtful if any other university will want you when it becomes known why you left here,” mused the President. “Don’t do it, Guthrie. You’ve been a living influence with our students. Many an old grad. is grateful to you for kindling in him here a life-long love of letters. You ought to go on doing that for twenty years.”“It’s just because I do not want to stop being a living influence—— A man must grow or ossify. Yesterday a new world of thought, a new secret of living, a new sincerity, came to birth in my mind. You want me to kill it. That is not being a living influence. That is spiritual infanticide. It means my extinction as a free teacher. And deserting that organization I helped to form last night—that means dishonor!”“No,” said the President emphatically. “You cannot be expected to sacrifice your career and your family because you happened to be carried away in a dramatic moment worked up by a professional agitator. You’ll see that within a month. This means your salvation from some wild ideas and wilder conduct.”With an air of relaxing from strain the President dropped back easily in his chair. “That woman must be clever, Guthrie. Isn’t she?”“She’s more than clever,” said Guthrie. “She’s a brave and skilful fighter for a great cause—a thing I cannot be. I cannot even face what every married button-cutter faces when he goes on strike!”Partially realizing how low Guthrie was sinking in his own estimation, the President was not the man to let sympathy keep him from gaining his end. “Well, Guthrie,” he said, “I take it that chiefly on account of your children I may count on your withdrawing from the College Teachers’ Union.” He smiled. “I say nothing more about the sex-radicalism, for I feel sure you will yourself see the need of soft-pedalling that in the classroom and in public. I am heartily glad you are still going to be with us.”Guthrie went out of the President’s office like a man who has been drugged. With an instinct to hide from every eye, he sought the noonday solitude of his seminar room, let the door lock behind him, and at the head of the long green table sank into that chair they called the chair of English.There, in the hour of his degradation, he felt prophetically the ennui of the next twenty years—the dead thoughts he would there utter and reiterate—the bored young faces——What had become of the interestingness of ideas? Where was that passion for the hard and glorious quest of the true truth within? Why had he been so fiercely bent on shaping new channels for his energy? He had no energy. His thwarted force flowed away from his will where it meant health and conquest into a morbid intensity of emotion—the road to melancholia.He stiffened up. There was one pain he must meet now. There was that desire to hide to overcome—a self-revelation harder than any he had ever thought to make. There was shame to endure. “I have to tell her,” he said.He rose and left his solitude, went down the deserted central walk, and over to the drab-colored hotel. He looked between the open double doors into the dining room. There werea dozen people. At the table by the window in the corner where he had sat with them two days before were Kenton Clark and Vida. They beckoned eagerly to Guthrie.He found himself strangely unwilling to cross alone the moderately large square room. Its floor of alternate light and dark wooden strips seemed like a great open space in which something evil must happen. He yielded to the irrational fear which impelled him to slip around close to the wall.Without waiting for him to take off his overcoat or sit down, Clark flashed news of his own dismissal—too much aglow with the war they were going to wage to perceive anything wrong with Guthrie.“Searles wanted all six to resign!” said Clark in a low, eager voice. “Corking spirit, but we decided not. Six is too few. With six more—! If we’d only had a little more time! Never mind. The idea is sound. We’ll put it through. We’re going to raise a fund. I’ll give my whole time to it as organizer. Sit down, man, sit down!”Guthrie shook his head.Vida rose with sudden solicitude, came close and laid her hand on his arm. “What has happened to you, Mr. Guthrie?” she asked, so low that Clark barely heard.“You are happy people,” said Guthrie, for a moment permitting her searching eyes to fathom his. “You will fight beautifully. I have failed you. The children were too much for me. I have caved in. I keep my job. I’m done for.”He turned away, unable to endure their eyes. “Good-bye,” he said, and started back along the wall.Clark sprang up, napkin in hand, knocking a knife to the floor. “Oh, here!” he protested.Vida, with compassionate eyes on the retreating figure of Guthrie, stopped Clark with a gesture.“That’s final,” she said. “He’s crushed. There’s no use torturing him.”

George Cram Cook

Thebattle 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’slecture 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 Iwilllose 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 hadlaid 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.

II

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 conveyingit. 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 hecame 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 proposof 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 kickhimout—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 methodto 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 insecurenow,” 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.”

III

In one of his classes next day Professor Guthrie,à proposof a literary-historical question of intellectual freedom, talked of the survival in American university government of the heretic-expelling machinery of the theocratic seventeenth century college. He said no professor who had a mind and spoke it was safe, and recommended the lecture of the syndicalist leader Vida Martin that night as promising to develop some new ideas on academic freedom.

It had never occurred to the students, accepting things as they found them, that it did not exist.

Vida’s handbills appeared with the cunning red line through “Assembly Hall.” Groups of students on the steps talked of the button-cutters’ strike, of syndicalism, of Judge Graham and Vida Martin. There was hot denunciation and defence of Professor Guthrie’s daring new ideas. He had stated the argument in the preface of Shaw’sGetting Married. The insulation between the university and the thought of the living world was broken.

A newspaper clipping about Vida Martin’s activity in university circles reached Regent H. P. Denton of Manistee, who caught a train from there that afternoon and called upon the President.

Some of the professors in the Opera House that night were furious at Vida Martin’s attack—the contrast she drew between striking button-cutters and submissive professors—her characterization of them as thinkers who dare not think. It seemed unjust to them because their submissiveness was a life-long habit and unconscious.

Some who realized this said it was stinging but salutary.

Hostile or friendly they felt the speaker’s personal force—the unfamiliar union in her mind of carefulness and fire.

During the lecture one ambitious assistant professor left to inform the President that he had been attacked in an alleged exposure of a connection between factory owners of Manistee and the Board of Regents.

The student president of the Y. W. C. A. who had recently acquired a taste for being shocked was disappointed because Vida advanced none of the ideas she was supposed to entertain regarding free love.

Mrs. Guthrie was in the dress circle with her husband and Clark. Reporters were watching them as the probable centre of a new storm in the faculty.

When Vida came to that “militant union which can restore the scholar’s dignity and through the fearlessness of freedom make the university teacher a living force as in the days of Abelard,” she surprised Clark and Guthrie by relating it closely to the syndicalist ideal. The organized college teachers should ultimately form a section of that part of the “one big union” which controlled education—a body of six hundred thousand teachers. She looked ahead to a far, fine goal. “Aside from its present, practical, fighting advantages,” she said, “this organization is a necessity as germ of a social organ essential to the future. It should be the crown of the crafts composing industrial society, not aloof from the working-class in disdainful superiority, but understanding its solidarity with all—free but responsible, governed not from without as now by the economic control of another class represented by Regents, but from within by the high technical conscience of the guild.” There a bigger vision of it opened to her unexpectedly. She spoke as awed by something mystic in her own unforeseen words. “The Scholars’ Guild,” she repeated. “It might become the central organ of the world’s new mind!”

That closed her lecture religiously. While the bulk of the audience was moving out—full of little explosions of argument—a number of instructors and young professors gathered around the lecturer near the stage door under the balcony. She foundthem surcharged with facts, and feelings, about the way they were governed.

When Mr. and Mrs. Guthrie reached the group, Sanders of the sociology department was talking energetically about recent magazine criticism of universities. “It’s unpenetrative,” he said. “They seem unable to see anything but undemocratic student fraternities. They don’t get in as far as the fundamental undemocracy of unelected governing bodies—much less to the revolutionary idea of a craft organization of teachers.”

“The last is new,” said a statistics man. “The editor ofSciencehas been hammering for years on election of president by faculty.”

“The University of Washington has a big committee working on undemocratic government,” said Hastings the mathematician.

“So’s Illinois,” said some one.

“Cornell’s talking of letting full professors vote for a third of its board of trustees,” said a professor of engineering.

“Wouldn’t it be better,” said Vida, “if you put yourselves in a position to compel such an elementary right as self-government, instead of waiting to have a third of it bestowed—perhaps?”

“Certainly,” said the engineer. “The right is only secure if based on our own power to get and hold it.”

“We ought to have got together last year when Brooks and Gleason were fired,” said Hastings.

“Better late than never,” muttered Sanders. “We might save the next man.”

“Yes,” said Searles of the French section, “but what some of us want to know is why we have not heard of this militant union. It’s all right in the right hands. But who’s responsible for the idea? When and where did it start? Whom can one write to about it? Why isn’t it represented in our own faculty?”

Vida set her lips and looked at Clark and Guthrie. The iron was hot.

Clark struck. “It started in this faculty last night,” he said.The attention of the group, which included two newspaper men, centred upon him. “I was one of those present.”

There was a little thrill at the courage of his declaration. Vida loved him for it.

“I was another,” said Professor Guthrie.

Mrs. Guthrie caught his arm. “John!” she exclaimed beseechingly. The word filled the group with a sense of drama and danger.

“As senior in that discussion,” said Guthrie, unshaken, “I regard it as my duty now to invite others who feel possibilities in a movement for freer government to meet and consider plans.”

“When?” asked Searles promptly.

“And where?” Two or three spoke at once.

Mrs. Guthrie turned away despairingly and sank down in a theatre seat. The thing was going.

“I suggest my rooms now,” said Clark.

“I will join you there as soon as I have taken Mrs. Guthrie home,” said Guthrie. The footsteps of the pair echoed in the emptied auditorium as they went out.

The college teachers asked Vida Martin to give them the benefit of her organizing experience, and nine of them went to Clark’s rooms.

There two of them, one a specialist on the American revolution, cautiously declined to commit themselves to any action at that time, but the revolutionists increased their number from two to seven.

They threshed their way through a lot of instinctive, irrational objections to formal organization, and planned to dragnet the faculty for members. In a few days, as things were going, they could make their position impregnable.

That the organization they sought was essentially a union of their craft became so clear that a scorn of disguising names like league, association, and federation prevailed even against the statistician’s sarcastic suggestion that they dub themselves “Brain Workers, No. 1.”

“Professors’ Union” was rejected, not on account of its openness to ridicule, but because it did not include instructorsand assistants. In order not to exclude small institutions “college” prevailed over “university.”

When they went home that night, glowing with their new communal hope, Guthrie was chairman and Clark secretary of the first local of the C. T. U.

IV

The brunt of battle fell next day on Guthrie. His eleven o’clock lecture was interrupted by a messenger with a note asking him to call at the President’s office at noon.

When he faced the Ruler in his swivel chair, that representative of things as they are was friendly of manner but meant business.

“I want to talk to you about you and Clark,” he said. “I have asked for Clark’s resignation, and I am extremely anxious not to have to ask for yours.”

“Clark dismissed!” exclaimed Guthrie. He realized that the President was striking too quickly for them, and groped for defence.

“I warn you fairly that the Regents are behind me,” said the President. “You have your choice of severing with that preposterous organization formed in Clark’s rooms last night or with the University.”

“You may not find it so simple a matter to dismiss teachers merely because they choose to form an organization,” said Guthrie, stiffening. “It is an open acknowledgment that freedom of action does not exist. Moreover, it is not two men you dismiss, if any, but—a considerable number.”

“I have reason to think not,” replied the President.

Guthrie was weakened by his lack of information, and by the fear that his colleagues had gone to pieces.

“Make no mistake,” said the President. “I am prepared to dismissseven—if necessary. There are other reasons for your own dismissal. You supported Clark in his insubordination with regard to Vida Martin.”

“Since you did refuse to let her speak in the University what was there wrong in saying so?”

“Clark’s tone. And yesterday you came out astonishingly for sex-radicalism. The student president of the Y. W. C. A. came to me and protested, saying a professor in this institution had no right to corrupt the youth of the State with any such doctrine as unmarried motherhood.”

“Because I presented Shaw’s argument!” exclaimed Guthrie indignantly. “If you are going to adopt this girl’s point of view you will be compelled to maintain the position that the ideas of the most conspicuous living English writer shall not be mentioned to students of English in this University!”

“Well, Guthrie, you must know where the fathers and mothers of this State would stand in a fight about that. You cannot expect the University to rise higher than its source, and its source is the community.”

“The University has no reason for existence unless it rises higher than the rest of the community,” said Guthrie. “It is nothing if it is not able to lift itself out of the community’s inertia and maintain itself against the community’s prejudice. If you had not condemned without inquiry that organization formed last night, you might find that it contains the possibility of raising the faculty into precisely that commanding position.”

“I know the purpose of your organization, Professor Guthrie. Its success would mean the end of all directing authority. An executive could not discipline men upon whose votes he was dependent for continuance in his position.”

“That is absurd,” said Guthrie scornfully. “An English premier, dependent upon a parliamentary majority, possesses power enough to govern the British Empire. He is not able to dismiss members of Parliament. There’s no reason why the head of a university should have any such power. There is altogether too much disciplining of teachers for acting on their own honest convictions.”

“I won’t argue that matter of opinion,” said the President. “The fact is plain that you have placed yourself at the head of an organization directed squarely against the legally constituted authority of this University, and unless you drop it you go.”

Guthrie sat silent, facing what he felt must be a vain sacrifice of himself—and nothing gained for his cause. He heardthe rushing click of typewriters through the closed door of an adjoining office. Their frequent tiny bells of warning gave him a sense of time moving too fast, events crowding too close.

The President rose and walked slowly up and down the room. “Can you afford it, Guthrie?” he said kindly. “How about your life insurance? Will it lapse if you stop payment? How about your house? Still paying for it?”

“You are remarkably well informed as to my private affairs,” said Guthrie coldly.

“You have given me reason to be. Your children are approaching their most expensive years. How about their education? Do you want Harold and Lucy Guthrie to sink back into the untrained, ignorant class?”

“That’s the fiendish cruelty of this!” cried Guthrie. He saw the eager face of Harold offering to sacrifice his little Indian suit. “That’s where you’ve got me,” he said despondently. “No wonder one of the Regents offered to double Clark’s salary if he would marry. There’s something hellish in a system that makes a slave of a man through the needs of his children!”

“It is doubtful if any other university will want you when it becomes known why you left here,” mused the President. “Don’t do it, Guthrie. You’ve been a living influence with our students. Many an old grad. is grateful to you for kindling in him here a life-long love of letters. You ought to go on doing that for twenty years.”

“It’s just because I do not want to stop being a living influence—— A man must grow or ossify. Yesterday a new world of thought, a new secret of living, a new sincerity, came to birth in my mind. You want me to kill it. That is not being a living influence. That is spiritual infanticide. It means my extinction as a free teacher. And deserting that organization I helped to form last night—that means dishonor!”

“No,” said the President emphatically. “You cannot be expected to sacrifice your career and your family because you happened to be carried away in a dramatic moment worked up by a professional agitator. You’ll see that within a month. This means your salvation from some wild ideas and wilder conduct.”

With an air of relaxing from strain the President dropped back easily in his chair. “That woman must be clever, Guthrie. Isn’t she?”

“She’s more than clever,” said Guthrie. “She’s a brave and skilful fighter for a great cause—a thing I cannot be. I cannot even face what every married button-cutter faces when he goes on strike!”

Partially realizing how low Guthrie was sinking in his own estimation, the President was not the man to let sympathy keep him from gaining his end. “Well, Guthrie,” he said, “I take it that chiefly on account of your children I may count on your withdrawing from the College Teachers’ Union.” He smiled. “I say nothing more about the sex-radicalism, for I feel sure you will yourself see the need of soft-pedalling that in the classroom and in public. I am heartily glad you are still going to be with us.”

Guthrie went out of the President’s office like a man who has been drugged. With an instinct to hide from every eye, he sought the noonday solitude of his seminar room, let the door lock behind him, and at the head of the long green table sank into that chair they called the chair of English.

There, in the hour of his degradation, he felt prophetically the ennui of the next twenty years—the dead thoughts he would there utter and reiterate—the bored young faces——

What had become of the interestingness of ideas? Where was that passion for the hard and glorious quest of the true truth within? Why had he been so fiercely bent on shaping new channels for his energy? He had no energy. His thwarted force flowed away from his will where it meant health and conquest into a morbid intensity of emotion—the road to melancholia.

He stiffened up. There was one pain he must meet now. There was that desire to hide to overcome—a self-revelation harder than any he had ever thought to make. There was shame to endure. “I have to tell her,” he said.

He rose and left his solitude, went down the deserted central walk, and over to the drab-colored hotel. He looked between the open double doors into the dining room. There werea dozen people. At the table by the window in the corner where he had sat with them two days before were Kenton Clark and Vida. They beckoned eagerly to Guthrie.

He found himself strangely unwilling to cross alone the moderately large square room. Its floor of alternate light and dark wooden strips seemed like a great open space in which something evil must happen. He yielded to the irrational fear which impelled him to slip around close to the wall.

Without waiting for him to take off his overcoat or sit down, Clark flashed news of his own dismissal—too much aglow with the war they were going to wage to perceive anything wrong with Guthrie.

“Searles wanted all six to resign!” said Clark in a low, eager voice. “Corking spirit, but we decided not. Six is too few. With six more—! If we’d only had a little more time! Never mind. The idea is sound. We’ll put it through. We’re going to raise a fund. I’ll give my whole time to it as organizer. Sit down, man, sit down!”

Guthrie shook his head.

Vida rose with sudden solicitude, came close and laid her hand on his arm. “What has happened to you, Mr. Guthrie?” she asked, so low that Clark barely heard.

“You are happy people,” said Guthrie, for a moment permitting her searching eyes to fathom his. “You will fight beautifully. I have failed you. The children were too much for me. I have caved in. I keep my job. I’m done for.”

He turned away, unable to endure their eyes. “Good-bye,” he said, and started back along the wall.

Clark sprang up, napkin in hand, knocking a knife to the floor. “Oh, here!” he protested.

Vida, with compassionate eyes on the retreating figure of Guthrie, stopped Clark with a gesture.

“That’s final,” she said. “He’s crushed. There’s no use torturing him.”

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