Chapter 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 conveying it. Her manner he felt to be not her own unaided invention but a social growth—a collaboration of many men and women moving in the same direction. He felt a need of moving with them.

The most tangible thing for him was an accent of sincerity in Vida which compelled her listener into an answering sincerity. He coveted the secret of that social power—the power of being and doing that. It rested down on a greater democracy than he had known—upon her sense of oneness with others, her feeling of non-superiority, her assumption: “You and I are fundamentally alike.”

He wanted to be with her long enough to catch that feeling, to have and to use it, giving it forth in turn to others. What a power to fill his students with! The teacher in him craved that secret of living. He wanted it to transmit; he wanted it as seed to sow in a more human seminar than he had yet conducted.

It meant scrutinizing, accepting and conveying the actual human truth about one’s own feelings and motives—without thought of whether they were or were not admirable. It meant the acceptance of one’s self as the most authentic human document—a desire and firm resolution not to embellish or in any way falsify that text in the mind of another.

One couldn’t do that and continue to set one’s self up professor-like as an example to youth. The power could be exerted only by taking youth completely into his confidence. Only one’s real, uncensored thoughts and impulses as they sprang out of one’s own nature had that quality he sought. He felt that he needed the help of Vida, with her long habit of truthful self-revelation, in learning to read that intricate, much disregarded text—himself.

In his new spirit he spoke to Mrs. Guthrie about the secret he wanted to acquire from Vida Martin, hoping to rouse in Anna a desire to acquire it for herself.

But Anna Guthrie was not prepared to take John’s grouping of himself and her as two human beings who had something to learn from a third. She was hurt that her husband should find in another woman something valuable which she herself lacked, and she thought him perfectly brutal in the bald way he came out with it. Things like that which would hurt people ought to be concealed. She herself concealed such things.

“Practising sincerity is like making a bargain,” Guthrie reflected. “It takes two. Not everyone is ready for it.”

To Vida arriving with Clark for dinner, Mrs. Guthrie was conventionally gracious—a manner she put on as she took off the all-over apron which protected her next to best dress in the hot kitchen. The green young Bohemian girl there was chiefly useful to Mrs. Guthrie as a topic of heartfelt conversation.

Vida avoided it by starting some talk with Lucy and Harold, aged ten and eight, who sat at a little table behind her. By the time she had them laughing Mrs. Guthrie’s prejudice began to thaw.

Their father noted their expressiveness with Vida. “They get it too,” he reflected. “They’re more human than I’ve realized. Anna and I have had too much the ideal of a child as a little obeying machine.”

When Mrs. Guthrie heard that the evening paper had a story about Vida’s exclusion from the University and Clark’s insubordination, she was perturbed by the question: “What will the President’s wife say of my having such a woman to dinner?”

The discussion which gave that dinner its importance sprang from Guthrie’s deploring, _à propos_ of the danger of Clark’s dismissal, the fact that a professor could not act in accordance with his own judgment in such a matter without endangering his position. He gave a dozen instances of tyranny which seemed to have created in him only a sort of reflected personal resentment against particular presidents and regents.

“Why do you scholars allow the power to remove you to be placed in the hands of outsiders like the regents?” asked Vida, whose mind worked promptly from individuals to the system they stood for.

“Oh, that can’t be changed,” said Guthrie, off-hand.

“Why not?” she challenged.

“It’s as natural as sunrise,” he said. “We’re all controlled through bread and butter channels.”

“Other classes of workers are testing out ways of controlling their own bread and butter. Bread and butter freedom is precisely what the world now needs and seeks. Are university professors less capable of thought than button-cutters?”

“No,” said Clark. “But less capable of concerted action. We’re too confoundedly jealous and individualistic to work together.”

“How do you know that?” Vida demanded. “Have you ever tried it? With things as they are you certainly can’t fulfil your social function. You’ll either have to get together and secure your freedom or remain in a position where you cannot really influence your students.”

“But they do influence them!” protested Mrs. Guthrie.

“About all the students look to us for,” said Clark, “is credits. A credit costs on the average so much time and attention. A little more and they resent your overcharge, a little less and they gloat because they’ve been able to underpay.”

“Imagine their having such an attitude toward a live man dealing with live ideas!” exclaimed Vida. “Toward Bernard Shaw, for instance, lecturing on the necessity of extending to unmarried women the right to have children!”

Mrs. Guthrie looked apprehensively at Lucy and then at the young Bohemian girl who was bringing in the dessert. “Fortunately,” she said, “our professors do not care to deal with things like that.”

“No,” said Vida, “they prefer to let society continue unwarned its present insane treatment of illegitimacy.”

“There’s no question about our lack of freedom,” said Guthrie hastily, “nor about our need of it. But what means do you suggest to us, Miss Martin, for gaining it?”

“Well,” said Vida, “here’s Kenton Clark, one of the best economists in the country, in danger of being kicked out for recommending my lecture. Brooks and Gleason went the same way last year. Who kicks you out?”

“The President,” said Guthrie. “He holds his authority, however, from omnipotent Regents who can kick _him_ out—and frequently do.” That idea seemed rather pleasant to Guthrie. He smiled at it.

“Why don’t you elect your own Regents and your own President—as Americans should?” asked Vida. “Why not insist that you shall be removable only by vote of your own colleagues? It’s absurd that a body of men as highly trained as a university faculty should not be self-governing.”

“Yes, yes,” said Guthrie, “it is absurd. But here’s the existing system. What force is capable of transforming it?”

“Organization,” said Vida, fresh from her button-cutters. “How many college teachers are there?”

“Twenty-eight thousand,” said Guthrie. “Five thousand of ‘em women.”

“But not five thousand of ’em men,” said Kenton Clark with a malicious chuckle.

“They would be—with power,” said Vida. “I’d like to see it. The scholar would become a real force. It would be good to see thinking married again to doing, after the long divorce that has made them both sterile.”

“There’s plenty of powder lying loose in discontented faculties,” Clark mused. “If only it could be rammed together and—touched with flame.”

“Be the flame!” cried Vida. “A movement nation-wide may sweep out from John Guthrie and Kenton Clark.”

Mrs. Guthrie pushed back her chair energetically, indicating that dinner was over. “Shall we go to the parlor?” she said. The three were so absorbed they did not hear.

“Could we get a dozen men who’d hold together, Guthrie?” said Clark.

“There are more than a dozen—twice that many—radicals in the faculty,” said Guthrie. “Whether they’d hold together——”

“The Regents would have to think a bit before they fired a dozen men,” said Clark.

He and Guthrie tried to see how to get the substance of the labor union idea without taking the name or the form. Vida told them the name was immaterial, the form essential. “You can’t get the strength of organization without organizing,” she said.

Their instinct was against applying the working-class method to their profession. They raised the difficulty of equal pay for unequal work and mulled around over it till Vida gave them up. “You’ve been too carefully selected,” she said. “It’s temperamental. No real revolutionist becomes a college professor.”

That set Clark and Guthrie persuading her of the advantages of the union—which college teachers certainly had the brains to perceive.

“Yes,” said Vida, “but the will to achieve them, the spirit to fight for them, the power to make sacrifices for them?”

Mrs. Guthrie sprang up. The movement, which drew all eyes to her, placed her unintentionally near Vida. “I don’t want Harold and Lucy sacrificed!” she cried.

Her primeval cry made Vida’s hand leap out and press hers for an instant. Mrs. Guthrie wavered between hostility to Vida’s doctrines and the attraction of that wave of sympathy which swept her like a physical force.

“The wives of the button-cutters are facing that to-night,” said Vida, her voice deepening. “Don’t you see why, Mrs. Guthrie? Through the present danger they seek the children’s greater safety.”

“Sit down, Anna,” said Guthrie. “This talk is going to lead to something.”

“It shouldn’t!” exclaimed Mrs. Guthrie. “It must not!” She turned to Vida. “The men who take the first steps—they will lose their positions. My husband’s salary is all we have. For a father of a family—it would be criminal. We can live very well as we are, John, as we always have. The Regents have even appointed a committee to see about raising salaries.”

“Our despotism is benevolent,” said Clark, “—if we’re submissive enough.”

“Our positions are insecure _now_,” said Guthrie. “To hold them some of us have to sacrifice the best that’s in us.”

“If it’s that or the children——” said Mrs. Guthrie.

“Don’t worry, Anna,” said Guthrie. “If we go into this it will be because we see it will make us more secure, not less.”

Mrs. Guthrie went to the children’s table, leaned over Lucy’s chair, and drew the girl’s head against her breast.

“What do you think, Lucy?” asked Vida.

“Papa ought not to have to do his work wrong to get money for us to live,” said Lucy. She rose and went to her father, who put his arm around her and hugged her.

Harold made a dive for the other arm. “I’ve got six dollars in my bank, Papa,” he said. “I’ll get along without the Indian suit and only buy the bow and arrow.”