The Professor Goes to Lunch

THE chimes in the memorial tower almost overhead suddenly began to jangle, their metallic voices flooding the old classroom, which had to be ventilated by opening the windows. Thirty pairs of feet scuffled, and the professor’s voice faded away. Noon — the hour was over. No more nineteenth-century prose that day. Twenty-nine pairs of feet carried their owners noisily out the door and down the stairs. One boy remained, addressing the professor, who was gathering two or three books and several sheets of yellowed notes into a brief case.

’Sir, I had to go home last week because my mother was sick, and I could n’t get that report on Newman done. I wonder if you’d —’

’See the Dean’s office,’said the professor sharply.

‘Yes, sir, but —’

The professor drew the zipper around his case and looked at the youth before him.

‘I trust your mother is out of danger,’ he said.

‘Oh, yes, sir, she—’

’Don’t you like Newman?‘

‘Well, I guess so. He’s—’

‘ You guess so? Have you tried him?’

The boy met the professor’s eye. His expression changed.

‘Yes, sir,’he replied. ‘I tried. I guess he’s not up my alley, sir.’

‘I guess very likely he’s not,’ said the professor with faint emphasis on the guess. ‘But I guess you’d better invite him up before next Tuesday and have a good long session.’

’Yes, sir. Thank you.’

The boy shuffled away on dirty rubber-soled shoes and the professor slowly followed. Thirty students. Fifteen years ago there had been ninety-five. But that was before the new interest in the ‘social sciences’ — ‘sciences,’ rubbish! After all, Charlie Benton’s course in Chaucer was down to twelve. He was n’t the only one to suffer. Suffer? How much did he really care except as a matter of silly personal vanity? And what difference did it make? Why should any boy read Newman? What place is there for Newman in this day and age?

A passage came into his head as he emerged upon the campus. ‘Many a more fruitful coast or isle is washed by the blue Ægean, many is the spot more beautiful or sublime to see, many the territory more ample; but there was one charm in Attica which in the same perfection was nowhere else. . . .’ Yes, that was the way it began, exactly. And that charm? How did it go? ‘The special purity, elasticity, clearness and salubrity of the air of Attica. . . .’ Then came the beautiful passage about what the English business man would not have reported — the tender tints on the marbles, the fragrance of the hillsides, the shiver and break of the white spray along the shore. . . .

The professor repeated what further phrases he could remember, slowly to himself, savoring their rhythm with an abstracted inward ear.

The day was dank and gray and warm. Stale, dirty snow was melting under the campus trees, and the crosswalks — which, like campus walks everywhere, made no definite design, but had been forced to obey the human instinct for a short cut — were fouled with dirty puddles. From behind the enclosing buildings came the roar of city traffic. At one side there was a wide gap, and through it, across the city street, he could see the Gothic pile of a new building, a building which had cost millions, to house the students in a luxury of carved oak and tiled shower baths and vaulted dining halls. The street was foul with oily slush, lined with parked motor cars, and through it passed a ceaseless stream of trucks, trolley cars, buses, and pedestrians.

‘Washed by the blue Ægean’ — quaint ideas Newman had for the site of a university!

The professor had been a student in this college, how many — good God, forty years ago! No piles of scholastic Gothic then, but only this older campus, with fewer buildings. Did n’t know then they were ugly. Maybe they’re not. The snow used to stay clean, too. There were n’t any motor cars. A few horses cloppity-clopping past. He could remember hearing them at night, as he studied — as he read Newman, and Ruskin, and Carlyle, and Arnold, and Pater. Pater — odd how phrases linger, and the memory of your first meeting with them. He and Joe Ellis, in those far-off days, were striving for ‘style,’ because ‘style’ was what landed you on the Literary Monthly board. One day Joe had rushed into his room, brandishing a book (it was bound in red, he recalled). ‘Listen, Bob, listen! It’s great! “The presence which thus rose so strangely beside the waters . . .”A purple passage? Maybe. He often said so. He scoffed at it, perhaps in unconscious deference to the bored expressions on his students’ faces as they listened — or pretended to. But what a grand, rich, satisfying color purple once had been! A royal color. Royal! Now we are making prose safe for democracy.

The professor, on that reflection, stepped over a puddle of slush with a certain alacrity. Not bad, not bad.

Students were streaming past him on their way from classes, or to lunch. Most of them wore dirty white summer shoes and no hats. Many wore light-colored overcoats dirtier than the shoes. It was the fad to be badly dressed. Collegiate — only they would choke before they’d use that word. But they could n’t have thought of any other.

The professor passed from the old campus to the street, and was caught in a current of boys and girls swarming down the sidewalk from a near-by public high school. They were shrill and aggressive, with hard little faces, and not one of them, of either sex, yielded any place to the spare, elderly man with the brief case, who breasted his way as best he might against their current. Their shrillness, their unattractiveness, the crude, harsh inflections of their speech, their endless numbers, made him faintly ill.

He turned in presently under a pseudo-Gothic arch, and found himself in a small quadrangle out of the Middle Ages. Stone walls mellowed by acid rose around him, full of windows with tiny leaded panes of glass expensively full of defects. Above the gabled roofs of many-colored slate rose towers and battlements. One sash of a fourthstory window stood open, and as the professor entered the quadrangle five or six boys on the ground were busily endeavoring to throw a snowball into the room behind. The stone wall around the window was peppered with white dots. At last two shots took effect. The first went through the opening, and there came down the sound of a faint crash.

‘Wheel’ cried the marksman. ‘Got something that time.’

The second shot, with a soggy snowball, caught a leaded pane full in the centre, and there was the tinkle of broken glass, so dear to the ears of the young.

‘Jeez,’ said the thrower, ‘let’s go eat!’

The youths sprang upon the flagstone walk, and, swinging neatly past the professor, dashed for the diningroom door, which the last one let slam almost in his face.

The professor, hanging his wraps in a far corner of the coatroom, could overhear snatches of conversation.

‘. . . a case of the stuff? Oh, feller!’

‘Old Johnny was good this morning. You oughta got up. Took the NRA for a ride. And how!’

‘. . . and did we blow him a raspberry!’

‘So what?’

He passed through this jargon, and through the pine-paneled commons room (why Georgian pine paneling in a Gothic building, he wondered, as always when it caught his eye) to the high-vaulted dining room, with its elaborate and beautiful oak carving, its expensively silent oak plank floor, its stately windows looking out on the large quad, and its scores of tables where boys were energetically eating. He was one of the faculty privileged to eat here — or, rather, he was supposed to eat here so that the students could have the privilege of sitting with him. So far, few of them had shown any inclination to avail themselves of the privilege. He hoped they would continue thus indifferent. Why should they wish to sit with him? Or he with them? Familiar as he was with them, he saw them suddenly as a race apart. They were separated from him, at any rate, by a great barrier of time. He might know their world, or as much of it as he cared to, but he was not of it. They did not even know his. They could never know his. His world shaped him when he was their age — forty years ago. These boys never knew a world in which there were no motor cars, no movies, no radio. Radio — he smiled again at the excuse offered in all honesty by one of his students to explain his failure to prepare a lesson. The boy said his radio broke down and he could n’t study. But it was a crooked smile, for the professor had believed him. The raucous and habitual noise suddenly shut off, a silence descended on that boy, not blessed but paralyzing.

It was his day for calling up quotations from the well of memory — a silly trick, but oddly comforting, like soft music.

He cast his eye down the ranks of tables, looking for one where some faculty member approximately of his age might be seated. Harry Boynton was in a far corner by himself, sardonically contemplating a plate of salad. The professor drew near and took the place opposite. Boynton looked up, nodded, and remarked: —

‘It is a curious fact that dressing improves a salad almost as much as a woman. I call this salad distinctly dowdy.’

‘When we were young we ate sugar on our lettuce,’ said the professor.

‘And wore woolen drawers,’ said the other. ‘ Undoubtedly civilization is advancing.’

‘Harry, you teach composition —’

‘I call it that on warm spring days when vacation is approaching and my invincible optimism is reborn.’

‘Well, you give a course in it. What writers do your boys imitate?’

‘Oh, Caldwell, of course. It used to be Hemingway, but he’s distinctly old fogey now.’

‘That’s unfortunate. I was just catching up to him. Should I skip him and tackle this — what is it — Caldwell?’

‘I would n’t if I were you,’ said Boynton. ‘Wait a bit and then you can skip him too.’

‘And then I can wait some more, and skip the next one?’

‘Exactly. You can go skipping through modern literature with a light heart. Your field is the nineteenth century.’

‘That’s not my field, it’s my home.’

Something in the professor’s voice made his colleague look up from the scantily dressed salad at which he was pecking.

‘Don’t let it get you, Bob,’ he said.

‘Let what get me?’

‘Call it the weather. I always do.’

‘Are you an expatriate, too, Harry?’

‘And that means?’

‘That means living in a land of aliens. Expatriates in Time, that’s what we are — or I am. Oh, I can talk on Pater and Newman historically, and set papers and give examinations. But why do that? What good is it? It’s their mood, their ideas, their music, which gave me something more than the thin barley-water blood of “scholarship”! Bah, sometimes I hate the very word! I can’t make them rekindle in this age the fires they kindled in mine. Newman, a boy just told me, is n’t up his alley.’

‘And Caldwell is n’t up yours.’

‘So what?’ the professor quoted grimly.

‘So I think we might take a walk this afternoon, out where the pavement ends. You would n’t get that allusion, Bob, but never mind. There’s a lot of clean snow up Newcastle way, and we’ll dig old Cobalt McFee out of his studio to give us tea — or something. It’s generally something. Remember how he always said Ruskin could n’t write and Pater was a pansy? ’

‘And you think that will cheer me up ? ’

‘It ought to. It’ll make you mad.’

‘You’re a decent old idiot,’ said the professor. ‘ I ’ll pick you up at three if I can get my papers corrected.’

Boynton left, and presently the professor finished his dessert of two pale canned apricots, lit a pipe, and followed him. A watery sun was trying to break through the gray mist. Unabated, the stream of traffic was grinding down the sloppy street. A fireengine siren shrieked on the next block. A motor van went by, covered with lurid posters for a motion picture and making the air hideous with the blast of a loud speaker. From a parked car beside the curb came the harsh, mechanical voice of a radio, to which the girl and the two boys crowded on the front seat were paying no attention. The shrill stream of high-school children was bearing down upon the professor as they returned for their afternoon session. Or was it a different lot? Who could tell? They all looked alike. And so many — so many!

‘“Jeez, Babe,” I says, “can that stuff . . .”’

‘Washed by the blue Ægean . . . Thou still unravished bride of Quietness . . .’

The professor hurried into his office and shut the door. There was silence, and loneliness. He sank into his battered armchair and closed his eyes wearily.