CHAPTER V
One September afternoon, Peter lingered in his class-room after his duties were done and his pupils had departed. He usually lost no time in shaking the dust of academic toil from his feet—and from his mind—but to-day an unwonted longing for some steadying purpose, some raison d'être, made him remain to dally with the tools of his occupation, perhaps in a wistful hope that he might discover a hitherto unsuspected charm in the teaching of rhetoric to reluctant young girls.
"If they only cared," he thought, "if they only cared a little for the English language, it wouldn't be such a deadly grind to teach I them. But they'll never 'contend for the shade of a world.' It's just a dull necessity to them—this business of learning how to use their mother tongue—except, of course, to Sheila. And next year she won't be here to help me endure it. Oh, how I wish I could get away—to something better, something bigger!"
But with the wish, there came to him also the certainty of its futility. He wouldn't get away; the next year, and the year following, and the year after that would find him still at his uninspiring post in the Shadyville Seminary, teaching bored pupils the properties of speech, and inwardly cursing himself for doing it.
For Peter knew that he would always be the victim of his own laziness; that every impulse toward a broader life and its achievements would be checked and overcome by what he termed his "vast inertia." In spite of his mental capacity, his social gifts, his assets of birth and excellent appearance, he would go through all his years without attaining either honors or profits—merely because, in his unconquerable languor, he would not exert himself to the extent of reaching out his hand for them.
He taught in the seminary because he must; because, otherwise, his bread would go unbuttered, or rather, there would be no bread to butter. For he was the last of a family whose fortune had been their "blood" and their brains, and not their material possessions. Nothing had been left to him but the prestige of his birth and his inherited intellect, and the connections which they opened to him. And these connections were rosebuds for him to wear in his buttonhole rather than beefsteak to swell his waistcoat. They entitled him to lead a cotillion, but not to direct a bank.
His natural parts, as he fully realized, would at any time have secured a career to him, if he had had the industry to use them assiduously. A little enterprise, a little initiative would long since have despatched him to the opportunities and successes of a city. But, always defeated by the "inertia" which he regarded as a fatal malady of his temperament—and also, perhaps, by a native distaste for the vulgar scramble and unsavory methods of the modern business world—his fine intelligence wasted itself in small tasks and his ambitions dissolved like dream-stuff in the somnolent atmosphere of Shadyville.
The only success available to him under such conditions was an advantageous marriage. This he could more than once have accomplished, for it cost him no effort to practice the abilities of the lover, and he had, indeed, a reputation for gallantry that invested him with a dangerous glamour as a suitor. But here he was thwarted each time by a quality that dominated him as ruthlessly to his undoing as did his laziness—and this quality was fastidiousness. For him only the exquisite was good enough. He wanted a woman with a face like an angel or a flower, and a soul to match it. And this the eligible girl had never had. So, although he had several times reached the verge of a leap into matrimonial prosperity, he had always drawn back before the crucial moment. A laugh—just a note too broad and loud—had once restrained him from the easy capture of half a million. He could not live with a woman who laughed like that, he told himself!
And on the other hand, though marriage appealed to him, he could not accept the exquisite in poverty. A few years before, he had spent a summer in courting a girl whose profile had enchanted him. In imagination he saw it always against a background of dull gold—the pure, slender throat; the sweet, round chin; the delicate, proud lip and nostril; the dreaming eye. But in fact, there was no background of gold, dull or otherwise; and when Peter reflected on the size of his salary and the shifts to which poverty must needs resort—the shabby clothes, the domestic sordidness, the devastating finger-marks of weariness and anxiety upon even the fairest face—his courage failed him, and he surrendered the profile to one who could give her a Kentucky stock farm, a town house in New York and a box at the opera there.
After that episode, he resigned his hope of romance. Fate was perverse and offered him impossible combinations, and he had not the energy to seek and seize for himself. So love, like the other big prizes of life, eluded him, and at thirty-three he was a confirmed bachelor as well as a professional idler. He still pursued the graceful, aimless flirtations that are the small change of intercourse at dances and dinners—just as he still read Theocritus—but neither his heart nor his mind engaged in any more serious endeavor.
And yet, every now and then, he felt a faint desire for something more, for something that should not be a pastime, nor a mere bread-and-butter chore—something that would demand and exhaust the best of him and give him in return the pride of work worth the doing and doing well.
This afternoon the desire was more than usually persistent, and it had held him at his desk long after school hours were over, fingering his pen and ink bottle, glancing through the weekly essays which had that day been handed in for criticism, and turning the leaves of a history of English literature with which he had vainly striven to awake enthusiasm in the minds of his class.
The school-room was a pleasant place, as school-rooms go. There were potted plants on the window sills and a few good engravings on the walls, and the afternoon sunshine was streaming gaily in. But to Peter the room was the disillusioning scene of unwilling labors—both on the part of his pupils and himself—and its chalky atmosphere was heavy and depressing.
"What's the use of pretending that this is a 'life-work'—a 'noble profession'?" he muttered, after his casual examination of a particularly discouraging essay. "They don't want to learn. They only want to get through and away. After Sheila graduates, I'll he without a single responsive pupil. For I won't get another like her—not in years, and probably never. Why don't I chuck it all? Why don't I go away? There's nothing to stay for! But my confounded antipathy to a tussle in the hurly-burly of my fellow-men——"
At that moment a tap sounded upon the door panel.
"Come in," called Peter carelessly, supposing that a pupil had returned for some forgotten possession. And he did not even look around until an amused voice inquired: "So absorbed, Professor Peter?" Then he turned to see Mrs. Caldwell, an old-fashioned picture in silvery gray, smiling at him from the doorway.
"I've come for a serious talk," said she, when he had seated her beside the sunniest window and established himself close by.
"Well," he answered ruefully, "you've come to the right place and the right person. I was just considering—in these scholarly surroundings—how I am wasting my life!"
"Really?" And she beamed on him hopefully. "Because that's the beginning of better things. You could amount to so much, Peter!"
But he shook his head: "Not here. And I'm too lazy to leave Shadyville."
"Why not here? I don't want you to leave Shadyville. I can't do without you! But I want you to do something splendid here. Peter, why don't you write a book?"
He laughed: "Dear Mrs. Caldwell, to write a book requires more than the determination or the wish to write one."
"Genius?"
"Not necessarily. But at least a special kind of ability. The divine fire has never burned on my hearth—not even a tiny spark of it!"
"Then you think it's rather a great thing to be able to write?"
"I do indeed!" And the reverence of the book-lover thrilled through his tone.
"I'm glad you feel that way about writers, Peter," she remarked archly, "because—we have one up at our house." And she extended a note-book to him, a thin, paper-backed book such as his class used for compositions.
"You mean—Sheila?" For he had expected this.
"Yes. It's happened!—as I told you it would." And her voice was very grave now.
He opened the book—and discovered that Sheila's efforts were poems. "I'll read them to-night," he said cautiously.
But Mrs. Caldwell would not let him escape so easily: "No, Peter, please. If you have the time, read them now. There are only a few, and I can't go home without a message from you about them. Sheila's waiting up there—and she's simply tense!"
"Then she knows you've brought them to me?"
"Of course. Do you think I'd have done it without her permission? Peter, don't neglect your manners with your grandchildren."
"I deserve the rebuke, Mrs. Caldwell. But if Sheila wants me to see her poems, why hasn't she brought them to me herself?"
"Too shy! Peter, poets are very sensitive. It's an awful thing to have one in your family!"
"Oh, you won't find it so bad."
"Yes, I shall. I always told you it would happen. And I always told you, too, that I couldn't cope with such a—calamity."
"Well, there's still hope that this may be a case of 'sweet sixteen' instead of genius. I'll take a peep and give you a verdict."
"She's a poet," insisted Mrs. Caldwell, obstinately convinced of the worst. And she fixed her eyes on Peter's face, as he read, with an eagerness that, save for her lamentations, might have seemed anxiety to have her opinion confirmed.
Presently Peter chuckled.
"What are you laughing at, Peter?"
"Have you read the 'Ode to the Evening Star'?"
"Yes, I've read them all."
"Well, then——"
"Well, then—what?"
"You know why I'm laughing."
"You think it's funny?" And there was an unmistakable note of indignation in the question.
"Of course I think it's funny! Don't you?"
There was no reply, and Peter looked up from the note-book. "Don't you think it's funny?" he repeated. And then he stared at her. Her cheeks were pink with excitement, her eyes were glittering with angry tears. "Why, I thought—" he began.
But she interrupted him: "I certainly don't think it's funny. I think it's a lovely poem! I think they're all lovely poems! I expected you to appreciate them, but as you don't—" And she put out a peremptory hand for the book. But as Peter continued to stare at her, she perceived his amusement, and her resentment gave way to mirth.
"Oh, Peter, do forgive me for being cross to you, but you see——"
"I see that you're proud of these poems!" he exclaimed, his own eyes twinkling merrily.
"Yes," she admitted, "I am proud of them. I really do think they're the loveliest poems ever written!" And she met his laughing gaze quite shamelessly.
"And you're glad—yes, glad—that she's turned out a poet!" he accused.
"Yes," confessed Mrs. Caldwell again, "I'm glad!" And she leaned earnestly toward him: "Oh, Peter, isn't she wonderful?"
But Peter regarded her severely. "Ah, the deceit of woman! And I believed you when you claimed to be distressed! I sympathized with you!"
But Mrs. Caldwell was not to be abashed: "I've been a shocking hypocrite, haven't I? But you're so clever, Peter, that I expected you to see through me."
"I trusted you!" he mourned.
"Oh, Peter! Peter! That's the way a man always seeks to excuse his stupidity when a woman gets the best of him! But you can trust my sincerity now. And you can sympathize with me if Sheila's not a poet. You seem to doubt her being one!"
"She isn't a poet—yet. She may become one. I can't tell about that. What I am sure of is that she has a remarkable mind—as I told you long ago. She has things to express, and evidently the time has come when she wants to express them. That's the hopeful point."
"Then she is promising—for all your laughter?"
"Indeed she is! These poems are funny—but every now and then there's a flash of light through them. Mrs. Caldwell, I believe in the light. I don't know what Sheila will do with it, but it's there—and it's wonderful!"
The tears were in Mrs. Caldwell's eyes again, not the bright tears of anger, but the soft mist that rises from a heart profoundly moved. As Peter spoke, the drops overflowed and rolled slowly down her cheeks, but she was unconscious of them. "You don't know what this means to me!" she said.
"I didn't know you would feel like this about it. You deceived me so thoroughly! But now I wonder why I didn't realize, in spite of all your protestations, that you'd care just this deeply. I should have understood what things of the mind are to you—you were my grandfather's friend!"
"Yes, I was your grandfather's friend. And he was a marvellous man, Peter. It's the proudest thing I can say of myself—that I was his friend." Then, quickly, as if she had closed a treasure box, she turned from the subject of her old friendship—which Peter knew might have been more—to that of Sheila.
"What shall I do with my poet, Peter? I'm as much afraid of her as I said I should be—and as unfit to help her."
"Let me help her! Will you let me train her?"
"Oh, my dear, I hoped you'd ask to do it!"
"Then it's a bargain—not only for the present, but for the future—after she graduates—as long as she needs me?"
Mrs. Caldwell flashed a keen glance at him: "As long as you will, Peter! I'll trust her to you gratefully."
But if there was any deeper significance in her words than her acceptance of the present compact, Peter failed to catch it. As he stood in the seminary doorway a few moments later, watching Mrs. Caldwell's retreating figure up the shady street, there came to him, however, a sense of having something to work for at last.
"What was it Mrs. Caldwell once said?" he murmured to himself. "That she wasn't wise enough to 'trim the wick of a star'? Yes, that was it. Well," he added whimsically, "I don't suppose I'm fit for the job either, but I'm going to undertake it. It'll be worth while staying here—it'll be worth while living—if I can trim the wick of a star and help it to shine!"