“Oh, her. Uh—well—I haven’t been seeing her lately.”
“Oh, Dirk, you haven’t quarrelled with that nice girl!”
He decided to have it out. “Listen, Mother. There are a lot of different crowds at the U, see? And Mattie doesn’t belong to any of ’em. You wouldn’t understand, but it’s like this. She—she’s smart and jolly and everything but she just doesn’t belong. Being friends with a girl like that doesn’t get you anywhere. Besides, she isn’t a girl. She’s a middle-aged woman, when you come to think of it.”
“Doesn’t get you anywhere!” Selina’s tone was cool and even. Then, as the boy’s gaze did not meet hers: “Why, Dirk DeJong, Mattie Schwengauer is one of my reasons for sending you to a university. She’s what I call part of a university education. Just talking to her is learning something valuable. I don’t mean that you wouldn’t naturally prefer pretty young girls of your own age to go around with, and all. It would be queer if you didn’t. But this Mattie—why, she’s life. Do you remember that story of when she washed dishes in the kosher restaurant over on Twelfth Street and the proprietor used to rent out dishes and cutlery for Irish and Italian neighbourhood weddings where they had pork and goodness knows what all, and then use them next day in the restaurant again for the kosher customers?”
Yes, Dirk remembered. Selina wrote Mattie, inviting her to the farm for Thanksgiving, and Mattie answered gratefully, declining. “I shall always remember you,” she wrote in that letter, “with love.”
XIV
Throughout Dirk’s Freshman year there were, for him, no heartening, informal, mellow talks before the wood-fire in the book-lined study of some professor whose wisdom was such a mixture of classic lore and modernism as to be an inspiration to his listeners. Midwest professors delivered their lectures in the classroom as they had been delivering them in the past ten or twenty years and as they would deliver them until death or a trustees’ meeting should remove them. The younger professors and instructors in natty gray suits and bright-coloured ties made a point of being unpedantic in the classroom and rather overdid it. They posed as being one of the fellows; would dashingly use a bit of slang to create a laugh from the boys and an adoring titter from the girls. Dirk somehow preferred the pedants to these. When these had to give an informal talk to the men before some university event they would start by saying, “Now listen, fellahs——” At the dances they were not above “rushing” the pretty co-eds.
Two of Dirk’s classes were conducted by women professors. They were well on toward middle age, or past it; desiccated women. Only their eyes were alive. Their clothes were of some indefinite dark stuff, brown or drab-gray; their hair lifeless; their hands long, bony, unvital. They had seen classes and classes and classes. A roomful of fresh young faces that appeared briefly only to be replaced by another roomful of fresh young faces like round white pencil marks manipulated momentarily on a slate, only to be sponged off to give way to other round white marks. Of the two women one—the elder—was occasionally likely to flare into sudden life; a flame in the ashes of a burned-out grate. She had humour and a certain caustic wit, qualities that had managed miraculously to survive even the deadly and numbing effects of thirty years in the classroom. A fine mind, and iconoclastic, hampered by the restrictions of a conventional community and the soul of a congenital spinster.
Under the guidance of these Dirk chafed and grew restless. Miss Euphemia Hollingswood had a way of emphasizing every third or fifth syllable, bringing her voice down hard on it, thus:
“In the consideration of all the facts in the case presented before us we must first review the history and attempt to analyze the outstanding——”