Chapter 2

The Wicomico State Teachers College Sits in a Great Flat Open Field

The Wicomico State Teachers College sits in a great flat open fieldringed with loblolly pine trees, at the southeastern edge of the town of Wicomico, on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Its physical plant consists of a single graceless brick building with two ells, a building too large for the pseudo-Georgian style in which it is constructed. A deep semicircular drive runs in from College Avenue to the main entrance.

In July, when the day of my interview approached, I loaded my belongings into my Chevrolet and relinquished the key to my room on East Chase Street, in Baltimore, for I meant to take lodgings in Wicomico at once, whether I were hired or not. This was on a Sunday. The date of the interview had originally been set for Tuesday in the letter I received in answer to my application, but on the Saturday afternoon before I left Baltimore the president of the college had telephoned me and asked that I come on Monday instead. The connection was poor, but there is no doubt in my mind that he changed the date to Monday.

"I can make it either day," I recall saying.

"Well, as a matter of fact I suppose we could too," the president said. "Monday or Tuesday. But maybe Monday would be better than Tuesday for some of the Committee. Unless Monday is out of the question for you, of course. Would Tuesday be better for you?"

"Monday or Tuesday, either one," I said. I was thinking that actually Tuesday (which remember was the original date)would be better for me, because there might be last-minute errands or some such for me to make before I moved out of Baltimore, and on Sunday the stores would be closed. But I certainly wasn't going to make an issue out of it, and for that matter an equally good case could be made for Monday. "If Monday is better for you all, then it's all right with me."

"I know we'd planned on Tuesday before," admitted the president, "but I guess Monday would be best."

"Either day, sir," I said.

So on Sunday I piled my clothes, my few books, my phonograph and phonograph records, whiskey, statuette, and odds and ends into the car and set out for the Eastern Shore. Three hours later I checked in at the Peninsula Hotel in Wicomico, where I meant to live until I found suitable permanent quarters, and after lunch I began looking for a room.

The first thing that went wrong was that I found an entirely satisfactory room at once. As a rule I was extremely hard to please in the matter of renting a room. I required that no one live above me; that my room be high-ceilinged and large-windowed; that my bed be high off the floor, wide, and very soft; that the bathroom be equipped with a good shower; that the landlord not live in the same building (and that he be not very particular about his property or his tenants); that the other tenants be of an uncomplaining nature; and that maid service be available. Because I was so fussy, it usually took me a good while to find even a barely acceptable place. But as ill luck would have it, the first room I saw advertised for rent on my way out College Avenue from the hotel met all these qualifications. The landlady, an imposing widow of fifty whom I just chanced to meet on her way out of the old two-story brick house, showed me to the second-floor room in the front.

"You're teaching at the college?" she asked.

"Yes, ma'am. Grammar teacher."

"Well, pleased to meet you. I'm Mrs. Alder. Let's shake hands and all now, because you won't see me very much around here."

"You don't live in the house?"

"Livehere? God, no! Can't stand tenants around me. Always pestering for this or that. I live in Ocean City all year round. Any time you need anything, don't call me; you call Mr. Prake, the janitor. He lives in town."

She showed me the room. Six-foot windows, three of them. Twelve-foot ceiling. Dark gray plaster walls, white woodwork. An incredible bed three feet high, seven feet long, at least seven feet wide; a black, towering, canopied monster with four posts as thick as masts, fluted and ringed, and an elaborately carved headboard extending three feet above the bolster. A most adequate bed! The other furniture was a potpourri of styles and periods -- one felt as if one had wandered into the odd-pieces room of Winterthur Museum -- but every piece was immensely competent. The adjectivecompetent came at once to mind, rather than, sayefficient. This furniture had an air of almost contemptuous competence, as though it were so absurdly well able to handle its job that it would scarcely noticeyour puny use of it. It would require a man indeed, a man's man, to make his presence felt by this furniture. I was impressed.

In short, the whole place left nothing to be desired. Shower, maid service -- everything was there.

"What about the other tenants?" I asked uneasily.

"Oh, they come and they go. Bachelors, mostly, a few young couples now and then, traveling men, a nurse or two from the hospital."

"Any students?" In Baltimore it was desirable to have students for neighbors, for they are singularly uncritical, but I suspected that in Wicomico all the students would know all the teachers rather too well.

"No students. The students generally live in the dorms or get rooms farther out College Avenue."

It was too perfect, and I was skeptical.

"I guess I should tell you that I practice on the clarinet," I said. This of course was untrue: I was not musical.

"Well, isn't that nice! I used to sing, myself, but my voice seemed to go after Mr. Alder died. I had the most marvelous voice teacher at the Peabody Conservatory when I was younger! Farrari. Farrari used to tell me, 'Alder,' he'd say, 'you've learned all I can teach you. You have precision, style,éclat. You areuna macchina cantanda,' he'd say -- that's Italian. 'Life will have to do the rest. Go out and live!" he'd say. But I never got to live until poor Mr. Alder died five years ago, and by that time my voice was gone."

"Do you object to pets?"

"What kind?" Mrs. Alder asked sharply. I thought I'd found an out.

"Oh, I don't know. I'm fond of dogs. Might pick up a boxer sometime, or a Doberman."

My landlady sighed, relieved. "I forgot you were a grammar teacher. I had a biology teacher once," she explained.

I snatched at a last hope: "I couldn't go over twelve a week."

"The rent's eight," Mrs. Alder said. "The maid gets three dollars a week extra, or four-fifty, depending."

"Depending on what, for heaven's sake?"

"She does laundry, too," Mrs. Alder said evenly.

There was nothing to do but take the room. I paid my landlady a month's rent in advance, though she required only a week's and ushered her out to her car, a five-year-old Buick convertible.

I call this windfall a stroke of ill luck because it gave me the whole of the afternoon and evening, and the next morning, with nothing to do. Even checking out of the Peninsula Hotel, moving to my new quarters, and arranging my belongings took but an hour and a half, after which time there was simply nothing to be done. I had no interest in touring Wicomico: it was the sort of small city that one knows adequately at the first glance -- entirely without character. A humdrum business district and a commonplace park, surrounded by middle-class residential neighborhoods varying only in age and upkeep. As for the Wicomico State Teachers College, one look was enough to lay any but the most inordinately pricked-up curiosity. It was a state teachers' college.

I drove about aimlessly for twenty minutes and then returned to my room. The one dusty maple outside my window exhausted its scenic potentialities in a half minute. My phonograph records -- nearly all Mozart -- sounded irritating in a room with which I was still too unfamiliar to be at ease. My statuette on the mantel, a plaster head of Laoco?n done by a sculpting uncle of mine who had died of influenza in the First World War, so annoyed me with his blank-eyed grimace that, had I been the sort of person who did such things, I'd have turned his ugly face to the wall. I got the wholesale fidgets. Finally, at only nine o'clock (but I'd been fidgeting since three-thirty, not counting supper hour), I went to my great bed and was somewhat calmed by its imposing grotesqueness, which, however, kept me from sleep for a long time.

Next morning was worse. I slept fitfully until ten and then went to breakfast logy and puffy-eyed, nursing a headache. The interview was set for two in the afternoon, and so I had more than enough time to become entirely demoralized. Reading was impossible, music exasperating. I nicked myself twice while shaving, and ran out of polish before the heel of my left shoe was covered. Since I'd put off shining my shoes until the last minute, hoping thus to occupy those most uncomfortable moments before I left the room, there was no time to go downtown for more polish. In a rage I went down to the car. But I'd forgotten my pen and my brief case, which, though empty, I thought it fitting to carry. I stormed back upstairs and fetched them, glaring so fiercely at a nurse who happened to look from her doorway that she sniffed and closed her door with some heat. Tossing the brief case onto the seat, I left with an uncalled-for spinning of tires and drove out to the college.

My exasperation would have carried me safely into the interview had there not been a cluster of young people lounging on the front steps. I took them for students, although, it being vacation time, it is unlikely that they were. At any rate they stared at my approaching car with a curiosity no less unabashed for its being mild. My courage failed me; as I passed them I glanced indifferently at my wrist watch, to suggest that it was only to check the time that I'd slowed down. I was assisted in my ruse by the college clock, which at that instant chimed two: I nodded my head shortly, as though satisfied with the accuracy of my timepiece, and drove purposefully down the other arc of the semicircular drive, back to College Avenue. There my anger returned at once, this time directed at myself for being so easily cowed. I went again to the entrance drive and headed up the semicircle for another try. But if it took determination to approach those impassive gatekeepers the first time, with their adolescent eyes as empty as Laoco?n's directing a stupid enfilade along the driveway, it took raw courage to run their fire again. I shoved the accelerator to the floor and rocked the Chevrolet around the bend, not even deigning to glance at them. Let the ninnies think what they would! The third time I did not hesitate for a moment, but drove heedlessly around to the parking lot behind the building and entered through a doorway near at hand. I was already six minutes late.

I found the president's office without difficulty and introduced myself to the receptionist.

"Mr. Horner?" she repeated, vaguely troubled.

"That's right," I said shortly. I was in no mood to be trifled with.

"Just a minute."

She disappeared into an inner office, from which I heard then a low-voiced conversation between her and, I presumed. Dr. Schott, the president. My heart sank; I felt nauseated.

A gray, fatherly gentleman came smiling from the inner office, the receptionist in his wake.

"Mr. Horner!" he exclaimed, grasping my hand. "I'm John Schott! Glad to meet you!"

Dr. Schott was of an exclamatory nature.

"Glad to meetyou, sir. Sorry I'm a little late. . ."

I was going to explain: my unfamiliarity with the little city, uncertainty as to where I should park, natural difficulty finding the office,etc.

"Late!" cried Dr. Schott. "My boy, you're twenty-four hours early! This is only Monday!"

"But isn't that what we decided on the phone, sir?"

"No, son!" Dr. Schott laughed loudly and placed his arm around my shoulders."Tuesday! Isn't that so, Shirley?" Shirley nodded happily, her troubled look vindicated. "Monday in the letter, Tuesday on the phone! Don't you remember now?"

I laughed and scratched my head (with my left hand, my right being pinioned by Dr. Schott).

"Well, I swear, I thought sure we'd changed it from Tuesday to Monday. I'm awfully sorry. That was stupid of me."

"Not a bit! Don't you worry!" Dr. Schott chuckled again and released me. "Didn't we tell Mr. Horner Tuesday?" he demanded again of Shirley.

"I'm afraid so," Shirley affirmed. "On account of Mr. Morgan's Boy Scouts. Monday in the letter and Tuesday on the phone."

"One of the committee members is a scoutmaster!" Dr. Schott explained. "He's had his boys up to Camp Rodney for two weeks and is bringing them home today. Joe Morgan, fine fellow, teaches history! That's why we changed the interview to Tuesday!"

"Well, I'm awfully sorry." I smiled ruefully.

"No! Not a bit! I could've gotten mixed up myself!"

He was.

"Well, I'll come back tomorrow."

"Wait! Wait a minute! Shirley, give Joe Morgan a call, see if he's in yet. He might be in. I know Miss Banning and Harry Carter are home."

"Oh no," I protested; "I'll come back."

"Hold on, now! Hold on!"

Shirley called Joe Morgan.

"Hello? Mrs. Morgan. Is Mr. Morgan there? I see. No, I know he's not. Yes, indeed. No, no, it's nothing. Mr. Horner came in for his interview today unexpectedly; he got the date mixed up and came in today instead of tomorrow. Dr. Schott thought maybe Mr. Morgan just might happen to have come back early. No, don't bother. Sorry to botheryou. Okay. 'By."

I wanted to spit on Shirley.

"Well, I'll come back," I said.

"Sure, you come back!" Dr. Schott said. He ushered me toward the front door, where, to my chagrin, I saw the sentries still on duty. But I threw up my hands at the idea of attempting to explain to him that my car was in the rear of the building.

"Well, well, we'll be seeing you!" Dr. Schott said, pumping my hand. "You be back tomorrow, now hear?"

"I will, sir."

We were outside the main door, and the watch regarded me blankly.

"Where's your car? You need a lift anywhere?"

"Oh, no, thanks; my car's in the back."

"In the back! Well, say, you don't want to go out the front here! I'll show you the back door! Ha!"

"Never mind sir," I said. "I'll just walk around."

"Well! Ha! Well, all right, then!" But he looked at me. "See you tomorrow!"

"Good-by, sir."

I walked very positively past the loungers on the steps.

"You dig up that letter!" Dr. Schott called from the doorway. "See if it doesn't say Monday!"

I turned and waved acknowledgment and acquiescence, but when, back in my room at last (which already seemed immensely familiar and comforting), I searched for it, I found that I'd thrown it out before leaving Baltimore. Since I would not in a hundred years have been at home enough in Dr. Schott's office to ask Shirley to investigate her letter files, the question of my appointment date could not be verified by appeal to objective facts.

One might suppose that after such an inauspicious start I would have been less prepared than ever to face my interview, but this supposition, though entirely reasonable, does not happen to be the case. On the contrary, I was disgusted enough not to care a damn about the interview. I didn't even bother to polish the rest of my left shoe next morning; in fact, after breakfast I sat in the park for several hours watching the children romp in the small artificial lake and didn't even think about the interview more than two or three times. When it occurred to me at all, I merely ticked my right cheek muscle. At ten minutes before two I drove out to the college, parked unhesitatingly in the front driveway, and walked through the main entrance. The steps happened to be uninhabited, but no reception committee could have daunted me that day. My mood had changed.

"Oh, hello," Shirley said brightly.

"How do you do. Tell Dr. Schott I'm here, will you please?"

"Everybody'shere today. Just a minute, please, Mr. Horner."

I turned my smile on, and then I turned it off, so, as a gentleman might tip his hat politely, but impassively, at absolutely any lady of his acquaintance, whether she merited the courtesy or not. Shirley stepped into and out of Dr. Schott's office.

"Go right on in, Mr. Horner."

"Thank you."

Inside I was introduced by Dr. Schott to Miss Banning, teacher of Spanish and French, a dear-elderly-lady type whom one accepted on her own terms because there was absolutely nothing else to be done about her; Dr. Harry Carter, teacher of psychology, a thin scholarly old man about whom one wondered at once what he was doing in Wicomico, but not so strongly that one didn't decide rather easily that he doubtless had his reasons; and Mr. Joseph Morgan, scoutmaster and teacher of ancient, European, and American history, a tall, bespectacled, athletic young man, terribly energetic, with whom one was so clearly expected to be charmed, he was so bright, busy, and obviously on his way up, that one had one's hands full simply trying to be civil to him, and realized at once that the invidious comparisons to oneself that he could not for the life of him help inviting would effectively prevent one's ever being really tranquil about the mere fact of his existence, to say nothing of becoming his friend.

Pleasantries were made about my being so eager to join the faculty that I came a day early to my interview. The Committee took a lively interest in one another's summer activities. There was joshing. Applicants for jobs at the Wicomico State Teachers College were obviously not so numerous that such meetings of the Appointments Committee were but a dull addition to the members' regular duties.

"You can count on Miss Banning's support for your application, Mr. Horner," Dr. Carter chortled. "She needs new victims to show off her mustache-cup collection to."

"Oh?" said I. This remark of Dr. Carter's was addressed notto me, but through me, as a grandmother teases her daughter by speaking to her grandchild.

"I have a simply marvelous collection, Mr. Horner," Miss Banning declared good-naturedly. "You'll surely have to see it. Oh dear, but you don't have a mustache, do you?"

All laughed. I observed that Joe Morgandid have a mustache.

"Ethel's been after me for fourteen years to grow one!" Dr. Schott guffawed at me. "Not a trim little affair like Joe's, mind you, but a great bushy one, so I can try out her collector's items! Now don't you start on Mr. Horner, Ethel!"

Ethel was poised to make a retort, in all good humor, but Joe Morgan pleasantly interjected a question about my academic experience.

"Do I understand you're from Johns Hopkins, Mr. Horner?"

"Yes, sir."

The others nodded approval at Joe's getting so tactfully down to business. He was a find, was Mr. Morgan. He'd not stay in their little circle long. Serious attention was focused on me.

"Oh, please, notsir!" Dr. Carter protested. "We don't stand on ceremony out here in the provinces."

"No indeed!" Dr. Schott agreed benignly. There ensued some twenty minutes of unsystematic interrogation about my graduate study and my teaching experience -- the latter, except for occasional tutoring jobs in Baltimore and a brief night-school class at Johns Hopkins, being nil.

"What made you decide to get back into teaching, Mr. Horner?" Dr. Carter asked. "You've been away from it for some time, I presume."

I shrugged. "You know how it is. You don't feel justright doing other things."

All acknowledged the truth of my observation. "Then too," I added casually, "my doctor recommended that I go back to teaching. He seems to think it's the thing I'm best at, and the thing that's best for me."

This was well said. My examiners were with me, and so I expatiated.

"I seem never to be content with ordinary jobs. There's something so -- sostultifying about working only for pay. It's -- well, I hate to use a cliché, but the fact is that other jobs are simply unrewarding. You know what I mean?"

They did know what I meant.

"You take a boy -- bright kid, alert kid, you see it at once, but never been exposed tothinking, never been in an environment where intellectual activity was as common as eating or sleeping. You see a fresh young mind that's never had a chance to flex its muscles, so to speak. Maybe he can't speak good English. Neverheard good English spoken. Not his fault. Not wholly his parents' fault. But there he is."

My audience was most receptive, all except Joe Morgan, who regarded me coolly.

"So you start him off. Parts of speech! Subjects and verbs! Modifiers!Complements! And after a while, rhetoric. Subordination! Coherence! Euphony! You drill and drill, and talk yourself blue in the face, and all the time you see that boy's mind groping, stumbling, stretching, making false steps. And then, just when you're ready to chuck the whole thing --"

"I know!" Miss Banning breathed. "One day, just like all the rest, you say the same thing for the tenth time -- andclick!" She snapped her fingers jubilantly at Dr. Schott. "He's got it!Why, there's nothing to it! he says.It's plain as day!"

"That's what we're here for!" Dr. Schott said quietly, with some pride. "That's what we all live for. A little thing, isn't it?"

"Little," Dr. Carter agreed, "but it's the greatest miracle on God's green earth! And the most mysterious, too."

Joe Morgan would not have committed himself on the matter, I believe, but that Dr. Carter addressed this last reflection to him directly. Cornered, Morgan made a sucking noise in the left side of his mouth, to express sympathetic awe before the mystery.

"I sometimes compare it to a man making fire with flint and steel," I said calmly to Joe Morgan, knowing I was hitting him where he lived. "He strikes and strikes and strikes, but the tinder lies dead under his hands. Then another strike, not a bit different from the rest, and there's your fire!"

"Very apt," Dr. Carter said. "And what a rewarding moment it is, when a student suddenly becomesignited! There's no other word for it: positivelyignited!"

"And then you can't hold him back!" Dr. Schott laughed, but as one would laugh at a sudden beneficence of God. "He's like a horse that smells the stable up the lane!"

There were reminiscent sighs. Certainly I had scored a triumph. Joe Morgan brought the conversation back to my qualifications for a minute or two, but it was plainly in the nature of an anti-climax. The other members of the Committee showed very little interest in the interrogation, and Dr. Schott began to describe very frankly the salary scale in Maryland state colleges, the hours I'd be expected to work, non-teaching duties, and the like.

"Well, you'll hear from us soon," he concluded, rising and shaking my hand. "Maybe tomorrow." I shook hands all around. "Shall I show you the back door this time?" He explained jovially my departure of the day before.

"No, thanks. My car's out front this time."

"Good, good!" Dr. Carter said heartily, for no reason whatever.

"I'm going out that way," Joe Morgan said, falling in beside me. "I live just down the block." He accompanied me across the driveway to my car, and even stood beside the front fender while I got inside and closed the door. I started the engine, but delayed putting the car in gear: apparently my colleague-to-be had something on his mind.

"Well, be seeing you around, Horner," he grinned, shaking hands with me again through the open window.

"Sure."

We released hands, but Joe Morgan still leaned against the car door, his face radiating cheerful candor. He was well tanned from his stay at camp, and had a marked Boy Scout look about him, a healthiness that suggested early rising, a nutritious diet, and other sorts of virtue -- to be specific, patriotism, courage, self-reliance, strength, alertness, moral straightness, trustworthiness, loyalty, helpfulness, friendliness, courtesy, kindness, obedience, cheerfulness, thrift, bravery, cleanliness and reverence. His eyes were clear.

"Say, were you making fun of me in there?" he asked cheerfully. "With that flint-and-steel nonsense?"

I smiled and shrugged, very much embarrassed at being thus confronted. "It seemed like a good thing to say at the time."

My colleague laughed briskly. "I was afraid you'd gone out on a limb with that line of horseshit, but it looks like you know what you're doing."

Clearly he was unhappy about it nonetheless, but wasn't going to voice his criticisms.

"We'll see about that pretty soon, I guess."

"Well, sure hope you get the job," he said, "if it's what you want."

I put the car in reverse and eased out the clutch. "Be seeing you."

But there was a point still unsettled in Joe Morgan's mind. His face mirrored faithfully whatever was in progress behind it, and even as the car began to move backwards out of the parking space I saw a question settle itself with visible finality on his pellucid brow.

"Say, we'd like to have you over to dinner -- Rennie and I -- before you go back to Baltimore, whether you get the job or not. I understand you've taken a room in town."

"Oh, I'll be around for a while, I guess, either way. Nothing special on the agenda."

"Swell. How about tonight?"

"Well -- better not." It seemed the thing to say.

"Tomorrow night?"

"Sure, I guess so."

There was another thing, dinner invitations aside: "Say, you know, if you weren't just being funny about that flint-and-steel, then you might as well lay off it, don't you think? There's nothing silly about working with the Scouts that I can see. You can tease me about them, or you can argue with me about them, but there's no sense just poking fun to be malicious. That's too easy."

This speech surprised me; I immediately labeled it bad taste, but I must admit that I felt ashamed, and at the same time I appreciated the subtlety with which Morgan had precluded any protest on my part by prefacing his reproof with a dinner invitation. He was still smiling most cordially.

"Excuse me if I offended you," I said.

"Oh hell, no offense! I'm not really touchy, but what the hell, we'll probably be working together; might as well understand each other a little. See you tomorrow for dinner, then. So long!"

"So long."

He turned and strode cleanly across the lawn, grown tall in the students' absence. Apparently Joe Morgan was the sort who heads directly for his destination, implying by his example that paths should be laid where people walk, instead of walking where the paths happen to be laid. All very well for a history man, perhaps, but I could see that Mr. Morgan would be a fish out of water in the prescriptive grammar racket.