The Eleventh Virgin · Part I · Chapter 1 5 (1/3)

V

Thanks to the fact that one had to pay only ten dollars matriculation fee and twelve dollars a semester, June was able to spend the next two years at the state university.

One of the boys she went with there told her one time after he had read some of the short stories she had written for her English class, “what you need is perspective, my dear.” And when June looked back on those two years in after life, it was always with what she thought of as perspective.

Of her studies, she remembered very little. She flunked in a course in biology because she skipped most of the classes and when her examination papers were set in front of her, the only thing she could remember was the definition of the word “sport.”

She took a bird course because it consisted of two trips a week through the fields and woods about the little town and because a boy she liked was taking it with her.

The thing which impressed her most in the course in American literature was the professor’s futile attempts to implant in the minds of his students the love for the poetic phrase. She could still hear that class of sixty, yelling in every pitch:

“The desert and the illimitable air.”

“Do you get the beauty and swing of that? Say it again!”

“The desert and the illimitable air.”

The most valuable bit of information she received in rhetoric 3a was the fact that if you pressed the length of your forefinger to your upper lip every time a sneeze threatened, the spasm would be averted.

June often had the occasion to do this in after years, and since it was always efficacious she sometimes wondered why people who were plagued with hay fever had never heard of it.

The Latin professor was always quoting a line which he said came from one of Dickens’ novels. June didn’t know which one for she hadn’t read them all. “When found, make a note of it!” Fifteen or twenty times a day, this remark would be the signal for notebooks and pencils. She liked the Latin class because her seat was next to the window which looked out over the south campus to the forest where the pines were blue black. Every now and then a meadowlark threw her into a trance out of which it was hard to awaken.

What stood out most clearly in her university life were the jobs she held in order to earn board and room and pocket-money.

At the home of one professor where June washed dishes for her lunch and supper, it was necessary to say grace before eating. The three children said it, the old grandmother said it, the professor said it, his wife said it, and June had to say it too. Its simplicity made it very hard to say.

“Be present at our table, Lord.

Be here and every where, Adored.

Bless Thou this food and grant that we

May feast in Paradise with Thee.”

There was the job of the four babies, all under five years of age, and when one of them went to sleep, another would awaken it by crying. (Their sex was hard to determine.) And when June went into another room looking for a dry diaper for this one, still another would take the opportunity to fall off the couch. At one time, all of them were howling together and then June had to gather them up in her arms which were long enough to go around, fortunately, and finding an upholstered rocking-chair big enough to swallow them all, sang them to sleep. It was smothering work.

Occasionally she had to scrub floors and beat rugs, and once she had to wash baby clothes and all the skin peeled off her knuckles. She swore over such work, but having accepted the job she could not turn it down when she found out what it was.

Working for the Y.W.C.A. was difficult. For a while June set the tables and changed the linen for one hundred and fifty students and in return received her board. For several months she washed dishes after the one hundred and fifty (with two girls to help her dry them) and realized how simple a thing it was to wash dishes for a family of six.

After that she moved her belongings into the home of a bootlegger to assist his wife in the care of the children and in return received board and room. June didn’t know she was working for a bootlegger and probably wouldn’t have minded. What forced her to leave was the evident amorous intention of her employer.

Then there was Mrs. Wittle who was expecting her second baby in July. She was “three months gone” as she explained to June. And every afternoon at four when June came in from her last class, Mrs. Wittle gave her some flannels or diapers to hem and told her how it felt to be a prospective mother.

“It’s so long since I had Edwin,” she told the girl, “that I’ve forgotten all about it and I’m absolutely terrified. And haven’t you always heard it was dangerous to have a baby at my age? I’m thirty-eight, you know.”

“Mother was forty when she had her last baby,” June comforted her, “and it didn’t bother her a bit. She told me it was nothing at all and women made entirely too much fuss about such things.”

“Some women have an easier time than others,” Mrs. Wittle said gloomily.

June found her in tears one afternoon over a book of Upton Sinclair’s. “Just listen to this, June,” she almost wailed, and between the snuffles read an elaborately detailed scene of the birth of a child.

“Now isn’t that horrible? I had forgotten it was as bad as all that. Oh, oh, oh!”

“I think it’s disgusting⁠—I mean for a man to write stuff like that. It would be different if it were a woman. I suppose he hung over his wife’s bed while she was having a baby, carefully observing in order to make copy of it.”

“He might have gone to a hospital,” Mrs. Wittle suggested, in the writer’s defense.

“But they don’t let young authors in the maternity wards of hospitals to watch the birth of children.”

“It is a rather disgusting idea, isn’t it,” Mrs. Wittle agreed, “a man watching his wife with scientific interest while she was in such agony. It’s humiliating enough to have to lie still and holler while you’re performing such an important piece of work.”

“It does take away some of the dignity of motherhood, I should think. When a woman has to lie still and protest at the top of her voice, it makes her seem such a passive instrument instead of an active one⁠—a child-bearer.”

“I’ve been thinking of it all afternoon,” and Mrs. Wittle almost began to weep again, “and I think it’s outrageous that women should have to suffer so. Here they’ve been bringing children into the world for thousands of years, and they’re doing it in the same prehistoric way⁠—a little chloroform maybe, but a lot of good that does! If it was men who had to bear children, you can bet doctors and scientists would find an easier way of doing it.”

“Yes, and they glorify it and put a halo around motherhood, I suppose, so that we’ll keep on doing it,” June put in, becoming ardently feminist. “It would be much better if it could be regulated. First the woman should have a baby, then the man. The discomfort would be more evenly divided that way.”

That night at supper the subject was rehashed, somewhat to June’s embarrassment, for Mrs. Wittle insisted on reading aloud the most gruesome bits of the story and commenting on them, every minute remembering more of her early agony. The cause of it sat very still in his chair, lest attention be called to him and he be sent out of the room. It was the custom of the Wittles to speak freely before Edwin, Mr. Wittle being something of a modern educationist, but occasionally in the midst of a most interesting discussion, Edwin found himself suddenly sent on an errand.

The next afternoon Mrs. Wittle remembered that in her distress she had forgotten to tell June about the rape which had occurred earlier in the book, and unable to convey all the excitement, turned to reading it aloud.

“For my part,” Mrs. Wittle said as she put the book down, “I don’t see why it didn’t happen long before. It seems to me the physical side of marriage is the most important one and how these two people lived together so long!⁠—why it’s contrary to human nature.”

“My instructor said that the American race were as a rule so reticent about sex that they laid too much stress on the frankness of French literature. That applies not only to the people who read, but to the people who write. When they are frank, they go to such extremes,” June said.

Not yet having read enough of Dr. Wittle’s library (he was professor of psychology) June could not give expression to her ideas as to suppressions. But Mrs. Wittle was not interested in generalities. She preferred debating whether or not rape was possible; cited cases in the newspapers, the opinions of her friends; told of things that had happened in her town when she was a girl; things that she had heard had happened in other towns.

She hated to have June leave her to prepare supper.

For a month breakfasts were embarrassing meals to June. At that time investigations were being made in the city into the activities of midwives and every morning the most lurid of the newspapers was delivered at the Wittle door.

After the editorial page had been torn out for Dr. Wittle, the rest of the paper was Mrs. Wittle’s in which to scavenge for news of salacious interest.

The most interesting bits were read aloud and were greeted with noncommittal grunts by Dr. Wittle who had his sheets propped up before him.

“What different ways are there for performing abortions? Have you ever heard, June? I must ask Mrs. Bigley when she comes over this afternoon.”

“Oh, here’s a sad case. Young girl, eighteen, consulted Dr. S⁠⸺ and told him that⁠—”

It wasn’t only from Mrs. Wittle that June was beginning to learn of sexual problems. Dr. Wittle’s library was an extensive one and contained not only some valuable works on psychology and education which June availed herself of, but also books on sexual pathology by Havelock Ellis, Forel, Krafft-Ebing, Brill and Freud. For the most part, she was repelled by what she read. She preferred her early glamorous idea of life and blotted out of her mind, as much as she could, the glimpse into the abnormal which her reading had given her.

Even though June didn’t remember what she learned in classes, she would always remember the instructors. There was one group especially which afforded her a great deal of delight. And once she and her roommate were invited to tea by Mr. Lord, their instructor in rhetoric that semester.

He was a very blonde, enthusiastic young man who tried to hide his enthusiasm by a drawl, rendered more effective by a Harvard accent (he had graduated from a western college). In the heat of discussion he almost lost his drawl and recovered it with a gasp, and as this was often, his discourses were punctuated with abrupt intakings of breath. He was one of a little group of English instructors who professed themselves modern and unfettered. It was rumored about the campus that indeed some of them were living together, perhaps Miss Hubbard and Mr. Lord, or maybe Miss Hubbard and Mr. Fenton. Nobody knew. Although there were other women in the group, everybody suspected Miss Hubbard because she read Oscar Wilde’s poetry aloud to her classes. An ephemeral flavor of sex hovered around her, and young men were drawn to her classes and held there.

What clinched the matter was the report that she had read those verses of Swinburne in which the lines occur

“Curled snakes that are fed from my breast

Bite hard lest remembrance come after

And press with new lips where you pressed.”

It was decided then once and for all that she was living with someone⁠—not exactly immoral, but unmoral, it is true. Lots of literary people were like that and it was understood she was writing a book.

So her angularity of form and feature was endowed with a decadent grace in the eyes of her students and the gasping blondness of Mr. Lord and the stentorian triteness of Mr. Fenton were disregarded in the awe they aroused as possible inspirers of passion.

There were a few other young men and women in the same group⁠—all instructors and all taking postgraduate courses, but these three stood out by their enthusiasm for things literary.

It was rumored about the campus that at a picnic given by this group, some students came upon them engaged in theatricals. Mr. Lord was said to have been clothed only in his B.V.D.’s and a tiger skin (Miss Hubbard had one on her library floor) and was declaiming George Bernard Shaw while his blond shock of hair waved over his face. This report served only to turn the students of English to Shaw.

Mr. Fenton had an apartment in one of the large new apartment houses which had been built overlooking the campus and in which the more wealthy students had furnished flats.

When the girls arrived, the tea-party was in full progress. Mr. Lord and Miss Hubbard were sitting side by side on a couch and leading the conversation.

“But how can one really know without a trial marriage?” Miss Hubbard was saying languidly, while her bright sharp eyes sparkled around the group. And perhaps there was no answer because of the general rustle, attendant on the arrival of June and her roommate Regina. Then when Miss Hubbard assured June that there was plenty of room on the couch and Mr. Fenton had placed another chair for Regina, Mr. Lord brought back the conversation to where it was when the girls entered.

“How can one really know,” repeated Miss Hubbard, full of the italics of earnestness.

“Know what?” Regina startled them all by asking.

But such a question could never be answered directly and Miss Hubbard went on, “The only true mating is a complete harmony of the spiritual, mental and physical⁠—and preferably in that order, my dear.”

“But surely that’s the usual order. We usually get acquainted with a man before we marry him,” Regina put in matter-of-factly.

“Not at all,” boomed Mr. Fenton. “Too many young things are attracted by mere physical passion.” A slight stir passed over the room. “They know little or nothing of their mate’s intellectual or spiritual life and care even less. In fact,” he went on in his best classroom manner, “it is by the sublimation of passion, or rather, the directing of it into higher channels that we arrive at the basis of an understanding.”

The ladies nodded in agreement. Somehow it was more fitting for a man to speak of passion than a woman.

“But how long should a trial marriage last before one can really know?” spoke up Miss Smythe, English 2b, sitting on the edge of her chair and twitching with interest.

This question, couched in her own italics, was a little too direct for Miss Hubbard, who went on, “I don’t know that I wouldn’t advise a rather full experience for women before marriage. How else can we get into direct contact with the intricate nature of man?”

Another little stir, this time masculine. Mr. Lord hawed rather loudly, settling himself more firmly between June and Miss Hubbard, and as the haw was understood to be the preface to a speech, everyone kept silent.

“And when you speak of full experience, I presume you are thinking of a single standard for men and women⁠—”

“Yes, yes! That women should be allowed the freedom from condemnation that man enjoys, since in having freedom, it is generally understood that they will exercise it with the moderation natural to their sensibilities.”

“But isn’t that presupposing”⁠—June unconsciously fell into the didactic tone of the others. “But isn’t that presupposing that the mental and spiritual can only be reached through the physical?”

“Or do you mean Platonic trial marriages?” Regina contributed.

“You have to take into consideration the nature of the man and woman involved,” Miss Hubbard said gently, as from a height.