So Big · Chapter 13 (2/3)

Midwest University had sprung up almost literally overnight on the property that had been the site of the Midway Plaisance during the World’s Fair in Chicago in ’93. One man’s millions had been the magic wand that, waved over a bare stretch of prairie land, had produced a seat of learning. The university guide book spoke of him reverently as the Founder, capitalizing the word as one does the Deity. The student body spoke of him with somewhat less veneration. They called him Coal-Oil Johnny. He had already given thirty millions to the university and still the insatiable maw of this institute of learning yawned for more. When oil went up a fraction of a cent they said, “Guess Coal-Oil Johnny’s fixing to feed us another million.”

Dirk commenced his studies at Midwest University in the autumn of 1909. His first year was none too agreeable, as is usually the case in first years. He got on well, though. A large proportion of the men students were taking law, which accounts for the great number of real-estate salesmen and insurance agents now doing business in and about Chicago. Before the end of the first semester he was popular. He was a natural-born floor committeeman and badges bloomed in his buttonhole. Merely by donning a ready-made dress suit he could give it a made-to-order air. He had great natural charm of manner. The men liked him, and the girls, too. He learned to say, “Got Pol Econ at ten,” which meant that he took Political Economy at that hour; and “I’d like to cut Psyk,” meant that he was not up on his approaching lesson in Applied Psychology. He rarely “cut” a class. He would have felt that this was unfair and disloyal to his mother. Some of his fellow students joked about this faithfulness to his classes. “Person would think you were an Unclassified,” they said.

The Unclassifieds were made up, for the most part, of earnest and rather middle-aged students whose education was a delayed blooming. They usually were not enrolled for a full course, or were taking double work feverishly. The Classifieds, on the other hand, were the regularly enrolled students, pretty well of an age (between seventeen and twenty-three) who took their education with a sprinkling of sugar. Of the Unclassified students the University catalogue said:

Persons at least twenty-one years of age, not seeking a degree, may be admitted through the office of the University Examiner to the courses of instruction offered in the University, as unclassified students. They shall present evidence of successful experience as a teacher or other valuable educative experience in practical life.⁠ ⁠… They are ineligible for public appearance.⁠ ⁠…

You saw them the Cinderellas and the Smikes of this temple of learning.

The Classifieds and the Unclassifieds rarely mixed. Not age alone, but purpose separated them. The Classifieds, boys and girls, were, for the most part, slim young lads with caps and pipes and sweaters, their talk of football, baseball, girls; slim young girls in sheer shirtwaists with pink ribbons run through the corset covers showing beneath, pleated skirts that switched delightfully as they strolled across the campus arm in arm, their talk of football games, fudge, clothes, boys. They cut classes whenever possible. The Student Body. Midwest turned them out by the hundreds⁠—almost by the link, one might say, as Aug Hempel’s sausage factory turned out its fine plump sausages, each one exactly like the one behind and the one ahead of it. So many hundreds graduated in this year’s class. So many more hundreds to be graduated in next year’s class. Occasionally an unruly sausage burst its skin and was discarded. They attended a university because their parents⁠—thrifty shopkeepers, manufacturers, merchants, or professional men and their good wives⁠—wanted their children to have an education. Were ambitious for them. “I couldn’t have it myself, and always regretted it. Now I want my boy (or girl) to have a good education that’ll fit ’em for the battle of life. This is an age of specialization, let me tell you.”

Football, fudge, I-said-to-Jim, I-said-to-Bessie.

The Unclassifieds would no more have deliberately cut a class than they would have thrown their sparse weekly budget-allowance into the gutter. If it had been physically possible they would have attended two classes at once, listened to two lectures, prepared two papers simultaneously. Drab and earnest women between thirty and forty-eight, their hair not an ornament, but something to be pinned up quickly out of the way, their clothes a covering, their shoes not even smartly “sensible,” but just shoes, scuffed, patched, utilitarian. The men were serious, shabby, often spectacled; dandruff on their coat collars; their lined, anxious faces in curious contrast to the fresh, boyish, carefree countenances of the Classifieds. They said, carefully, almost sonorously, “Political Economy. Applied Psychology.” Most of them had worked ten years, fifteen years for this deferred schooling. This one had had to support a mother; that one a family of younger brothers and sisters. This plump woman of thirty-nine, with the jolly kindly face, had had a paralyzed father. Another had known merely poverty, grinding, sordid poverty, with fifteen years of painful penny savings to bring true this gloriously realized dream of a university education. Here was one studying to be a trained Social Service Worker. She had done everything from housework as a servant girl to clerking in a 5- and 10-cent store. She had studied evenings; saved pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters. Other valuable educative experience in practical life. They had had it, God knows.

They regarded the university at first with the love-blind eyes of a bridegroom who looks with the passionate tenderness of possession upon his mistress for whom he has worked and waited through the years of his youth. The university was to bring back that vanished youth⁠—and something more. Wisdom. Knowledge. Power. Understanding. They would have died for it⁠—they almost had, what with privation, self-denial, work.

They came with love clasped close in their two hands, an offertory. “Take me!” they cried. “I come with all I have. Devotion, hope, desire to learn, a promise to be a credit to you. I have had experience, bittersweet experience. I have known the battle. See, here are my scars. I can bring to your classrooms much that is valuable. I ask only for bread⁠—the bread of knowledge.”

And the University gave them a stone.

“Get on to the hat!” said the Classifieds, humorously, crossing the campus. “A fright!”

The professors found them a shade too eager, perhaps; too inquiring; demanding too much. They stayed after class and asked innumerable questions. They bristled with interrogation. They were prone to hold forth in the classroom, “Well, I have found it to be the case in my experience that⁠—”

But the professor preferred to do the lecturing himself. If there was to be any experience related it should come from the teacher’s platform, not the student’s chair. Besides, this sort of thing interfered with the routine; kept you from covering ground fast enough. The period bell rang, and there you were, halfway through the day’s prescribed lesson.

In his first year Dirk made the almost fatal mistake of being rather friendly with one of these Unclassifieds⁠—a female Unclassified. She was in his Pol Econ class and sat next to him. A large, good-humoured, plump girl, about thirty-eight, with a shiny skin which she never powdered and thick hair that exuded a disagreeable odour of oil. She was sympathetic and jolly, but her clothes were a fright, the Classifieds would have told you, and no matter how cold the day there was always a half-moon of stain showing under her armpits. She had a really fine mind, quick, eager, balanced, almost judicial. She knew just which references were valuable, which useless. Just how to go about getting information for next day’s class; for the weekly paper to be prepared. Her name was Schwengauer⁠—Mattie Schwengauer. Terrible!

“Here,” she would say good-naturedly, to Dirk. “You don’t need to read all those. My, no! I’ll tell you. You’ll get exactly what you want by reading pages 256 to 273 in Blaine’s; 549 to 567 in Jaeckel; and the first eleven⁠—no, twelve⁠—pages of Trowbridge’s report. That’ll give you practically everything you need.”

Dirk was grateful. Her notes were always copious, perfect. She never hesitated to let him copy them. They got in the way of walking out of the classroom together, across the campus. She told him something of herself.

“Your people farmers!” Surprised, she looked at his well-cut clothes, his slim, strong, unmarked hands, his smart shoes and cap. “Why, so are mine. Iowa.” She pronounced it Ioway. “I lived on the farm all my life till I was twenty-seven. I always wanted to go away to school, but we never had the money and I couldn’t come to town to earn because I was the oldest, and Ma was sickly after Emma⁠—that’s the youngest⁠—there are nine of us⁠—was born. Ma was anxious I should go and Pa was willing, but it couldn’t be. No fault of theirs. One year the summer would be so hot, with no rain hardly from spring till fall, and the corn would just dry up on the stalks, like paper. The next year it would be so wet the seed would rot in the ground. Ma died when I was twenty-six. The kids were all pretty well grown up by that time. Pa married again in a year and I went to Des Moines to work. I stayed there six years but I didn’t save much on account of my brother. He was kind of wild. He had come to Des Moines, too, after Pa married. He and Aggie⁠—that’s the second wife⁠—didn’t get along. I came to Chicago about five years ago.⁠ ⁠… I’ve done all kinds of work, I guess, except digging in a coal mine. I’d have done that if I’d had to.”

She told him all this ingenuously, simply. Dirk felt drawn toward her, sorry for her. His was a nature quick to sympathy. Something she said now stirred him while it bewildered him a little, too.

“You can’t have any idea what it means to me to be here⁠ ⁠… All those years! I used to dream about it. Even now it seems to me it can’t be true. I’m conscious of my surroundings all the time and yet I can’t believe them. You know, like when you are asleep and dream about something beautiful, and then wake up and find it’s actually true. I get a thrill out of just being here. ‘I’m crossing the campus,’ I say to myself. ‘I’m a student⁠—a girl student⁠—in Midwest University and now I’m crossing the campus of my university to go to a class.’ ”

Her face was very greasy and earnest and fine.

“Well, that’s great,” Dirk replied, weakly. “That’s cer’nly great.”

He told his mother about her. Usually he went home on Friday nights to stay until Monday morning. His first Monday-morning class was not until ten. Selina was deeply interested and stirred. “Do you think she’d spend some Saturday and Sunday here with us on the farm? She could come with you on Friday and go back Sunday night if she wanted to. Or stay until Monday morning and go back with you. There’s the spare room, all quiet and cool. She could do as she liked. I’d give her cream and all the fresh fruit and vegetables she wanted. And Meena would bake one of her fresh coconut cakes. I’d have Adam bring a fresh coconut from South Water Street.”

Mattie came one Friday night. It was the end of October, and Indian summer, the most beautiful time of the year on the Illinois prairie. A mellow golden light seemed to suffuse everything. It was as if the very air were liquid gold, and tonic. The squash and pumpkins next the good brown earth gave back the glow, and the frost-turned leaves of the maples in the sun. About the countryside for miles was the look of bounteousness, of plenty, of prophecy fulfilled as when a beautiful and fertile woman having borne her children and found them good, now sits serene-eyed, gracious, ample bosomed, satisfied.

Into the face of Mattie Schwengauer there came a certain glory. When she and Selina clasped hands Selina stared at her rather curiously, as though startled. Afterward she said to Dirk, aside, “But I thought you said she was ugly!”

“Well, she is, or⁠—well, isn’t she?”

“Look at her!”

Mattie Schwengauer was talking to Meena Bras, the houseworker. She was standing with her hands on her ample hips, her fine head thrown back, her eyes alight, her lips smiling so that you saw her strong square teeth. A new cream separator was the subject of their conversation. Something had amused Mattie. She laughed. It was the laugh of a young girl, carefree, relaxed, at ease.

For two days Mattie did as she pleased, which meant she helped pull vegetables in the garden, milk the cows, saddle the horses; rode them without a saddle in the pasture. She tramped the road. She scuffled through the leaves in the woods, wore a scarlet maple leaf in her hair, slept like one gloriously dead from ten until six; ate prodigiously of cream, fruits, vegetables, eggs, sausage, cake.

“It got so I hated to do all those things on the farm,” she said, laughing a little shamefacedly. “I guess it was because I had to. But now it comes back to me and I enjoy it because it’s natural to me, I suppose. Anyway, I’m having a grand time, Mrs. DeJong. The grandest time I ever had in my life.” Her face was radiant and almost beautiful.

“If you want me to believe that,” said Selina, “you’ll come again.”

But Mattie Schwengauer never did come again.

Early the next week one of the university students approached Dirk. He was a Junior, very influential in his class, and a member of the fraternity to which Dirk was practically pledged. A decidedly desirable frat.

“Say, look here, DeJong, I want to talk to you a minute. Uh, you’ve got to cut out that girl⁠—Swinegour or whatever her name is⁠—or it’s all off with the fellows in the frat.”

“What d’you mean! Cut out! What’s the matter with her!”

“Matter! She’s Unclassified, isn’t she! And do you know what the story is? She told it herself as an economy hint to a girl who was working her way through. She bathes with her union suit and white stockings on to save laundry soap. Scrubs ’em on her! ’S the God’s truth.”

Into Dirk’s mind there flashed a picture of this large girl in her tight knitted union suit and her white stockings sitting in a tub half full of water and scrubbing them and herself simultaneously. A comic picture, and a revolting one. Pathetic, too, but he would not admit that.

“Imagine!” the frat brother-to-be was saying. “Well, we can’t have a fellow who goes around with a girl like that. You got to cut her out, see! Completely. The fellahs won’t stand for it.”

Dirk had a mental picture of himself striking a noble attitude and saying, “Won’t stand for it, huh! She’s worth more than the whole caboodle of you put together. And you can all go to hell!”

Instead he said, vaguely, “Oh. Well. Uh⁠—”

Dirk changed his seat in the classroom, avoided Mattie’s eye, shot out of the door the minute class was over. One day he saw her coming toward him on the campus and he sensed that she intended to stop and speak to him⁠—chide him laughingly, perhaps. He quickened his pace, swerved a little to one side, and as he passed lifted his cap and nodded, keeping his eyes straight ahead. Out of the tail of his eye he could see her standing a moment irresolutely in the path.

He got into the fraternity. The fellahs liked him from the first. Selina said once or twice, “Why don’t you bring that nice Mattie home with you again some time soon? Such a nice girl⁠—woman, rather. But she seemed so young and carefree while she was here, didn’t she? A fine mind, too, that girl. She’ll make something of herself. You’ll see. Bring her next week, h’m?”

Dirk shuffled, coughed, looked away. “Oh, I dunno. Haven’t seen her lately. Guess she’s busy with another crowd, or something.”