“That’s fine!” Fox whispers, and shakes his head sharply with immense satisfaction. “I’ll bet it’s good!”
The girl’s ivory features flush crimson. Like Fox, she loves praise, yet cannot stand to have it spoken. She squirms, is terrified, is hoping against hope----
“I don’t kno-o-w,” she gasps. “Miss Allen didn’t like the last paper I wrote—what I said about Mark Twain.”
“Then,” Fox whispers, low and scornfully, “let Miss Allen not like it. That was a fine paper,” he whispers. “What—what you said about the River was just right.”
“I kno-o-w! And that was the part she didn’t like. She didn’t seem to know what I was talking about—said it was immature and not sound, and gave me a ‘C’.”
“Oh,” says Fox absently, thinking all the time with an immense satisfaction of the spirit: “What a girl this is! She has a fine mind. She—she understands things!”
“You see, darling,” Fox whispers gently, coming back to Miss Allen, “it’s not their fault. These people do the best they can—but—but they just can’t seem to understand,” he whispers. “You see, Miss Allen is an—an academic kind of person—I guess, kind of an old maid, really,” he whispers, with an emphatic movement of the head—“and that kind of person, darling, just wouldn’t be able to understand what Whitman and Mark Twain and Keats are like…It’s—it’s a shame,” Fox mutters, and shakes his head, his eyes troubled with regret—“it’s a shame we’ve got to hear about these people first in—in schools—from—from people like Miss Allen. You see, darling,” Fox says gently, his face cocked sideways, his good ear pointing towards the girl, his language simple as a shoe, his face keen, shrewd, thoughtful, and absorbed, and radiant as a blade of light, as it always is when interest and reflection hold the wise serpent of his brain—“you see, darling, schools are all right, really—but the Thing they do is different from the Thing that Keats and Whitman and Mark Twain do…People like that really have no place in schools. A—a school,” Fox whispers, “is an academic kind of place, you see—and the people that you find in schools are academic people—and these other kind of people—the poets,” whispers Fox, “are not academic people—they’re—they’re really against what the academic people do—they are people who—who discover things for themselves,” Fox whispers, “who burst through and make another world—and the academic people cannot understand them—so that’s why what the academic people say about them is—_is not much good_,” Fox whispers. For a moment he is silent, then shakes his head and mutters in a low tone of profound regret: “It’s a pity! Too bad you’ve got to hear about it first in schools—but—but just do the best you can with it—get what you can from it—and—and when those people“—whisper mixed with understanding, pity, and contempt—“have gone as far as they can go, just forget about the rest they tell you.”
“I kno-o-w! But, really, daddy, when Miss Allen starts drawing charts and diagrams upon the blackboard, showing how they did it—it’s—it’s aw-w-full I can’t be-e-ar it—it just makes everything so,—_te-er-rible_!...Oh, daddy, let me go!” She squirms to free herself again, her tender features tortured with self-consciousness. “Please, daddy! I’ve got to! I’ll be late!”
“How are you going?”
“But naturally, the way I always go.”
“By taxi?”
“But of course not, I take the str-e-e-t car.”
“Oh…What street car?”
“The Lexington A-a-a-venue.”
“Alone?” says Fox in a low, grave, troubled tone.
“But, of course, daddy!”
He looks at her sternly with a sorrow-troubled face, and shakes his head.
“But what’s wrong with taking the str-e-e-t car? Oh, daddy, you’re so-o—” she squirms, looks off indefinitely, her face touched by a smile of agonised embarrassment. “Please, daddy! Let me go-o-o! I tell you I’ll be late!”
She pushes a little to release herself, he kisses her, and lets her go reluctantly.
“Good-bye, darling”—low, hoarse, tender, troubled with grave solicitude. “You will take care, won’t you?”
“But, of course!” A little agonised laugh. “There’s nothing to take care.” Then, suddenly, in a timid little voice: “Good-bye, daddy”—and she is gone, swiftly, silently, like fading light.
Fox, hands upon his hips, with a look half-trouble and half-tenderness, follows her with sea-pale eyes until she has gone. Then he turns back to the table, sits down again, and picks up the paper.
News.
29. “The Hollow Men”
Fox picks up the paper and settles back to read it with keen relish. The paper is the Times. (He read the Tribune late last night: waited up for it, would not miss it, has never missed it, could not sleep if he had not read it.) Morning now, Fox reads the Times.