The Groves of Academe: A Novel (Transaction Large Print Books) Read Online Free Page A

girls’ rooms—“ Don’t go to Philadelphia this weekend; stay and go to the dance!” Having been taught by their mothers that the girl was always at fault if the boy drank or took liberties, the missioners applied this principle to the social situation at Jocelyn, and, perched on the foots of beds, in pajamas, with cold cream on their faces, in the bathroom with soap-dish and towel, argued earnestly against weekend absenteeism, indifferentism, laisser aller, capitulation to the status quo.
    They knew that at bottom the inert majority felt as they did: the girls’ rooms they visited were decorated with the same rag-dolls and teddy-bears, pink kewpies won at shooting-ranges, poufs and taffeta comforters, Mickey Mouse lamps, pictures of Mummy and Daddy in silver frames; the boys still had their lariats and bridles, souvenirs of the rodeo, autographed baseballs, bird-books—often, on the athletic field, on a clear fall afternoon, a boy would be seen flying a pale-blue kite into the blue sky. And yet agreement, they sorrowfully learned to recognize, was not tantamount to active adherence. In principle, most would admit that what Jocelyn needed in its social life was a certain modicum of formality and supervision. In practice, few, it seemed, were convinced by the assertion that Dr. and Mrs. Mulcahy had put new life into the dances by taking their chaperonage seriously. The majority would not consent to try out, even once, in action what it gladly conceded in talk, and, tendering promises of “another time,” “ask me later,” “give me a rain-check” (male), would follow the crowd as usual down to Gus’s roadhouse or off and away altogether. What disturbed the advocates of the dances most profoundly was the discovery of a fathomless paradox at the bottom of their friends’ thinking: in following the crowd, against their own will and judgment, they were following themselves, i.e., nobody.
    Moreover, the claim that the Mulcahys took their chaperonage seriously, queer as this sounded as an inducement to youth in a progressive college, actually touched on a vital issue. The tolerance of other chaperons had been the subject of much student dispute. Certain younger teachers had been courting popularity by winking at gross infringements of the rules, allowing the punch to be spiked, hip-flasks to be produced on the dance-floor, necking to go on unchecked; on one occasion, even, marijuana had been smoked on the steps of the gymnasium during intermissions, with the tacit, shrugging knowledge of the faculty-member present. More responsible teachers, asked to serve as chaperons, irritably refused to give their time. Others treated the affair condescendingly, as a lark, coming in late, wearing ski-clothes or rough tweeds patched at the elbows, dancing close with their favorites or with members of their own party—moist-eyed strangers out of the night, wrapped in bright scarves and smelling of liquor. To such teachers, who appeared to live for the pleasure-principle, chaperonage, plainly, was a vast jest or a tiresome imposition; progressive education was a jest, which you winked at and made your living off; the students were comic archetypes, fantastic humors, butts of an educational ideology or else simply fair game, trophies of an impersonal venery—every year there were rumors of seduction, homosexuality, abortion, lesbian attachments, and what shocked the students about these stories, some of them very circumstantial, was the fact that they appeared to take place in a moral vacuum, to leave no trace the morning after; the teacher was at his desk, unchanged, smiling, impassive, and the student’s grade, a C usually in these cases, showed no improvement for the encounter.
    Dr. Mulcahy, of course, was not the only instructor whose domestic life was regular, but he was the only one of the modernists who had a real sympathy for youth. He respected it in its integrity, its conservatism, its quest for forms, laws, definitions,