With the opening of the last and lived-in year of this life which to others was passionless, the student-experience of reaching the fulness of student days, and facing their wane, was robbed of its heed by the knowledge of near communion with the creature first to her judging. The strait routine continued to give of what seemed so foreign to itself. It was at the first hearing of a lecture from his lips, that there came the first awakening to the hidden truth.
She took long to forget what her pale calmness hid, as its minutes passed and its words fell. It was not that the words were as those she had looked for: there was little that strained the feelings or powers of those who listened. There was nothing but an academic dealing with the drama prescribed, with holding to the hearers’ needs, and checking of instinct to rise or probe beyond their following. But poor Dolores! There was little need of what her fancy had painted, for the begetting of tumult within her. As surely as this would have brought it, it was born of what was afforded. This simple doing of a common thing by the man of genius, this expending of the greatly-achieving energy on the unhonoured service, given for sustenance — it was an awakening of deeper heart-throbs. That month was a dream, bound up with the real by the struggle with the lassitude of mind, which came of the long emotional strain; and at its end, no word had passed between the teacher and the pupil who would have given this worth to a word.
But there was difference in the months that followed. The classic drama was held a subject calling for some individual teaching; and there came a moment when she stood, with limbs that trembled, at the door behind which he awaited her alone. The essay whose judgment was to fill his hour of duty to her, passed from her hand to his, with a faltering of the one and a casual grasp of the other, which showed her herself as she was in his sight — one in an insignificant many. His dealing with it struck no note — as she had had a formless fear that it might — discordant with her conception of him. He propped his face in his hands with his eyes almost touching its pages; read them from the first to the last without diversion of glance; and then accomplished his task with as great a despatch as permitted its doing; limiting critical words to the parts that needed them, and showing what offended by drawing his pen through the passage. When he gathered up the papers at the end, he stayed his hand, and turned them as if he had found them not as their kind. Then putting them into her hands, without encountering her eyes, he pushed back his chair from the desk, and seemed to sink into musing. The lessons passed thus for weeks, even to the doubt at the end. At last, urged by the thought of their lessening number, she embodied in her essay a passage that showed a knowledge of his dramas. It was not an actual quotation or eulogy; for her instinct guarded her from stumbling — simply some words which implied a reading of his latest play. She saw his eyes arrested by the passage; and felt rather than saw, his glance at herself; but he spoke no word. Her sense of repulsion revealed in its pain how much the action had held of purpose; and she summoned her strength, and faced the following meeting with no emotion free. As she entered the room, his eyes went to her face.
“You read my plays?” he said.
“Yes,” said Dolores, feeling no power of further utterance.
“Ah! that is well,” he said, looking into her face with a peering gaze, that seemed to be straining to grasp what it held. Then, turning to her papers, he added in his harsher tones, “Well, for your own sake;” and gave himself to his task.
No further word, apart from their formal dealings, was said till the close of the term. As he gave her her papers for the last time, he fixed his eyes on hers in a manner to hold her in waiting for speech. When they had stood for some moments, he spoke in quick, deep tones.
“How about some lessons with me on my own plays?”
Dolores never recalled her answer. The memory she summoned was of his turning away with the words, “Ah, well, well; we shall see to it.”
Coming upon him in the cloisters early in the following term, and passing him, believing she was not perceived, she was startled at a distance by his voice.
“Five o’clock will do,” he called, as though some discussion of the hour had passed. “Five o’clock on Fridays. We begin this evening.”
From that day Dolores knew the great man as a teacher, and was dealt with by him as a pupil. He laid aside the conventional mask he wore with women; and showed her himself, sparing her nothing of the brunt of his moods. At times he was full of forbearance and kindliness, in control of his nervous temper, and delighted to gratitude by the insight into his aims, which her early study and the affinity of their minds had given; at others, intolerant of the faintest faltering of grasp; and at others, in a mood of cynical bitterness to the world that ignored his service, which held her in heavy constraint, in its grudging of sign that exception was made of herself. He accepted no gratitude for the service he rendered; and presumed in no way upon it unless in assumption of a right to guide. It was not in chief his own plays that he taught, but, as he told her in a moment of emotion, “the greatest thing that life offered to men”—the study of men, as shown in nature, and, as grasped from nature, in the plays of the greater dramatists of different time and race; in whom, with a natural dignity which thrilled her to passion, he numbered himself: and at times he demanded not only understanding of these, but studies of character from her own pen.
As the months grew few and priceless, and the days heavy with the knowledge, that this sufficing lot was but a passage of her life, about to be resolved into a burden of memories, for the rendering her other than she seemed in a barren sphere, Dolores found that her daily service to duty was a daily wrestling. The approaching change seemed the tearing of her being from the only nurture that was sustenance. And comfort was not a thing to be sought. There was denied to her grief the bitter softening of waking and moving in thraldom to itself. The public tests of student-proficience, which were in name the end of these passionate, prosaic years, lay before her, as they lay before those whose unchastened youthfulness had welcome for their young emulation. It was due from her to strive for much that had grown to be of childish things; and the hours and effort given to the dramatist’s demands, were owed in duty to the feebler ends.
Dolores’ living of this time showed her the same as we have known her. Her bearing marked her light of heart, when the hidden burden lay heavily; the daylight hours of helpless wrestling were atoned by labour in the silence; and her voice was as calm, as her lips were white, when she showed the playwright that his counsels must be second to her academic toiling.
“Ah!” he said, and was silent; but Dolores heard his confession of error in thinking her not as her fellows.
“It is not,” she said, not trying longer to smother what came to her voice, “that I do not value your teaching far above other things. It is only — you see I have given time to what I have done for you — that I have no choice but to work for credentials. I shall be obliged to support myself by teaching.”