Smith E-Book

Ken Everett

• Herausgeber: Ken Everett
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

Smith is a complex person. His family tries to provide him an education in farming. In an effort to take charge of his own life. He decides to study Literature. He then marries a girl he hardly knows. He succeeds in his career, his marriage, and his relationship with his daughter, but it becomes a struggle. As he ages, will he look back on his life and feel satisfied with the road he had taken. Less
John Smith was born into a poor farming family in Missouri. Sent to a university to study agronomy, he instead falls in love with English literature and embraces the life of a scholar. Over the years, Smith experiences a series of disappointments: marrying a "real" family alienates him from his parents; his career is hampered; his wife and daughter coldly turn their backs on him; A transformative new love experience ends under threat of scandal. Driven deeper and deeper, Smith rediscovers the stoic stillness of his ancestors and confronts an underlying loneliness. John Smith emerges not only as an archetypal American, but also as an unlikely existential hero,

The central theme of the story is surely that of love, of love's many forms and of all the forces that oppose it. "It [love] was neither a passion of the mind nor of the heart, it was a force that encompassed them both as if they were just the matter of love, its specific substance."

Leseprobe

Smith

By Ken Everett

To family… without them we would have nothing.

Characters

John Smith: The main character of the novel, referred to as "Smith" throughout the book, is a farm boy-turned-English professor. He uses his love of literature to deal with his unfulfilling family life.

Sharon Bostwick Smith: Smith's wife, a neurotic woman, came from a strict and sheltered upbringing. Smith falls in love with the idea of her, but soon realizes that she is bitter and has been for so long before they were married.

Doris Smith: Smith and Sharon's only child, Doris is easily influenced by her mother. Sharon keeps Doris away from and against her father because of the couple's failed relationship as a sort of "punishment" for Smith.

George Wren: Smith's colleague and only real ally and friend, he has known Smith since her grad school and becomes the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. His affable and outgoing demeanor contrasts with Smith's.

Brian Doyon: Smith's friend from grad school, he is killed during World War I, but his words have a lasting impact on Smith's worldview.

Bowman Quinn: As Smith's teacher and mentor, he inspired Smith to leave farming and study English literature. He is old and sickly when Smith is hired at the university.

Robin Loomis: Quinn's "replacement" at the university, he and Smith started out as friends, but Smith eventually sees him as an "enemy". Smith and Loomis disagree on their working lives. He is described as a hunchback.

Colin Stander: Loomis' crippled mentee, he is an arrogant and duplicitous young man who uses rhetorical flourishes to hide his scientific ineptitude. He also becomes an enemy of Smith.

Charlotte Durbin: A younger teacher, she is having an affair with Smith. University politics and circumstances prevent her from continuing the relationship.

Summary

John Smith was born into a poor farming family in Missouri. Sent to a university to study agronomy, he instead falls in love with English literature and embraces the life of a scholar. Over the years, Smith experiences a series of disappointments: marrying a "real" family alienates him from his parents; his career is hampered; his wife and daughter coldly turn their backs on him; A transformative new love experience ends under threat of scandal. Driven deeper and deeper, Smith rediscovers the stoic stillness of his ancestors and confronts an underlying loneliness. John Smith emerges not only as an archetypal American, but also as an unlikely existential hero,

The central theme of the story is surely that of love, of love's many forms and of all the forces that oppose it. "It [love] was neither a passion of the mind nor of the heart, it was a force that encompassed them both as if they were just the matter of love, its specific substance."

Chapter 1

John Smith entered the University of Missouri that year as a freshman

1910, aged nineteen. Eight years later, during the height of World War I, he received his doctorate in philosophy and accepted a teaching position at the same university where he taught until his death in 1956. He did not rise above the rank of assistant professor, and few of the students remembered him clearly after attending his courses. When he died, his colleagues donated a medieval manuscript to the university library as a commemorative contribution. This manuscript is still in the Rare Books Collection and bears the inscription: "Presented to the Library of the University of Missouri, in memory of John Smith, Department of English. By his members."

A casual student who comes across the name may wonder who John Smith was, but rarely pursues his curiosity beyond a casual question. Smith's colleagues, who did not hold him in high esteem when he was alive, rarely talk about him now; for the older ones, his name is a reminder of the end that awaits them all, and for the younger ones it's just a sound that evokes no sense of the past and no identity to connect themselves or their careers with.

He was born in 1891 on a small farm in central Missouri near the village of Booneville, about forty miles from Columbia, home of the university. Though his parents were young when he was born—his father twenty-five, his mother barely twenty—Smith considered them old even as boys. At thirty his father looked fifty; Bent over from his work, he looked hopelessly at the dry piece of land that supported the family from year to year. His mother watched her life patiently as if it were a long moment to endure. Her eyes were pale and blurry, and the tiny lines around her were accentuated by thin, graying hair that she wore straight over her head and tied in a bun at the back.

For as long as he can remember, John Smith has had his duties. By the age of six he was milking the bony cows, throwing the pigs into the pen a few yards from the house and collecting small eggs from a flock of scrawny hens. And even when he began attending country school eight miles from the farm, his day was filled with one or two jobs from before dawn until after dark. At seventeen his shoulders were already beginning to sag under the weight of his job.

It was a lonely household of which he was the only child, and it was held together by the necessity of his work. In the evening the three of them sat in the little kitchen, which was lit by a single kerosene lamp, and stared at the yellow flame; often the only sound that could be heard during the hour between supper and bed was the weary movement of a body on a straight chair and the soft creaking of a beam that was giving slightly with the age of the house.

The house was built in a rough square, and the unpainted beams hung around the porch and doors. It had taken on the colors of the dry land over the years – gray and brown, striped with white. To one side of the house was a long drawing room, sparsely furnished with straight chairs and a few carved tables, and a kitchen where the family spent most of their time together. On the other side were two bedrooms, each with a white-enameled iron bedstead, a single straight chair, and a table with a lamp and washbasin on it. The floors were unpainted planks, unevenly spaced and cracked with age, through which dust constantly seeped and was swept back by Smith's mother every day.

At school, he did his classes as if they were chores, just a little less strenuous than those on the farm. When he finished high school in the spring of 1910, he expected to do more work in the fields; it seemed to him that his father was getting slower and more tired as the months went by.

But one late spring evening, after the two men had spent a day chopping corn, his father accosted him in the kitchen after the dinner dishes had been cleared.

"County agent came by last week."

John looked up from the red and white checked oilcloth spread flat across the round kitchen table. He didn't speak.

"Says they have a new school at Columbia University. They call her a

College of Agriculture. Says he thinks you should go. It'll take four years." "Four years," John said. "Does it cost money?"

"You could work your room and board," his father said. "Your mother owns a first cousin who owns something outside of Columbia. There would be books and such. I could send you two or three dollars a month."

John spread his hands on the tablecloth, which shimmered dully in the lamplight. He had never been further from home than Booneville, fifteen miles away. He swallowed to steady his voice.

"Do you think you could manage the store yourself?" he asked.

"Your mother and I could do it. I would plant the top twenty in wheat; that would reduce manual labor."

John looked at his mother. "Mummy?" he asked. She said tonelessly, "You do what your da says."

"You really want me to go?" he asked, as if half hoping for a refusal. "Do you really want me?"

His father shifted his weight in the chair. He looked at his thick, calloused fingers, the cracks in which dirt had gotten so deep it couldn't be washed away. He interlaced his fingers and held them up from the table, almost in an attitude of prayer.

"I've never had any formal education," he said, looking down at his hands. "I started working on a farm when I finished sixth grade. When I was young, I never stuck to school. But now I don't know anymore. Seems the land is getting drier and harder to work with every year; it's not rich like it was when I was a boy. The district agent says they have new ideas, methods of doing things that they teach you at university. Maybe he's right. Sometimes when I work in the fields I have to think." He stopped. His fingers spasmed and his clasped hands fell on the table. "I'm starting to think..." He scowled at his hands and shook his head. "You're going to college in the fall.

It was the longest speech he had ever heard his father give. That fall he did not go to Columbia and enrolled as a freshman at the College of the University

Agriculture. He came to Columbia with a new black wool suit that he ordered from the Sears & Roebuck catalog and paid for with his mother's egg money, a worn coat that had belonged to his father, and blue serge pants that he wore once a month had gone to the Methodist church in Booneville, two white shirts, a change of work clothes, and twenty-five dollars in cash his father had borrowed from a neighbor for the fall wheat. He began his trek in Booneville, where his father and mother took him early that morning on the farm's flat-bottomed mule-drawn wagon.

It was a hot fall day and the road from Booneville to Columbia was dusty; He had walked for almost an hour when a boxcar pulled up next to him and the driver asked if he wanted a ride. He nodded and got up in the car seat. His serge trousers were red with dust to the knees, and his face, tanned by sun and wind, was caked with dirt where the dust of the road had mixed with his sweat. During the long drive, he smoothed his slacks with clumsy hands and ran his fingers through his straight, sandy-colored hair, which would not fall flat on his head.

They arrived in Columbia in the late afternoon. The driver dropped Smith on the outskirts of town and pointed to a cluster of buildings shaded by tall elms. "This is your university," he said. "You will go to school there."

After the man pulled away, Smith stood motionless for several minutes, staring at the building complex. He had never seen anything so posing. The red brick buildings stretched upwards from a wide green field punctuated by stone paths and small patches of garden. Beneath his awe, he suddenly felt a sense of security and serenity he had never felt before. Even though it was late, he walked around the campus for minutes only looking like he had no right to enter it.

It was almost dark when he asked a passer-by about Ashland Gravel, the road that would lead him to the farm of Jim Foote, his mother's first cousin, for whom he was to work; and it was after dark when he came to the white two-story frame house where he was to live. He had never seen the Footes before, and it seemed odd going to see them so late.

They greeted him with a nod and eyed him closely. After a moment where Smith stood awkwardly in the doorway, Jim Foote waved him into a small, gloomy drawing room crammed with overstuffed furniture and nick-knacks on matte-finished tables. He wasn't sitting.

"And dinner?" asked Foote. "No, sir," Smith replied.

Mrs. Foote pointed a finger at him and trotted off. Smith followed her through several rooms into a kitchen, where she gestured for him to sit at a table. She placed a jug of milk and several pieces of cold cornbread in front of him. He sipped the milk, but his mouth, dry with excitement, would not take the bread.

Foote came into the room and stood next to his wife. He was a small man, no more than five foot three inches tall, with a thin face and a sharp nose. His wife was four inches taller and heavy; rimless glasses hid her eyes and her thin lips were tight. The two watched hungrily as he sipped his milk.

"Feed and water the cattle, feed the pigs in the morning," Foote said quickly.

Smith looked at him blankly. "What?"

"You do that in the morning," Foote said, "before you go to school. In the evening you feed and beat again, collect the eggs, milk the cows. Chop firewood when you find time. On weekends you help me with everything I do."

"Yes sir," said Smith.

Foote studied him for a moment. "College," he said, shaking his head.

So for nine months he fed and watered the cattle, shed pigs, collected eggs, milked cows and chopped firewood. He also plowed and harrowed fields, dug tree stumps (breaking through three inches of frozen ground in the winter), and churned butter for Mrs. Foote, who watched him with a grim nod of approval as the wooden butter churn squirted milk up and down.

It was housed on an upper floor that had formerly been a storeroom; His only furniture was a black iron bedstead with sagging frames that supported a thin spring mattress, a broken table with a kerosene lamp, a straight chair that sat unevenly on the floor, and a large box that he used as a desk. In the winter, the only warmth it got seeped up through the floor from the rooms below; He wrapped himself in the tattered quilts and blankets he was allowed and blew on his hands so they could turn the pages of his books without tearing them.

He did his work at the university like he did his work on the farm—thoroughly, conscientiously, without joy or sorrow. At the end of his freshman year, his GPA was just under a B; He was pleased it wasn't lower and not worried that it wasn't higher. He was aware that he had learned things he hadn't known before, but to him that just meant he could do as well in his sophomore year as he did in his first.

In the summer after his freshman year, he returned to his father's farm and helped with the harvest. Once his father asked him how he liked school and he replied that he liked it a lot. His father nodded and didn't bring up the matter again.

It wasn't until he returned for his sophomore year that John Smith learned why he had come to college. By his sophomore year, he was a familiar figure on campus. In every season he wore the same black wool suit, white shirt, and tie; his wrists poked out of the sleeves of his jacket and his trousers hung awkwardly around his legs like it was a uniform that had once belonged to someone else.

His working hours increased with the increasing indolence of his employers, and he spent the long evenings in his room systematically doing his classwork; he had begun the course of study that would lead him to a Bachelor of Science degree from the College of Agriculture, and during that first semester of his sophomore year he had two undergraduate courses, a course from the School of Agriculture in soil chemistry, and a course that was becoming rather superficial from required of all university students – a semester overview of English literature.

After the first few weeks he had little trouble with the science subjects; there was so much to do, so many things to remember. The study of soil chemistry aroused his general interest; it had never occurred to him that the brownish nuggets he had been working with for most of his life were anything other than what they appeared to be, and he was beginning to vaguely realize that his growing knowledge of them could be useful when he returned to his farm. But the required perusal of English literature troubled and troubled him like nothing before.

The instructor was a middle-aged man in his early fifties; his name was

Bowman Quinn, and he approached his teaching with an apparent disdain and contempt, as if he perceived a chasm so wide between what he knew and what he could say that he would not bother to bridge it. He was feared and disliked by most of his students, and he responded with distant, wry amusement. He was a man of medium height, with a long, lined face, clean-shaven; he had the impatient gesture of running his fingers through his mop of gray curly hair. His voice was flat and dry, and it came without expression or intonation through barely moving lips; but his long thin fingers moved with Doris and persuasion, as if giving the words a form his voice could not.

Away from the classroom, doing his chores on the farm or squinting into the dim lamplight in his windowless attic room, Smith was often aware that the image of this man had popped up in his mind's eye. He had trouble imagining the face of another of his teachers or remembering something very specific about another of his classes; but always on the threshold of his consciousness waited the figure of Bowman Quinn, and his dry voice, and his scornful, casual words about a passage from Beowulf or a couplet from Chaucer.

He found he couldn't complete the survey like his other courses. Though he remembered the authors and their works and their dates and their influences, he nearly failed his first exam; and he did little better on his second. He read and reviewed his literature assignments so often that his work in other courses began to suffer; and still the words he read were words upon pages, and he could not see the use of what he was doing.

And he thought about the words Bowman Quinn spoke in class as if beneath their flat, dry meaning he might find some clue that would lead him where he was going; he bent over the desk in a chair too small to hold comfortably, clinging to the edges of the desk so tight his knuckles were white against his brown hard skin; he frowned and bit his bottom lip. But as Smith and his classmates' attention grew more desperate, Bowman's contempt for Quinn became irresistible. And once that contempt exploded into anger and was directed solely at John Smith.

The class had read two plays by Shakespeare and ended the week studying the sonnets. The students were nervous and confused, half-startled by the tension building between them and the hunched figure watching them from behind the lectern. Quinn had read them the seventy-third sonnet; his eyes darted around the room and his lips curled into a humorless smile.

"What does the sonnet mean?" he asked abruptly, pausing, his eyes scanning the room with a grim and almost contented hopelessness. "Mr. Wilbur?" There was no answer. "Mr. Schmidt?" Someone coughed. Quinn turned his dark, light eyes on Smith. "Mr. Smith, what does the sonnet mean?"

Smith swallowed and tried to open his mouth.

'It is a sonnet, Mr Smith,' said Quinn dryly, 'a fourteen-line poetic composition in a particular pattern which I am sure you have memorized. It's written in English, which I think you've been speaking for a number of years. Its author is John Shakespeare, a poet who is dead but who nevertheless occupies an important place in the minds of a few." He continued to stare at Smith for a moment, and then his eyes went blank as she became invisible beyond the class fixed. Without looking at his book, he recited the poem; and his voice became deeper and softer, as if the words and tones and rhythms had become himself for a moment: "You can see this time of year in me, when yellow leaves or none or few are hanging on these branches, those against it shiver the cold, mere ruin d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang. In me you see the twilight of such a day

As the west fades after sunset;

Which gradually takes away the black night, Death's second self, which seals everything in silence.

In me you see such fire glowing that lies on the ashes of his youth,

Like the deathbed on which it must perish, consumed by what it was nourished on.

You realize what makes your love stronger

To love what you will soon have to leave." In a moment of silence, someone cleared their throat. Quinn repeated the lines, his voice flat again, his own again. "You perceive that what makes your love stronger, To love this well you must soon leave." Quinn's eyes returned to John Smith and he said dryly, "Mr. Shakespeare speaks to you for three hundred years, Mr. Smith; do you hear him?"

John Smith realized he had been holding his breath for several moments. He let it out gently, aware of the movement of his clothes on his body as his breath left his lungs. He looked away from Quinn across the room. Light fell obliquely from the windows and fell on the faces of his fellow students, so that the illumination seemed to come from them and went out against a twilight; a student blinked, and a thin shadow fell on a cheek whose down had caught the sunlight. Smith became aware of his fingers loosening their hard grip on his desktop. He turned his hands under his gaze, marveling at her tan, at the intricate way the nails fit into his blunt fingertips; he mean,

Quinn spoke again. "What is he saying to you, Mr Smith? What does his sonnet mean?"

Smith's eyes rose slowly and reluctantly. "That is," he said, raising his hands in the air with a small movement; he felt his eyes glaze over as they sought the form of Bowman Quinn. "That is," he said again, unable to finish what he had started to say.

Quinn looked at him curiously. Then he nodded abruptly and said, "Class is dismissed." Without looking at anyone, he turned and left the room.

John Smith was barely aware of the students around him, who grumbled and muttered from their seats and shuffled out of the room. After they left, he sat motionless for a few minutes, staring ahead at the narrow floorboards worn bare by the restless feet of students he would never see or know. He slid his own feet across the floor, hearing the dry rustle of wood on his soles and feeling the roughness through the leather. Then he got up and walked slowly out of the room.

The thin chill of the late autumn day cut through his clothes. He looked around, at the bare, gnarled branches of the trees that rippled and twisted against the pale sky. Students hurrying across campus to their classes brushed it; he heard the murmur of their voices and the clatter of their heels on the stone paths and saw their faces, flushed from the cold, bent down against a gentle breeze. He looked at them curiously as if he had never seen them before, feeling very far from them and very close to them. He captured the feeling that he had rushed to his next class, and held it through his soil chemistry professor's lecture, against the booming voice reciting things to be written in notebooks and remembered by a process of drudgery,

In the sophomore of that school year, John Smith dropped his foundation science courses and interrupted his Ag School sequence; he took introductory courses in philosophy and ancient history and two courses in English literature. In the summer he returned to the family farm and helped his father with the harvest and did not mention his work at the university. When he was much older, he would look back on his last two college years as if they were an unreal time belonging to someone else, a time that passed, not in the regular flow to which he was accustomed, but in fits and starts begins. One moment was contrasted with yet isolated from the other, and he felt lost in time as he watched them run like a big,

He became aware of himself in a way he hadn't before. Sometimes he looked at himself in the mirror, looked at the long face with the shock of dry brown hair and touched his sharp cheekbones; he saw the thin wrists protruding inches from the sleeves of his coat; and he wondered if he seemed as ridiculous to others as he did to himself.

He had no plans for the future, and he never shared his insecurities with anyone. He continued to work for the Footes for his room and board, but he no longer worked the long hours of his first two years at the university. He let himself be used as Jim and Serena Foote wished for three hours every afternoon and half a day on weekends; he claimed the rest of the time for himself.

He spent part of this time in his little attic room above the Foote house; but as often as he could, after his classes were finished and his work at Footes done, he returned to the university. In the evenings he sometimes wandered about the long open courtyard among couples who walked together and murmured softly; even though he didn't know any of them and even though he didn't speak to them, he felt related to them. Sometimes he would stand in the center of the courtyard and gaze at the five huge pillars in front of Jesse Hall, jutting out of the cool grass into the night; he had learned that these pillars were the remains of the original main building of the university, which had been destroyed by fire many years before. Gray-silver in the moonlight, bare and pure, they seemed to represent the way of life

In the university library, he wandered through the stacks, among the thousands of books, breathing in the musty smell of leather, cloth, and drying pages as if it were some exotic incense.

Sometimes he would pause, pick a volume off the shelf and hold it for a moment in his large hands, which tingled at the still unfamiliar feel of spine and box and unresistant page. Then he flipped through the book, reading a paragraph here and there, his stiff fingers turning the pages cautiously as if in their clumsiness they might tear and destroy what they had taken so much trouble to uncover.

He had no friends and for the first time in his life he became aware of his loneliness. Sometimes, at night in his attic room, he would look up from a book he was reading and stare into the dark corners of his room where the lamplight flickered against the shadows. If he stared long and hard, the darkness would gather into a light that took on the insubstantial shape of what he had been reading. And he would feel like he was running out of time, like he had felt that day in class when Bowman Quinn had spoken to him. The past gathered from the darkness where it stayed, and the dead rose to live before it; and the past and the dead flowed into the present among the living, so that for an intense moment he had a vision of density that he was condensed into and from which he could not and did not want to escape. Tristan, Iseult the Fair, went before him; Paolo and Francesca whirled in the glowing darkness; Helen and the radiant Paris, their faces bitter at the consequence, rose from the darkness. And he was with them in a way he could never be with his fellow students, who went from class to class, who found local abode in a great university in Columbia, Missouri, and roamed the Midwest air unconcernedly. Helen and the radiant Paris, their faces bitter at the consequence, rose from the darkness. And he was with them in a way he could never be with his fellow students, who went from class to class, who found local abode in a great university in Columbia, Missouri, and roamed the Midwest air unconcernedly. Helen and the radiant Paris, their faces bitter at the consequence, rose from the darkness. And he was with them in a way he could never be with his fellow students, who went from class to class, who found local abode in a great university in Columbia, Missouri, and roamed the Midwest air unconcernedly.

In one year he learned Greek and Latin well enough to be able to read simple texts; often his eyes were red and burning from exertion and lack of sleep. Sometimes he thought of himself as he had been a few years ago and marveled at the memory of that strange figure, brown and passive like the earth from which he had emerged. He thought of his parents, and they were almost as strange as the child they had borne; he felt a mixture of pity for her and a distant love.

One day, in the middle of his fourth year at university, Bowman stopped Quinn after class and asked him to come to his office to talk.

It was winter, and a low, humid Midwestern fog hung over campus. Even at mid-morning the slender boughs of the dogwood trees gleamed with hoarfrost, and the black tendrils that climbed the great pillars in front of Jesse Hall were fringed with iridescent crystals that sparkled against the gray. Smith's coat was so shabby and worn that he had decided not to wear it to see Quinn, even though the weather was freezing. He shivered as he hurried up the sidewalk and up the wide stone steps that led to Jesse Hall.

After the cold, the heat inside the building was intense. The gray outside seeped through the windows and glass doors on either side of the hall, making the yellow tiled floors shine brighter than the gray light on them, and the tall oak columns and worn walls gleamed in their darkness. Shuffling footsteps hissed across the floors, and a murmur of voices was muffled by the vastness of the hall; indistinct shapes moved slowly, mingling and separating; and the oppressive air gathered the smell of oiled walls and the damp smell of woolen clothes. Smith climbed the smooth marble staircase to Bowman Quinn's office on the second floor. He knocked on the closed door, heard a voice and entered.

The office was long and narrow, lit by a single window at the far end. Shelves full of books reached up to the high ceiling. A desk was wedged in near the window, and in front of that desk sat Bowman Quinn, half-turned and outlined darkly against the light.

"Mr. Smith," Quinn said dryly, half standing and gesturing toward a leather-covered chair facing him. Smith sat down.

"I've checked your papers." Quinn paused and picked up a folder from his desk, which he eyed with distant irony. "I hope you don't mind my curiosity."

Smith licked his lips and shifted in the chair. He tried to fold his big hands together so they were invisible. "No, sir," he said hoarsely.

Quinn nodded. "Good. I see that you started your studies here as an agricultural student and switched to literature sometime in your sophomore year. Is that correct?"

"Yes sir," said Smith.

Quinn leaned back in his chair and looked up at the square of light pouring in through the tall little window. He tapped his fingertips together and turned back to the young man sitting stiffly in front of him.

"The official purpose of this conference is to inform you that you need to make a formal change of major by declaring your intention to drop out of your original major and by declaring your final major. It's a matter of about five minutes to registry office. You take care of it, don't you?"

"Yes sir," said Smith.

"But as you might have guessed, that's not why I asked you to stop by.

"No, sir," Smith said. He looked down at his hands, which were tightly clasped together.

Quinn touched the briefcase he had dropped on his desk. "I assume you were a bit older than a normal student when you first came to the university. Almost twenty I think?"

"Yes sir," said Smith.

"And at that time you were planning to complete the sequence offered by agricultural school?"

"Yes indeed."

Quinn leaned back in his chair and looked at the high, gloomy ceiling. He asked abruptly, "And what are your plans now?"

Smith said nothing. He hadn't thought of that, hadn't wanted to think about it. Finally, with a touch of resentment, he said, "I don't know. I haven't thought much about it."

Quinn said, "Are you looking forward to the day you step out of these closed walls into what some call the world?"

Smith grinned at his embarrassment. "No sir."

Quinn tapped the briefcase on his desk. "I understand from these records that you come from a farming community. I assume your parents are farmers?"

Smith nodded.

"And do you plan on returning to the farm after you graduate?" "No, sir," Smith said, surprised by the determination in his voice. He should consider the decision he had suddenly made with some wonder.

Quinn nodded. "I would imagine that a serious student of literature would find his skills not exactly suited to soil persuasion."

"I'm not going back," Smith said as if Quinn hadn't said anything. "I don't know what I'm going to do exactly." He looked down at his hands and said to them, "I can't imagine finishing so quickly that I'm leaving university at the end of the year."

Quinn said casually, "There's no absolute reason for you to go, of course. Schmidt shook his head.

"You have an excellent bachelor's degree. Except for your' - he raised his eyebrows and smiled - 'except for your second survey of English literature, you get all A's in your English courses, nothing below B anywhere else. If you could last a year or so beyond graduation, you could sure to successfully complete the work for your Master of Arts, after which you could probably teach while working towards your PhD interests you at all."

Smith withdrew. "What do you mean?" he asked, hearing something like fear in his voice.

Quinn leaned forward until his face was close; Smith saw the lines on the long, thin face soften and heard the dry, mocking voice soften and guard.

"But don't you know, Mr. Smith?" asked Quinn. "Don't you understand yourself yet? You're going to be a teacher."

Suddenly Quinn seemed very distant and the walls of the office receded. Smith felt himself floating in the open air and heard his voice asking, "Are you sure?"

"I'm sure," Quinn said softly.

"How do you know that? How can you be sure?"

"It's love, Mr. Smith," Quinn said cheerfully. "You're in love. It's that simple."

It was that simple. He was aware that he was nodding to Quinn and saying something irrelevant. Then he left the office. His lips tingled and his fingertips were numb; He walked as if he were asleep, and yet he was intensely aware of his surroundings. He brushed against the polished wooden walls in the corridor and thought he could feel the warmth and age of the wood; He walked slowly down the stairs, wondering at the veined cold marble that seemed to slip a little under his feet. In the hallways, the students' voices rose clearly and individually from the muffled murmurs, and their faces were close and strange and familiar. He left Jesse Hall in the morning and the gray no longer seemed to oppress the campus; it turned his eyes outward and up into the sky,

In the first week of June 1914, John Smith received his Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Missouri along with sixty other young men and a few young women.

To attend the ceremony, his parents had left the day before—in a borrowed buggy pulled by their old dun mare—and had driven the forty or so miles from the farm overnight, arriving at the Footes' house just after sunrise, stiff from her sleepless journey. Smith met them in the yard. They stood side by side in the clear morning light and awaited his arrival.

Smith and his father shook hands in one quick pumping motion without looking each other.

"How are you?" said his father.

His mother nodded. "Your da and I are coming down to watch you graduate."

He didn't speak for a moment. Then he said, "You'd better come in and have some breakfast."

They were alone in the kitchen; since Smith had come to the farm, the Footes had taken to sleeping late. But neither then nor after his parents had finished breakfast could he bring himself to tell them about his change of plans, his decision not to return to the farm. Once or twice he began to speak; then he watched the brown faces rising naked from their new clothes and thought of the long journey they had made and the years they had waited for his return. He sat stiffly beside them until they had drunk the last of their coffee and until the Footes got up and came into the kitchen. He then told them that he had to go to the university early and that he would see them doing the exercises there later in the day.

He wandered about campus wearing the black robe and cap he had rented; they were heavy and cumbersome, but he could not find a place to put them. He thought about what he needed to say to his parents, and for the first time he realized the finality of his decision and almost wished he could remember it. He felt his inadequacy to the goal he had so recklessly chosen and felt the pull of the world he had left. He grieved for his own loss and that of his parents, and even in his grief he felt himself withdrawing from them.

He carried that sense of loss with him during final practice; when his name was called and he walked across the platform to accept a scroll from a faceless man behind a soft gray beard, he could not believe his own presence, and the scroll of parchment in his hand meant nothing. All he could think about was his mother and father, sitting stiff and uncomfortable in the crowd.

When the ceremonies were over, he drove them back to the Footes, where they were to stay the night and begin their journey home at dawn.

They sat in the Footes' parlor until late. Jim and Serena Foote stayed with them for a while. Every now and then, Jim and Smith's mother exchanged a relative's name and fell silent. His father was sitting in a straight chair, legs apart, leaning forward a little, wide hands wrapped around his kneecaps. Finally, the Footes looked at each other, yawned, and announced it was late. They went to their bedroom and the three were left alone.

Silence reigned again. His parents, looking straight ahead in the shadows of their own bodies, gave their son sidelong glances now and then, as if not wanting to disturb him in his new home.

After a few minutes, John Smith leaned forward and spoke, his voice louder and more energetic than he had intended. "I should have told you earlier. I should have told you last summer or this morning."

His parents' faces were dull and expressionless in the lamplight.

"What I'm trying to say is I'm not coming back to the farm with you."

Nobody moved. His father said, "You still have a few things to do here, we can go back in the morning and you can come home in a few days."

Smith rubbed his face with his open palm. "That's – not what I meant. I want to tell you that I will not be coming back to the farm at all."

His father's hands tightened around his kneecaps and he leaned back in the chair. He said, "Are you getting yourself into any trouble?"

Smith smiled. "It's not like that. I'll go to school for another year, maybe two or three."

His father shook his head. "I saw you come through tonight.

Smith tried to explain to his father what he was up to, trying to evoke in him his own sense of meaning and purpose. He listened to his words as if from someone else's mouth and watched his father's face absorb those words like a stone absorbs the repeated blows of a fist. When he was done, he sat with his hands clasped between his knees and his head bowed. He listened to the stillness of the room.

Eventually his father shifted in his chair. Smith looked up. His parents' faces faced him; he almost yelled for them.

"I don't know," said his father. His voice was hoarse and tired. "I didn't think it would turn out like this. I thought I would do my best for you by sending you here. Your mother and I have always done our best for you."

"I know," Smith said. He couldn't look at her any longer. "Are you going to be okay? I might come back and help out for a while this summer. I could..."

"If you think you should stay here and study your books, then you should. Your mom and I can do it."

His mother faced him, but she did not see him. Her eyes were narrowed; she was breathing heavily, her face was contorted as if in pain, and her closed fists pressed against her cheeks. With amazement, Smith realized that she was crying, deeply and quietly, with the shame and embarrassment of a person who rarely cries. He watched her for a moment; then he got up clumsily and left the drawing-room. He found his way up the narrow staircase that led to his attic room; for a long time he lay on his bed and stared with open eyes at the darkness above him.

Chapter 2

Two weeks after Smith received his Bachelor of Arts degree, Archduke Francis Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo by a Serbian nationalist; and before the autumn war was common throughout Europe. It was a topic of ongoing interest among the older students; They wondered what role America would ultimately play, and they were pleasantly uncertain about their own future.

But before John Smith lay the future bright and sure and unchanging. He didn't see it as a flow of events and changes and possibilities, but as an area ahead that awaited exploration. He viewed it as the great university library, to which new wings could be built, new books added, and old ones removed, while its true nature remained essentially unchanged. He saw the future in the institution to which he was committed and which he so imperfectly understood; he envisioned himself changing in that future, but he saw the future itself as an instrument of change rather than its object.

Towards the end of that summer, just before the start of the fall semester, he visited his parents. He had intended to help with the summer harvest; but he found that his father had hired a black field hand who worked with a calm, fierce intensity, and accomplished almost as much in a day as John and his father together had once done in the same amount of time. His parents were happy to see him and didn't seem to mind his decision. But he found he had nothing to say to them; He already realized that he and his parents were becoming strangers; and he felt his love grow with the loss. He returned to Columbia a week earlier than intended.

He began to resent the time he had to spend working at Foote Farm. Being late to his studies, he felt the urgency of studying. Sometimes, when he was engrossed in his books, he became aware of all that he didn't know, that he hadn't read; and the serenity he worked for was shattered when he realized how little time in life he had to read so much to learn what he needed to know.

In the spring he completed his Master of Arts degree

1915 and spent the summer completing his doctoral thesis, a prosody study of one of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Before the summer was over, the Footes told him they wouldn't need him on the farm anymore.

He had expected his release and in a way welcomed it; but for a moment after it happened, a rush of panic came over him. It was as if the last tie between him and the old life had been severed. He spent the last weeks of the semester on his father's farm, where he put the finishing touches on his thesis. By this time, Bowman Quinn had arranged for him to teach two classes of Beginner's English to incoming freshmen while he began pursuing his Ph.D. For this he was paid four hundred dollars a year. He took his things out of the Footes' tiny attic room he had occupied for five years and moved to an even smaller room near the university.

Though assigned to teach only the basics of grammar and composition to a group of unselected freshmen, he approached his task with enthusiasm and a keen sense of its importance. He planned the course the week before the fall semester began, seeing the kind of opportunities that come with struggling with the materials and subjects of an endeavor; he felt the logic of grammar and thought he could see it spreading of its own accord, permeating language and sustaining human thought. In the simple compositional exercises he did for his students, he saw the possibilities of prose and its beauties, and looked forward to enlivening his students with the sense of what he perceived.

But in the first classes he met, after the opening routines of roles and curriculum, as he began to reach out to his subject and his students, he found that his sense of wonder remained hidden within him. Sometimes when he spoke to his students it was as if he were standing outside himself, watching a stranger speak to a reluctantly assembled group; he heard his own flat voice reciting the materials he had prepared, and none of his own excitement came through that recitation.

He found salvation and fulfillment in the classes in which he was a student himself. There he could regain the sense of discovery he'd felt that first day when Bowman Quinn had spoken to him in class and he'd instantly become someone else than he had been. As his mind engaged with the subject, as he grappled with the power of the literature he studied and sought to understand its nature, he was aware of a constant shift within himself; and when he was conscious of this, he moved of himself into the world which contained him, so that he knew that the poem of Milton he was reading, or the essay of Bacon, or the drama of Ben Jonson, the world, which was his altered subject and changed it because of his dependence on him.

He began to get to know some of his fellow students who were also assistant lecturers in the department. Among these were two he befriended, Brian Doyon and George Wren.