The Listener by Taylor Caldwell
“She was very eloquent, and she made little ballet gestures with her hands and rolled her eyes, and her voice became lyrical. ‘A teacher’, she warbled — how I hate these warbling, professional mothers! — ‘cares nothing for money, and isn’t that wonderful in a materialistic age?’ He or she has given his or her life to the holy ‘children’. I looked at Marcia, sitting opposite me, and thought of her salary and her invalid mother and how I had just co-signed a loan for her so she could pay the doctor’s bills. Marcia, who, like myself, must find another job in the summer, instead of studying or resting and refreshing herself on a little holiday so that she could be not only a strong teacher in September but a full human being. That is part of the horror of it all: we aren’t full human beings. We were never permitted to be. ‘Dedicated’. Why does everybody believe that a teacher should have no life of his own, no pleasure, no joy, no money, no laughter, and occasionally no innocent sin? Who are they, these professional mothers and fatuous fathers, to believe that their children are worth our death in life? Or anyone’s life, if it comes to that? Or even their own? The majority of people only take up room in the world, without contributing a thing to it but endless replicas of themselves who must be ‘educated’. ”
The room was very quiet, very still. The man sighed, looked about him. “You don’t know,” he said, “how wonderful it is to be in a place that is as silent and peaceful as this! No children, no school board, no principals, no PTA, no shrill voices and pounding feet, no worry, no anxiety. Above all, no voices and no bells.
“Only recently I overheard a man say to another, ‘It’s very funny, but the teachers are always complaining about their low salaries. But I’ve noticed they leave very fat estates, most of them. Did you see where old Miss Thompson died the other day? She was all of eighty. She left nearly two hundred thousand dollars. Not bad. Not bad at all’.
“I wanted to tell the fool,” said the teacher, his voice rising, “that old Miss Thompson had been able to save a large part of her salary before high taxes came on the scene. And in an age when a schoolteacher’s salary was substantial compared with an unskilled laborer’s and prices were low. Moreover, many teachers had been left respectable estates by parents. Moreover, many of them remained unmarried and had small expenses. Unmarried. Now we must remain unmarried because we can’t afford to marry! Marcia — ”
His features drew together in a spasm.
“The only time we see anything beautiful is when we are in our schools — all glass and landscaping and fine hot and cold running swimming pools and pretty furniture and colored walls and lavish gyms and auditoriums that resemble expensive theaters. Then we go home to our drab rooms and look at the old furniture handed down to us by our mothers, or at the miserable sticks of a furnished, cheap apartment. Yet we teachers are the ones who are scolded in the press and at public meetings for ‘palatial schools’ and ‘high budgets’ and extravagance! This always happens when we timidly ask for a raise in salary so we can live too. We are blamed for the high estimates of new schools or expansions of old ones.
“None of the scolders, of course, ever blames himself for the gigantic and luxurious school plants. They want the very best, and the most expensive and luxurious, for ‘the children’. They demand these things; the children ‘deserve’ them. I should like to know what law, spiritual or national, declares that people ‘deserve’ anything simply because they’ve been born! I was taught as a child that you must justify your existence in this world. I’ve had kids whimper in my class that they didn’t ‘ask to be born’. Well, neither did I, and neither did my parents, or their parents before them, or anyone else in the world! But once here we have duties before rights, and responsibilities before ‘demands’. Try to tell that to your class! The principal will ask for your suspension or resignation at once. The professional mothers will be all shrieking mouths and baleful eyes and angry gestures.”
The teacher sighed, a faint sigh that spoke of exhaustion and hopelessness.
“The kids don’t need luxurious school palaces. My generation didn’t. They need only sound buildings; no luxuries. They don’t need ‘supervised’ play. Why can’t people let kids alone? They’ve become ‘projects’ now, of idle mothers who in other generations were too busy caring for their homes and cooking and baking and washing and sewing and scrubbing floors and ironing and window-cleaning and baby-tending. There is nothing so dangerous to a whole nation than a tribe of idle women busying themselves with ‘projects’ of one sort or another. I’d like to hang the men who invented automatic washing machines and other gadgets! Now the majority of people don’t have homes; they have ‘housing’ for electrical equipment which gives them more time — more time for what? Mischief. No wonder we have the problem of juvenile delinquency.”
The teacher rubbed his lined forehead. “I could talk all day about this,” he said apologetically. “The teacher’s problems are the problems of a whole nation. I do want to thank you for listening to me. People never listen to a teacher. They think we’re prosy, proper, and stiff, almost as bad as the clergy. They’ve forced that archetype on us. We’re flesh and blood; we hate the pattern they demand we fit.
“I was speaking to you about the school palaces. A school is a place of learning, not of ‘fun’ and recreation, not a place of baby-sitters. A school is an institution where children should be taught as widely as possible, and drilled and disciplined, and informed about their present and future public duties, to their family, their Creator, and their nation. I could spend another full day telling you of the silly and embarrassing ‘courses’ which are now part of the school curriculum, which were demanded by parents and not by teachers. Each facet of a teacher’s life would fill a whole book! And each facet is expensive, and the taxpayers scream — yet it is the taxpayers who demand all this nonsense and all this lavishness. When they look at their tax bills, they next look at the salaries teachers receive and talk about five hours’ work a day and ‘holidays’ and ‘long summer vacations’ and why are teachers so greedy? Why do they want more money? Where is the old-fashioned teacher who was ‘dedicated’ and never thought about money at all?
“Yes, where is the old-fashioned teacher who was regarded with awe and respect by his students, and with even more respect by his students’ parents? What happened to an age when children understood they came to school to learn, to be grateful for the chance to learn, and to listen with eager interest? What happened to an age when parents kept their hands off the schools and attended to their own business — which was earning a living by sound labor and caring for their families and taking them to church? I think I have at least one answer to that: too many people have too much money, too much time, too much ‘fun’. ”
He sighed again. “If all this money, leisure, and fun had resulted in a spiritually stronger people, a nobler people, a people with higher principles and strength of character, a more free and intelligent people, a more responsible people, a people more aware of what there is to learn in the world, a people who desired more libraries and a continuing education after they had long left school, it would be worth it. It would even be worth the miserable salaries paid school teachers; we’d be happy, have a high feeling of self-esteem and satisfaction; we’d know we had accomplished something worthwhile. We’d feel, then, that our demanded ‘dedication’ was dedication indeed, given with all our hearts and all our souls. If a man has any rights at all, it is the right of pride in his occupation.
“But all the money and leisure and fun have been disastrous to us as a nation. They’ve sent us searching, not for learning and wisdom, but for trivialities, newer amusements, newer mischief, cheaper and more vulgar entertainment, more ornate cars, more toys to fill idle, restless hands. Where is the American character now, the character that opened frontiers in the wilderness, that sailed on dark seas, that established free schools and churches, that voted for men of integrity and not men with four-cornered smiles full of glaring teeth, that considered morality the very founda
The teacher rested his worn cheek on his palm. “Because of the kind of people we have now we shall lose that nation, conceived in liberty and faith. Because we teachers are not permitted any longer to teach the children what they should be taught, they’ll become increasingly weak, undisciplined, fierce, bored, unprincipled and dutiless — and uneducated. The children aren’t more stupid than their grandparents, even if some teachers bitterly say they are. It is only that they are ignorant, and are kept ignorant, by the insistence of their parents that their brains not be taxed in schools, that they not be disciplined, that they be amused in the classroom and not taught, that school be only a glorified, warm, luxurious play pen. While Mama busies herself about her ‘projects’ and bridge games.
“Mama loves the word ‘trauma’. She’s picked up a great deal of psychiatric jargon in her careless reading. I wonder if she ever thinks of the incurable ‘trauma’ she is inflicting on her children by making life too pleasant and comfortable for them? I wonder if she ever thinks of the ‘trauma’ she inflicts on the teachers of her children by denying them the right of pride in their occupation and a decent recompense as some of the more important people in her children’s lives?
“She’s taken our ancient pride from us, the pride of Socrates and Plato and Aristotle, and the whole grandeur of the teaching profession, from the very beginning when teachers were also priests and philosophers. To Mama, we are baby-sitters, paid to amuse her children and ‘care’ for them. If she despises what she has made of us, does she ever wonder how much we despise ourselves for letting her do this to our spirits?”
The teacher looked with haggard eyes at the curtain. His lips were dry. He moistened them. He leaned forward a little.
“Were you ever a teacher?” he asked, coughing apologetically, then hating himself for that apologetic cough which was now part of a teacher’s mannerisms. He waited. The light in the room seemed warmer, gentler, like an assent. “Oh?” he murmured. “Then you were, or are, a teacher! Then you know.” For a moment he was apprehensive. “I wonder if you can see through those curtains. I’d — I’d prefer it if you could not. I wouldn’t want the board —
“I’m sorry,” said the teacher. There was a dry smarting along his eyelids. “I shouldn’t have said that.”
Something tight in him began to relax. He coughed, wiped his lips. He was trembling a little. “I don’t know when I’ve talked so much, and in this way, before, except when I’m with Marcia. You see, Marcia and I want to be married.”
He rubbed his dry hands over his dry face. He mumbled,
“Even my bones are tired. I go to bed tired and wake up tired. My life is one drab gray tiredness. I can’t eat without feeling the grit of tiredness in my food. The uselessness — ”
He said, “Marcia and I grew up together, and that’s a miracle now, considering what the social scientists call a ‘mobile population’. Approvingly. As if the mere moving of legs and bodies and cars and trains and planes and buses were a virtue in itself. Mobility is assumed to be ‘dynamism’. Then the desperate pacing of lions in a zoo is dynamism too. The desperate pacing of creatures who want to be free — free of what? I don’t know! Perhaps of comfort and leisure and entertainment and ‘fun’. Perhaps they want to find some solid worth in their lives, and they go looking for it restlessly and never find it. They only exchange places and habitations, and they’re all the same. So they move again. Mobile. I’d prefer to call it desperation.
“As a teacher yourself, you’ll understand this. No doubt you encounter it every day. I wonder if I know you.”
Again the warm and beaming assent reached out to him with love. He coughed.
“Marcia and I went to school together in old Number Ten. We saw each other in class; we had to run — and I do mean run — home after school to help our mothers. Marcia had two brothers and one sister. They’re all married now. They have ‘responsibilities’ to their families and so can’t contribute to their old mother’s support. Marcia, they say resentfully, isn’t married, and as a teacher she’ll probably never marry, so it is her ‘responsibility’ to support their mother. It’s very strange that people who are not responsible themselves always demand responsibility in others — especially if it involves their wallets.
“Marcia was always a gentle, quiet girl and, like myself, she always wanted to be a teacher. We used to talk about it whenever we had a moment to talk, in the hallways, just before the bells rang, at Sunday school. And so we studied very hard. We were, in the true meaning of the word, dedicated young people. We couldn’t think of anything nobler and finer than taking up where our hard-working and dedicated teachers had to leave off, in death and old age. We loved and reverenced our teachers. We knew what they were. Why, our teachers were the same kind of people as our pastors!
“We would often talk of Our Lord as The Teacher. When we were at State Teachers College we’d walk on the campus and discuss Him. We knew that the word ‘rabbi’ meant teacher, and He was called ‘rabbi’ by His disciples. What greater calling, then, was there beyond teaching, except the priesthood and the ministry? In fact, teachers were the laymen of Holy Orders. We wore vestments on our spirits.
“We didn’t think of salaries — then. Because we had the pride of our profession, the nobility of it. That was above money.”
The teacher laughed gently, sadly. “I am thirty-eight,” he said. “Marcia is thirty-seven. We’ve been teaching many years, if you want to call it ‘teaching’. At first it was exhilarating. It was exciting, satisfying, fulfilling.
“Then one day when Marcia was teaching history — her subject — she happened to mention that if one looked acutely at history one saw the hand of God in the rise and fall of nations. A nation flourished, said Marcia, when it obeyed the immutable Law of God, and it declined when it disobeyed. There was a terrible inevitability in it all.
“What happened to Marcia, then, was also terrible. A mob of parents stormed into the school loudly denouncing Marcia as a violator of the ‘principle of separation of Church and State’. Marcia is such a gentle soul. She could only stand in confused silence in the principal’s office while the professional mothers scolded her. Didn’t she know that the Constitution expressly forbids the establishing of a State religion? Wasn’t she modern? Hadn’t she learned yet that no prayers or mention of God was permitted in the public schools? ‘Separation of Church and State’.
“Then Marcia said, ‘But God is the State’. She was suspended immediately. The principal was a kindly, religious soul. But there were the parents. And something more sinister behind the parents. Why, she and I were taught the Lord’s Prayer in our public schools, and the Ten Commandments, and were told our duty to God. I never heard any Catholic, Protestant, or Jewish mother protest then. It is possible, of course, that parents in our youth were more concerned about the souls of their children than the milk they drank and the hot free lunches they had and the playgrounds and the mental health, as they now call it. (What is ‘mental health’ but harmony between a man and his God?)
“Marcia was heartbroken. She is too gentle to fight. She had no money with which to fight. I had five hundred dollars. We brought up the whole matter in court. It was finally decided — the judge looked tired and embarrassed, himself — that Marcia should be restored to her position but that she must never violate the principle of ‘separation of Church and State’ again.
“I’ve studied that Amendment to the Constitution. It speaks only of the fact that the government must never set up any particular religion as the State religion, such as they have in Britain and the S