No, Helga wasn’t sick. Not physically. She was merely disgusted. Fed up with Naxos. If that could be called sickness. The truth was that she had made up her mind to leave. That very day. She could no longer abide being connected with a place of shame, lies, hypocrisy, cruelty, servility, and snobbishness. “It ought,” she concluded, “to be shut down by law.”
“But, Helga, you can’t go now. Not in the middle of the term.” The kindly Margaret was distressed.
“But I can. And I am. Today.”
“They’ll never let you,” prophesied Margaret.
“They can’t stop me. Trains leave here for civilization every day. All that’s needed is money,” Helga pointed out.
“Yes, of course. Everybody knows that. What I mean is that you’ll only hurt yourself in your profession. They won’t give you a reference if you jump up and leave like this now. At this time of the year. You’ll be put on the black list. And you’ll find it hard to get another teaching-job. Naxos has enormous influence in the South. Better wait till school closes.”
“Heaven forbid,” answered Helga fervently, “that I should ever again want work anywhere in the South! I hate it.” And fell silent, wondering for the hundredth time just what form of vanity it was that had induced an intelligent girl like Margaret Creighton to turn what was probably nice live crinkly hair, perfectly suited to her smooth dark skin and agreeable round features, into a dead straight, greasy, ugly mass.
Looking up from her watch, Margaret said: “Well, I’ve really got to run, or I’ll be late myself. And since I’m staying—Better think it over, Helga. There’s no place like Naxos, you know. Pretty good salaries, decent rooms, plenty of men, and all that. Ta-ta.” The door slid to behind her.
But in another moment it opened. She was back. “I do wish you’d stay. It’s nice having you here, Helga. We all think so. Even the dead ones. We need a few decorations to brighten our sad lives.” And again she was gone.
Helga was unmoved. She was no longer concerned with what anyone in Naxos might think of her, for she was now in love with the piquancy of leaving. Automatically her fingers adjusted the Chinese-looking pillows on the low couch that served for her bed. Her mind was busy with plans for departure. Packing, money, trains, and—could she get a berth?
III
On one side of the long, white, hot sand road that split the flat green, there was a little shade, for it was bordered with trees. Helga Crane walked there so that the sun could not so easily get at her. As she went slowly across the empty campus she was conscious of a vague tenderness for the scene spread out before her. It was so incredibly lovely, so appealing, and so facile. The trees in their spring beauty sent through her restive mind a sharp thrill of pleasure. Seductive, charming, and beckoning as cities were, they had not this easy unhuman loveliness. The trees, she thought, on city avenues and boulevards, in city parks and gardens, were tamed, held prisoners in a surrounding maze of human beings. Here they were free. It was human beings who were prisoners. It was too bad. In the midst of all this radiant life. They weren’t, she knew, even conscious of its presence. Perhaps there was too much of it, and therefore it was less than nothing.
In response to her insistent demand she had been told that Dr. Anderson could give her twenty minutes at eleven o’clock. Well, she supposed that she could say all that she had to say in twenty minutes, though she resented being limited. Twenty minutes. In Naxos, she was as unimportant as that.
He was a new man, this principal, for whom Helga remembered feeling unaccountably sorry, when last September he had first been appointed to Naxos as its head. For some reason she had liked him, although she had seen little of him; he was so frequently away on publicity and money-raising tours. And as yet he had made but few and slight changes in the running of the school. Now she was a little irritated at finding herself wondering just how she was going to tell him of her decision. What did it matter to him? Why should she mind if it did? But there returned to her that indistinct sense of sympathy for the remote silent man with the tired gray eyes, and she wondered again by what fluke of fate such a man, apparently a humane and understanding person, had chanced into the command of this cruel educational machine. Suddenly, her own resolve loomed as an almost direct unkindness. This increased her annoyance and discomfort. A sense of defeat, of being cheated of justification, closed down on her. Absurd!
She arrived at the administration building in a mild rage, as unreasonable as it was futile, but once inside she had a sudden attack of nerves at the prospect of traversing that great outer room which was the workplace of some twenty odd people. This was a disease from which Helga had suffered at intervals all her life, and it was a point of honor, almost, with her never to give way to it. So, instead of turning away, as she felt inclined, she walked on, outwardly indifferent. Halfway down the long aisle which divided the room, the principal’s secretary, a huge black man, surged toward her.
“Good morning, Miss Crane, Dr. Anderson will see you in a few moments. Sit down right here.”
She felt the inquiry in the shuttered eyes. For some reason this dissipated her self-consciousness and restored her poise. Thanking him, she seated herself, really careless now of the glances of the stenographers, bookkeepers, clerks. Their curiosity and slightly veiled hostility no longer touched her. Her coming departure had released her from the need for conciliation which had irked her
