And by the way Deborah talked to them he felt
she had gone before, that years ago by day and night she had been over the
ground alone. And she'd done all this while she lived in his house!
Scattered memories out of the past, mere fragments she had told him, here
flashed back into his mind: humorous little incidents of daily battles she
had waged in rotten old tenement buildings with rags and filth and garbage,
with vermin, darkness and disease. Mingled with these had been accounts of
dances, weddings and christenings and of curious funeral rites. And
struggling with such dim memories of Deborah in her twenties, called forth
in his mind by the picture of the woman of thirty here, Roger grew still
more confused. What was to be the end of it? She was still but a pioneer in
a jungle, endlessly groping and trying new things.
"How many children are there in the public schools?" he asked.
"About eight hundred thousand," Deborah said.
"Good Lord!" he groaned, and he felt within him a glow of indignation rise
against these immigrant women for breeding so inconsiderately. With the mad
city growing so fast, and the people of the tenements breeding, breeding,
breeding, and packing the schools to bursting, what could any teacher be
but a mere cog in a machine, ponderous, impersonal, blind, grinding out
future New Yorkers?
He reached home limp and battered from the storm of new impressions coming
on top of his sleepless night.
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