The Theban Mysteries Read Online Free PDF Page A

first made up that phrase. Some of the posters are pretty outspoken or downright vulgar. (‘Make love not babies’ caused a
great
deal of discussion a while back) and many of the staff wanted to outlaw them altogether, but Miss Tyringham insisted they were to stay up if they didn’t actually express an obscenity. We are surrounded with Bob Dylan and the Beatles, but they make the girls feel at home, I guess. This floor, as you see, has student art, which seems to me to change very little over the years.”
    “Lord, yes,” Kate said, looking around her. “A portrait of someone with snowflakes falling—I remember doing the same thing myself, having dropped somewhite paint on the face I was doing and not being able to get it off.
Some
things remain the same. And that,” she added, “is the supply closet.”
    “So it is. A particularly feverish memory, I gather.”
    “Sad, really, though I still can’t think of it without chuckling. I was in the middle school, and we had acquired a German math teacher of overpowering qualifications. A refugee, no doubt, from Hitler. He knew a great deal and might even have been able to explain it so that a group of giggling eleven-year-olds could understand. But he was unbearably pompous and moralistic, always fulminating against American spoiled youth in general, and our own lack of manners, brains, and attention in particular. As they would say today, he didn’t relate to the group. One day he stomped out to get some paper for an exam that was to punish us for our sins, and as one being we floated out the door and locked him in the supply closet. Then we went back to the classroom and bent innocently and silently over our books. His screams eventually aroused someone in authority.”
    “What happened?”
    “Oddly enough, nothing. We waited for the fearful summons, but it never came. He was out sick for a week, and then it was Christmas; we all felt so bad we chipped in to buy him a fruitcake. When we returned from the vacation we had a new math teacher, frightfully up-to-date, who kept one lesson ahead of us, understanding children rather than decimals. What monsters youngsters are. Yet, you know, we weren’t really unkind, only bewildered.”
    Anne Copland showed Kate the seminar rooms,newly decorated, and each holding a table surrounded by chairs, with bookcases around the walls. “To get rid of the classroom look, heaven forfend,” Anne explained. “The surroundings turned out to be half the battle. You’ll be in here.” She opened the door of a room at the moment empty. A sign “Hurrah for Antigone” was spread across the wall, and below it was a poster with a poem:
    Miss Kate Fansler, who is she
,
Expounder of Antigone?

Will she hold forth like old Tiresias
Propounding some established thesias?
Or will she know, or learn like Creon,
That we’ll discuss what we agree on?
    “Well,” Anne said, looking at Kate with some trepidation, “you are warned. I didn’t know that would be there. Hope you aren’t offended.”
    “Not offended,” Kate said. “Terrified.”
    They debouched, Kate feeling somewhat stricken, onto the entrance floor. She was not only slightly offended, which she had denied, and terrified, which she had admitted, but also a bit angry. It’s easy enough to talk about the delightful and honest young, she thought, until they get their fangs into you. Now, why didn’t I tell Miss Tyringham, impressive though she be, to take her seminar on
Antigone
and jolly well teach it herself if she’s such a bloody genius. Is it too late, I wonder, to back out now? And, faced with her first personal encounter with the high-school generation, Kate wantedto take to her heels and fly. At least my brothers know where they stand, she told herself grimly. You phony liberal, you.
    She pulled herself together to greet the lady who attended the switchboard and kept a watchful eye on the large entrance hall.
    “I’d like you to meet Miss Fansler,” Anne was saying.