Professor Darcy was a classic, tight lipped, stone faced man. It would not be a stretch to say he embodied the definition of laconic. To hear from him a flock of sentences, birdied together in any form of cohesively voluntary array, was a miracle. He did lecture, but it didn't count as "talking". A textbook, read out loud, had the same emotion and human feeling as his lectures.
He was the sole cathedral of classic literature. The room was ample, closer to an amphitheater, with some six or seven layers forming a half-circle with his desk and chalkboard as the center. Each layer was a step above the others, consisting of two pairs of double desks on each side, and the little stair with its little steps running across the center of the piece.
His desk looked like mahogany, for someone who does not know wood, and certainly few students had a good prior knowledge of carpentering to the point of pin-pointing that the desk was not, in fact, mahogany. Professor Darcy, during some introduction lecture professed every semester, would always say - "that's not mahogany" - to prove an argument which, frankly, was so unimportant as the material in which the desk was carved.
There were, too, ample windows looking at the outside world, but as one of the previous students would say - with an air of aphorism that made past his semester and became a symbol of the class for the next years to come - "to look at the Hades would be preferred over the windows". He was not, essentially, wrong. The windows had a subtle classicism about them, with the delicate frames drowned in what looked like gold - and it was. But the painting of the outside world was deplorable. Easy to say it was dead, the perfect image of human interaction with the horizon, with its grays of the concrete and purplish of long past its prime plants. It was just an abandoned building from immemorial times - sixty or seventy years before - and some not so vivacious plants. However the so great human mind would conjure a reality worse than Hades, helped by the subject of the lectures. A good combination, if you permit the aesthetics to draw your eyes, but not such a good mood if you are a tiny little more realistic. As for everything, it depended on us.
Professor Darcy, surprisingly, was a realistic. He hated the environment outside his class and fought, more than one time, thought his silent words and gestures, to reopen the building or at least take care of the green (that was purple and brown and not green). But he loved the room. So every semester, in that corner of the world, fifteen or twenty students would find themselves enthralled by his voice, narrating Aeneid or Illiad or Ars Amatoria.
Not so surprisingly, Professor Darcy used all of his allotted time during classes. No tolerance for tardiness, no students allowed after the tick of the clock, and no students leaving early, if not in the rare cases of true necessity. An iron hand teacher, maybe, a man guided by rules, for sure. The fame was shared, and everyone in related departments knew that the subsequent classes should be taken in buildings closer to Darcy's class - or they would be late everytime. So almost every semester, the students would fill their Tuesday and Thursday morning with classes in Darcy's building - known, affectionately, as Darcy's building.
Which was, of course, normal. During my days as a uni student I rarely took classes distant from each other, under punishment of running a mile in ten minutes to not arrive late in class. Not Mr. Patrick Shaw, though. Mr. Shaw looked at this arrangement and decided it was a challenge. Some men are more intrepid, that's an universal truth. Men tend to grow into their skins as they age, turning into who they are, mending the bridges with the self. It is an experimentation of sorts, advancing through the dungeons of living and tasting the bittersweet aftermath of sensations, deciding if you like it or not, if it does fall flat in mind or it makes so much noise it borders annoying. Patrick was, as every other student, in this stage.
But Patrick, as this one who speaks, was not a man of solitude. There are people like this, who shine in company and see life as a journey that justify its struggles not by the destiny or by itself, but by the compay. He hated to be alone as much as getting burned, and thrived when with friends and romances and parents and siblings and strangers and the general people. A sociable man. So, the challenge was shared. And soon, Patrick found in his company, counting the seconds to the end of Professor Darcy's lectures, a Miss Edwine, a Mr. Hercule, a Miss Abelina, a Miss Caroline and a Miss Shauna.
Every class, when the clock ticked 10 a.m., the six of them would rush throughout the campus, to the opposite building, in the last classroom available, to watch the complete and total opposite lecture.
Zoroastrians used to say the world worked in the dicotomy. They were, in this case, right. You will find two types of literature professors during your life - the guided by morals, stony faced, brickwalled one - that was already stablished as the primordial mould in which Professor Fitzwilliam Darcy as born - and the laid back, oversharer, not a care in the world one - that, again, was the perfect balance the world needed to give itself equilibrium.
Professor Elizabeth Bennet was like this. Borned in a small rural village somewhere in the middle of nowhere, she was molded from the same clay as Mr. Patrick Shaw. She was a favorite of the students, mainly because her personality was a warm one, the type to welcome and nurture the aspirations of her students. If compared to a season, the summer, if compared to an essential human emotion, hope. Professor Bennet was a safe haven to anyone struggling, in the way a nest is always remembered by its birds as the primary home, a place to safely enclose during the harshness of winter. Not rarely students would fall madly in love with her - or at least picturing themselves in love. Who wouldn't fall in love with such protected space? Kindness is the most common cause of love.
Her classroom was not grandiose as Darcy's. The room itself was new, which destitute it from the preferred old feeling of wood and crinkles on the walls. The desks were individual, blue, made of plastic with a handle attached to the chair, forming a plain and flat surface on one side, mainly the right, sometimes the left. It remind Bennet of highschool - some twenty years before - and of laughs and jokes and the general worryless attitude towards life. There were three ceiling fans, who worked more during cold days than during the warmer ones, and served mostly as a decorative accessorie. Her desk was white, made probably from cheap wood, the ones you find in public buildings, or second rate libraries, if libraries could be rated. It did form a nice image with the paperback books always on the table, with its wrinkled covers and various drawing styles - dragons, magicians, women, flames, lots and lots of letters. She liked the feel of the spines, all marked by the time, against her fingers, to run them top to bottom in the piles in her desk - as high as herself - during in-between lectures. Those small pleasures, she says, are little droplets of colour.
The highlight, thought, was the view from the window. Lifeless windows, for sure, but the communal garden was directly in its front. During her time as a student the student council worked against the university policy to build a garden for the community around the campus, to extricate whatever nature could give and whatever they had ability enough to grow. It was a bad time, an epoch of economical crisis and social strife, in which food was scarce, and hope more of a word than of a feeling. The fingers who planted in the garden laboured more for life than for labour itself. Every major had a finger in it - even business majors took it to themselves to solve logistics and moneywise problems. The garden now is mostly for viewing, the necessity of it being lost in the two decades past, but the memory of its creation still strong with the professors who were already involved in university life at the time, and its young blood still flowing into the new students vein. She fell in love with her husband during those years of struggle and fight.
"Do you think she is dating someone?" Mr. Patrick asked, tapping the heel of his feet lightly into the floor, motioning his knees up and down.
"Who?" Miss Abelina looked intently, as anything coming out from his mouth could possibly be informative. Lina knew better, but discovered quite early in life, that fun is way deeper than meaning, and inanities were also a form of finding joy in existence - she was, assuredly, a very philosophical girl.
"Professor Bennet". He look intensely, with frowned sharp eyebrows, at the pen rotating between his fingers. Lina generally found uncomfortable so many movements at once. It made her dizzy, as if she was also juggling her brain. Though she liked when Pat did it. It seemed more of a different kind of concentration rather than dispersed energy.
"I think she is married. There is an air around her, you know?" Caro said. "A woman knows the status of other women. It is identifiable." She threw her hair behind her left shoulder, lifting her chin in a mock superiority pose. "Also, the bright big ring on her finger gave it out, you moron. Of course she is married, for Christ sake."
"It wouldn't be your first married woman, though, Pat. Maybe it is worth the shot." Hercule took a seat besides Caroline, vying her neck - it looked like a goose neck, which was rather attractive in a woman, and It had a sense of paleness that resemble, uncannily, some unnamed character from Twilight. He couldn't pinpoint who it was, unfortunately. "Although, it is to consider the size of the husband this time"
"Tiny little details, Poirot. What do you think, Professor Darcy?" Patrick was knew for his fearless nature. When Professor Darcy's shadow loomed over them, from behind his back, he blurted the question.
No one moved.
"I know, for a fact, Professor Bennet is married. And her husband is tall" his deep dark voice resonated throught the room. Patrick's hands clasped, blood flowing rapidly in his veins, pumping even more courage.
"How do you know?"
"I'm her husband".
And that's how they discovered that Professor Brickwall was married to Professor Oversharer.