Kitabı oku: «The Brown Mouse», sayfa 3
CHAPTER IV
THE FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL
I suppose every reader will say that genius consists very largely in seeing Opportunity in the set of circumstances or thoughts or impressions that constitute Opportunity, and making the best of them.
Jim Irwin would have said so, anyhow. He was full of his Emerson’s Representative Men, and his Carlyle’s French Revolution, and the other old-fashioned, excellent good literature which did not cost over twenty-five cents a volume; and he had pored long and with many thrills over the pages of Matthews’ Getting on in the World– which is the best book of purely conventional helpfulness in the language. And his view of efficiency was that it is the capacity to see opportunity where others overlook it, and make the most of it.
All through his life he had had his own plans for becoming great. He was to be a general, hurling back the foes of his country; he was to be the nation’s master in literature; a successful drawing on his slate had filled him with ambition, confidently entertained, of becoming a Rubens – and the story of Benjamin West in his school reader fanned this spark to a flame; science, too, had at times been his chosen field; and when he had built a mousetrap which actually caught mice, he saw himself a millionaire inventor. As for being president, that was a commonplace in his dreams. And all the time, he was barefooted, ill-clad and dreamed his dreams to the accompaniment of the growl of the plow cutting the roots under the brown furrow-slice, or the wooshing of the milk in the pail. At twenty-eight, he considered these dreams over.
As for this new employment, he saw no great opportunity in it. Of any spark of genius he was to show in it, of anything he was to suffer in it, of those pains and penalties wherewith the world pays its geniuses, Jim Irwin anticipated nothing. He went into the small, mean, ill-paid task as a part of the day’s work, with no knowledge of the stirring of the nation for a different sort of rural school, and no suspicion that there lay in it any highway to success in life. He was not a college man or even a high-school man. All his other dreams had found rude awakening in the fact that he had not been able to secure the schooling which geniuses need in these days. He was unfitted for the work geniuses do. All he was to be was a rural teacher, accidentally elected by a stupid school board, and with a hard tussle before him to stay on the job for the term of his contract. He could have accepted positions quite as good years ago, save for the fact that they would have taken him away from his mother, their cheap little home, their garden and their fowls. He rather wondered why he had allowed Jennie’s sneer to sting him into the course of action which put him in this new relation to his neighbors.
But, true to his belief in honest thorough work, like a general preparing for battle, he examined his field of operations. His manner of doing this seemed to prove to Colonel Woodruff, who watched it with keen interest as something new in the world, that Jim Irwin was possibly a Brown Mouse. But the colonel knew only a part of Jim’s performances. He saw Jim clothed in slickers, walking through rainstorms to the houses in the Woodruff District, as greedy for every moment of rain as a haymaker for shine; and he knew that Jim made a great many evening calls.
But he did not know that Jim was making what our sociologists call a survey. For that matter, neither did Jim; for books on sociology cost more than twenty-five cents a volume, and Jim had never seen one. However, it was a survey. To be sure, he had long known everybody in the district, save the Simmses – and he was now a friend of all that exotic race; but there is knowing and knowing. He now had note-books full of facts about people and their farms. He knew how many acres each family possessed, and what sort of farming each husband was doing – live stock, grain or mixed. He knew about the mortgages, and the debts. He knew whether the family atmosphere was happy and contented, or the reverse. He knew which boys and girls were wayward and insubordinate. He made a record of the advancement in their studies of all the children, and what they liked to read. He knew their favorite amusements. He talked with their mothers and sisters – not about the school, to any extent, but on the weather, the horses, the automobiles, the silo-filling machinery and the profits of farming.
I suppose that no person who has undertaken the management of the young people of any school in all the history of education, ever did so much work of this sort before his school opened. Really, though Jennie Woodruff did not see how such doings related to school work, Jim Irwin’s school was running full blast in the homes of the district and the minds of many pupils, weeks and weeks before that day when he called them to order on the Monday specified in his contract as the first day of school.
Con Bonner, who came to see the opening, voiced the sentiments of the older people when he condemned the school as disorderly. To be sure, there were more pupils enrolled than had ever entered on a first day in the whole history of the school, and it was hard to accommodate them all. But the director’s criticism was leveled against the free-and-easy air of the children. Most of them had brought seed corn and a good-sized corn show was on view. There was much argument as to the merits of the various entries. Instead of a language lesson from the text-book, Jim had given them an exercise based on an examination of the ears of corn.
The number exercises of the little chaps had been worked out with ears and kernels of corn. One class in arithmetic calculated the percentage of inferior kernels at tip and butt to the full-sized grains in the middle of the ear.
All the time, Jim Irwin, awkward and uncouth, clad in his none-too-good Sunday suit and trying to hide behind his Lincolnian smile the fact that he was pretty badly frightened and much embarrassed, passed among them, getting them enrolled, setting them to work, wasting much time and laboring like a heavy-laden barge in a seaway.
“That feller’ll never do,” said Bonner to Bronson next day. “Looks like a tramp in the schoolroom.”
“Wearin’ his best, I guess,” said Bronson.
“Half the kids call him ‘Jim,’” said Bonner.
“That’s all right with me,” replied Bronson.
“The room was as noisy as a caucus,” was Bonner’s next indictment, “and the flure was all over corn like a hog-pin.”
“Oh! I don’t suppose he can get away with it,” assented Bronson disgustedly, “but that boy of mine is as tickled as a colt with the whole thing. Says he’s goin’ reg’lar this winter.”
“That’s because Jim don’t keep no order,” said Bonner. “He lets Newt do as he dam pleases.”
“First time he’s ever pleased to do anything but deviltry,” protested Bronson. “Oh, I suppose Jim’ll fall down, and we’ll have to fire him – but I wish we could git a good teacher that would git hold of Newt the way he seems to!”
CHAPTER V
THE PROMOTION OF JENNIE
If Jennie Woodruff was the cause of Jim Irwin’s sudden irruption into the educational field by her scoffing “Humph!” at the idea of a farm-hand’s ever being able to marry, she also gave him the opportunity to knock down the driver of the big motor-car, and perceptibly elevate himself in the opinion of the neighborhood, while filling his own heart with something like shame.
The fat man who had said “Cut it out” to his driver, was Mr. Charles Dilly, a business man in the village at the extreme opposite corner of the county. His choice of the Woodruff District as a place for motoring had a secret explanation. I am under no obligation to preserve the secret. He came to see Colonel Woodruff and Jennie. Mr. Dilly was a candidate for county treasurer, and wished to be nominated at the approaching county convention. In his part of the county lived the county superintendent – a candidate for renomination. He was just a plain garden or field county superintendent of schools, no better and no worse than the general political run of them, but he had local pride enlisted in his cause, and was a good politician.
Mr. Dilly was in the Woodruff District to build a backfire against this conflagration of the county superintendent. He expected to use Jennie Woodruff to light it withal. That is, while denying that he wished to make any deal or trade – every candidate in every convention always says that – he wished to say to Miss Woodruff and her father, that if Miss Woodruff would permit her name to be used for the office of county superintendent of schools, a goodly group of delegates could be selected in the other corner of the county who would be glad to reciprocate any favors Mr. Charles J. Dilly might receive in the way of votes for county treasurer with ballots for Miss Jennie Woodruff for superintendent of schools.
Mr. Dilly never inquired as to Miss Woodruff’s abilities as an educator. That would have been eccentric. Miss Woodruff never asked herself if she knew anything about rural education which especially fitted her for the task; for was she not a popular and successful teacher – and was not that enough? Mr. Dilly merely asked himself if Miss Woodruff’s name could command strength enough to eliminate the embarrassing candidate in his part of the county and leave the field to himself. Miss Woodruff asked herself whether the work would not give her a pleasanter life than did teaching, a better salary, and more chances to settle herself in life. So are the officials chosen who supervise and control the education of the farm children of America.
This secret mission to effect a political trade accounted for Mr. Dilly’s desire that his driver should “cut out” the controversy with Newton Bronson, and the personal encounter with Jim Irwin – and it may account for Jim’s easy victory in his first and only physical encounter. An office seeker could scarcely afford to let his friend or employee lick a member of a farmers’ road gang. It certainly explains the fact that when Jim Irwin started home from putting out his team the day after his first call on the Simms family, Jennie was waiting at the gate to be congratulated on her nomination.
“I congratulate you,” said Jim.
“Thanks,” said Jennie, extending her hand.
“I hope you’re elected,” Jim went on, holding the hand; “but there’s no doubt of that.”
“They say not,” replied Jennie; “but father says I must go about and let the people see me. He believes in working just as if we didn’t have a big majority for the ticket.”
“A woman has an advantage of a man in such a contest,” said Jim; “she can work just as hard as he can, and at the same time profit by the fact that it’s supposed she can’t.”
“I need all the advantage I possess,” said Jennie, “and all the votes. Say a word for me when on your pastoral rounds.”
“All right,” said Jim, “what shall I say you’ll do for the schools?”
“Why,” said Jennie, rather perplexed, “I’ll be fair in my examinations of teachers, try to keep the unfit teachers out of the schools, visit schools as often as I can, and – why, what does any good superintendent do?”
“I never heard of a good county superintendent,” said Jim.
“Never heard of one – why, Jim Irwin!”
“I don’t believe there is any such thing,” persisted Jim, “and if you do no more than you say, you’ll be off the same piece as the rest. Your system won’t give us any better schools than we have – of the old sort – and we need a new kind.”
“Oh, Jim, Jim! Dreaming as of yore! Why can’t you be practical! What do you mean by a new kind of rural school?”
“A truly-rural rural school,” said Jim.
“I can’t pronounce it,” smiled Jennie, “to say nothing of understanding it. What would your tralalooral rural school do?”
“It would be correlated with rural life,” said Jim.
“How?”
“It would get education out of the things the farmers and farmers’ wives are interested in as a part of their lives.”
“What, for instance?”
“Dairying, for instance, in this district; and soil management; and corn-growing; and farm manual training for boys; and sewing, cooking and housekeeping for the girls – and caring for babies!”
Jennie looked serious, after smothering a laugh.
“Jim,” said she, “you’re going to have a hard enough time to succeed in the Woodruff school, if you confine yourself to methods that have been tested, and found good.”
“But the old methods,” urged Jim, “have been tested and found bad. Shall I keep to them?”
“They have made the American people what they are,” said Jennie. “Don’t be unpatriotic, Jim.”
“They have educated our farm children for the cities,” said Jim. “This county is losing population – and it’s the best county in the world.”
“Pessimism never wins,” said Jennie.
“Neither does blindness,” answered Jim. “It is losing the farms their dwellers, and swelling the cities with a proletariat.”
For some time, now, Jim had ceased to hold Jennie’s hand; and their sweetheart days had never seemed farther away.
“Jim,” said Jennie, “I may be elected to a position in which I shall be obliged to pass on your acts as teacher – in an official way, I mean. I hope they will be justifiable.”
Jim smiled his slowest and saddest smile.
“If they’re not, I’ll not ask you to condone them,” said he. “But first, they must be justifiable to me, Jennie.”
“Good night,” said Jennie curtly, and left him.
Jennie, I am obliged to admit, gave scant attention to the new career upon which her old sweetheart seemed to be entering. She was in politics, and was playing the game as became the daughter of a local politician. The reader must not by this term get the impression that Colonel Woodruff was a man of the grafting tricky sort of which we are prone to think when the term is used. The West has been ruled by just such men as he, and the West has done rather well, all things considered. Colonel Albert Woodruff went south with the army as a corporal in 1861, and came back a lieutenant. His title of colonel was conferred by appointment as a member of the staff of the governor, long years ago, when he was county auditor. He was not a rich man, as I may have suggested, but a well-to-do farmer, whose wife did her own work much of the time, not because the colonel could not afford to hire “help,” but for the reason that “hired girls” were hard to get.
The colonel, having seen the glory of the coming of the Lord in the triumph of his side in the great war, was inclined to think that all reform had ceased, and was a political stand-patter – a very honest and sincere one. Moreover, he was influential enough so that when Mr. Cummins or Mr. Dolliver came into the county on political errands, Colonel Woodruff had always been called into conference. He was of the old New England type, believed very much in heredity, very much in the theory that whatever is is right, in so far as it has secured money or power.
He had hated General Weaver and his forces; and had sometimes wondered how a man of Horace Boies’ opinions had succeeded in being so good a governor. He broke with Governor Larrabee when that excellent man had turned against the great men who had developed Iowa by building the railroads. He was always in the county convention, and preferred to serve on the committee on credentials, and leave to others the more showy work of membership in the committee on resolutions. He believed in education, provided it did not unsettle things. He had a good deal of Latin and some Greek, and lived on a farm rather than in a fine house in the county seat because of his lack of financial ability. As a matter of fact, he had been too strictly scrupulous to do the things – such as dealing in lands belonging to eastern speculators who were not advised as to their values, speculating in county warrants, buying up tax titles with county money, and the like – by which his fellow-politicians who held office in the early years of the county had founded their fortunes. A very respectable, honest, American tory was the colonel, fond of his political sway, and rather soured by the fact that it was passing from him. He had now broken with Cummins and Dolliver as he had done years ago with Weaver and later with Larrabee – and this breach was very important to him, whether they were greatly concerned about it or not.
Such being her family history, Jennie was something of a politician herself. She was in no way surprised when approached by party managers on the subject of accepting the nomination for county superintendent of schools. Colonel Woodruff could deliver some delegates to his daughter, though he rather shied at the proposal at first, but on thinking it over, warmed somewhat to the notion of having a Woodruff on the county pay-roll once more.
CHAPTER VI
JIM TALKS THE WEATHER COLD
“Going to the rally, James?”
Jim had finished his supper, and yearned for a long evening in his attic den with his cheap literature. But as the district schoolmaster he was to some extent responsible for the protection of the school property, and felt some sense of duty as to exhibiting an interest in public affairs.
“I guess I’ll have to go, mother,” he replied regretfully. “I want to see Mr. Woodruff about borrowing his Babcock milk tester, and I’ll go that way. I guess I’ll go on to the meeting.”
He kissed his mother when he went – a habit from which he never deviated, and another of those personal peculiarities which had marked him as different from the other boys of the neighborhood. His mother urged his overcoat upon him in vain – for Jim’s overcoat was distinctly a bad one, while his best suit, now worn every day as a concession to his scholastic position, still looked passably well after several weeks of schoolroom duty. She pressed him to wear a muffler about his neck, but he declined that also. He didn’t need it, he said; but he was thinking of the incongruity of a muffler with no overcoat. It seemed more logical to assume that the weather was milder than it really was, on that sharp October evening, and appear at his best, albeit rather aware of the cold. Jennie was at home, and he was likely to see and be seen of her.
“You can borrow that tester,” said the colonel, “and the cows that go with it, if you can use ’em. They ain’t earning their keep here. But how does the milk tester fit into the curriculum of the school? A decoration?”
“We want to make a few tests of the cows in the neighborhood,” answered Jim. “Just another of my fool notions.”
“All right,” said the colonel. “Take it along. Going to the speakin’?”
“Certainly, he’s going,” said Jennie, entering. “This is my meeting, Jim.”
“Surely, I’m going,” assented Jim. “And I think I’ll run along.”
“I wish we had room for you in the car,” said the colonel. “But I’m going around by Bronson’s to pick up the speaker, and I’ll have a chuck-up load.”
“Not so much of a load as you think,” said Jennie. “I’m going with Jim. The walk will do me good.”
Any candidate warms to her voting population just before election; but Jennie had a special kindness for Jim. He was no longer a farm-hand. The fact that he was coming to be a center of disturbance in the district, and that she quite failed to understand how his eccentric behavior could be harmonized with those principles of teaching which she had imbibed at the state normal school in itself lifted him nearer to equality with her. A public nuisance is really more respectable than a nonentity.
She gave Jim a thrill as she passed through the gate that he opened for her. White moonlight on her white furs suggested purity, exaltation, the essence of womanhood – things far finer in the woman of twenty-seven than the glamour thrown over him by the schoolgirl of sixteen.
Jim gave her no thrill; for he looked gaunt and angular in his skimpy, ready-made suit, too short in legs and sleeves, and too thin for the season. Yet, as they walked along, Jim grew upon her. He strode on with immense strides, made slow to accommodate her shorter steps, and embarrassing her by his entire absence of effort to keep step. For all that, he lifted his face to the stars, and he kept silence, save for certain fragments of his thoughts, in dropping which he assumed that she, like himself, was filled with the grandeur of the sparkling sky, its vast moon, plowing like an astronomical liner through the cloudlets of a wool-pack. He pointed out the great open spaces in the Milky Way, wondering at their emptiness, and at the fact that no telescope can find stars in them.
They stopped and looked. Jim laid his hard hands on the shoulders of her white fur collarette.
“What’s the use of political meetings,” said Jim, “when you and I can stand here and think our way out, even beyond the limits of our Universe?”
“A wonderful journey,” said she, not quite understanding his mood, but very respectful to it.
“And together,” said Jim. “I’d like to go on a long, long journey with you to-night, Jennie, to make up for the years since we went anywhere together.”
“And we shouldn’t have come together to-night,” said Jennie, getting back to earth, “if I hadn’t exercised my leap-year privilege.”
She slipped her arm in his, and they went on in a rather intimate way.
“I’m not to blame, Jennie,” said he. “You know that at any time I’d have given anything – anything – ”
“And even now,” said Jennie, taking advantage of his depleted stock of words, “while we roam beyond the Milky Way, we aren’t getting any votes for me for county superintendent.”
Jim said nothing. He was quite, quite reestablished on the earth.
“Don’t you want me to be elected, Jim?”
Jim seemed to ponder this for some time – a period of taking the matter under advisement which caused Jennie to drop his arm and busy herself with her skirts.
“Yes,” said Jim, at last; “of course I do.”
Nothing more was said until they reached the schoolhouse door.
“Well,” said Jennie rather indignantly, “I’m glad there are plenty of voters who are more enthusiastic about me than you seem to be!”
More interesting to a keen observer than the speeches, were the unusual things in the room itself. To be sure, there were on the blackboards exercises and outlines, of lessons in language, history, mathematics, geography and the like. But these were not the usual things taken from text-books. The problems in arithmetic were calculations as to the feeding value of various rations for live stock, records of laying hens and computation as to the excess of value in eggs produced over the cost of feed. Pinned to the wall were market reports on all sorts of farm products, and especially numerous were the statistics on the prices of cream and butter. There were files of farm papers piled about, and racks of agricultural bulletins. In one corner of the room was a typewriting machine, and in another a sewing machine. Parts of an old telephone were scattered about on the teacher’s desk. A model of a piggery stood on a shelf, done in cardboard. Instead of the usual collection of text-books in the desk, there were hectograph copies of exercises, reading lessons, arithmetical tables and essays on various matters relating to agriculture, all of which were accounted for by two or three hand-made hectographs – a very fair sort of printing plant – lying on a table. The members of the school board were there, looking on these evidences of innovation with wonder and more or less disfavor. Things were disorderly. The text-books recently adopted by the board against some popular protest had evidently been pitched, neck and crop, out of the school by the man whom Bonner had termed a dub. It was a sort of contempt for the powers that be.
Colonel Woodruff was in the chair. After the speechifying was over, and the stereotyped, though rather illogical, appeal had been made for voters of the one party to cast the straight ticket, and for those of the other faction to scratch, the colonel rose to adjourn the meeting.
Newton Bronson, safely concealed behind taller people, called out, “Jim Irwin! speech!”
There was a giggle, a slight sensation, and many voices joined in the call for the new schoolmaster.
Colonel Woodruff felt the unwisdom of ignoring the demand. Probably he relied upon Jim’s discretion and expected a declination.
Jim arose, seedy and lank, and the voices ceased, save for another suppressed titter.
“I don’t know,” said Jim, “whether this call upon me is a joke or not. If it is, it isn’t a practical one, for I can’t talk. I don’t care much about parties or politics. I don’t know whether I’m a Democrat, a Republican or a Populist.”
This caused a real sensation. The nerve of the fellow! Really, it must in justice be said, Jim was losing himself in a desire to tell his true feelings. He forgot all about Jennie and her candidacy – about everything except his real, true feelings. This proves that he was no politician.
“I don’t see much in this county campaign that interests me,” he went on – and Jennie Woodruff reddened, while her seasoned father covered his mouth with his hand to conceal a smile. “The politicians come out into the farming districts every campaign and get us hayseeds for anything they want. They always have got us. They’ve got us again! They give us clodhoppers the glad hand, a cheap cigar, and a cheaper smile after election; – and that’s all. I know it, you all know it, they know it. I don’t blame them so very much. The trouble is we don’t ask them to do anything better. I want a new kind of rural school; but I don’t see any prospect, no matter how this election goes, for any change in them. We in the Woodruff District will have to work out our own salvation. Our political ring never’ll do anything but the old things. They don’t want to, and they haven’t sense enough to do it if they did. That’s all – and I don’t suppose I should have said as much as I have!”
There was stark silence for a moment when he sat down, and then as many cheers for Jim as for the principal speaker of the evening, cheers mingled with titters and catcalls. Jim felt a good deal as he had done when he knocked down Mr. Billy’s chauffeur – rather degraded and humiliated, as if he had made an ass of himself. And as he walked out of the door, the future county superintendent passed by him in high displeasure, and walked home with some one else.
Jim found the weather much colder than it had been while coming. He really needed an Eskimo’s fur suit.
