CHAPTER VIIIAND THE OLD BOTTLES
The day passed. Four o’clock came. In order that all might reach home for supper, there was no staying, except that Newt Bronson and Raymond Simms remained to sweep and dust the schoolroom, and prepare kindling for the next morning’s fire—a work they had taken upon themselves, so as to enable the teacher to put on the blackboards such outlines for the morrow’s class work as might be required. Jim was writing on the board a list of words constituting a spelling exercise. They were not from the text-book, but grew naturally out of the study of the seed wheat—“cockle,” “morning-glory,” “convolvulus,” “viable,” “viability,” “sprouting,” “iron-weed” and the like. A tap was heard at the door, and Raymond Simms opened it.
In filed three women—and Jim Irwin knewas he looked at them that he was greeting a deputation, and felt that it meant a struggle. For they were the wives of the members of the school board. He placed for them the three available chairs, and in the absence of any for himself remained standing before them, a gaunt shabby-looking revolutionist at the bar of settled usage and fixed public opinion.
Mrs. Haakon Peterson was a tall blonde woman who, when she spoke betrayed her Scandinavian origin by the northern burr to her “r’s,” and a slight difficulty with her “j’s,” her “y’s” and long “a’s.” She was slow-spoken and dignified, and Jim felt an instinctive respect for her personality. Mrs. Bronson was a good motherly woman, noted for her housekeeping, and for her church activities. She looked oftener at her son, and his friend Raymond than at the schoolmaster. Mrs. Bonner was the most voluble of the three, and was the only one who shook hands with Jim; but in spite of her rather offhand manner, Jim sensed in the little, black-eyed Irishwoman the real commander of the expedition against him—for such he knew it to be.
“You may think it strange of us coming after hours,” said she, “but we wanted to speak to you, teacher, without the children here.”
“I wish more of the parents would call,” said Jim. “At any hour of the day.”
“Or night either, I dare say,” suggested Mrs. Bonner. “I hear you’ve the scholars here at all hours, Jim.”
Jim smiled his slow patient smile.
“We do break the union rules, I guess, Mrs. Bonner,” said he; “there seems to be more to do than we can get done during school hours.”
“What right have ye,” struck in Mrs. Bonner, “to be burning the district’s fuel, and wearing out the school’s property out of hours like that—not that it’s anny of my business,” she interposed, hastily, as if she had been diverted from her chosen point of attack. “I just thought of it, that’s all. What we came for, Mr. Irwin, is to object to the way the teachin’s being done—corn and wheat, and hogs and the like, instead of the learnin’ schools was made to teach.”
“Schools were made to prepare children for life, weren’t they, Mrs. Bonner?”
“To be sure,” went on Mrs. Bonner, “I can see an’ the whole district can see that it’s easier for a man that’s been a farm-hand to teach farm-hand knowledge, than the learnin’ schools was set up to teach; but if so be he hasn’t the book education to do the right thing, we think he should get out and give a real teacher a chance.”
“What am I neglecting?” asked Jim mildly.
Mrs. Bonner seemed unprepared for the question, and sat for an instant mute. Mrs. Peterson interposed her attack while Mrs. Bonner might be recovering her wind.
“We people that have had a hard time,” she said in a precise way which seemed to show that she knew exactly what she wanted, “want to give our boys and girls a chance to live easier lives than we lived. We don’t want our children taught about nothing but work. We want higher things.”
“Mrs. Peterson,” said Jim earnestly, “we must have first things first. Making a living is the first thing—and the highest.”
“Haakon and I will look after making a living for our family,” said she. “We want our children to learn nice things, and go to high school, and after a while to the Juniwersity.”
“And I,” declared Jim, “will send out from this school, if you will let me, pupils better prepared for higher schools than have ever gone from it—because they will be trained to think in terms of action. They will go knowing that thoughts must always be linked with things. Aren’t your children happy in school, Mrs. Peterson?”
“I don’t send them to school to be happy, Yim,” replied Mrs. Peterson, calling him by the name most familiarly known to all of them; “I send them to learn to be higher people than their father and mother. That’s what America means!”
“They’ll be higher people—higher than their parents—higher than their teacher—they’ll be efficient farmers, and efficient farmers’ wives. They’ll be happy, because they will know how to use more brains in farming than any lawyer or doctor or merchant can possibly use in hisbusiness. I’m educating them to find an outlet for genius in farming!”
“It’s a fine thing,” said Mrs. Bonner, coming to the aid of her fellow soldiers, “to work hard for a lifetime, an’ raise nothing but a family of farmers! A fine thing!”
“They will be farmers anyhow,” cried Jim, “in spite of your efforts—ninety out of every hundred of them! And of the other ten, nine will be wage-earners in the cities, and wish to God they were back on the farm; and the hundredth one will succeed in the city. Shall we educate the ninety-and-nine to fail, that the hundredth, instead of enriching the rural life with his talents, may steal them away to make the city stronger? It is already too strong for us farmers. Shall we drive our best away to make it stronger?”
The guns of Mrs. Bonner and Mrs. Peterson were silenced for a moment, and Mrs. Bronson, after gazing about at the typewriter, the hectograph, the exhibits of weed seeds, the Babcock milk tester, and the other unscholastic equipment, pointed to the list of words, and the arithmetic problems on the board.
“Do you get them words from the speller?” she asked.
“No,” said he, “we got them from a lesson on seed wheat.”
“Did them examples come out of an arithmetic book?” cross-examined she.
“No,” said Jim, “we used problems we made ourselves. We were figuring profits and losses on your cows, Mrs. Bronson!”
“Ezra Bronson,” said Mrs. Bronson loftily, “don’t need any help in telling what’s a good cow. He was farming before you was born!”
“Like fun, he don’t need help! He’s going to dry old Cherry off and fatten her for beef; and he can make more money on the cream by beefing about three more of ’em. The Babcock test shows they’re just boarding on us without paying their board!”
The delegation of matrons ruffled like a group of startled hens at this interposition, which was Newton Bronson’s effective seizing of the opportunity to issue a progress bulletin in the research work on the Bronson dairy herd.
“Newton!” said his mother, “don’t interrupt me when I’m talking to the teacher!”
“Well, then,” said Newton, “don’t tell the teacher that pa knew which cows were good and which were poor. If any one in this district wants to know about their cows they’ll have to come to this shop. And I can tell you that it’ll pay ’em to come too, if they’re going to make anything selling cream. Wait until we get out our reports on the herds, ma!”
The women were rather stampeded by this onslaught of the irregular troops—especially Mrs. Bronson. She was placed in the position of a woman taking a man’s wisdom from her ne’er-do-well son for the first time in her life. Like any other mother in this position, she felt a flutter of pride—but it was strongly mingled with a motherly desire to spank him. The deputation rose, with a unanimous feeling that they had been scored upon.
“Cows!” scoffed Mrs. Peterson. “If we leave you in this yob, Mr. Irwin, our children will know nothing but cows and hens and soils and grains—and where will the culture come in? How will our boys and girls appear when we get fixed so we can move to town? We won’t have no culture at all, Yim!”
“Culture!” exclaimed Jim. “Why—why, after ten years of the sort of school I would give you if I were a better teacher, and could have my way, the people of the cities would be begging to have their children admitted so that they might obtain real culture—culture fitting them for life in the twentieth century—”
“Don’t bother to get ready for the city children, Jim,” said Mrs. Bonner sneeringly, “you won’t be teaching the Woodruff school that long.”
All this time, the dark-faced Cracker had been glooming from a corner, earnestly seeking to fathom the wrongness he sensed in the gathering. Now he came forward.
“I reckon I may be making a mistake to say anything,” said he, “f’r we-all is strangers hyeh, an’ we’re pore; but I must speak out for Mr. Jim—I must! Don’t turn him out, folks, f’r he’s done mo’ f’r us than eveh any one done in the world!”
“What do you mean?” asked Mrs. Peterson.
“I mean,” said Raymond, “that when Mr. Jim began talking school to us, we was a poreno-’count lot without any learnin’, with nothin’ to talk about except our wrongs, an’ our enemies, and the meanness of the Iowa folks. You see we didn’t understand you-all. An’ now, we have hope. We done got hope from this school. We’re goin’ to make good in the world. We’re getting education. We’re all learnin’ to use books. My little sister will be as good as anybody, if you’ll just let Mr. Jim alone in this school—as good as any one. An’ I’ll he’p pap get a farm, and we’ll work and think at the same time, an’ be happy!”
CHAPTER IXJENNIE ARRANGES A CHRISTMAS PARTY
The great party magnates who made up the tickets from governor down to the lowest county office, doubtless regarded the little political plum shaken off into the apron of Miss Jennie Woodruff of the Woodruff District, as the very smallest and least bloomy of all the plums on the tree; but there is something which tends to puff one up in the mere fact of having received the votes of the people for any office, especially in a region of high average civilization, covering six hundred or seven hundred square miles of good American domain. Jennie was a sensible country girl. Being sensible, she tried to avoid uppishness. But she did feel some little sense of increased importance as she drove her father’s little one-cylinder runabout over the smooth earth roads, in the crisp December weather, just before Christmas.
The weather itself was stimulating, and she was making rapid progress in the management of the little car which her father had offered to lend her for use in visiting the one hundred or more rural schools soon to come under her supervision. She rather fancied the picture of herself, clothed in more or less authority and queening it over her little army of teachers.
Mr. Haakon Peterson was phlegmatically conscious that she made rather an agreeable picture, as she stopped her car alongside his top buggy to talk with him. She had bright blue eyes, fluffy brown hair, a complexion whipped pink by the breeze, and she smiled at him ingratiatingly.
“Don’t you think father is lovely?” said she. “He is going to let me use the runabout when I visit the schools.”
“That will be good,” said Haakon. “It will save you lots of time. I hope you make the county pay for the gasoline.”
“I haven’t thought about that,” said Jennie. “Everybody’s been so nice to me—I want to give as well as receive.”
“Why,” said Haakon, “you will yust beginto receive when your salary begins in Yanuary.”
“Oh, no!” said Jennie. “I’ve received much more than that now! You don’t know how proud I feel. So many nice men I never knew before, and all my old friends like you working for me in the convention and at the polls, just as if I amounted to something.”
“And you don’t know how proud I feel,” said Haakon, “to have in county office a little girl I used to hold on my lap.”
In early times, when Haakon was a flat-capped immigrant boy, he had earned the initial payment on his first eighty acres of prairie land as a hired man on Colonel Woodruff’s farm. Now he was a rather richer man than the colonel, and not a little proud of his ascent to affluence. He was a mild-spoken, soft-voiced Scandinavian, quite completely Americanized, and possessed of that aptitude for local politics which makes so good a citizen of the Norwegian and Swede. His influence was always worth fifty to sixty Scandinavian votes in any county election. He was a good party man and conscious of being entitled to his voicein party matters. This seemed to him an opportunity for exerting a bit of political influence.
“Yennie,” said he, “this man Yim Irwin needs to be lined up.”
“Lined up! What do you mean?”
“The way he is doing in the school,” said Haakon, “is all wrong. If you can’t line him up, he will make you trouble. We must look ahead. Everybody has his friends, and Yim Irwin has his friends. If you have trouble with him, his friends will be against you when we want to nominate you for a second term. The county is getting close. If we go to conwention without your home delegation it would weaken you, and if we nominate you, every piece of trouble like this cuts down your wote. You ought to line him up and have him do right.”
“But he is so funny,” said Jennie.
“He likes you,” said Haakon. “You can line him up.”
Jennie blushed, and to conceal her slight embarrassment, got out for the purpose of cranking her machine.
“But if I can not line him up?” said she.
“I tank,” said Haakon, “if you can’t line him up, you will have a chance to rewoke his certificate when you take office.”
So Jim Irwin was to be crushed like an insect. The little local gearing of the big party machine was to crush him. Jennie dimly sensed the tragedy of it, but very dimly. Mainly she thought of Mr. Peterson’s suggestion as to “lining up” Jim Irwin as so thoroughly sensible that she gave it a good deal of thought that day. She could not help feeling a little resentment at Jim for following his own fads and fancies so far. We always resent the necessity of crushing any weak creature which must needs be wiped out. The idea that there could be anything fundamentally sane in his overturning of the old and tried school methods under which both he and she had been educated, was absurd to Jennie. To be sure, everybody had always favored “more practical education,” and Jim’s farm arithmetic, farm physiology, farm reading and writing, cow-testing exercises, seed analysis, corn clubs and the tomato, poultry and pig clubs he proposed tohave in operation the next summer, seemed highly practical; but to Jennie’s mind, the fact that they introduced dissension in the neighborhood and promised to make her official life vexatious, seemed ample proof that Jim’s work was visionary and impractical. Poor Jennie was not aware of the fact that new truth always comes bringing, not peace to mankind, but a sword.
“Father,” said she that night, “let’s have a little Christmas party.”
“All right,” said the colonel. “Whom shall we invite?”
“Don’t laugh,” said she. “I want to invite Jim Irwin and his mother, and nobody else.”
“All right,” reiterated the colonel. “But why?”
“Oh,” said Jennie, “I want to see whether I can talk Jim out of some of his foolishness.”
“You want to line him up, do you?” said the colonel. “Well, that’s good politics, and incidentally, you may get some good ideas out of Jim.”
“Rather unlikely,” said Jennie.
“I don’t know about that,” said the colonel,smiling. “I begin to think that Jim’s a Brown Mouse. I’ve told you about the Brown Mouse, haven’t I?”
“Yes,” said Jennie. “You’ve told me. But Professor Darbishire’s brown mice were simply wild and incorrigible creatures. Just because it happens to emerge suddenly from the forests of heredity, it doesn’t prove that the Brown Mouse is any good.”
“Justin Morgan was a Brown Mouse,” said the colonel. “And he founded the greatest breed of horses in the world.”
“You say that,” said Jennie, “because you’re a lover of the Morgan horse.”
“Napoleon Bonaparte was a Brown Mouse,” said the colonel. “So was George Washington, and so was Peter the Great. Whenever a Brown Mouse appears he changes things in a little way or a big way.”
“For the better, always?” asked Jennie.
“No,” said the colonel. “The Brown Mouse may throw back to slant-headed savagery. But Jim ... sometimes I think Jim is the kind of Mendelian segregation out of which we get Franklins and Edisons and their sort. Youmay get some good ideas out of Jim. Let us have them here for Christmas, by all means.”
In due time Jennie’s invitation reached Jim and his mother, like an explosive shell fired from a distance into their humble dwelling—quite upsetting things. Twenty-five years constitute rather a long wait for social recognition, and Mrs. Irwin had long since regarded herself as quite outside society. To be sure, for something like half of this period, she had been of society if not in it. She had done the family washings, scrubbings and cleanings, had made the family clothes and been a woman of all work, passing from household to household, in an orbit determined by the exigencies of threshing, harvesting, illness and child-bearing. At such times she sat at the family table and participated in the neighborhood gossip, in quite the manner of a visiting aunt or other female relative; but in spite of the democracy of rural life, there is and always has been a social difference between a hired woman and an invited guest. And when Jim, having absorbed everything which the Woodruff school could give him in the way of education, foundhis first job at “making a hand,” Mrs. Irwin, at her son’s urgent request, ceased going out to work for a while, until she could get back her strength. This she had never succeeded in doing, and for a dozen years or more had never entered a single one of the houses in which she had formerly served.
“I can’t go, James,” said she; “I can’t possibly go.”
“Oh, yes, you can! Why not?” said Jim. “Why not?”
“You know I don’t go anywhere,” urged Mrs. Irwin.
“That’s no reason,” said her son.
“I haven’t a thing to wear,” said Mrs. Irwin.
“Nothing to wear!”
I wonder if any ordinary person can understand the shock with which Jim Irwin heard those words from his mother’s lips. He was approaching thirty, and the association of the ideas of Mother and Costume was foreign to his mind. Other women had surfaces different from hers, to be sure—but his mother was not as other women. She was just Mother, always at work in the house or in the garden, alwaysdoing for him those inevitable things which made up her part in life, always clothed in the browns, grays, gray-blues, neutral stripes and checks which were cheap and common and easily made. Clothes! They were in the Irwin family no more than things by which the rules of decency were complied with, and the cold of winter turned back—but as for their appearance! Jim had never given the thing a thought further than to wear out his Sunday best in the schoolroom, to wonder where the next suit of Sunday best was to come from, and to buy for his mother the cheap and common fabrics which she fashioned into the garments in which alone, it seemed to him, she would seem like Mother. A boy who lives until he is nearly thirty in intimate companionship with Carlyle, Thoreau, Wordsworth, Shakespeare, Emerson, Professor Henry, Liberty H. Bailey, Cyril Hopkins, Dean Davenport and the great obscurities of the experiment stations, may be excused if his views regarding clothes are derived in a transcendental manner fromSartor Resartusand the agricultural collegetests as to the relation between Shelter and Feeding.
“Why, mother,” said he, “I think it would be pretty hard to explain to the Woodruffs that you stayed away because of clothes. They have seen you in the clothes you wear pretty often for the last thirty years!”
Was a woman ever quite without a costume?
Mrs. Irwin gazed at vacancy for a while, and went to the old bureau. From the bottom drawer she took an old, old black alpaca dress—a dress which Jim had never seen. She spread it out on her bed in the alcove off the combined kitchen, parlor and dining-room in which they lived, and smoothed out the wrinkles. It was almost whole, save for the places where her body, once so much fuller than now, had drawn the threads apart—under the arms, and at some of the seams—and she handled it as one deals with something very precious.
“I never thought I’d wear it again,” said she, “but once. I’ve been saving it for my last dress. But I guess it won’t hurt to wear it once for the benefit of the living.”
Jim kissed his mother—a rare thing, save as the caress was called for by the established custom between them.
“Don’t think of that, mother,” said he, “for years and years yet!”
CHAPTER XHOW JIM WAS LINED UP
There is no doubt that Jennie Woodruff was justified in thinking that they were a queer couple. They weren’t like the Woodruffs, at all. They were of a different pattern. To be sure, Jim’s clothes were not especially noteworthy, being just shiny, and frayed at cuff and instep, and short of sleeve and leg, and ill-fitting and cheap. They betrayed poverty, and the inability of a New York sweatshop to anticipate the prodigality of Nature in the matter of length of leg and arm, and wealth of bones and joints which she had lavished upon Jim Irwin. But the Woodruff table had often enjoyed Jim’s presence, and the standards prevailing there as to clothes were only those of plain people who eat with their hired men, buy their clothes at a county seat town, and live simply and sensibly on the fatof the land. Jim’s queerness lay not so much in his clothes as in his personality.
On the other hand, Jennie could not help thinking that Mrs. Irwin’s queerness was to be found almost solely in her clothes. The black alpaca looked undeniably respectable, especially when it was helped out by a curious old brooch of goldstone, bordered with flowers in blue and white and red and green—tiny blossoms of little stones which looked like the flowers which grow at the snow line on Pike’s Peak. Jennie felt that it must be a cheap affair, but it was decorative, and she wondered where Mrs. Irwin got it. She guessed it must have a story—a story in which the stooped, rusty, somber old lady looked like a character drawn to harmonize with the period just after the war. For the black alpaca dress looked more like a costume for a masquerade than a present-day garment, and Mrs. Irwin was so oppressed with doubt as to whether she was presentable, with knowledge that her dress didn’t fit, and with the difficulty of behaving naturally—like a convict just discharged from prison after a ten years’ term—that she tookon a stiffness of deportment quite in keeping with the idea that she was a female Rip Van Winkle not yet quite awake. But Jennie had the keenness to see that if Mrs. Irwin could have had an up-to-date costume she would have become a rather ordinary and not bad-looking old lady. What Jennie failed to divine was that if Jim could have invested a hundred dollars in the services of tailors, haberdashers, barbers and other specialists in personal appearance, and could for this hour or so have blotted out his record as her father’s field-hand, he would have seemed to her a distinguished-looking young man. Not handsome, of course, but the sort people look after—and follow.
“Come to dinner,” said Mrs. Woodruff, who at this juncture had a hired girl, but was yoked to the oar nevertheless when it came to turkey and the other fixings of a Christmas dinner. “It’s good enough, what there is of it, and there’s enough of it such as it is—but the dressing in the turkey would be better for a little more sage!”
The bountiful meal piled mountain high for guest and hired help and family melted awayin a manner to delight the hearts of Mrs. Woodruff and Jennie. The colonel, in stiff starched shirt, black tie and frock coat, carved with much empressement, and Jim felt almost for the first time a sense of the value of manner.
“I had bigger turkeys,” said Mrs. Woodruff to Mrs. Irwin, “but I thought it would be better to cook two turkey-hens instead of one great big gobbler with meat as tough as tripe and stuffed full of fat.”
“One of the hens would ’a’ been plenty,” replied Mrs. Irwin. “How much did they weigh?”
“About fifteen pounds apiece,” was the answer. “The gobbler would ’a’ weighed thirty, I guess. He’s pure Mammoth Bronze.”
“I wish,” said Jim, “that we could get a few breeding birds of the wild bronze turkeys from Mexico.”
“Why?” asked the colonel.
“They’re the original blood of the domestic bronze turkeys,” said Jim, “and they’re bigger and handsomer than the pure-bred bronzes, even. They’re a better stock than the northernwild turkeys from which our common birds originated.”
“Where do you learn all these things, Jim?” asked Mrs. Woodruff. “I declare, I often tell Woodruff that it’s as good as a lecture to have Jim Irwin at table. My intelligence has fallen since you quit working here, Jim.”
There came into Jim’s eyes the gleam of the man devoted to a Cause—and the dinner tended to develop into a lecture. Jennie saw a little more plainly wherein his queerness lay.
“There’s an education in any meal, if we would just use the things on the table as materials for study, and follow their trails back to their starting-points. This turkey takes us back to the chaparral of Mexico——”
“What’s chaparral?” asked Jennie, as a diversion. “It’s one of the words I have seen so often and know perfectly to speak it and read it—but after all it’s just a word, and nothing more.”
“Ain’t that the trouble with our education, Jim?” queried the colonel, cleverly steering Jim back into the track of his discourse.
“They are not even living words,” answeredJim, “unless we have clothed them in flesh and blood through some sort of concrete notion. ‘Chaparral’ to Jennie is just the ghost of a word. Our civilization is full of inefficiency because we are satisfied to give our children these ghosts and shucks and husks of words, instead of the things themselves, that can be seen and hefted and handled and tested and heard.”
Jennie looked Jim over carefully. His queerness was taking on a new phase—and she felt a sense of surprise such as one experiences when the conjurer causes a rose to grow into a tree before your very eyes. Jim’s development was not so rapid, but Jennie’s perception of it was. She began to feel proud of the fact that a man who could make his impractical notions seem so plausible—and who was clearly fired with some sort of evangelistic fervor—had kissed her, once or twice, on bringing her home from the spelling school.
“I think we lose so much time in school,” Jim went on, “while the children are eating their dinners.”
“Well, Jim,” said Mrs. Woodruff, “every onebut you is down on the human level. The poor kids have to eat!”
“But think how much good education there is wrapped up in the school dinner—if we could only get it out.”
Jennie grew grave. Here was this Brown Mouse actually introducing the subject of the school—and he ought to suspect that she was planning to line him up on this very thing—if he wasn’t a perfect donkey as well as a dreamer. And he was calmly wading into the subject as if she were the ex-farm-hand country teacher, and he was the county superintendent-elect!
“Eating a dinner like this, mother,” said the colonel gallantly, “is an education in itself—and eating some others requires one; but just how ‘larnin’ is wrapped up in the school lunch is a new one on me, Jim.”
“Well,” said Jim, “in the first place the children ought to cook their meals as a part of the school work. Prior to that they ought to buy the materials. And prior to that they ought to keep the accounts of the schoolkitchen. They’d like to do these things, and it would help prepare them for life on an intelligent plane, while they prepared the meals.”
“Isn’t that looking rather far ahead?” asked the county superintendent-elect.
“It’s like a lot of other things we think far ahead,” urged Jim. “The only reason why they’re far off is because we think them so. It’s a thought—and a thought is as near the moment we think it as it will ever be.”
“I guess that’s so—to a wild-eyed reformer,” said the colonel. “But go on. Develop your thought a little. Have some more dressing.”
“Thanks, I believe I will,” said Jim. “And a little more of the cranberry sauce. No more turkey, please.”
“I’d like to see the school class that could prepare this dinner,” said Mrs. Woodruff.
“Why,” said Jim, “you’d be there showing them how! They’d get credits in their domestic-economy course for getting the school dinner—and they’d bring their mothers into it to help them stand at the head of their classes. And one detail of girls would cook one week, and another serve. The setting of the tablewould come in as a study—flowers, linen and all that. And when we get a civilized teacher, table manners!”
“I’d take on that class,” said the hired man, winking at Selma Carlson, the maid, from somewhere below the salt. “The way I make my knife feed my face would be a great help to the children.”
“And when the food came on the table,” Jim went on, with a smile at his former fellow-laborer, who had heard most of this before as a part of the field conversation, “just think of the things we could study while eating it. The literary term for eating a meal is discussing it—well, the discussion of a meal under proper guidance is much more educative than a lecture. This breast-bone, now,” said he, referring to the remains on his plate. “That’s physiology. The cranberry-sauce—that’s botany, and commerce, and soil management—do you know, Colonel, that the cranberry must have an acid soil—which would kill alfalfa or clover?”
“Read something of it,” said the colonel, “but it didn’t interest me much.”
“And the difference between the types offowl on the table—that’s breeding. And the nutmeg, pepper and cocoanut—that’s geography. And everything on the table runs back to geography, and comes to us linked to our lives by dollars and cents—and they’re mathematics.”
“We must have something more than dollars and cents in life,” said Jennie. “We must have culture.”
“Culture,” cried Jim, “is the ability to think in terms of life—isn’t it?”
“Like Jesse James,” suggested the hired man, who was a careful student of the life of that eminent bandit.
There was a storm of laughter at this sally amidst which Jennie wished she had thought of something like that. Jim joined in the laughter at his own expense, but was clearly suffering from argumentative shock.
“That’s the best answer I’ve had on that point, Pete,” he said, after the disturbance had subsided. “But if the James boys and the Youngers had had the sort of culture I’m for, they would have been successful stock men and farmers, instead of train-robbers. Take RaymondSimms, for instance. He had all the qualifications of a member of the James gang when he came here. All he needed was a few exasperated associates of his own sort, and a convenient railway with undefended trains running over it. But after a few weeks of real ‘culture’ under a mighty poor teacher, he’s developing into the most enthusiastic farmer I know. That’s real culture.”
“It’s snowing like everything,” said Jennie, who faced the window.
“Don’t cut your dinner short,” said the colonel to Pete, “but I think you’ll find the cattle ready to come in out of the storm when you get good and through.”
“I think I’ll let ’em in now,” said Pete, by way of excusing himself. “I expect to put in most of the day from now on getting ready to quit eating. Save some of everything for me, Selma,—I’ll be right back!”
“All right, Pete,” said Selma.
CHAPTER XITHE MOUSE ESCAPES
Jennie played the piano and sang. They all joined in some simple Christmas songs. Mrs. Woodruff and Jim’s mother went into other parts of the house on research work connected with their converse on domestic economy. The colonel withdrew for an inspection of the live stock on the eve of the threatened blizzard. And Jim was left alone with Jennie in the front parlor. After the buzz of conversation, they seemed to have nothing to say. Jennie played softly, and looked at nothing, but scrutinized Jim by means of the eyes which women have concealed in their back hair. There was something new in the man—she sensed that. He was more confident, more persuasive, more dynamic. She was used to him only as a static force.
And Jim felt something new, too. He hadfelt it growing in him ever since he began his school work, and knew not the cause of it. The cause, however, would not have been a mystery to a wise old yogi who might discover the same sort of change in one of his young novices. Jim Irwin had been a sort of ascetic since his boyhood. He had mortified the flesh by hard labor in the fields, and by flagellations of the brain to drive off sleep while he pored over his books in the attic—which was often so hot after a day of summer’s sun on its low thin roof, that he was forced to do his reading in the midmost night. He had looked long on such women as Helen of Troy, Cleopatra, Isabel, Cressida, Volumnia, Virginia, Evangeline, Agnes Wickfleld and Fair Rosamond; but on women in the flesh he had gazed as upon trees walking. The aforesaid spiritual director, had this young ascetic been under one, would have foreseen the effects on the psychology of a stout fellow of twenty-eight of freedom from the toil of the fields, and association with a group of young human beings of both sexes. To the novice struggling for emancipation from earthly thoughts, he would have recommended fastingand prayer, and perhaps, a hair shirt. Just what his prescription would have been for a man in Jim’s position is, of course, a question. He would, no doubt, have considered carefully his patient’s symptoms. These were very largely the mental experiences which most boys pass through in their early twenties, save, perhaps that, as in a belated season, the transition from winter to spring was more sudden, and the contrast more violent. Jim was now thrown every day into contact with his fellows. He was no longer a lay monk, but an active member of a very human group. He was becoming more of a boy, with the boys, and still more was he developing into a man with the women. The budding womanhood of Calista Simms and the other girls of his school thrilled him as Helen of Troy or Juliet had never done. This will not seem very strange to the experienced reader, but it astonished the unsophisticated young schoolmaster. The floating hair, the heaving bosom, the rosebud mouth, the starry eye, the fragrant breath, the magnetic hand—all these disturbed the hitherto sedate mind, and filled the brief hours he was accustomedto spend in sleep with strange dreams. And now, as he gazed at Jennie, he was suddenly aware of the fact that, after all, whenever these thoughts and dreams took on individuality, they were only persistent and intensified continuations of his old dreams of her. They had always been dormant in him, since the days they both studied from the same book. He was quite sure, now, that he had never forgotten for a moment, that Jennie was the only girl in the world for him. And possibly he was right about this. It is perfectly certain, however, that for years he had not consciously been in love with her.
Now, however, he arose as from some inner compulsion, and went to her side. He wished that he knew enough of music to turn her sheets for her, but, alas! the notes were meaningless to him. Still scanning him by means of her back hair, Jennie knew that in another moment Jim would lay his hand on her shoulder, or otherwise advance to personal nearness, as he had done the night of his ill-starred speech at the schoolhouse—and she rose in self-defense. Self-defense, however, did not seemto require that he be kept at too great a distance; so she maneuvered him to the sofa, and seated him beside her. Now was the time to line him up.
“It seems good to have you with us to-day,” said she. “We’re such old, old friends.”
“Yes,” repeated Jim, “old friends .... We are, aren’t we, Jennie?”
“And I feel sure,” Jennie went on, “that this marks a new era in our friendship.”
“Why?” asked Jim, after considering the matter.
“Oh! everything is different, now—and getting more different all the time. My new work, and your new work, you know.”
“I should like to think,” said Jim, “that we are beginning over again.”
“Oh, we are, we are, indeed! I am quite sure of it.”
“And yet,” said Jim, “there is no such thing as a new beginning. Everything joins itself to something which went before. There isn’t any seam.”
“No?” said Jennie interrogatively.
“Our regard for each other,” Jennie notedmost pointedly his word “regard”—“must be the continuation of the old regard.”
“I hardly know what you mean,” said Jennie.
Jim reached over and possessed himself of her hand. She pulled it from him gently, but he paid no attention to the little muscular protest, and examined the hand critically. On the back of the middle finger he pointed out a scar—a very tiny scar.
“Do you remember how you got that?” he asked.
Because Jim clung to the hand, their heads were very close together as she joined in the examination.
“Why, I don’t believe I do,” said she.
“I do,” he replied. “We—you and I and Mary Forsythe were playing mumble-peg, and you put your hand on the grass just as I threw the knife—it cut you, and left that scar.”
“I remember, now!” said she. “How such things come back over the memory. And did it leave a scar when I pushed you toward the red-hot stove in the schoolhouse one blizzardy day, like this, and you peeled the skin off your wrist where it struck the stove?”
“Look at it,” said he, baring his long and bony wrist. “Right there!”
And they were off on the trail that leads back to childhood. They had talked long, and intimately, when the shadows of the early evening crept into the corners of the room. He had carried her across the flooded slew again after the big rain. They had relived a dozen moving incidents by flood and field. Jennie recalled the time when the tornado narrowly missed the schoolhouse, and frightened everybody in school nearly to death.
“Everybody but you, Jim,” Jennie remembered. “You looked out of the window and told the teacher that the twister was going north of us, and would kill somebody else.”
“Did I?” asked Jim.
“Yes,” said Jennie, “and when the teacher asked us to kneel and thank God, you said, ‘Why should we thank God that somebody else is blowed away?’ She was greatly shocked.”
“I don’t see to this day,” Jim asserted, “what answer there was to my question.”
In the gathering darkness Jim again tookJennie’s hand, but this time she deprived him of it.
He was trembling like a leaf. Let it be remembered in his favor that this was the only girl’s hand he had ever held.
“You can’t find any more scars on it,” she said soberly.
“Let me see how much it has changed since I stuck the knife in it,” begged Jim.
Jennie held it up for inspection.
“It’s longer, and slenderer, and whiter, and even more beautiful,” said he, “than the little hand I cut; but it was then the most beautiful hand in the world to me—and still is.”
“I must light the lamps,” said the county superintendent-elect, rather flustered, it must be confessed. “Mama! Where are all the matches?”
Mrs. Woodruff and Mrs. Irwin came in, and the lamplight reminded Jim’s mother that the cow was still to milk, and that the chickens might need attention. The Woodruff sleigh came to the door to carry them home; but Jim desired to breast the storm. He felt that heneeded the conflict. Mrs. Irwin scolded him for his foolishness, but he strode off into the whirling drift, throwing back a good-by for general consumption, and a pathetic smile to Jennie.
“He’s as odd as Dick’s hatband,” said Mrs. Woodruff, “tramping off in a storm like this.”
“Did you line him up?” asked the colonel of Jennie.
The young lady started and blushed. She had forgotten all about the politics of the situation.
“I—I’m afraid I didn’t, papa,” she confessed.
“Those brown mice of Professor Darbishire’s,” said the colonel, “were the devil and all to control.”
Jennie was thinking of this as she dropped asleep.
“Hard to control!” she thought. “I wonder. I wonder, after all, if Jim is not capable of being easily lined up—when he sees how foolish I think he is!”
And Jim? He found himself hard to control that night. So much so that it was aftermidnight before he had finished work on a plan for a cooperative creamery.
“The boys can be given work in helping to operate it,” he wrote on a tablet, “which, in connection with the labor performed by the teacher, will greatly reduce the expense of operation. A skilled butter-maker, with slender white hands”—but he erased this last clause and retired.