The Brown Mouse

CHAPTER XI
THE 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 had felt 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 fasting and 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 accustomed to 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 seem to 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 noted most 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 took Jennie’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 he needed 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 after midnight 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.

CHAPTER XII
FACING TRIAL

A distinct sensation ran through the Woodruff school, but the schoolmaster and a group of five big boys and three girls engaged in a very unclasslike conference in the back of the room were all unconscious of it. The geography classes had recited, and the language work was on. Those too small for these studies were playing a game under the leadership of Jinnie Simms, who had been promoted to the position of weed-seed monitor.

The game was forfeits. Each child had been encouraged to bring some sort of weed from the winter fields – preferably one the seed of which still clung to the dried receptacles – but anyhow, a weed. Some pupils had brought merely empty tassels, some bare stalks, and some seeds which they had winnowed from the grain in their father’s bins; and with them they played forfeits. They counted out by the “arey, Ira, ickery an’” method, and somebody was “It.” Then, in order, they presented to him a seed, stalk or head of a weed, and if the one who was It could tell the name of the weed, the child who brought the specimen became It, and the name was written on slates or tablets, and the new It told where the weed or seed was collected. If any pupil brought in a specimen the name of which he himself could not correctly give, he paid a forfeit. If a specimen was brought in not found in the school cabinet – which was coming to contain a considerable collection – it was placed there, and the task allotted to the best penman in the school to write its proper label. All this caused excitement, and not a little buzz – but it ceased when the county superintendent entered the room.

For it was after the first of January, and Jennie was visiting the Woodruff school.

The group in the back of the room went on with its conference, oblivious of the entrance of Superintendent Jennie. Their work was rather absorbing, being no more nor less than the compilation of the figures of a cow census of the district.

“Altogether,” said Mary Talcott, “we have in the district one hundred and fifty-three cows.”

“I don’t make it that,” said Raymond Simms. “I don’t get but a hundred and thirty-eight.”

“The trouble is,” said Newton Bronson, “that Mary’s counting in the Bailey herd of Shorthorns.”

“Well, they’re cows, ain’t they?” interrogated Mary.

“Not for this census,” said Raymond.

“Why not?” asked Mary. “They’re the prettiest cows in the neighborhood.”

“Scotch Shorthorns,” said Newton, “and run with their calves.”

“Leave them out,” said Jim, “and to-morrow, I want each one to tell in the language class, in three hundred words or less, whether there are enough cows in the district to justify a cooperative creamery, and give the reason. You’ll find articles in the farm papers if you look through the card index. Now, how about the census in the adjoining districts?”

“There are more than two hundred within four miles on the roads leading west,” said a boy.

“My father and I counted up about a hundred beyond us,” said Mary. “But I couldn’t get the exact number.”

“Why,” said Raymond, “we could find six hundred dairy cows in this neighborhood, within an hour’s drive.”

“Six hundred!” scoffed Newton. “You’re crazy! In an hour’s drive?”

“I mean an hour’s drive each way,” said Raymond.

“I believe we could,” said Jim. “And after we find how far we will have to go to get enough cows, if half of them patronized the creamery, we’ll work over the savings the business would make, if we could get the prices for butter paid the Wisconsin cooperative creameries, as compared with what the centralizers pay us, on a basis of the last six months. Who’s in possession of that correspondence with the Wisconsin creameries?”

“I have it,” said Raymond. “I’m hectographing a lot of arithmetic problems from it.”

“How do you do, Mr. Irwin!” It was the superintendent who spoke.

Jim’s brain whirled little prismatic clouds before his vision, as he rose and shook Jennie’s extended hand.

“Let me give you a chair,” said he.

“Oh, no, thank you!” she returned. “I’ll just make myself at home. I know my way about in this schoolhouse, you know!”

She smiled at the children, and went about looking at their work – which was not noticeably disturbed, by reason of the fact that visitors were much more frequent now than ever before, and were no rarity. Certainly, Jennie Woodruff was no novelty, since they had known her all their lives. Most of the embarrassment was Jim’s. He rose to the occasion, however, went through the routine of the closing day, and dismissed the flock, not omitting making an engagement with a group of boys for that evening to come back and work on the formalin treatment for smut in seed grains, and the blue-vitriol treatment for seed potatoes.

“We hadn’t time for these things,” said he to the county superintendent, “in the regular class work – and it’s getting time to take them up if we are to clean out the smut in next year’s crop.”

They repeated Whittier’s Corn Song in concert, and school was out.

Alone with her in the old schoolhouse, Jim confronted Jennie in the flesh. She felt a sense of his agitation, but if she had known the power of it, she would have been astonished. Since that Christmas afternoon when she had undertaken to follow Mr. Peterson’s advice and line Yim Irwin up, Jim had gone through an inward transformation. He had passed from a late, cold, backward sexual spring, into a warm June of the spirit, in which he had walked amid roses and lilies with Jennie. He was in love with her. He knew how insane it was, how much less than nothing had taken place in his circumstances to justify the hope that he could ever emerge from the state in which she would not say “Humph!” at the thought that he could marry her or any one else. Yet, he had made up his mind that he would marry Jennie Woodruff … She ought never have tried to line him up. She knew not what she did.

He saw her through clouds of rose and pink; but she looked at him as at a foolish man who was making trouble for her, chasing rainbows at her expense, and deeply vexing her. She was in a cold official frame of mind.

“Jim,” said she, “do you know that you are facing trouble?”

“Trouble,” said Jim, “is the natural condition of a man in my state of mind. But it is going to be a delicious sort of tribulation.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” she replied in perfect honesty.

“Then I don’t know what you mean,” replied Jim.

“Jim,” she said pleadingly, “I want you to give up this sort of teaching. Can’t you see it’s all wrong?”

“No,” answered Jim, in much the manner of a man who has been stabbed by his sweetheart. “I can’t see that it’s wrong. It’s the only sort I can do. What do you see wrong in it?”

“Oh, I can see some very wonderful things in it,” said Jennie, “but it can’t be done in the Woodruff District. It may be correct in theory, but it won’t work in practise.”

“Jennie,” said he, “when a thing won’t work, it isn’t correct in theory.”

“Well, then, Jim,” said she, “why do you keep on with it?”

“It works,” said Jim. “Anything that’s correct in theory will work. If the theory seems correct, and yet won’t work, it’s because something is wrong in an unsuspected way with the theory. But my theory is correct, and it works.”

“But the district is against it.”

“Who are the district?”

“The school board are against it.”

“The school board elected me after listening to an explanation of my theories as to the new sort of rural school in which I believe. I assume that they commissioned me to carry out my ideas.”

“Oh, Jim!” cried Jennie. “That’s sophistry! They all voted for you so you wouldn’t be without support. Each wanted you to have just one vote. Nobody wanted you elected. They were all surprised. You know that!”

“They stood by and saw the contract signed,” said Jim, “and – yes, Jennie, I am dealing in sophistry! I got the school by a sort of shell-game, which the board worked on themselves. But that doesn’t prove that the district is against me. I believe the people are for me, now, Jennie. I really do!”

Jennie rose and walked to the rear of the room and back, twice. When she spoke, there was decision in her tone – and Jim felt that it was hostile decision.

“As an officer,” she said rather grandly, “my relations with the district are with the school board on the one hand, and with your competency as a teacher on the other.”

“Has it come to that?” asked Jim. “Well, I have rather expected it.”

His tone was weary. The Lincolnian droop in his great, sad, mournful mouth accentuated the resemblance to the martyr president. Possibly his feelings were not entirely different from those experienced by Lincoln at some crises of doubt, misunderstanding and depression.

“If you can’t change your methods,” said Jennie, “I suggest that you resign.”

“Do you think,” said Jim, “that changing my methods would appease the men who feel that they are made laughing-stocks by having elected me?”

Jennie was silent; for she knew that the school board meant to pursue their policy of getting rid of the accidental incumbent regardless of his methods.

“They would never call off their dogs,” said Jim.

“But your methods would make a great difference with my decision,” said Jennie.

“Are you to be called upon to decide?” asked Jim.

“A formal complaint against you for incompetency,” she replied, “has been lodged in my office, signed by the three directors. I shall be obliged to take notice of it.”

“And do you think,” queried Jim, “that my abandonment of the things in which I believe in the face of this attack would prove to your mind that I am competent? Or would it show me incompetent?”

Again Jennie was silent.

“I guess,” said Jim, “that we’ll have to stand or fall on things as they are.”

“Do you refuse to resign?” asked Jennie.

“Sometimes I think it’s not worth while to try any longer,” said Jim. “And yet, I believe that in my way I’m working on the question which must be solved if this nation is to stand – the question of making the farm and farm life what they should be and may well be. At this moment, I feel like surrendering – for your sake more than mine; but I’ll have to think about it. Suppose I refuse to resign?”

Jennie had drawn on her gloves, and stood ready for departure.

“Unless you resign before the twenty-fifth,” said she, “I shall hear the petition for your removal on that date. You will be allowed to be present and answer the charges against you. The charges are incompetency. I bid you good evening!”

“Incompetency!” The disgraceful word, representing everything he had always despised, rang through Jim’s mind as he walked home. He could think of nothing else as he sat at the simple supper which he could scarcely taste. Incompetent! Well, had he not always been incompetent, except in the use of his muscles? Had he not always been a dreamer? Were not all his dreams as foreign to life and common sense as the Milky Way from the earth? What reason was there for thinking that this crusade of his for better schools had any sounder foundation than his dream of being president, or a great painter, or a poet or novelist or philosopher? He was just a hayseed, a rube, a misfit, as odd as Dick’s hatband, an off ox. He was incompetent. He picked up a pen, and began writing. He wrote, “To the Honorable the Board of Education of the Independent District of – ” And he heard a tap at the door. His mother admitted Colonel Woodruff.

“Hello, Jim,” said he.

“Good evening, Colonel,” said Jim. “Take a chair, won’t you?”

“No,” replied the colonel. “I thought I’d see if you and the boys at the schoolhouse can’t tell me something about the smut in my wheat. I heard you were going to work on that to-night.”

“I had forgotten!” said Jim.

“I wondered if you hadn’t,” said the colonel, “and so I came by for you. I was waiting up the road. Come on, and ride up with me.”

The colonel had always been friendly, but there was a new note in his manner to-night. He was almost deferential. If he had been talking to Senator Cummins or the president of the state university, his tone could not have been more courteous, more careful to preserve the amenities due from man to man. He worked with the class on the problem of smut. He offered to aid the boys in every possible way in their campaign against scab in potatoes. He suggested some tests which would show the real value of the treatment. The boys were in a glow of pride at this cooperation with Colonel Woodruff. This was real work! Jim and the colonel went away together. It had been a great evening.

“Jim,” said the colonel, “can these kids spell?”

“You mean these boys?”

“I mean the school.”

“I think,” said Jim, “that they can outspell any school about here.”

“Good,” said the colonel. “How are they about reading aloud?”

“Better than they were when I took hold.”

“How about arithmetic and the other branches? Have you sort of kept them up to the course of study?”

“I have carried them in a course parallel to the text-books,” said Jim, “and covering the same ground. But it has been vocational work, you know – related to life.”

“Well,” said the colonel, “if I were you, I’d put them over a rapid review of the text-books for a few days – say between now and the twenty-fifth.”

“What for?”

“Oh, nothing – just to please me … And say, Jim, I glanced over a communication you have started to the more or less Honorable Board of Education.”

“Yes?”

“Well, don’t finish it … And say, Jim, I think I’ll give myself the luxury of being a wild-eyed reformer for once.”

“Yes,” said Jim, dazed.

“And if you think, Jim, that you’ve got no friends, just remember that I’m for you.”

“Thank you, Colonel.”

“And we’ll show them they’re in a horse race.”

“I don’t see …” said Jim.

“You’re not supposed to see,” said the colonel, “but you can bet that we’ll be with them at the finish; and, by thunder! while they’re getting a full meal, we’ll get at least a lunch. See?”

“But Jennie says,” began Jim.

“Don’t tell me what she says,” said the colonel. “She’s acting according to her judgment, and her lights and other organs of perception, and I don’t think it fittin’ that her father should try to influence her official conduct. But you go on and review them common branches, and keep your nerve. I haven’t felt so much like a scrap since the day we stormed Lookout Mountain. I kinder like being a wild-eyed reformer, Jim.”