The Brown Mouse

Calista blushed – but this stranger, so much like themselves, could not see the rosy suffusion. The allusion gave him a chance to look about him at the family. There was a boy of sixteen, a girl – the duck-shooting Calista – younger than Raymond – a girl of eleven, named Virginia, but called Jinnie – and a smaller lad who rejoiced in the name of McGeehee, but was mercifully called Buddy.

Calista squirmed for something to say. “Raymond runs a line o’ traps when the fur’s prime,” she volunteered.

Then came a long talk on traps and trapping, shooting, hunting and the joys of the mountings – during which Jim noted the ignorance and poverty of the Simmses. The clothing of the girls was not decent according to local standards; for while Calista wore a skirt hurriedly slipped on, Jim was quite sure – and not without evidence to support his views – that she had been wearing when he arrived the same regimentals now displayed by Jinnie – a pair of ragged blue overalls. Evidently the Simmses were wearing what they had and not what they desired. The father was faded, patched, gray and earthy, and the boys looked better than the rest solely because we expect boys to be torn and patched. Mrs. Simms was invisible except as a gray blur beyond the rain-barrel, in the midst of which her pipe glowed with a regular ebb and flow of embers.

On the next rainy day Jim called again and secured the services of Raymond to help him select seed corn. He was going to teach the school next winter, and he wanted to have a seed-corn frolic the first day, instead of waiting until the last – and you had to get seed corn while it was on the stalk, if you got the best. No Simms could refuse a favor to the fellow who was so much like themselves, and who was so greatly interested in trapping, hunting and the Tennessee mountains – so Raymond went with Jim, and with Newt Bronson and five more they selected Colonel Woodruff’s seed corn for the next year, under the colonel’s personal superintendence.

In the evening they looked the grain over on the Woodruff lawn, and the colonel talked about corn and corn selection. They had supper at half past six, and Jennie waited on them – having assisted her mother in the cooking. It was quite a festival. Jim Irwin was the least conspicuous person in the gathering, but the colonel, who was a seasoned politician, observed that the farm-hand had become a fisher of men, and was angling for the souls of these boys, and their interest in the school. Jim was careful not to flush the covey, but every boy received from the next winter’s teacher some confidential hint as to plans, and some suggestion that Jim was relying on the aid and comfort of that particular boy. Newt Bronson, especially, was leaned on as a strong staff and a very present help in time of trouble. As for Raymond Simms, it was clearly best to leave him alone. All this talk of corn selection and related things was new to him, and he drank it in thirstily. He had an inestimable advantage over Newt in that he was starved, while Newt was surfeited with “advantages” for which he had no use.

“Jennie,” said Colonel Woodruff, after the party had broken up, “I’m losing the best hand I ever had, and I’ve been sorry.”

“I’m glad he’s leaving you,” said Jennie. “He ought to do something except work in the field for wages.”

“I’ve had no idea he could make good as a teacher – and what is there in it if he does?”

“What has he lost if he doesn’t?” rejoined Jennie. “And why can’t he make good?”

“The school board’s against him, for one thing,” replied the colonel. “They’ll fire him if they get a chance. They’re the laughing-stock of the country for hiring him by mistake, and they’re irritated. But after seeing him perform to-night, I wonder if he can’t make good.”

“If he could feel like anything but an underling he’d succeed,” said Jennie.

“That’s his heredity,” stated the colonel, whose live-stock operations were based on heredity. “Jim’s a scrub, I suppose; but he acts as if he might turn out to be a Brown Mouse.”

“What do you mean, pa,” scoffed Jennie – “a Brown Mouse!”

“A fellow in Edinburgh,” said the colonel, “crossed the Japanese waltzing mouse with the common white mouse. Jim’s pedling father was a waltzing mouse, no good except to jump from one spot to another for no good reason. Jim’s mother is an albino of a woman, with all the color washed out in one way or another. Jim ought to be a mongrel, and I’ve always considered him one. But the Edinburgh fellow every once in a while got out of his variously-colored, waltzing and albino hybrids, a brown mouse. It wasn’t a common house mouse, either, but a wild mouse unlike any he had ever seen. It ran away, and bit and gnawed, and raised hob. It was what we breeders call a Mendelian segregation of genetic factors that had been in the waltzers and albinos all the time – their original wild ancestor of the woods and fields. If Jim turns out to be a Brown Mouse, he may be a bigger man than any of us. Anyhow, I’m for him.”

“He’ll have to be a big man to make anything out of the job of a country school-teacher,” said Jennie.

“Any job’s as big as the man who holds it down,” said her father.

Next day, Jim received a letter from Jennie.

“Dear Jim,” it ran. “Father says you are sure to have a hard time – the school board’s against you, and all that. But he added, ‘I’m for Jim, anyhow!’ I thought you’d like to know this. Also he said, ‘Any job’s as big as the man who holds it down,’ And I believe this also, and I’m for you, too! You are doing wonders even before the school starts in getting the pupils interested in a lot of things, which, while they don’t belong to school work, will make them friends of yours. I don’t see how this will help you much, but it’s a fine thing, and shows your interest in them. Don’t be too original. The wheel runs easiest in the beaten track. Yours. Jennie.”

Jennie’s caution made no impression on Jim – but he put the letter away, and every evening took it out and read the italicized words, “I’m for you, too!” The colonel’s dictum, “Any job’s as big as the man who holds it down,” was an Emersonian truism to Jim. It reduced all jobs to an equality, and it meant equality in intellectual and spiritual development. It didn’t mean, for instance, that any job was as good as another in making it possible for a man to marry – and Jennie Woodruff’s “Humph!” returned to kill and drag off her “I’m for you, too!”

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.”