The Heritage Of The Kurts Volume I Part 14

IV

THE STAFF

This, thinks the intelligent reader, will be an account of a school, and I quite agree that so it ought to be. But life's logic is not always ours, and we are going to keep to that of life.

CHAPTER I

A GREAT LECTURE AND A LITTLE TOWN

That same evening Tomas knew what Dean Green thought of the lecture.

Karl was the bearer of this information. Tomas went out to him when he saw him in the avenue, and they went for a long walk into the country to the left of "The Estate."

Dean Green had a.s.sumed that when Tomas proposed to explain his design for the school, it really was that design he meant, and not something quite different; he had not for a moment imagined the possibility of its being a scheme on a large scale in which the plan for the school was merely hinted at. Such a lecture, on such a subject, might be given in this country, but it must be in one of the large towns; in a small one it might be possible to do so with impunity ten years hence, and at all events it should be given by a man in an independent position; but a man who wished to found a school on it ... a more ill-judged lecture the old gentleman could not imagine. It was inc.u.mbent on Karl to tell this to Tomas, word for word, for he must have no illusions as to what would follow. If the school went on after this it would be exclusively owing to the respect which his mother had inspired. After such a challenge, it was sure to be condemned. Not by what it taught--no, but if any girl who left school during even the present year made a false step, the school would bear the blame. The Dean had gathered from the lecture that Tomas himself had feared this. Why in the world, then, had he not held his tongue? Now a single chance might destroy the school.

It is impossible to describe how this took hold upon Tomas; he felt that in repeating this Karl agreed with the Dean; he felt that his mother would go over to them as well, that every one would. He had been guilty of egregious folly. They did not return before midnight. They could not talk to his mother that evening, everything was quiet when they entered their rooms.

Tomas had his old one, next to the bath-room, but it had all been done up for his home-coming. Karl had the one next it, the corner room; like all those in the house, it was so long that the curtains which divided the bed from the rest of the room were hardly noticeable. Their supper was set for them, but they were cast down to such a degree that they did not touch it. After Karl had gone to bed, Tomas sat beside him, nor was it only on this night that he did so.

Early the next morning--it was Sunday--Fru Rendalen was down at Nils Hansen's; she wished to act according to her usual ways. She came up again just at the time people were going to church. Karl saw her from his window, which faced the avenue, and told Tomas; he himself was going to church. Tomas went out with him to his mother; she looked worried.

"So not even Nils Hansen?"

"No, Nils Hansen himself had said he did not like to be called names in church."

"What had he meant by that?"

"That he went to a public lecture to learn something, or to hear something pleasant, not to be abused himself, or to hear others abused."

Fru Rendalen had answered that a lecture must point out people's faults.

"No, you must not _invite_ people to hear about their faults."

"But Fru Hansen?"

Laura did not think his lecture wise. "Children must not know everything."

On the contrary, the shoemaker had objected that his peasant experience taught him quite the opposite; in the country, children knew everything from the time they were quite little, and although there was much immorality in the country, it was not for that reason, but because the whole subject was neglected there. He himself had been brought up in a thickly populated district, where both s.e.xes went to the same school and played the same games until they were grown up; they knew everything, but he looked back to that time with confidence.

Nils Hansen had said this so often before that Tomas was puzzled why his mother should repeat it now. She did it merely to gain time.

The fact was that Fru Emilie Engel was ill; she had been carried straight to bed from the carriage, the doctor had been there yesterday, again during the night, and had just now come away: Fru Rendalen had met him; she began to cry.

If Emilie succ.u.mbed to this it would be her fault, she might have understood that Emilie could not bear that men's infidelity should be spoken about while her husband was beside her; so, weak and delicate as Emilie was, Fru Rendalen ought, at any cost, to have prevented Tomas from doing such a thing.

Instead, she had rejoiced over what he had done. That was because both she and others always agreed with Tomas when they were in his company, whether they would or no. For of course he had gone too far. The doctor had said so too. What had he said? "He said that it was those cursed nerves--Kurt excess--in another form." She began to cry again.

And as though Tomas wished on the spot to show her that the doctor and she were right, he flew into a violent pa.s.sion. "It was really dreadful to have come home to such a miserable position, to be obliged to work among indifferent and poor-spirited people, who fled right and left as soon as ever a reform was brought forward."

"It was not the reform itself but the way--"

The way? A reform cannot be effected by stealth, it must show itself for what it is. Yesterday evening, when he was tired, he had felt this icy coldness as well, it made him s.h.i.+ver; but now it really was all too mad; if every one deserted, he would hold his ground; he certainly had thought that his mother would have been better than that; for in reality it was mostly her experiences which he had brought forward yesterday.

This pa.s.sed, out in the garden, on Sunday morning. On Thursday at midday the local newspaper--the _Spectator_--was delivered to its subscribers. Under a large note of interrogation by way of heading a correspondent wished to know if it really were true that in a large school in the town the greater number of the pupils had fallen into immorality? Although it was the princ.i.p.al himself who had said this to several hundred people, one must still permit oneself to doubt it. That he had not been misunderstood would be proved by the following quotation: "This (namely, immorality) _was the rule_, he said; _the contrary was the exception_."

This contribution was not signed. It fanned the smouldering feeling to an open flame. No one spoke of anything else. There was an abject terror among all the school-girls the next day; they came up to morning prayers, pupils and teachers as well, as though they were about to be punished, and Karl Vangen was so much agitated, that he could scarcely pray. The day's work was dull and spiritless. Rendalen did not show himself.

He responded in his own name in the next number (Thursday's). He said that if this misunderstanding were intentional, it was paltry; if unintentional, explanation ought at least to have been sought privately. Nothing had been said that in the least resembled this; all that was said was that the transition from childhood to maturity was so difficult a time for most that it became dangerous, and it therefore needed watchfulness.

What the princ.i.p.al of the school had noticed was that the characters of children of that age altered, that they lost their industry, their sense of order; "that this was the rule, the contrary the exception."

Could any one discover in this any such frightful suggestions as had been made?

The answer was good, but it did not avail, the excitement was so great that no words could set things straight. "Why was this transition dangerous?" they wished to know, if not for the reason he now tried to evade?

Just below Rendalen's answer appeared in the same number another question, signed "A Mother:" "Why was it of such great importance that little children should learn how the race is propagated?" This inquiry gave expression to a _second_ side of the scandal, which filled the town. Under this question was still another address to Herr _Real-Kandidat_, School Director Rendalen; it begged "most respectfully" to ask, if he would not allow the lecture, which he had delivered last Sat.u.r.day at the new gymnasium of the girls' school to be printed. Those who had heard it might thus enjoy it again, and those who had not been so fortunate ought not to lose the opportunity of obtaining some information on so remarkable a subject: signed "A friend of sound and safe enlightenment."

In the next number (Sat.u.r.day's) an answer from Rendalen: "Children already learned natural history, and therefore of course the terms for propagation of the species. Why they must learn this, any head-master or princ.i.p.al of a school could answer as well as he; this formed no part of the new side of his proposal, and only so far affected small schools as regarded the scope and method of teaching the subject." To the other question he replied, that a lecture to which only parents had had admission was evidently not fitted for general circulation.

Few found this answer satisfactory; he simply evaded the question; at least three hundred people had heard the lecture, so that it might quite properly be discussed in the press.

Three more contributions in the same number. The first expressed pleasure in the promptness of the reply; would Herr Rendalen now further explain how the sinful inclinations of young people could be checked by microscopes? This witticism was at once recognised as Dosen's. The second was signed "_Arithmeticus_" and reckoned up what it would cost the country if, in the future, every school were to have a doctor as a teacher; he calculated that a sum of one million kroner a year would be necessary for this item alone; if every school were to have a chaplain as well, this would require an equal sum; a rough estimate of the cost of the apparatus, necessitated by Rendalen's plan, would, reckoned as income, be hardly less than one hundred thousand kroner a year. Therefore the school budget of the country would be burdened with an addition of about two million one hundred thousand kroner a year. He asked if this were reasonable?

After this came a communication addressed to Herr Tomas Kurt, otherwise Rendalen. A child of the town, it said, had fouled its own nest. If this town were worse than others, which the writer begged leave to doubt, then the ancestors of the lecturer were certainly most to blame for it, and that both in ancient and modern times, he was certainly therefore the last who ought to talk? This contributor signed himself "_Suum cuique_."

On the same day that these appeared Rendalen gave his second lecture, and at this, which was announced as being exclusively a technical one, twenty people, including the teachers, were present; beside these, ten came in during the course of the lecture.

One could see that those eight days had pressed hardly upon Thomas, Fru Rendalen, and Karl. Tomas's opening to-day was another man's--tame, flat, hesitating; his nervousness had increased twenty per cent., his handkerchief was out of his pocket and in again, the water-bottle was emptied, his hair pushed up; he fidgeted with his hands, and his feet moved about as though he were blowing the bellows of an organ. But when he began to speak of the school plan, exhibiting and explaining appliances and apparatus, he caught fire and was soon his old self again, his superior power of making things plain and of awakening interest in them was recovered. A microscope with a leaf under it was pa.s.sed round while he spoke; he showed them a succession of new things, either entire collections, or large coloured pictures, or highly finished models which could be taken to pieces and studied in the most minute details; for example, a man's chest, stomach, neck, head, some of the finer parts being on an enlarged scale. Such a collection of apparatus, he said, could never have been made in their own country.

"We are indebted to the interest of the world at large that we, remote and small as we are, are able to see such a one; and, moreover, that I should have been able to procure it." Some of it, however, he said, had been given to him.

The few who were present at the lecture were extremely pleased; they thought the school might still do well even if he had given an unfortunate lecture.

But these favourable views were carried away by too few to create a counter-current. In Thursday's number a contributor asked the man who had signed himself "_Suum cuique_," if it meant "For every pig." If this question were on behalf of Rendalen it was absolutely the worst which had yet been advanced against him. The contributor began by saying how audacious it was that a young man, and one, moreover, who had scarcely been at home since he was grown up, should descant upon the morals of this town with a boastful superiority. Not only that, but he had spoken as though he knew every skipper in the country, as though he had followed them round the world and inst.i.tuted inquiries about them; and in order to fill up the measure of shamelessness, he had talked as though he knew the whole trading community of the world. A man with such great effrontery, and so inconsiderate a mode of expression, ought not to be a teacher in an educational inst.i.tution, least of all its princ.i.p.al. Under these circ.u.mstances, proposals ought at once to be made for the formation of another school. It was already known that a well-meant application to the former princ.i.p.al to continue her work as before, without Herr Rendalen's help, had been fruitless.

Well then, the writer would call upon men of position to come to the front with a view to the formation of a new school. Such a call would receive universal response. Every one in the town wondered who this contributor could be; that very evening the suggestion was canva.s.sed in the club, but neither then did he make himself known. All agreed to wait for Consul Engel's sake; they did not in the least doubt that he would be on their side; every one knew only too well what had been the result of Rendalen's lecture in Engel's home, but it would not do to talk about plans to him now. Fru Engel was dangerously ill.

Although the deliberations lasted only a few minutes, every one agreed to this at once. When it was over it was not more than nine o'clock, so Dr. Holmsen, who had been a pa.s.sive listener, went straight from the club, which was on the market-place, up the avenue to "The Estate," and repeated all to Tomas Rendalen; "the sooner he learns it the better,"

Holmsen considered.

"Leave this wretched hole to the devil," was his advice. Tomas took the doctor in with him to his mother and repeated to her what he had been told, adding at once that he should certainly go away.

Karl came home at that moment; it was all told to him and he agreed that it was useless to go on after what he had heard that day in the town. But Fru Rendalen would not on any account consent that they should give way; better embody the whole school plan and its grounds in a book, and appeal from the town to the country at large. There must surely be enough sensible parents in the whole of Norway to enable them to have a full school. It had not, she said, been her plan but Tomas's, and he must therefore carry it through.

She understood Tomas; it was only necessary to overcome the first painful impression and he would be himself again. They did not separate that night until twelve o'clock, and then they were all agreed in the determination to continue the plan.

It was the school work which gave Tomas strength for this; he was an unequalled schoolmaster and found his greatest happiness in it, and now he brought all his powers to the task. He showed the pupils the most amusing experiments that he knew, and described, explained, and lectured. He still a.s.sembled the senior cla.s.s, as he had done ever since his return, one evening a week in Fru Rendalen's room, for a special meeting. He Had given them some idea of the great question of the position of women, as it affected the minds of the whole civilised world; he read to them, he played to them; at this time, of course, these meetings had a special importance for him.