Recollections of a Varied Life Part 4

It was a new gospel, and in the main it fell upon deaf ears. A few of the pupils were impressed by its reasonableness and disposed to meet the new teacher half way. The opinion of the majority was expressed by one boy whom I overheard at recess when he said to one of his fellows:

[Sidenote: The Biggest Boy]

"He's skeered o' Charley Grebe, an' he's a-tryin' to soft-sawder us."

The first day or two of school were given to the rather perplexing work of cla.s.sifying pupils whose previous instruction had been completely at haphazard. During that process I minutely observed the one foe against whom I had received more than one warning--Charley Grebe. He was a young man of nearly twenty-one, six feet, one or two inches high, broad-shouldered, muscular, and with a jaw that suggested all the relentless determination that one young man can hold.

When I questioned him with a view to his cla.s.sification, he was polite enough in his uninstructed way, but exceedingly reserved. On the whole he impressed me as a young man of good natural ability, who had been discouraged by bad and incapable instruction. After he had told me, rather grudgingly I thought, what ground his studies had covered, he suddenly changed places with me and became the questioner.

"Say," he broke out, interrupting some formal question of mine, "Say, do you know anything in fact? Do you know Arithmetic an' Algebra an'

Geometry and can you really teach me? or are you just pretending, like the rest?"

I thought I understood him and I guessed what his experience had been. I a.s.sured him that there was nothing in Arithmetic that I could not teach him, that I knew my Algebra, Geometry, and Trigonometry, and could help him to learn them, if he really desired to do so. Then adopting something of his own manner I asked:

"What is it you want me to do, Charley? Say what you have to say, like a man, and don't go beating about the bush."

For reply, he said:

"I want to talk with you. It'll be a long talk. I want you to go home with me to-night. Father said I might invite you. Will you come?"

There was eager earnestness in his questions, but there was also a note of discouragement, if not quite of despair in his tone. I agreed at once to go with him for the night, and, taking the hand he had not thought of offering, I added:

"If there is any way in which I can help you, Charley, I'll do it gladly."

Whether it was the unaccustomed courtesy, or the awakening of a new hope, or something else, I know not, but the awkward, overgrown boy seemed at once to a.s.sume the dignity of manhood, and while he had never been taught to say "thank you" or to use any other conventionally polite form of speech, he managed to make me understand by his manner that he appreciated my offer, and a few minutes later, school having been dismissed, he and I set out for his home.

There he explained his case to me. He wanted to become a s.h.i.+pwright--a trade which, in that time of mult.i.tudinous steamboat building on the Western rivers, was the most inviting occupation open to a young man of energy. He had discovered that a man who wished to rise to anything like a mastery in that trade must have a good working knowledge of Arithmetic, elementary Algebra, Geometry, and at least the rudiments of Trigonometry. He had wanted to learn these things and some of his previous schoolmasters had undertaken to teach them, with no result except presently to reveal to him their own ignorance. His father permitted him six months more of schooling. He had "sized me up," he said, and he believed I could teach him what he wanted to learn. But could he learn it within six months? That was what he wanted me to tell him. I put him through a close examination in Arithmetic that night--consuming most of the night--and before morning I had satisfied myself that he was an apt pupil who, with diligence and such earnest determination as he manifested, could learn what he really needed of mathematics within the time named.

[Sidenote: A Vigorous Volunteer Monitor]

"You can do it, Charley, if you work hard, and I'll help you, in school hours and out," was my final verdict.

"It's a bargain," he said, and that was all he said. But a day or two later a boy in school--a great, hulking fellow whose ugliness of disposition I had early discerned--made a nerve-racking noise by dragging his pencil over his slate in a way that disturbed the whole school. I bade him cease, but he presently repeated the offense. Again I rebuked him, but five minutes or so later he defiantly did the thing again, "just to see if the master dared," he afterward explained.

Thereupon Charley Grebe arose, seized the fellow by the ear, twisted that member until its owner howled with pain, and then, hurling him back into his seat, said:

"_You heard the master! You'll mind him after this or I'll make you._"

The event fairly appalled the school. The thought that Charley Grebe was on the master's side, and actively helping him to maintain discipline, seemed beyond belief. But events soon confirmed it. There was a little fellow in the school whom everybody loved, and whose quaint, childish ways afterwards suggested the character of "Shocky" in "The Hoosier Schoolmaster." There was also a cowardly brute there whose delight it was to persecute the little fellow on the playground in intolerable ways. I sought to stop the thing. To that end I devised and inflicted every punishment I could think of, short of flogging, but all to no purpose. At last I laid aside my convictions with my patience, and gave the big bully such a flogging as must have impressed his mind if he had had anything of the kind about his person.

That day, at the noon recess, the big bully set to work to beat the little boy unmercifully in revenge for what I had done for his protection. I was looking out through a Venetian blind, with intent to go to the rescue, when suddenly Charley Grebe, who was playing town ball threw down the bat, seized the fellow, threw him across his knees, pinioned his legs with one of his own, and literally wore out a dozen or more thick blue ash s.h.i.+ngles over that part of his victim's body which was made for spanking.

When at last he released the blubbering object of his wrath he slapped his jaws soundly and said:

"Don't you go a-whining to the master about this. If you do it'll be a good deal wuss for you. I'm a-takin' this here job off the master's hands."

I gave no hint that I had seen or heard. But from that hour forth no boy in the school ever gave me the smallest trouble by misbehavior. The school perfectly understood that Charley Grebe was "a-takin' this here job off the master's hands," and the knowledge was sufficient.

After that only the big girls--most of them older than I was--gave me trouble. I met it with the explanation that I could never think of punis.h.i.+ng a young woman, and that I must trust to their honor and courtesy, as girls who expected presently to be ladies, for their behavior. The appeal was a trifle slow in eliciting a response, but in the end it answered its purpose.

XVIII

[Sidenote: What's in a Name?]

While I was enrolling and cla.s.sifying the pupils, I encountered a peculiarly puzzling case. There were five John Riddels in the school, and I found that all of them were sons of the same man, whose name also was John Riddel. No one of them had a middle name or any other sort of name by which he might be distinguished from his brothers. On the playground they were severally known as "Big John Riddel," "John Riddel," "Johnny Riddel," "Little John Riddel," and "Little Johnny Riddel," while their father was everywhere known as "Old John Riddel,"

though he was a man under fifty, I should say. He lived near, in a stone house, with stone barns and out-houses, an ingeniously devised milk-house, and a still more ingeniously constructed device for bringing water from the spring under the hill into his dwelling.

In brief his thrift was altogether admirable, and the mechanical devices by which he made the most of every opportunity, suggested a fertilely inventive mind on the part of a man whose general demeanor was stolid to the verge of stupidity. When I was taking supper at his house one night by special invitation, I asked him why he had named all his sons John.

For reply he said:

"John is a very good name," and that was all the explanation I ever got out of him.

XIX

One pupil I had at Riker's Ridge, was Johnny G. His people had some money and Johnny had always dressed better than the rest of us could afford to do, when several years before, he and I had been cla.s.smates in the second or third grade of the Grammar School in Madison. Johnny had never got out of that grade, and even when I was in my second year in college, he gave no promise of ever making a scholastic step forward.

But he had relatives on Riker's Ridge, and when he heard that I was to be the teacher there he promised his people that he would really make an effort if they would let him live with his relatives there and become my pupil. It was so arranged, and Johnny came to me, with all his dazzling waistcoats and trousers with the latest style of pockets, and all the rest of the upholstery with which he delighted to decorate his person.

I think he really did make an effort to master the rudimentary school studies, and I conscientiously endeavored to help him, not only in school but of evenings. For a time there seemed to be a reasonable promise of success in lifting Johnny to that level of scholastic attainment which would permit him to return to Madison and enter the High School. But presently all this was brought to naught. Johnny was seized by a literary ambition that completely absorbed what mind he had, and made his school studies seem to him impertinent intrusions upon the attention of one absorbed in higher things.

He told me all about it one afternoon as I walked homeward with him, intent upon finding out why he had suddenly ceased to get his lessons.

"I'm going to write a song," he told me, "and it's going to make me famous. I'm writing it now, and I tell you it's fine."

"Tell me about it, Johnny," I replied. "What is its theme? And how much of it have you written?"

"I don't know what it's to be about," he answered, "if that's what you mean by its theme. But it's going to be great, and I'm going to make the tune to it myself."

"Very well," I replied encouragingly. "Would you mind reciting to me so much of it as you've written? I'd like to hear it."

"Why, of course. I tell you it's going to be great, but I haven't got much of it done yet--only one line, in fact."

[Sidenote: A b.u.t.termilk Poet]

Observing a certain discouragement in his tone I responded:

"Oh, well, even one line is a good deal, if it's good. Many a poem's fortune has been made by a single line. Tell me what it is."

"Well, the line runs: 'With a pitcher of b.u.t.termilk under her arm.'

Don't you see how it sort o' sings? 'With a pitcher of b.u.t.termilk under her arm'--why, it's great, I tell you. Confound the school books! What's the use of drudging when a fellow has got it in him to write poetry like that? 'With a pit-cher of but-termilk un-der her arm'--don't it sing?

'With a _pit_-cher of but-termilk un-der her arm.' 'With a _pit_-cher of _but_-termilk--un-der her arm.' Whoopee, but it's great!"

I lost sight of Johnny soon after that, and I have never heard what became of that b.u.t.termilk pitcher, or the fascinating rhythm in which it presented itself. But in later years I have come into contact with many literary ambitions that were scarcely better based than this. Indeed, if I were minded to be cynical--as I am not--I might mention a few magazine poets whose pitchers of b.u.t.termilk seem to me--but all that is foreign to the purpose of this book.