The Brown Mouse Part 19

THE GLORIOUS FOURTH

A good deal of water ran under the Woodruff District bridges in the weeks between the school election and the Fourth of July picnic at Eight-Mile Grove. They were very important weeks to Jim Irwin, though outwardly uneventful. Great events are often mere imperceptible developments of the spirit.

Spring, for instance, brought a sort of spiritual crisis to Jim; for he had to face the accusing glance of the fields as they were plowed and sown while he lived indoors. As he labored at the tasks of the Woodruff school he was conscious of a feeling not very easily distinguished from a sense of guilt. It seemed that there must be something almost wicked in his failure to be afield with his team in the early spring mornings when the woolly anemones appeared in their fur coats, the heralds of the later comers--violets, sweet-williams, pucc.o.o.ns, and the scarlet prairie lilies.

A moral crisis accompanies the pa.s.sing of a man from the struggle with the soil to any occupation, the productiveness of which is not quite so clear.

It requires a keenly sensitive nature to feel conscious of it, but Jim Irwin possessed such a temperament; and from the beginning of the daily race with the seasons, which makes the life of a northern farmer an eight months' Marathon in which to fall behind for a week is to lose much of the year's reward, the gawky schoolmaster slept uneasily, and heard the earliest c.o.c.k-crow as a soldier hears a call to arms to which he has made up his mind he will not respond.

I think there is a real moral principle involved. I believe that this deep instinct for labor in and about the soil is a valid one, and that the gathering together of people in cities has been at the cost of an obscure but actual moral shock.

I doubt if the people of the cities can ever be at rest in a future full of moral searchings of conscience until every man has traced definitely the connection of the work he is doing with the maintenance of his country's population. Sometimes those vocations whose connection can not be so traced will be recognized as wicked ones, and people engaged in them will feel as did Jim--until he worked out the facts in the relation of school-teaching to the feeding, clothing and sheltering of the world. Most school-teaching he believed--correctly or incorrectly--has very little to do with the primary task of the human race; but as far as his teaching was concerned, even he believed in it. If by teaching school he could not make a greater contribution to the productiveness of the Woodruff District than by working in the fields, he would go back to the fields. Whether he could make his teaching thus productive or not was the very fact in issue between him and the local body politic.

These are some of the waters that ran under the bridges before the Fourth of July picnic at Eight-Mile Grove. Few surface indications there were of any change in the little community in this annual gathering of friends and neighbors. Wilbur Smythe made the annual address, and was in rather finer fettle than usual as he paid his fervid tribute to the starry flag, and to this very place as the most favored spot in the best country of the greatest state in the most powerful, intellectual, freest and most progressive nation in the best possible of worlds. Wilbur was going strong. Jim Irwin read the Declaration rather well, Jennie Woodruff thought, as she sat on the platform between Deacon Avery, the oldest settler in the district, and Mrs. Columbus Brown, the sole local representative of the Daughters of the American Revolution. Colonel Woodruff presided in his Grand Army of the Republic uniform.

The fresh northwest breeze made free with the oaks, elms, hickories and box-elders of Eight-Mile Grove, and the waters of Pickerel Creek glimmered a hundred yards away, beyond the flitting figures of the boys who preferred to shoot off their own fire-crackers and torpedoes and n.i.g.g.e.r-chasers, rather than to listen to those of Wilbur Smythe. Still farther off could be heard the voice of a lone lemonade vender as he advertised ice-cold lemonade, made in the shade, with a brand-new spade, by an old maid, as a guaranty that it was the blamedest, coldest lemonade ever sold. And under the shadiest trees a few incorrigible Marthas were spreading the snowy tablecloths on which would soon be placed the bountiful repasts stored in ponderous wicker baskets and hampers. It was a lovely day, in a lovely spot--a good example of the miniature forests which grew naturally from time immemorial in favored locations on the Iowa prairies--half a square mile of woodland, all about which the green corn-rows stood aslant in the cool breeze, "waist-high and laid by."

They were pa.s.sing down the rough board steps from the platform after the exercises had terminated in a rousing rendition of _America_, when Jennie Woodruff, having slipped by everybody else to reach him, tapped Jim Irwin on the arm. He looked back at her over his shoulder with his slow gentle smile.

"Isn't your mother here, Jim?" she asked. "I've been looking all over the crowd and can't see her."

"She isn't here," answered Jim. "I was in hopes that when she broke loose and went to your Christmas dinner she would stay loose--but she went home and settled back into her rut."

"Too bad," said Jennie. "She'd have had a nice time if she had come."

"Yes," said Jim, "I believe she would."

"I want help," said Jennie. "Our hamper is terribly heavy. Please!"

It was rather obvious to Mrs. Bonner that Jennie was throwing herself at Jim's head; but that was an article of the Bonner family creed since the decision which closed the hearing at the court-house. It must be admitted that the young county superintendent found tasks which kept the schoolmaster very close to her side. He carried the hamper, helped Jennie to spread the cloth on the gra.s.s, went with her to the well for water and cracked ice wherewith to cool it. In fact, he quite cut Wilbur Smythe out when that gentleman made ponderous efforts to obtain a share of the favor implied in these permissions.

"Sit down, Jim," said Mrs. Woodruff, "you've earned a bite of what we've got. It's good enough, what there is of it, and there's enough of it, such as it is!"

"I'm sorry," said Jim, "but I've a prior engagement."

"Why, Jim!" protested Jennie. "I've been counting on you. Don't desert me!"

"I'm awfully sorry," said Jim, "but I promised. I'll see you later."

One might have thought, judging by the colonel's quizzical smile, that he was pleased at Jennie's loss of her former swain.

"We'll have to invite Jim longer ahead of time," said he. "He's getting to be in demand."

He seemed to be in demand--a fact that Jennie confirmed by observation as she chatted with Deacon Avery, Mrs. Columbus Brown and her husband, and the Orator of the Day, at the table set apart for the guests and notables.

Jim received a dozen invitations as he pa.s.sed the groups seated on the gra.s.s--one of them from Mrs. Cornelius Bonner, who saw no particular point in advertising disgruntlement. The children ran to him and clung to his hands; young girls gave him sisterly smiles and such trifles as chicken drumsticks, pieces of cake and like tidbits. His pa.s.sage to the numerous groups at a square table under a big burr-oak was quite an ovation--an ovation of the significance of which he was himself quite unaware. The people were just friendly, that was all--to his mind.

But Jennie--the daughter of a politician and a promising one herself--Jennie sensed the fact that Jim Irwin had won something from the people of the Woodruff District in the way of deference. Still he was the gangling, Lincolnian, ill-dressed, poverty-stricken Jim Irwin of old, but Jennie had no longer the feeling that one's standing was somewhat compromised by a.s.sociation with him. He had begun to put on something more significant than clothes, something which he had possessed all the time, but which became valid only as it was publicly apprehended. There was a slight air of command in his down-sitting and up-rising at the picnic. He was clearly the central figure of his group, in which she recognized the Bronsons, those queer children from Tennessee, the Simmses, the Talcotts, the Hansens, the Hamms and Colonel Woodruff's hired man, Pete, whose other name is not recorded.

Jim sat down between Bettina Hansen, a flaxen-haired young Brunhilde of seventeen, and Calista Simms--Jennie saw him do it, while listening to Wilbur Smythe's account of the exacting nature of the big law practise he was building up,--and would have been glad to exchange places with Calista or Bettina.

The repast drew to a close; and over by the burr-oak the crowd had grown to a circle surrounding Jim Irwin.

"He seems to be making an address," said Wilbur Smythe.

"Well, Wilbur," replied the colonel, "you had the first shot at us.

Suppose we move over and see what's under discussion."

As they approached the group, they heard Jim Irwin answering something which Ezra Bronson had said.

"You think so, Ezra," said he, "and it seems reasonable that big creameries like those at Omaha, Sioux City, Des Moines and the other centralizer points can make b.u.t.ter cheaper than we would do here--but we've the figures that show that they aren't economical."

"They can't make good b.u.t.ter, for one thing," said Newton Bronson c.o.c.kily.

"Why can't they?" asked Olaf Hansen, the father of Bettina.

"Well," said Newton, "they have to have so much cream that they've got to s.h.i.+p it so far that it gets rotten on the way, and they have to renovate it with lime and other ingredients before they can churn it."

"Well," said Raymond Simms, "I reckon they sell their b.u.t.ter fo' all it's wuth; an' they cain't get within from foah to seven cents a pound as much fo' it as the farmers' creameries in Wisconsin and Minnesota get fo'

theirs."

"That's a fact, Olaf," said Jim.

"How do you kids know so darned much about it?" queried Pete.

"Huh!" sniffed Bettina. "We've been reading about it, and writing letters about it, and figuring percentages on it in school all winter. We've done arithmetic and geography and grammar and I don't know what else on it."

"Well, I'm agin' any schoolin'," said Pete, "that makes kids smarter in farmin' than their parents and their parents' hired men. Gi' me another swig o' that lemonade, Jim!"

"You see," said Jim to his audience, meanwhile pouring the lemonade, "the centralizer creamery is uneconomic in several ways. It has to pay excessive transportation charges. It has to pay excessive commissions to its cream buyers. It has to accept cream without proper inspection, and mixes the good with the bad. It makes such long s.h.i.+pments that the cream spoils in transit and lowers the quality of the b.u.t.ter. It can't make the best use of the b.u.t.termilk. All these losses and leaks the farmers have to stand. I can prove--and so can the six or eight pupils in the Woodruff school who have been working on the cream question this winter--that we could make at least six cents a pound on our b.u.t.ter if we had a cooperative creamery and all sent our cream to it."

"Well," said Ezra Bronson, "let's start one."

"I'll go in," said Olaf Hansen.

"Me, too," said Con Bonner.

There was a general chorus of a.s.sent. Jim had convinced his audience.

"He's got the jury," said Wilbur Smythe to Colonel Woodruff.

"Yes," said the colonel, "and right here is where he runs into danger. Can he handle the crowd when it's with him?"

"Well," said Jim, "I think we ought to organize one, but I've another proposition first. Let's get together and pool our cream. By that, I mean that we'll all sell to the same creamery, and get the best we can out of the centralizers by the cooperative method. We can save two cents a pound in that way, and we'll learn to cooperate. When we have found just how well we can hang together, we'll be able to take up the cooperative creamery, with less danger of falling apart and failing."

"Who'll handle the pool?" inquired Mr. Hansen.

"We'll handle it in the school," answered Jim.