The Brown Mouse Read online

  CHAPTER IV

  THE FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL

  I suppose every reader will say that genius consists very largely inseeing Opportunity in the set of circumstances or thoughts or impressionsthat 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 otherold-fashioned, excellent good literature which did not cost overtwenty-five cents a volume; and he had pored long and with many thrillsover the pages of Matthews' _Getting on in the World_--which is the bestbook of purely conventional helpfulness in the language. And his view ofefficiency was that it is the capacity to see opportunity where othersoverlook it, and make the most of it.

  All through his life he had had his own plans for becoming great. He wasto be a general, hurling back the foes of his country; he was to be thenation's master in literature; a successful drawing on his slate hadfilled him with ambition, confidently entertained, of becoming aRubens--and the story of Benjamin West in his school reader fanned thisspark to a flame; science, too, had at times been his chosen field; andwhen he had built a mousetrap which actually caught mice, he saw himself amillionaire inventor. As for being president, that was a commonplace inhis dreams. And all the time, he was barefooted, ill-clad and dreamed hisdreams to the accompaniment of the growl of the plow cutting the rootsunder the brown furrow-slice, or the wooshing of the milk in the pail. Attwenty-eight, he considered these dreams over.

  As for this new employment, he saw no great opportunity in it. Of anyspark 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, JimIrwin anticipated nothing. He went into the small, mean, ill-paid task asa part of the day's work, with no knowledge of the stirring of the nationfor a different sort of rural school, and no suspicion that there lay init any highway to success in life. He was not a college man or even ahigh-school man. All his other dreams had found rude awakening in the factthat he had not been able to secure the schooling which geniuses need inthese days. He was unfitted for the work geniuses do. All he was to be wasa rural teacher, accidentally elected by a stupid school board, and with ahard tussle before him to stay on the job for the term of his contract. Hecould have accepted positions quite as good years ago, save for the factthat they would have taken him away from his mother, their cheap littlehome, their garden and their fowls. He rather wondered why he had allowedJennie's sneer to sting him into the course of action which put him inthis new relation to his neighbors.

  But, true to his belief in honest thorough work, like a general preparingfor battle, he examined his field of operations. His manner of doing thisseemed to prove to Colonel Woodruff, who watched it with keen interest assomething new in the world, that Jim Irwin was possibly a Brown Mouse. Butthe colonel knew only a part of Jim's performances. He saw Jim clothed inslickers, walking through rainstorms to the houses in the WoodruffDistrict, as greedy for every moment of rain as a haymaker for shine; andhe knew that Jim made a great many evening calls.

  But he did not know that Jim was making what our sociologists call asurvey. For that matter, neither did Jim; for books on sociology cost morethan twenty-five cents a volume, and Jim had never seen one. However, itwas 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; butthere is knowing and knowing. He now had note-books full of facts aboutpeople and their farms. He knew how many acres each family possessed, andwhat sort of farming each husband was doing--live stock, grain or mixed.He knew about the mortgages, and the debts. He knew whether the familyatmosphere was happy and contented, or the reverse. He knew which boys andgirls were wayward and insubordinate. He made a record of the advancementin their studies of all the children, and what they liked to read. He knewtheir favorite amusements. He talked with their mothers and sisters--notabout the school, to any extent, but on the weather, the horses, theautomobiles, the silo-filling machinery and the profits of farming.

  I suppose that no person who has undertaken the management of the youngpeople of any school in all the history of education, ever did so muchwork of this sort before his school opened. Really, though Jennie Woodruffdid not see how such doings related to school work, Jim Irwin's school wasrunning full blast in the homes of the district and the minds of manypupils, weeks and weeks before that day when he called them to order onthe Monday specified in his contract as the first day of school.

  Con Bonner, who came to see the opening, voiced the sentiments of theolder people when he condemned the school as disorderly. To be sure, therewere more pupils enrolled than had ever entered on a first day in thewhole history of the school, and it was hard to accommodate them all. Butthe director's criticism was leveled against the free-and-easy air of thechildren. Most of them had brought seed corn and a good-sized corn showwas on view. There was much argument as to the merits of the variousentries. Instead of a language lesson from the text-book, Jim had giventhem an exercise based on an examination of the ears of corn.

  The number exercises of the little chaps had been worked out with ears andkernels of corn. One class in arithmetic calculated the percentage ofinferior kernels at tip and butt to the full-sized grains in the middle ofthe ear.

  All the time, Jim Irwin, awkward and uncouth, clad in his none-too-goodSunday suit and trying to hide behind his Lincolnian smile the fact thathe was pretty badly frightened and much embarrassed, passed among them,getting them enrolled, setting them to work, wasting much time andlaboring like a heavy-laden barge in a seaway.

  "That feller'll never do," said Bonner to Bronson next day. "Looks like atramp 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, "andthe flure was all over corn like a hog-pin."

  "Oh! I don't suppose he can get away with it," assented Bronsondisgustedly, "but that boy of mine is as tickled as a colt with the wholething. Says he's goin' reg'lar this winter."

  "That's because Jim don't keep no order," said Bonner. "He lets Newt do ashe dam pleases."

  "First time he's ever pleased to do anything but deviltry," protestedBronson. "Oh, I suppose Jim'll fall down, and we'll have to fire him--butI wish we could git a _good_ teacher that would git hold of Newt the wayhe seems to!"