KATHERINE TO THE WINNEBAGOS
Nov. 15, 19—.
Dearest Winnebagos:
You don’t happen to know of anyone that would like to employ a good country schoolma’am for the rest of the term, do you? I’m fired; that is, I’ll wager all my earthly possessions that I will be at the next session of the Board. The prophet hath spoken truly; and you can’t make a silk-purse-carrying schoolmarm out of Katherine Adams.
This morning I woke up with a glouch, which is a combination of a gloom and a grouch, and worse than either. It didn’t improve it to have to go to school on such a crisp, cool, ten-mile-walk day and listen to Clarissa Butts stammer out a paragraph in the reader about vegetation around extinct volcanoes, and all the while trying to keep my eye on the rest of the pupils, who were not listening, but throwing spitballs at each other. The worst of it was I didn’t blame them a bit for not listening. Why on earth can’t they put something interesting into school readers? Even I, with my insatiable thirst for information, gagged on vegetation around extinct volcanoes. Clarissa’s paragraph drew to a halting close and finally stopped with a rising inflection, regardless of my oft-repeated instructions how to behave in the presence of a period, and I had to go through the daily process of correction, which ended as usual with Clarissa in tears and me wondering why I was born.
The next little girl took up the tale in a droning sing-song that was almost as bad as Clarissa’s halting delivery, and fed the Glouch until he was twice his original size. The climax came when Absalom Butts, by some feat of legerdemain, pulled the bottom out of his desk and his books suddenly fell to the floor with a crash that shattered the nerves of the entire class. Absalom and some of the other boys snickered out loud; the girls looked at me with anxious expectancy.
I sat up very straight. “Class attention!” I commanded, rapping with my ruler. “Close books and put them away,” I ordered next.
Books and papers made a fluttering disappearance, through which the long-drawn sniffs of Clarissa Butts were plainly audible.
“Get your hats and form in line for dismissal,” was the next order that fell on their startled ears.
“She’s going to send us home,” came to my hearing in a sibilant whisper. Clarissa’s sniffs became gurgling sobs as she took her place in the apprehensive line.
“Forward march, and halt outside the door!” I drove them out like sheep before me and then I came out and banged the door shut with a vicious slam. Passing between the two files I divided the ranks into sheep and goats, left and right.
“Class attention!” I called again. “Do you all see that dark spot over there?” said I, pointing to the dim line of trees that marked the beginning of the woods, some seven miles distant.
“Yes, Miss Adams,” came the wondering reply.
“Well,” I continued, “the left half of the line will take the road around Spencer way, and the right half will take the road around the other way, and the half that gets there last will have to give a show to amuse the winners. We’re going to have a hike, and a picnic. You all have your lunch baskets, haven’t you?”
For a minute they stood dazed, looking at me as if they thought I had lost my senses. Clarissa stopped short in the middle of a sob to gape open-mouthed. Come to think of it, I don’t believe she ever did finish that sob. I repeated my directions, and taking the youngest girl by the hand I started one half of the line down the road, calling over my shoulder to the other line that they might as well make up their stunts on the way, because they were going to get beaten. But after all it was our side that got there last, because we were mostly girls and I had to carry the littlest ones over some of the rough places.
I sent the boys to gather wood and built up a big fire, and then I proceeded to initiate the crowd into some of the mysteries of camp cookery. I daubed a chicken with clay and baked it with the feathers on, like we used to do last summer on Ellen’s Isle, and it would have been splendid if it hadn’t been for one small oversight. I forgot to split the chicken open and take the insides out before I put the clay on.
After dinner it was up to me to produce a show in obedience to my own mandate. None of the rest on my side could help me out, because not one of the blessed chicks had ever done a “stunt” in their lives. The only “prop” I had was a bright red tie, so I proceeded to do the stunt about the goat that ate the two red shirts right off the line—you remember the way Sahwah used to bring the house down with it? Well, I had just got to the part where “he heard the whistle; was in great pain——” and, accompanying the action to the music, was down on all fours giving a lifelike imitation of a goat tied to a railroad track, while the delighted boys and girls were doubled up in all stages of mirth, when I heard a sound that resembled the last gasp of a dying elephant. I jumped to my feet and whirled around, and there in the offing were anchored—anchored is the only expression that fits because they were literally rooted to the spot—the entire school board of Spencer township, plus two strange men plus Justice Sherman. The board members and the strangers stood with their jaws dropped down on their chests and their eyes popping out of their heads; Justice had his handkerchief over his mouth and was shaking from head to foot like a sapling in a high wind. I gave a gasp of dismay which resulted in further developments, for I had the whole red tie stuffed into my mouth with which to flag the train when the time came, and the minute I opened my mouth it billowed out in the breeze. That was the finishing touch. I might have explained away the quadruped attitude as a gymnastic pose, but it takes considerable of an artist to explain away a mouthful of red tie in a schoolmarm. Besides that, I was mud from head to foot, having slid about ten feet for the home plate in a baseball game we had before dinner, so that I presented a front elevation in natural clay effect, broken here and there with elderberries in bas-relief, which had adhered when the can was accidentally spilled over me.
Being acutely conscious of all these facts in every corner of my anatomy did not add to my ease of manner, but I said as nonchalantly as I could, “How do you do, Mr. Butts? How do you do, gentlemen?” Then I added rather lamely, “Pleasant day, is it not?”
Mr. Butts exploded into the same sort of snort as had interrupted me in time to prevent the goat from flagging the train.
“Miss Adams,” he said severely, when he had recovered his breath sufficiently to speak, “what does this mean? Why ain’t you teaching school to-day? Here comes these here two fellers——” and he jerked his thumb in the direction of the two strangers—“from the new school board over to Sabot Junction, to visit our school, and I takes them over to the schoolhouse and finds it empty and no sign of you or the class. Fine doin’s, them! These fellers had their trip for nothin’ and they were pretty mad about it I can tell you, and so I thinks I’ll drive them over to Kenridge to the schoolhouse there and here on the way I runs into you in the woods, acting like a lunytic. I always said Bill Adams’s daughter was plumb crazy and now I’m sure of it.”
I stood aghast. How was I to explain to an irate school board that neither I nor the children had felt like going to school to-day and had decided to have a picnic instead, and that the “lunytic actin’s” was Sahwah’s famous stunt, enacted to add to the hilarity of the occasion? I threw an appealing glance at Justice Sherman, and he sobered up enough to speak.
“You don’t understand, Mr. Butts,” he said hastily. “Miss Adams is teaching school to-day. She is teaching the children botany and it is sometimes necessary to go out into the woods and study right from Nature. I heard her say that she was going to take the children out the first fine day.”
This was outrageous fibbing, but nobly done in a good cause. It was of no avail, however, for Absalom Butts promptly called out importantly, “It ain’t either no botany class; it’s a picnic. She made us put our books away when we didn’t want to and come out here.” And he made an impudent grimace at me, accompanied with the usual taunting grin.
Right here I had another surprise of my young life. No sooner had the craven Absalom turned state’s evidence when there rose from the masses an unexpected champion. As Elijah Butts began to express his opinion of my “carryin’s on” in no veiled terms, his daughter Clarissa, developing a hitherto undreamed of amount of spirit, suddenly threw her arms around my waist and stood there stamping her feet with anger.
“She ain’t a lunatic, she ain’t a lunatic,” she shrilled above her father’s gruff tones, “she’s nice and I love her!” After which astounding confession she melted into tears and stood there sobbing and hugging the breath out of me. To my greater astonishment all the other girls immediately followed suit and gathered around me with shielding caresses, turning defiant faces to the upbraiding school board members. The boys made themselves very inconspicuous in the rear, but I caught more than one glowering look cast in the direction of Absalom.
Before this demonstration of affection, Mr. Butts paused in astonishment, and, having hesitated, was lost. He felt he was no longer cock of the walk, and in dignified silence led the way to the surrey standing in the road, with the rest of the school board members and the visitors stalking after. I watched them climb in and drive away, and then the reaction set in and I sat down on the ground and laughed until I cried, while the girls, not sure whether I was laughing or crying, alternately giggled convulsively and soothingly bade me “never mind.” I sat up finally and shook the hair out of my eyes and then I discovered that Justice Sherman had not departed with the rest of the delegation, but was sitting on the ground not far away, still shaking with laughter and wiping his eyes on a red-bordered napkin that had strayed out of a lunch basket. A sudden suspicion seized me.
“Justice,” I cried severely, “did you do it?”
“Did I do what?” he asked in a startled tone.
“Find out I was off on a picnic and bring the Board down to visit me?”
Justice threw out his hands in a gesture of denial. “‘Thou canst not say I did it, never shake thy gory locks at me,’” he declaimed feelingly. “Where did they come from? They dropped, fair one, like the gentle rain from heaven, upon the place beneath. They came first to my humble dispensary of learning, anxious to show the visiting Solons what a bargain they had captured, and listened feelingly while I conducted a Latin lesson, which impressed them so much they invited me to come along while they gave you the ‘once over.’ You never saw such an expression in your life as there was on the face of Mr. Butts when he arrived at your place and found it empty. I will remember it to my dying day.
“But what on earth were you doing when we found you in the woods?” he finished in a mystified tone.
Then I told him about Sahwah’s goat that ate the two red shirts right off the line, and again he laughed until he was weak.
“Some schoolma’am you, for visiting committees to make notes on!” he exclaimed.
“I’m discharged, of course,” I remarked, after a moment’s silence.
“Oh, maybe not,” said Justice soothingly, as we reached home, and he turned off to go to his cabin.
“I don’t care if I am,” I cried savagely. “I hate that old Board so I wouldn’t work for them another day.” And I stalked into the house with my head in the air.
But somehow, after I had eaten my supper and begun to write this letter, I began to feel differently. The way the girls stood up for me this afternoon changed my whole attitude toward school teaching. To find out that they actually loved me was the biggest surprise I had ever had in my life. I had hated them so thoroughly along with the school teaching that it had never occurred to me that they did not feel the same way toward me. I suddenly hated myself for my impatience with their stupidity. Of course they were stupid—how could they be otherwise, poor, pitiful, ill-clad, overworked creatures, coming from such homes as they did? I stopped despising them and was filled only with pity for the narrow, colorless lives they led. That afternoon when they had told me, shyly and wistfully, how much they enjoyed my teaching, I was filled with guilty pangs, because I knew just how much I had enjoyed it. That impromptu picnic had quite won their hearts and broken down the barriers between us, and the trouble it had gotten me into crystallized their affection into expression. Now the ice was broken, and I would be able to get more out of them than ever before. The prospect of teaching began to have compensations.
Then suddenly I remembered. I would be discharged after the next meeting of the Board. I would have no opportunity of getting better acquainted with my pupils and leading them in the pleasant paths of knowledge. Just when the drink began to taste sweet I had to go and upset the cup!
And your Katherine, who had hated teaching the poor whites so fiercely all these months, buried her head on her arms and cried bitterly at the thought of having to give it up!
Yours, in tears,
Katherine.