CHAPTER XXIII
AND SO THEY LIVED——
And so it turned out quite as if it were in the old ballad, that “all in the merry month of May,” and also “all in the merry green wood,” there were great doings about the bold little promontory where once stood the cabin on the old wood-lot where the Simms family had dwelt. The brook ran about the promontory, and laid at its feet on three sides a carpet of blue-grass, amid clumps of trees and wild bushes. Not far afield on either hand came the black corn-land, but up and down the bluffy sides of the brook for some distance on both sides of the King-dragged highway, ran the old wood-lot, now regaining much of the unkempt appearance which characterized it when Jim Irwin had drawn upon himself the gentle rebuke of Old Man Simms for not giving a whoop from the big road before coming into the yard.
But Old Man Simms was gone, with all the Simmses, now thoroughly established on the Blanchard farm, and quite happy in their new success. The cabin was gone, and in its place stood a pretty little bungalow, about which blossomed the lilacs and peonies and roses and other old-fashioned flowers, planted there long ago by some pioneer woman, nourished back to thriftiness by old Mrs. Simms, and carefully preserved during the struggles with the builders of the bungalow by Mrs. Irwin. For this was Mrs. Irwin’s new home. It was, in point of fact, the teacher’s house or schoolmanse for the new consolidated Woodruff District, and the old Simms wood-lot was the glebe-land of the schoolmanse.
Jim turned over and over in his mind these new applications of old, historic, significant words, dear to every reader of history—“glebe-land,” “schoolmanse”—and it seemed to him that they signified the return of many old things lost in Merrie England, lost in New England, lost all over the English-speaking world, when the old publicly-paid clergyman ceased to be so far the servant of all the people that they refused to be taxed for his support. Was not the new kind of rural teacher to be a publicly-paid leader of thought, of culture, of progress, and was he not to have his manse, his glebe-land, and his “living”? And all because, like the old clergymen, he was doing a work in which everybody was interested and for which they were willing to be taxed. Perhaps it was not so high a status as the old; but who was to say that? Certainly not Jim Irwin, the possessor of the new kind of “living,” with its “glebe-land” and its “schoolmanse.” He would have rated the new quite as high as the old.
From the brow of the promontory, a light concrete bridge took the pretty little gorge in the leap of a single arch, and landed the eye at the bottom of the front yard of the schoolhouse. Thus the new institution of life was in full view of the schoolmanse veranda, and yet shut off from it by the dry moat of the brook and its tiny meadow of blue-grass.
Across the road was the creamery, with its businesslike unloading platform, and its addition in process of construction for the reception of the machinery for the cooperative laundry. Not far from the creamery, and also across the road, stood the blacksmith and wheelwright shop. Still farther down the stream were the barn, poultry house, pens, hutches and yards of the little farm—small, economically made, and unpretentious, as were all the buildings save the schoolhouse itself, which was builded for the future.
And even the schoolhouse, when one thinks of the uses to which it was to be put—kitchen, nursery, kindergarten, banquet-hall, theater, moving-picture hall, classrooms, manual training rooms, laboratory and counting-room and what-not, was wonderfully small—Colonel Woodruff said far too small—though it was necessarily so large as to be rather astonishing to the unexpectant passer-by.
The unexpectant passer-by this May day, however, would have been especially struck by the number of motor-cars, buggies and surreys parked in the yard back of the creamery, along the roadside, and by the driveway running to the schoolhouse. People in numbers had arrived by five o’clock in the afternoon, and were still coming. They strolled about the place, examining the buildings and grounds, and talking with the blacksmith and the butter-maker, gradually drawing into the schoolhouse like a swarm of bees into a hive selected by the queen. None of them, however, went across the concrete bridge to the schoolmanse, save Mrs. Simms, who crossed, consulted with Mrs. Irwin about the shrubbery and flowers, and went back to Buddie and Jinnie, who were good children but natchally couldn’t be trusted with so many other young ones withouten some watchin’.