For he confessed that his stay there would be martyrdom. He had resolved that he would not try to see her; that would only mean grief for her and humiliation for him. He was proud of his love for Elva Barrett, in spite of her father’s contempt and insults. He found no reproach for himself because he had loved her and had told her so. But for the rôle of a Lochinvar his New England nature had no taste. He realized, without arguing the question with himself, that Elva Barrett was not to be won by the impetuous folly that demanded blind sacrifice of name and position and father and friends.
There was no cowardice in this realization. It was rather a pathetic sacrifice on the part of simple loyalty and a love that was absolute devotion. In deciding to remain in Stillwater he kept his love alight like a flame before a shrine. But beyond his daily work and the unflinching purpose of his great love he could not see his way.
It was because his way was so obscure that the wasps found him an easier victim.
He heard the buzzings at street corners as he passed. There were stings of glances and of half-heard words.
Like the pastor of a church in a small place, the principal of a high-school is one in whom the community feels a sense of proprietorship, with full right to canvass his goings and comings and liberty to circumscribe and control. For is he not the one that should “set example”?
The wasps would not accept his silent surrender. They suspected something hidden, and their imaginings saw the worst. They buzzed more busily every day. That they would not allow him the peace and the pathetic liberty of renunciation drove Wade frantic. With all the courage of his conscience, he still faced John Barrett’s battery. But the wasps he could not face.
And he fled. In the end it was nothing but that—he was put to flight! The people of Stillwater accepted it as flight, for he placed his resignation in the hands of the school board barely a week before the date for the opening of the autumn term. And on the train on which he fled was the Honorable Pulaski D. Britt, still unconscious that the word of gossip he had dropped was the match that lighted a fuse, and that the fuse was briskly burning.
Above the rumble of the starting car-wheels Wade heard the mills of Stillwater screaming their farewell taunt at him.
Then the Honorable Pulaski Britt came and sat down in his seat, penning him next to the window.
“Yes, sir,” said Britt, with keen memory as to where he had left off in his previous conversation and with dogged determination to have his say out, “a man that reads a book written by a perfesser that don’t know the difference between a ramdown and a dose of catnip tea, and then thinks he understands forestry of the kind that there’s a dollar in, needs to have his head examined for hollows. Do you find anything in them books about how to get the best figgers on dressed beef?—and when you are buyin’ it in fifty-ton lots for a dozen camps a half a cent on a pound means something! Is there anything about hirin’ men and makin’ ’em stay and work, gettin’ cooks and saw-filers that know their business, chasin’ thieves away from depot-camps, keepin’ crews from losin’ half the tools? Forestry! Making trees grow! Gawd-amighty, young man, Nature will attend to the tree-growin’. That’s all Nature has got to do. She was doin’ it before we got here, and doin’ it well, and do you reckon we have any right to set up and tell Nature her business? I’ve got something else to think of besides tellin’ Nature how to run her end. I’d like to know how to grow men instead of trees. My Jerusalem boss, MacLeod, writes me he has been two weeks getting together his hundred men for that operation. He’ll meet me at the Umcolcus junction, up the line here a hundred miles. And I’ve been tryin’ most of that time to get hold of the right sort of a ‘chaney man.’”