“Goodby, pupil,” he waved, “see you later.”
“If you don’t forget the date-r,” she rhymed.
“I’ll sure be there, I beg to state-r,” he returned as he moved off.
“Wednesday next at this here gate-r,” she called after him, gleeful to get the last rhyme.
He shook his head and threw up his hands as if she had scored heavily against him. That was an instinctive trick of his, to make children feel the keen joy of a mental victory. It gave her a little glow for hours afterward, as he knew it would, and quite saved her from a far-off conscience which told her she had not been faithful to Bardek.
III
THE OLD PAPER MILL
BLYNN found himself tremendously interested in the business of teaching young persons, but he always discounted that enthusiasm. Scholarship, he felt, was his predestined occupation. Not that he really knew any good reason why the work of a delver in past documents should be especially worthy; nor did he ever inquire whether a life given to Elizabethan dramatists could be a life well spent. He enjoyed that sort of thing, but he had the collector’s instinct, not the scholar’s, although he did not know that; he carried on his readings and note-takings and classifyings as an amateur might collect butterflies. The figure fails in one important respect: all butterflies are beautiful. Better, he was like certain dealers in antique: ugly old furniture and bric-a-brac were sorted out with the same reverent care as the really beautiful. Six hundred a year—the beginner’s salary—seemed a magnificent return for tasks that he would willingly have performed, if he could have afforded it, without money and without price.
He did not know until much later that he was an exceptional teacher. Youngsters got the habit of confiding their academic troubles to him; and whether it were algebra or English grammar or poetry, he had the gift of making straight roads through the difficulties, and of charging his young friends with desire to go ahead.
A so-called stupid child or “bad” boys who wouldn’t study, these always seized his interest. Before he knew it, he had a dozen young folks on his list whose whole educational life he had surreptitiously taken possession of. The Williams boy was one; and now Gorgas had been added.
Gorgas Levering was an interesting “case” to Blynn. Through unwitting neglect, the child was out of touch with her parents and possibly in danger. Evidently she had a magnificent will, almost the only thing needful with the right sort of teacher, but perilous if it is coerced or left to drive its own unaided bent. The thought of her three years’ intimacy with the Bohemian Bardek gave Blynn a physical chill.