The Mountain School-Teacher

by Melville Davisson Post

T HE School-teacher had been helping the miller.

He had taken the shirts which she had offered to him, but he had refused to put upon her the labor of making up the big piece of linen that remained.

“Keep it,” he said, “until I need it.” All of Saturday he had been at work mending the wooden water wheel. In the evening he set out to return to Nicholas Parks' house. He took the short way up the mountain. When he came out on the great hickory ridge, the sun was not yet down. He stopped where the path entered the two roads, one turning along the ridge to his house, the other winding down the mountain, eastward, toward the far-off lumber mills, sometimes faintly to be indicated by a tiny wisp of smoke on the horizon.

There had been a gentle rain, and now under the soft evening sun the earth seemed to recover something of the virility of springtime, as though the impulse of life waning in the autumn were about to reconquer its dominion. Here and there, in the moist earth, a little flower crept out, as though tricked into the belief that it was springtime—a white strawberry, a tiny violet.

The sap seemed about to move under the bark of the beech trees, the buds to issue from the twigs.

In the forest the wren and the catbirds fluttered as under a nesting instinct, the gray squirrels fled around the rough shellbark trees and from one tree top to another, far off a pheasant drummed, and farther off a mountain bull lowed as he wandered through the forest.

The road descending the mountain was decked out in color, banked along its border with the poison ivy and the Virginia creeper, now a mass of scarlet. Above the beech and hickory leaves were yellow, the clay of the road below was yellow, and the soft sunlight entered and fused the edges of these colors. The forest for this hour took on the ripe expectancy of springtime.

The School-teacher stood where the path emerged from the forest

Presently from below him, beyond the turn of the road, a voice arose, a voice full, rich and sensuous—a woman's voice singing a song. It carried through the forest, swaggering, defiant melody. The words could not be determined. Indeed, there seemed to be no words. The song was a thing of sounds—of tropical, sensuous sounds. As though all the love calls of the creatures of the forest had been fused into one great, barbaric symphony.

A moment later the singer came into view.