“Your worship,” said Kobus, “it is a conspiracy! Shall we—should we—go and ask the Dominie?”
But scarcely had Kobus uttered this fatal word than he darted out of the door and up the street, and it was long before his mind’s eye had lost sight of that frightful picture: the burgomaster, purple in the face, and boiling over with indignation; and the voice of his superior thundered in his ears with all the annihilating force of contempt.
“The Dominie!” was all he had said.
The village schoolmaster was an old man of sixty-three, who, ever since his twentieth year, had stood, day after day, Sundays excepted, behind the same desk, leading the peasants’ children from the spelling of s, p, a—spa, to the four elementary rules of arithmetic. Every year a few left him, being found ripe for forgetting at the plough-tail what they had learnt in the schoolroom, and every year fresh aspirants for s, p, a—spa, appeared on the scenes. So he had grown old at his work, and his work with him. For he belonged to the pre-examination days—he was a “schoolmeester,” not an “onderwijzer.” The new generation looked on him rather as a curiosity, a touchstone of progress, a souvenir of old times, than a living being, a wheel in the world-machine of the nineteenth century. Other men of his age had gone with the stream, and followed its capricious windings; he had landed on the bank, and followed his own old path; his mind had rusted into the old groove, and he could not extricate it.
He had already received hints that he ought to retire, to ask for his pension, so as to make way for modern forces; but the idea of ceasing to stand before his class and behind his desk was too strange to the old man—too new!
So he remained on for the present, till his resignation should no longer be a matter of choice.
The elder children were busy doing sums; the younger ones were being attended to by the Dominie himself.
But how strange he was to-day! It sometimes seemed as if he heard nothing of the lesson the children were droning over,—saw nothing of the tricks the older ones were up to in the background,—as if, in fact, he were thinking of something entirely different. He had such fits, sometimes. How funny it was, now, when he dipped his pencil into the inkstand, instead of a penholder, and, shortly afterwards, abstractedly put it into his mouth! What a face he made when he found it out! The whole school had simply yelled at the joke, and the Dominie had got very angry, and put the whole lot of them in detention. Later, however, he almost laughed at the matter himself, and allowed them all to go home. Such foolish and absurd things he used to do every now and then; and the reason for this was, as the burgomaster said, because the Dominie was “an obstructive fellow,” and “not practical.”
And when the burgomaster said so, every one believed him, for the burgomaster was considered a very clever man.
But, after all, the Dominie was cleverer still.