“Can you tell me, sir, the reason why my friend Burgers did not give satisfaction here?”
“Oh! well—what can I say to you?—the man was the victim of a stupid joke. His hair is, as I suppose you are aware,...”
“Red—yes, fiery red,” sighed the probationer, with a faint smile. “Yes—that hair of his!”
“Well,” pursued the schoolmaster, “on the day Mr Burgers was preaching here, Jaap Stricker, a farmer, who is known as the worst joker in the village, happened to be sitting in the pew just behind the elders. When the young man, who was certainly doing his best, rather raised his voice at the end of his sermon, and at the same time threw his arms out quickly, Jaap Stricker bent over to the burgomaster, and whispered to him, ‘The fire is bursting out.’ That joke, sir, was the coup de grâce.”
“Il n’y a pire que le ridicule,” thought the probationer, “even among these farmers.” And suddenly—as the schoolmaster drew the little stove towards him in order to light his pipe—there rose up before him the image of Hein Burgers, the rejected, as he used to sit at students’ gatherings, with his honest, jovial face, crowned—alas! with locks of too brilliant a colour. He saw once more the gloomy Van Overveen pretending, with his melancholy smile, to light his cigar at Hein Burgers’ flaming head; he heard one and the other call out, on finding that his pipe had gone out, “Just pass Hein this way, will you?”...
“I was just saying,” the schoolmaster continued, carefully putting the cover on his pipe, after a vigorous pull or two,—“I was saying that was the finishing touch. For even if Mr Burgers’ hair had been black instead of red, the man’s chance was gone. In the first place, he forgot, when he entered the church, to salute the elders—ahem!—just nod to them, you know!”
“Aha!” said the candidate, making a mental note of the fact.
“And, besides that, there was something in his sermon the burgomaster did not like.”
Here the schoolmaster’s lips opened, and the pipe slid into the corner of his mouth. His eyes wandered over the ceiling, while he exhibited that vibration of the diaphragm which, according to Darwin, is the symptom of suppressed mirth.
“Pah!” ... he continued, after a pause, emitting a thick cloud of smoke, under shelter of which his face came back into its normal condition. “You must know that there occurred in his sermon an allusion to Galileo. This was what offended the burgomaster.”