elements in it that gave character to "Flat Creek" as depicted in
"The Hoosier Schoolmaster." The people were all quiet, orderly, entirely
reputable folk, most of them devotedly pious. They were mainly of
"Pennsylvania Dutch" extraction, stolid on the surface but singularly
emotional within. But the school traditions of the region were those
of the old time, when the master was regarded as the common enemy, who
must be thwarted in every possible way, resisted at every point where
resistance was possible, and "thrashed" by the biggest boy in school
if the biggest boy could manage that.
There was really some justification for this attitude of the young
Americans in every such district. For under the old system, as I very
well remember it, the government of schools was brutal, cruel, inhuman
in a degree that might in many cases have excused if it did not justify
a homicidal impulse on the part of its victims. The boys of the early
time would never have grown into the stalwart Americans who fought the
Civil War if they had submitted to such injustice and so cruel a tyranny
without making the utmost resistance they could.
XVII
I began my work with a little friendly address to the forty or fifty
boys and girls who presented themselves as pupils. I explained to
them that my idea of a school was quite different from that which had
before that time prevailed in that region; that I was employed by the
authorities to teach them all I could, by way of fitting them for life,
and that I was anxious to do that in the case of every boy and girl
present. I expressed the hope that they in their turn were anxious to
learn all I could teach them, and that if any of them found their
studies too difficult, I would gladly give my time out of school hours
to the task of discovering the cause of the difficulty and remedying it.
I explained that in my view government in a school should have no object
beyond that of giving every pupil opportunity to learn all he could, and
the teacher opportunity to teach all he could. I frankly abolished the
arbitrary rule that had before made of whispering a grave moral offense,
and substituted for it a request that every pupil should be careful not
to disturb the work of others in any way, so that we might all make the
most of our time and opportunity.
It was a new gospel, and in the main it fell upon deaf ears. A few of
the pupils were impressed by its reasonableness and disposed to meet the
new teacher half way. The opinion of the majority was expressed by one
boy whom I overheard at recess when he said to one of his fellows:
[Sidenote: The Biggest Boy]
"He's skeered o' Charley Grebe, an' he's a-tryin' to soft-sawder us."
The first day or two of school were given to the rather perplexing work
of classifying pupils whose previous instruction had been completely at
haphazard. During that process I minutely observed the one foe against
whom I had received more than one warning--Charley Grebe. He was a
young man of nearly twenty-one, six feet, one or two inches high,
broad-shouldered, muscular, and with a jaw that suggested all the
relentless determination that one young man can hold.
When I questioned him with a view to his classification, he was polite
enough in his uninstructed way, but exceedingly reserved. On the whole
he impressed me as a young man of good natural ability, who had been
discouraged by bad and incapable instruction. After he had told me,
rather grudgingly I thought, what ground his studies had covered, he
suddenly changed places with me and became the questioner.
"Say," he broke out, interrupting some formal question of mine, "Say,
do you know anything in fact? Do you know Arithmetic an' Algebra an'
Geometry and can you really teach me? or are you just pretending, like
the rest?"
I thought I understood him and I guessed what his experience had been. I
assured him that there was nothing in Arithmetic that I could not teach
him, that I knew my Algebra, Geometry, and Trigonometry, and could
help him to learn them, if he really desired to do so. Then adopting
something of his own manner I asked:
"What is it you want me to do, Charley? Say what you have to say, like
a man, and don't go beating about the bush."
For reply, he said:
"I want to talk with you. It'll be a long talk. I want you to go home
with me to-night. Father said I might invite you. Will you come?"
There was eager earnestness in his questions, but there was also a note
of discouragement, if not quite of despair in his tone. I agreed at once
to go with him for the night, and, taking the hand he had not thought of
offering, I added:
"If there is any way in which I can help you, Charley, I'll do it
gladly."
Whether it was the unaccustomed courtesy, or the awakening of a new
hope, or something else, I know not, but the awkward, overgrown boy
seemed at once to assume the dignity of manhood, and while he had never
been taught to say "thank you" or to use any other conventionally polite
form of speech, he managed to make me understand by his manner that he
appreciated my offer, and a few minutes later, school having been
dismissed, he and I set out for his home.
There he explained his case to me. He wanted to become a shipwright--a
trade which, in that time of multitudinous steamboat building on the
Western rivers, was the most inviting occupation open to a young man
of energy. He had discovered that a man who wished to rise to anything
like a mastery in that trade must have a good working knowledge of
Arithmetic, elementary Algebra, Geometry, and at least the rudiments
of Trigonometry. He had wanted to learn these things and some of his
previous schoolmasters had undertaken to teach them, with no result
except presently to reveal to him their own ignorance. His father
permitted him six months more of schooling. He had "sized me up," he
said, and he believed I could teach him what he wanted to learn. But
could he learn it within six months? That was what he wanted me to
tell him. I put him through a close examination in Arithmetic that
night--consuming most of the night--and before morning I had satisfied
myself that he was an apt pupil who, with diligence and such earnest
determination as he manifested, could learn what he really needed of
mathematics within the time named.
[Sidenote: A Vigorous Volunteer Monitor]
"You can do it, Charley, if you work hard, and I'll help you, in school
hours and out," was my final verdict.
"It's a bargain," he said, and that was all he said. But a day or
two later a boy in school--a great, hulking fellow whose ugliness
of disposition I had early discerned--made a nerve-racking noise by
dragging his pencil over his slate in a way that disturbed the whole
school. I bade him cease, but he presently repeated the offense. Again
I rebuked him, but five minutes or so later he defiantly did the thing
again, "just to see if the master dared," he afterward explained.
Thereupon Charley Grebe arose, seized the fellow by the ear, twisted
that member until its owner howled with pain, and then, hurling him
back into his seat, said:
"_You heard the master! You'll mind him after this or I'll make you._"
The event fairly appalled the school. The thought that Charley Grebe was
on the master's side, and actively helping him to maintain discipline,
seemed beyond belief. But events soon confirmed it. There was a little
fellow in the school whom everybody loved, and whose quaint, childish
ways afterwards suggested the character of "Shocky" in "The Hoosier
Schoolmaster." There was also a cowardly brute there whose delight it
was to persecute the little fellow on the playground in intolerable
ways. I sought to stop the thing. To that end I devised and inflicted
every punishment I could think of, short of flogging, but all to no
purpose. At last I laid aside my convictions with my patience, and gave
the big bully such a flogging as must have impressed his mind if he had
had anything of the kind about his person.
That day, at the noon recess, the big bully set to work to beat
the little boy unmercifully in revenge for what I had done for his
protection. I was looking out through a Venetian blind, with intent to
go to the rescue, when suddenly Charley Grebe, who was playing town
ball threw down the bat, seized the fellow, threw him across his knees,
pinioned his legs with one of his own, and literally wore out a dozen or
more thick blue ash shingles over that part of his victim's body which
was made for spanking.
When at last he released the blubbering object of his wrath he slapped
his jaws soundly and said:
"Don't you go a-whining to the master about this. If you do it'll be
a good deal wuss for you. I'm a-takin' this here job off the master's
hands."
I gave no hint that I had seen or heard. But from that hour forth no
boy in the school ever gave me the smallest trouble by misbehavior. The
school perfectly understood that Charley Grebe was "a-takin' this here
job off the master's hands," and the knowledge was sufficient.
After that only the big girls--most of them older than I was--gave me
trouble. I met it with the explanation that I could never think of
punishing a young woman, and that I must trust to their honor and
courtesy, as girls who expected presently to be ladies, for their
behavior. The appeal was a trifle slow in eliciting a response, but
in the end it answered its purpose.
XVIII
[Sidenote: What's in a Name?]
While I was enrolling and classifying the pupils, I encountered a
peculiarly puzzling case. There were five John Riddels in the school,
and I found that all of them were sons of the same man, whose name also
was John Riddel. No one of them had a middle name or any other sort
of name by which he might be distinguished from his brothers. On the
playground they were severally known as "Big John Riddel," "John
Riddel," "Johnny Riddel," "Little John Riddel," and "Little Johnny
Riddel," while their father was everywhere known as "Old John Riddel,"
though he was a man under fifty, I should say. He lived near, in a
stone house, with stone barns and out-houses, an ingeniously devised
milk-house, and a still more ingeniously constructed device for bringing
water from the spring under the hill into his dwelling.
In brief his thrift was altogether admirable, and the mechanical devices
by which he made the most of every opportunity, suggested a fertilely
inventive mind on the part of a man whose general demeanor was stolid to
the verge of stupidity. When I was taking supper at his house one night
by special invitation, I asked him why he had named all his sons John.
For reply he said:
"John is a very good name," and that was all the explanation I ever got
out of him.
XIX
One pupil I had at Riker's Ridge, was Johnny G. His people had some
money and Johnny had always dressed better than the rest of us could
afford to do, when several years before, he and I had been classmates
in the second or third grade of the Grammar School in Madison. Johnny
had never got out of that grade, and even when I was in my second year
in college, he gave no promise of ever making a scholastic step forward.
But he had relatives on Riker's Ridge, and when he heard that I was to
be the teacher there he promised his people that he would really make
an effort if they would let him live with his relatives there and become
my pupil. It was so arranged, and Johnny came to me, with all his
dazzling waistcoats and trousers with the latest style of pockets, and
all the rest of the upholstery with which he delighted to decorate his
person.
I think he really did make an effort to master the rudimentary school
studies, and I conscientiously endeavored to help him, not only in
school but of evenings. For a time there seemed to be a reasonable
promise of success in lifting Johnny to that level of scholastic
attainment which would permit him to return to Madison and enter the
High School. But presently all this was brought to naught. Johnny was
seized by a literary ambition that completely absorbed what mind he had,
and made his school studies seem to him impertinent intrusions upon the
attention of one absorbed in higher things.
He told me all about it one afternoon as I walked homeward with him,
intent upon finding out why he had suddenly ceased to get his lessons.
"I'm going to write a song," he told me, "and it's going to make me
famous. I'm writing it now, and I tell you it's fine."
"Tell me about it, Johnny," I replied. "What is its theme? And how much
of it have you written?"
"I don't know what it's to be about," he answered, "if that's what you
mean by its theme. But it's going to be great, and I'm going to make the
tune to it myself."
"Very well," I replied encouragingly. "Would you mind reciting to me so
much of it as you've written? I'd like to hear it."
"Why, of course. I tell you it's going to be great, but I haven't got
much of it done yet--only one line, in fact."
[Sidenote: A Buttermilk Poet]
Observing a certain discouragement in his tone I responded:
"Oh, well, even one line is a good deal, if it's good. Many a poem's
fortune has been made by a single line. Tell me what it is."
"Well, the line runs: 'With a pitcher of buttermilk under her arm.'
Don't you see how it sort o' sings? 'With a pitcher of buttermilk under
her arm'--why, it's great, I tell you. Confound the school books! What's
the use of drudging when a fellow has got it in him to write poetry like
that? 'With a pit-cher of but-termilk un-der her arm'--don't it sing?
'With a _pit_-cher of but-termilk un-der her arm.' 'With a _pit_-cher
of _but_-termilk--un-der her arm.' Whoopee, but it's great!"
I lost sight of Johnny soon after that, and I have never heard what
became of that buttermilk pitcher, or the fascinating rhythm in which it
presented itself. But in later years I have come into contact with many
literary ambitions that were scarcely better based than this. Indeed, if
I were minded to be cynical--as I am not--I might mention a few magazine
poets whose pitchers of buttermilk seem to me--but all that is foreign
to the purpose of this book.
Before quitting this chapter and the period and region to which it
relates, I wish to record that Charley Grebe mastered the mathematics
he needed, and entered hopefully upon his apprenticeship to a ship
carpenter. I hope he rose to the top in the trade, but I know nothing
about it.
XX
Not many months after my school-teaching experience came to an end,
circumstances decreed that my life should be changed in the most radical
way possible in this country. I quitted the rapidly developing,
cosmopolitan, kaleidoscopic West, and became a dweller upon the old
family plantation in Virginia, where my race had been bred and nurtured
ever since 1635 when the first man of my name to cross the seas
established himself there and possessed himself of lavishly abundant
acres which subsequent divisions among his descendants had converted
into two adjoining plantations--the ancestral homes of all the
Egglestons, so far, at least, as I knew them or knew of them.
I suppose I was an imaginative youth at seventeen, and I had read
enough of poetry, romance, and still more romantic history, to develop
that side of my nature somewhat unduly. At any rate it was strongly
dominant, and the contrast between the seething, sordid, aggressive,
and ceaselessly eager life of the West, in which I had been bred and
the picturesquely placid, well-bred, self-possessed, and leisurely life
into which the transfer ushered me, impressed me as nothing else has
ever done. It was like escaping from the turmoil of battle to the
green pastures, and still waters of the Twenty-third Psalm. It was
like passing from the clamor of a stock exchange into the repose of
a library.
I have written much about that restful, refined, picturesque old
Virginia life in essays and romances, but I must write something more
of it in this place at risk of offending that one of my critics who not
long ago discovered that I had created it all out of my own imagination
for the entertainment of New England readers. He was not born,
I have reason to believe, until long after that old life had passed
into history, but his conviction that it never existed, that it was
_a priori_ impossible, was strong enough to bear down the testimony
of any eye-witness's recollection.
[Sidenote: Creative Incredulity]
It has often been a matter of chastening wonder and instruction to me to
observe how much more critics and historians can learn from the intuitions
of their "inner consciousness" than was ever known to the unfortunates
who have had only facts of personal observation and familiar knowledge
to guide them. It was only the other day that a distinguished historian
of the modern introspective, self-illuminating school upset the
traditions of many centuries by assuring us that the romantic story
of Antony and Cleopatra is a baseless myth; that there never was any
love affair between the Roman who has been supposed to have "madly
flung a world away" for worship of a woman, and the "Sorceress of the
Nile"--the "star-eyed Egyptian" who has been accused of tempting him
to his destruction; that Cleopatra merely hired of Antony the services
of certain legions that she needed for her defense, and paid him for
them in the current money of the time and country.
Thus does the incredulous but infallible intuition of the present
correct the recorded memory of the past. I have no doubt that some day
the country will learn from that sort of superior consciousness that in
the Virginia campaign of the Wilderness, Spottsylvania and Cold Harbor,
where men are now believed to have fought and marched so heroically with
empty bellies and often with unshod feet, there were in fact no such
discomforts incident to the discussion; that Grant and Lee like the
courteous commanders they were, suspended the argument of arms at the
dinner hour each day in order that their men might don evening clothes
and patent leather shoes and sit down to banquets of eleven courses,
with _pousse cafes_ and cigars at the end. Nevertheless, I shall write
of the old Virginia life as I remember it, and let the record stand at
that until such time as it shall be shown by skilled historical criticism
that the story of the Civil War is a sun myth and that the old life which
is pictured as having preceded it was the invention of the romance
writers.
XXI
The first thing that impressed me in that old life, when I was thrust
into it, was its repose, the absence of stress or strain or anxious
anticipation, the appreciation of to-morrow as the equal of to-day for
the doing of things and the getting of things done. My trunks had missed
connection somewhere on the journey, and I thought of telegraphing about
the matter. My uncle, the master of the plantation and head of the
family, discouraged that, and suggested that I should go fishing in a
neighboring creek instead. The telegraph office was six miles away. He
had never sent a telegram in his life. He had no doubt the trunks would
come along to-morrow or next day, and the fish in the creek were just
then biting in encouraging fashion.
That was my first lesson, and it impressed me strongly. Where I had
come from nobody would have thought of resting under the uncertainty or
calmly contemplating the unwarranted delay. Here nobody thought of doing
anything else, and as the trunks did in fact come the next day without
any telegraphing or hurry or worry, I learned that it was just as well
to go fishing as to go fussing.
[Sidenote: The Virginian Way]
The restful leisureliness of the life in Virginia was borne in upon me
on every hand, I suppose my nerves had really been upon a strain during
all the seventeen years that I had lived, and the relief I found in my
new surroundings doubtless had much to do with my appreciation of it
all. I had been used to see hurry in everything and everybody; here
there was no such thing as hurry. Nobody had a "business engagement"
that need interfere with anything else he was minded to do. "Business,"
indeed, was regarded as something to be attended to on the next court
day, when all men having affairs to arrange with each other were sure
to meet at the Court-House--as the county seat village was usually
called. Till then it could wait. Nobody was going to move away.
Everybody was "able to owe his debts." Why bother, then, to make a
journey for the settlement of a matter of business which could wait as
well as not for next court day to come round? It was so much pleasanter
to stay at home, to entertain one's friends, to ride over the
plantation, inspecting and directing crop work, to take a gun and go
after squirrels or birds or turkeys, to play backgammon or chess or
dominoes in the porch, to read the new books that everybody was talking
about, or the old ones that Virginians loved more--in brief, there was
no occasion for hurry, and the Virginians wasted none of their vital
force in that way.
The very houses suggested repose. They had sat still upon their
foundations for generations past, and would go on doing so for
generations to come. The lawns were the growth of long years, with
no touch of recent gardeners' work about them. The trees about the
house grounds had been in undisputed possession there long before the
grandfathers of the present generation were born. There was nowhere any
suggestion of newness, or rawness, of change actual or likely to come.
There were no new people--except the babies--and nobody ever dreamed of
changing his residence.
XXII
Another thing that peculiarly impressed me, coming as I did from a
region where the mart was the center about which all life's activities
circled, was the utter absence of talk about money or the things that
relate to money. Practically there was no money in use among the
planter folk, except when a journey to distant points required the
lining of a purse. Except in the very smallest way the planters never
used money in their daily lives. They rarely bought anything directly,
and they never thought of selling anything except in planter fashion
through accredited agencies. Once a year they shipped the tobacco and
the wheat their fields had produced, to the city, for a commission
merchant to sell. The commission merchant held a considerable part of
the proceeds to the planter's credit, and when the planter wanted
anything of consequence he simply wrote to the commission merchant to
buy it for him. The rest of the money from the sale of the plantation
products was deposited in bank to the planter's account. If the women
folk went to town on a shopping expedition, they bought whatever they
wanted in the stores and had it "charged," for every planter's credit
was limitless in the shops. When the bill was rendered, which was never
in a hurry, the planter drew a check in discharge of it. He had no
"blank check" book. No such thing was known in that community. He simply
wrote his check at top of a sheet of foolscap, stating in it what it was
for, and courteously asking the bank "please" to pay the amount. Then
he carefully cut off the remainder of the sheet and put it away as an
economy of paper. The next time he drew a check or anything of the sort,
he took a fresh sheet of paper for the purpose and carefully laid away
all that was not used of it. Thus was his instinct of economy gratified,
while his lordly sense of liberality in the use of material things was
not offended. When he died, the drawers filled with large and small
fragments of foolscap sheets were cleared out and left for his successor
to fill in his turn.
[Sidenote: Parson J----'s Checks]
This custom of paying by check so strongly commended itself to a certain
unworldly parson of my time, that he resorted to it on one occasion in
entire ignorance and innocence of the necessity of having a bank deposit
as a preliminary to the drawing of checks. He went to Richmond and
bought a year's supplies for his little place--it was too small to be
called a plantation--and for each purchase he drew a particularly polite
check. When the banks threw these out, on the ground that their author
had no account, the poor old parson found the situation a difficult one
to understand. He had thought that the very purpose of a bank's being
was to cash checks for persons who happened to be short of money.
"Why, if I'd had the money in the bank," he explained, "I shouldn't
have written the checks at all; I should have got the money and paid
the bills."
Fortunately the matter came to the knowledge of a well-to-do and
generous planter who knew parson J. and who happened to be in Richmond
at the time. His indorsement made the checks good, and saved the
unworldly old parson a deal of trouble.