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THE BROWN MOUSE
By
HERBERT QUICK
Author of
Aladdin & Company, The Broken Lance
On Board the Good Ship Earth, Etc.
INDIANAPOLIS
THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY
PUBLISHERS
Copyright 1915
The Bobbs-Merrill Company
Printed in the United States of America
PRESS OF
BRAUNWORTH & CO.
BOOK MANUFACTURERS
BROOKLYN, N. Y.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I A Maiden's "Humph" 1
II Reversed Unanimity 24
III What Is a Brown Mouse 38
IV The First Day of School 48
V The Promotion of Jennie 55
VI Jim Talks the Weather Cold 65
VII The New Wine 75
VIII And the Old Bottles 89
IX Jennie Arranges a Christmas Party 99
X How Jim Was Lined Up 111
XI The Mouse Escapes 122
XII Facing Trial 132
XIII Fame or Notoriety 147
XIV The Colonel Takes the Field 164
XV A Minor Casts Half a Vote 188
XVI The Glorious Fourth 203
XVII A Trouble Shooter 218
XVIII Jim Goes to Ames 235
XIX Jim's World Widens 242
XX Think of It 248
XXI A School District Held Up 258
XXII An Embassy From Dixie 277
XXIII And So They Lived---- 295
THE BROWN MOUSE
CHAPTER I
A MAIDEN'S "HUMPH"
A Farm-hand nodded in answer to a question asked him by Napoleon on the
morning of Waterloo. The nod was false, or the emperor misunderstood--and
Waterloo was lost. On the nod of a farm-hand rested the fate of Europe.
This story may not be so important as the battle of Waterloo--and it may
be. I think that Napoleon was sure to lose to Wellington sooner or later,
and therefore the words "fate of Europe" in the last paragraph should be
understood as modified by "for a while." But this story may change the
world permanently. We will not discuss that, if you please. What I am
endeavoring to make plain is that this history would never have been
written if a farmer's daughter had not said "Humph!" to her father's hired
man.
Of course she never said it as it is printed. People never say "Humph!" in
that way. She just closed her lips tight in the manner of people who have
a great deal to say and prefer not to say it, and--I dislike to record
this of a young lady who has been "off to school," but truthfulness
compels--she grunted through her little nose the ordinary "Humph!" of
conversational commerce, which was accepted at its face value by the
farm-hand as an evidence of displeasure, disapproval, and even of
contempt. Things then began to happen as they never would have done if the
maiden hadn't "Humphed!" and this is a history of those happenings.
As I have said, it may be more important than Waterloo. _Uncle Tom's
Cabin_ was, and I hope--I am just beginning, you know--to make this a much
greater book than _Uncle Tom's Cabin_. And it all rests on a "Humph!"
Holmes says,
"Soft is the breath of a maiden's 'Yes,'
Not the light gossamer stirs with less."
but what bard shall rightly sing the importance of a maiden's "Humph!"
when I shall have finished telling what came of what Jennie Woodruff said
to Jim Irwin, her father's hired man?
Jim brought from his day's work all the fragrances of next year's meadows.
He had been feeding the crops. All things have opposite poles, and the
scents of the farm are no exception to the rule. Just now, Jim Irwin
possessed in his clothes and person the olfactory pole opposite to the
new-mown hay, the fragrant butter and the scented breath of the lowing
kine--perspiration and top-dressing.
He was not quite so keenly conscious of this as was Jennie Woodruff. Had
he been so, the glimmer of her white pique dress on the bench under the
basswood would not have drawn him back from the gate. He had come to the
house to ask Colonel Woodruff about the farm work, and having received
instructions to take a team and join in the road work next day, he had
gone down the walk between the beds of four o'clocks and petunias to the
lane. Turning to latch the gate, he saw through the dusk the white dress
under the tree and drawn by the greatest attraction known in nature, had
re-entered the Woodruff grounds and strolled back.
A brief hello betrayed old acquaintance, and that social equality which
still persists in theory between the work people on the American farm and
the family of the employer. A desultory murmur of voices ensued. Jim Irwin
sat down on the bench--not too close, be it observed, to the pique
skirt.... There came into the voices a note of deeper earnestness,
betokening something quite aside from the rippling of the course of true
love running smoothly. In the man's voice was a tone of protest and
pleading....
"I know you are," said she; "but after all these years don't you think you
should be at least preparing to be something more than that?"
"What can I do?" he pleaded. "I'm tied hand and foot.... I might have
..."
"You might have," said she, "but, Jim, you haven't ... and I don't see any
prospects...." "I have been writing for the farm papers," said Jim; "but
..."
"But that doesn't get you anywhere, you know.... You're a great deal more
able and intelligent than Ed ---- and see what a fine position he has in
Chicago...."
"There's mother, you know," said Jim gently.
"You can't do anything here," said Jennie. "You've been a farm-hand for
fifteen years ... and you always will be unless you pull yourself loose.
Even a girl can make a place for herself if she doesn't marry and leaves
the farm. You're twenty-eight years old."
"It's all wrong!" said Jim gently. "The farm ought to be the place for the
best sort of career--I love the soil!"
"I've been teaching for only two years, and they say I'll be nominated for
county superintendent if I'll take it. Of course I won't--it seems
silly--but if it were you, now, it would be a first step to a life that
leads to something."
"Mother and I can live on my wages--and the garden and chickens and the
cow," said Jim. "After I received my teacher's certificate, I tried to
work out some way of doing the same thing on a country teacher's wages. I
couldn't. It doesn't seem right."
Jim rose and after pacing back and forth sat down again, a little closer
to Jennie. Jennie moved away to the extreme end of the bench, and the
shrinking away of Jim as if he had been repelled by some sort of negative
magnetism showed either sensitiveness or temper.
"It seems as if it ought to be possible," said Jim, "for a man to do work
on the farm, or in the rural schools, that would make him a livelihood. If
he is only a field-hand, it ought to be possible for him to save money and
buy a farm."
"Pa's land is worth two hundred dollars an acre," said Jennie. "Six months
of your wages for an acre--even if you lived on nothing."
"No," he assented, "it can't be done. And the other thing can't, either.
There ought to be such conditions that a teacher could make a living."
"They do," said Jennie, "if they can live at home during vacations. _I_
do."
"But a man teaching in the country ought to be able to marry."
"Marry!" said Jennie, rather unfeelingly, I think. "_You_ marry!" Then
after remaining silent for nearly a minute, she uttered the
syllable--without the utterance of which this narrative would not have
been written. "_You_ marry! Humph!"
Jim Irwin rose from the bench tingling with the insult he found in her
tone. They had been boy-and-girl sweethearts in the old days at the
Woodruff schoolhouse down the road, and before the fateful time when
Jennie went "off to school" and Jim began to support his mother. They had
even kissed--and on Jim's side, lonely as was his life, cut off as it
necessarily was from all companionship save that of his tiny home and his
fellow-workers of the field, the tender little love-story was the sole
romance of his life. Jennie's "Humph!" retired this romance from
circulation, he felt. It showed contempt for the idea of his marrying. It
relegated him to a sexless category with other defectives, and badged him
with the celibacy of a sort of twentieth-century monk, without the honor
of the priestly vocation. From another girl it would have been bad enough,
but from Jennie Woodruff--and especially on that quiet summer night under
the linden--it was insupportable.
"Good night," said Jim--simply because he could not trust himself to say
more.
"Good night," replied Jennie, and sat for a long time wondering just how
deeply she had unintentionally wounded the feelings of her father's
field-hand; deciding that if he was driven from her forever, it would
solve the problem of terminating that old childish love affair which still
persisted in occupying a suite of rooms all of its own in her memory; and
finally repenting of the unpremeditated thrust which might easily have
hurt too deeply so sensitive a man as Jim Irwin. But girls are not usually
so made as to feel any very bitter remorse for their male victims, and so
Jennie slept very well that night.
Great events, I find myself repeating, sometimes hinge on trivial things.
Considered deeply, all those matters which we are wont to call great
events are only the outward and visible results of occurrences in the
minds and souls of people. Sir Walter Raleigh thought of laying his cloak
under the feet of Queen Elizabeth as she passed over a mud-puddle, and all
the rest of his career followed, as the effect of Sir Walter's mental
attitude. Elias Howe thought of a machine for sewing, Eli Whitney of a
machine for ginning cotton, George Stephenson of a tubular boiler for his
locomotive engine, and Cyrus McCormick of a sickle-bar, and the world was
changed by those thoughts, rather than by the machines themselves. John D.
Rockefeller thought strongly that he would be rich, and this thought, and
not the Standard Oil Company, changed the commerce and finance of the
world. As a man thinketh so is he; and as men think so is the world. Jim
Irwin went home thinking of the "Humph!" of Jennie Woodruff--thinking with
hot waves and cold waves running over his body, and swellings in his
throat. Such thoughts centered upon his club foot made Lord Byron a great
sardonic poet. That club foot set him apart from the world of boys and
tortured him into a fury which lasted until he had lashed society with the
whips of his scorn.
Jim Irwin was not club-footed; far from it. He was bony and rugged and
homely, with a big mouth, and wide ears, and a form stooped with labor. He
had fine, lambent, gentle eyes which lighted up his face when he smiled,
as Lincoln's illuminated his. He was not ugly. In fact, if that quality
which fair ladies--if they are wise--prize far more than physical beauty,
the quality called charm, can with propriety be ascribed to a field-hand
who has just finished a day of the rather unfragrant labor to which I have
referred, Jim Irwin possessed charm. That is why little Jennie Woodruff
had asked him to help with her lessons, rather oftener than was necessary,
in those old days in the Woodruff schoolhouse when Jennie wore her hair
down her back.
But in spite of this homely charm of personality, Jim Irwin was set off
from his fellows of the Woodruff neighborhood in a manner quite as
segregative as was Byron by his deformity. He was different. In local
parlance, he was an off ox. He was as odd as Dick's hatband. He ran in a
gang by himself, like Deacon Avery's celebrated bull. He failed to
matriculate in the boy banditti which played cards in the haymows on rainy
days, told stereotyped stories that smelled to heaven, raided melon
patches and orchards, swore horribly like Sir Toby Belch, and played pool
in the village saloon. He had always liked to read, and had piles of
literature in his attic room which was good, because it was cheap. Very
few people know that cheap literature is very likely to be good, because
it is old and unprotected by copyright. He had Emerson, Thoreau, a John B.
Alden edition of Chambers' _Encyclopedia of English Literature_, some
Franklin Square editions of standard poets in paper covers, and a few
Ruskins and Carlyles--all read to rags. He talked the book English of
these authors, mispronouncing many of the hard words, because he had never
heard them pronounced by any one except himself, and had no standards of
comparison. You find this sort of thing in the utterances of self-educated
recluses. And he had piles of reports of the secretary of agriculture,
college bulletins from Ames, and publications of the various bureaus of
the Department of Agriculture at Washington. In fact, he had a good
library of publications which can be obtained gratis, or very cheaply--and
he knew their contents. He had a personal philosophy, which while it had
cost him the world in which his fellows lived, had given him one of his
own, in which he moved as lonely as a cloud, and as untouched of the life
about him.
He seemed superior to the neighbor boys, and felt so; but this feeling was
curiously mingled with a sense of degradation. By every test of common
life, he was a failure. His family history was a badge of failure. People
despised a man who was so incontestably smarter than they, and yet could
do no better with himself than to work in the fields alongside the tramps
and transients and hoboes who drifted back and forth as the casual market
for labor and the lure of the cities swept them. Save for his mother and
their cow and garden and flock of fowls and their wretched little rented
house, he was a tramp himself.
His father had been no better. He had come into the neighborhood from
nobody knows where, selling fruit trees, with a wife and baby in his old
buggy--and had died suddenly, leaving the baby and widow, and nothing else
save the horse and buggy. That horse and buggy were still on the Irwin
books represented by Spot the cow--so persistent are the assets of
cautious poverty. Mrs. Irwin had labored in kitchen and sewing room until
Jim had been able to assume the breadwinner's burden--which he did about
the time he finished the curriculum of the Woodruff District school. He
was an off ox and odd as Dick's hatband, largely because his duties to his
mother and his love of reading kept him from joining the gangs whereof I
have spoken. His duties, his mother, and his father's status as an outcast
were to him the equivalent of the Byronic club foot, because they took
away his citizenship in Boyville, and drove him in upon himself, and, at
first, upon his school books which he mastered so easily and quickly as to
become the star pupil of the Woodruff District school, and later upon
Emerson, Thoreau, Ruskin and the poets, and the agricultural reports and
bulletins.
All this degraded--or exalted--him to the position of an intellectual
farm-hand, with a sense of superiority and a feeling of degradation. It
made Jennie Woodruff's "Humph!" potent to keep him awake that night, and
send him to the road work with Colonel Woodruff's team next morning with
hot eyes and a hotter heart.
What was he anyhow? And what could he ever be? What was the use of his
studies in farming practise, if he was always to be an underling whose
sole duty was to carry out the crude ideas of his employers? And what
chance was there for a farm-hand to become a farm owner, or even a farm
renter, especially if he had a mother to support out of the twenty-five or
thirty dollars of his monthly wages? None.
A man might rise in the spirit, but how about rising in the world?
Colonel Woodruff's gray percherons seemed to feel the unrest of their
driver, for they fretted and actually executed a clumsy prance as Jim
Irwin pulled them up at the end of the turnpike across Bronson's Slew--the
said slew being a peat-marsh which annually offered the men of the
Woodruff District the opportunity to hold the male equivalent of a sewing
circle while working out their road taxes, with much conversational gain,
and no great damage to the road.
In fact, Columbus Brown, the pathmaster, prided himself on the Bronson
Slew Turnpike as his greatest triumph in road engineering. The work
consisted in hauling, dragging and carrying gravel out on the low fill
which carried the road across the marsh, and then watching it slowly
settle until the next summer.
"Haul gravel from the east gravel bed, Jim," called Columbus Brown from
the lowest spot in the middle of the turnpike. "Take Newt here to help
load."
Jim smiled his habitual slow, gentle smile at Newton Bronson, his helper.
Newton was seventeen, undersized, tobacco-stained, profane and proud of
the fact that he had once beaten his way from Des Moines to Faribault on
freight trains. A source of anxiety to his father, and the subject of many
predictions that he would come to no good end, Newton was out on the road
work because he was likely to be of little use on the farm. Clearly,
Newton was on the downward road in a double sense--and yet, Jim Irwin
rather liked him.
"The fellers have put up a job on you, Jim," volunteered Newton, as they
began filling the wagon with gravel.
"What sort of job?" asked Jim.
"They're nominating you for teacher," replied Newton.
"Since when has the position of teacher been an elective office?" asked
Jim.
"Sure, it ain't elective," answered Newton. "But they say that with as
many brains as you've got sloshing around loose in the neighborhood,
you're a candidate that can break the deadlock in the school board."
Jim shoveled on silently for a while, and by example urged Newton to earn
the money credited to his father's assessment for the day's work.
"Aw, what's the use of diggin' into it like this?" protested Newton, who
was developing an unwonted perspiration. "None of the others are heatin'
themselves up."
"Don't you get any fun out of doing a good day's work?" asked Jim.
"Fun!" exclaimed Newton. "You're crazy!"
A slide of earth from the top of the pit threatened to bury Newton in
gravel, sand and good top soil. A sweet-clover plant growing rankly beside
the pit, and thinking itself perfectly safe, came down with it, its dark
green foliage anchored by the long roots which penetrated to a depth below
the gravel pit's bottom. Jim Irwin pulled it loose from its anchorage, and
after looking attentively at the roots, laid the whole plant on the bank
for safety.
"What do you want of that weed?" asked Newton.
Jim picked it up and showed him the nodules on its roots--little white
knobs, smaller than pinheads.
"Know what they are, Newt?"
"Just white specks on the roots," replied Newton.
"The most wonderful specks in the world," said Jim. "Ever hear of the use
of nitrates to enrich the soil?"
"Ain't that the stuff the old man used on the lawn last spring?"
"Yes," said Jim, "your father used some on his lawn. We don't put it on
our fields in Iowa--not yet; but if it weren't for those white specks on
the clover-roots, we should be obliged to do so--as they do back east."
"How do them white specks keep us from needin' nitrates?"
"It's a long story," said Jim. "You see, before there were any plants big
enough to be visible--if there had been any one to see them--the world was
full of little plants so small that there may be billions of them in one
of these little white specks. They knew how to take the nitrates from the
air----"
"Air!" ejaculated Newton. "Nitrates in the air! You're crazy!"
"No," said Jim. "There are tons of nitrogen in the air that press down on
your head--but the big plants can't get it through their leaves, or
their roots. They never had to learn, because when the little
plants--bacteria--found that the big plants had roots with sap in them,
they located on those roots and tapped them for the sap they needed.
They began to get their board and lodgings off the big plants. And in
payment for their hotel bills, the little plants took nitrogen out of
the air for both themselves and their hosts."
"What d'ye mean by 'hosts'?"
"Their hotel-keepers--the big plants. And now the plants that have the
hotel roots for the bacteria furnish nitrogen not only for themselves but
for the crops that follow. Corn can't get nitrogen out of the air; but
clover can--and that's why we ought to plow down clover before a crop of
corn."
"Gee!" said Newt. "If you could get to teach our school, I'd go again."
"It would interfere with your pool playing."
"What business is that o' yours?" interrogated Newt defiantly.
"Well, get busy with that shovel," suggested Jim, who had been working
steadily, driving out upon the fill occasionally to unload. On his return
from dumping the next load, Newton seemed, in a superior way, quite
amiably disposed toward his workfellow--rather the habitual thing in the
neighborhood.
"I'll work my old man to vote for you for the job," said he.
"What job?" asked Jim.
"Teacher for our school," answered Newt.
"Those school directors," replied Jim, "have become so bullheaded that
they'll never vote for any one except the applicants they've been voting
for."
"The old man says he will have Prue Foster again, or he'll give the school
a darned long vacation, unless Peterson and Bonner join on some one else.
That would beat Prue, of course."
"And Con Bonner won't vote for any one but Maggie Gilmartin," added Jim.
"And," supplied Newton, "Haakon Peterson says he'll stick to Herman
Paulson until the Hot Springs freeze over."
"And there you are," said Jim. "You tell your father for me that I think
he's a mere mule--and that the whole district thinks the same."
"All right," said Newt. "I'll tell him that while I'm working him to vote
for you."
Jim smiled grimly. Such a position might have been his years ago, if he
could have left his mother or earned enough in it to keep both alive. He
had remained a peasant because the American rural teacher is placed
economically lower than the peasant. He gave Newton's chatter no
consideration. But when, in the afternoon, he hitched his team with others
to the big road grader, and the gang became concentrated within talking
distance, he found that the project of heckling and chaffing him about his
eminent fitness for a scholastic position was to be the real entertainment
of the occasion.
"Jim's the candidate to bust the deadlock," said Columbus Brown, with a
wink. "Just like Garfield in that Republican convention he was nominated
in--eh, Con?"
"Con" was Cornelius Bonner, an Irishman, one of the deadlocked school
board, and the captain of the road grader. He winked back at the
pathmaster.
"Jim's the gray-eyed man o' destiny," he replied, "if he can get two votes
in that board."
"You'd vote for me, wouldn't you, Con?" asked Jim.
"I'll try annything wance," replied Bonner.
"Try voting with Ezra Bronson once, for Prue Foster," suggested Jim.
"She's done good work here."
"Opinions differ," said Bonner, "an' when you try annything just for
wance, it shouldn't be an irrevocable shtip, me bye."
"You're a reasonable board of public servants," said Jim ironically. "I'd
like to tell the whole board what I think of them."
"Come down to-night," said Bonner jeeringly. "We're going to have a board
meeting at the schoolhouse and ballot a few more times. Come down, and be
the Garfield of the convintion. We've lacked brains on the board, that's
clear. They ain't a man on the board that iver studied algebra, 'r that
knows more about farmin' than their impl'yers. Come down to the
schoolhouse, and we'll have a field-hand addriss the school board--and
begosh, I'll move yer illiction mesilf! Come, now, Jimmy, me bye, be game.
It'll vary the program, anny-how."
The entire gang grinned. Jim flushed, and then reconquered his calmness of
spirit.
"All right, Con," said he. "I'll come and tell you a few things--and you
can do as you like about making the motion."