THE MOUSE ESCAPES
Jennie played the piano and sang. They all joined in some simple Christmas
songs. Mrs. Woodruff and Jim's mother went into other parts of the house
on research work connected with their converse on domestic economy. The
colonel withdrew for an inspection of the live stock on the eve of the
threatened blizzard. And Jim was left alone with Jennie in the front
parlor. After the buzz of conversation, they seemed to have nothing to
say. Jennie played softly, and looked at nothing, but scrutinized Jim by
means of the eyes which women have concealed in their back hair. There was
something new in the man--she sensed that. He was more confident, more
persuasive, more dynamic. She was used to him only as a static force.
And Jim felt something new, too. He had felt it growing in him ever since
he began his school work, and knew not the cause of it. The cause,
however, would not have been a mystery to a wise old yogi who might
discover the same sort of change in one of his young novices. Jim Irwin
had been a sort of ascetic since his boyhood. He had mortified the flesh
by hard labor in the fields, and by flagellations of the brain to drive
off sleep while he pored over his books in the attic--which was often so
hot after a day of summer's sun on its low thin roof, that he was forced
to do his reading in the midmost night. He had looked long on such women
as Helen of Troy, Cleopatra, Isabel, Cressida, Volumnia, Virginia,
Evangeline, Agnes Wickfleld and Fair Rosamond; but on women in the flesh
he had gazed as upon trees walking. The aforesaid spiritual director, had
this young ascetic been under one, would have foreseen the effects on the
psychology of a stout fellow of twenty-eight of freedom from the toil of
the fields, and association with a group of young human beings of both
sexes. To the novice struggling for emancipation from earthly thoughts, he
would have recommended fasting and prayer, and perhaps, a hair shirt. Just
what his prescription would have been for a man in Jim's position is, of
course, a question. He would, no doubt, have considered carefully his
patient's symptoms. These were very largely the mental experiences which
most boys pass through in their early twenties, save, perhaps that, as in
a belated season, the transition from winter to spring was more sudden,
and the contrast more violent. Jim was now thrown every day into contact
with his fellows. He was no longer a lay monk, but an active member of a
very human group. He was becoming more of a boy, with the boys, and still
more was he developing into a man with the women. The budding womanhood of
Calista Simms and the other girls of his school thrilled him as Helen of
Troy or Juliet had never done. This will not seem very strange to the
experienced reader, but it astonished the unsophisticated young
schoolmaster. The floating hair, the heaving bosom, the rosebud mouth, the
starry eye, the fragrant breath, the magnetic hand--all these disturbed
the hitherto sedate mind, and filled the brief hours he was accustomed to
spend in sleep with strange dreams. And now, as he gazed at Jennie, he was
suddenly aware of the fact that, after all, whenever these thoughts and
dreams took on individuality, they were only persistent and intensified
continuations of his old dreams of her. They had always been dormant in
him, since the days they both studied from the same book. He was quite
sure, now, that he had never forgotten for a moment, that Jennie was the
only girl in the world for him. And possibly he was right about this. It
is perfectly certain, however, that for years he had not consciously been
in love with her.
Now, however, he arose as from some inner compulsion, and went to her
side. He wished that he knew enough of music to turn her sheets for her,
but, alas! the notes were meaningless to him. Still scanning him by means
of her back hair, Jennie knew that in another moment Jim would lay his
hand on her shoulder, or otherwise advance to personal nearness, as he had
done the night of his ill-starred speech at the schoolhouse--and she rose
in self-defense. Self-defense, however, did not seem to require that he be
kept at too great a distance; so she maneuvered him to the sofa, and
seated him beside her. Now was the time to line him up.
"It seems good to have you with us to-day," said she. "We're such old, old
friends."
"Yes," repeated Jim, "old friends .... We are, aren't we, Jennie?"
"And I feel sure," Jennie went on, "that this marks a new era in our
friendship."
"Why?" asked Jim, after considering the matter.
"Oh! everything is different, now--and getting more different all the
time. My new work, and your new work, you know."
"I should like to think," said Jim, "that we are beginning over again."
"Oh, we are, we are, indeed! I am quite sure of it."
"And yet," said Jim, "there is no such thing as a new beginning.
Everything joins itself to something which went before. There isn't any
seam."
"No?" said Jennie interrogatively.
"Our regard for each other," Jennie noted most pointedly his word
"regard"--"must be the continuation of the old regard."
"I hardly know what you mean," said Jennie.
Jim reached over and possessed himself of her hand. She pulled it from him
gently, but he paid no attention to the little muscular protest, and
examined the hand critically. On the back of the middle finger he pointed
out a scar--a very tiny scar.
"Do you remember how you got that?" he asked.
Because Jim clung to the hand, their heads were very close together as she
joined in the examination.
"Why, I don't believe I do," said she.
"I do," he replied. "We--you and I and Mary Forsythe were playing
mumble-peg, and you put your hand on the grass just as I threw the
knife--it cut you, and left that scar."
"I remember, now!" said she. "How such things come back over the memory.
And did it leave a scar when I pushed you toward the red-hot stove in the
schoolhouse one blizzardy day, like this, and you peeled the skin off your
wrist where it struck the stove?"
"Look at it," said he, baring his long and bony wrist. "Right there!"
And they were off on the trail that leads back to childhood. They had
talked long, and intimately, when the shadows of the early evening crept
into the corners of the room. He had carried her across the flooded slew
again after the big rain. They had relived a dozen moving incidents by
flood and field. Jennie recalled the time when the tornado narrowly missed
the schoolhouse, and frightened everybody in school nearly to death.
"Everybody but you, Jim," Jennie remembered. "You looked out of the window
and told the teacher that the twister was going north of us, and would
kill somebody else."
"Did I?" asked Jim.
"Yes," said Jennie, "and when the teacher asked us to kneel and thank God,
you said, 'Why should we thank God that somebody else is blowed away?' She
was greatly shocked."
"I don't see to this day," Jim asserted, "what answer there was to my
question."
In the gathering darkness Jim again took Jennie's hand, but this time she
deprived him of it.
He was trembling like a leaf. Let it be remembered in his favor that this
was the only girl's hand he had ever held.
"You can't find any more scars on it," she said soberly.
"Let me see how much it has changed since I stuck the knife in it," begged
Jim.
Jennie held it up for inspection.
"It's longer, and slenderer, and whiter, and even more beautiful," said
he, "than the little hand I cut; but it was then the most beautiful hand
in the world to me--and still is."
"I must light the lamps," said the county superintendent-elect, rather
flustered, it must be confessed. "Mama! Where are all the matches?"
Mrs. Woodruff and Mrs. Irwin came in, and the lamplight reminded Jim's
mother that the cow was still to milk, and that the chickens might need
attention. The Woodruff sleigh came to the door to carry them home; but
Jim desired to breast the storm. He felt that he needed the conflict. Mrs.
Irwin scolded him for his foolishness, but he strode off into the whirling
drift, throwing back a good-by for general consumption, and a pathetic
smile to Jennie.
"He's as odd as Dick's hatband," said Mrs. Woodruff, "tramping off in a
storm like this."
"Did you line him up?" asked the colonel of Jennie.
The young lady started and blushed. She had forgotten all about the
politics of the situation.
"I--I'm afraid I didn't, papa," she confessed.
"Those brown mice of Professor Darbishire's," said the colonel, "were the
devil and all to control."
Jennie was thinking of this as she dropped asleep.
"Hard to control!" she thought. "I wonder. I wonder, after all, if Jim is
not capable of being easily lined up--when he sees how foolish I think he
is!"
And Jim? He found himself hard to control that night. So much so that it
was after midnight before he had finished work on a plan for a cooperative
creamery.
"The boys can be given work in helping to operate it," he wrote on a
tablet, "which, in connection with the labor performed by the teacher,
will greatly reduce the expense of operation. A skilled butter-maker, with
slender white hands"--but he erased this last clause and retired.