HER FIRST PERIL
She came in contact during her school life with a variety of teachers.
Most of the women she did not like, but one sweet and thoughtful girl
had her unbounded love and confidence. She was from Madison, that was in
itself a great distinction, for the capital of the state had come to
mean something great and beautiful and heroic to Rose.
There it was the governor lived. There the soldiers went to enter the
army, she remembered hearing the neighbors say, and her father's weekly
paper was printed there. It was a great thing to have come from so far
away and from Madison, and Rose hung about the door of the school house
at the close of the first day, hoping the teacher would permit her to
walk home by her side.
The young teacher, worried almost to despair over the arrangement of her
classes, did not rise from her desk until the sun was low, rolling upon
the tree-fringed ridge of the western bluff.
She was deeply touched to find this dusky-complexioned, bare-legged girl
waiting for her.
"It was very nice of you, Rose," she said, and they walked off together.
She talked about the flowers in the grass, and Rose ran to and fro,
climbing fences to pick all sorts that she knew. She did not laugh when
the teacher told her the botanical names. She wished she could remember
them.
"When you grow up you can study botany too. But you must run home now,
it's almost dark."
"I ain't afraid of the dark," said Rose stoutly, and she went so far
Miss Lavalle was quite alarmed.
"Now you must go."
She kissed the child good-bye, and Rose ran off with her heart big with
emotion, like an accepted lover.
It was well Rose turned to her for help, for most of her teachers had
not the refinement of Miss Lavalle. They were generally farmers'
daughters or girls from neighboring towns, who taught for a little extra
money to buy dresses with--worthy girls indeed, but they expressed less
of refining thought to the children.
One day this young teacher, with Rose and two or three other little
ones, was sitting on a sunny southward sloping swell. Her hands were
full of flowers and her great dark eyes were opened wide as if to mirror
the whole scene, a valley flooded with light and warm with the radiant
grass of spring. She was small and dark and dainty, and still carried
the emotional characteristics of her French ancestry. She saw nature
definitely, and did not scruple to say so.
"O, it is beautiful!" she said, as her eyes swept along the high broken
line of the Western coule ridge, down to the vast blue cliff where the
river broke its way into the larger valley. "Children, see how beautiful
it is!" The children stared away at it, but Rose looked into the
teacher's eager face. Then her flowers dropped to the ground, the
sunlight fell upon her with a richer glow, the dandelions shone like
stars in a heaven of green, the birds and the wind sang a wild clear
song in the doors of her ears, and her heart swelled with unutterable
emotion. She was overpowered by the beauty of the world, as she had been
by its immensity that day on the hill top with her father.
She saw the purple mists, the smooth, green, warm slopes dotted with
dandelions, and the woodlands with their amber, and purple-gray, and
gray-green foliage. The big world had grown distinctly beautiful to her.
It was as though a gray veil had been withdrawn from the face of created
things--but this perception did not last. The veil fell again before her
eyes when the presence of the teacher was withdrawn. She felt the
beautiful and splendid phases of nature and absorbed and related them to
herself, but she did not consciously perceive except at rare moments.
The men, who taught in winter, were blunt and crude, but occasionally
one of a high type came. Some young fellows studying law, or taking a
course at some school, teaching to keep their place or to go higher.
These men studied nights and mornings out of great Latin books which
were the wonder of the children. Such teachers appealed to the better
class of pupils with great power, but excited rebellion in others.
It seemed a wonderful and important day to Rose, the first time she
entered the scarred and greasy room in winter, because it was swarming
with big girls and boys. She took her seat at one of the little benches
on the north side of the room, where all the girls sat. At some far time
the girls had been put on that, the coldest side of the house, and they
still sat there; change was impossible.
Rose was a little bit awed by the scene. The big boys never seemed so
rough, and the big girls never seemed so tall. They were all talking
loudly, hanging about the old square stove which sat in the middle of a
puddle of bricks.
She was an unimportant factor in the winter school, however, for the big
boys and girls ignored the little ones, or ordered them out of their
games.
In winter also her physical superiority to the other girls was less
apparent, for she wore thick shoes and shapeless dresses and muffled her
head and neck like the boys.
She plodded to school along the deep sleigh tracks, facing a bitter
wind, with the heart of a man. It made her cry sometimes but there was
more of rage than fear in her sobbing. She coughed and wheezed like the
rest, but through it all her perfect lungs and sinewy heart carried her
triumphantly.
The winter she was fourteen years of age she had for teacher a girl
whose beautiful presence brought a curse with it. She was small and
graceful, with a face full of sudden tears and laughter and dreams of
desire. She fascinated the children, and the larger boys woke to a
sudden savagery of rivalry over her, which no one understood. The older
boys fought over her smiles and low-voiced words of praise.
The girls grew vaguely jealous or were abject slaves to her whims. The
school became farcical in session, with ever-increasing play hours and
ever-shortening recitations, and yet such was the teacher's power over
the students they did not report her. She gathered the larger girls
around her as she flirted with the young men, until children like Carl
and Rose became a part of it all.
At night the young men of the neighborhood flocked about her
boarding-place, absolutely fighting in her very presence for the promise
which she withheld, out of coquettish perversity. She herself became a
victim of the storm of passion which swept over the neighborhood. She
went out to parties and dances every night and came languidly to school
each morning. Most of the men of the district laughed, but the women
began to talk excitedly about the stories they heard.
At school the most dangerous practices were winked at. The older boys
did not scruple to put their arms about the teacher's waist as they
stood by her side. All the reserve and purity which is organic in the
intercourse of most country girls and boys seemed lost, and parties and
sleigh-rides left remorse and guilt behind. There was something feverish
and unwholesome in the air.
The teacher's fame mysteriously extended to Tyre, and when known
libertines began to hitch their horses at the fence before her house and
to enter into rivalry with the young men of the neighborhood, then the
fathers of the coule suddenly awoke to their children's danger, and
turning the teacher away (tearful and looking harmless as a kitten),
they closed and locked the school-house door.
Instantly the young people grew aware of their out-break of premature
passion. Some of them, like Rose, went to their parents and told all
they knew about it. John Dutcher received his daughter's answers to his
questions with deep sorrow, but he reflected long before he spoke. She
was only a child, not yet fifteen; she would outgrow the touch of
thoughtless hands.
He sent for Carl, and as they stood before him, with drooping heads, he
talked to them in his low, mild voice, which had the power of bringing
tears to the sturdy boy's eyes.
"Carl, I thought I could trust you. You've done wrong--don't you know
it? You've made my old heart ache. When you get old and have a little
girl you may know how I feel, but you can't now. I don't know what I can
say to you. I don't know what I am going to do about it, but I want you
to know what you've done to me--both of you. Look into my face now--you
too, Rose--look into your old father's face!"
The scared children looked into his face with its streaming tears, then
broke out into sobbing that shook them to their heart's center. They
could not bear to see him cry.
"That's what you do to your parents when you do wrong. I haven't felt so
bad since your mother died, Rose."
The children sobbed out their contrition and desire to do better, and
John ended it all at last by saying, "Now, Carl, you may go, but I shall
keep watch of you and see that you grow up a good, true man. When I see
you're real sorry I'll let you come to see Rose again."
After Carl went out, Rose pressed into his ready arms. "I didn't mean to
be bad, pappa."
"I know you didn't, Rosie, but I want you to know how you can make me
suffer by doing wrong--but there, there! don't cry any more. If you are
good and kind and true like your mother was you'll outgrow this trouble.
Now run away and help get supper."
The buoyancy of a healthy child's nature enabled her to throw off the
oppression of that dark day, the most terrible day of her life, and she
was soon cheerful again, not the child she had been, but still a happy
child. After a few weeks John sent for Carl to come over, and they
popped corn and played dominos all the evening, and the innocency of
their former childish companionship seemed restored.