Monday morning found Margaret at the school-house nerved for her new
task.
One by one the scholars trooped in, shyly or half defiantly, hung their
hats on the hooks, put their dinner-pails on the shelf, looked furtively
at her, and sank into their accustomed seats; that is, the seats they
had occupied during the last term of school. The big boys remained
outside until Bud, acting under instructions from Margaret--after she
had been carefully taught the ways of the school by Bud himself--rang
the big bell. Even then they entered reluctantly and as if it were a
great condescension that they came at all, Jed and "Delicate" coming in
last, with scarcely a casual glance toward the teacher's desk, as if she
were a mere fraction in the scheme of the school. She did not need to be
told which was Timothy and which was Jed. Bud's description had been
perfect. Her heart, by the way, instantly went out to Timothy. Jed was
another proposition. He had thick, overhanging eyebrows, and a mouth
that loved to make trouble and laugh over it. He was going to be hard to
conquer. She wasn't sure the conquering would be interesting, either.
Margaret stood by the desk, watching them all with a pleasant smile. She
did not frown at the unnecessary shuffling of feet nor the loud remarks
of the boys as they settled into their seats. She just stood and watched
them interestedly, as though her time had not yet come.
Jed and Timothy were carrying on a rumbling conversation. Even after
they took their seats they kept it up. It was no part of their plan to
let the teacher suppose they saw her or minded her in the least. They
were the dominating influences in that school, and they wanted her to
know it, right at the start; then a lot of trouble would be saved. If
they didn't like her and couldn't manage her they didn't intend she
should stay, and she might as well understand that at once.
Margaret understood it fully. Yet she stood quietly and watched them
with a look of deep interest on her face and a light almost of mischief
in her eyes, while Bud grew redder and redder over the way his two idols
were treating the new teacher. One by one the school became aware of the
twinkle in the teacher's eyes, and grew silent to watch, and one by one
they began to smile over the coming scene when Jed and Timothy should
discover it, and, worst of all, find out that it was actually directed
against them. They would expect severity, or fear, or a desire to
placate; but a twinkle--it was more than the school could decide what
would happen under such circumstances. No one in that room would ever
dare to laugh at either of those two boys. But the teacher was almost
laughing now, and the twinkle had taken the rest of the room into the
secret, while she waited amusedly until the two should finish the
conversation.
The room grew suddenly deathly still, except for the whispered growls of
Jed and Timothy, and still the silence deepened, until the two young
giants themselves perceived that it was time to look up and take account
of stock.
The perspiration by this time was rolling down the back of Bud's neck.
He was about the only one in the room who was not on a broad grin, and
he was wretched. What a fearful mistake the new teacher was making right
at the start! She was antagonizing the two boys who held the whole
school in their hands. There was no telling what they wouldn't do to her
now. And he would have to stand up for her. Yes, no matter what they
did, he would stand up for her! Even though he lost his best friends, he
must be loyal to her; but the strain was terrible! He did not dare to
look at them, but fastened his eyes upon Margaret, as if keeping them
glued there was his only hope. Then suddenly he saw her face break into
one of the sweetest, merriest smiles he ever witnessed, with not one
single hint of reproach or offended dignity in it, just a smile of
comradeship, understanding, and pleasure in the meeting; and it was
directed to the two seats where Jed and Timothy sat.
With wonder he turned toward the two big boys, and saw, to his
amazement, an answering smile upon their faces; reluctant, 'tis true,
half sheepish at first, but a smile with lifted eyebrows of astonishment
and real enjoyment of the joke.
A little ripple of approval went round in half-breathed syllables, but
Margaret gave no time for any restlessness to start. She spoke at once,
in her pleasantest partnership tone, such as she had used to Bud when
she asked him to help her build her bookcase. So she spoke now to that
school, and each one felt she was speaking just to him especially, and
felt a leaping response in his soul. Here, at least, was something new
and interesting, a new kind of teacher. They kept silence to listen.
"Oh, I'm not going to make a speech now," she said, and her voice
sounded glad to them all. "I'll wait till we know one another before I
do that. I just want to say how do you do to you, and tell you how glad
I am to be here. I hope we shall like one another immensely and have a
great many good times together. But we've got to get acquainted first,
of course, and perhaps we'd better give most of the time to that to-day.
First, suppose we sing something. What shall it be? What do you sing?"
Little Susan Johnson, by virtue of having seen the teacher at
Sunday-school, made bold to raise her hand and suggest, "Thar-thpangle
Banner, pleath!" And so they tried it; but when Margaret found that only
a few seemed to know the words, she said, "Wait!" Lifting her arm with a
pretty, imperative gesture, and taking a piece of chalk from the box on
her desk, she went to the new blackboard that stretched its shining
black length around the room.
The school was breathlessly watching the graceful movement of the
beautiful hand and arm over the smooth surface, leaving behind it the
clear, perfect script. Such wonderful writing they had never seen; such
perfect, easy curves and twirls. Every eye in the room was fastened on
her, every breath was held as they watched and spelled out the words one
by one. "Gee!" said Bud, softly, under his breath, nor knew that he had
spoken, but no one else moved.
"Now," she said, "let us sing," and when they started off again
Margaret's strong, clear soprano leading, every voice in the room
growled out the words and tried to get in step with the tune.
They had gone thus through two verses when Jed seemed to think it was
about time to start something. Things were going altogether too smoothly
for an untried teacher, if she _was_ handsome and unabashed. If they
went on like this the scholars would lose all respect for him. So, being
quite able to sing a clear tenor, he nevertheless puckered his lips
impertinently, drew his brows in an ominous frown, and began to whistle
a somewhat erratic accompaniment to the song. He watched the teacher
closely, expecting to see the color flame in her cheeks, the anger flash
in her eyes; he had tried this trick on other teachers and it always
worked. He gave the wink to Timothy, and he too left off his glorious
bass and began to whistle.
But instead of the anger and annoyance they expected, Margaret turned
appreciative eyes toward the two back seats, nodding her head a trifle
and smiling with her eyes as she sang; and when the verse was done she
held up her hand for silence and said:
"Why, boys, that's beautiful! Let's try that verse once more, and you
two whistle the accompaniment a little stronger in the chorus; or how
would it do if you just came in on the chorus? I believe that would be
more effective. Let's try the first verse that way; you boys sing during
the verse and then whistle the chorus just as you did now. We really
need your voices in the verse part, they are so strong and splendid.
Let's try it now." And she started off again, the two big astonished
fellows meekly doing as they were told, and really the effect was
beautiful. What was their surprise when the whole song was finished to
have her say, "Now everybody whistle the chorus softly," and then pucker
up her own soft lips to join in. That completely finished the whistling
stunt. Jed realized that it would never work again, not while she was
here, for she had turned the joke into beauty and made them all enjoy
it. It hadn't annoyed her in the least.
Somehow by that time they were all ready for anything she had to
suggest, and they watched again breathlessly as she wrote another song
on the blackboard, taking the other side of the room for it, and this
time a hymn--"I Need Thee Every Hour."
When they began to sing it, however, Margaret found the tune went
slowly, uncertainly.
"Oh, how we need a piano!" she exclaimed. "I wonder if we can't get up
an entertainment and raise money to buy one. How many will help?"
Every hand in the place went up, Jed's and Timothy's last and only a
little way, but she noted with triumph that they went up.
"All right; we'll do it! Now let's sing that verse correctly." And she
began to sing again, while they all joined anxiously in, really trying
to do their best.
The instant the last verse died away, Margaret's voice took their
attention.
"Two years ago in Boston two young men, who belonged to a little group
of Christian workers who were going around from place to place holding
meetings, sat talking together in their room in the hotel one evening."
There was instant quiet, a kind of a breathless quiet. This was not like
the beginning of any lesson any other teacher had ever given them. Every
eye was fixed on her.
"They had been talking over the work of the day, and finally one of them
suggested that they choose a Bible verse for the whole year--"
There was a movement of impatience from one back seat, as if Jed had
scented an incipient sermon, but the teacher's voice went steadily on:
"They talked it over, and at last they settled on II Timothy ii:15. They
made up their minds to use it on every possible occasion. It was time to
go to bed, so the man whose room adjoined got up and, instead of saying
good night, he said, 'Well, II Timothy ii:15,' and went to his room.
Pretty soon, when he put out his light, he knocked on the wall and
shouted 'II Timothy ii:15,' and the other man responded, heartily, 'All
right, II Timothy ii:15.' The next morning when they wrote their letters
each of them wrote 'II Timothy ii:15' on the lower left-hand corner of
the envelope, and sent out a great handful of letters to all parts of
the world. Those letters passed through the Boston post-office, and some
of the clerks who sorted them saw that queer legend written down in the
lower left-hand corner of the envelope, and they wondered at it, and one
or two wrote it down, to look it up afterward. The letters reached
other cities and were put into the hands of mail-carriers to distribute,
and they saw the queer little sentence, 'II Timothy ii:15,' and they
wondered, and some of them looked it up."
By this time the entire attention of the school was upon the story, for
they perceived that it was a story.
"The men left Boston and went across the ocean to hold meetings in other
cities, and one day at a little railway station in Europe a group of
people were gathered, waiting for a train, and those two men were among
them. Pretty soon the train came, and one of the men got on the back end
of the last car, while the other stayed on the platform, and as the
train moved off the man on the last car took off his hat and said, in a
good, loud, clear tone, 'Well, take care of yourself, II Timothy ii:15,'
and the other one smiled and waved his hat and answered, 'Yes, II
Timothy ii:15.' The man on the train, which was moving fast now, shouted
back, 'II Timothy ii:15,' and the man on the platform responded still
louder, waving his hat, 'II Timothy ii:15,' and back and forth the queer
sentence was flung until the train was too far away for them to hear
each other's voices. In the mean time all the people on the platform had
been standing there listening and wondering what in the world such a
strange salutation could mean. Some of them recognized what it was, but
many did not know, and yet the sentence was said over so many times that
they could not help remembering it; and some went away to recall it and
ask their friends what it meant. A young man from America was on that
platform and heard it, and he knew it stood for a passage in the Bible,
and his curiosity was so great that he went back to his boarding-house
and hunted up the Bible his mother had packed in his trunk when he came
away from home, and he hunted through the Bible until he found the
place, 'II Timothy ii:15,' and read it; and it made him think about his
life and decide that he wasn't doing as he ought to do. I can't tell you
all the story about that queer Bible verse, how it went here and there
and what a great work it did in people's hearts; but one day those
Christian workers went to Australia to hold some meetings, and one
night, when the great auditorium was crowded, a man who was leading the
meeting got up and told the story of this verse, how it had been chosen,
and how it had gone over the world in strange ways, even told about the
morning at the little railway station when the two men said good-by.
Just as he got to that place in his story a man in the audience stood up
and said: 'Brother, just let me say a word, please. I never knew
anything about all this before, but I was at that railway station, and I
heard those two men shout that strange good-by, and I went home and read
that verse, and it's made a great difference in my life.'
"There was a great deal more to the story, how some Chicago policemen
got to be good men through reading that verse, and how the story of the
Australia meetings was printed in an Australian paper and sent to a lady
in America who sent it to a friend in England to read about the
meetings. And this friend in England had a son in the army in India, to
whom she was sending a package, and she wrapped it around something in
that package, and the young man read all about it, and it helped to
change his life. Well, I thought of that story this morning when I was
trying to decide what to read for our opening chapter, and it occurred
to me that perhaps you would be interested to take that verse for our
school verse this term, and so if you would like it I will put it on the
blackboard. Would you like it, I wonder?"
She paused wistfully, as if she expected an answer, and there was a low,
almost inaudible growl of assent; a keen listener might almost have said
it had an impatient quality in it, as if they were in a hurry to find
out what the verse was that had made such a stir in the world.
"Very well," said Margaret, turning to the board; "then I'll put it
where we all can see it, and while I write it will you please say over
where it is, so that you will remember it and hunt it up for yourselves
in your Bibles at home?"
There was a sort of snicker at that, for there were probably not half a
dozen Bibles, if there were so many, represented in that school; but
they took her hint as she wrote, and chanted, "II Timothy ii:15, II
Timothy ii:15," and then spelled out after her rapid crayon, "Study to
show thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be
ashamed."
They read it together at her bidding, with a wondering, half-serious
look in their faces, and then she said, "Now, shall we pray?"
The former teacher had not opened her school with prayer. It had never
been even suggested in that school. It might have been a dangerous
experiment if Margaret had attempted it sooner in her program. As it
was, there was a shuffling of feet in the back seats at her first word;
but the room, grew quiet again, perhaps out of curiosity to hear a
woman's voice in prayer:
"Our Heavenly Father, we want to ask Thee to bless us in our work
together, and to help us to be such workmen that we shall not need to be
ashamed to show our work to Thee at the close of the day. For Christ's
sake we ask it. Amen."
They did not have time to resent that prayer before she had them
interested in something else. In fact, she had planned her whole first
day out so that there should not be a minute for misbehavior. She had
argued that if she could just get time to become acquainted with them
she might prevent a lot of trouble before it ever started. Her first
business was to win her scholars. After that she could teach them easily
if they were once willing to learn.
She had a set of mental arithmetic problems ready which she propounded
to them next, some of them difficult and some easy enough for the
youngest child who could think, and she timed their answers and wrote on
the board the names of those who raised their hands first and had the
correct answers. The questions were put in a fascinating way, many of
them having curious little catches in them for the scholars who were not
on the alert, and Timothy presently discovered this and set himself to
get every one, coming off victorious at the end. Even Jed roused
himself and was interested, and some of the girls quite distinguished
themselves.
When a half-hour of this was over she put the word "TRANSFIGURATION" on
the blackboard, and set them to playing a regular game out of it. If
some of the school-board had come in just then they might have lifted up
hands of horror at the idea of the new teacher setting the whole school
to playing a game. But they certainly would have been delightfully
surprised to see a quiet and orderly room with bent heads and knit
brows, all intent upon papers and pencils. Never before in the annals of
that school had the first day held a full period of quiet or
orderliness. It was expected to be a day of battle; a day of trying out
the soul of the teacher and proving whether he or she were worthy to
cope with the active minds and bodies of the young bullies of Ashland.
But the expected battle had been forgotten. Every mind was busy with the
matter in hand.
Margaret had given them three minutes to write as many words as they
could think of, of three letters or more, beginning with T, and using
only the letters in the word she had put on the board. When time was
called there was a breathless rush to write a last word, and then each
scholar had to tell how many words he had, and each was called upon to
read his list. Some had only two or three, some had ten or eleven. They
were allowed to mark their words, counting one for each person present
who did not have that word and doubling if it were two syllables, and so
on. Excitement ran high when it was discovered that some had actually
made a count of thirty or forty, and when they started writing words
beginning with R every head was bent intently from the minute time was
started.
Never had three minutes seemed so short to those unused brains, and Jed
yelled out: "Aw, gee! I only got three!" when time was called next.
It was recess-time when they finally finished every letter in that word,
and, adding all up, found that Timothy had won the game. Was that
school? Why, a barbecue couldn't be named beside it for fun! They rushed
out to the school-yard with a shout, and the boys played leap-frog
loudly for the first few minutes. Margaret, leaning her tired head in
her hands, elbows on the window-seat, closing her eyes and gathering
strength for the after-recess session, heard one boy say: "Wal, how d'ye
like 'er?" And the answer came: "Gee! I didn't think she'd be that kind
of a guy! I thought she'd be some stiff old Ike! Ain't she a peach,
though?" She lifted up her head and laughed triumphantly to herself, her
eyes alight, herself now strengthened for the fray. She wasn't wholly
failing, then?
After recess there was a spelling-match, choosing sides, of course,
"Because this is only the first day, and we must get acquainted before
we can do real work, you know," she explained.
The spelling-match proved an exciting affair also, with new features
that Ashland had never seen before. Here the girls began to shine into
prominence, but there were very few good spellers, and they were
presently reduced to two girls--Rosa Rogers, the beauty of the school,
and Amanda Bounds, a stolid, homely girl with deep eyes and a broad
brow.
"I'm going to give this as a prize to the one who stands up the
longest," said Margaret, with sudden inspiration as she saw the boys in
their seats getting restless; and she unpinned a tiny blue-silk bow that
fastened her white collar.
The girls all said "Oh-h-h!" and immediately every one in the room
straightened up. The next few minutes those two girls spelled for dear
life, each with her eye fixed upon the tiny blue bow in the teacher's
white hands. To own that bow, that wonderful, strange bow of the
heavenly blue, with the graceful twist to the tie! What delight! The
girl who won that would be the admired of all the school. Even the boys
sat up and took notice, each secretly thinking that Rosa, the beauty,
would get it, of course.
But she didn't; she slipped up on the word "receive," after all, putting
the i before the e; and her stolid companion, catching her breath
awesomely, slowly spelled it right and received the blue prize, pinned
gracefully at the throat of her old brown gingham by the teacher's own
soft, white fingers, while the school looked on admiringly and the blood
rolled hotly up the back of her neck and spread over her face and
forehead. Rosa, the beauty, went crestfallen to her seat.
It was at noon, while they ate their lunch, that Margaret tried to get
acquainted with the girls, calling most of them by name, to their great
surprise, and hinting of delightful possibilities in the winter's work.
Then she slipped out among the boys and watched their sports, laughing
and applauding when some one made a particularly fine play, as if she
thoroughly understood and appreciated.
She managed to stand near Jed and Timothy just before Bud rang the bell.
"I've heard you are great sportsmen," she said to them, confidingly.
"And I've been wondering if you'll teach me some things I want to learn?
I want to know how to ride and shoot. Do you suppose I could learn?"
"Sure!" they chorused, eagerly, their embarrassment forgotten. "Sure,
you could learn fine! Sure, _we'll learn_ you!"
And then the bell rang and they all went in.
The afternoon was a rather informal arrangement of classes and schedule
for the next day, Margaret giving out slips of paper with questions for
each to answer, that she might find out just where to place them; and
while they wrote she went from one to another, getting acquainted,
advising, and suggesting about what they wanted to study. It was all so
new and wonderful to them! They had not been used to caring what they
were to study. Now it almost seemed interesting.
But when the day was done, the school-house locked, and Bud and Margaret
started for home, she realized that she was weary. Yet it was a
weariness of success and not of failure, and she felt happy in looking
forward to the morrow.