Herbert Quick

“ The chauffeur behaved much as his pointer had done, saving and excepting that the pointer did not swear.
It was funny—even the pain involved could not make it otherwise than funny. The grading gang laughed to a man. Newton grinned even while in the fell clutch of circumstance. 28 Ponto tried to smell the chauffeur’s trousers, and what had been a laugh became a roar, quite general save for the fact that the chauffeur did not join in it.
Caution and mercy departed from the chauffeur’s mood; and he drew back his fist to strike the boy—and found it caught by the hard hand of Jim Irwin. ”

“ Why shouldn’t things have been well done, when every one worked, not for money, but for the love of the doing, and the love of learning to do in the best way?
Some of these things came out in the speeches following the repast—and some other things, too. It was probably not quite fair for B. B. Hamm to incorporate in his wishes for the welfare and prosperity and so forth of Jim and Jennie that stale one about the troubles of life, but he wanted to see Jennie blush—which as a matter of fact he did; but she failed to grow quite so fiery red as did Jim. ”

“ Jennie looked serious, after smothering a laugh.
“Jim,” said she, “you’re going to have a hard enough time to succeed in the Woodruff school, if you confine yourself to methods that have been tested, and found good.”
“But the old methods,” urged Jim, “have been tested and found bad. Shall I keep to them?”
“They have made the American people what they are,” said Jennie. “Don’t be unpatriotic, Jim.”
“They have educated our farm children for the cities,” said Jim. “This county is losing population—and it’s the best county in the world.”
“Pessimism never wins,” said Jennie. ”

“ Was not the new kind of rural teacher to be a publicly-paid leader of thought, of culture, of progress, and was he not to have his manse, his glebe-land, and his “living”? And all because, like the old clergymen, he was doing a work in which everybody was interested and for which they were willing to be taxed. Perhaps it was not so high a status as the old; but who was to say that? Certainly not Jim Irwin, the possessor of the new kind of “living,” with its “glebe-land” and its “schoolmanse.” ”

“ The creek bed was a withdrawing room in which to retire from the eternal black soil and level corn-fields of Iowa. What if the soil was so poor, in comparison with those black uplands, that the owner of the old wood-lot could find no renter? It was better than the soil in the 41 mountains, and suited the lonesome Simmses much more than a better farm would have done. They were not of the Iowa people anyhow, not understood, not their equals—they were pore, and expected to stay pore—while the Iowa people all seemed to be either well-to-do, or expecting to become so. ”

“ 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. ”

“ He had begun as a reformer late in life, he said, but he would leave it to them if he hadn’t worked at the trade steadily after enlistment. He had become a follower of Jim Irwin, because Jim’s reform was like dragging the road in front of your own farm—it was reform right at home, and not at the county seat, or Des Moines, or Washington. He had followed Jim Irwin as he had followed Lincoln, and Grant, and Blaine, and McKinley—because Jim Irwin stood for more upward growth for the average American citizen than the colonel could see any prospect of getting from any other choice. ”

“ 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 15 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. ”

“ The unexpectant passer-by this May day, however, would have been especially struck by the number of motor-cars, buggies and surreys parked in the yard back of the creamery, along the roadside, and by the driveway running to the schoolhouse. People in numbers had arrived 299 by five o’clock in the afternoon, and were still coming. They strolled about the place, examining the buildings and grounds, and talking with the blacksmith and the butter-maker, gradually drawing into the schoolhouse like a swarm of bees into a hive selected by the queen. ”

“ Our civilization is full of inefficiency because we are satisfied to give our children these ghosts and shucks and husks of words, instead of the things themselves, that can be seen and hefted and handled and tested and heard.”
Jennie looked Jim over carefully. His queerness was taking on a new phase—and she felt a sense of surprise such as one experiences when the conjurer causes a rose to grow into a tree before your very eyes. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Newton reassured Mrs. Simms, and went away pensive. He was in rebellion against the strange ways grown men have of discharging their duties as citizens—a rather remarkable thing, and perhaps a proof that Jim Irwin’s methods had already accomplished much in preparing Newton and Raymond for citizenship. He had shown them the fact that voting really has some relation to life. At present, however, the new wine in the old bottles was causing Newton to forget his filial duty, and his respect for his father. He wished he could lock him up in the barn so he couldn’t go to the school election. ”

“ Any candidate warms to her voting population just before election; but Jennie had a special kindness for Jim. He was no longer a farm-hand. The fact that he was coming to be a center of disturbance in the district, and that she quite failed to understand how his eccentric behavior could be harmonized with those principles of teaching which she had imbibed at the state normal school in itself lifted him nearer to equality with her. A public nuisance is really more respectable than a nonentity. ”

“ The horse did his work as a servant, submissive to the wills of others; the community could never develop anything worth while in its common life, until it worked the system out for itself. Horse management was despotism; man-government must be like the government of a society of wild horses, the result of the common work of the members of the herd.
Two figures emerged from the schoolhouse door, and as he turned toward his home after his pastoral calls on the horses, they overtook him. They were the figures of Newton Bronson and the county superintendent of schools. ”

“ Jim walked to the open window and looked out over the still landscape. The untidy grounds appealed to him—there would be lessons in their improvement for both the children and the older people. It was all good. Down in the little meadow grew the dreaming trees, their round crowns rising as from a sea not quite to the level of the bungalow, their thrifty leaves glistening in the moonlight. ”

“ And had not Newton become a better boy—a wonderfully better boy? Mrs. Bronson’s heart was filled with resentment that she also could not be enrolled among Jim Irwin’s supporters. And when Mrs. Bonner sneered at the buttonholes and cookies, Mrs. Bronson, knowing how the little fingers had puzzled themselves over the one, and young faces had become floury and red over the other, flared up a little.
“And I don’t see,” said she, “anything to laugh at when the young girls do the best they can to make themselves capable housekeepers. I’d like to help them.” ”

“ It was what we breeders call a Mendelian segregation of genetic factors that had been in the waltzers and albinos all the time—their original wild ancestor of the woods and fields. If Jim turns out to be a Brown Mouse, he may be a bigger man than any of us. Anyhow, I’m for him.”
“He’ll have to be a big man to make anything out of the job of a country school-teacher,” said Jennie.
“Any job’s as big as the man who holds it down,” said her father. ”

“ The politicians come out into the farming districts every campaign and get us hayseeds for anything they want. They always have got us. They’ve got us again! They give us clodhoppers the glad hand, a cheap cigar, and a cheaper smile after election;—and that’s all. I know it, you all know it, they know it. I don’t blame them so very much. The trouble is we don’t ask them to do anything better. I want a new kind of rural school; but I don’t see any prospect, no matter how this election goes, for any change in them. We in the Woodruff District will have to work out our own salvation. ”

“ Bronson to the remains of Mr. Carmichael’s creamery party, “we’ve been cutting bait in this neighborhood about long enough. I’m in favor of fishing, now. It would have been the biggest disgrace ever put on this district to have been swindled by that sharper, when the man that could have set us right on the subject was right here working for us, and we never let him have a chance. And yet that’s what we pretty near did. How many here favor building a cooperative creamery if we can get the farmers in with cows enough to make it profitable, and the equipment at the right price?” ”

“ A fine thing!”
“They will be farmers anyhow,” cried Jim, “in spite of your efforts—ninety out of every hundred of them! And of the other ten, nine will be wage-earners in the cities, and wish to God they were back on the farm; and the hundredth one will succeed in the city. Shall we educate the ninety-and-nine to fail, that the hundredth, instead of enriching the rural life with his talents, may steal them away to make the city stronger? It is already too strong for us farmers. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The school I ask for will make each of you more money than the taxes it will require would make if invested in your farm equipment. If you are not convinced of this, don’t bother with me any longer. But the money the school will make for you—this new kind of rural school—will be as nothing to the social life which will grow up—a social life which will make necessary an assembly-room, which will be the social center, because it will be the educational center, and the business center of the countryside. ”

“ The great party magnates who made up the tickets from governor down to the lowest county office, doubtless regarded the little political plum shaken off into the apron of Miss Jennie Woodruff of the Woodruff District, as the very smallest and least bloomy of all the plums on the tree; but there is something which tends to puff one up in the mere fact of having received the votes of the people for any office, especially in a region of high average civilization, covering six hundred or seven hundred square miles of good American domain. Jennie was a sensible country girl. ”

“ Raymond Simms was dimly conscious of a change in Newton since the day when they met and helped select Colonel Woodruff’s next year’s seed corn. Newton’s mother had a mother’s confidence that Newton was now a good boy, who had been led astray by other boys, but had reformed. Jim Irwin had a distinct feeling of optimism. Newton had quit tobacco and beer, casually stating to Jim that he was “in training.” Since Jim had shown 77 his ability to administer a knockout to that angry chauffeur, he seemed to this hobbledehoy peculiarly a proper person for athletic confidences. ”

“ Jim the country teacher! It was stupefying.
“Oh, you musn’t judge him by his looks,” said the professor. “I really do hope he’ll take some advice on the matter of clothes—put on a cravat and a different shirt and collar when he comes to Ames—but I have no doubt he will.”
“He hasn’t any other,” said the colonel.
“Well, it won’t signify, if he has the truth to tell us,” said the professor.
“Has he?” asked Jennie.
“Miss Woodruff,” replied the professor earnestly, “he has something that looks toward truth, and something that we need. ”