I heard her laugh, a little delighted laugh, and found myself agreeing to the heresy that, after all, the chief thing is to train the girls to be gentle, and the boys brave! Then I gave her my arm in to dinner.
Chester, who had never offered a girl his arm except at a dance or after dark, glared at me. Mother was uneasy at the stirring of the old brotherly antagonisms. I expanded, and told Miss Frayn that if all southern women were like the only one I had met, I didn't wonder at the feuds. Then seeing whither I was drifting, I asked her plans as to the school she would take, when I sent her her certificate. She said that "Mistah Chestah" was going to let her have the home school.
"A boy like Chester," said I, "will have little influence with Mr.
Middlekauff, the director."
"Oh, cut it out, Oc!" burst in Chester. "I've got it all framed up to be elected director!"
"My political plans," said I, "will not allow of a breach between my family and Mr. Middlekauff."
"Well, mine do," retorted Chester. "You'll take your chances with the Middlekauffs, just as I do!"
It was not the occult influence, but a desire to benefit educational conditions, that led me to visit Miss Frayn's school the week Chester's insurgency placed her in it. My memory is hazy as to the matter, but my notes show that her weakness was in the matter of organization.
"Oh," said she, when I mentioned this, "do you all prefeh things so regulah and poky? It's so much mo' pleasant foh the little things to be free!" She called most of the little ones "Honey," and allowed much latitude in whispering and moving about. They crowded around her like ants to a lump of sugar. Some of them were beginning to evince a laxity of pronunciation, sounding the personal pronoun "I" like the interjection "Ah."
In a few days I went back--Chester sneered at me as I went by--to tell Miss Frayn of the necessity of teaching the effects of stimulants and narcotics according to the Iowa law. She was greatly surprised when I told her of this requirement.
"What, _daily_, Mr. Supe'intendent!" she exclaimed.
"Daily teaching," said I. "Our law requires it."
"It seems _so_ unnecessa'y," she said in perplexity. "The young gentlemen will find out all about it in due time: and is it raght to expe'iment with the littlest ones? And wheiah shall I obtain the liquoh foh the demonstrations?"
I felt strangely overcome at this astounding speech, by an indescribable mixture of tender solicitude for her welfare, and horror at her fearful mistake; but I reproved her for jesting at the vice of drinking.
"Vice!" said she, with a bubbling laugh. "Why, down home we-all regyahd it as an accomplishment! But Ah reckon you ah jokin' about teachin' it.
Youah jokes and use of the lettah 'ah' ah things Ah shall nevah get used to, Ah'm afraid; but Ah'm glad you don't mean that about the drinkin'."
Despairing of making her understand, I left her, again conscious of being under occult and abnormal control. I was astonished to see in the school several large boys who must have been greatly needed in the fields. They looked at each other sheepishly as I came in, but most of the time they gazed at the teacher, rather than at their books. Not having the gift of prophecy, I could not see in their presence the cloud that would soon overshadow my official life. I took their attendance as proof of the popularity of the school. I studied the philosophers, and sought calm of spirit. Learning from Epictetus that the earthen pitcher and the rock do not agree, and from Lubbock that love at first sight is thought by great minds actually to occur, I reexamined my abnormal psychic symptoms in Miss Frayn's presence, and prudently refrained from seeking her society. Poise alone makes possible a consistent career, and this I had in large measure reconquered, when, like a bolt from the blue--or at least with much abruptness--into my quiet office burst a committee from the Teal Lake Township School Board, accompanied by a number of patrons of the Boggs school--all old neighbors of ours--headed by the defeated Mr. Elizur Middlekauff. This could mean but one thing--Miss Frayn! The rebel invasion was at the door.
"Mr. Middlekauff," said one, "is the spokesman."
"We've got a grievyance," said Mr. Middlekauff, "a whale of a grievyance in our deestrict; and we've come right to the power-house to fix it."
"It shall command my most careful consideration," said I. "Please state the case."
"That 'ere railroad wreck," said Mr. Middlekauff, who was a very forcible speaker at caucuses, "let loose on our people a scourge in caliker more pestilential than the Huns and Vandals. We come to you as clothed with a little brief authority, an' accessory after the fact to this scourge business."
"I fail," said I, "to catch your meaning."
"I mean," said he, growing loud, "that peaches-an'-cream invader from the states lately in rebellion that you've give a stiffkit, an' your brother Chet by stratagems an' spiles has got himself elected an' put into our school. That's what I mean!"
"I infer," said I, "some implied strictures upon the character or school management or educational qualifications of Miss Roberta Lee Frayn."
"W'l you infer surprisin'ly clus to the truth!" replied Mr. Middlekauff offensively. "We're a-complainin' of this schoolma'am with the rebil name; and of her onrivaled facilities f'r spreadin' treason an'
emotional insanity! Try to git that through your hair!"
Like lightning a course of policy occurred to me.
"Are the defendant," said I, looking them over, "and Mr. Boggs, the director, among your numbers?"
"No," said Mr. Middlekauff. "This is kinder informal. An' besides, we'd crawl out right where we went in if she was here. I tell you she's a--a--irresistible force."
"It is elementary," said I, "that no _ex parte_ investigation can have any validity."
"Now, see here, Oc Boggs!" hissed he, "I don't take any high-an'-mighty stand-off from a lunkhead that's stole my melons when he was a kid!
You'll hear this complaint, see?"
I did not weaken, but I allowed his standing in the community and party to outweigh offensive orthoepy, rhetoric, and manners. Unofficially, I took down the complaint, reserving my ruling. As the horrid tale was told I grew sick at the problem before me. I glean the details of the situation from my notes:
Miss Frayn (all these things are set down as _asserted_) had assigned William Middlekauff, whose father was a member of the G. A. R., the Confederate side of a debate on the comparative greatness of Washington and Robert E. Lee, and had said: "She reckoned Mr. William ought to have won, as he had the strong side." Complained of as against public policy, adhering to armed insurrection, and giving aid and comfort to the enemy.
_Quoere_ (per O. B.): Is complaint good after forty years of peace, and Reconstruction?
All members of the committee said that every boy in the district of more than sixteen years of age was irresistibly attracted to her (exact language, "be-daddled over her," O. B.). Hence, her character must be "wrong" somehow. Two boys, each claiming an exclusive franchise to sweep out for her, had met in Allen's feed-lot to fight a duel, and been discovered in the act of firing and tied to the feed-rack by Allen's hired man, and spanked with the end-gate of his wagon. Clarence Skeen was poorly, and had been found kneeling before a bench calling it his darling Roberta and begging it to be his. Columbus Smith had turned somnambulist, and his father had lost ten tons of timothy which "Clumb"
had failed to put up in cock. When sleep-walking Clumb had been heard by Vespucci, his brother (known as "Spootch"), to protest with sighs and groans that his heart was broken and to ask "Roberta" to shed one tear over his grave. Twitted of this by his young sister, Semiramis, Clumb had slapped her and, cursing profanely, had assaulted Spootch, who reproved him, and had fled to the Wiggly Creek woods with no subsistence but a loaf of salt-rising bread, a box of paper collars, and a book of poems. Letter from Mrs. Smith asking that this Jezebel's certificate be revoked before all should be lost.
Whipple Cavanaugh had been idle and "lawless" since attending school.
Refused nourishment. Pillow wet with tears. Kissed Cavanaugh's mare, "Old Flora," on nose after Miss Frayn had patted her on said spot. Had written a poem to Roberta, and rather than have it read publicly by the hired girl, who had found it under his pillow, had eaten it, paper, ink, and all. Doctor Dilworthy called in; pronounced him in danger of gastritis and love-sickness with grave prognosis.
Names of fifteen boys given, known as "Frayn Mooners," who haunted the shrubbery about the home of Mrs. Jane D. Boggs, where the teacher boarded. Six fights were known to have occurred among them. Tension in the neighborhood was unbearable because of the loosing by Chester Boggs, "in violation of his official oath," of a bulldog which had bitten Albert Boyer, and thrown his mother into nervous prostration.
This epidemic of "worthlessness and sentimentality" was spreading outside the district, as evidenced by an excerpt found in the dog's possession, from the upper rear elevation of the Sunday trousers of Boliver Fromme, living in District No. 4. Progress in the studies of the boys confined to amatory poetry and pugilism, both unrelated to their life work. _Iowa, My Iowa_, Major Byers' stirring lyric, had been supplanted by _Maryland, My Maryland_, in school singing. Chester Boggs, the director, refused to receive complaints, and was condemned as equally affected with the disease, and probably a "Mooner" himself.
There was a certificate of Doctor Dilworthy of Teal Lake as to the existence of many cases of "extreme mental exaltation accompanied by explosive and fulminant cerebral disturbances traceable to mediate or immediate association with one Roberta Lee Frayn, an individual seemingly possessed of an abnormal power in the way of causing obsessions, fixed ideas, aberrant cranio-spinal functionings, and cranial tempests, in those of her associates resembling her in the matter of age, and differing from her in social habits, hereditary constitution, and sex."
I sank back in my chair horrified, with a sinking in the region of the epigastric plexus.
"We kind o' thought, Oc," said Mr. Middlekauff, "that thet would hold yeh f'r a while."
I saw the muddled political relations with which this imbroglio teemed, and clung to delay as my sole hope.
"I am inexpressibly shocked," said I, "and as soon as we can meet with the defendant and the director--"
"What!" shrieked Mr. Middlekauff. "_Her_ present! Arter what them papers says? And everybody follerin' her, if she jest smiles, like a caff arter salt! Why, dad ding me, if I'd trust _myself_ f'r more'n a smile or two.
She'll bamboozle the hull thing if she's there. I b'lieve _you've_ got it, you conceited young sprout! No, sir; decide this thing now!"
"I regret the necessity," said I, "of asking time to get the opinion of the county attorney, and to--to--"
"Not by a dum sight!" roared Mr. Middlekauff. "We'll see what the court has to say on this. An' when you're up f'r election ag'in, come round, an' we'll consider it f'r a while--an' then you won't know you're runnin'!"
I was torn by conflicting emotions when they went away. I knew that Middlekauff was a man of influence. I was not averse to seeing Chester rebuked for his fatuous behavior, and for tempting me to a deviation from strict duty. I felt that in taking my stand with the "Mooners" I might be siding with the heaviest body of voters after all. By these whiffling winds of the mind was I baffled, finding no rest in my works on didactics and pedagogics, wondering what Middlekauff would do--until all doubts were settled by the filing of the case of The School Board of Teal Lake versus Frayn; and in a few days it came on for trial before Judge Worthington.
Chester telephoned, asking to see me. He came in looking thinner than I had ever seen him.
"Do you know," said he, "that this case old Middlekauff's got plugged up comes off this morning?"
"Having been summonsed by writ of subpoena," said I severely, "I am aware that your wilfulness in placing an untried importation in charge of our school, regardless of her unfitness, or of my political well-being, is this morning bearing its legitimate fruit in the hearing which comes _on_--not _off_! And I hope your lack of consideration for the welfare of the school system, so largely wrapped up in my career, will--"
That Chester was temporarily insane is clear. He flew at me, seized my trachea in his iron hands, compressed it so as greatly to impede respiration, and knocked my head against the wall, using incoherently certain technical terms he had learned at Ames.