The Graysons: A Story of Illinois

VIII

BARBARA'S PRIVATE AFFAIRS

From childhood Barbara's ambition had centered in Tom; it was her plan that the clever brother should give standing to the family by his success in life. If Tom could only be persuaded to be steady, he might come to be a great man. A great man, in her thinking, was a member of the State legislature, or a circuit judge, for example: to her provincial imagination the heights above these were hazy and almost inaccessible. The scheme of a professional career for Tom had been her own, in conception and management; for though her brother was nearly two years her senior, she, being prudent and forecasting, had always played the part of an elder. Tom's undeniable "brightness" was a great source of pride to her. In spite of his heedless collisions with the masters, he was always at the head of his classes; and it seemed to Barbara the most natural thing in the world that she, being a girl, should subordinate herself to the success of a brother so promising. She had left school to devote herself to the house and the cares of the farm, in order that Tom might be educated – in the moderate sense of the word then prevalent. The brother was far from being ungrateful; if he accepted his sister's sacrifices without protest, he repaid her with a demonstrative affection and admiration not often seen in brothers; and there were times when he almost reverenced in her that prudence and practical wisdom in which he found himself deficient.

It was only during this summer that Barbara had been seized with independent aspirations for herself; and perhaps even these were not without some relation to Tom. If Tom should come to be somebody in the county, she would sit in a reflected light as his sister. It became her, therefore, not to neglect entirely her own education. To go to Moscow to a winter school was out of the question. Every nerve was strained to extricate the farm from debt and to give a little help, now and then, to Tom. It chanced, however, that a student from an incipient Western college, intent on getting money to pay his winter's board bills, had that summer opened a "pay school" in the Timber Creek district school-house, which was only two miles from the Grayson farm.

Those who could attend school in the summer were, for the most part, small fry too young to be of much service in the field, and such girls, larger and smaller, as could be spared from home. But the appetite for "schooling" in the new country was always greater than the supply; and when it was reported that a school was "to be took up" in the Timber Creek school-house, by a young man who had not only "ciphered plumb through the Rule of Three," but had even begun to penetrate the far-away mysteries of Latin and algebra, it came to pass that several young men and young women, living beyond the district limits, subscribed to the school, that they might attend it, even if only irregularly; – not that any of the pupils dreamed of attacking the Latin, but a teacher who had attained this Ultima Thule of human learning was supposed to know well all that lay on the hither side of it. The terms of a "pay school," in that day, were low enough, – a dollar and twenty-five cents was the teacher's charge for each pupil for thirteen weeks; but the new schoolmaster had walked from home to avoid traveling expenses, the log school-house cost him no rent, and he had stipulated that he should "board 'round" in the families of his patrons, so that the money he received from twenty pupils was clear profit, and at the price of living in those primitive times would pay his board at college for six months.

Barbara, for one, had resolved to treat herself to a dollar and a quarter's worth of additional learning. The Timber Creek school-house was on the road leading to the village of Moscow; she could therefore catch a ride, now and then, on the wagon of some farmer bound to the village, by mounting on top of a load of wood, hay, or potatoes; and often she got a lift in the evening in a neighbor's empty wagon rattling homeward from town, or for a part of the way by sitting in the tail of some ox-cart plying between forest and prairie; but more frequently she had to walk both in going and coming, besides working early and late at her household duties.

Hiram Mason was the name of the new teacher whom the pupils found behind the master's desk on the first day of school. He was the son of a minister who had come out from New England with the laudable intention of lending a hand in evangelizing this great strapping West, whose vigorous and rather boisterous youth was ever a source of bewilderment, and even a cause of grief, to the minds of well-regulated Down-easters. The evangelists sent out aimed at the impossible, even at the undesirable, in seeking to reproduce a New England in communities born under a different star. Perhaps it was this peninsular trait of mind that prevented the self-denying missionaries from making any considerable impression on the country south of the belt peopled by the current of migration from New England. The civilization of the broad, wedge-shaped region on the north side of the Ohio River, which was settled by Southern and Middle State people, and which is the great land of the Indian corn, has been evolved out of the healthier elements of its own native constitution. But it was indebted to New England, in the time of its need, for many teachers of arithmetic and grammar, as well as for the less-admirable but never-to-be-forgotten clock-peddlers and tin-peddlers from Connecticut, who also taught the rustics of southern Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois things they had never dreamed of before, and took high pay for the instruction. Young Mason, though he had mostly grown up in the new country, and would have scorned the name of Yankee, had got from his father that almost superstitious faith in the efficacy of knowledge which, in the North-eastern States, has been handed down from generation to generation, and which has produced much learning and some pedantry. Mason was of middle stature, good breadth of shoulder, prominent, broad forehead, and brows that overhung his eyes, but were rather high above them. He had a well-set chin and a solid jaw; his mouth was too large to be handsome and was firmly closed; his gait was strong, straightforward, resolute, and unhurried. There were little touches of eccentricity in him: he had a way of looking at an interlocutor askance, and his habitual expression was one of mingled shyness and self-contained amusement. The religious enthusiasm of his father had been transmuted in him to a general earnestness of character, which was veiled under a keen perception of the droll side of life, derived from a mother of Southern extraction. His early-and-late diligence in study was the wonder of the country, but the tastes and aspirations that impelled him to so much toil rarely found utterance in any confessions, even to his nearest friends. Reserved as he was, the people could never complain that he held himself above them. A new-country youth, the son of a minister on slender pay, Hiram understood how to extend a helping hand, when occasion required, in any work that might be going on. At school, when the young master saw the boys playing at the boisterous and promiscuous "soak about," he would sometimes catch the contagion of the wild fun, and, thrusting his "Livy" into the desk, rush out of the door to mix in the confusion, throwing the yarn ball at one and another with a vigor and an accuracy of aim that doubled the respect of his pupils for him. But when once he had extricated himself from the mélée, and had rapped on the door-frame with his ruler, crying, "Books, books!" the boy who a minute before had enjoyed the luxury of giving the master what was known in school-boy lingo as a "sockdolager," delivered full in the back, or even on the side of the head, did not find any encouragement to presume on that experience in school-hours.

The new master's punishments usually had a touch of his drollery in them; he contrived to make the culprit ridiculous, and so to keep the humor of the school on his side. A girl who could not otherwise be cured of munching in school had to stand in front of the master's desk with an apple in her teeth; a boy who was wont to get his sport by pinching his neighbors, and sticking them with pins, was forced to make no end of amusement for the school in his turn, by standing on the hearth with a cleft stick pinching his nose out of shape. It was soon concluded that there was no fun in "fooling" with a master who was sure to turn the joke on the offender.

The older pupils who occupied the "writing bench," in front of a continuous shelf-like desk fixed along the wall, spent much of their time in smuggling from one to another fervid little love notes, which, for disguise, were folded like the "thumb-papers" that served to protect their books from the wear and tear of their over-vigorous thumbs, and from soiling. By passing books from one to another, with such innocent-looking square papers in them, a refreshing correspondence was kept up. This exchange of smuggled billets-doux was particularly active when Rachel Albaugh was present. As for the love-letters thus dispatched, they were fearfully monotonous and not worth the pains of capture by a schoolmaster. Some were straightforward and shameless declarations of admiration and affection in prose scrawls, but a very common sort was composed entirely of one or another of those well-worn doggerel couplets that have perhaps done duty since the art of writing became known to the Anglo-Saxons.

was a favorite with the swains of the country school-house; but

had a molasses-like consistency in its alliterative lines that gave it the preference over all other love poems extant.

Amongst these unblushing scribblers of love doggerel and patient cutters and folders of many sorts of thumb-papers, whose fits of studying, like chills and fever, came on only "by spells," Barbara sat without being one of them. The last chance for education was not to be thrown away; and Mason soon singled out this rather under-sized, sharp-eyed girl, not only as the most industrious and clever of the pupils in the Timber Creek school, but as a person of quite another sort from the rest of them. When he was explaining anything to a group of half-listless scholars, her dark eyes, drawn to beads, almost startled him with their concentrated interest. She could not be taught in any kind of classification with the rest; her rate of progress was too rapid. So finding that Barbara studied all through the recess time, he undertook to give her extra instruction while the others were on the playground. The most agreeable minutes of his day were those in which he unfolded to her the prosaic principles of Vulgar Fractions, of Tare and Tret, and of the Rule of Three. This last was the great and final goal, and it was attained by few of those who attended an intermittent country school in that time. To reach it was to become competent to teach school. Barbara, with the help of the master, who directed her to save time by omitting some of the rubbish in Pike's Arithmetic, was soon in sight of this promised land of the Rule of Three, and it became a question of reviewing the book once more, when she should be through with it, so as to take rank among those who would certainly "do every sum in the book."

"Why not take up algebra?" said the teacher to her, during a long noon recess as they sat side by side at his desk poring over a slate full of figures.

"Do you think I could learn it?" she asked.

"You could learn anything," he said; and the assurance gave Barbara more pleasure than any commendation she had ever received. But she did not know what to reply. To go beyond the arithmetic would be, according to the standard of the country, to have a liberal education, and she was ambitious enough to like that. But where would she get the money to buy a text-book? She didn't wish to confess her scruple of economy. It was not that she was ashamed of her poverty, for poverty might be said to be the prevailing fashion in the Timber Creek country; but it would be bringing to Mason's attention her private affairs, and from that she shrank with an instinct of delicacy for which she could not have given any reason. Yet there sat Mason, leaning back and waiting for her to reply to his question. After a few moments she mustered courage to ask timidly:

"Would the book cost much?"

"I wouldn't buy any book just now," said the master, seeing the drift of her thoughts. He went to one corner of the school-room, and, standing on the bench, pushed aside one of the boards laid loosely over the joists above. It was here, in the dark loft, that he kept the few articles not necessary to his daily existence in boarding 'round. Reaching his hand up above the boards, he found a copy of a school text-book on algebra, and brought it down with him, rapping it against his hand and blowing the dust off it.

"Use that for a while," he said.

"Oh, thank you!" said Barbara, taking hold of the book with a curious sense of reverence, which was greatly increased as she turned the leaves and regarded the symbols, whose nature and use were quite inconceivable to her. Here was a knowledge beyond any that she had ever dreamed of looking into; beyond that of any schoolmaster she had ever known, except Mason. "It looks hard," she said, regarding him.

"Take it home and try it," he replied, as he took up his ruler to call the scholars to books.

A closer companionship now grew up between the master and the pupil. Both of them anticipated with pleasure the coming of recess time, when the new study could be discussed together. Henceforth the boys looked in vain for Mason to take a turn with them in playing soak-about.

To a man of high aims nothing is more delightful than to have a devoted disciple. Even the self-contained Mason could not be quite unmoved in contemplating this young girl, all of whose tastes and ambitions flowed in the same channel with his own, listening to him as to an oracle. If he had not been so firmly fixed in his resolve that he would not allow any woman to engage his affections before he had completed his college course, he might have come to fall in love with her. But all such thoughts he resolutely put aside. Of course, teaching her was a delight; but who could help feeling delight in teaching such a learner? Moreover, he was particularly fond of algebra. But he could hardly lay all of his enjoyment to his liking for algebra, or his pleasure in teaching a quick-witted pupil. He could not make himself believe that it was his enjoyment of algebraic generalizations that made his hand tremble whenever he returned a slate or book to Barbara Grayson.

Barbara, for her part, was too intent on her work to think much about anything else. She had more than once caught sight of the furtive, inquiring glance of her teacher on her face before he could turn his eyes away; she was pleased to note that his voice had a tone in addressing her that it had not when he spoke to the others; and she took pleasure in perceiving that she was beyond question the favorite pupil. But Barbara was averse to building any castles in the air which she had small chance of being able to materialize.

One evening, as she was going briskly toward home, she was overtaken by Mason, who walked with her up hill and down dale the whole long rough new-country road through the woods, carrying her books, and chatting about trivial things as he had never done before. He contrived, half in pleasantry, but quite in earnest, to praise her diligence, and even her mind. She had hardly ever thought of herself as having a mind. That Tom had such a gift she knew, and she understood how important it was to cultivate his abilities. But she was only Tom's sister. It seemed to her a fine thing, however, this having a mind of her own, and she thought a good deal about it afterward.

When Hiram Mason reached the place where Barbara was accustomed to leave the main road, in order to reach her home by a shorter path through a meadow, he got over the fence first and gave her his hand, though he wondered afterward that he had had the courage to do it. Barbara had climbed fences and trees too, for that matter, from her infancy, and she was in the habit of getting over this fence twice a day, without ever dreaming that she needed help. But a change had come over her in this two-miles' walk from school. For the first time, she felt a certain loneliness in her life, and a pleasure in being protected. She let Mason take her hand and help her to the top of the fence, though she could have climbed up much more nimbly if she had had both hands free to hold by. Hiram found it so pleasant helping her up, by holding her hand, that he took both her hands when she was ready to jump down on the meadow side of the fence, and then, by an involuntary impulse he retained her right hand in his left a bare moment longer than was necessary. A little ashamed, not so much of the feeling he had shown as of that he had concealed, he finished his adieux abruptly, and, placing his hands on the top rail, vaulted clean over the fence again into the road. Then he thought of something else that he wanted to say about Barbara's new study of algebra, – something of no consequence at all, except in so far as it served to make Barbara turn and look at him once more. The odd twinkling smile so habitual with him died out of his face, and he looked into hers with an eagerness that made her blush, but did not make her turn away. Blaming himself for what seemed to him imprudence, he left her at last and started back, only stopping on the next high ground to watch her figure as she hurried along through the meadow grass, and across the brook, and then up the slope toward the house.

There were several other evenings not very different from this one. The master would wait until all the pupils had gone, and then overtake Barbara. He solaced his conscience by carrying a book in his pocket, so as to study on the way back; but he found a strange wandering of the mind in his endeavors to read a dead language after a walk with Barbara. He still held to his resolution, or to what was left of his resolution, not to entangle himself with an early engagement. What visions he indulged in, of projects to be carried out in a very short time after his graduation, belong to the secrets of his own imagination; all his follies shall not be laid bare here. But to keep from committing himself too far, he drew the line at the boundary of Mrs. Grayson's farm, – the meadow fence. He gave himself a little grace, and drew the line on the inside of the fence. He was firmly resolved never to go quite home with his pupil, and never to call at her house. So long as he stopped at the fence, or within ten, or say twenty, or perhaps thirty, feet of it he felt reasonably safe. But he could not, in common civility, turn back until he had helped her to surmount this eight-rail fence; and indeed it was the great treat to which he always looked forward. There was a sort of permissible intimacy in such an attention. He guarded himself, however, against going beyond the limits of civility – of kindly politeness – of polite friendship; that was the precise phrase he hit on at last. But good resolutions often come to naught because of its being so very difficult to reckon beforehand with the involuntary and the uncontrollable. The goodman of the house never knows at what moment the thief will surprise him. One evening Mason had taken especial pains to talk on only the most innocent and indifferent subjects, such as algebra. On this theme he was the schoolmaster, and he felt particularly secure against any expression of feeling, for x, y, and z are unknown quantities that have no emotion in them. Though Barbara was yet in the rudiments of the study, he was trying to make her understand the general principles involved in the discussion of the famous problem of the lights. To make this clear he sat down once or twice on logs lying by the roadside, and wrote some characters on her slate showing the relation of a to b in any given case, while Barbara sat by and looked over his demonstrations. But in spite of these delays, they got to the fence before he had finished, and the rest was postponed for another time. It didn't matter so much about the lights after all, whether they were near together or far apart; it does not matter to lights, but there are flames much affected by proximity. As Mason helped Barbara down from the fence, his passion, by some sudden assault, got the better of his prudence, and looking intently into the eyes shaded by the sun-bonnet, he came out with:

"It's all the world to a fellow like me to have such a scholar as you are, Barbara."

The words were mild enough; but his eager manner and his air of confidence, as he stood in front of her sun-bonnet and spoke, with his face flushed, and in a low and unsteady voice, made his speech a half confession. Startled at this sudden downfall of his resolution, he got back over the fence and went straight away, without giving her a chance to say anything; without so much as uttering a civil good-bye. The precipitation of his retreat only served to lend the greater significance to his unpremeditated speech.

Mrs. Grayson complained that there was "no sense in a girl's studyin' algebra, an' tryin' to know more 'n many a good schoolmaster ever knowed when I was a girl. Ever since Barbary's been at that new-fangled study, it's seemed like as if she'd somehow'r nuther gone deranged. She'll say supper's ready when they ain't knife nur fork on the table; an' she's everlastin'ly losin' her knittin'-needles an' puttin' her thimble where she can't find it, or mislayin' her sun-bonnet. Ef her head was loose, she'd be shore to leave that around somewheres, liker'n not."

If Hiram Mason's half-involuntary love-making had not brought Barbara unmeasured pleasure she would not have been the normal young woman that she was. He filled all her ideals, and went beyond the highest standard she had set up before she knew him. She was not the kind of a girl that one meets nowadays; at least, that one meets nowadays in novels. She did not have a lot of perfectly needless and inconceivably fine-spun conscientious scruples to prevent the course of her fortune from running smoothly. She did find in herself a drawing back from the future which Mason's partiality had brought within the range of her vision. But her scruple was only one of pride; she exaggerated the superiority of an educated family, such as she conceived his to be, and she reflected that the Graysons were simple country people. She felt in herself that she could never endure the mortification she would feel, as Hiram's wife, if the Masons should look down on her good but unlettered mother, and say or feel that Hiram had "married below him." If, now, Tom should come to something, the equation would be made good.

But the very day after Mason had spoken so warmly of the comfort he found in such a pupil was that disagreeable Saturday on which Tom had come home plucked in gambling, to ask for money enough to pay the debt he had incurred in redeeming his clothes. Was it any wonder that Barbara spoke to him with severity when she found her cherished vision becoming an intangible illusion? Tom would make no career at all at this rate; and to yield to Hiram Mason's wooing would now be to bring to him, not only the drawback of a family of humble breeding and slender education, but the disgrace of a rash, unsteady, and unsuccessful brother, whose adventures with gamblers would seem particularly disreputable to a minister's family. There was no good in thinking about it any more. Her pride could never bear to be "looked down on" by the family of her husband. It would be better to give it up at once – unless – she clung to this possibility – unless Tom should turn out right after all. The necessity for surrendering so much imminent happiness did not surprise her. She had always had to forego, and no prospect of happiness could seem quite possible of realization to an imagination accustomed to contemplate a future of self-denial. None the less, the disappointment was most acute, for she must even give up the school, and try, by spinning yarn, by knitting stockings, and by weaving jeans and linsey, to make up the money taken out of their little fund by Tom's recklessness.