Bonaventure Part 10

The priest shrugged and made a mouth. The young schoolmaster's face dropped.

"Sir, I must ask you--is he not the frien' of the poor and downtrod?"

The visitor's smile quite disappeared. He said:--

"Oh!"--and waved a hand impatiently; "Victor Hugo"--another mouth--"Victor Hugo"--replying in French to the schoolmaster's English--"is not of my party." And then he laughed unpleasantly and said good-day.

The State Superintendent did not come, but every day--"It is perhaps he shall come to-mo'w, chil'run; have yo' lessons well!"

The whole tiny army of long, blue, ankle-hiding cottonade pantalettes and pantaloons tried to fulfil the injunction. Not one but had a warm place in the teacher's heart. But Toutou, Claude, Sidonie, anybody who glanced into that heart could see sitting there enthroned. And some did that kind of reconnoitring. Catou, 'Mian's older brother, was much concerned. He saw no harm in a little education, but took no satisfaction in the introduction of English speech; and speaking to 'Mian of that reminded him to say he believed the schoolmaster himself was aware of the three children's pre-eminence in his heart.

But 'Mian only said:--

"_Ah bien, c'est_ all right, _alors_!" (Well, then, it's all right.) Whether all right or not, Bonaventure was aware of it, and tried to hide it under special kindnesses to others, and particularly to the dullard of the school, grandson of Catou and nicknamed _Crebiche_[4].

The child loved him; and when Claude rang the chapel bell, and before its last tap had thrilled dreamily on the morning air, when the urchins playing about the schoolhouse espied another group coming slowly across the common with Bonaventure in the midst of them, his coat on his arm and the children's hands in his, there among them came Crebiche, now on one side, now running round to the other, hoping so to get a little nearer to the master.

[4] _ecrevisse_, crawfish.

"None shall have such kindness to-day as thou," Bonaventure would silently resolve as he went in through a gap in the _pieux_. And the children could not see but he treated them all alike. They saw no unjust inequality even when, Crebiche having three times spelt "earth"

with an _u_, the master paced to and fro on the bare ground among the unmatched desks and break-back benches, running his hands through his hair and crying:--

"Well! well aht thou name' the crawfish; with such rapiditive celeritude dost thou progress backwardly!"

It must have been to this utterance that he alluded when at the close of that day he walked, as he supposed, with only birds and gra.s.shoppers for companions, and they grew still, and the turtle-doves began to moan, and he smote his breast and cried:

"Ah! rules, rules! how easy to make, likewise break! Oh! the shame, the shame! _If_ Victor Hugo had seen that! And if George Washington!

But thou,"--some one else, not mentioned,--"thou sawedst it!"

The last word was still on the speaker's lips, when--there beside the path, with heavy eye and drunken frown, stood the father of Crebiche, the son of Catou, the little boy of twenty-five known as Chat-oue. He spoke:

"To who is dat you speak? Talk wid de dev'?"

Bonaventure murmured a salutation, touched his hat, and pa.s.sed.

Chat-oue moved a little, and delivered a broadside:

"Afteh dat, you betteh leave! Yes, you betteh leave Gran' Point'!"

"Sir," said Bonaventure, turning with flushed face, "I stay."

"Yes," said the other, "da.s.s righ'; you betteh go way and stay. _Magicien_," he added as the schoolmaster moved on, "_sorcier!_--Voudou!--jacka.s.s!"

What did all this mean?

CHAPTER VI.

WAR OF DARKNESS AND LIGHT.

Catou, it seems, had gone one day to College Point with a pair of wild ducks that he had shot,--first of the season,--and offered them to the priest who preached for Grande Pointe once a quarter.

"Catou," said the recipient, in good French but with a cruel hardness of tone, "why does that man out there teach his school in English?"

The questioner's intentions were not unkind. He felt a protector's care for his Acadian sheep, whose wants he fancied he, if not he only, understood. He believed a sudden overdose of enlightenment would be to them a real disaster, and he proposed to save them from it by the kind of management they had been accustomed to--they and their fathers--for a thousand years.

Catou answered the question only by a timid smile and shrug. The questioner spoke again:

"Why do you Grande Pointe folk allow it? Do you want your children stuffed full of American ideas? What is in those books they are studying? You don't know? Neither do I. I would not look into one of them. But you ought to know that to learn English is to learn free-thinking. Do you know who print those books that your children are rubbing their noses in? Yankees! Oh, I doubt not they have been sharp enough to sprinkle a little of the stuff _they_ call religion here and there in them; 'tis but the bait on the hook! But you silly 'Cadians think your children are getting education, and that makes up for every thing else. Do you know what comes of it? Discontent.

Vanity. Contempt of honest labor. Your children are going to be discontented with their lot. It will soon be good-by to sunbonnets; good-by to homespun; good-by to Grande Pointe,--yes, and good-by to the faith of your fathers. Catou, what do you know about that man, anyhow? You ask him no questions, you 'Cadians, and he--oh, he is too modest to tell you who or what he is. _Who pays him?_"

"He say pay is way behine. He say he don't get not'in' since he come yondeh," said Catou, the distress that had gathered on his face disappearing for a moment.

The questioner laughed contemptuously.

"Do you suppose he works that way for nothing? How do you know, at all, that his real errand is to teach school? A letter from Mr.

Wallis! who simply told your simple-minded brother what the fellow told him! See here, Catou; you owe a tax as a raiser of tobacco, eh?

And besides that, hasn't every one of you an absurd little sign stuck up on the side of his house, as required by the Government, to show that you owe another tax as a tobacco manufacturer? But still you have a little arrangement to neutralize that, eh? How do you know this man is not among you to look into that? Do you know that he _can_ teach?

No wonder he prefers to teach in English! I had a conversation with him the other day; I want no more; he preferred to talk to _me_ in English. That is the good manners he is teaching; light-headed, hero-worshipping, free-thinker that he is."

Catou was sore dismayed. He had never heard of hero-worship or free-thinking before, but did not doubt their atrocity. It had never occurred to him that a man with a few spelling-books and elementary readers could be so dangerous to society.

"I wish he clear out from yondeh," said Catou. He really made his short responses in French, but in a French best indicated in bad English.

"Not for my sake," replied the priest, coldly smiling. "I shall just preach somewhere else on the thirteenth Sunday of each quarter, and let Grande Pointe go to the devil; for there is where your new friend is sure to land you. Good-day, I am very busy this morning."

These harsh words--harsh barking of the shepherd dog--spread an unseen consternation in Grande Pointe. Maximian was not greatly concerned.

When he heard of the threat to cut off the spiritual table-crumbs with which the villagers had so scantily been fed, he only responded that in his opinion the dominie was no such a fool as that. But others could not so easily dismiss their fears. They began to say privately, leaning on fences and lingering at stiles, that they had felt from the very day of that first mad bell-ringing that the whole movement was too headlong; that this opening the sluices of English education would make trouble. Children shouldn't be taught what their parents do not understand. Not that there was special harm in a little spelling, adding, or subtracting, but--the notions they and the teacher produced! Here was the school's influence going through all the place like the waters of a rising tide. All Grande Pointe was lifting from the sands, and in danger of getting afloat and drifting toward the current of the great world's life. Personally, too, the schoolmaster seemed harmless enough. From the children and he loving each other, the hearts of the seniors had become entangled. The children had come home from the atmosphere of that old tobacco-shed, and persuaded the very grandmothers to understand vaguely--very vaguely and dimly--that the day of liberty which had come to the world at large a hundred years before had come at last to them; that in France their race had been peasants; in Acadia, forsaken colonists; in Ma.s.sachusetts, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, exiles alien to the land, the language, and the times; in St. Domingo, penniless, sick, unwelcome refugees; and for just one century in Louisiana the jest of the proud Creole, held down by the triple fetter of illiteracy, poverty, and the compet.i.tion of unpaid, half-clad, swarming slaves. But that now the slave was free, the school was free, and a new, wide, golden future waited only on their education in the greatest language of the world.

All this was pleasant enough to accept even in a dim way, though too good to be more than remotely grasped. But just when, as music in a sleeper's ear, it is taking hold of their impulses somewhat, comes the word of their hereditary dictator that this man is among them only for their destruction. What could they reply? They were a people around whom the entire world's thought had swirled and tumbled for four hundred years without once touching them. Their ancestors had left France before Descartes or Newton had begun to teach the modern world to think. They knew no method of reasoning save by precedent, and had never caught the faintest reflection from the mind of that great, sweet thinker who said, "A stubborn retention of customs is a turbulent thing, no less than the introduction of new." To such strangers in the world of to-day now came the contemptuous challenge of authority, defying them to prove that one who proposed to launch them forth upon a sea of changes out of sight of all precedent and tradition was not the hireling of some enemy's gold secretly paid to sap the foundations of all their spiritual and temporal interests and plunge them into chaos.

They blamed Bonaventure; he had got himself hated and them rebuked; it was enough. They said little to each other and nothing to him; but they felt the sleepy sense of injury we all know so well against one who was disturbing their slumber; and some began to suspect and distrust him, others to think hard of him for being suspected and distrusted. Yet all this reached not his ears, and the first betrayal of it was from the lips of Chat-oue, when, in his cups, he unexpectedly invited the schoolmaster to leave Grande Pointe.

After that, even the unconscious schoolmaster could feel the faint chill of estrangement. But he laid it not to his work, but to his personal unloveliness, and said to 'Mian he did not doubt if he were more engaging there would not be so many maidens kept at the wheel and loom in the priceless hours of school, or so many strapping youths sent, all unlettered, to the sugar-kettles of the coast plantations what time M'sieu' Walleece big-in to gryne.

"'Tain't dat," said 'Mian. He had intended to tell the true reason, but his heart failed him; and when Bonaventure asked what, then, it was, he replied:

"Aw, dey don't got no time. Time run so fas',--run like a scared dog.

I dunno fo' w'at dey make dat time run so fas' dat way."

"O my friend," cried the young schoolmaster, leaping from his chair, "say not that! If G.o.d did not make time to p'oceed with rapidness, who would ever do his best?"

It was such lessons as this that made the children--Crebiche among them--still gather round the humble master and love to grasp his hand.

CHAPTER VII.