The Brown Mouse Part 8

"Culture!" exclaimed Jim. "Why--why, after ten years of the sort of school I would give you if I were a better teacher, and could have my way, the people of the cities would be begging to have their children admitted so that they might obtain real culture--culture fitting them for life in the twentieth century--"

"Don't bother to get ready for the city children, Jim," said Mrs. Bonner sneeringly, "you won't be teaching the Woodruff school that long."

All this time, the dark-faced Cracker had been glooming from a corner, earnestly seeking to fathom the wrongness he sensed in the gathering. Now he came forward.

"I reckon I may be making a mistake to say anything," said he, "f'r we-all is strangers hyeh, an' we're pore; but I must speak out for Mr. Jim--I must! Don't turn him out, folks, f'r he's done mo' f'r us than eveh any one done in the world!"

"What do you mean?" asked Mrs. Peterson.

"I mean," said Raymond, "that when Mr. Jim began talking school to us, we was a pore no-'count lot without any learnin', with nothin' to talk about except our wrongs, an' our enemies, and the meanness of the Iowa folks.

You see we didn't understand you-all. An' now, we have hope. We done got hope from this school. We're goin' to make good in the world. We're getting education. We're all learnin' to use books. My little sister will be as good as anybody, if you'll just let Mr. Jim alone in this school--as good as any one. An' I'll he'p pap get a farm, and we'll work and think at the same time, an' be happy!"

CHAPTER IX

JENNIE ARRANGES A CHRISTMAS PARTY

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 ap.r.o.n 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. Being sensible, she tried to avoid uppishness. But she did feel some little sense of increased importance as she drove her father's little one-cylinder runabout over the smooth earth roads, in the crisp December weather, just before Christmas.

The weather itself was stimulating, and she was making rapid progress in the management of the little car which her father had offered to lend her for use in visiting the one hundred or more rural schools soon to come under her supervision. She rather fancied the picture of herself, clothed in more or less authority and queening it over her little army of teachers.

Mr. Haakon Peterson was phlegmatically conscious that she made rather an agreeable picture, as she stopped her car alongside his top buggy to talk with him. She had bright blue eyes, fluffy brown hair, a complexion whipped pink by the breeze, and she smiled at him ingratiatingly.

"Don't you think father is lovely?" said she. "He is going to let me use the runabout when I visit the schools."

"That will be good," said Haakon. "It will save you lots of time. I hope you make the county pay for the gasoline."

"I haven't thought about that," said Jennie. "Everybody's been so nice to me--I want to give as well as receive."

"Why," said Haakon, "you will yust begin to receive when your salary begins in Yanuary."

"Oh, no!" said Jennie. "I've received much more than that now! You don't know how proud I feel. So many nice men I never knew before, and all my old friends like you working for me in the convention and at the polls, just as if I amounted to something."

"And you don't know how proud I feel," said Haakon, "to have in county office a little girl I used to hold on my lap."

In early times, when Haakon was a flat-capped immigrant boy, he had earned the initial payment on his first eighty acres of prairie land as a hired man on Colonel Woodruff's farm. Now he was a rather richer man than the colonel, and not a little proud of his ascent to affluence. He was a mild-spoken, soft-voiced Scandinavian, quite completely Americanized, and possessed of that apt.i.tude for local politics which makes so good a citizen of the Norwegian and Swede. His influence was always worth fifty to sixty Scandinavian votes in any county election. He was a good party man and conscious of being ent.i.tled to his voice in party matters. This seemed to him an opportunity for exerting a bit of political influence.

"Yennie," said he, "this man Yim Irwin needs to be lined up."

"Lined up! What do you mean?"

"The way he is doing in the school," said Haakon, "is all wrong. If you can't line him up, he will make you trouble. We must look ahead. Everybody has his friends, and Yim Irwin has his friends. If you have trouble with him, his friends will be against you when we want to nominate you for a second term. The county is getting close. If we go to conwention without your home delegation it would weaken you, and if we nominate you, every piece of trouble like this cuts down your wote. You ought to line him up and have him do right."

"But he is so funny," said Jennie.

"He likes you," said Haakon. "You can line him up."

Jennie blushed, and to conceal her slight embarra.s.sment, got out for the purpose of cranking her machine.

"But if I can not line him up?" said she.

"I tank," said Haakon, "if you can't line him up, you will have a chance to rewoke his certificate when you take office."

So Jim Irwin was to be crushed like an insect. The little local gearing of the big party machine was to crush him. Jennie dimly sensed the tragedy of it, but very dimly. Mainly she thought of Mr. Peterson's suggestion as to "lining up" Jim Irwin as so thoroughly sensible that she gave it a good deal of thought that day. She could not help feeling a little resentment at Jim for following his own fads and fancies so far. We always resent the necessity of crushing any weak creature which must needs be wiped out. The idea that there could be anything fundamentally sane in his overturning of the old and tried school methods under which both he and she had been educated, was absurd to Jennie. To be sure, everybody had always favored "more practical education," and Jim's farm arithmetic, farm physiology, farm reading and writing, cow-testing exercises, seed a.n.a.lysis, corn clubs and the tomato, poultry and pig clubs he proposed to have in operation the next summer, seemed highly practical; but to Jennie's mind, the fact that they introduced dissension in the neighborhood and promised to make her official life vexatious, seemed ample proof that Jim's work was visionary and impractical. Poor Jennie was not aware of the fact that new truth always comes bringing, not peace to mankind, but a sword.

"Father," said she that night, "let's have a little Christmas party."

"All right," said the colonel. "Whom shall we invite?"

"Don't laugh," said she. "I want to invite Jim Irwin and his mother, and n.o.body else."

"All right," reiterated the colonel. "But why?"

"Oh," said Jennie, "I want to see whether I can talk Jim out of some of his foolishness."

"You want to line him up, do you?" said the colonel. "Well, that's good politics, and incidentally, you may get some good ideas out of Jim."

"Rather unlikely," said Jennie.

"I don't know about that," said the colonel, smiling. "I begin to think that Jim's a Brown Mouse. I've told you about the Brown Mouse, haven't I?"

"Yes," said Jennie. "You've told me. But Professor Darbishire's brown mice were simply wild and incorrigible creatures. Just because it happens to emerge suddenly from the forests of heredity, it doesn't prove that the Brown Mouse is any good."

"Justin Morgan was a Brown Mouse," said the colonel. "And he founded the greatest breed of horses in the world."

"You say that," said Jennie, "because you're a lover of the Morgan horse."

"Napoleon Bonaparte was a Brown Mouse," said the colonel. "So was George Washington, and so was Peter the Great. Whenever a Brown Mouse appears he changes things in a little way or a big way."

"For the better, always?" asked Jennie.

"No," said the colonel. "The Brown Mouse may throw back to slant-headed savagery. But Jim ... sometimes I think Jim is the kind of Mendelian segregation out of which we get Franklins and Edisons and their sort. You may get some good ideas out of Jim. Let us have them here for Christmas, by all means."

In due time Jennie's invitation reached Jim and his mother, like an explosive sh.e.l.l fired from a distance into their humble dwelling--quite upsetting things. Twenty-five years const.i.tute rather a long wait for social recognition, and Mrs. Irwin had long since regarded herself as quite outside society. To be sure, for something like half of this period, she had been of society if not in it. She had done the family washings, scrubbings and cleanings, had made the family clothes and been a woman of all work, pa.s.sing from household to household, in an orbit determined by the exigencies of threshing, harvesting, illness and child-bearing. At such times she sat at the family table and partic.i.p.ated in the neighborhood gossip, in quite the manner of a visiting aunt or other female relative; but in spite of the democracy of rural life, there is and always has been a social difference between a hired woman and an invited guest. And when Jim, having absorbed everything which the Woodruff school could give him in the way of education, found his first job at "making a hand," Mrs. Irwin, at her son's urgent request, ceased going out to work for a while, until she could get back her strength. This she had never succeeded in doing, and for a dozen years or more had never entered a single one of the houses in which she had formerly served.

"I can't go, James," said she; "I can't possibly go."

"Oh, yes, you can! Why not?" said Jim. "Why not?"

"You know I don't go anywhere," urged Mrs. Irwin.

"That's no reason," said her son.

"I haven't a thing to wear," said Mrs. Irwin.