“It seems to me quite as important, Mr. Twing,” she said drily, “that you should first learn some of your own duties, which I came here early to teach you.”
“Not at all,” he said cheerfully. “Today I take my seat, as I’ve arranged it, you see, over there with them, and watch ’em go through the motions. One rehearsal’s enough for me. At the same time, I can chip in if necessary.” And before she could reply he was out of the schoolhouse again, hailing the new-comers. This was done with apparently such delight to the children and with some evidently imported expression into his smooth mask-like face, that Mrs. Martin had to content herself with watching him with equal curiosity. She was turning away with a sudden sense of forgotten dignity, when a shout of joyous, childish laughter attracted her attention to the window. The new assistant, with half a dozen small children on his square shoulders, walking with bent back and every simulation of advanced senility, was evidently personating, with the assistance of astonishingly distorted features, the ogre of a Christmas pantomime. As his eye caught hers the expression vanished, the mask-like face returned; he set the children down, and moved away. And when school began, although he marshaled them triumphantly to the very door,—with what contortion of face or simulation of character she was unable to guess,—after he had entered the schoolroom and taken his seat every vestige of his previous facial aberration was gone, and only his usual stolidity remained. In vain, as Mrs. Martin expected, the hundred delighted little eyes before her dwelt at first eagerly and hopefully upon his face, but, as she had not expected, recognizing from the blankness of his demeanor that the previous performance was intended for them exclusively, the same eager eyes were presently dropped again upon their books in simple imitation, as if he were one of themselves. Mrs. Martin breathed freely, and lessons began.
Yet she was nervously conscious, meanwhile, of a more ill-omened occurrence. This was the non-arrival of several of her oldest pupils, notably, the refractory and incorrigible Pike County contingent to whom Sperry had alluded. For the past few days they had hovered on the verge of active insubordination, and had indulged in vague mutterings which she had resolutely determined not to hear. It was, therefore, with some inward trepidations, not entirely relieved by Twing’s presence, that she saw the three Mackinnons and the two Hardees slouch into the school a full hour after the lessons had begun. They did not even excuse themselves, but were proceeding with a surly and ostentatious defiance to their seats, when Mrs. Martin was obliged to look up, and—as the eldest Hardee filed before her—to demand an explanation. The culprit addressed—a dull, heavy-looking youth of nineteen—hesitated with an air of mingled doggedness and sheepishness, and then, without replying, nudged his companion. It was evidently a preconcerted signal of rebellion, for the boy nudged stopped, and, turning a more intelligent, but equally dissatisfied, face upon the schoolmistress, began determinedly:—
“Wot’s our excuse for coming an hour late? Well, we ain’t got none. We don’t call it an hour late—we don’t. We call it the right time. We call it the right time for our lessons, for we don’t allow to come here to sing hymns with babbies. We don’t want to know ‘where, oh where, are the Hebrew children?’ They ain’t nothin’ to us Americans. And we don’t want any more Daniels in the Lions’ Den played off on us. We have enough of ’em in Sunday- school. We ain’t hankerin’ much for grammar and dictionary hogwash, and we don’t want no Boston parts o’ speech rung in on us the first thing in the mo’nin’. We ain’t Boston—we’re Pike County—we are. We reckon to do our sums, and our figgerin’, and our sale and barter, and our interest tables and weights and measures when the time comes, and our geograffy when it’s on, and our readin’ and writin’ and the American Constitution in reg’lar hours, and then we calkilate to git up and git afore the po’try and the Boston airs and graces come round. That’s our rights and what our fathers pay school taxes for, and we want ’em.”
He stopped, looking less towards the schoolmistress than to his companions, for whom perhaps, after the schoolboy fashion, this attitude was taken. Mrs. Martin sat, quite white and self- contained, with her eyes fixed on the frayed rim of the rebel’s straw hat which he still kept on his head. Then she said quietly:—
“Take off your hat, sir.”
The boy did not move.
“He can’t,” said a voice cheerfully.
It was the new assistant. The whole school faced rapidly towards him. The rebel leader and his followers, who had not noticed him before, stared at the interrupter, who did not, however, seem to exhibit any of the authority of office, but rather the comment and criticism of one of themselves. “Wot you mean?” asked the boy indignantly.
“I mean you can’t take off your hat because you’ve got some things stowed away in it you don’t want seen,” said Twing, with an immovable face.
“Wot things?” exclaimed the boy angrily. Then suddenly recollecting himself, he added, “Go along! You can’t fool me! Think you’ll make me take off my hat—don’t you?”
“Well,” said Twing, advancing to the side of the rebel, “look here then!” With a dexterous movement and a slight struggle from the boy, he lifted the hat. A half-dozen apples, a bird’s nest, two birds’ eggs, and a fluttering half-fledged bird fell from it. A wave of delight and astonishment ran along the benches, a blank look of hopeless bewilderment settled upon the boy’s face, and the gravity of the situation disappeared forever in the irrepressible burst of laughter, in which even his brother rebels joined. The smallest child who had been half-frightened, half-fascinated by the bold, bad, heroic attitude of the mutineer, was quick to see the ridiculousness of that figure crowned with cheap schoolboy plunder. The eloquent protest of his wrongs was lost in the ludicrous appearance of the protester. Even Mrs. Martin felt that nothing she could say at that moment could lift the rebellion into seriousness again. But Twing was evidently not satisfied.
“Beg Mrs. Martin’s pardon, and say you were foolin’ with the boys,” he said in a low voice.
The discomfited rebel hesitated.
“Say it, or I’ll show what you’ve got in your pockets!” said Twing in a terribly significant aside.
The boy mumbled an apology to Mrs. Martin, scrambled in a blank, hopeless way to his seat, and the brief rebellion ignominiously ended. But two things struck Mrs. Martin as peculiar. She overheard the culprit say, with bated breath and evident sincerity, to his comrades: “Hadn’t nothing in my hat, anyway!” and one of the infant class was heard to complain, in a deeply-injured way, that the bird’s nest was his, and had been “stoled” from his desk. And there still remained the fact for which Twing’s undoubted fascination over the children had somewhat prepared her—that at recess the malcontents—one and all—seemed to have forgiven the man who had overcome them, and gathered round him with unmistakable interest. All this, however, did not blind her to the serious intent of the rebellion, or of Twing’s unaccountable assumption of her prerogative. While he was still romping with the children she called him in.
“I must remind you,” she said, with a slight nervous asperity, “that this outrageous conduct of Tom Hardee was evidently deliberated and prepared by the others, and cannot end in this way.”
He looked at her with a face so exasperatingly expressionless that she could have slapped it as if it had belonged to one of the older scholars, and said,—“But it has ended. It’s a dead frost.”
“I don’t know what you mean; and I must remind you also that in this school we neither teach nor learn slang.”
His immobile face changed for an instant to a look of such decided admiration that she felt her color rise; but he wiped his expression away with his hand as if it had been some artificial make-up, and said awkwardly, but earnestly:—
“Excuse me—won’t you? But, look here, Mrs. Martin, I found out early this morning, when I was squaring myself with the other children, that there was this row hangin’ on—in fact, that there was a sort of idea that Pike County wasn’t having a fair show—excuse me—in the running of the school, and that Peaseley and Barstow were a little too much on in every scene. In fact, you see, it was just what Tom said.”
“This is insufferable,” said Mrs. Martin, her eyes growing darker as her cheeks grew red. “They shall go home to their parents, and tell them from me”—
“That they’re all mistaken—excuse me—but that’s just what they’re goin’ to do. I tell you, Mrs. Martin, their little game’s busted—I beg pardon—but it’s all over. You’ll have no more trouble with them.”
“And you think that just because you found Tom had something in his hat, and exposed him?” said Mrs. Martin scornfully.
“Tom hadn’t anything in his hat,” said Twing, wiping his mouth slowly.
“Nothing?” repeated Mrs. Martin.
“No.”
“But I saw you take the things out.”
“That was only a trick! He had nothing except what I had up my sleeve, and forced on him. He knew it, and that frightened him, and made him look like a fool, and so bursted up his conspiracy. There’s nothin’ boys are more afraid of than ridicule, or the man or boy that make ’em ridiculous.”
“I won’t ask you if you call this fair to the boy, Mr. Twing?” said Mrs. Martin hotly; “but is this your idea of discipline?”
“I call it fair, because Tom knew it was some kind of a trick, and wasn’t deceived. I call it discipline if it made him do what was right afterwards, and makes him afraid or unwilling to do anything to offend me or you again. He likes me none the worse for giving him a chance of being laughed out of a thing instead of being driven out of it. And,” he added, with awkward earnestness, “if you’ll just leave all this to me, and only consider me here to take this sort of work which ain’t a lady’s—off your hands, we’ll just strike our own line between the Peaseleys and Pike County—and run this school in spite of both.”
A little mollified, a good deal puzzled, and perhaps more influenced by the man’s manner than she had imagined, Mrs. Martin said nothing, but let the day pass without dismissing the offenders. And on returning home that evening she was considerably surprised to receive her landlady’s extravagant congratulations on the advent of her new assistant. “And they do say, Mrs. Martin,” continued that lady enthusiastically, “that your just setting your foot down square on that Peaseley and that Barstow, both of ’em—and choosing your own assistant yourself—a plain young fellow with no frills and fancies, but one that you could set about making all the changes you like, was just the biggest thing you ever did for Pine Clearing.”
“And—they—consider him quite—competent?” said Mrs. Martin, with timid color and hesitating audacity.
“Competent! You ask my Johnny.”
Nevertheless, Mrs. Martin was somewhat formally early at the schoolhouse the next morning. “Perhaps,” she said, with an odd mixture of dignity and timidity, “we’d better, before school commences, go over the lessons for the day.”
“I have,” he said quickly. “I told you one rehearsal was enough for me.”
“You mean you have looked over them?”
“Got ’em by heart. Letter perfect. Want to hear me? Listen.”
She did. He had actually committed to memory, and without a lapse, the entire text of rules, questions, answers, and examples of the lessons for the day.