Chapter Seventeen

At first, Mathilda cried secret tears over Davey’s having to attend the county school.

She cried secret tears over pretty nearly everything these days. That was why her face seemed to wear an almost constant smile stretched across the surface of her glassy teeth.

It was as if she had erected that smile on a stick and carried it about before her face as you would a lorgnette.

They were slightly larger than the life, these artificial teeth of Mathilda’s, with a dazzling-white lifeless glaze to them, and pink-celluloid gums that had an air of detachment from the unsullied porcelains.

The girls had remonstrated for years against this blazing dentistry, and once, on one of her visits to Springfield, Rita had decoyed her mother-in-law to the office of one of the town’s most eminent dental practitioners. But it was no use. Mathilda would not so much as mount the chair.

The great strip of smile, cutting so blatantly through the lean, bony structure of her cheeks, was a barrage behind which she could cry more secretly. It hurt her so terribly for the Old Gentleman, almost as much as for Davey, considering the school taxes her husband had paid into the town of Centralia. Davey, because of the move, obliged to receive his schooling in a little one-room county structure that was no larger than a shed!

Second Ward School in Centralia, where David had enjoyed only three months of primary grade, was a three-story brick structure, as regular-looking as a biscuit-tin. Henriette Simpson taught in that school. Every Schuyler youngster had at one time or another carved initials into its desks. Second Ward School was somehow David’s right! sobbed Mathilda, bitterly, to herself. David’s right. The Old Gentleman’s right!

Of course, there would have been a way to obtain special dispensation by establishing Davey’s residence, nominally at least, with the Morton Millikens in Centralia. Mathilda was all for that. Dave could leave with Henry each morning and return with him at night. But the Old Gentleman would hear to no such arrangement. No favor of any man! His back and his head were up, so far as his habits in adversity were concerned.

Besides, with the early-morning and after-school chores that were now falling to Dave, county school, only one-half mile distant, offered advantages.

At six o’clock, as early in the spring season as March, Davey used to help Tarkington’s old black Nemo drive a herd of about sixty Tarkington cattle to pasture, and then drive them home at dusk. Winter mornings, long before the stars were gone, with a black crocheted scarf of his mother’s tied over his ears, which he removed well before coming in sight of the lantern hung in Nemo’s barn door, Dave used to lickety-split over to the Tarkington place to help Nemo mix bran.

For this he received eighty cents a week. Sickeningly often, the winter that Davey was eight, Mathilda, secretly from the Old Gentleman, who even though knowing its inevitability would have yelled about it, was obliged to accept from the boy this eighty cents every Saturday night.

He gave it so blithely and yet a little furtively. No spoken word between him and his mother, and yet guarding the transaction from his father, even as Mathilda guarded it.

“I’ll make it all right with you some day,” Mathilda was in the habit of saying to him, as the coins slipped hands.

“Make it all right!” Why, as it was, the days were packed with being all right. All-too-fleet days, for the doing of the many, many things to be crammed into them. Even the ones of rising in the chilled dusk to the light and heat of the candle stuck into the bottle, or to perhaps a bit of gleam thrown in from a last great isolated star showing through the frosted design on the window-pane.

The names of those last stars of the cold dawns were “Procyon” and “Sirius.” “Castor” had a green fire in her. There was a way, with Henry alongside, to figure the distance from the earth of certain constellations. They had run across an old volume of Henry’s during the move, called The Geography of the Stars, and another old text-book, Handbook of Astronomy.

When it was not too cold in the room to have an arm out from the cover, there were volumes to pore over. The Relations of the Planets. Pictures of them. There was a precision about this business of the stars, once you were able to figure it out a little for yourself. There was beauty in precision. Soldiers had precision. Stars. Funny, even Dora had precision. The way her eyes made you want to look and look, because they were set at exactly the right equidistance and were just the precise blue of perfection.

There was an array of books which Davey had routed out of the attic for himself. Canterbury Tales. David Copperfield. Around the World in Eighty Days. Black Beauty. A Condensed History of England. Peck’s Bad Boy. Golden Treasury. Forestry and Fisheries Report for the State of Maine, 1901. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Treasure Island. Essays of Elia. Franklin’s Autobiography. Æsop’s Fables. Burke on Taste. Boy’s Æneid. Voyage of the “Beagle.” Gilbert’s Voyage to Newfoundland. Don Quixote. Gil Blas. A Study of the Diseases of Chickens. Circus Tim. The Jungle Book. Hoosier Holiday. Course in Telegraphy. Jesse James—The Boy. The Red Badge of Courage. The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew, with “From Henriette to Bek, with best wishes for a Happy Birthday, June 6, 1889,” in angular script on the fly-leaf.[27]

A jungle of books picked hit-or-miss. For the lure of a title. Or because, as in the case of the Boy’s Æneid or Burke on Taste or Charles Lamb, Henry had paved the way. Or just because.

The Red Badge of Courage. Spelling out the title under its coating of dust, it came through at one so! The Red Badge of Courage. Years before he was ready to read it, that book was always lying around somewhere in his room. For a long time it propped the unsteady fourth leg of the small white-pine table. Once it was used for pressing mint-leaves and left on a window-sill all night to be rained on and warped. Motley of books, chosen for a motley of reasons or lack of them.

No, these were not days and nights to mope over, or to have Mathilda dry her eyes over. Each and every one of them was a key-hole to which you glued your eye and saw something of the great, grand, alluring tomorrow.

The schoolhouse, a one-room frame building with a fine-bellied stove on a tin mat in the center, adjoined the pasture where Davey helped old Nemo to herd the Tarkington stock. One of the fascinating aspects of the Tarkington pasture was that the city-limits imaginary line ran through its middle, cutting a salt-rock in two.

The school windows overlooked all this. There were blackboards around the four walls, and carved and whittled desks in sizes sufficiently graduated to accommodate seven grades.

Small Miss Hassebrock, who the winter that Davey was eight was beginning to sicken of a bone-disease that was to almost ossify her and keep her ridden to a slanted bed for the next eighteen years of her life, carried across her narrow shoulders the burden of that ill-equipped schoolhouse.

There was a handful of children, seven grades and first year High School entrusted to the tutelage of the gallant, ill-trained, underpaid and undersized little person who seventeen years before had graduated from the equally inadequate High School of a town called Ideola.

In the course of her seven-hour school-day, Miss Hassebrock taught two-plus-two; Ohio-is-bounded-on-the-North-by; James-Monroe’s-Administration-was-the most-serene-and-yet-one-of-the-most-important-periods-in-the-life-of-the-nation;

(2x + 3y = 8) (3x + 7y = 7);

This-is-the-forest-primeval; The-battle-of-Bunker-Hill-all-things-considered-is-the-most...; Listen-my-children-and-you-shall-hear; Friends, Romans, Countrymen; How-many-yards-of-50-inch-linoleum-are-required-to-cover-a-floor-27×34; all interspersed with drawings of geometrical cubes, spheres; rhomboids in red chalk; and antiquated relief-maps of Europe and Asia.

It meant that in that small room of graduated desks and conglomerate subjects, there was allotted to each child about twenty minutes of direct instruction out of the day. Twenty minutes of Miss Hassebrock tilting her little brain, like a spinster at the old gesture of tilting her teapot, to let trickle the stale, small array of academic facts and near-facts of the vintage of Ideola High School Normal Course, 1897.

The schoolroom squirmed with this ill-assorted conglomerate of children, waiting or dreading their turn for the trickle. The mornings were riddled by their spit-balls, hacked up by their penknives, whispered into; hissed into; scraped into by their restless feet. Often, during the drone of these days, with his mind sliding and shying away from the chief exports of the Argentine Republic and “In 1066, William the Conqueror invaded England,” David would become part of a fast and furious spit-ball barrage taking place beneath desks.

These occasions could reduce Miss Hassebrock to a state of helplessness that sent her rushing and dodging pell-mell about the room, usually ending in tears, the poor pug of her hair lopsided and every pupil in the room suddenly subsiding into a state of repentant and aboveboard beatitude.

There was something a little horribly pathetic about her, as she stood there defeated.

Once Davey, who sensed that more strongly than was comfortable for him, let a few of the spit-balls lie conspicuously in his open palm, thereby offering himself up as victim to take the edge off her somewhat disquieting defeat. But if Miss Hassebrock saw them, she did not let on. It was simpler, somehow, just to take up her pointer and indicate on the map the point where the Suez Canal becomes the north outlet of the Red Sea.

That meant the spit-ball barrages must to her seem something appallingly outside her control. As a matter of fact, she used to cry over them after school, bitterly and privately humiliated by the realization of her lack of disciplinary powers.

Davey sensing that, kept out of future spit-ball encounters rather than endure what the sight of her, standing there with her hair sliding, did to him.

There were nine pupils in all. Ross Tawkett, a great lanky sixteen-year-old fellow in the seventh grade. How he could confuse and bully and intimidate poor Miss Hassebrock with questions specifically designed to trip her up. Thus:

“Now Ross, name three of the eight planets of the solar system.”

“Mercury-Venus-Earth!”

“Excellent. That will be all, Ross.”

“No, now you name the rest of them to me, Miss Hassebrock, ’n’ then I’ll know them all eight for next lesson.”

“Why—Ross, that’s not in our today’s lesson. Be seated.”

Poor Miss Hassebrock, sufficient unto the day were the facts thereof!

Once Davey found himself in the position of prompting his teacher.

“How can Thomas Jefferson have died on July 4th, 1826, Miss Hassebrock,” sneered Ross one day, “when you just told me John Adams died that same date?”

“Why, Ross—did I? Now did I? How come? Let me see—guess I must have meant—now how come I made that mistake?”

How well Davey knew that they had both died on that date exactly fifty years after they had signed the Declaration of Independence. Henry had read him that long before he had ever entered a schoolroom.

“They both died on that same date,” mouthed David; hissed David to Miss Hassebrock behind Ross’s back. And then when she continued to regard him helplessly, held up two fingers in emphasis. “Both. Both—died. Same—day!”

“Of course,” said Miss Hassebrock, rather coldly. “It is a well-known historical fact that both Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died on the same date. David, come to order or take a demerit.” Ross was a class terror, all right.[28]

Six out of the nine pupils were primaries, besides David, who fitted into third grade because of certain precocities resulting from the long evenings with Henry, and a girl named Flora Wohlgemuth in fifth, whose father ran a flour-mill. A great flax doll, with the loveliest lips, that adenoids kept rather breathlessly apart.

Knowledge of that educational boll-weevil, the adenoid, was not part of Miss Hassebrock’s teaching-equipment. She daily instructed little Flora to keep her mouth closed, and struggled to crash the principles of long division through the two greatly enlarged adenoidal impedimenta to Flora’s alertness.

Later, still without benefit of surgery, Miss Wohlgemuth was in turn to teach school, through those same two, even more deplorably enlarged, impedimenta.

There was something about Flora’s round little smudge of a face that one day impelled David to yield to an old temptation to wash it roughly with a snowball. There was an hour after school of writing “The Good That Men Do Lives After Them” fifty times down foolscap; and Mrs. Wohlgemuth, who ran a butter-and-egg stand “at market” in Court House Square, complained to the Old Gentleman in Low German.

For it, the Old Gentleman stood David up on the edge of the kitchen table and gave him three wallops against the seat of Henry’s cut-down trousers.

It was almost a pleasantly reminiscent chastisement, recalling the satisfaction of feeling the snow squash up against Flora’s boneless-feeling little face, which had to it the feel of mashed potato.

Years later, from the vantage of a private hospital room, made possible by the annuity of her one-time pupil, Miss Hassebrock used to strain her tired old hack of a brain for anecdotes of Davey. She was too conscientious to invent, even where anecdotes would have been treasures, but as she used to say, there was just nothing to be said about Davey as a youngster, those primary-years, that could not be said of the average run of them who had shuffled their small-boy days across the routine pine floor of that schoolroom. Nothing, except the certain precocity traceable to the home-opportunity of reading with an older brother, and the intent quality he had of listening and sucking in, well in advance, the work of the classes ahead of him. And then the funny additional precocities that contact with the older man’s mind had given him. Rag-tags of odds and ends of information that clung to his mind like fuzz. At six, he had already begun to hoard books in the secret library of the spring-house.[29]

Once at Friday afternoon platform-exercises, when a small boy named Ike Mintz, the son of a dealer in old iron, began to sniffle and shuffle of inability to remember his allotted recitation, Davey volunteered with the following:

Henry frequently read this poem aloud to himself, evenings. It is doubtful if, at the time, Dave took in its meaning as much as its music. It is certain he did not know its source. Neither did Miss Hassebrock.

No, he was scarcely a memorable pupil, except for his sturdy little personality thumping in so dependably every morning. Never tardy. Seldom unruly enough for more than a passing reprimand. Seldom brilliant. Never remiss.

There is this little incident, which has to do with Teddy. All of the school-day Teddy lay in the vestibule that led into the small section where the children hung their hats and coats, or wandered the countryside of the vicinity, usually showing up at recess or lunch period for the droppings from Davey’s lunch-basket.

There was an old feud between Punt, a fox-terrier that belonged to Red Kelsoe, and Teddy.

Their masters had bitten the dust together more than once over the mangled ear or the torn flank of the conquered. Teddy was half Punt’s size, but an eye-to-eye fighter. Punt, on the other hand, had a trick of hurling himself from the rear, taking his adversary unawares. Teddy bore scars that had been inflicted by a rearward adversary.

One day, just as the children were filing out of school, a series of yelps split the tired, four-o’clock air.

Teddy’s moment had come. At the very threshold of the building, his teeth into the rear of the terrier’s neck, Teddy had Punt pinioned in the bloody dust.

Through the cries of excited children, as they formed a tight circle, the air thickening and blurring with more dust and yelps, there mingled the squeals and the high admonitive tones of Miss Hassebrock.

There was a red trail across the school-yard and with his teeth all of their depth into the terrier’s throat, Teddy was shaking him like a rat, releasing him only to prove further the glory of his sure vantage, by leaping at him for fresh clutch.

It was a one-sided struggle this time, and David had finally to pull Teddy off by the scruff of his neck, while he still leaped and yelped for more Punt-flavored blood.

It was Davey’s and Teddy’s moment, as Punt, limping, slunk off tail-down past his master, the children applauding the turning of the tables of this old feud between dogs and masters.

It was Davey’s moment all right, when Red, instead of leaping at him with his usual taunt of victory, stood grinding his toe in the dust.

Except that Davey knew what Teddy knew! Teddy had conquered his foe with his foe’s own despised methods. Teddy had leaped on Punt unawares! Davey knew, in his heart, that was the only way Teddy could ever have gained that particular first strangle-hold over an adversary twice his heft and cunning. Teddy must have leaped at Punt as he lay sleeping at the threshold, waiting for Red. It was in the half-slink of his tail, as he crept up to his master. It was in the fawning lick of his tongue. Davey knew! And Teddy knew what Davey knew, and victory was as dead-sea fruit.

And in that instant, as Davey stood looking down at his dog, and shame of shameful conquest lay in the eyes of both, the belated flash of understanding was transmuted to Red.

“You’re a dirty little sneak!” he shouted, and batted David sideways on the head, so that he saw things in waves. “He sneaked up on Punt—yer dog’s a dirty little sneak, too!”

“Red,” said Miss Hassebrock sharply, stepping forward into the ring, “that blow was a cowardly act. Either you apolog——”

“No,” said David, a little dully, “Teddy did sneak up. His winning don’t count.”

That evening, after the supper-things had been cleared, Mathilda, who had pains in her legs from having done a day’s washing in the damp Igrotte cellar, set about the unsavory task of stewing up some asafœtida in an old tomato-can.

This she sewed up into a small bag and hung about David’s protesting neck, for what she termed his right peaked look.

FOOTNOTES: