"For wastin" the scholars" time and gettin" their feet wet pokin" around in bogs and marshy places, a-pullin" weeds! And for what?--why, by gum, to _draw_ "em!"
His auditors chuckled.
"What," he asked, "are drawin"-books _for_?"
His fellow-citizens nodded intelligently.
"And even when she _does_ use the books," cried Mr. Samuel Shears, "she won"t let "em draw a consarned circle or cross or square, without they tell her some fool story of Michael the Angelo!"
The crowd laughed hoa.r.s.ely.
"And who _was_ Michael the Angelo?" asked Mr. Shears, s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g his face up in fine derision and stamping one foot, rabbit-like, by way of emphasis to his scorn. "Who _was_ this here Michael the Angelo?"
Four men spat and the others shuffled.
"A _Dago_!" roared Shears, and the crowd was too much relieved to do more than gurgle. "What does my son care about Michael the Angelo?"
Let.i.tia admitted, I believe, that _his_ son didn"t.
"And further_more_," said Mr. Shears, insinuatingly, "what I want to know is: why has she got them pitchers a-hanging around the school-room walls? Pitchers of Dago churches and Dago statures--and I guess _you_ know what Dago statures are--I guess you know whether they"re dressed like you and me!--I guess you fellows know all right--and if you don"t, there"s them that do. And, in conclusion, I want to ask right here: who"s a-payin" for them there decorations?"
Mr. Shears spat, the crowd spat, and they adjourned.
Now, there may have been a dozen prints relieving the ugliness and concealing the cracks in the school-room walls, but all quite innocent, as I recall them: "Socrates in the Market-Place," "The Parthenon," "The Battle of Salamis," "Christian Martyrs," a tragic moment in the arena of ancient Rome, "St. Peter"s," I suppose, "St. Mark"s by Moonlight," and of statues only one and irreproachable, the "Moses" of Michael Angelo.
His "David" was Let.i.tia"s joy, but she never dreamed, I am sure, of its exhibition in a grammar-school, though I have heard her declare (shamelessly, Mr. Shears would say) that were it not for a Puritan weakness of eyesight hereditary in Gra.s.sy Ford, that lithe Jew"s ideal figure would be a far better lesson to her boys than all the text-books in physiology.
"Might it not incite them to sling-shots?" queried Dove, softly.
"I don"t agree with you," said Let.i.tia, lost in her theme, and noting only the fact, and not the nature, of the opposition. "I don"t agree with you at all. It would teach them the beauty of manly--Why do you laugh?"
If Shears could have heard her! His information, such as it was, had been derived from his only son, a youth named David, "not by Angelo,"
Let.i.tia said, and hopelessly indolent, whose only fondness was for sticking pins into smaller boys. He was useful, however, as a barometer in which the rise or fall of his surly impudence registered the parental feeling against her rule.
Shears and his kind held that the proper study of mankind was arithmetic. What would he not have said at the corner of Main and Clingstone streets, had he known that Let.i.tia was trifling with Robinson"s Complete?--that between its lines, she was teaching (surrept.i.tiously would have been his word), an original, elementary course in ethics, a moral law of honesty, fair-dealing, and full-measure, so that all examples, however intricate, were worked out rigidly to the seventh decimal, by the Golden Rule!
Red geraniums bloomed in her school-room window, and on a corner-shelf, set so low that the children easily might have leaned upon it, lay Webster and another book--always one other; though sometimes large and sometimes small, now green, now red, now blue, now yellow, but always seeming to have been left there carelessly. Every volume bore on its fly-leaf two names--"David Buckleton Primrose," written in a bold, old-fashioned script in fading ink, and below it "Let.i.tia Primrose," in a smaller, finer but no less quaint a hand. That book, whatever its name and matter, had been left there purposely, you may be sure. Let.i.tia remembered how young Keats drank his first sweet draught of Homer and became a Greek; how little lame Walter poured over border legends to become the last of the Scottish minstrels; and how that other, that English boy, swam the h.e.l.lespont in a London street, to climb on its farther side, that flowery bank called poesy. It was her dream that among her foster-children, as she fondly called them, there might be one, perhaps, some day--some rare soul waiting rose-like for the sun, who would find it shining on her school-room shelf. So she dropped there weekly in the children"s way, as if by accident, and without a word to them unless they asked, books which had been her father"s pride or her own young world of dreams--books of all times and mental seasons, but each one chosen with her end in mind. They were beyond young years, she admitted frankly, as school years go, but when her Keats came, she would say, smiling, they would be bread-and-wine to him; milk and wild-honey they had been to her.
"Suppose," said Dove, "it should be a girl who bears away sacred fire from your shelf, Let.i.tia?"
"Yes, it might be a girl," replied the school-mistress. "Perhaps--who knows?--another "Shakespeare"s daughter"!" And yet, she added, and with the faintest color in her cheeks, knowing well that we knew her preference, she rather hoped it would be a boy.
Few could resist that book waiting by the dictionary; at least they would open it, spell out its t.i.tle-page, flutter its yellowing leaves, looking for pictures, and, disappointed, close it and turn away. But sometimes one more curious would stop to read a little, and now and then, to Let.i.tia"s joy, a lad more serious than the rest would turn inquiringly to ask the meaning of what he found there; then she would tell its story and loan the volume, hoping that Johnny Keats had come at last.
No one will ever know how many subtle lures she set to tempt her pupils into pleasant paths, but men and women in Gra.s.sy Ford today remember that it was Miss Primrose who first said this, or told them that, and while her discipline is sometimes smiled at--she was far too trusting at times, they tell me--doubtless, no one is the worse for it, since whatever evil she may have failed to nip, may be balanced now by the good of some lovely memory. Bad boys grown tall remembering their hookey-days do not forget the woman they cajoled with their forged excuses; and it is a fair question, I maintain, boldly, as one of that guilty clan, whether the one who put them on an honor they did not have, or, let us say, had mislaid temporarily--whether the recollection of Let.i.tia Primrose and her innocence is not more potent now for good than the crimes she overlooked, for evil.
Sometimes I wonder if she was half so blind as she appeared to be, for as we walked one Sabbath by the water-side, with the sun golden on the marshes, and birds and flowers and caressing breezes beguiling our steps farther and farther from the drowsy town, I remember her saying:
"It is for this my boys play truant in the spring-time. Do you wonder, Bertram?"
For the best of reasons I did not. I was thinking of how the springs came northward to Gra.s.sy Fordshire when I was a runaway; and then suddenly as we turned a bend in Troublesome, there was a splash, and two bare feet sank modestly into the troubled waters. There was a bubbling, and then a head emerged dripping from all its hairs. Young David Shears had dived in the nick of time.
III
A YOUNGER ROBIN
When our boy was born we named him Robin Weatherby, after that elder Robin who had charmed my youth. If his babyhood lacked aught of love or discipline, it was neither Dove"s fault nor Let.i.tia"s, for Robin"s mother had ideas and a book on childhood, and dear Let.i.tia did not need a book. In fact, she clashed with Dove"s. I, as physician-in-ordinary to my child--for in dire emergencies in my own family I always employ an old-fogy, rival--was naturally of some little service in consultation with the two ladies and the Book. Of the characters of these a.s.sociates of mine, I need only say that Dove was ever an anxious soul, the Book a truthful but at times a vague one, while Let.i.tia was all that could be desired as guide, philosopher, and friend. Alarming symptoms might puzzle others, but never her; they might, even to myself, even to the Book, bode any one of twenty kinds of evil; to her they pointed solely, solemnly to one--that one, alas! which had carried off some dear child of her school.
Dove, I am sure, had never been impatient with Let.i.tia, but now, such was the tension of these family conferences and such the gravity of the case involved, there were times, I noted, when the cousins addressed each other with the most exquisite and elaborate courtesy, lest either should think the other in the least disturbed. For example, there was that little affair of consolation--a sort of rubber make-believe with which young Robin curbed and soothed his appet.i.te and invited pensiveness. Microbes, Let.i.tia said, were--
Dove interposed to remind her that the things were boiled just seven--
Germs, Let.i.tia argued, were not to be trifled with.
"Just seven times a week, my dear," said Dove, triumphantly.
"And besides," Let.i.tia continued, undismayed, "they will ruin the shape of the child"s mouth."
"But how?" cried Dove. "Pray tell me how, my love, when they are made in the very identical im--"
"And modern doctors," Let.i.tia stated with some severity, "are doing away with so many foolish notions of our grandmothers."
"Yet our fathers and mothers," Dove replied, "were very fair specimens of the race, my dear. Shakespeare, doubtless, was rocked in a cradle, and his brains survived. They were quite intact, I think you will admit.
_He_ wasn"t joggled into--"
"Yet who knows what he might have written, dear love," answered Let.i.tia, "if he had been permitted to lie quite--"
"_You_ try to make a child go to sleep, my darling, without _something_!" my wife suggested. "Just try it once, my dear."
"Cradles," said Let.i.tia--but at this juncture I stepped in, authoritatively, as the father of my child. It is due to Dove, I confess gladly, and partly to Let.i.tia also, that this fatherhood has been so pleasant to look back upon. Robin"s mouth is very normal, as even Let.i.tia will admit, I know, as she would be the last person in the world to say that his brains had suffered any in the joggling. Somehow, by dint of boiling the consolation I suppose, and by what-not formulae, we got him up at last on two of the st.u.r.diest, little, round, brown legs that ever splashed in mud-puddle--Dove"s Darling, my Old Fellow, and Let.i.tia"s Love.
Love she called him in their private moments, and other names as fond, I have no doubt; publicly he was her Archer, her Bowman, her Robin Hood.
She, it was, who purchased him bow-and-arrows, and replaced for him without a murmur, three panes in the library windows and a precious little wedding vase. The latter cost her a pretty penny, but she reminded us that a boy, after all, will be a boy! She took great pride in his better marksmanship and sought a suit for him, a costume that should be traditional of archers bold.
"Have you cloth," she asked, "of the shade called Lincoln green?"
The clerk was doubtful.
"I"ll see," she said. "Oh, Mr. Peabody! Mr. Peabody!"
"Well?" asked a man"s voice hidden behind a wall of calicoes. "Well?
What is it?"
"Mr. Peabody, have we any cloth called Abraham--"