Henry Koehler, Misogynist

“IT is already eight-thirty. The school will now come to order.”

The Millerstown school children of the grammar grade went noisily to their seats. Outside, the rain was turning the beaten play-ground into a lake; within there was an odor of drying shawls and steaming coats. The teacher, Henry Koehler, frowned down from the little platform. He was a tall, slender young man, with a round face, cut across with a long, somewhat sparse, but carefully-tended black mustache.

“It is first of all some announcements what shall be made,” he went on, when they had settled into comparative quiet. “But Ellie Shindler shall first put her desk lid down and listen once.”

A desk lid in the last row was speedily lowered. From behind it appeared a round and smiling face, and a mop of brown curls.

“First, is it any one a Geography short ? ”

A lifted hand followed the smile and the curls.

“Please, teacher, I can’t find my Geography since yesterday.”

“Well, then, come and get it, and don’t leave it any more where it don’t belong. It is no place for the scholars’ geographies on the teacher’s desk.”

The girl complied with disarming speed and gentleness.

“All right, teacher,” she answered sweetly, as she went back to her desk.

“And you don’t need to say anything back. It is yet another announcement what shall be made. It shall be no more sewing done in school at recess. Recess is not meant for sewing.”

The school turned itself as one man to look at Ellie Shindler, who was the only needlewoman among them. They admired inexpressibly the pair of pillow shams at which she worked whenever the teacher’s eye was not upon her.

“We won’t have this morning any opening exercises,” the master went on. “The A Class made yesterday such poor marks in Arithmetic that they will now take the lesson over. A Class step out.”

The A Class gathered up its Arithmetic and slate and arose. It was composed of one girl, Ellie Shindler. The school giggled.

“Where are then Ollie Kuhns and Billy Knerr?” demanded the teacher.

“Ollie, he is sick,” answered Ollie’s little sister. “He has it so bad in his head. Billy Knerr, he threw him yesterday with a ball. But he did n’t do it purpose.”

“Where is Billy Knerr?”

“Billy is by my gran’pop,” vouchsafed Sarah Knerr.

“All right.” The teacher’s tone became savage. “Ellie Shindler can go to the board, and work Example Three, on page one hundred and one.”

Ellie copied the problem carefully on the blackboard. Then she set out row after row of neat figures. The teacher watched her, frowning. For all her multiplying and dividing she did not seem to arrive at the answer.

“ Ellie Shindler,” he said presently, “what is the matter that you do not get sooner that example?”

“It is something that I do not understand, teacher.”

“What is it?”

“Why do we here at this place—” Ellie’s hand indicated one process of the problem — “why do we here at this place multiply by 3.1416?”

“Because I tell you.”

“But why do we?” Ellie’s tone was respectful but insistent.

“Why! why!” he repeated angrily. “I am sick of this ‘ whying.’ Why is your name Ellie ? Because it is. Why do we multiply by 3.1416? Because it shall be multiplied by 3.1416. Because the book says it and I say it.”

Ellie turned meekly to the board. At the end of the twenty minutes allotted to the opening exercises she seemed no nearer a solution.

“It won’t get right, teacher,” she said cheerfully.

“All right,” he answered grimly. “ You can stay in after school — no — ” he hastily, almost fearfully corrected himself. “You can work it out at home, and copy it ten times on your slate, and you can bring it in the morning to the school. Now we will have the A Class spelling.”

The A Class left the board, went to her seat, and slate and pencil in hand, went back to the front of the room.

“Return.” The A Class wrote diligently. This was the one subject in the grammar school curriculum in which the present A Class never failed.

“ Oblige. — Rescue. — Student. — Various. — Vinous.— Dictionary. —Testament.— Tier. — Now, A Class, read once how you spell these words.”

“R-e, re, t-u-r-n, turn; return,” she spelled, and so down the line until she reached “t-e-a-r.”

“Wrong. It is ten words and one wrong. It gives ninety for a mark.”

“But, teacher, what is wrong?”

“Tear is wrong.”

“But it is t-e-a-r, tear.”

“Not the kind of tier what I am talking from. They have t-e-a-r in the primary school. This is t-i-e-r.”

Ellie rose slowly.

“Look out that it don’t give t-e-a-r in the grammar school, too,” he remarked sententiously.

Ellie turned and looked at him, her lips quivering. Then she walked down the aisle, while the children smiled up at her as they would not have dared to smile at the oldest girl in school if she were in tears. The teacher caught their grimaces.

“Ellie Shindler! ” he said sharply.

Ellie turned. Her lips were still quivering.

“Go to your seat.”

“Yes, teacher,” she answered meekly.

“The B Class spelling.”

The small boys of the B Class stamped noisily out, a train of pencil boxes and books, twitched from the desks of the C Class, falling behind them. They looked half fearfully at the master, then smilingly back at Ellie Shindler. The master, however, ignored the noise and confusion. It was not the fault of the small boys that they did not behave. It was Ellie Shindler who excited them to riot. He had had no trouble with them, until, late in the fall term, Ellie had decided that she would return to school. He had not wanted her. For one thing he hated all women. His exceedingly limited conception of their usefulness had been partly inherited from his father, who had tried three wives and had found all of them wanting, and partly induced by the fact that he saw his patrimony constantly jeopardized by an increasing number of heirs, all of them girls.

“It is girls, girls, girls,” he would say. “ It makes me sick. I can no more have any peace. It is big girls on the front porch with beaux, and little girls on the back porch fighting. I hire them out, that is what I do, when I was Pop, or I put them in the factory.”

“Why don’t you get married and go off ? ” queried Ollie Kuhns, the elder, in whom he confided his woes.

“Get married! To a woman! Well, I guess not! Am I not already wild from these women ? Shall I yet tie myself to one so I cannot get away ? Shall I then fix myself, so when I want to go in the evening off, I must say, ‘ Dare I go ? ’ or everywhere I go, must I have a woman along ? I guess not! ”

“But you would then only have one instead of — how many is it at your house ? ”

“It is ten, counting Mom. And I can’t stand it. I go to the hotel and board.”

“To the hotel! When you could live easy at home!” Ollie’s economical soul was shocked almost beyond expression.

“Yes, I cannot stand any more these women.”

“But it would be cheaper to get married. It is plenty nice girls. ”

“ Who ? ” demanded Henry, with scorn.

“Ay, Mary Kuhns.”

“She is me too stuck up.”

“Well, Jovina Neuweiler.”

“She! I guess not. She is ugly. They are not many good-looking ones.”

“Well, Linnie Kurtz. Perhaps you could cut Jimmie Weygandt out with Linnie.”

“He may have her. I don’t want her.”

Had Ollie Kuhns been more clever, he might have detected in Henry’s vehement tones a certain bitterness. Once, five years before, he had paid court to Mary Kuhns, and she, of the many lovers, had declined him so soon and so firmly, that the mere mention of her name hurt him. No, he hated them all, and especially Ellie Shindler. She was seventeen years old, and the Millerstown girls seldom went to school after they were fifteen. No one knew why she continued, except herself, and she would not tell.

“She is plenty big enough to work in the factory,” said her teacher. “She don’t study nothing. When I was her Pop I settle her!”

Her Pop, however, did not receive pleasantly this advice. Some one reported to him Henry’s remarks, and he took occasion to meet him the next day in front of the post-office.

“I pay my taxes,” he said succinctly. “You get always your pay. My Ellie can go in the school till she is fifty years old, and you dass n’t say nothing. You learn her, that is all.”

Ellie, however, would not be “learned.” She took her sewing to school, and accomplished wonders behind her desk-lid during school hours, and at recess. She joined in the fun of the smaller children at his expense, she incited them to all kinds of mischief, she set them constantly a bad example, she reminded him every hour of the ewig weibliche, which he was sacrificing his hard-earned money to escape. Sometimes it seemed to him that it was she, and not his nine little step-sisters, who kept him in his miserable little room in the hotel, where the fare was bad, and the company worse, but where, at least, there were no women. Moreover — and all her other faults paled into insignificance before this crime — she was able to exert a curious influence over him. There were times when he felt himself staring at her curly head with such fixedness that he could not take his eyes away, even though he knew that in a minute the curly head would be lifted, and a smiling gaze meet his own. When she came up to the desk to hand him a book, she looked at him out of the corner of her eye in a way that made him send her savagely to her seat. He could endure her mischief, her defiance, but he could not endure her smiles. It was bad enough that she should be always smiling at Jim Weygandt and Al Mattern when she met them on the street. They liked it and encouraged it. But that she should dream for one instant that he could be affected. It was insulting!

To-day it seemed as though she were “verhext” (bewitched). She had brought some candy, with which she treated the children on the last row. She failed in every lesson, and seemed dead to any sense of shame.

“What two kinds picks is it?” he asked, in a vain effort to have her distinguish between the verb and the noun.

Ellie studied the wall back of the teacher’s head. From window to window ran the legend, “Everybody must talk English here.” Then her eyes fell to the level of his necktie.

“It is three kinds picks,” she answered slowly. “It is p-i-c-k, to pick up, and p-i-c-k, to pick with, and p-i-g, one what grunts.”

The teacher glared.

“I mean p-i-c-k, spelling, not pronouncing. What is now the definition of a noun and a verb?”

Ellie shook her head. Thus the eyes of Psyche might have widened at the same question.

“I don’t know, teacher.”

“Is it anything you do know?” he demanded. “Am I to waste all my time teaching you when you won’t learn nothing?”

Ellie answered him with a slow smile.

“Go to your seat,” he commanded.

He did not remember that the scholars had ever been so unruly or so “dumb” as they were that morning. It seemed as though Ellie’s stupidity had set the whole school frantic with a desire to imitate her. No one knew his lessons. Little Louisa Kuhns wailed aloud when he reproved her, — which, of all demonstrations, he disliked the most.

What should he do? Ellie Shindler would not leave school, and he could have no order while she was there. He might resign and go to work in the shoe factory, but that would mean defeat for one thing, and work which he hated, for another. This morning, he could not even have the few minutes quiet at recess, for the rain continued and there was no place for the children to stay but the schoolroom. After recess things grew even worse than before. Jakie Kemerer boldly threw a wad of damp paper at the blackboard, and hit it so squarely that the teacher, standing near, felt a drop of water on his cheek. He started down the aisle, and Jakie leaped to his feet. He ran swiftly around the back of Ellie Shindler’s chair, with the teacher close behind him. Then, doubling upon his tracks, he was about to pass Ellie once more. Then he could open the door, and once without he was safe. The teacher felt his heart swell with rage. Suddenly, however, he found an ally. A plump foot shot out from beneath Ellie Shindler’s desk, and Jakie fell into the teacher’s arms, and was led to the front of the room. The children looked on indifferently while he received the punishment meted out to such as throw paper wads. The louder Jakie’s screams, the less impression they made.

“And now,” the master went on angrily, “Ellie Shindler can come up and stand in the corner, while she tripped Jakie up. It shall be no tripping up in this school.”

He scarcely knew what he said. His eyes had met her own in the moment of her coming to his defense, and he read there pity and the offer of aid. Moreover, he knew that his own eyes had responded gratefully. He hated her.

She came slowly, her lip trembling, now without any laughter lingering behind. Her shoulders drooped, she did not look at him, but went straight to the corner of the room. The children watched her, open-mouthed. Ellie Shindler obedient, subdued!

For half an hour there was peace. The C Class knew its spelling. Jakie Kemerer settled down to his books with a celerity and willingness which he had never before exhibited after a whipping. There was not a whisper. Then suddenly the master was conscious of a stir. There was a smothered giggle from one corner of the room, an open laugh from the other. The faces of the whole school were turned toward the corner where Ellie stood. What they saw there to amuse them, he did not know. She stood meekly as before, with her hands clasped before her.

After another long half-hour he rang the bell for dismission. He had had a lunch put up for him at the hotel as he often did on stormy days. There was a scramble for coats and hats, then the boys charged noisily out the door, the girls following slowly after, until only Ellie Shindler remained.

“The school was already dismissed, Ellie Shindler,” he said.

“I have my dinner by me,” she answered sweetly.

The teacher spread his dinner out on his desk at the front of the room, and Ellie spread hers out on her desk at the back.

“I have here some raisin pie,” she ventured tentatively, when the silence grew oppressive. “Will you then not have a piece ? ”

“I have also raisin pie,” he answered shortly, quite as though hotel raisin pie were not to Ellie Shindler’s raisin pie as water unto wine.

Presently Ellie put her lunch basket back in her desk, and took out her sewing. This was not recess. The teacher took from his desk a bundle of papers. He was desperately thirsty, but the water bucket stood in the corner nearest Ellie, and he would not go there for a drink. He heard her humming softly, and was irritably and angrily conscious of a desire to watch her. Then suddenly it occurred to him to make an appeal to her to leave. Nothing could hurt his pride so much, but he had tried everything else.

“Ellie,” he began, “why do you come in the school?”

“To learn,” she answered.

“Well, then, why don’t you learn?”

“ I do, some. But I am pretty dumb.”

She smiled at him, and closed one eye while she tried to thread her needle. Failing, she drew the thread between her lips and tried again. The dimples which the process induced did not escape the teacher’s eye.

“I wish you would stay away from the school.”

Ellie dropped her sewing into her lap and looked at him.

“Yes, I mean it. I don’t want you in the school. I can’t keep school when you are here. You are a — a nuisance. You are all the time making trouble. The children will not behave. I wish— ”

“But, teacher, I will —”

“And I don’t want no ‘teachering.’ I mean now what I say.”

“Do you mean I should go now?”

“Yes, now, this minute.”

Ellie rose slowly and folded her sewing. Then she took her books out of her desk and piled them neatly on the lid, and put the piece of raisin pie which the teacher had declined, and which she meant to save for the afternoon recess, back into the basket. She walked slowly toward the cupboard where the shawls and sunbonnets were kept, and vanished within. Then silence fell. The teacher almost held his breath. Why had he suffered so long, when all his troubles might have been so easily ended ? He would strap her books together for her. But why did she not come out of the cupboard and start home ? The children would soon return, and he wanted her to be gone.

“Ellie Shindler!” he said.

There was no response, and he called again, “Ellie Shindler! ” Still she did not answer. The cupboard opened only into the schoolroom. She must be there. He walked slowly down the room.

“Why don’t you answer?” he said. “I said you should go. Now—”

The teacher paused. Ellie stood just inside the door. Her sunbonnet hid her face, and her shawl was wrapped closely about her.

“What is then wrong that you don’t go?”

Ellie’s shoulders moved up and down.

“I don’t want to go,” she said. “I — ach,— I don’t — I don’t want to go!”

“Ellie — ” the teacher paused again. He had flushed scarlet, and there was an uneasy expression on his face. He must not forget that he hated her, that he hated all women. All women cried. His sisters, big and little, cried when they could not have what they wanted. Nothing made him more angry than to see a woman cry, unless it was to see her get what she cried for. What did she want ? Could it be —

“ Ellie Shindler — ” he laid his hand on her shoulder. He felt it tremble, and a strange and unaccountable emotion suddenly took possession of him. He pushed back her sunbonnet and kissed her. She drew herself gently away.

“You scold me and want me to go,” she said in a choked voice. “And then you act like this. It is not right. It — ”

“Wait once.” He stood with his hand pressed against his forehead. Had he gone mad ? If Ellie Shindler told her father that he had kissed her, the school would not be his for a day. Who would believe him if he said that she had cried and made eyes at him, that she had led him on, him who understood all their tricks so thoroughly?

“Are you going to tell ? ” he demanded.

“I tell! Did you think — did you think I would tell ? Ach, I will go home, I will go home!”

“Wait once.” His hand was on her wrist, hurting her. He could not think. He had never been so near a woman before. Something seemed to sweep him out of himself, but even in the midst of his confusion of mind, he remembered that he had been brutal to her, and that, in spite of it, she cried at going. She stood passive in his grasp, and Mary Kuhns had not even let him touch her hand. “I — I — ” he faltered. “Don’t cry, Ellie.” Her grief seemed suddenly a sacred thing. Then he drew a long breath. “I will marry you.”

Ellie looked up at him. She put one tight-closed hand against her lips.

“Perhaps it is only that you shall not have me any more in the school,” she said. “Perhaps it is only that you are afraid I will tell my Pop.”

The teacher put his arm across her shoulders.

“I don’t know what it is,” he said, half angrily.

“Perhaps you did not mean it.” Her voice trembled. Neither did she know why she liked him better than Jimmie Weygandt and Al Mattern and all the rest.

For answer he kissed her again. Then, suddenly, he saw that she was smiling. She looked as though she had always been smiling.

“For why are you laughing ?” he said roughly. “You are forever laughing.”

“I? Laughing?” Her broken, indignant voice denied the accusation to which her shameless eyes confessed.

“Yes, you. I — I —”

The disgrace of his capitulation swept over him. The word on his lips was almost “hate.”

“You what?” From the circle of his loosening arm, Ellie looked up at him. Again her lip trembled.

“I love you,” he finished weakly.