The Opening Door

HAVE you ever paused, on the way to school, to snuggle your bare toes into the soft warm dust at the side of the lane, or slipped under a forbidden gate to shake down a Northern Spy from a forbidden apple tree? Have you ever wound your long woolen tippet about your throat, buckled on your red-lined overshoes, pulled down your cap, drawn on your red mittens, and ploughed through the fresh-crusted drifts between your house and the schoolhouse, or beaten your way, half-blinded, against a driving snowstorm down an unbroken road? Have you ever, on a winter night, drawn your special chair close to the sitting-room table and absent-mindedly helped yourself to popcorn from a big blue bowl, while you studied your geography by the light of a student lamp and the warmth of a large coal-stove? Did your father have his own sleepy-hollow armchair, and your mother her black walnut rocker and overflowing mending-basket; and did she look up and smile at you above your little brother’s stocking the way ours did? Did you go to a country school in the pioneer days of the Middle West, and were your schools as primitive and your teachers as varied as ours?

Ed Bieger— no one ever called him anything else — was the first teacher that John and Sherman remember. He taught the Corners School — the first school in Brierly — in the days when Brierly was just a cluster of brown and white houses that slept through the summer sunshine at the edge of the river, or huddled together for shelter against the winter winds that swept our Illinois prairie.

The Corners School stood near the bridge, where two roads met. It was a one-story frame building, furnished with rough pine benches and tables, and heated by a ‘volcano’ stove. Mother had some doubts about it from the first; but father, who was circuit judge of the county at that time, held out strongly for the democratic institutions of these United States. A compromise was finally reached by Tryphena’s being taught at home, while John and Sherman were entrusted to the tender care of Ed Bieger.

Ed was a large, blue-eyed, gentlemannered man, of the type usually described in Brierly as ‘ fleshy.’ He taught the Corners School for thirty-five dollars a month ‘and board himself,’ performing the triple offices of teacher, janitor, and fireman, though he received some assistance in the last two lines of activity from John and Sherman each in his own fashion. John swept out the school building, daily, for twentyfive cents a week. Sherman once climbed the hickory tree that stood in the playground, dropped to the roof of the school, and stuffed his coat down the chimney, in the fair hope that a holiday would be declared.

His disillusionment was sudden and complete. He found that getting up was easier than getting down; and while he straddled the ridgepole in indecision of spirit, the schoolhouse filled with smoke. Ed quickly sought the purer air of out-of-doors, and the children came after him, to act as an interested audience during the little scene that followed.

There was no graduation from the Corners School. Ed’s pupils attended until they were needed at home. They used any textbook that, happened to be in the family, ‘went through’ it, and began another. There was no attempt to divide the school by grades. And yet, in spite of these haphazard methods, Ed had the real teacher’s gift. He opened doors for those boys and girls, and they looked through them beyond the Brierly horizon. Geography, as he taught it, was no dusty succession of flat, pale-colored maps and uninteresting paragraphs, but a wonder-tale of snow-capped mountains, green valleys, and burning deserts, of great winds and tossing waves, of white-winged ships and slowly winding caravans.

In winter, when he was stimulated by the presence of the older boys and the biting northeasters, the atmosphere of that school was satisfactory even to mother. But in summer, things were different. The school dwindled to a mere handful of younger children. The sun beat down on the frame schoolhouse. The river slipped past its door, talking softly to itself. The big hickory tree rustled in the south wind. Bees droned past the windows, and the air was full of the smell of clover.

I have mentioned that Ed was portly, good-natured, and — usually — mild. Such temperaments require a maximum of repose in warm weat her. At the morning recess, it was his custom to go out with the children, lie down on the bank of the stream under the hickory tree, and fall asleep with a red cotton handkerchief over his face. The children gently withdrew, and played quietly at some distance. John and Sherman slipped away in the direction of the swimming-hole. The recess prolonged itself from fifteen minutes to half an hour — an hour — sometimes two. Ed frequently slept until noon.

It seemed to the children a singularly happy arrangement; and by common, though unspoken, agreement they refrained from mentioning it at home. But a day of reckoning arrived — a perfect summer day, when Toby Schwartz, a black-haired former pupil of Ed’s, with a devil of mischief in his eye, came rowing down the river and rested on his oars beside the Corners School, to watch the maestro peacefully slumbering while his disciples played.

The previous winter Toby had been whipped, before the school, for answering, ‘Ham and eggs!’ when Ed said, ‘Order, please!' No doubt a memory of that day lingered in Toby’s mind, as he climbed the bank and gently but strongly tied the painter of his boat around Ed’s left ankle. A strong pull at the oars, and the horrified children saw Ed sitting up suddenly, — clutching grotesquely at the red cotton handkerchief,— sliding, slipping, and landing in the river with a tremendous splash.

Ed’s career as a teacher in Brierly ended here. Indignantly he shook the dust of our village and the water of its river from his heels, and left us for parts unknown. This seemed an auspicious moment for a change in the educational environment of Sherman and John. Tryphena had been taught at home for two years, and Frances and I were now ready for some regular instruction. Mother enrolled all five of us, that autumn, in Miss Fowles’s private school.

The opening of this institution of learning — held, by the way, in the second story of Miss Fowles’s home — marked the beginnings of a social system in Brierly; and, from that time on, the cleavage was sharp and distinct. All the ‘ nicer people ’ sent their children to Miss Fowles — a typical maiden lady of great refinement, and quiet dignity. Tryphena took to her at once, although Sherman and John, inured to the bracing atmosphere of the Corners School, adapted themselves with difficulty to some of her frills. There was a ‘calisthenics class for young ladies’ which was felt to be a distinct innovation and was perhaps the first systematized physical culture for girls in this part of the state. The kniekerbocker girl of to-day would dissolve in derisive mirth at the sight of that ring of young ladies bending, balancing, and swaying on their heels and toes, carefully lifting their skirts a few inches each time they raised a foot, while Miss Fowles primly enunciated ' One, tue. One, tue.’>

We also studied elocution. I remember hearing father tell mother, after visiting the elocution class, that when he had heard twelve children recite, in pleading tones, ‘ Give me three grains of corn, Mother! Only three grains of corn! ’T will keep the little life I have till the coming of the morn!’ he felt himself transported to the famine districts of India. Another great favorite was, ‘Woodman, spare that tree!’ — and here we used ‘chest tones.’

But not all our time was devoted to these gentler arts. John and Sherman studied Latin with Miss Fowles, and Tryphena began French, much to mother’s quiet, satisfaction, for she always encouraged us to learn new languages. ‘ It opens another door,’ she used to say.

We went for three years to Miss Fowles’s school. Then, to the amazement of all of us, this demure little lady, who seemed divinely suited to a life of single blessedness and the gentle bending of small intellectual twigs, married a burly German farmer from Bloomingdale and rode smilingly away with him in his two-horse wagon. Mr. Skinner, from Indiana, took her place.

He was the tallest, narrowest, and chilliest man I ever knew. He had gray hair, gray eyes, and a gray army shawl which he folded diagonally and wrapped about his shoulders in almost all weathers. He went on with the boys’ Latin, but Tryphena’s French had to be abandoned, to mother’s disappointment. I shall always remember that Mr. Skinner opened the door of English history to me — a country of hitherto unknown delights, where I was instantly at home. Tryphena might have her irregular verbs and the boys their Gallic Wars — I was always three or four chapters ahead of the history class and impatient of their slowness, although God’s own fool when it came to fractions and decimals.

Arthur, Edward, and Caroline began school during Mr. Skinner’s dynasty. They were his primer class, and he was very lenient with them — merely saying, when he caught them eating apples behind their table-desk, ‘Children, kindly throw your chan kings out of the window.’

There were seven of us now to do lessons at night around the sitting-room table, and lessons presently took on a new significance, for Mr. Skinner developed a chronic cough and went back to Indiana, and that fall the ‘Academy’ opened.

It was the first graded school in Brierly — a square, two-story stone building, west of the town, with plastered walls, cinder playgrounds, and a stove in every room. There was a primary department for Gerald and Charley, a high-school division for Sherman, John, and Tryphena. There was Greek as well as Latin, and German in addition to French, and, best of all, there was Mr. Addington, — tall, clean-shaven, romantically good to look at, — the nicest thing in teachers that had ever happened to Brierly.

Richard Addington was one of those rare teachers who are called to their work as men are called to the ministry. He was full of infectious enthusiasm. The boys admired him, the girls adored him, and the whole school took his word for law. He had charge of the high-school work, but he superintended the reading of the whole school. English literature was his hobby. He taught all Bricrly to read, and to read well. Under his care even Arthur, the sensitive, shy dreamer, bloomed into a public speaker and recited ‘Sheridan’s Ride’ at a Friday-afternoon entertainment, with such vigor and abandon that I heard, from behind me, the awe-struck whispered comment of a little Dutch boy: ‘My, did n’t he holler, though!’

One by one, Tryphena, John, and Sherman attained the high-school department, passed beyond it, and out through the Academy gates: Sherman to college, Tryphena to teach, and John to read law in father’s office. The rest of us rose steadily toward those heights, and mother’s contentment about us knew no bounds. Her dreams for our education were being realized, and our occasional lapses never worried her.

There were dark days and bright ones — but one of the brightest was the day that Caroline came home, at the mature age of twelve, and announced that Air. Addington had said she might study Greek. The Greek class was Richard Addington’s special pride, and the goal toward which every masculine heart in the Academy was set. Caroline’s joy and pride were difficult to describe; as was the blackness of her disappointment when John, who had somewhat unnecessarily taken upon himself much of the responsibility for the proper bringing up of his younger brothers and sisters, set his foot down determinedly. Greek, he said, was no language for a girl. Let Caroline learn French, as Tryphena had done, or study German with Frances.

There was a stormy interview in which father rather inclined to John’s view, mother maintained a judicial calm, and Caroline argued and wept. John departed at length, feeling that he had won his point; father had long since left for the court-house; and Caroline turned to mother. ‘I thought you’d be pleased,’ she sobbed, ‘and you never said a word! Don’t you want me to study Greek?’

‘Of course I do,’ comforted mother; ‘and so you shall.’ And she gave Caroline the money to buy a Greek grammar, but enjoined her to silence.

‘Study and wait,’ she said, smiling, ‘and don’t talk about it. John has some very-young-man’s thoughts just now about the things that are proper for women-folks to do. Besides, he’s quick-tempered. Have n’t I told you you must “Speak him canny, speak him fair, stroke him gentle, with the hair?”’

‘He might stroke me gentle, sometimes,’ murmured Caroline. But she went her way in secret, though burdened with such a sense of guilt, that she always studied her Greek on the top flight of steps leading up to the attic.

It was here that John almost fell over her as he raced up the attic stairs to get something from an old trunk, one afternoon when, by all precedent, he should have been at the law office. And it was here that she faced him, and t ranslated a difficult passage so well, that his wrath was changed to admiration and he sat down on the attic steps with an arm across her shoulder, and went on with the next page — and the next.

From that evening on, when we drew lip to the sitting-room table with our books and papers, John’s chair was next to Caroline’s — his brown head and her taffy-colored one bent close together in the lamplight, while he helped her with her Greek; and mother smiled at them across her mending basket.