Annie Pike Greenwood

by We Sagebrush Folks

  I might have gone on down through that poverty to my grave, and my children...what would have become of them?—if it had not been for Walter. There was an attractive girl in the Hazelton High School whom Walter liked as he had never liked any girl before. There was also a foolish young girl teacher, a graduate of a good college, who had not yet learned to confess that she did not know everything. Why should one know everything? God needs no understudy.

  It happened that there sprang up a fierce antagonism between the young girl teacher and the young girl Walter liked. The teacher was no doubt an unusually bright girl, but her judgment was poor, and she overestimated the power of the institution from which she had graduated to strike awe among the high-school students she was teaching. Gradually all her classes were on terms of rebellion with her.

  Caroline, so I shall call the young girl Walter liked, was influential in turning Walter against the teacher, but this antipathy was more than fostered by the foolishness of the teacher herself. Walter was not the only boy liking Caroline. She had half a dozen other admirers. Among these was Red, a boy for whom she finally showed open scorn. Hell hath no hate like love to madness turned in anybody, man or woman.

  One day, as the school wagon passed Caroline, walking beside her bicycle, Red said, “There goes that——” The epithet was vile. Walter immediately struck him on the jaw. Then the fight began which ended with broken ribs for Walter, crushed backward, as he was, against the driver’s seat. It was suspended on the plea of the driver that the boys wait till they reached the Greenwood school-house, where they could fight it out.

  On the grounds of the school-house, in the presence of the fathers of both boys, eighteen-year-old Red and sixteen-year-old Walter fairly flayed each other, closing each other’s eyes and doing other damage. The principal of the Hazelton High School sent for the boys. They were not presentable for a week. At the end of that time they went to him, Red with a well-coached witness. Before Walter could utter a word, Red told the principal that Walter had called the foolish young teacher that vile name which Red had flung at Caroline, whereupon he had hit Walter on the jaw, and the fight was on. Walter quietly denied this version, but Red’s statement had been corroborated by his friend, and the principal preferred to believe them.

  Charley had scolded Walter for his low grades under this teacher, grades common to the rest of her classes, and I had challenged the Baron to stop scolding and do something. That had made him turn Walter over to me, since I was always advising and therefore should know how to act. I did. When Walter came home with his story about Red’s stratagem, I took my boy out of high school. There was no law compelling attendance, so I was entirely within my rights.

  Walter began to work with passionate interest on his boy-made radio. There was friction between him and his father about work hours and late radio hours at night, for the boy-made set would not bring much in until after eleven o’clock. Then came what happens so frequently because of misunderstandings between father and son: Walter decided to run away, he and a good-natured farm boy whose father was likewise having trouble with him—the ordinary sort of trouble so very common between adolescent lads and their fathers.

  I knew of the run-away plot only an hour before the time set for their going. I knew that if I opposed or informed, I might never learn what had become of the boys; and if they were compelled to remain, it was undoubtedly only a question of time until they would slip away without telling me, that time perhaps forever. I did not feel that I could risk such a thing, so I packed an enormous lunch for Walter, had him bring me the shoe-blacking and a piece of beaver board, and I myself printed with the blacking on the beaver board,

  GOING AROUND THE WORLD!

  This legend I strapped on the side of his old straw suitcase. It seemed to me that it ought to get him some car-rides from folks as foolishly imaginative as his mother.

  He was gone, and the Baron was upbraiding me for not letting him know, and I was lying stark awake, wondering where my beloved boy might be that night. I slept scarcely at all until I heard he was safe with a good Christian Science family, owners of a music-store, in Rocky Ford, Colorado. In between the time he had left me and his succor by those good people, he had been in a railroad wreck, caused by a flood, which nearly drowned everybody on the train—particularly the freight-car riders, one of whom was my sixteen-year-old boy. At Colorado Springs he was about to be placed under arrest for the murder of a man found dead in a box-car. When he said his name was Greenwood and that he had an uncle in Colorado Springs, the police wanted to test the truth of his story by taking him before my brother-in-law Ed, and Walter was much agitated, fearing that the incident would be disgraceful to his uncle, a prominent man of that place. Luckily for Walter, though unluckily for the poor wretch, the real murderer was discovered just then, and Walter was allowed to go.

  At the time I took Walter out of school, my peace of mind began to be greatly disturbed. What was I to do with him? Was this to be the end of his education—fourth year high school, and not yet graduated? What would happen to a boy with his fine brain and no education? That seemed a terrible fate to me, for I have never known a human being more eaten up with ambition than I am, and not to have been able to learn would for me have been deep tragedy.

  I decided to go out and teach, the profession I disliked—and still do dislike, though not teaching in and of itself; I am now a pretty good teacher of the things I know enough to teach, but I can never teach in any school or college, for I do not believe in teaching in the manner it is now done. I tried in every way I knew to get a job, yet I might have failed but for my good friend Mrs. Sullivan, who had named the Greenwood School District after me. It was she who obtained for me, through her recommendations, the post of head of the history and English departments of the Acequia High School, a rural institution depending principally for its support on children outside the district, called “paying students.”

  When Walter ran away, I did not break my Acequia contract. Rhoda wanted music lessons. I would go anyhow, and she might have them. It looked, too, like a way out for the little family, and with the greatest gratitude I took it. I did everything to make myself subservient to the incoming principal, even going so far as to dub him the complimentary “Professor,” a title to which he had no right whatever. He was practically illiterate, although he could do some mathematics, having been a carpenter in his native Denmark; yet he told me he had taught school for twenty years, a matter which quite overawed me. I did not know until long afterward, when Mrs. Mead told me, that from the first moment he had tried to get me out of the school in order to put in my place another woman—a woman he had brought with him, along with his wife and two boys, the youngest, he said, adopted, though this child was his very image, in a most startling reproduction. The other woman the Professor left in Rupert; for himself and his wife and the children he rented a farm not far from the school-house.

  I have never had any trouble getting along with children and young folks, though occasionally I am on the point of beheading some adult, without, as yet, carrying this inviting project through. Yet it was not long after I began teaching—and keeping house for Rhoda and Joe and me, Charles having been left with his father on the farm—that my troubles began. Pupils became more and more insubordinate. I knew I was doing right, and I could not fathom the reason for this hostility. Then something happened, and it was this event in my life that made me know what faith can accomplish, what a momentary resting upon That Which Is can effect in a crisis.

  PROFESSOR LARSON I shall call him in this book. He deserves no anonymity, but he has a good old wife, whom I would not hurt. However, no one who lives in that part of Idaho will be deceived, nor would any one there be indignant or sorry if I used his real name. What follows is public knowledge and, as I state it, beyond dispute.

  Almost Larson’s first words were an effort to throw me out of my job. “I have a woman at Rupert,” he told the trustees, “who’s a fine teacher, and she can take Mrs. Greenw
ood’s place. I have worked with her before, and I would rather work with her now.”

  The men on the board, one a fellow-Dane, the other a very sanctimonious churcher, were in favor, as honorable men so often are, of breaking my contract and putting Larson’s woman he had brought with him to Rupert in my place. But Mrs. Mead reminded them, “Mrs. Greenwood has signed that contract, and so have we. When I first met her, Mrs. Greenwood told me of a teacher that the trustees tried to throw out at Buhl. The teacher sued them, and she went and sat on the school-house steps every day, ready to teach if they would let her, and the court awarded her a year’s salary, just the same.”

  That gave pause to the two honorable gentlemen. Lucky for me that I was inspired to tell that tale by way of entertaining the Mead-Gillespie family when they had me stay to dinner the night I came to see Mrs. Mead about the school. (I cannot forget that thirty-mile ride through the wilderness on the Gallopin’ Goose, my shoes too shabby, the waist-line of my suit too high, my ostrich feather, relic of early married prosperity, hopelessly out of style.)

  The big square school-house held all the lower grades on the ground floor. All the high school was upstairs. I had a big, draughty room, which in winter was never warm, and Larson gave me the whole of the high school to discipline while I taught my classes up in front. I could have done this successfully under normal conditions. But conditions were not normal. Larson still had hopes of ousting me, in spite of the fact that Mrs. Mead had reminded him that my Bachelor of Letters degree was what accredited the high school. He himself had nothing but a certificate for teaching, won by a county examination which any eighth-grade pupil might pass. His classes were small, and he taught them in a little, pleasant room, which was always warm.

  But I never envied him his easier life and bigger pay. I was so happy to be earning money, I who never had a piece of money in my hands except what little I could earn writing, which had been only enough to clothe me and pay my dentist’s bills and buy a few things for the children. As I said before, farming is no part-time job, nor is writing. The articles I wrote for the Atlantic Monthly and the Nation were first drafts—I could never have found time to copy them, nor money to buy paper to do it on—and they were written after days of from twelve to sixteen hours of labor. Strange that I could write at all. But, of course, others might have done it easily. I do not know. At last, however, my heart was filled with joy, there in Acequia, though I was overworking again, keeping house and teaching...and I had to write, even then. I hoped that through my efforts the little family could be lifted out of the poverty into which it had sunk.

  My school trouble came to a head through a purple-eyed boy whom I shall call Wendell Troughton. He was very often absent. Larson was having trouble with the boys, and he had an idea that Wendell would be a good one of whom to make an example, since his parents were among the least influential in the district. I had happened to come upon Wendell nailing boxes at the cheese-factory for his pocket-money. All education is not in books. It is a part of real education for a boy to earn his own pocket-money. Who doubts that a sixteen-year-old boy needs to have a little money on hand, which he himself has earned?

  When Wendell returned after one of these absences, Larson met him at the top of the stairs leading to the high-school rooms. “Did you bring your excuse?” he demanded sternly.

  “No, sir, I didn’t bring no excuse.” Wendell’s answer was quiet and courteous.

  “Why not?” shouted Larson, glaring savagely in his face. “You go straight home and get your excuse, and don’t you give me no back talk, neither.”

  Wendell navigated deliberately toward the huge black sombrero he habitually wore. He removed it from the hook carefully, as though it were precious glass. He placed it reluctantly upon his head as though it were a crown of thorns. He took down his mackinaw and proceeded to put his arms into the sleeves, as though into dens of rattlesnakes. Then he slowly drew from his pocket his white canvas gloves and inserted his hands as daintily as a maiden fitting a new pair of suedes.

  Larson stood fuming, heels flicking up and down, hands twitching, eyes like those of a vicious horse. Before the second glove could be pulled on entirely, he had seized Wendell by the shoulders and, taking him by surprise, literally threw him down the high flight of stairs. Wendell was as big as Larson and more muscular. Only the unexpectedness of the attack overcame him. As it was, after falling with astounding scuffling bumps and clatter of heavy boots, when Wendell regained his feet at the bend in the stairway, he called in defiance which could be heard throughout the building, “I’ll bring my Pa to see you, you low-down, cowardly dog!”

  “Do it!” yelled Larson. “Bring your Pa and your Ma both. I’ll show ‘em both around!”

  Immediately after school that day Larson went in his Ford to inform the officers of the law of Wendell’s incorrigibility. And after this visit those very officers revealed that Larson was doing everything in his power to put Wendell Troughton in the Reform School at St. Anthony.

  The next day after Larson’s trouble with Wendell came his encounter with charming Sterling Baker. I am not sarcastic. I use the word charming advisedly. The very thought of Sterling Baker’s winning smile makes me laugh.

  Sterling smoked. All the boys in the high school except the Italians smoked. Some of them were more successful than others in disguising the fact. At first they had smoked away from the school-house, until Larson began his crusade against cigarettes; then all of them took delight in smoking as near to the school as possible. The adventure was in the danger of being detected. Youth must have adventure. There must be risk to give piquancy to life, even if it be acquired in no more noble manner than by smoking a forbidden cigarette on forbidden ground. Out of such illicit daring is the very material for the making of legitimate heroes.

  Time and again Larson sneaked around the school grounds in order to surprise the smokers in their barn conclaves, when they gathered in the school stable-shed to mount their horses for the ride home. As his suspicious, bald-domed visage was thrust suddenly through the doorway, often a film of smoke could still be seen floating in the air, but never would there be a cigarette in a boy’s fingers. Once two cigarettes lay openly where they had been flung at sound of his step, but not a boy would admit knowing anything about the incriminating smoking white stubs lying there on the manure.

  Larson had told me that he was “laying” for Sterling Baker. “I’ve smelt it on his breath,” he informed me. “He can’t fool me. I’ll get him yet. There’s a law agin minors buying tobacco. I’ll make it hot for them as sells cigarettes to these school-boys!”

  Larson, as a reformer, was well within his rights, but reform is not popular among those who are breaking the law, nor among those who connive at the infringement. He was in the thankless position of trying to save boys from the evils of tobacco when their male parents not only smoked, but winked at the same habit in their offspring. Larson had no support whatever (except, sympathetically, from me), and his influence decreased daily. He was within his pedagogical and legal rights in his anticigarette campaign, but the damning fact began to be circulated that he never threatened a boy unless his victim was alone.

  Had Larson been an admirable man, the example of his abstention might have had its effect. Emulation of an inspiring character is the groundwork of successful reformation. My boy Walter wore his shirt-sleeves rolled to the elbows all one winter and consistently went without his coat, because one of the truly great teachers with whom he came in contact, John Wilson, last heard of in California, did those very things. Those clothes habits were only the outward indication of what was taking place in my boy’s heart and mind because of that inspiring young man—handsome, strong, normal, as he was—when he taught in the Hazelton High School. It was a sad truth that the boys of the Acequia High School hated Larson so much that the very fact of his not smoking made them want to smoke.

  “Sterling, do you smoke?” Larson accosted the lad at the head of the stairs, as he had done Wendel
l. Crafty man that he was, he had learned the strategic advantages of that position.

  Sterling dropped his eyes but did not answer.

  “Answer me! I want to know whether you smoke. Answer me!”

  Still Sterling made no reply. That should have been answer enough, the reason for his silence being so apparent that there was no need for vocal reinforcement. But Larson was one of those petty souls who insist upon the degradation of those they have accused. The boy might easily have attempted a lying defense, and Larson had not enough sensitiveness to respect Sterling for not lying. Instead, he swung his arm around and slapped Sterling in the face, pushing him toward the stairs.

  “You know you smoke!” he yelled. “You just get out of here until you can answer me.”

  The sequel to this act was not long waiting. On the following morning Mrs. Baker, Sterling’s mother, accompanied by her close friend, Mrs. Laudenslager, faced Larson at his desk.

  “Professor Larson,” said pretty Mrs. Baker, her brown eyes on his face, “I came to see you about my boy Sterling. He has been having some trouble lately with both you and Mrs. Greenwood...”

  “Did you want to see Mrs. Greenwood?” Larson hastened to interrupt.

  “Yes, I want to see Mrs. Greenwood after I have seen you. But...”

  Larson’s interrupting was again hasty. “It won’t do no good to see Mrs. Greenwood,” he said. “She is the most egotistical person in the world. You can’t get nowhere with her by talking to her. You got to...”

  Country people, who live slow-cogitating lives on the farms, can be diverted easily from their original intentions by designing persons of more foxy capacities. The adroit manœuver was Larson’s. What Mrs. Baker did within the next few minutes was as far as possible from her thoughts when she entered Larson’s classroom. She told me the whole affair later.