_ GRANDE POINTE CHAPTER IV. HOW THE CHILDREN RANG THE BELL
Where the fields go wild and grow into brakes, and the soil becomes fenny, on the north-western edge of Grande Pointe, a dark, slender thread of a bayou moves loiteringly north-eastward into a swamp of huge cypresses. In there it presently meets another like itself, the Bayou Tchackchou, slipping around from the little farm village's eastern end as silently as a little mother comes out of a bower where she has just put her babe to sleep. A little farther on they are joined as noiselessly by Blind River, and the united waters slip on northward through the dim, colonnaded, watery-floored, green-roofed, blue-vapored, moss-draped wilderness, till in the adjoining parish of Ascension they curve around to the east and issue into the sunny breadth of Lake Maurepas. Thus they make the Bayou des Acadiens. From Lake Maurepas one can go up Amite or Tickfaw River, or to Pass Manchac or Pontchatoula, anywhere in the world, in fact,--where a canoe can go.
On a bank of this bayou, no great way from Grande Pointe, but with the shadow of the swamp at its back and a small, bright prairie of rushes and giant reeds stretching away from the opposite shore, stood, more in the water than on the land, the palmetto-thatched fishing and hunting lodge and only home of a man who on the other side of the Atlantic you would have known for a peasant of Normandy, albeit he was born in this swamp,--the man who had tarried all day at the schoolmaster's handshaking.
What a day that had been! Once before he had witnessed a positive event. That was when, one day, he journeyed purposely to the levee of Belle Alliance, waited from morning till evening, and at last saw the steamer "Robert E. Lee" come by, and, as fortune would have it, land! loaded with cotton from the water to the hurricane deck. He had gone home resolved from that moment to save his money, and be something more than he was.
But that event had flashed before his eyes, and in a quarter-hour was gone, save in his memory. The coming of the schoolmaster, all unforeseen, had lasted a day, and he had seen it from beginning to end. All day long on 'Mian's galerie, standing now here, now there, he had got others to interpret for him, where he could not guess, the meanings of the wise and noble utterances that fell every now and then from the lips of the young soldier of learning, and stored them away in his now greedy mind.
One saying in particular, whose originality he did not dream of questioning, took profound hold of his conviction and admiration; and two or three times that evening, as his canoe glided homeward in the twilight, its one long, smooth ripple gleaming on this side and that as it widened away toward the bayou's dark banks, he rested for a moment on his tireless paddle, and softly broke the silence of the wilderness with its three simple words, so trite to our ears, so strange to his:--
"Knowledge is power."
In years he was but thirty-five; but he was a widower, and the one son who was his only child and companion would presently be fourteen.
"Claude," he said, as they rose that evening from their hard supper in the light and fumes of their small kerosene-lamp, "_I' faut z-ahler coucher._" (We must go to bed.)
"_Quofoir?_" asked the sturdy lad. (_Pourquoi?_ Why?)
"Because," replied the father in the same strange French in which he had begun, "at daybreak to-morrow, and every day thereafter, you must be in your dug-out on your way to Grande Pointe, to school. My son, you are going to learn how to read!"
So came it that, until their alphabetical re-arrangement, the first of all the thirty-five names on the roll was Claude St. Pierre, and that every evening thenceforward when that small kerosene-lamp glimmered in the deep darkness of Bayou des Acadiens, the abecedarian Claude was a teacher.
But even before the first rough roll was made he was present, under the little chapel-tower, when for the first time its bell rang for school. The young master was there, and all the children; so that really there was nothing to ring the bell for. They could, all together, have walked quietly across the village green to the forlorn tobacco-shed that 'Mian had given them for a schoolhouse, and begun the session. Ah! say not so! It was good to ring the bell. A few of the stronger lads would even have sent the glad clang abroad before the time, but Bonaventure restrained them. For one thing, there must be room for every one to bear a hand. So he tied above their best reach three strands of "carat" cord to the main rope. Even then he was not ready.
"No, dear chil'run; but grasp hold, every one, the ropes, the cawds,--the shawt chil'run reaching up shawtly, the long chil'run the more longly."
Few understood his words, but they quietly caught the idea, and yielded themselves eagerly to his arranging hand. The highest grasp was Claude's. There was a little empty space under it, and then one only of Sidonie's hands, timid, smooth, and brown. And still the master held back the word.
"Not yet! not yet! The pear is not ripe!" He stood apart from them, near the chapel-door, where the light was strong, his silver watch open in his left hand, his form erect, his right hand lifted to the brim of his hat, his eyes upon the dial.
"Not yet, dear chil'run. Not yet. Two minute mo'.--Be ready.--Not yet!--One minute mo'!--Have the patience. Hold every one in his aw her place. Be ready! Have the patience." But at length when the little ones were frowning and softly sighing with the pain of upheld arms, their waiting eyes saw his dilate. "Be ready!" he said, with low intensity: "Be ready!" He soared to his tiptoes, the hat flounced from his head and smote his thigh, his eyes turned upon them blazing, and he cried, "Ring, chil'run, ring!"
The elfin crew leaped up the ropes and came crouching down. The bell pealed; the master's hat swung round his head. His wide eyes were wet, and he cried again, "Ring! ring! for God, light, libbutty, education!" He sprang toward the leaping, sinking mass; but the right feeling kept his own hands off. And up and down the children went, the bell answering from above, peal upon peal; when just as they had caught the rhythm of Claude's sturdy pull, and the bell could sound no louder, the small cords gave way from their fastenings, the little ones rolled upon their backs, the bell gave one ecstatic double clang and turned clear over, the swift rope straightened upward from its coil, and Claude and Sidonie, her hands clasped upon each other about the rope and his hands upon hers, shot up three times as high as their finest leap could have carried them. For an instant they hung; then with another peal the bell turned back and they came blushing to the floor. A swarm of hands darted to the rope, but Bonaventure's was on it first.
"'Tis sufficient!" he said, his face all triumph. The bell gave a lingering clang or two and ceased, and presently the happy company walked across the green. "Sufficient," the master had said; but it was more than sufficient. In that moment of suspension, with Sidonie's great brown frightened eyes in his, and their four hands clasped together, Claude had learned, for his first lesson, that knowledge is not the only or the greatest power. _