_ GRANDE POINTE CHAPTER V. INVITED TO LEAVE
After that, every school-day morning Claude rang the bell. Always full early his pirogue came gliding out of the woods and up through the bushy fen to the head of canoe navigation and was hauled ashore. Bonaventure had fixed his home near the chapel and not far from Claude's landing-place. Thus the lad could easily come to his door each morning at the right moment--reading it by hunter's signs in nature's book--to get the word to ring. There were none of the usual reasons that the schoolmaster should live close to the schoolhouse. There was no demand for its key.
Not of that schoolhouse! A hundred feet length by twenty-five breadth, of earth-floored, clapboard-roofed, tumbling shed, rudely walled with cypress split boards,--_pieux_,--planted endwise in the earth, like palisades, a hand-breadth space between every two, and sunlight and fresh air and the gleams of green fields coming in; the scores of little tobacco-presses that had stood in ranks on the hard earth floor, the great sapling levers, and the festoons of curing tobacco that had hung from the joists overhead, all removed, only the odor left; bold gaps here and there in the _pieux_, made by that mild influence which the restless call decay, and serving for windows and doors; the eastern end swept clean and occupied by a few benches and five or six desks, strong, home-made, sixty-four pounders.
Life had broadened with Claude in two directions. On one side opened, fair and noble, the acquaintanceship of Bonaventure Deschamps, a man who had seen the outside world, a man of books, of learning, a man who could have taught even geography, had there been any one to learn it; and on the other side, like a garden of roses and spices, the schoolmateship of Sidonie Le Blanc. To you and me she would have seemed the merest little brown sprout of a thing, almost nothing but two big eyes--like a little owl. To Claude it seemed as though nothing older or larger could be so exactly in the prime of beauty; the path to learning was the widest, floweriest, fragrantest path he had ever trod.
Sidonie did not often speak with him. At recess she usually staid at her desk, studying, quite alone but for Bonaventure silently busy at his, and Claude himself, sitting farther away, whenever the teacher did not see him and drive him to the playground. If he would only drive Sidonie out! But he never did.
One day, after quite a contest of learning, and as the hour of dismission was scattering the various groups across the green, Toutou, the little brother who was grand for his age, said to Claude, hanging timidly near Sidonie:--
"_Alle est plus_ smart' _que vous_." (She is smarter than you.)
Whereupon Sidonie made haste to say in their Acadian French, "Ah! Master Toutou, you forget we went to school to our dear aunt. And besides, I am small and look young, but I am nearly a year older than Claude." She had wanted to be kind, but that was the first thorn. Older than he!
And not only that; nearly fifteen! Why, at fifteen--at fifteen girls get married! The odds were heavy. He wished he had thought of that at first. He was sadly confused. Sometimes when Bonaventure spoke words of enthusiasm and regard to him after urging him fiercely up some hill of difficulty among the bristling heights of English pronunciation, he yearned to seek him alone and tell him this difficulty of the heart. There was no fear that Bonaventure would laugh; he seemed scarce to know how; and his smiles were all of tenderness and zeal. Claude did not believe the ten years between them would matter; had not Bonaventure said to him but yesterday that to him all loveliness was the lovelier for being very young? Yet when the confession seemed almost on Claude's lips it was driven back by an alien mood in the master's face. There were troubles in Bonaventure's heart that Claude wot not of.
One day who should drop in just as school was about to begin but the priest from College Point! Such order as he found! Bonaventure stood at his desk like a general on a high hill, his large hand-bell in his grasp, passed his eyes over the seventeen demure girls, with their large, brown-black, liquid eyes, their delicately pencilled brows, their dark, waveless hair, and sounded one tap! The sport outside ceased, the gaps at the shed's farther end were darkened by small forms that came darting like rabbits into their burrows, eighteen small hats came off, and the eighteen boys came softly forward and took their seats. Such discipline!
"Sir," said Bonaventure, "think you 'tis arising, f'om the strickness of the teacher? 'Tis f'om the goodness of the chil'run! How I long the State Sup'inten'ent Public Education to see them!"
The priest commended the sight and the wish with smiling affirmations that somehow seemed to lack sympathy. He asked the names of two or three pupils. That little fellow with soft, tanned, chubby cheeks and great black eyes, tiny mouth, smooth feet so shapely and small, still wet to their ankles with dew, and arms that he could but just get folded, was Toutou. That lad with the strong shoulders, good wide brows, steady eye, and general air of manliness,--that was Claude St. Pierre. And this girl over on the left here,--"You observe," said Bonaventure, "I situate the lambs on the left and the kids on the right,"--this little, slender crescent of human moonlight, with her hair in two heavy, black, down-falling plaits, meek, drooping eyes, long lashes, soft childish cheeks and full throat, was Sidonie Le Blanc. Bonaventure murmured:--
"Best scholah in the school, yet the _only_--that loves not her teacher. But I give always my interest, not according to the interestingness, but rather to the necessitude, of each."
The visit was not long. Standing, about to depart, the visitor seemed still, as at the first, a man of many reservations under his polite smiles. But just then he dropped a phrase that the teacher recognized as an indirect quotation, and Bonaventure cried, with greedy eyes:--
"You have read Victor Hugo?"
"Yes."
"Oh, sir, that grea-a-at man! That father of libbutty! Other patriots are the sons, but he the father! Is it not thus?"
The priest shrugged and made a mouth. The young schoolmaster's face dropped.
"Sir, I must ask you--is he not the frien' of the poor and downtrod?"
The visitor's smile quite disappeared. He said:--
"Oh!"--and waved a hand impatiently; "Victor Hugo"--another mouth--"Victor Hugo"--replying in French to the schoolmaster's English--"is not of my party." And then he laughed unpleasantly and said good-day.
The State Superintendent did not come, but every day--"It is perhaps he shall come to-mo'w, chil'run; have yo' lessons well!"
The whole tiny army of long, blue, ankle-hiding cottonade pantalettes and pantaloons tried to fulfil the injunction. Not one but had a warm place in the teacher's heart. But Toutou, Claude, Sidonie, anybody who glanced into that heart could see sitting there enthroned. And some did that kind of reconnoitring. Catou, 'Mian's older brother, was much concerned. He saw no harm in a little education, but took no satisfaction in the introduction of English speech; and speaking to 'Mian of that reminded him to say he believed the schoolmaster himself was aware of the three children's pre-eminence in his heart. But 'Mian only said:--
"_Ah bien, c'est_ all right, _alors_!" (Well, then, it's all right.) Whether all right or not, Bonaventure was aware of it, and tried to hide it under special kindnesses to others, and particularly to the dullard of the school, grandson of Catou and nicknamed _Crebiche_[4]. The child loved him; and when Claude rang the chapel bell, and before its last tap had thrilled dreamily on the morning air, when the urchins playing about the schoolhouse espied another group coming slowly across the common with Bonaventure in the midst of them, his coat on his arm and the children's hands in his, there among them came Crebiche, now on one side, now running round to the other, hoping so to get a little nearer to the master.
[4] _Ecrevisse_, crawfish.
"None shall have such kindness to-day as thou," Bonaventure would silently resolve as he went in through a gap in the _pieux_. And the children could not see but he treated them all alike. They saw no unjust inequality even when, Crebiche having three times spelt "earth" with an _u_, the master paced to and fro on the bare ground among the unmatched desks and break-back benches, running his hands through his hair and crying:--
"Well! well aht thou name' the crawfish; with such rapiditive celeritude dost thou progress backwardly!"
It must have been to this utterance that he alluded when at the close of that day he walked, as he supposed, with only birds and grasshoppers for companions, and they grew still, and the turtle-doves began to moan, and he smote his breast and cried:
"Ah! rules, rules! how easy to make, likewise break! Oh! the shame, the shame! _If_ Victor Hugo had seen that! And if George Washington! But thou,"--some one else, not mentioned,--"thou sawedst it!"
The last word was still on the speaker's lips, when--there beside the path, with heavy eye and drunken frown, stood the father of Crebiche, the son of Catou, the little boy of twenty-five known as Chat-oue. He spoke:
"To who is dat you speak? Talk wid de dev'?"
Bonaventure murmured a salutation, touched his hat, and passed. Chat-oue moved a little, and delivered a broadside:
"Afteh dat, you betteh leave! Yes, you betteh leave Gran' Point'!"
"Sir," said Bonaventure, turning with flushed face, "I stay."
"Yes," said the other, "dass righ'; you betteh go way and stay. _Magicien_," he added as the schoolmaster moved on, "_sorcier!_--Voudou!--jackass!"
What did all this mean? _