Mr. John Craven could not be said to take his school-teaching seriously; and indeed, any one looking at his face would hardly expect him to take anything seriously, and certainly those who in his college days followed and courted and kept pace with Jack Craven, and knew his smile, would have expected from him anything other than seriousness. He appeared to himself to be enacting a kind of grim comedy, exile as he was in a foreign land, among people of a strange tongue.
He knew absolutely nothing of pedagogical method, and consequently he ignored all rules and precedents in the teaching and conduct of the school. His discipline was of a most fantastic kind. He had a feeling that all lessons were a bore, therefore he would assign the shortest and easiest of tasks. But having assigned the tasks, he expected perfection in recitation, and impressed his pupils with the idea that nothing less would pass. His ideas of order were of the loosest kind, and hence the noise at times was such that even the older pupils found it unbearable; but when the hour for recitation came, somehow a deathlike stillness fell upon the school, and the unready shivered with dread apprehension. And yet he never thrashed the boys; but his fear lay upon them, for his eyes held the delinquent with such an intensity of magnetic, penetrating power that the unhappy wretch felt as if any kind of calamity might befall him.
When one looked at John Craven's face, it was the eyes that caught and held the attention. They were black, without either gleam or glitter, indeed almost dull—a lady once called them “smoky eyes.” They looked, under lazy, half-drooping lids, like things asleep, except in moments of passion, when there appeared, far down, a glowing fire, red and terrible. At such moments it seemed as if, looking through these, one were catching sight of a soul ablaze. They were like the dull glow of a furnace through an inky night.
He was constitutionally and habitually lazy, but in a reading lesson he would rouse himself at times, and by his utterance of a single line make the whole school sit erect. Friday afternoon he gave up to what he called “the cultivation of the finer arts.” On that afternoon he would bring his violin and teach the children singing, hear them read and recite, and read for them himself; and no greater punishment could be imposed upon the school than the loss of this afternoon.
“Man alive! Thomas, he's mighty queer,” Hughie explained to his friend. “When he sits there with his feet on the stove smoking away and reading something or other, and letting them all gabble like a lot of ducks, it just makes me mad. But when he wakes up he puts the fear of death on you, and when he reads he makes you shiver through and through. You know that long rigmarole, 'Friends, Romans, countrymen'? I used to hate it. Well, sir, he told us about it last Friday. You know, on Friday afternoons we don't do any work, but just have songs and reading, and that sort of thing. Well, sir, last Friday he told us about the big row in Rome, and how Caesar was murdered, and then he read that thing to us. By gimmini whack! it made me hot and cold. I could hardly keep from yelling, and every one was white. And then he read that other thing, you know, about Little Nell. Used to make me sick, but, my goodness alive! do you know, before he got through the girls were wiping their eyes, and I was almost as bad, and you could have heard a pin drop. He's mighty queer, though, lazy as the mischief, and always smiling and smiling, and yet you don't feel like smiling back.”
“Do you like him?” asked Thomas, bluntly.
“Dunno. I'd like to, but he won't let you, somehow. Just smiles at you, and you feel kind of small.”
The reports about the master were conflicting and disquieting, and although Hughie was himself doubtful, he stood up vehemently for him at home.
“But, Hughie,” protested the minister, discussing these reports, “I am told that he actually smokes in school.”
Hughie was silent.
“Answer me! Does he smoke in school hours?”
“Well,” confessed Hughie, reluctantly, “he does sometimes, but only after he gives us all our work to do.”
“Smoke in school hours!” ejaculated Mrs. Murray, horrified.
“Well, what's the harm in that? Father smokes.”
“But he doesn't smoke when he is preaching,” said the mother.
“No, but he smokes right afterwards.”
“But not in church.”
“Well, perhaps not in church, but school's different. And anyway, he makes them read better, and write better too,” said Hughie, stoutly.
“Certainly,” said his father, “he is a most remarkable man. A most unusual man.”
“What about your sums, Hughie?” asked his mother.
“Don't know. He doesn't bother much with that sort of thing, and I'm just as glad.”
“You ought really to speak to him about it,” said Mrs. Murray, after Hughie had left the room.
“Well, my dear,” said the minister, smiling, “you heard what Hughie said. It would be rather awkward for me to speak to him about smoking. I think, perhaps, you had better do it.”
“I am afraid,” said his wife, with a slight laugh, “it would be just as awkward for me. I wonder what those Friday afternoons of his mean,” she continued.
“I am sure I don't know, but everywhere throughout the section I hear the children speak of them. We'll just drop in and see. I ought to visit the school, you know, very soon.”
And so they did. The master was surprised, and for a moment appeared uncertain what to do. He offered to put the classes through their regular lessons, but at once there was a noisy outcry against this on the part of the school, which, however, was effectually and immediately quelled by the quiet suggestion on the master's part that anything but perfect order would be fatal to the programme. And upon the minister requesting that the usual exercises proceed, the master smilingly agreed.
“We make Friday afternoons,” he said, “at once a kind of reward day for good work during the week, and an opportunity for the cultivation of some of the finer arts.”
And certainly he was a master in this business. He had strong dramatic instincts, and a remarkable power to stimulate and draw forth the emotions.
When the programme of singing, recitations, and violin-playing was finished, there were insistent calls on every side for “Mark Antony.” It appeared to be the 'piece de resistance' in the minds of the children.
“What does this mean?” inquired the minister, as the master stood smiling at his pupils.
“Oh, they are demanding a little high tragedy,” he said, “which I sometimes give them. It assists in their reading lessons,” he explained, apologetically, and with that he gave them what Hughie called, “that rigmarole beginning, 'Friends, Romans, countrymen,'” Mark Antony's immortal oration.
“Well,” said the minister, as they drove away from the school, “what do you think of that, now?”
“Marvelous!” exclaimed his wife. “What dramatic power, what insight, what interpretation!”
“You may say so,” exclaimed her husband. “What an actor he would make!”
“Yes,” said his wife, “or what a minister he would make! I understand, now, his wonderful influence over Hughie, and I am afraid.”
“O, he can't do Hughie any harm with things like that,” replied her husband, emphatically.
“No, but Hughie now and then repeats some of his sayings about—about religion and religious convictions, that I don't like. And then he is hanging about that Twentieth store altogether too much, and I fancied I noticed something strange about him last Friday evening when he came home so late.”
“O, nonsense,” said the minister. “His reputation has prejudiced you, and that is not fair, and your imagination does the rest.”
“Well, it is a great pity that he should not do something with himself,” replied his wife. “There are great possibilities in that young man.”
“He does not take himself seriously enough,” said her husband. “That is the chief trouble with him.”
And this was apparently Jack Craven's opinion of himself, as is evident from his letter to his college friend, Ned Maitland.
“Dear Ned:—
“For the last two months I have been seeking to adjust myself to my surroundings, and find it no easy business. I have struck the land of the Anakim, for the inhabitants are all of 'tremenjous' size, and indeed, 'tremenjous' in all their ways, more particularly in their religion. Religion is all over the place. You are liable to come upon a boy anywhere perched on a fence corner with a New Testament in his hand, and on Sunday the 'tremenjousness' of their religion is overwhelming. Every other interest in life, as meat, drink, and dress, are purely incidental to the main business of the day, which is the delivering, hearing, and discussing of sermons.
“The padre, at whose house I am very happily quartered, is a 'tremenjous' preacher. He has visions, and gives them to me. He gives me chills and thrills as well, and has discovered to me a conscience, a portion of my anatomy that I had no suspicion of possessing.
“The congregation is like the preacher. They will sit for two hours, and after a break of a few minutes they will sit again for two hours, listening to sermons; and even the interval is somewhat evenly divided between their bread and cheese in the churchyard and the discussion of the sermon they have just listened to. They are great on theology. One worthy old party tackled me on my views of the sermon we had just heard; after a little preliminary sparring I went to my corner. I often wonder in what continent I am.
“The school, a primitive little log affair, has much run to seed, but offers opportunity for repose. I shall avoid any unnecessary excitement in this connection.
“In private life the padre is really very decent. We have great smokes together, and talks. On all subjects he has very decided opinions, and in everything but religion, liberal views. I lure him into philosophic discussions, and overwhelm him with my newest and biggest metaphysical terms, which always reduce his enormous cocksureness to more reasonable dimensions.
“The minister's wife is quite another proposition. She argues, too, but unfortunately she asks questions, in the meekest way possible acknowledging her ignorance of my big terms, and insisting upon definitions and exact meanings, and then it's all over with me. How she ever came to this far land, heaven knows, and none but heaven can explain such waste. Having no kindred soul to talk with, I fancy she enjoys conversation with myself, (sic) revels in music, is transported to the fifth heaven by my performance on the violin, but evidently pities me and regards me as dangerous. But, my dear Maitland, after a somewhat wide and varied experience of fine ladies, I give you my verdict that here among the Anakim, and in this wild, woody land, is a lady fine and fair and saintly. She will bother me, I know. Her son Hughie (he of the bear), of whom I told you, the lad with the face of an angel and the temper of an angel, but of a different color—her son Hughie she must make into a scholar. And no wonder, for already he has attained a remarkable degree of excellence, by the grace, not of the little log school, however, I venture to shy. His mother has been at him. But now she feels that something more is needed, and for that she turns to me. You will be able to see the humor of it, but not the pathos. She wants to make a man out of her boy, 'a noble, pure-hearted gentleman,' and this she lays upon me! Did I hear you laugh? Smile not, it is the most tragic of pathos. Upon me, Jack Craven, the despair of the professors, the terror of the watch, the—alas! you know only too well. My tongue clave to the roof of my mouth, and before I could cry, 'Heaven forbid that I should have a hand in the making of your boy!' she accepted my pledge to do her desire for her young angel with the OTHER-angelic temper.
“And now, my dear Ned, is it for my sins that I am thus pursued? What is awaiting me I know not. What I shall do with the young cub I have not the ghostliest shadow of an idea. Shall I begin by thrashing him soundly? I have refrained so far; I hate the role of executioner. Or shall I teach him boxing? The gloves are a great educator, and are at times what the padre would call 'means of grace.'
“But what will become of me? Shall I become prematurely aged, or shall I become a saint? Expect anything from your most devoted, but most sorely bored and perplexed,
All books are sourced from Project Gutenberg