The Path of Learning
WE could go to school by either of two ways. We could follow the drive down to the gate and take the road east for nearly quarter of a mile and then turn south for a mile, at the end of which, where the section roads crossed, we should find the schoolhouse. Taking this way, we would go along between barb-wire fences, bordered with a shaving of scant prairie grass, and when we got to the top of one hill we saw another just like it before us. The advantages of this way were almost entirely social. Other children came and went along the road, and we had the pleasure of exchanging views on current topics with them — they knew a great deal that we did not know—and of getting tags at successive gates. The scanty traffic of the road afforded varied interests, too, as well as a chance of rides with the good-natured drivers who overtook us. Many different kinds of men went along that road, but there was rarely one who, if he had any room at all to spare or any horse-strength, did not pull up when he was beside us, with a ‘Whoa’ and a push on the creaking brake, and a cordial ‘ Want a ride?’ — the word we had been waiting for. If it did not come, he was a mean thing, and the boys made demonstrations in the rear of the wagon to illustrate their opinion.
The social intercourse of the road had an added attraction because, as we did not usually take that way, we were regarded by the others as company of a sort, and had the advantage of their hospitality. We took the road when it was wet weather, or in winter when the snow was deep or soft, or when some impulse of sociability led us to walk home with the other children. At other times we cut down through the orchard, —a very convenient thing to do at the right season, — and then along a farm-road beside a cornfield, over the half-mile fence, and finally across a quarter-section of original prairie, still unbroken. That way was a half-mile shorter than the other and we were encouraged to take it in suitable weather, for one of the vague or unuttered becauses of which grownups had always an endless store in mind.
Aside from its convenience this path offered many allurements. It was surprising that we reached school at all, there was so much to see along the way. The orchard itself—from the time when the burnished mahogany of its tops changed to the faint rosiness of the closed buds and then to the cool pink of the open blossoms, and we breathed hard and deep all the way through it to get all possible of this enriched air, until the day when the last wagon had driven around to gather up the ‘down apples ’ — offered us a hundred reasons for staying along the way. If nothing else delayed us, we — Mary and I, that is, not the boys — must take a bouquet for the teacher or for the home decoration of our desks, where the stems were thrust precariously into a topply bottle or into the shallow depths of the ink-well. The bouquet came from a Ben Davis or Limbertwig tree, though; the most reckless person would not sacrifice a Jonathan or Red June possibility.
The orchard once passed, we sped along pretty rapidly by the milder attractions of the cornfield and the farm-road, unless a butcher-bird on wire-fence or hedge-tree, or a harmless blue-racer, or a toiling family of tumble-bugs, made us pause. No one has written a book about tumble-bugs, although they are much more interesting than the intelligent bees. If a snake were certainly harmless, Henry and John conscientiously killed it, even at the risk of tardiness. If it bore the dreadful tradition of being deadly poisonous, they let it escape.
We should have liked one of those new-fashioned schools where the pupils arrive at their own sweet will, as often at eleven-thirty as at nine. We never found a teacher of that charming attitude of mind. Ours always had a predilection for keeping us after school — or worse still, at recess—to make up delinquencies, or making us write our names in a pœna list on the blackboard. One discerning teacher made Henry write out the family list — knowing doubtless that within the family circle vicarious punishment does not long remain merely vicarious.
Beyond the cornfield a barb-wire fence waited to be crossed. Any one who has crossed a barb-wire fence, at least any one who wears the garments of civilization, knows what exigencies and problems that offers. But after the fence came the stretch of prairie grass. Half the flavor of going to that country school would have been lost had we not had the experience of crossing the wild grass in the mornings and evenings. That made a frame into which all the events of the day were set.
There were early summer mornings when the grass was only shoe-high, soft and springy under foot and deliciously green, and the calls of the meadow-larks dotted its quiet here and there, and we could n’t help, however good our intention, darting out of our way for just a minute to pluck a violet or a wild verbena or a horsepipe to take apart and stick together again; June mornings when the sweet wild strawberries colored the southward-sloping hillside and we barely escaped being late to school, our fingers and lips telling the tale of our foraging, even at that; September mornings when we found bulrushes ripebrown in the slough our path skirted, and chased each other with stiff, dry bristles of jimson weed; late autumn mornings when the tardy sunrise reddened all the lovely pink in the drying bunches of prairie grass, even while the frost lay on the yellow upper blades, and we raced with the wild tumbleweeds, and reached school all prickly with broken bits of tickle-grass secreted in unreachable places among our garments.
There were autumn evenings, when all the grass lay pale under a dead gray sky and the strange cry of the fleeing wild geese came down to us from far up in the grayness, and we sped along home to a warm supper and a cozy indoors. There were sunny winter days, with the grass crisp under foot and a bright blue sky curving over the rose and the buff of the prairie — or else over acres of bright snow, smooth and unbroken save where a man had been sent along to make a path for us. And then early spring again, and the wild geese going back, joyful this time we thought, and the floating V of the wild ducks, and the green creeping up from the roots of the grasses, and the sharp, satisfying smell of burning cornstalks in the air. These and a thousand other things formed the experiences which led us up to the door of the schoolhouse in the morning, and caught us up there again in the evening, when we had finished quips and pungent: courtesies with the other children at the schoolhouse door and set off on our own road.
The schoolhouse itself differed from the hundreds that have appeared in literature, in that it had not a single romantic element in its construction or surroundings. Its little square yard was enclosed by a smooth wire fence and the moth-eaten remnants of an osage-orange hedge, and was set out with a few cottonwoods and box-elders, still small. A long hitching-rack, the bark all worn away from the poles by the teeth of ‘mully-grubbing’ horses and the feet of young acrobats, surrounded it, and a stile allowed us to cross the fence — of more use for social purposes however than for this, since no one would wait to cross a stile when it took only an instant to roll under the fence. The schoolhouse sat by the road, and I suppose it could be called a ragged beggar sunning, since the shade was scanty and it was never all in repair at once. It was of the general proportions of a Greek temple, but the resemblance to a Greek temple was not close. It bristled fiercely with lightningrods, a sign of the successful loquacity of some agent or of the scientific faith of the school directors. And there was a covered well-house at the side of the yard.
The well-house was mainly a show, however. For when the rope was not broken the well needed cleaning,—for reasons frankly explained by the children,— and when the water was drinkable the windlass-handle was gone or the bucket was staved in. These things did not matter, however. It would have been a great pity if the well had been always usable, because then we could not have brought the water from the Browns’ well, half a quarter down the road. A journey to the Browns was a rare excursion, especially for us smaller children, since the big boys and girls were too likely to arrogate the privilege to themselves. The Browns had not only a well, but a loom where a grandmother worked, weaving rag-carpets, and a cider-mill and a sorghum-press and a leach, trickling off lye for soft soap. There was always reason for hanging around to watch some interesting operation. The Browns made sauerkraut too, and had a smokehouse, and there was always something going on there which did not occur at our house, and which added to the joy of going for water.
We drank a great deal of water, I believe. There was scarcely an hour on a spring day when some publicspirited one was not offering to pass the water or to fetch a fresh bucket from the Browns’ well. The ceremony of passing the water added some of the charms of social intercourse to our academic pursuits. It was almost like serving afternoon tea. The passer put on little graces and manners and took the opportunity to exchange persiflage, sometimes involving a sly liquid retort, with the passees. We made it a point to show our fastidiousness by drinking as close to the handle as possible, a spot which was supposed to be sequestered. Nine tenths of us drank from that place.
As it seems to me now, the elements of this section of our education consisted of the following things: slaterags, the Fifth Reader, notes, passing the water, headmarks, what the big girls said, Blackman and a torn dress, spilled ink, and pokeberry substitute, the big boys, apples, staying in, speaking pieces on Friday, cube root, the dinner-bucket, geography,—the book, not the science, — partial payments, chronological recapitulations. I suppose we learned a few other things, but these are all I remember. They are the projecting mountain-tops above the general mist of education. Being educated is a hazy sort of thing anyway.
As to the slate-rag, the least said the soonest mended. But no object connected with our early intellectual development stands more clearly before my mental vision than that slate-rag — a fabric in dull grayish black with an accompanying odor of Araby — and the small vial of water which all housewifely little girls affected. I can’t claim that I was housewifely, but I was easily made emulous in any line; and in fact there are many purposes not domestic to which water may be put. So I, too, had my little bottle of water. In a jocular or vindictive mood, you filled your bottle to the brim and then after you had reached your seat you put your thumb on its mouth, turned casually in the direction of some one deserving such an attention, and pressed down on your thumb. A simple law of physics took care of the result — though not always of the consequences. That was one of the advantages of using a bottle instead of keeping water in the ink-well — where we never kept ink. The teachers were too cautious for that. There were children who did not rise to the plane of owning bottles of water at all, but used a convenient natural resource. And there were some who did not have slaterags, but used their sleeves. But on the other hand there were priggish little girls, now doubtless high in the profession of domestic science, who flaunted their pride in the number and size and shade of their slate-rags, to a disgusting degree.
I suppose there was a time in the life of every slate-rag when it was white and dry and odorless. But that was an intimation of immortality early forgotten. I generally had Augusta Horlocher (pronounced Highlocker) for a seat-mate. Seatmateship, I may say in passing, has many elements of matrimony, and like it requires mutual forbearance and complementary virtues. Augusta was a domestic soul who spent more time in washing up the desk and putting my things over on my own side than she did in learning definitions. When Augusta emptied the waterbottle it was always for a worthy purpose. I can’t say the same for myself, but I helped her—having got permission to communicate —with complex fractions. Poor Augusta never got beyond decimals. She washed her slate assiduously, but between times she never could get the answer.
I hardly know why it is the Fifth of all the Readers which I distinguish in memory, except that the Reader we were interested in was never the one out of which we were at the time supposedly learning to read, and the contents of which were already tiresomely familiar, but one ahead of that, which we borrowed from the big girls to read at our desks. The Fifth Reader was in advance of us longer than any of the others, so of course I knew it best of all. There was a Sixth Reader, we had heard, but it was like a digamma or an ideal: no one had ever really seen one. Even the big girls never reached it.
Learning to read meant learning to read aloud. It did n’t make any difference whether we learned to get the meaning from a ‘selection’ by reading it to ourselves. The thing was to be able to pronounce the words out loud and to give the definitions at the bottom of the page. There were two rules for reading. One was to let your voice fall at the end of a sentence, and not to read over a comma; the other was to read all words in italics very loud, those in capitals fortissimo. That was a rule we could appreciate. There was a result to which definite measurement could be applied. In the Fourth Reader was a soft little poem which ended with a tender epitaph, printed in small capitals; we came out strong on that epitaph. When we read in concert, as we were fond of doing for reasons which the sociologist and pedagogist know, one could have heard ‘SOMEBODY’S DARLING LIES BURIED HERE,’ forty rods away.
Did you ever get a note in school ? — from a boy? — from a big boy? I suppose there are other experiences in life that are comparable to this, but certainly there is nothing else at that time which combines the same elements, — dramatic, embarrassing, gratifying, triumphant, delicious, queer. Not that there was anything in such a note — the outside, as the missive first came to view, was much more thrilling than the contents. But the very sight of it — penciled on rough blueish scratchpaper, and ragged-edged and rumpled — as it was flipped across an intervening space, or offered slyly behind a geography, or dropped on the desk as the writer went up to the A spelling class, gave a sensation not to be duplicated in any later years. The contents, I regret to say, were insignificant, negligible. It is to be hoped that the big boys learned more about the art in time. But the mere fact of getting such a note, of having it written to yourself, of forecasting the contents, of having the other girls see you get it, all that in addition to the exciting fear that the teacher might see — once she made a girl read a note out loud! — filled the moment with peculiar emotion.
Notes had a family connection with apples which appeared mysteriously on your desk or were offered slyly at recess, with gum-drops, — available only on Monday, since people went to town only on Saturday, — with being chosen in Clap-In-and-Clap-Out, with valentines in the valentine box, with distinguished attentions in Drop-theHandkerchief and such games, and — acme of romance!—with your name carved by some one, bold and unashamed, on some one’s desk. The pleasures of the affair were largely factitious, however. The notes which looked so promising and had nothing in them were typical of the whole matter. It was all like Clap-In-and-ClapOut or Miller-Boy. It was very exciting and gratifying to be chosen, but after you had settled down in partnership, shyly uncomfortable and unable to think of anything to say, the game was largely over for you — no more excitement, no suspense; you were merely an onlooker on life. Your partner in discomfort became very unattractive, and you rather envied those not yet chosen. As you looked around you saw no one you liked less than the boy who had chosen you.
Cube root and partial payments were the two great mountain peaks of the science — I had almost called it the art — of arithmetic. Many a climber faltered and failed before he reached the dizzy heights of their summits. To have mastered them was to have a reputation for scholarship and intellectual attainment, not only in the school but in the whole neighborhood, and even in adjoining ones, which nothing could shake. When, at a ciphering-match, after other competitors had been following the easy paths of cancellation and long division, you called for ‘cube root’ with an easy nonchalant air, an audible breath of admiration came from the ranks of your allies, and visible consternation mingled with awe spread among your foes. It was almost glory enough for one life. When you came to the last great problem in partial payments — a Titanic problem, a problem to set Homeric heroes —and you were chosen by the teacher to put it on the blackboard for the benefit of the class, it was a half-day’s work. You were excused from all other classes while you wrought at it. You essayed a modest demeanor while you explained it to the unsuccessful ones, but it was difficult to support.
It is an instance of the bad management of destiny that after all this preparation you should never be in the position of a large creditor with such a problem to solve, and that a bankclerk can sum up all your little finances with a few clicks of an insignificant machine. I supposed at such moments of glory that in my riper years I should spend a part of every morning computing interest and courteously accepting partial payments. So much of our practical education is useless to us.
Chronological recapitulations afforded a chance to achieve the same sort of scholarly triumph that partial payments did. Studying history meant reading along hazily about this and that, with only one thing really clear, namely, that the United States was always right, no matter what it was doing, and whoever interfered was wrong, —wickedly, shamelessly wrong. We came out on solid ground about once a month, however, when we reached a chronological recapitulation. Here were concrete facts, isolated, to be sure, and rather meaningless; but ’committing’ them was a definite task, to which we could buckle down with a satisfying effort of will. When learned, they were to be written in a long list on the blackboard. You wrote them by putting down all the dates first, in a wavy disjointed line, and then, beginning at the top, you set in order the appropriate happenings. Sometimes you forgot, and left gaps in the progress of events, where important dates stood alone, begging for facts to prove their distinction. Something happened in 1775, you meditated with chalk on lip — but what was it? A chronological recapitulation was a leveling process, where all events assumed precisely the same importance. It was a kind of historical multiplication table. Sometimes the class recited the list in concert,—a popular form of recitation which made individual weakness inconspicuous.
The performance began in full chorus : —
1607, Virginia was settled at Jamestown.
1609, Henry Hudson navigated the Hudson River.
1610, Starving time prevailed in Virginia.
But only a quartette survived into the eighteenth century, two of these fell in the hardships of colonial life, and only a soloist sighted the French and Indian war. Glory waited the soloist, however, and in so difficult a feat as this the failure of the others was regarded as something to be condoned.
There were other chances for academic distinction, such as the writing lesson, in which, however, proficiency was of a distinctly low order, — Augusta had a beautiful copy-book and never spilled her ink, — and headmarks, which one could achieve in either reading or spelling. The glory which went with headmarks was not of so fine a type as that which was attained through partial payments or chronological recapitulations, but still one would not be without it. Even in speaking pieces one could attain a sort of eminence, though in this as in all artistic achievement, the result was less definite and logically certain than in the pursuit of pure scholarship. After you got used to speaking pieces there was a kind of pleasure in it. I got my pieces largely from Chambers Cyclopedia of English Literature, where I found many a thing that suited my fancy, at least; whatever other merits they lacked, they had the virtue of variety. But I suspect the audience liked them much less than the selections from the ragged Speaker Number Three, which came into requisition weekly.
As I recall the process of education now, the lunch-basket seems to occupy a disproportionately large place in it. The receptacle was more frequently a bucket, — we preferred to say bucket, though most of the children said pail, — since a bucket stood the physical strain better than a basket, and was more easily replaced from month to month. A great many different situations and dramatic interests and physical joys and sorrows were connected with that daily dinner-bucket. From the moment when Maldy or my mother packed it brim-full in the morning and tucked in the special red-bordered make of napkin which was devoted to school use, until we dropped the empty bucket inside the kitchen door at night and were promptly bidden by Maldy to pick it up and put it away, it was, one might say, an active element in our lives. In the first place, there was the daily — semi-daily, in fact — question as to who was to carry it. Dramatic and emotional possibilities hovered about this problem, which was no simple one. It involved intricate issues of precedence and succession and privilege, and physical superiority and age and sex, and who did it last , and vigor of conscience and proportion of appetite, and some occasional problems which no system could foresee or provide for.
Mary shamelessly pleaded privilege of sex and age. But I, being a suffragist by birth and so prideful as to be loath to acknowledge physical inferiority, accepted my turn as a matter of principle and only contended that I should not have more than my turn. Having brothers is a great quickener of moral courage. One day, Henry, who was at times sophistical beyond belief, proved by some masculine system of logic that if women ought to vote I ought to carry the bucket as often as both he and John: and they set the lunch at my wrath-paralyzed feet and went racing off. The spirit of Deborah and Semiramis and all the rest of them descended upon me. I placed the bucket in a fence-corner, hid it with a clot of tickle-grass, and went highmindedly on. The look on the faces of the boys when they discovered my act sustained me in many an hour afterward; and they never tried the experiment again. After being generously supplied from our neighbors’ buckets at noon, we resurrected our own lunch on the way home and ate it in restored amity, tinged with respect on the part of the boys, I was pleased to notice. Henry carried the bucket home.
That was not the only time when we found ourselves dinnerless. Sometimes through real forgetfulness or genuine misunderstanding of the transportation system, the packed bucket remained standing on the kitchen table, and we were left at noon, or rather at recess, for no one could wait until noon, unsupplied with what seemed at times to be the main object of going to school. The result, however, was far from tragic. The readiness with which the other children divided their own resources and laid their offerings before us, was entirely characteristic of the temper of the prairie. I had never been in the Eckharts’ house and never would be, but I ate with cordial relish their cold boiled eggs and their pieplant pie, with its subconscious flavor of sauerkraut. The relish was partly superinduced by curiosity, however. This was a fine opportunity to test the contents of other dinner-buckets, on which we had looked with curious and speculative eye.
Some of the children had the custom of trading select morsels in moments of cordial intimacy; but that was forbidden by the authorities at our house, I did n’t know why. We could n’t even exchange apple-cores, after the pleasant social manner of the Huffs and Browns. I tried it once, exchanging the luscious, translucent heart of a Jonathan for the dry remains of a Ben Davis, mysteriously but unmistakably flavored with sausage and that breadand-buttery taste which is undesirable except in bread and butter. I was n’t sure but there was a taste of Huff on it too. After that experiment it was easy to obey the injunction not to exchange.
But on the occasions when we were thus the objects of public charity, we courteously sampled everything that came our way, from the rich browntopped coffee-cake of the Eckharts — again with the sauerkraut flavor — to the cold biscuits with only milk and sugar for ‘spread,’ proffered by the poor Burnhams whose father was a renter. The opportunity was as valuable as a whole course in sociology. The Huffs were renters too, but they had mince pie and always a little glass of preserve.
In bad weather or on rainy days, the lunch pervaded the whole noonhour, reappearing at intervals and filling in the interstices of Clap-In-andClap-Out, or charades. At these times we set our provisions on the desk-tops and began the meal with some show of ceremony. On other days, when the normal excitement of Blackman, or Dare-Base, or coasting, called us, we dispatched our lunches so rapidly that they hardly seemed to have existed at all, and took a prompt departure for the outdoors, holding a final slice of bread and jam aloft on a smeary palm, and eating it into a neat curve around the edges. The most conscientious member of the family was always left to put away the remains. It is needless to say that Mary put ours away.
The real epicure of the school was Augusta Horlocher. All pictures of the noon hour are pervaded by her. Augusta in a mood of easy friendliness, cracking her hard-boiled eggs — the pickled limes of our time — on the forehead of her intimate for the day, or, in a period of soul-aloneness, on her own brow; Augusta scraping the greater part of the preserves over to one corner of a slice of bread, so that the last bite should be preëminently the best; Augusta eating roll-jellycake and reveling in the mechanical process, following round and round its snail-like convolutions without once removing it from her lips until the centre was reached; Augusta retiring with her choicest morsel to a quiet corner where no covetous glance could seem to urge her to divide; pictures like these showed an art of enjoyment which none of the rest of us ever attained.
It was through the big girls, I believe, that the major part, the really desirable part, of our education was carried on. They had attained a wisdom of life which, amid the reserve practiced by the elders at our house, I despaired of ever reaching. The big girls knew so many things which I did not know, and which in fact no one at our house seemed to know. It behooved me to be hanging about, listening to what they had to say to each other, — only they so often whispered,—and picking up any savory crumb of knowledge that they kindly dropped for me.
What greatness the big girls possessed! They were so worldly-wise, so authoritative. I can’t remember that they shone academically; they often bore, very lightly, too, the ignominy of being in classes with us, and even at that by no means outstripping us. They even had to be ‘put back’ on occasion. But at recess and noon it was different. Then we dropped into our proper place and they rose to theirs. No one else can ever be so grown-up as they were. Every sign of maturity about them was a wonder.
Augusta was really more impressed than I was. All other incentives to ambition had passed over Augusta, leaving her unmoved; but the ambition to grow up bit her hard. When she should have been committing her spelling-lesson, she was slyly but seriously piling her hair on top of her head. And she spent much time sitting out to the end of the seat and letting her skirt hang straight down until it reached the floor, so that it would look long and grown-up. She would look down at this expanse of trailing garment, feel her small stack of hair, and wave the fan made from a leaf cut neatly out of her copy-book and carefully wimpled, and have the most blissful feelings.
As for me, I coveted the knowledge of the big girls more than I did their years. There was Amanda Huff. I learned a good deal from her while she sat in front of me. Amanda was quite sixteen, an age which we understood marked an epoch in feminine experience. She was going to stop school pretty soon, she was so big. Even now she very readily stayed out for housecleaning, or the baby, or washing. Joe Withers went to see her every Sunday night, and Monday morning in school, having got permission to ‘speak’ to ask the grammar lesson, she told me all that had happened the night before. Her information marked clearly the stages in Joe’s courtship, a progress to which, to do her justice, Amanda was offering no obstructions. I was a young confidant, but a very responsive one. I learned a good deal from Amanda. But when I began to tell it to my mother she spoke of having my seat changed, and I divulged no more. My mother’s views on education by experience were limited.
Amanda was married the next year, and so lifted above companionship with me forever. I never attained the state of being a big girl myself, because my sojourn in the school was too short. So I never could know their feelings or their glory. They were still looking down on me as a little girl, I have no doubt, when on a June ‘last day’ I stacked my other books and my slate upon my geography as a foundation, and carried them across the prairie quarter-section for the last time.
There were masses of blue spiderwort and white anemone down by the slough that day, I remember, and ripe strawberries among the grass.