CHAPTER XI
THE MOUSE ESCAPES
Jennie played the piano and sang. They all joined in some simple Christmassongs. Mrs. Woodruff and Jim's mother went into other parts of the houseon research work connected with their converse on domestic economy. Thecolonel withdrew for an inspection of the live stock on the eve of thethreatened blizzard. And Jim was left alone with Jennie in the frontparlor. After the buzz of conversation, they seemed to have nothing tosay. Jennie played softly, and looked at nothing, but scrutinized Jim bymeans of the eyes which women have concealed in their back hair. There wassomething new in the man--she sensed that. He was more confident, morepersuasive, more dynamic. She was used to him only as a static force.
And Jim felt something new, too. He had felt it growing in him ever sincehe began his school work, and knew not the cause of it. The cause,however, would not have been a mystery to a wise old yogi who mightdiscover the same sort of change in one of his young novices. Jim Irwinhad been a sort of ascetic since his boyhood. He had mortified the fleshby hard labor in the fields, and by flagellations of the brain to driveoff sleep while he pored over his books in the attic--which was often sohot after a day of summer's sun on its low thin roof, that he was forcedto do his reading in the midmost night. He had looked long on such womenas Helen of Troy, Cleopatra, Isabel, Cressida, Volumnia, Virginia,Evangeline, Agnes Wickfleld and Fair Rosamond; but on women in the fleshhe had gazed as upon trees walking. The aforesaid spiritual director, hadthis young ascetic been under one, would have foreseen the effects on thepsychology of a stout fellow of twenty-eight of freedom from the toil ofthe fields, and association with a group of young human beings of bothsexes. To the novice struggling for emancipation from earthly thoughts, hewould have recommended fasting and prayer, and perhaps, a hair shirt. Justwhat his prescription would have been for a man in Jim's position is, ofcourse, a question. He would, no doubt, have considered carefully hispatient's symptoms. These were very largely the mental experiences whichmost boys pass through in their early twenties, save, perhaps that, as ina belated season, the transition from winter to spring was more sudden,and the contrast more violent. Jim was now thrown every day into contactwith his fellows. He was no longer a lay monk, but an active member of avery human group. He was becoming more of a boy, with the boys, and stillmore was he developing into a man with the women. The budding womanhood ofCalista Simms and the other girls of his school thrilled him as Helen ofTroy or Juliet had never done. This will not seem very strange to theexperienced reader, but it astonished the unsophisticated youngschoolmaster. The floating hair, the heaving bosom, the rosebud mouth, thestarry eye, the fragrant breath, the magnetic hand--all these disturbedthe hitherto sedate mind, and filled the brief hours he was accustomed tospend in sleep with strange dreams. And now, as he gazed at Jennie, he wassuddenly aware of the fact that, after all, whenever these thoughts anddreams took on individuality, they were only persistent and intensifiedcontinuations of his old dreams of her. They had always been dormant inhim, since the days they both studied from the same book. He was quitesure, now, that he had never forgotten for a moment, that Jennie was theonly girl in the world for him. And possibly he was right about this. Itis perfectly certain, however, that for years he had not consciously beenin love with her.
Now, however, he arose as from some inner compulsion, and went to herside. He wished that he knew enough of music to turn her sheets for her,but, alas! the notes were meaningless to him. Still scanning him by meansof her back hair, Jennie knew that in another moment Jim would lay hishand on her shoulder, or otherwise advance to personal nearness, as he haddone the night of his ill-starred speech at the schoolhouse--and she rosein self-defense. Self-defense, however, did not seem to require that he bekept at too great a distance; so she maneuvered him to the sofa, andseated him beside her. Now was the time to line him up.
"It seems good to have you with us to-day," said she. "We're such old, oldfriends."
"Yes," repeated Jim, "old friends .... We are, aren't we, Jennie?"
"And I feel sure," Jennie went on, "that this marks a new era in ourfriendship."
"Why?" asked Jim, after considering the matter.
"Oh! everything is different, now--and getting more different all thetime. My new work, and your new work, you know."
"I should like to think," said Jim, "that we are beginning over again."
"Oh, we are, we are, indeed! I am quite sure of it."
"And yet," said Jim, "there is no such thing as a new beginning.Everything joins itself to something which went before. There isn't anyseam."
"No?" said Jennie interrogatively.
"Our regard for each other," Jennie noted most pointedly his word"regard"--"must be the continuation of the old regard."
"I hardly know what you mean," said Jennie.
Jim reached over and possessed himself of her hand. She pulled it from himgently, but he paid no attention to the little muscular protest, andexamined the hand critically. On the back of the middle finger he pointedout a scar--a very tiny scar.
"Do you remember how you got that?" he asked.
Because Jim clung to the hand, their heads were very close together as shejoined in the examination.
"Why, I don't believe I do," said she.
"I do," he replied. "We--you and I and Mary Forsythe were playingmumble-peg, and you put your hand on the grass just as I threw theknife--it cut you, and left that scar."
"I remember, now!" said she. "How such things come back over the memory.And did it leave a scar when I pushed you toward the red-hot stove in theschoolhouse one blizzardy day, like this, and you peeled the skin off yourwrist where it struck the stove?"
"Look at it," said he, baring his long and bony wrist. "Right there!"
And they were off on the trail that leads back to childhood. They hadtalked long, and intimately, when the shadows of the early evening creptinto the corners of the room. He had carried her across the flooded slewagain after the big rain. They had relived a dozen moving incidents byflood and field. Jennie recalled the time when the tornado narrowly missedthe schoolhouse, and frightened everybody in school nearly to death.
"Everybody but you, Jim," Jennie remembered. "You looked out of the windowand told the teacher that the twister was going north of us, and wouldkill somebody else."
"Did I?" asked Jim.
"Yes," said Jennie, "and when the teacher asked us to kneel and thank God,you said, 'Why should we thank God that somebody else is blowed away?' Shewas greatly shocked."
"I don't see to this day," Jim asserted, "what answer there was to myquestion."
In the gathering darkness Jim again took Jennie's hand, but this time shedeprived him of it.
He was trembling like a leaf. Let it be remembered in his favor that thiswas the only girl's hand he had ever held.
"You can't find any more scars on it," she said soberly.
"Let me see how much it has changed since I stuck the knife in it," beggedJim.
Jennie held it up for inspection.
"It's longer, and slenderer, and whiter, and even more beautiful," saidhe, "than the little hand I cut; but it was then the most beautiful handin the world to me--and still is."
"I must light the lamps," said the county superintendent-elect, ratherflustered, it must be confessed. "Mama! Where are all the matches?"
Mrs. Woodruff and Mrs. Irwin came in, and the lamplight reminded Jim'smother that the cow was still to milk, and that the chickens might needattention. The Woodruff sleigh came to the door to carry them home; butJim desired to breast the storm. He felt that he needed the conflict. Mrs.Irwin scolded him for his foolishness, but he strode off into the whirlingdrift, throwing back a good-by for general consumption, and a patheticsmile to Jennie.
"He's as odd as Dick's hatband," said Mrs. Woodruff, "tramping off in astorm like this."
"Did you line him up?" asked the colonel of Jennie.
The young lady started and blushed. She had forgotten all about thepolitics of the
situation.
"I--I'm afraid I didn't, papa," she confessed.
"Those brown mice of Professor Darbishire's," said the colonel, "were thedevil and all to control."
Jennie was thinking of this as she dropped asleep.
"Hard to control!" she thought. "I wonder. I wonder, after all, if Jim isnot capable of being easily lined up--when he sees how foolish I think heis!"
And Jim? He found himself hard to control that night. So much so that itwas after midnight before he had finished work on a plan for a cooperativecreamery.
"The boys can be given work in helping to operate it," he wrote on atablet, "which, in connection with the labor performed by the teacher,will greatly reduce the expense of operation. A skilled butter-maker, withslender white hands"--but he erased this last clause and retired.