Читать книгу Miss Bishop - Bess Streeter Aldrich - Страница 8

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Ella could scarcely wait to begin her work. Sometimes in the summer she would go over to school, tramping through the campus grass to where Chris was mowing, and get the key to the building.

“May I take the key to Central Hall?” she would ask when he had put down his scythe and come swinging across the newly-cut grass to meet her.

“Say ... vy you alvays call her Cendral Hall,” Chris asked once, “ven dey ain’t but von anyvay?”

“Don’t you see, Chris? Look around. Here, stand over here,—can’t you see a lot more buildings there,—one over here and one there,—a calisthenics building there,—and a huge library,—and a science building,—and maybe a teachers’ training one?”

But even though Chris, open-mouthed, looked and looked, he could not see a calisthenics building, nor a huge library, nor a teachers’ training building,—nothing but a plain three-story one with a few straggling ivy vines clinging desperately to the hot bricks in the prairie sun. Only those who have dreams in their minds and courage in their hearts when they are young see such mirage-like things on familiar horizons.

Her classroom was to be on the second floor at the front, with a tiny inner room opening from it. “My office,” she said under her breath many times a day to get the thrill which the words gave her. The potential office was a little room in the tower over which the bell hung. To hear the resounding clang of that brass-throated messenger directly over her was to feel its vibration in every nerve of her being. It was more than the mere ringing of a bell,—it was a call to knowledge,—a summons to life itself. Already pigeons had begun to nest in the tower and when the bell rang, they flew violently out like so many frightened loafers. Sometimes they tapped the swinging thing themselves in their turbulent activity.

There were windows on three sides of the little tower room. From them she could see the town to the east, four thousand people now—that was what the college had done for Oak River—the rolling campus to the south—well, anyway, the short prairie grass sloped down an incline—and farm land to the west as far as the eye could see, some of it cultivated, much of it still rough prairie land with no sign of road or fence, and with horses and cattle, herded in little bunches, grazing on its vast unbroken expanse.

Surprisingly, the September morning on which Chris rang the bell for opening classes was almost a replica of the rainy one on which Ella first entered four years before. Remembering the dismal reception to those half-frightened newcomers, she stationed herself near the big doors and greeted every freshman as though he were an honored guest arriving for a social event. President Corcoran, coming through the hall, smiled behind the ambush of his whiskers. “Whatever that girl does, she does,” he said to Professor Cunningham in passing.

All fall, Ella Bishop taught grammar classes as though she had invented adjectives and was personally responsible for subordinate clauses. Papers she carted home in sheaves. Notebooks she perused so thoroughly that not an insignificant “for him and I” or an infinitesimal “has came” dared lift its head without fear of her sturdy blue pencil. Still so young, she made no effort to disengage herself from student activities. She was adviser for the now-flourishing Minerva Society. She helped start a tiny college paper called the Weekly Clarion. She was secretary of the modest little Faculty Family Club. “She’s just about an ideal connection between faculty and students,” President Corcoran told his wife. “Young enough to get the students’ viewpoints, with a nice older dignity when necessary.”

Sometimes a little daring crowd of students would plan to slip away in a hayrack or a bob-sled to Maynard to dance, and hearing it, Ella would try to think of some new entertainment to counteract the scheme.

Altogether life was full for her and very, very interesting, swinging along at a lively tempo for the times. The town was growing. Mr. Van Ness built a three-story bank building, renting out the upper floors to the Masons and the Odd Fellows and the Knights of Pythias. Every day Judge Peters walked pompously down Adams and Main Streets in four-four time, his gold-headed cane swinging out the rhythm. Sam slipped quietly down to the grocery store at daylight. Chester wrote home glowing accounts of his own activities over which Irene hung with tremulous hopes. Mrs. Bishop attempted to keep house, but the results were so confused and messy that Ella put her young shoulder to the wheel and did much of it over when she came at night.

The graduating class,—Class of 1880, the members always reminded their friends, as though there had been a dozen others,—had started a round-robin letter. Ella and Irene Van Ness were the only ones living in Oak River, so the package made trips to ten other localities before its return to the city of its birth. Mina Gordon and Emily Teasdale and Evelyn Hobbs all had new names now and were almost maudlin in their wishes that every one else in the class could be as happy as they. Mary Crombie and Janet McLaughlin were enjoying their teaching, the former having started a little Woman’s Suffrage organization which she hoped would expand and sweep the country. George Schroeder was teaching and anticipating saving enough money to go to Heidelberg to school. Albert Fonda’s report for the most part read like a treatise on astronomy,—Albert having hitched his wagon to all the stars.

On a Friday night in November, Chris came into Ella’s room with a noisy depositing of mops, pail and brooms. She sighed and prepared to gather up her work to leave. That Chris,—he seemed to haunt her this week with his jangling paraphernalia.

He kept eying her furtively, she imagined, with a large show of cleaning activity but not much progress. Was it possible that the big bungling fellow had something on his mind?

“Why does every one always pick on me to unload their troubles?” she was saying to herself, half in exasperation, when he began:

“Miss Bis’op, I got news for you.” His fat face was red, his pale blue eyes winking nervously.

“Yes, Chris?”

“I be gettin’ marriet next veek.”

“Well, Chris—congratulations. I didn’t know you had a girl here.”

“Oh, s’e not nobody here. S’e come by Ellis Island to-day. Next veek s’e get here to Oak Riffer—den ve get marriet. I rent a leetle house across from school over der by Smit’s.”

“Well, that’s fine. I’m sure she’s a nice girl, too, Chris.”

“Oh, s’e nice all right. I not see her, now, come six year. S’e vait ’til I safe money and send for passage. S’e healt’y and goot vorker. S’e he’p me safe money.”

Dear, dear, thought Ella—how unromantic.

“What’s her name, Chris?”

“Hannah Christine Maria Jensen.”

“Jensen?”

“Yah.”

“The same as yours? Is she any relation to you now?”

“No-o.” He threw back his head and laughed long and mirthfully. “Denmark, s’e full of Jensens.”

Ella was interested, as indeed she always was in her fellow man. She could not quite seem to keep a hand out of the affairs of every one around her.

“Where will you be married?”

“I don’ know. By the Lutheran preacher’s house, mebbe.”

Suddenly, Ella had an inspiration,—one of those enthusiasms with which she was eternally possessed. “Chris, would you like to be married at my mother’s house? Wouldn’t you like to have your—your Hannah Christine Maria come right to our house from the train ... and have the ceremony in my mother’s parlor ... and then a little supper with us afterward?”

The blond giant’s eyes shone,—his fat face grew redder with emotion. “Py golly, Miss Bis’op, I like it fine an’ I t’ank you.”

Now that she was launched on this new interest, she went into it, as always, with heart and soul. Several times she went to the little cottage at Chris’s plea for advice. She took over a half-dozen potted geraniums—sent eggs and bread and fried-cakes for the first breakfast—would have taken the dresser scarf or curtains from her own room if necessary.

When the girl arrived, she proved to be apple-cheeked and buxom—her flesh hard and solid, her pale blue eyes and pale yellow hair contrasting oddly with the flushed red of her face. So in the parlor of Ella’s home, Miss Hannah Christine Maria Jensen became Mrs. Hannah Christine Maria Jensen, after which the newlyweds and the Lutheran minister and his wife sat down with Ella and her mother to what the Oak River paper later termed “a bounteous repast.”

When they were leaving for the cottage, Chris said, “To my dyin’ day I’ll nefer forget dis kindness.”

He talked to the girl a moment in Danish and turned to Ella: “S’e say s’e tink s’e can mebbe come vork sometime to s’ow you her respeck.”

It touched Ella. It was always to touch her a little,—Chris and Hannah Jensen’s dog-like faithfulness to her all the years of her life.

It was not an astonishing piece of news to any one to hear in the spring that Ella had been elected for another year at a five-dollar-per-month increase in salary.

“I’m afraid ... Ella, ... you’ll be an old maid,” her mother said plaintively, “that way ... teaching ... kind of ... seems like ...”

“I can think of lots worse things, Mother,” Ella laughed. “Marrying a worthless man, for instance, and having to take in washing or be a dressmaker. I wonder if the day will ever come when a married woman can do anything more than those two things?”

But Ella knew she would not be an old maid. Something told her so—some singing voice down in the innermost recesses of her heart. As well as she liked her teaching,—to have a husband and home and children,—these were better. These were the things for which her healthy young body and warm heart were intended. She knew.