Читать книгу Candles' Beams - Francis J. Finn - Страница 6

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AMONG the fifty and odd boys of the fourth grade who faced me on the opening day of school, there was one who caught my attention within the first five minutes of class. His face was amiability itself. When he smiled—and I noticed that he was seeking every opportunity to perform that pleasing act—his mouth, large by nature, dilated to a striking degree, and his entire face radiated good nature.

He was hardly a handsome boy, much less was he pretty. His nose was tip-tilted, his face was extremely freckled, and his hair anarchistic. His features, in general large and coarse, were redeemed by a pair of large grey eyes, and an expression—temporary, it might be—of effusive good nature.

His attire puzzled me. It was not convincing. Face and clothes did not jump together. His collar and tie were immaculately clean; his clothes, spick and span. The face was the face of Huckleberry Finn; the attire was the attire of Little Lord Fauntleroy.

I had opened the school year with a short talk on the importance of study, good conduct and attention. It was an eager audience I was addressing—an awed crowd of little boys who had never yet sat under a man teacher. But the attention of this particular boy led all the rest. His eyes were fixed squarely upon mine; they twinkled if I so much as came near to a pleasantry; they danced if I actually got off a joke; and when there was occasion for laughter his treble rose high above all other sounds of glee.

Presently, I found myself addressing him alone. He was an audience in himself. In an unhappy moment, chancing to notice how his ears stood out prominently from his head and wondering whether he could wag them, I broke into a smile which really had nothing to do with what I then happened to be saying. My sympathetic audience of one, misled utterly, at once broke into a laugh of keen appreciation. One would think it was the best joke he had ever heard. As a matter of fact, I had just made the following original statement: “A year wasted, a year of idleness, is a year that is lost forever.”

The hearty laughter of my freckled-faced audience rang out alone. It started off buoyantly, and suddenly subsided as though an invisible hand at one fell grip had choked it into silence.

“Ah, Roughneck, wot’s the matter with you?” came a voice in a low whisper which somehow reached my ears.

Ah! so my friend, my audience, was “Roughneck.”

The young gentleman thus addressed went the color of a boiled lobster, and incontinently turned in his seat to eye his monitor. The amiability was all gone; the mouth wore a snarl, and several particular clusters of hair seemed to rear their angry crests upon Roughneck’s untamed head.

Then all the boys laughed, not at any real or fancied joke of mine, but at the blushing and irate Roughneck.

Later on, while I was passing over to the blackboard, I thought I saw out of the corner of my eye, a shiny fist—even the shininess was suspicious—shaking itself in the direction of Roughneck’s offender; and the suspicion deepened into a certainty after recess when Roughneck returned to class with a scratched cheek and a skinned knuckle, and his insulting schoolmate with a very suspicious eye.

“Your name, sir,” I said rather sternly when all had been duly seated.

“Please, Brother, Frank Reardon,” said my whilom audience of one.

“And yours, sir?” I continued addressing myself to the youngster of impaired eyesight.

In a hollow, deep voice, surprisingly deep for one of his years, the youth in question, a very fat boy with a very serious face, made answer.

“Ed Stevens.” His voice seemed to come from his boots.

“I must say,” I continued, “that you’re both a nice pair to begin the school year with hammering each other.”

Upon the class there came a great awe. They all knew I had remained in the classroom during recess. How then had I seen through walls and from a height of three stories a little affair which had happened in an obscure corner of the playground on the other side of the building. Ed Stevens, familiarly known as Fatty, allowed his lower jaw to fall and gaped at me, breathing heavily; Roughneck, so called, as I already inferred, because of a certain manner of speech and action in keeping with his upturned nose and freckled face, opened his eyes to their widest, and, within a few seconds’ time gave me, gazing into their depths, a moving picture of swift and varying emotion, wild surprise, fear of a whipping, shame at discovery, and, to end the play, two large tears which gathered so rapidly that they were each speeding their way down his cheek, telling their story of wounded self-love and repentance. In fear of a fresh discharge, I said:

“Well, Frank, don’t take it hard. As it is the first offence, I’m going to forget it here and now.”

A timid finger went up, its owner a thin eager-faced boy occupying one of the front seats.

“Well, John, what is it?”

“Sister—I mean Brother—it wasn’t so awful much of a fight.”

I learned afterwards that John Hogarth, whose name I had picked up, much to his and the class’s astonishment, during recess, was a bosom friend of Fatty.

Then pandemonium, so to speak, broke loose; and, unused as I was to such very small boys, reigned for almost a minute. “Fatty hit him first”—“Naw, he didn’t”—“Roughneck had him skinned”—“Aw, Fatty didn’t want to fight”—“Fatty went to Communion this morning.”

There was a strap, dread signal of authority, upon my desk. In a happy inspiration, I took it and brought it down with all my force on that unoffending article of furniture. The suggestive whack cut some twenty sentences untimely, and left their authors spellbound and with mouths arrested and open.

“Silence,” I said. The enjoinment was superfluous. Slowly each individual mouth closed—all except Roughneck’s. His was fixed apparently for all time; the boy needed a dentist badly.

“The two belligerents will please come forward.”

At the word “belligerent,” Roughneck was dissolved in tears, and Fatty, from the depths of his interior, emitted an unctuous groan.

“Reardon and Stevens,” I translated, seeing that neither quite got my idea, “come here.”

By some alchemy peculiar to the small boy, Reardon’s cheeks showed lines of dirt where the tears multitudinous had gone their way. He rose and came forward, digging his fists into his eyes, and then rubbing his fingers upon his no longer immaculate shirt-waist. Stevens, with a face so preternaturally solemn and rueful as to defy description, also came forward; so promptly, indeed, that in his eagerness to obey he knocked his friend and admirer John Hogarth out of his seat. The two were presently standing before me with solemn inquiry upon their faces, Stevens gazing fixedly at me, and Reardon eyeing with an artless trepidation the strap still in my hand.

“Now, boys,” I said, “suppose you shake hands.”

Suddenly all the solemnity flew from the expansive features of Fatty. The change reminded me of the sun bursting away from a black cloud. Fatty was smiling; his whole being went into that smile. Up went a chubby finger: there was mirth and youthful jollity in the gesture.

“Well, my boy?”

“Please, Brother,” he gurgled deep down from, let us say, his diaphragm, “we did shake hands. We done it coming up the stairs.”

Then twenty fingers were snapping from the highly interested class. Hogarth’s face, I observed, was pregnant with information he was almost dancing to impart.

“Well, Hogarth? What is it?”

“Sister-er—Brother, I seen ’em shaking hands. And I told Fatty they ought to make up.”

It was evident from the snapping fingers on every side that half of the class was willing, nay bursting, to corroborate Master Hogarth’s pleasing information.

After laying down the law on the snapping of fingers, I gazed once more upon the culprits. Edward was again owllike in his solemnity; but upon the tear-stained face of Master Frank the light of hope was shining to such effect that it gave me the feeling of gazing upon a rainbow.

“Now, young gentlemen,” I began—and Reardon, addressed as gentleman, suddenly lost his rainbow and became clearly disconcerted—“I said a moment ago that I was going to forget this whole incident. But I’ve changed my mind; I’m not going to forget it.”

A portentous frown gathered upon the brow of Edward Stevens; Francis Reardon absently set to wringing his hands.

“Two boys,” I continued, “who can lambast each other in one minute, and in the next shake each other’s hands, are just the kind of boys I like to know. I want to shake hands with you.”

The class gave a gasp. I was creating a sensation.

“Your hand, Frank.”

Roughneck looked at his hand as though he were bidding it a last farewell, and ruefully, gingerly, put it forward. I grasped it warmly, and forthwith the lifeless palm in mine grew warm and strong. It was, after all, a fine handshake. As I turned to my fat friend, I saw in Reardon’s eyes an expression which told me that I was his master, his hero, his beloved.

Edward was now sunlit; his hand came into mine with something more than spontaneity. It was he that did the shaking.

On my giving them the sign to return to their seats, Reardon paused and looked appealingly into my eye.

“Yes?”

“Please, Brother, I’d like to shake hands with Fatty again.”

“Yes, Brother,” growled Fatty; “me and Roughneck will do it better this time.”

“Go ahead,” I said.

It looked more like a wrestling match than a handshake. Hogarth, the enthusiastic, broke into applause. All followed his example; eighty odd hands were clapping as one. I shook my head; at once the applause ceased; and as Stevens and Reardon went back to their seats, I, who had never before had to do with boys under fourteen, realized that by a lucky series of events, I had entered into the heart of every little lad in that room.

When I came to make my examination of conscience that night it was with a heart overflowing with gratitude to God. To think of it! In the space of barely an hour I had won the hearts of, morally speaking, an entire class. There were exactly fifty-five boys in the fourth grade. Of these, I was sure that from forty-five to fifty were in bondage to my will, which meant that, using justice and kindness day after day, I could make them see things as I saw them, love the things I loved, aspire to the things I aspired to, do the things I did. There is no leadership in the world so tremendous as the leadership of a good teacher. No wonder, then, that the enemies of the Church would steal her followers by stealing her schools.

I had gone into the class that morning with no fear as to order and discipline. Almost any man can secure these things by following out a few simple rules. One may have order and hatred; discipline and underhandedness. But to have order and hearts, discipline and candor—these are things that make a teacher’s life noble and momentous.

Gratitude, however, was not my only emotion. When I considered my petty vanity, my inordinate ambition, my quick temper—in a word, when I considered all my petty faults and dangerous inclinations—I humbled myself before Christ; I begged Him to be with me in the classroom, so that, despite my miserable self, I might act and teach and think as He, the lover of little children, would have me.