by Willa Cather
It is only fair to say that in the community where she lived Miss Knightly was considered an intelligent young woman, but plain—distinctly plain. The standard of female beauty seems to be the same in all newly settled countries: Australia, New Zealand, the farming country along the Platte. It is, and was, the glowing, smiling calendar girl sent out to advertise agricultural implements. Colour was everything, modelling was nothing. A nose was a nose—any shape would do; a forehead was the place where the hair stopped, chin utterly negligible unless it happened to be more than two inches long.
Miss Knightly’s old mare, Molly, took her time along the dusty, sunflower-bordered roads that morning, occasionally pausing long enough to snatch off a juicy, leafy sunflower top in her yellow teeth. This she munched as she ambled along. Although Molly had almost the slowest trot in the world, she really preferred walking. Sometimes she fell into a doze and stumbled. Miss Knightly also, when she was abroad on these long drives, preferred the leisurely pace. She loved the beautiful autumn country; loved to look at it, to breathe it. She was not a “dreamy” person, but she was thoughtful and very observing. She relished the morning; the great blue of the sky, smiling, cloudless,—and the land that lay level as far as the eye could see. The horizon was like a perfect circle, a great embrace, and within it lay the cornfields, still green, and the yellow wheat stubble, miles and miles of it, and the pasture lands where the white-faced cattle led lives of utter content. All their movements were deliberate and dignified. They grazed through all the morning; approached their metal water tank and drank. If the windmill had run too long and the tank had overflowed, the cattle trampled the overflow into deep mud and cooled their feet. Then they drifted off to graze again. Grazing was not merely eating, it was also a pastime, a form of reflection, perhaps meditation.
Miss Knightly was thinking, as Molly jogged along, that the barbed-wire fences, though ugly in themselves, had their advantages. They did not cut the country up into patterns as did the rail fences and stone walls of her native New England. They were, broadly regarded, invisible—did not impose themselves upon the eye. She seemed to be driving through a fineless land. On her left the Hereford cattle apparently wandered at will: the tall sunflowers hid the wire that kept them off the road. Far away, on the horizon line, a troop of colts were galloping, all in the same direction—purely for exercise, one would say. Between her and the horizon the white wheels of windmills told her where the farmhouses sat.
Miss Knightly was abroad this morning with a special purpose—to visit country schools. She was the County Superintendent of Public Instruction. A grim title, that, to put upon a charming young woman.… Fortunately it was seldom used except on reports which she signed, and there it was usually printed. She was not even called “the Superintendent.” A country schoolteacher said to her pupils: “I think Miss Knightly will come to see us this week. She was at Walnut Creek yesterday.”
After she had driven westward through the pasture lands for an hour or so, Miss Knightly turned her mare north and very soon came into a rich farming district, where the fields were too valuable to be used for much grazing. Big red barns, rows of yellow straw stacks, green orchards, trim white farmhouses, fenced gardens.
Looking at her watch, Miss Knightly found that it was already after eleven o’clock. She touched Molly delicately with the whip and roused her to a jog trot. Presently they stopped before a little one-storey schoolhouse. All the windows were open. At the hitch-bar in the yard five horses were tethered—their saddles and bridles piled in an empty buckboard. There was a yard, but no fence—though on one side of the playground was a woven-wire fence covered with the vines of study rambler roses—very pretty in the spring. It enclosed a cemetery—very few graves, very much sun and waving yellow grass, open to the singing from the schoolroom and the shouts of the boys playing ball at noon. The cemetery never depressed the children, and surely the school cast no gloom over the cemetery.
When Miss Knightly stopped before the door, a boy ran out to hand her from the buggy and to take care of Molly. The little teacher stood on the doorstep, her face lost, as it were, in a wide smile of tremulous gladness.
Miss Knightly took her hand, held it for a moment and looked down into the child’s face—she was scarcely more—and said in the very gentlest shade of her many-shaded voice, “Everything going well, Lesley?”
The teacher replied in happy little gasps, “Oh yes, Miss Knightly! It’s all so much easier than it was last year. I have some such lovely children—and they’re all good!”
Miss Knightly took her arm, and they went into the schoolroom. The pupils grinned a welcome to the visitor. The teacher asked the conventional question: What recitation would she like to hear?
Whatever came next in the usual order, Miss Knightly said.
The class in geography came next. The children were “bounding” the States. When the North Atlantic States had been disposed of with more or less accuracy, the little teacher said they would now jump to the Middle West, to bring the lesson nearer home.
“Suppose we begin with Illinois. That is your State, Edward, so I will call on you.”
A pale boy rose and came front of the class; a little fellow aged ten, maybe, who was plainly a newcomer—wore knee pants and stockings, instead of long trousers or blue overalls like the other boys. His hands were clenched at his sides, and he was evidently much frightened. Looking appealingly at the teacher, he began in a high treble: “The State of Illinois is bounded on the north by Lake Michigan, on the east by Lake Michigan …” He felt he had gone astray, and language utterly failed. A quick shudder ran over him from head to foot, and an accident happened. His dark blue stockings grew darker still, and his knickerbockers very dark. He stood there as if nailed to the floor. The teacher went up to him and took his hand and led him to his desk.
“You’re too tired, Edward,” she said. “We’re all tired, and it’s almost noon. So you can all run out and play, while I talk to Miss Knightly and tell her how naughty you all are.”
The children laughed (all but poor Edward), laughed heartily, as if they were suddenly relieved from some strain. Still laughing and punching each other they ran out into the sunshine.
Miss Knightly and the teacher (her name, by the way, was Lesley Ferguesson) sat down on a bench in the corner.
“I’m so sorry that happened, Miss Knightly. I oughtn’t to have called on him. He’s so new here, and he’s a nervous little boy. I thought he’d like to speak up for his State. He seems homesick.”
“My dear, I’m glad you did call on him, and I’m glad the poor little fellow had an accident,—if he doesn’t get too much misery out of it. The way those children behaved astonished me. Not a wink, or grin, or even a look. Not a wink from the Haymaker boy. I watched him. His mother has no such delicacy. They have just the best kind of good manners. How do you do it, Lesley?”
Lesley gave a happy giggle and flushed as red as a poppy. “Oh, I don’t do anything! You see they really are nice children. You remember last year I did have a little trouble—till they got used to me.”
“But they all passed their finals, and one girl, who was older than her teacher, got a school.”
“Hush, hush, ma’am! I’m afraid for the walls to hear it! Nobody knows our secret but my mother.”
“I’m very well satisfied with the results of our crime, Lesley.”
The girl blushed again. She loved to hear Miss Knightly speak her name, because she always sounded the s like a z, which made it seem gentler and more intimate. Nearly everyone else, even her mother, hissed the s as if it were spelled “Lessley.” It was embarrassing to have such a queer name, but she respected it because her father had chosen it for her.
“Where are you going to stay all night, Miss Knightly?” she asked rather timidly.
“I think Mrs. Ericson expects me to stay with her.”
“Mrs. Hunt, where I stay, would be awful glad to have you, but I know you’ll be more comfortable at Mrs. Ericson’s.
She’s a lovely housekeeper.” Lesley resigned the faint hope that Miss Knightly would stay where she herself boarded, and broke out eagerly:
“Oh, Miss Knightly, have you seen any of our boys lately? Mother’s too busy to write to me often.”
“Hector looked in at my office last week. He came to the Court House with a telegram for the sheriff. He seemed well and happy.”
“Did he? But Miss Knightly, I wish he hadn’t taken that messenger job. I hate so for him to quit school.”
“Now, I wouldn’t worry about that, my dear. School isn’t everything. He’ll be getting good experience every day at the depot.”
“Do you think so? I haven’t seen him since he went to work.”
“Why, how long has it been since you were home?”
“It’s over a month now. Not since my school started. Father has been working all our horses on the farm. Maybe you can share my lunch with me?”
“I brought a lunch for the two of us, my dear. Call your favourite boy to go to my buggy and get my basket for us. After lunch I would like to hear the advanced arithmetic class.”
* *
While the pupils were doing their sums at the blackboard, Miss Knightly herself was doing a little figuring. This was Thursday. Tomorrow she would visit two schools, and she had planned to spend Friday night with a pleasant family on Farmers’ Creek. But she could change her schedule and give this homesick child a visit with her family in the county seat. It would inconvenience her very little.
When the class in advanced arithmetic was dismissed, Miss Knightly made a joking little talk to the children and told them about a very bright little girl in Scotland who knew nearly a whole play of Shakespeare’s by heart, but who wrote in her diary: “Nine times nine is the Devil”; which proved, she said, that there are two kinds of memory, and God is very good to anyone to whom he gives both kinds. Then she asked if the pupils might have a special recess of half an hour, as a present from her. They gave her a cheer and out they trooped, the boys to the ball ground, and the girls to the cemetery, to sit neatly on the headstones and discuss Miss Knightly.
During their recess the Superintendent disclosed her plan. “I’ve been wondering, Lesley, whether you wouldn’t like to go back to town with me after school tomorrow. We could get into MacAlpin by seven o’clock, and you could have all of Saturday and Sunday at home. Then we would make an early start Monday morning, and I would drop you here at the schoolhouse at nine o’clock.”
The little teacher caught her breath—she became quite pale for a moment.
“Oh Miss Knightly, could you? Could you?”
“Of course I can. I’ll stop for you here at four o’clock tomorrow afternoon.”
II
The dark secret between Lesley and Miss Knightly was that only this September had the girl reached the legal age for teachers, yet she had been teaching all last year when she was still under age!
Last summer, when the applicants for teachers’ certificates took written examinations in the County Superintendent’s offices at the Court House in MacAlpin, Lesley Ferguesson had appeared with some twenty-six girls and nine boys. She wrote all morning and all afternoon for two days. Miss Knightly found her paper one of the best in the lot. A week later, when all the papers were filed, Miss Knightly told Lesley she could certainly give her a school. The morning after she had thus notified Lesley, she found the girl herself waiting on the sidewalk in front of the house where Miss Knightly boarded.
“Could I walk over to the Court House with you, Miss Knightly? I ought to tell you something,” she blurted out at once. “On that paper I didn’t put down my real age. I put down sixteen, and I won’t be fifteen until this September.”
“But I checked you with the high-school records, Lesley.”
“I know. I put it down wrong there, too. I didn’t want to be the class baby, and I hoped I could get a school soon, to help out at home.”
The County Superintendent thought she would long remember that walk to the Court House. She could see that the child had spent a bad night; and she had walked up from her home down by the depot, quite a mile away, probably without breakfast.
“If your age is wrong on both records, why do you tell me about it now?”
“Oh, Miss Knightly, I got to thinking about it last night, how if you did give me a school it might all come out, and mean people would say you knew about it and broke the law.”
Miss Knightly was thoughtless enough to chuckle. “But, my dear, don’t you see that if I didn’t know about it until this moment, I am completely innocent?”
The child who was walking beside her stopped short and burst into sobs. Miss Knightly put her arm around those thin, eager, forward-reaching shoulders.
“Don’t cry, dear. I was only joking. There’s nothing very dreadful about it. You didn’t give your age under oath, you know.” The sobs didn’t stop. “Listen, let me tell you something. That big Hatch boy put his age down as nineteen, and I know he was teaching down in Nemaha County four years ago. I can’t always be sure about the age applicants put down. I have to use my judgment.”
The girl lifted her pale, troubled face and murmured, “Judgment?”
“Yes. Some girls are older at thirteen than others are at eighteen. Your paper was one of the best handed in this year, and I am going to give you a school. Not a big one, but a nice one, in a nice part of the county. Now let’s go into Ernie’s coffee shop and have some more breakfast. You have a long walk home.”
Of course, fourteen was rather young for a teacher in an ungraded school, where she was likely to have pupils of sixteen and eighteen in her classes. But Miss Knightly’s “judgment” was justified by the fact that in June the school directors of the Wild Rose district asked to have “Miss Ferguesson” back for the following year.
III
At four o’clock on Friday afternoon Miss Knightly stopped at the Wild Rose schoolhouse to find the teacher waiting by the roadside, and the pupils already scattering across the fields, their tin lunch pails flashing back the sun. Lesley was standing almost in the road itself, her grey “telescope” bag at her feet. The moment old Molly stopped, she stowed her bag in the back of the buggy and climbed in beside Miss Knightly. Her smile was so eager and happy that her friend chuckled softly. “You still get a little homesick, don’t you, Lesley?”
She didn’t deny it. She gave a guilty laugh and murmured, “I do miss the boys.”
The afternoon sun was behind them, throwing over the pastures and the harvested, resting fields that wonderful light, so yellow that it is actually orange. The three hours and the fourteen miles seemed not overlong. As the buggy neared the town of MacAlpin, Miss Knightly thought she could feel Lesley’s heart beat. The girl had been silent a long while when she exclaimed:
“Look, there’s the standpipe!”
The object of this emotion was a red sheet-iron tube which thrust its naked ugliness some eighty feet into the air and held the water supply for the town of MacAlpin. As it stood on a hill, it was the first thing one saw on approaching the town from the west. Old Molly, too, seemed to have spied this heartening landmark, for she quickened her trot without encouragement from the whip. From that point on, Lesley said not a word. There were two more low hills (very low), and then Miss Knightly turned off the main road and drove by a short cut through the baseball ground, to the south appendix of the town proper, the “depot settlement” where the Ferguessons lived.
Their house stood on a steep hillside—a storey-and-a-half frame house with a basement on the downhill side, faced with brick up to the first-floor level. When the buggy stopped before the yard gate, two little boys came running out of the front door. Miss Knightly’s passenger vanished from her side—she didn’t know just when Lesley alighted. Her attention was distracted by the appearance of the mother, with a third boy, still in kilts, trotting behind her.
Mrs. Ferguesson was not a person who could be overlooked. All the merchants in MacAlpin admitted that she was a fine f
igure of a woman. As she came down the little yard and out of the gate, the evening breeze ruffled her wavy auburn hair. Her quick step and alert, upright carriage gave one the impression that she got things done. Coming up to the buggy, she took Miss Knightly’s hand.
“Why, it’s Miss Knightly! And she’s brought our girl along to visit us. That was mighty clever of you, Miss, and these boys will surely be a happy family. They do miss their sister.” She spoke clearly, distinctly, but with a slight Missouri turn of speech.
By this time Lesley and her brothers had become telepathically one. Miss Knightly couldn’t tell what the boys said to her, or whether they said anything, but they had her old canvas bag out of the buggy and up on the porch in no time at all. Lesley ran toward the front door, hurried back to thank Miss Knightly, and then disappeared holding fast to the little chap in skirts. She had forgotten to ask at what time Miss Knightly would call for her on Monday, but her mother attended to that. When Mrs. Ferguesson followed the children through the hall and the little back parlour into the dining-room, Lesley turned to her and asked breathlessly, almost sharply:
“Where’s Hector?”
“He’s often late on Friday night, dear. He telephoned me from the depot and said not to wait supper for him—he’d get a sandwich at the lunch counter. Now how are you, my girl?” Mrs. Ferguesson put her hands on Lesley’s shoulders and looked into her glowing eyes.
“Just fine, Mother. I like my school so much! And the scholars are nicer even than they were last year. I just love some of them.”