The leaves whispered a message to her, and the stream repeated an occult note of joy, which was mixed with sorrow.
The struggle of wild fear and bitter-sweet hunger of desire – this vague, mystical perception of her sex, did not last, to Rose. It was lost when she came out of the wood into the road on the way homeward. It was a formless impulse and throbbing stir far down below definite thought. It was sweet and wild and innocent as the first coquettish love-note of the thrush, and yet it was the beginning of her love-life. It was the second great epoch of her life.
CHAPTER V
HER FIRST PERIL
She came in contact during her school life with a variety of teachers. Most of the women she did not like, but one sweet and thoughtful girl had her unbounded love and confidence. She was from Madison, that was in itself a great distinction, for the capital of the state had come to mean something great and beautiful and heroic to Rose.
There it was the governor lived. There the soldiers went to enter the army, she remembered hearing the neighbors say, and her father's weekly paper was printed there. It was a great thing to have come from so far away and from Madison, and Rose hung about the door of the school house at the close of the first day, hoping the teacher would permit her to walk home by her side.
The young teacher, worried almost to despair over the arrangement of her classes, did not rise from her desk until the sun was low, rolling upon the tree-fringed ridge of the western bluff.
She was deeply touched to find this dusky-complexioned, bare-legged girl waiting for her.
"It was very nice of you, Rose," she said, and they walked off together. She talked about the flowers in the grass, and Rose ran to and fro, climbing fences to pick all sorts that she knew. She did not laugh when the teacher told her the botanical names. She wished she could remember them.
"When you grow up you can study botany too. But you must run home now, it's almost dark."
"I ain't afraid of the dark," said Rose stoutly, and she went so far Miss Lavalle was quite alarmed.
"Now you must go."
She kissed the child good-bye, and Rose ran off with her heart big with emotion, like an accepted lover.
It was well Rose turned to her for help, for most of her teachers had not the refinement of Miss Lavalle. They were generally farmers' daughters or girls from neighboring towns, who taught for a little extra money to buy dresses with – worthy girls indeed, but they expressed less of refining thought to the children.
One day this young teacher, with Rose and two or three other little ones, was sitting on a sunny southward sloping swell. Her hands were full of flowers and her great dark eyes were opened wide as if to mirror the whole scene, a valley flooded with light and warm with the radiant grass of spring. She was small and dark and dainty, and still carried the emotional characteristics of her French ancestry. She saw nature definitely, and did not scruple to say so.
"O, it is beautiful!" she said, as her eyes swept along the high broken line of the Western coulé ridge, down to the vast blue cliff where the river broke its way into the larger valley. "Children, see how beautiful it is!" The children stared away at it, but Rose looked into the teacher's eager face. Then her flowers dropped to the ground, the sunlight fell upon her with a richer glow, the dandelions shone like stars in a heaven of green, the birds and the wind sang a wild clear song in the doors of her ears, and her heart swelled with unutterable emotion. She was overpowered by the beauty of the world, as she had been by its immensity that day on the hill top with her father.
She saw the purple mists, the smooth, green, warm slopes dotted with dandelions, and the woodlands with their amber, and purple-gray, and gray-green foliage. The big world had grown distinctly beautiful to her. It was as though a gray veil had been withdrawn from the face of created things – but this perception did not last. The veil fell again before her eyes when the presence of the teacher was withdrawn. She felt the beautiful and splendid phases of nature and absorbed and related them to herself, but she did not consciously perceive except at rare moments.
The men, who taught in winter, were blunt and crude, but occasionally one of a high type came. Some young fellows studying law, or taking a course at some school, teaching to keep their place or to go higher. These men studied nights and mornings out of great Latin books which were the wonder of the children. Such teachers appealed to the better class of pupils with great power, but excited rebellion in others.
It seemed a wonderful and important day to Rose, the first time she entered the scarred and greasy room in winter, because it was swarming with big girls and boys. She took her seat at one of the little benches on the north side of the room, where all the girls sat. At some far time the girls had been put on that, the coldest side of the house, and they still sat there; change was impossible.
Rose was a little bit awed by the scene. The big boys never seemed so rough, and the big girls never seemed so tall. They were all talking loudly, hanging about the old square stove which sat in the middle of a puddle of bricks.
She was an unimportant factor in the winter school, however, for the big boys and girls ignored the little ones, or ordered them out of their games.
In winter also her physical superiority to the other girls was less apparent, for she wore thick shoes and shapeless dresses and muffled her head and neck like the boys.
She plodded to school along the deep sleigh tracks, facing a bitter wind, with the heart of a man. It made her cry sometimes but there was more of rage than fear in her sobbing. She coughed and wheezed like the rest, but through it all her perfect lungs and sinewy heart carried her triumphantly.
The winter she was fourteen years of age she had for teacher a girl whose beautiful presence brought a curse with it. She was small and graceful, with a face full of sudden tears and laughter and dreams of desire. She fascinated the children, and the larger boys woke to a sudden savagery of rivalry over her, which no one understood. The older boys fought over her smiles and low-voiced words of praise.
The girls grew vaguely jealous or were abject slaves to her whims. The school became farcical in session, with ever-increasing play hours and ever-shortening recitations, and yet such was the teacher's power over the students they did not report her. She gathered the larger girls around her as she flirted with the young men, until children like Carl and Rose became a part of it all.
At night the young men of the neighborhood flocked about her boarding-place, absolutely fighting in her very presence for the promise which she withheld, out of coquettish perversity. She herself became a victim of the storm of passion which swept over the neighborhood. She went out to parties and dances every night and came languidly to school each morning. Most of the men of the district laughed, but the women began to talk excitedly about the stories they heard.
At school the most dangerous practices were winked at. The older boys did not scruple to put their arms about the teacher's waist as they stood by her side. All the reserve and purity which is organic in the intercourse of most country girls and boys seemed lost, and parties and sleigh-rides left remorse and guilt behind. There was something feverish and unwholesome in the air.
The teacher's fame mysteriously extended to Tyre, and when known libertines began to hitch their horses at the fence before her house and to enter into rivalry with the young men of the neighborhood, then the fathers of the coulé suddenly awoke to their children's danger, and turning the teacher away (tearful and looking harmless as a kitten), they closed and locked the school-house door.
Instantly the young people grew aware of their out-break of premature passion. Some of them, like Rose, went to their parents and told all they knew about it. John Dutcher received his daughter's answers to his questions with deep sorrow, but he reflected long before he spoke. She was only a child, not yet fifteen; she would outgrow the touch of thoughtless hands.
He sent for Carl, and as they stood before him, with drooping heads, he talked to them in his low, mild voice, which had the power of bringing tears to the sturdy boy's eyes.
"Carl, I thought I could trust you. You've done wrong – don't you know it? You've made my old heart ache. When you get old and have a little girl you may know how I feel, but you can't now. I don't