The Romance of a Soul
When Marion Willis became a schoolmistress in the Glendale public
school at twenty-two she regarded her employment as a transient
occupation, to be terminated presently by marriage. She possessed an
imaginative temperament, and one of her favorite and most satisfying
habits was to evoke from the realm of the future a proper hero,
shining with zeal and virtue like Sir Galahad, in whose arms she would
picture herself living happily ever after a sweet courtship,
punctuated by due maidenly hesitation. This fondness for letting her
fancy run riot and evolve visions splendid with happenings for her own
advancement and gladness was not confined to matrimonial day-dreams.
On the morning when she entered the school-house door for the first
time the eyes of her mind saw the curtain which veils the years
divide, and she beheld herself a famous educator, still young, but
long since graduated from primary teaching. She forgot the vision of
her Sir Galahad there. Nor were the circumstances of her several
day-dreams necessarily consistent in other respects. It sufficed for
her spiritual exaltation that they should be merely a fairy-like
manifestation in her own favor. But though she loved to give her
imagination rein, the fairy-like quality of these visions was patent
to Miss Willis, for she possessed a quiet sense of humor as a sort of
east-wind supplementary to the sentimental and poetic properties of
her nature. She had a way of poking fun at herself, which, when
exercised, sent the elfin figures scattering with a celerity
suggestive of the departure of her own pupils at the tinkle of the
bell for dismissal. Then she was left alone with her humor and her New
England conscience, that stern adjuster of real values and enemy of
spiritual dissipation. This same conscience was a vigilant monitor in
the matter of her school-teaching, despite Miss Willis's reasonable
hope that Sir Galahad would claim her soon. The hope would have been
reasonable in the case of any one of her sex, for every woman is said
to be given at least one opportunity to become a wife; but in the case
of Miss Willis nature had been more than commonly bounteous. She was
not a beauty, but she was sweet and fresh-looking, with clear, honest
eyes, and a cheery, gracious manner such as is apt to captivate
discerning men. She was one of those wholesome spirits, earnest and
refined, yet prone to laughter, which do not remain long unmated in
the ordinary course of human experience. But her conscience did not
permit her to dwell on this advantage to the detriment of her
scholars.
Miss Willis lived at home with her mother. They owned their small
house. The other expenses were defrayed from the daughter's salary;
hence strict economy was obligatory, and the expenditure of every
five-dollar bill was a matter of moment. Miss Willis's father had died
when she was a baby. The meagre sum of money which he left had
sufficed to keep his widow and only child from want until Marion's
majority. All had been spent except the house; but, as Miss Willis now
proudly reflected, she had become a breadwinner, and her mother's
declining years were shielded from poverty. They would be able to
manage famously until Sir Galahad arrived, and when he came one of the
joys of her surrender would be that her mother's old age would be
brightened by a few luxuries.
Glendale, as its name denotes, had been a rustic village. When Miss
Willis was engaged (to teach school, not to be married) it was a
thriving, bustling, overgrown, manufacturing town already yearning to
become a city. By the end of another five years Glendale had realized
its ambition, and Miss Willis was still a teacher in its crowded
grammar-school. How the years creep, yet how they fly, when one is
busy with regular, routine employment! The days are such a repetition
of each other that they sometimes seem very long, but when one pauses
and looks back one starts at the accumulation of departed time, and
deplores the swiftness of the seasons.
Five years had but slightly dimmed the freshness of Miss Willis's
charms. She was as comely as ever. She was a trifle stouter, a trifle
less girlish in manner, and only a trifle--what shall we call
it?--wilted in appearance. The close atmosphere of a school-room is
not conducive to rosiness of complexion; and the constant strain of
guiding over forty immature minds in the paths of knowledge will weigh
upon the flesh, though the soul be patient and the heart light. Miss
Willis's class comprised the children whose average age was twelve to
thirteen--those who had been in the school three years. There were
both boys and girls, and they remained with her a year. She had begun
with the youngest children, but promotion had presently established
her in this position.
Forty immature minds--minds just groping on the threshold of life--to
be watched, shaped, and helped for ten months, and their individual
needs treated with sympathy and patience. For ten months--the school
term,--then to be exchanged for a new batch, and so from year to year.
Glendale's manufacturing population included several nationalities, so
that the little army of scholars which sat under Miss Willis's eye
included Poles, Italians, negroes, and now and then a youthful
Chinaman, as well as the sons and daughters of the merchant, the
tailor, the butcher, and baker, and other citizens whose title as
Americans was of older date. It was not easy to keep the atmosphere of
such a school-room wholesome, for the apparel of the poorest children,
though often well darned, was not always clean, and the ventilating
apparatus represented a political job. But it was Miss Willis's pride
that she knew the identity of every one of her boys and girls, and
carried it by force of love and will written on her brain as well as
on the desk-tablets which she kept as a safeguard against possible
lapses of memory. She loved her classes, and it was a grief to her at
first to be obliged to pass them on at the end of the school year. But
habit reconciles us to the inevitable, and she presently learned to
steel her heart against a too sensitive point of view in this respect,
and to supplement the bleeding ties thus rudely severed with a fresh
set without crying her eyes out. Yet though faithful teachers are thus
schooled to forget, they rarely do, and Miss Willis found herself
keeping track, in her mind's eye, of her little favorites--some of
them youthful reprobates--in their progress up the ladder of knowledge
and out into the world.
But what of Sir Galahad? He had dallied, but about this time--the
sixth year of her life as a teacher--he appeared. Not as she had
imagined him--a lover of great personal distinction, amazing talents,
compelling virtues, and large estates; yet, nevertheless, a
presentable being in trousers, whose devotion touched her maidenly
heart until it reciprocated the passion which his lips expressed. He
was a young bookkeeper in a banker's office, with a taste for literary
matters and a respectable gift for private theatricals. A small social
club was the medium by which they became intimate. Sir Galahad was
refined in appearance and bearing, a trifle too delicate for perfect
manliness, yet, as Miss Willis's mother justly observed, a gentle soul
to live with. He had a taste for poetry, and a sentimental vein which
manifested itself in verses of a Wordsworthian simplicity descriptive
of his lady-love's charms. No wonder Marion fell in love with him, and
renounced, without even a sigh of regret, her vision of a husband with
lordly means. Sir Galahad had only his small means, which were not
enough for a matrimonial venture. They would wait in the hope that
some opportunity for preferment would present itself. So for three
years--years when she was in the heyday of her comeliness--they
attended the social club as an engaged couple, and fed their mutual
passion on the poets and occasional chaste embraces. Marion felt sure
that something would happen before long to redeem the situation and
establish her Sir Galahad in the seat to which his merit entitled him.
Her favorite vision was of some providential catastrophe, even an
epidemic or wholesale maiming, by which the partners of the
banking-house and all in authority over her lover should be
temporarily incapacitated, and the entire burden of the business be
thrown on his shoulders long enough to demonstrate his true worth. As
a sequel she beheld him promptly admitted to partnership and herself
blissfully married.
The course of events did not respect her vision. After they had been
engaged nearly four years Sir Galahad came to the conclusion one day
that the only hope of establishing himself in business on his own
account was (to repeat his own metaphor) to seize the bull by the
horns and go West. Marion bravely and enthusiastically seconded his
resolution, and fired his spirit by her own prophecy as to his rapid
success. Western real estate for Eastern investors was the line of
business to which Sir Galahad decided to fasten his hopes. He set
forth upon his crusade protesting that within a twelvemonth he would
win a home for Marion and her mother in the fashionable quarter of St.
Paul, Minn., and carrying in his valise a toilet-case tastefully
embroidered by his sweetheart, in a corner of which were emblazoned
two hearts beating as one.
Marion returned to her scholars more than ever convinced that her
employment was but a transient occupation. What followed was this: Sir
Galahad put out his sign as a broker in Western real estate for
Eastern investors, and fifteen months slipped away before he earned
more than his bare living expenses. He had carried with him his poetic
tastes and his gift for private theatricals. The first of these he
exercised in his fond letters home; the second he employed for the
entertainment of the social club in St. Paul, to which he presently
obtained admittance. By the end of the second year he was doing better
financially, but his letters to Marion had become less frequent and
less frank in regard to his own circumstances and doings. There came a
letter at last from Sir Galahad--a letter of eight pages of soul
stress and sorrow, as he would have called it, and of disingenuous
wriggling, as the world would call it--in which he explained as
delicately as was possible under the circumstances that his love for
Miss Willis had become the love of a brother for a sister, and that he
was engaged to be married to Miss Virginia Crumb, the only daughter of
Hon. Cephas I. Crumb, owner and treasurer of the Astarte Metal Works,
of Minnesota. Exit Sir Galahad! And following his perfidy Marion's
imagination evoked a vision of revenge in which she figured as the
plaintiff in a breach-of-promise suit, and had the fierce yet
melancholy joy of confronting him and his new love face to face before
a sympathizing judge and jury. But her New England conscience and her
sense of humor combined disposed of this vision in a summary fashion,
so that she let Sir Galahad off with the assurance that it was a
happiness to her that he had discovered how little he cared before it
was too late. Then her New England conscience bade her settle down to
her teaching with a grim courage, and be thankful that she had never
been unfaithful to her work. Also her sense of humor told her that she
must not assume all men to be false because Sir Galahad had been. It
was then, when she needed him sorely, that destiny introduced on the
scene Jimmy.
Jimmy was no Sir Galahad. He was a chunky, round-faced school-boy with
brown hair, which, when it had not been cut for a month, blossomed
into close, curly tangles. At first sight Jimmy was dull-eyed, and in
the class his mental processes were so slow that he had already
acquired among his mates the reputation of being stupid. The teacher
who had taught him last confided to Miss Willis that she feared Jimmy
was hopeless. Hopeless! Somehow the word went to Marion's heart. Not
that she was hopeless; far from it, she would have told you. But her
sense of humor did not conceal from her that in spite of her
grin-and-bear-it mien, she was far from happy. At any rate, the
suggestion that Jimmy was hopeless awoke a sympathetic chord in her
breast, so that she looked at him more tenderly on the day after she
had been told. Jimmy was slow of speech and rather dirty as to his
face. There were warts on his hands, and his sphinx-like countenance
was impassive almost to the point of stolidity. Somehow, though, Miss
Willis said to herself, in her zeal to characterize him fairly, the
little thirteen-year-old product of democracy (Jimmy was the son of a
carpenter and a grocer's daughter) suggested power; suggested it as a
block of granite or a bull-dog suggests it. His compact, sturdy frame
and well-poised head, with its close, brown curls, seemed a protest in
themselves against hopelessness. On the third day he smiled; it was in
recess that she detected him at it. An organ-grinder's monkey in the
school-yard called it forth, a sweet, glad smile, which lit up his
dense features as the sun at twilight will pierce through and
illuminate for a few minutes a sullen cloud-bank. Miss Willis saw in a
vision on the spot a refuge from hopelessness. Behind that smile there
must be a winsome soul. That spiritless expression was but a veil or
rind hiding the germs of sensibility and reason. This was discovery
number one. After it came darkness again, so far as outward
manifestation was concerned. Jimmy's attitude toward his lessons
appeared to be one of utter density. He listened with blank but
slightly lowered eyes. When questioned he generally gurgled
inarticulately, as though seeking a response, then broke down.
Occasionally he essayed an answer, which revealed that he had
understood nothing. Oftener he sought refuge in complete silence. But
hope had been stimulated in Miss Willis's breast, and she relaxed
neither scrutiny nor tenderness. One day matters were brought to a
head by the thoughtless jest of a classmate, a flaxen-haired fairy,
who, in the recess following one of Jimmy's least successful gurgles,
crept up behind him and planted upon his curls a brown-paper cap,
across which the little witch had painted "DUNCE" in large capital
letters.
Jimmy did not know what had happened. For a moment he thought,
perhaps, that he had been introduced to some new game. But the jeers
of the children checked the rising smile and led him to pluck at his
forehead. As he gazed at the fool's-cap in his hand a roar of
merciless laughter greeted his discovery. Miss Willis had realized the
fairy's deed too late to prevent the catastrophe. The sharp tap of her
ruler on the desk produced a silence interjected with giggles. The
fairy was a successful scholar, and would not have harmed a fly
willingly. It was a case of fun--the rough expression of an
indisputable fact. Jimmy was such a dunce that he ought really to wear
the brand as a notice to the world. What Miss Willis said by way of
reproof to the fairy is immaterial. If Jimmy heard it he gave no sign.
He dropped his head upon his desk and was sobbing audibly. The
bewildered children hearkened to the protest against cruelty with that
elfin look which mischievous youth dares assume, while the culprit
stood with a finger in her mouth, not quite understanding the enormity
of her conduct. In a moment more they were in the school-yard, and
Miss Willis was beside Jimmy's desk patting his tangled head. He wept
as though his heart would break.
"No matter, Jimmy; it was only a thoughtless jest. She didn't mean to
hurt your feelings."
Her words and variations on the same theme called forth successive
bursts of sobs. Only silence diminished their intensity. When at last
they had become only quiverings of his shoulders he looked up and
said, with a wail of fierce despair, but with a grasp upon self which
was a fresh revelation:
"It's true; it's true! She did it because I'm so stupid!"
Thereupon his shoulders shook again convulsively, and he burst into
fresh grief.
Marion's arms were about him in an instant. "Jimmy, Jimmy, it is not
true! You are not stupid! You and I will fight it out together! Will
you trust me, Jimmy?"
He sobbed, but she could perceive that he was listening. Had her hope
become his? Surely they were words he had never heard before.
"Jimmy, listen to me. I have found out something, and all owing to
that ridiculous dunce-cap. It is I who have been stupid. I never knew
until now how much you wish to learn and to improve. You are not
stupid, Jimmy. I am sure of it. You are slow, but you and I will put
our heads together and make the best of that. Will you try with me,
Jimmy?"
The curly head was raised again. His tear-stained eyes looked out at
her shyly, but with a beam of astonished gratitude. From his quivering
lips fell a low but resolute "Yes, ma'am!"
"We will begin to-day. We need each other, Jimmy."
As a work of art grows slowly from confusion and lack of form to
coherence and symmetry to the moral joy of its maker, so her
experience in human plastic enterprise filled the heart of Miss Willis
with a vital happiness. For two years--day in and day out--she never
flagged in her task of giving sight to the eyes and ears to the mind
of the unshaped clay which fate had put into her hands for making or
marring. How patient she had to be! How ingenious, vigilant, and
sympathetic! Through working upon the souls of Jimmy's father and
mother by pathetic appeal she obtained permission to keep him an hour
after school each day and drill him step by step, inch by inch. She
brought her midday meal and shared it with him. In the evening she
framed cunning devices to lure his budding intelligence. And from the
very first she beheld her figure of human ignorance respond to her
gentle moulding. Jimmy's soul was first of all a hot-spring of
ambition; the evidences of which, when once recognized, were ever
paramount. But how blocked and intricate were the passages through
which this yearning for fame sought to express itself! Sometimes it
seemed even to her as though she would never dissipate the fog-bank
which tortured his intelligence. But Jimmy was patient, too, and his
bull-dog features were but the reflex of a grim tenacity of purpose.
At the end of the first year she reported that he was unfit to be
promoted, in order that she need not lose him just when he needed her
most. She was able to make clear to Jimmy that this was not a
disgrace, but a sign of progress. But when the end of the second year
came she passed him on with only the qualm of love parting with its
own. Her task was done. The dull, clouded brow was clear with the
light of eager reason; the still struggling faculties had begun to
understand that in slowness there was the compensation of power, and
were resolute with hope.
"Good-by, Miss Willis. I'm going to be at the head of my class next
year; see if I'm not!"
So said Jimmy as he left her. She hesitated a moment, then stooped and
kissed him. It made her blush, for she had never kissed a pupil
before, nor any one but her mother since Sir Galahad. It made Jimmy
blush, too, for he did not know exactly what to make of it. So they
parted, and Jimmy went up the ladder of knowledge for two years more
at that school. He was not the head of his class; he was number five
the first year and number three the second. When he graduated he
promised to write; but, boylike, he never did, so he vanished into the
open polar world, and was lost to the eyes of the woman who had grown
gray in his service.
Yes, Miss Willis had grown gray. That is, there were more or less
becoming threads of silver in her maiden tresses, and the dignity of
middle age had added inches to her waist and a few interesting lines
to her forehead. There was no new Sir Galahad on the horizon even of
her day-dreams, and her mother was in failing health. Mrs. Willis
continued now to fail for five years--years which taxed her daughter's
strength, though not her affection. Pupils came and went--pupils to
whom she gave herself with the faithfulness of her New England
conscience--but no one exactly like Jimmy. He remained unique, yet
lost in the maze of life. When her mother died she settled down as an
incorrigible old maid, and her daydreams knew no more the vision of a
love coming from the clouds to possess her. Nor did the years bring
with them realization of that other vision--herself enthroned in the
public mind as a wonderful educator to whom the world should bow. She
was only Miss Marion Willis, the next to the oldest and the most
respected teacher of the Glendale grammar-school. So she found herself
at the end of twenty-five years of continuous service. It did occur to
her as a delightful possibility that the authorities or scholars or
somebody would observe this quarter-centennial anniversary in a
suitable manner, and a vision danced before her mind's eye of a
surprise-party bearing a pretty piece of silver or a clock as a
memorial of her life-work. But the date came and passed without
comment from any source, and Marion's sense of humor made the best of
it by drinking her own health on the evening of the day in question,
and congratulating herself that she loved her work and was happy. At
that supper there was no guest save Jimmy's tintype, which she fetched
from the mantelpiece and leaned against the cake-basket on the table.
Jimmy stood now not only for himself, but for a little army of
struggling souls upon whom her patient intelligence had been freely
lavished.
Of course, Jimmy was found. Miss Willis had always felt sure that he
would be. But ten years more had slipped away before he was brought to
light. One day she discovered his name in the newspaper as a rising
political constellation, and she was convinced, without the least
particle of evidence to support her credulity, that the James in
question was her Jimmy. His name had suddenly become prominent in the
political firmament on account of his resolute conduct as the mayor of
a Western city. The public had been impressed by his strength and
pluck and executive ability, working successfully against a gang of
municipal cutthroats, and his name was being paraded over the country.
"I've half a mind to write to him and discover if it's he," Miss
Willis said to herself. "How surprised he would be to receive a postal
card 'Are you my Jimmy?'" But somehow she refrained. She did not wish
to run the risk of disappointment, though she was sure it was he. She
preferred to wait and to watch him now that she had him under her eye
again. This was an easy thing to do, for Jimmy the mayor became Jimmy
the governor before two years had passed, and one morning Miss Willis
found facing her in the Daily Dispatch a newspaper cut of large
dimensions which set her heart beating as it had not throbbed since
the days of Sir Galahad. It was a portrait of her Jimmy; Jimmy
magnified and grown into a hirsute man, but the same old Jimmy with
the tangled hair, serious brow, and large, pathetic eyes. Miss Willis
laughed and Miss Willis cried, and presently, after she had time to
realize the full meaning of what had happened, she had a vision of
Jimmy in the White House, and herself, a venerable yet hale old woman,
standing beside him in a famous company, and Jimmy was saying before
them all, "I wish to make you acquainted with my dear teacher--the
woman to whom I owe my start in life." The idea tickled her
imagination, and she said to herself that she would keep the secret
until that happy day arrived. What a delightful secret it was, and how
surprised he would be when she said to him, "I suppose you don't
recognize me, Jimmy?" Then, perhaps, he would embrace her before
everybody, and the newspapers would have her picture and give the
particulars of her life.
* * * * *
Jimmy was not elected President until four years later, and in the
meantime Miss Willis kept her secret. When he was nominated, and the
details of his career were eagerly sought for, it was announced by the
press that in early life he had attended the Glendale grammar-school,
and the fact was regarded by the authorities as a feather in the
school's cap, and was commemorated during the campaign by the display
in the exhibition hall of a large picture of the candidate festooned
with an American flag. It was vaguely remembered that he had been
under Miss Willis, among other teachers, but the whole truth was
unknown to anybody, and Marion's New England conscience shrank from
obtaining glory and sympathy through brag. She hugged her secret, and
bore it with her intact when she took her departure for Washington to
attend the inauguration ceremonies. She did not tell the authorities
where she was going when she asked for a short leave of absence--the
first she had ever requested in all her years of service. She was
setting forth on the spree of her life, and her spirit was jubilant at
the thought of Jimmy's amazement when he found out who she was.
A day came at last, after the new chief magistrate had taken the oaths
of office and was in possession of the White House, when the American
public was at liberty to file past their President and shake his hand
in their might as free men and free women. Miss Willis had not been
able to obtain a location near enough to the inauguration proceedings
to distinguish more than the portly figure of a man, or to hear
anything except the roar of the multitude. But now she was to have the
chance to meet Jimmy face to face and overwhelm him with her secret.
Little by little the file of visitors advanced on its passage toward
the nation's representative, and presently Miss Willis caught her
first glimpse of Sir Galahad--her real Sir Galahad. Her heart throbbed
tumultuously. It was he--her Jimmy; he, beyond the shadow of a doubt;
a strong, grave, resolute man; the prototype of human power and
American intelligence.
Her Jimmy! She let her eyes fall, for it would soon be her turn, and
her nerves were all tingling with a happy mixture of pride and
diffidence. Her vision, her dearest vision, was about to be realized.
There was no chance for delusion or disappointment now. So it seemed.
Yet, as she stood there waiting, with her New England conscience and
her sense of humor still active, of a sudden her imagination was
seized by a new prospect. Why should she tell her secret? What was the
use? There he stood--her Jimmy--good, great, and successful, and she
had helped to make him so. Nothing could ever deprive her of that. The
truth was hers forever. She was only an elderly spinster. Perhaps he
would have forgotten. He was but fifteen when he left her, and he had
never written to her during all these years. Very likely he did not
realize at all what she had done for him. Nothing which he could do
for her now would add to the joy of her heart. Secret? To share it
with him might spoil all. The chances were it was her secret only;
that only she could understand it.
She was close to the President now, and some one at her ear was asking
her name. Suddenly she heard her name called, and stepping forward she
was face to face with her soul's knight, and he was holding her hand.
"I am very glad to see you, Miss Willis," she heard him say.
She had been stepping shyly, with her eyes lowered. At his words,
spoken in a voice which for all its manliness was still the same, she
looked up into his face and murmured, as she pressed his fingers:
"God bless you, sir!"
She did not even say "Jimmy." Then she passed, and--and her secret was
safe.
Six months later Miss Willis was found one morning dead in her bed.
She had died peacefully in her sleep. When her personal effects were
administered there was noticed on the mantelpiece in her sitting-room
a mounted tintype, on the paper back of which were two inscriptions.
Of these the upper, in faded ink, was dated forty years before and
read "From Jimmy." The other, recent and written with the pen of an
elderly person, ran as follows: "Portrait of the President of the
United States as a school-boy."
-THE END-
Robert Grant's short story: The Romance of a Soul
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