The American: A Middle Western Legend Read Online Free PDF Page B

broadcloth suit out of his first month’s pay, he cut his hair short, and a mustache was beginning to cover his split lip. He affected a thin cane, the hallmark of a teacher, and when he performed his first thrashing, he kept telling himself, “Hard work and guts. What did I come from—nothing. So a beating doesn’t hurt.” When he walked down the streets of Woodville, people said hello to him, and whenever he entered the Woodville School, his first appointment, he had a fine, proud feeling of identification. The students disliked him, but that was a matter of course with every teacher, and if he had any doubts about the rigid mechanics of what he taught, he never allowed them to trouble him greatly. Education was like a god; he read many books, and each time he finished one, he felt like a man who has come from profound worship. He was invited to tea by the Misses Carteret, the maiden sisters who were one of the town’s best families and the bulwark of culture in Woodville, and though for a while he was made speechless by the sumptuous beauty of their home, the overstuffed pieces, the ornate horsehair sofa, the lifelike pheasant under a wonderfully wrought glass bell which had a china figure of a hunter perched on top of it, the delicate lace antimacassars, the Oriental carpet, the crystal closet, and the many painted lamps, he was nevertheless able to relax after a while and even agree with them that Whitman was a rude barbarian, although he had actually never heard of Whitman, and hardly knew whether he was a general or a local politician. But he had read Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare and was able to make a credible pretense at knowing the plays, and agreed that the theatre, while ungodly, could make a contribution to a select few; and he found, in telling some of his experiences from the great war, that he could also be amusing, for both the sisters and the Methodist minister laughed with real appreciation. But the fires inside him were not quenched by warm tea; as much as he had, still he wanted and lusted. He, who had once regarded a girl as the unobtainable, now played suit to a pretty little teacher at the school, and, rebuffed, thought that he could only die. He couldn’t put out the fire inside himself; the daughter of Charles Adams, who ran the wagon works, was still unobtainable; he dreamed of her and set himself new lands to conquer.
    The father and the mother came to him again, now. They plucked at umbilical cords, and when he attempted to be superior and disdainful, the mother broke down and wept, and the father stared embarrassedly at the ground. They were peasant folk and their son was a gentleman of quality, but they were going to lose the farm unless they could lay hands on a little money; they were still in the jungle where a man attempts to crawl uphill on hands and knees, and he was making thirty-five dollars a month. “All right, all right,” he said. “Whatever you want, I will give it to you.” They kissed his hand; they had never dreamed that they would father and mother such a son, and it was not their fault. “All right, all right,” he said.
    Everyone said that now Pete Altgeld would settle down, because the boy had quality and drive and perseverance, as you could see. If one girl had rebuffed him, another went walking with him one evening, down to the edge of town, past the lumber yard, and along the winding cowpath, talking quickly and vapidly, and it was all so easy; but fear followed on that, and like a caged animal his mind lurched from side to side, and when he was once again invited to the sisters Carteret, there was a musty smell of decay he had not noticed before. Anton Schwab, the town drunkard and athiest, cornered him one day as he returned from the schoolhouse and said, “How is the paragon of virtue?”
    He wanted to get away; it did no one any good to be seen talking to Schwab, and certainly not a schoolmaster, but the