A Bloodsmoor Romance (37 page)

Complaints arose primarily from parents who felt that their children enjoyed themselves too much, and were too infrequently caned, to argue for the schoolmaster's credentials. Teachers from neighboring districts came to visit, having heard of a “radical” school in this most unlikely of regions, and were surprisingly severe in their judgments. Reverend Tidewell of the Methodist Church in the village expressed worry and doubt and some mild anger as to the “Christian” nature of certain remarks that had snaked their way back to him. What did John Quincy Zinn mean by catechizing his students, and asking them such questions as,
Is God One—or Many?

Naturally there were complaints: but then there were always complaints: and this enterprising young man was so very
willing
to work for a pittance, without offering any complaints of his own. And, indeed, a virtual blizzard of accusations had swirled about the head of his predecessor (who had spent much of his teaching time simply staring out the window—staring and staring, expressionless, his face doughy-pale and his eyes glassy), and about the head of
his
predecessor (rumored to have been a defrocked Unitarian minister, who had retreated to Mouth-of-Lebanon to lick his wounds, and, as it turned out, drink himself into the grave). Mr. Zinn's methods, tolerated at first, began to be generally disliked, for did not his fellow teachers themselves say they were “too radical”?—and there was considerable, if inchoate, feeling about his “preaching” (on such timely and controversial matters as slavery, and the South, and the Free Soil Republicans, and Abolitionist agitation, and
Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly
—passages of which he read to his thunderstruck charges); but his sunny, uncomplicated personality was so winning, his smile so quick and frank, how could he be faulted? He loved nothing more than to talk with the parents of his pupils, and gave them, during these conversations, an uncanny sense of privilege; he was tireless in the tutoring duties he took on, for no fee, after school and on Saturdays; and, as his employers noted again and again, he was willing to work for a pittance . . . as no one of his manliness might be expected to do. And certainly his students were learning a great deal. Children written off as “slow” were making progress, and even the rebellious older boys rarely caused trouble. How very odd, everyone said, that Homer Feucht should emerge as an outstanding student, Homer Feucht of all people!
Zinn works some kind of spell over them,
it was said, neutrally at first,
He gets them to do anything he wants them to do—so they learn fast.

 

JOHN QUINCY ZINN'S
tenure at the Mouth-of-Lebanon school gave little explicit warning of coming to an abrupt end, but John Quincy surely anticipated something of the kind: for the young man was not, despite the smiling equanimity with which he faced the world, insensitive to hostility, however guarded. He knew about the Methodist minister's vociferated doubts—for he had his spies, his adoring spies, among the students. He knew that the parents of one of his female students objected to her peculiarities of diet, which were very much bound up with idealism about Nature and Spirit and the need to free all slaves in the Union. He knew that the Griswolds were jealous of the Feuchts, and the Hyneses angry that their twelve-year-old son lingered after school, to do chores for the schoolmaster, instead of the considerable farm chores that awaited him at home. And there was Eliza, who left little presents for him on his desk—a bunch of bluebells, a poem lettered in a half-dozen pastel colors—and Clara, who was jealous of Eliza; and thirteen-year-old Hannelore, as plumply endowed as any young woman, and disturbingly pretty, who insisted that in dreams Mr. Zinn and Jesus Christ addressed her “in the same voice.” And the older boys, as always over the years, proved as difficult
won,
as they had been while being
courted:
for they, too, could be absurdly jealous of their schoolmaster's attention, and as childish as the very youngest students.

And gradually the question
How is the new schoolmaster working out?
ceased to be asked.

It is ironic, and yet significant, that John Quincy's increasing fascination with invention should have brought his sojourn at Mouth-of-Lebanon to an end, for his difficulties as a young man of twenty-five merely prefigured the difficulties he would face in later life—the philistine world's distrust of
genius
being everywhere the same, whether expressed in blunt aggressive terms, or in insidiously subtle ones.

He spoke with great excitement to his pupils, of the inventions that had been discovered, and the still more remarkable inventions that lay in the future.
America,
he stated, and
Invention
are near-synonymous! Hardly a decade earlier Samuel Finley Morse, with the aid of the brilliant Joseph Henry, had assembled a practical telegraph line, and had sent the prophetic message from Washington to Baltimore:
What hath God wrought?
Peter Cooper had built his famous Tom Thumb—a wonderful contraption with a steam engine at the center—not very many miles from Mouth-of-Lebanon; and everywhere textile mills were improving their spinning frames, to capture the greatest efficiency. There were steamboats, steamships, powerful locomotives, Eli Whitney's “American System” of interchangeable parts, a new repeating pistol, a reaper perfected by Cyrus McCormick that would, in John Quincy's passionate words, “change the face of the North American continent forever.” One day soon there would be submarines, that would explore the most forbidding depths of all the oceans; and horseless carriages fueled by electricity or steam. And surely the manned balloons of the previous century would be vastly improved upon, steered by some sort of propeller, and lifted into the air by gases that would not explode. “And this is the world, boys and girls,” John Quincy proudly announced, “into which
you
have been born—a new Garden of Eden.”

He turned his long rectangular room at the rear of the schoolhouse into a tinkerer's paradise, filled with queer contraptions made of wire, glass, magnets, strips of copper, and wood. His students became his assistants—not only boys, but girls as well. They experimented with electricity by rubbing glass rods with fur, to produce a charge of static electricity. They experimented with radiant heat by carefully placing, on a snowbank, squares of cloth of different colors—thereby proving, to their own satisfaction, that darker colors absorb the sun's heat more readily than light colors. They tinkered with the school stove, they constructed their own lightning rod, they dismantled clocks and built an elaborate orrery, which was at once a mechanical model of the universe and a calendar indicating the hour, the day, and the month. So intense was Mr. Zinn's interest in his contraptions, and so powerfully did it communicate itself to his most sensitive pupils, they were distracted and nervous when away from the schoolhouse; and were oft awakened at night by tumultuous dreams, crying out that their schoolmaster was in danger—the building had caught fire, or had been struck by lightning! Their heads were filled with the motion of pulleys, wheels, cogs, and pistons. They spoke of telescopes, rockets, “auto-wagens” that would someday fly to the moon, machines that would propel themselves, tunnels beneath the rivers and lakes, buildings that rose miles into the sky, underground cities impervious to all weather, the colonization of distant stars, machines that dissolved time, machines that could run forever. A slender, small-boned eleven-year-old named Nahum, the youngest of six children, became particularly obsessed with two of his schoolmaster's notions: the
time-machine,
and the
perpetual-motion machine.

He dreamt about them, he told John Quincy, every night.

Lessons of a more conventional nature—in reading, writing, and simple mathematics—were neglected, as Mr. Zinn, pacing excitedly about the classroom, speaking in a monologue and taking little note, as to whether the youngest of his charges could follow him at all, speculated aloud on the nature of
Invention,
and the nature of
Evolution,
and the destiny of the United States of America. Now and then a boy might grin slyly behind his fingers, or a girl, suddenly embarrassed by Mr. Zinn's dramatic self-queries—“But how shall I, John Quincy Zinn, figure in this great destiny? How shall Mouth-of-Lebanon declare itself to the world, and to posterity?”—might blush a deep red, and turn away, to doodle nervously in her notebook. But the majority of the students, of all ages and abilities, watched their teacher with rapt fascination, whether or no they comprehended his every word.

It may be said that John Quincy, being still very young, and, as it were, somewhat brash in his expectations, o'erestimated his students' intelligence, as well as the willingness, on the part of their parents, to be tolerant of somewhat eccentric methodology, over a protracted period of time. His sojourn at the Brownrrigg Academy, tho' by no means without attendant difficulties, was to be marked by a comparative
conservatism,
and this in a much more liberal social context, as we have seen. But in Mouth-of-Lebanon, alas, he seemed at times to be totally unaware of the presence of others, and of his responsibility to them. Enough for him, he fervently believed, that he
loved
his small charges: and consequently knew best how to educate them.

The objections of Reverend Tidewell continued, and had their sway in the community, for did not the “mechanical universe” (which very few adults had seen) speak of a godless, lawless, atheistical creation? Did not the schoolmaster Mr. Zinn preach a heresy, in the very bosom of a Christian land? Summoned to a meeting of the district board of education, John Quincy was called upon to defend himself—to answer to certain charges—but he professed only mild alarm that such questions should be asked at all; and declined to answer them, since no one unfamiliar with the
livingness
of his classroom could presume to judge him.

“Gentlemen,” he said, his voice quivering, “it is out of the mouths of babes my wisdom springs: I but pluck and gather it, and reap my humble harvest.”

So he returned to his small kingdom in the schoolhouse, and continued with his lessons as before, firmly resolved that his way was correct, and that his students, whom he customarily thought of as “his,” profited greatly from the very boldness of his enterprise. He believed himself immune to all outside attack, once he was safely home; he knew himself wonderfully privileged; at the same time, a part of his imagination disengaged itself, and considered coolly whether his life might be in danger!—and so he set about systematically preparing a document that would explain, in tireless detail, his educational theories; and he prepared a day-book out of the notes he had been scribbling informally for years, to exhibit to the world the absolute
rightness
of his method, as it blossomed forth in sessions with pupils given names and voices—itself a revolutionary approach. “Thus I consummate the work of seven years,” he declared, on the last page of the document.

And he mailed it off to the State Supervisor of Public Education.

 

THE CHILD NAHUM,
tho' but a sixth-grader, had become so adept at mathematics that John Quincy, ostentatiously seating himself in one of the larger desks, at the rear of the room, empowered him to “deliver a lesson—any lesson” on the blackboard, using colored chalks. These sessions were spirited, but Nahum's shyness erupted into a queer rushed vocableness, which the other children, being unable to follow, began to find distinctly amusing. And so Mr. Zinn felt compelled to “discipline” them, by way of a curious stratagem: he commanded the noisiest offenders to cane
him.

Which of course they could not do—they simply could not do. The oldest boy in the school, a fifteen-year-old who had grown to a height of six feet, and a probable weight of one hundred eighty pounds, could manage no more than to raise the hickory cane over his schoolmaster's poised hands: and then, flushing red, and coming very close to bursting into tears, the naughty child dropped the cane to the floor; and ran out of the room.

So John Quincy had triumphed—and had, he believed, broken the spirit of all opposition.

As the weeks passed, and no challenge issued from the outside world—“the world of slumbering adults,” as he phrased it, tho' not with scorn—John Quincy plunged all the more boldly, one might say brashly, into his teaching of Science. He read aloud from Newton, and Galileo; and William Blake; and Ralph Waldo Emerson; and Edgar Allan Poe, whose fantastical
Eureka
had recently appeared. He had gone on foot to Baltimore, where he examined the newest of steam locomotives of the Baltimore & Ohio, which he diagrammed on the blackboard, in cross-section, for his students to admire. Fire—steam—expanding gas—a closed cylinder—pistons—energy—glorious
Motion!
“And in such ways, boys and girls,” John Quincy said passionately, “is the great North American continent made humanly navigable.”

Crude “provisional” models of the perpetual-motion and time-machines, each some three feet in height, were set up on the schoolmaster's desk, along with the controversial orrery—which continued, faithfully and precisely, to record the passage of hours, days, and months, as the tiny copper planets revolved around their copper sun. There was, of course, an initial interest in the models; but then they were
not,
after all, the actual machines. “They don't work,” many a student murmured in dismay or chagrin. “They never will work”—so a daring student might reply.

Mr. Zinn lectured on the machines, and on invention in general. “What is called, boys and girls, an
invention,
is but the dramatic climax of a vast accretion of details, insinuated, as it were, into Time, by the grace of Eternity. An invention is an
Evolution,
very closely resembling a biologic and a geologic process, as well as the process of human mentality. Do you see?”