Matilda
Mary E. Mitchell, The Youth's Instructor, 1925

“I am sorry, Miss Higgins,” said President Dorsythe.
The sun, dropping to the west, shone full through the big window, slanting long, dusty beams across the president’s desk. Matilda gazed dully at the scintillating motes which danced in the light, but nothing sparkling or lively had any message for her just then. She gave no sign, however, and stared so fixedly ahead of her that the president made a mental observation to the effect that the information he was imparting to Miss Higgins was not likely to disturb that stolid individual much.

“It cannot be a surprise to you,” went on the president. “You were fully warned at the mid-year examinations that your standard would have to be very much raised to allow you to be graduated. The results of the final tests are most discouraging. We have done what we could for you through your course, but, somehow, you have failed to respond. Perhaps you have done your best?”

From the upward inflection, and the inquiring look on the speaker’s face, Matilda felt that something was expected of her; so she answered, “Yes, sir.”

“Well,” continued the president, rapidly sifting through his papers as if he could not stop working even to talk, “if you have honestly done your part, you have nothing with which to reproach yourself. Do not regret your time here; all you have learned will be of use to you, and there are many other parts in life besides that of a teacher. I suppose you will hardly care to stay for graduation.”

“No, sir,” answered Matilda.

“Then I must bid you goodbye, Miss Higgins, and repeat that I am heartily sorry we cannot grant you a diploma.”

The president spoke kindly, but he went back to his work with the air of one who has finished an unpleasant duty. He became absorbed in the pile of documents before him, and hardly noticed that Miss Higgins left the room, or that Miss Mansfield entered. When the presence of his mathematics teacher did dawn upon his consciousness, he leaned back in his chair with a sigh.

“I’ve just disposed of Miss Higgins, he said. “She did not seem to regret the situation very much. I am afraid all the pushing and pulling we did in her case are thrown away. What do you make of her, Miss Mansfield?”

Miss Mansfield laughed. “Not a success in mathematics, at all events. She will be much more in keeping on her father’s farm, feeding the hens and scrubbing floors.”

When Matilda Higgins left the president’s room, she felt that the end of the world had come; that is, the end of her world. Two years before she had entered the Westlake College with hopes high. This was the end—failure.

She walked slowly away between the long lines of elms which shaded the campus path with their lofty, graceful branches. No one knew what those trees meant to that silent, awkward girl. They had so often given her courage to keep pressing forward, standing as pillars amidst the difficulties of school life.

Her thoughts went over the hills to her home by the quarry. She must go back and take up life again with its purpose gone. She could never be a teacher. Who would hire one who had failed to take her diploma? She wondered what the other girls had that she lacked. They did not study as hard as she, yet they had no trouble with their marks.

No more awkward or unattractive student had ever presented herself at Westlake College than Matilda Higgins. Her appearance was as unprepossessing as her name. The social life of the place was to her a mystery into which she never penetrated. She longed for it with all the strength of her shy nature, but she did not know how to make it hers. She loved the college, and it was to her as if she were banished from paradise when she packed her poor little wardrobe and bought her ticket for home.

Matilda thought over the whole situation as she sat bolt upright on the car seat. Her mother would say that she was glad of it; the place for a girl was in the kitchen. Her father would grumble at the expense which had brought no return. There would be many questions asked and comments made all over the village. Matilda was not so stolid as she looked—she winced at the thought of disgrace.

It was a very wretched Matilda who climbed into the stage for Quarry Hill. Hanson Mires, the driver, slapped the reins on the back of his rusty old pair as they started on their slow pull.

“Well, there, Tilly,” he remarked, “I wasn’t calculating to see you back quite so soon. Your pa told me you wouldn’t be along for quite a spell yet. Ain’t sick or anything?”

“No,” said Matilda.

“Got your graduating, or whatever you call it, done up before you expected, eh? I reckon you took all the prizes, didn’t you, Matilda?”

A deep red mounted to Matilda’s cheeks. Hanson was a diligent dealer in small news, but the truth might as well come out now as any time, and Matilda was not one to shirk.

“Oh, no, Mr. Mires,” she said. “I’m home because I didn’t pass.”

“Didn’t what?” inquired the merciless Hanson.

“Didn’t pass my examinations. I’ve failed.”

“Sho, now! You don’t say so. Well, that’s too bad! Better have stayed home in the first place, hadn’t you?”

Matilda almost admitted in her heart that she had. She thought it again as she washed the dishes that night in the hot, steamy little kitchen, under the fire of her mother’s questions and her father’s complaints. In the next several days, it was forced to her mind many times as she worked back into her old place in the household. It was not the work Matilda minded. She gave to her domestic duties the same slow but faithful labor that she had expended upon her algebra. But the girl had taken a glimpse into another world, a world of though, of gentleness and courtesy, of high aims and beautiful ideals. Would it be better to have remained ignorant of that world, now she could have no share in it? However it might appear to others, her heart answered, No!

Matilda’s mind was busy with the question one bright September day, as she sat on the rickety little back porch, shelling peas for dinner. Over the rock ledge which cropped out behind the house bobbed two little towheads, their owners busy at play. Suddenly a shriek of infantile warfare broke the silence. Matilda put down her pan and went to the rescue. She separated the two children, talked to them about their behavior, and then returned to her work.

“If there was something for them to do, they wouldn’t fight so,” she said to herself. “Those Peek twins are scratched up all the time, and they don’t even know their letters. The Quarry Hill children are just going to the bad. If I had a diploma, I’d set up a school right away. Of course those babies can’t walk all the way to Centerville.”

Here a pea intended for the pan took an erratic leap into space, impelled by a surprised action of Matilda’s thumb as an idea seized her.

“Why!” she exclaimed aloud. “Why, I believe I will!”

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Nearly two years after that autumn day Miss Mansfield was sent out from Westlake on a tour of educational instruction. She visited large towns with their well-graded systems and their imposing buildings, and small villages with their country schoolhouses. In both fields she found graduates of the college doing good and acceptable work.

She was stopping in a mountain village in the western part of the State, when she was told that three miles farther on there was a small settlement known as Quarry Hill.

“A forsaken place,” said her informer. “They’re a real wild lot up there, those quarrymen are, foreigners, most of them, and they don’t care anything about learning. Some of their young ones used to walk down here every day, but it’s a long tramp, and I believe they’ve got some kind of a school of their own now. You’d better not think of going, Miss Mansfield; it’s a rough road, and you won’t find much.”

Miss Mansfield was tired. She had hoped to turn her face homeward that day, but instead she took passage in the stage for Quarry Hill.

“Those struggling little schools are the very ones which need our help and encouragement,” she said to herself.

The Quarry Hill schoolhouse was an old, unpainted barn. It stood upon the crest of a hill, and had for its outlook a whole world of rise and dip, of wooded slope and green valley, away to the purple mountains of the horizon.

Miss Mansfield knocked at the rough entrance. A white-headed tot with a clean face and a ragged apron opened the door; then, abashed by the presence of a stranger, he introduced one stubby finger into his mouth and stared.

“What is it, Ivan?” asked a voice from within, and a young woman appeared, book in hand. The book fell to the floor as the young woman cried, “Miss Mansfield!”

“Matilda Higgins!” exclaimed the visitor.

It was the rudest kind of a schoolroom, with its sagging floor and its unfinished walls. The desks were made of rough boards nailed onto crossed legs, and the benches were lower additions of the same. The children were of all sorts and ages. They looked happy, quiet and docile.

“I hope you don’t think it wrong of me?” said Matilda, when she had dismissed her pupils to their recess.

“Wrong of you! I don’t understand.”

“Teaching without my diploma, Miss Mansfield. It does seem a little bold of me. I don’t feel that I have any right to a school when I failed so; but this place does need it, and there isn’t anyone else to do it. Of course I wouldn’t take pay like a regular teacher.”

“My dear Matilda,” said Miss Mansfield, “what do you mean? Are you not paid for this work?”

"Oh, no; the children give enough to get some books; I couldn’t take anything when they are so poor. You see, it isn’t as if I were a real teacher, who had graduated.”

“What do your parents think of such an arrangement?”

Matilda’s face fell. “They don’t like it much. Father says I’ve got to go to earning next fall. I don’t know what I shall do. There’s a factory at Centerville, but I can’t bear to leave here.”

Miss Mansfield looked at the girl before her in amazement. Could this be the unresponsive Matilda Higgins of the algebra class? Clumsy and plain as ever, and even more shabbily dressed, she was actually dignified. When she spoke to her former teacher, she was the shy awkward girl of old; when she confronted her scholars, there was no doubt but she was “Miss Higgins,” absolute and supreme.

All that afternoon, Miss Mansfield watched Matilda and her school closely. She made almost no comment on what she saw; but once she asked, “How did you learn to be so clear, Matilda?” Matilda’s answering flush was born of astonished delight.

“Do I make things clear? Oh, I’m so glad, Miss Mansfield! I don’t know, unless it’s because I have to study things out myself. I’m so slow, you know.”

Miss Mansfield went back to the Westlake Normal College. At the first meeting of the faculty she gave an account of her journey. When she finished her report, she paused for a moment, and then began to speak again, not from her paper this time.

“I have yet to tell of a school,” she said, “which, it seems to me, is accomplishing valuable and practical results. Beginning with five pupils in an ignorant and lawless community, it now numbers thirty. The children, instead of running wild, are orderly and interested. The tone of the place has been changed. Some of the parents, who are foreigners, have formed an evening class, where they may learn to read and write. The teacher carries on her work, if not in accord with the latest pedagogical methods, at least with admirable simplicity and judgment. In humble circumstances herself, she gives her services. Her name is Matilda Higgins.”

The president raised his eyebrows. “Matilda Higgins! Was that not the girl who couldn’t get her diploma?”

“The same Matilda,” replied Miss Mansfield, dropping her official manner. “The girl we all thought hopeless is working on in a humble, patient way, feeling actually guilty because she thinks she is not worthy to teach, apologizing to me for presuming to teach without a diploma, yet, single-handed, making over the rough little village. And the most wonderful part of it all is that she really is a good teacher. She has to go down to the very bottom of things to understand them herself, and that is just what those children need. Of all the classes I visited, I enjoyed none more than I did Matilda Higgins’s in that tumble-down shanty.”

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
It was graduation day at Westlake. Most of the students were from country towns, and their families came by rail or stage, or drove in their own wagons to see their girls graduated. College Hall was well filled with an admiring audience of interested relatives and friends, and on one of the very front seats sat Matilda Higgins. She had come in response to a letter from Miss Mansfield.

“I want you to visit me during commencement week, and as I will not take no for an answer, I enclose a ticket for your journey. It will do you good to come, and perhaps you may get some points for your school.”

Matilda winced as she read this last sentence. The thought of her school touched a sore spot. Her father had told her decidedly that when the summer was over, she must “quit playing” and go to work. Matilda admitted the justice of his decision, but her whole heart was in her school. She shrank, too, from visiting the scene of her failure. But Miss Mansfield’s word was law to Matilda. She was too young and simple-minded not to be excited by the prospect. Besides, Miss Mansfield had already purchased the ticket. Matilda quickly packed her trunk.

“I’m so glad my best dress is all right,” she thought, as she laid it in the tray. The “best dress” was a cheap muslin, bought two years before in happy anticipation of her own graduation. But in Matilda’s eyes it was beautiful, and she spread out its clumsy folds with entire satisfaction as she took her seat in College Hall. Miss Mansfield, with true delicacy, had made no suggestions in regard to the ungainly gown, but she had added a fresh ribbon here and a few flowers there, and had fluffed up the hair which, when allowed to curve into its natural waves, was Matilda’s most attractive feature.

Matilda could not help feeling a pang of envy when the graduating class came on the platform, but she crushed it as unworthy. She listened to the exercises with great respect.

“I never could have done it,” she thought. “I wish one of them would teach in Quarry Hill. They’d know how so much better than I.”

President Dorsythe presented the diplomas with his usual felicity. “He’s so handsome,” thought Matilda. “My, wouldn’t I like to have him look at me that way, as if he was proud of me!” she added, in painful recollection of that dreadful day when she last stood in his little office. “When a soldier in the British army distinguishes himself by special bravery,” said President Dorsythe, “he is given a badge of honor called the Victoria Cross. It has no value in itself; no price can be set upon it. Its worth lies simply in its sentiment; it is the symbol of bravery. Like that plain iron cross, these certificates which I give you have no intrinsic value. They are of no possible use to you save in showing that you have honorably done your work. They are the ‘Well done’ pronounced upon your labor. It is with great pleasure that I have presented you with these diplomas. It is with special gratification that I bestow one on a young lady, not a member of this class, but one who has earned it by faithful and successful endeavor. Will Miss Matilda Higgins please step up on the platform?”

“I!” exclaimed Matilda, from the front seat.

It took considerable pushing, encouragement and explanation to get the bewildered Matilda up on the platform. Finally she stood before the president, surprised out of her awkwardness into the simple dignity of perfect unconsciousness.

“I congratulate you heartily, Miss Higgins,” said President Dorsythe, with his most stately bow.

And then, Matilda, not knowing what else to do, broke down, put her face in her hands and cried.

She cried once more that night, when Miss Mansfield told her that an appropriation would be granted for the maintenance of a school at Quarry Hill, and that if she wished the position of teacher, it should be hers.

“You can earn quite as much as you can at the factory, Matilda,” said Miss Mansfield, “so I think you may feel certain that your father will be satisfied.”

“But it doesn’t seem right that I should have it,” said Matilda. “I don’t know a bit more about algebra than I did, Miss Mansfield.”

“Perhaps not, but you have learned a great deal about some other higher things,” responded the teacher, as she tenderly kissed the girl good night.