He prided
himself on his intelligence; asked us if we knew the school ma'am.
HE didn't think much of her, anyway. He had tried her, he had. He
had put a question to her. If a tree a hundred feet high were to
fall a foot a day, how long would it take to fall right down? She
had not been able to solve the problem. "She don't know nothing,"
he opined. He told us how a friend of his kept a school with a
revolver, and chuckled mightily over that; his friend could teach
school, he could. All the time he kept chewing gum and spitting.
He would stand a while looking down; and then he would toss back
his shock of hair, and laugh hoarsely, and spit, and bring forward
a new subject. A man, he told us, who bore a grudge against him,
had poisoned his dog. "That was a low thing for a man to do now,
wasn't it? It wasn't like a man, that, nohow. But I got even with
him: I pisoned HIS dog." His clumsy utterance, his rude
embarrassed manner, set a fresh value on the stupidity of his
remarks. I do not think I ever appreciated the meaning of two
words until I knew Irvine--the verb, loaf, and the noun, oaf;
between them, they complete his portrait. He could lounge, and
wriggle, and rub himself against the wall, and grin, and be more in
everybody's way than any other two people that I ever set my eyes
on. Nothing that he did became him; and yet you were conscious
that he was one of your own race, that his mind was cumbrously at
work, revolving the problem of existence like a quid of gum, and in
his own cloudy manner enjoying life, and passing judgment on his
fellows.
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