Ramsey Milholland sat miserably in school, his conscious being
consisting principally of a dull hate. Torpor was a little dispersed
during a fifteen-minute interval of “Music,” when he and all the other
pupils in the large room of the “Five B. Grade” sang repeated fractions
of what they enunciated as “The Star Span-guh-hulled Banner”; but
afterward he relapsed into the low spirits and animosity natural to
anybody during enforced confinement under instruction. No alleviation
was accomplished by an invader's temporary usurpation of the teacher's
platform, a brisk and unsympathetically cheerful young woman mounting
thereon to “teach German.”
For a long time mathematics and German had been about equally repulsive
to Ramsey, who found himself daily in the compulsory presence of both;
but he was gradually coming to regard German with the greater horror,
because, after months of patient mental resistance, he at last began to
comprehend that the German language has sixteen special and particular
ways of using the German article corresponding to that flexible bit of a
word so easily managed English--_the_. What in the world was the use of
having sixteen ways of doing a thing that could just as well be done in
one? If the Germans had contented themselves with insisting upon sixteen
useless variations for infrequent words, such as _hippopotamus_, for
instance, Ramsey might have thought the affair unreasonable but not
necessarily vicious--it would be easy enough to avoid talking about
a hippopotamus if he ever had to go to Germany. But the fact that the
Germans picked out _a_ and _the_ and many other little words in use all
the time, and gave every one of them sixteen forms, and expected Ramsey
Milholland to learn this dizzying uselessness down to the last crotchety
detail, with “When to employ Which” as a nausea to prepare for the
final convulsion when one _didn't_ use Which, because it was an
“Exception”--there was a fashion of making easy matters hard that was
merely hellish.
The teacher was strict but enthusiastic; she told the children, over and
over, that German was a beautiful language, and her face always had a
glow when she said this. At such times the children looked patient; they
supposed it must be so, because she was an adult and their teacher; and
they believed her with the same manner of believing which those of them
who went to Sunday-school used there when the Sunday-school teachers
were pushed into explanations of various matters set forth in the Old
Testament, or gave reckless descriptions of heaven. That is to say, the
children did not challenge or deny; already they had been driven into
habits of resignation and were passing out of the age when childhood is
able to reject adult nonsense.
Thus, to Ramsey Milholland, the German language seemed to be a
collection of perverse inventions for undeserved torment; it was full of
revolting surprises in the way of genders; vocally it often necessitated
the employment of noises suggestive of an incompletely mastered
knowledge of etiquette; and far inside him there was something faintly
but constantly antagonistic to it--yet, when the teacher declared that
German was incomparably the most beautiful language in the world, one of
the many facets of his mind submissively absorbed the statement as light
to be passed inward; it was part of the lesson to be learned. He did not
know whether the English language was beautiful or not; he never thought
about that, and no one ever said anything to him about it. Moreover,
though his deeper inward hated “German,” he liked his German teacher,
and it was pleasant to look at her when that glow came upon her face.
Sometimes, too, there were moments of relaxation in her class, when
she would stop the lesson and tell the children about Germany: what a
beautiful, good country it was, so trim and orderly, with such pleasant
customs, and all the people sensible and energetic and healthy. There
was “Music” again in the German class, which was another alleviation;
though it was the same old “Star Spangled Banner” over again. Ramsey
was tired of the song and tired of “My Country 'Tis of Thee”; they were
bores, but it was amusing to sing them in German. In German they sounded
“sort o' funny,” so he didn't mind this bit of the day's work.
Half an hour later there arrived his supreme trial of this particular
morning. Arithmetic then being the order of business before the house,
he was sent alone to the blackboard, supposedly to make lucid the proper
reply to a fatal conundrum in decimals, and under the glare and focus of
the whole room he breathed heavily and itched everywhere; his brain at
once became sheer hash. He consumed as much time as possible in getting
the terms of the problem stated in chalk; then, affecting to be critical
of his own handiwork, erased what he had done and carefully wrote it
again. After that, he erased half of it, slowly retraced the figures,
and stepped back as if to see whether perspective improved their
appearance. Again he lifted the eraser.
“Ramsey Milholland!”
“Ma'am?”
“Put down that eraser!”
“Yes'm. I just thought--”
Sharply bidden to get forward with his task, he explained in a feeble
voice that he had first to tie a shoe string and stooped to do so, but
was not permitted. Miss Ridgely tried to stimulate him with hints and
suggestion; found him, so far as decimals went, mere protoplasm, and,
wondering how so helpless a thing could live, summoned to the board
little Dora Yocum, the star of the class, whereupon Ramsey moved toward
his seat.
“Stand still, Ramsey! You stay right where you are and try to learn
something from the way Dora does it.”
The class giggled, and Ramsey stood, but learned nothing. His
conspicuousness was unendurable, because all of his schoolmates
naturally found more entertainment in watching him than in following
the performance of the capable Dora. He put his hands in and out of his
pockets; was bidden to hold them still, also not to shuffle his feet;
and when in a false assumption of ease he would have scratched his head
Miss Ridgely's severity increased, so that he was compelled to give over
the attempt.
Instructed to watch every figure chalked up by the mathematical wonder,
his eyes, grown sodden, were unable to remove themselves from the part
in her hair at the back of her head, where two little braids began their
separate careers to end in a couple of blue-and-red checked bits of
ribbon, one upon each of her thin shoulder blades. He was conscious that
the part in Dora's shining brown hair was odious, but he was unconscious
of anything arithmetical. His sensations clogged his intellect; he
suffered from unsought notoriety, and hated Dora Yocum; most of all he
hated her busy little shoulder blades.
He had to be “kept in” after school; and when he was allowed to go home
he averted his eyes as he went by the house where Dora lived. She was
out in the yard, eating a doughnut, and he knew it; but he had passed
the age when it is just as permissible to throw a rock at a girl as at a
boy; and stifling his normal inclinations, he walked sturdily on, though
he indulged himself so far as to engage in a murmured conversation with
one of the familiar spirits dwelling somewhere within him. “Pfa!” said
Ramsey to himself--or himself to Ramsey, since it is difficult to say
which was which. “Pfa! Thinks she's smart, don't she?”... “Well, I guess
she does, but she ain't!” ... “I hate her, don't you?”... “You bet
your life I hate her!”... “Teacher's Pet, that's what _I_ call her!”...
“Well, that's what _I_ call her, too, don't I?” “Well, _I_ do; that's
all she is, anyway--dirty ole Teacher's Pet!”