THAT the child should have gone to the dame school at all was due to her
Auntie Bell. From the first Miss Ailie had been dubious of the seminary,
but Bell was terribly domineering; in fact, was neither to hold nor
bind, and the doo-cot it bode to be. A product herself of the old
dame school in the spacious days of Barbara Mushet, whose pupils in
white-seam sewing and Italian hand were nowadays married to the best,
and notable as housewives, she deemed it still the only avenue to
the character and skill that keep those queer folk, men, when they're
married, by their own fire-ends. As for Daniel Dyce, he was, I fear,
indifferent how Bud came by her schooling, having a sort of philosophy
that the gate of gifts is closed on us the day we're bom, and that the
important parts of the curriculum, good or bad, are picked up like a
Scots or Hielan' accent, someway in the home.
So Ailie had gone reluctant to the Misses Duff and told them that on the
morrow the child would start in their academy. They currookity cooed at
the prospect, put past their crocheting, brought out their celebrated
silver spoons, and made of the afternoon tea a banquet with the aid of
a seed-cake hurriedly brought from P. & A. MacGlashan's. Their home was
like a stall in a bazaar and smelt of turpentine. Ailie, who loved
wide spaces, sat cramped between a laden what-not and a white-enamelled
spinning-wheel, the feathers of her hat colliding with a fretwork
bracket on the wall behind her chair, and thinking not unkindly of the
creatures, wished that she could give them a good shaking. Oh! they were
so prim, pernickety, and hopelessly in all things wrong! She was not
very large herself, for stature, but in their company she felt gigantic.
And oddly there rose in her, too, a sense of gladness that she was of
a newer kind of women than those gentle slaves, prisoned in their
primness, manacled by stupid old conceits. She was glad she was free,
that her happy hours were not so wasted in futilities, that she saw
farther, that she knew no social fears, that custom had not crushed her
soul, and yet she someway liked and pitied them.
“You'll find her somewhat odd,” she explained, as she nibbled the
seed-cake, with a silly little doily of Miss Jean's contrivance on her
knee, and the doves fluttering round her as timid of settling down
as though they had actual feathers and she were a cat. “She has got a
remarkably quick intelligence; she is quite unconventional--quite unlike
other children in many respects, and it may be difficult at first to
manage her.”
“Dear me!” said Miss Jean. “What a pity she should be so odd! I suppose
it's the American system; but perhaps she will improve.”
“Oh, it's nothing alarming,” explained Miss Ailie, recovering the doily
from the floor to which it had slid from her knee, and replacing it with
a wicked little shake. “If she didn't speak much you would never guess
from her appearance that she knew any more than--than most of us. Her
mother, I feel sure, was something of a genius--at least it never came
from the Dyce side; we were all plain folk, not exactly fools, but still
not odd enough to have the dogs bite us, or our neighbors cross to the
other side of the street when they saw us coming. She died two years
ago, and when William--when my brother died, Lennox was staying with
professional friends of himself and his wife, who have been good enough
to let us have her, much against their natural inclination.”
“The dear!” said Miss Jean, enraptured.
“Quite a sweet romance!” cooed Miss Amelia, languishing.
“You may be sure we will do all we can for her,” continued Miss Jean,
pecking with unconscious fingers at the crumbs on her visitor's lap,
till Ailie could scarcely keep from smiling.
“She will soon feel quite at home among us in our little school,” said
Miss Amelia. “No doubt she'll be shy at first--”
“Quite the contrary!” Ailie assured them, with a little mischievous
inward glee, to think how likely Bud was to astonish them by other
qualities than shyness. “It seems that in America children are brought
up on wholly different lines from children here; you'll find a curious
fearless independence in her.”
The twins held up their hands in amazement, “tcht-tcht-tchting”
simultaneously. “_What_ a pity!” said Miss Jean, as if it were a
physical affliction.
“But no doubt by carefulness and training it can be eradicated,” said
Miss Amelia, determined to encourage hope.
At that Miss Ailie lost her patience. She rose to go, with a start that
sent the doves more widely fluttering than ever in their restless little
parlor, so crowded out of all comfort by its fretful toys.
“I don't think you should trouble much about the eradication,” she said,
with some of her brother's manner at the bar. “Individuality is not
painful to the possessor like toothache, so it's a pity to eradicate it
or kill the nerve.”
The words were out before she could prevent them; she bit her lips, and
blushed in her vexation to have said them, but luckily the Pigeons in
their agitation were not observant.
“Like all the Dyces, a little daft!” was what they said of her when she
was gone, and they were very different women then, as they put on their
aprons, rolled up the silver spoons in tissue-paper and put them in a
stocking of Amelia's, before they started to their crochet work again.
It was a bright, expectant, happy bairn that set out next day for the
school. No more momentous could have seemed her start for Scotland
across the wide Atlantic; her aunties, looking after her going down the
street alone, so confident and sturdily, rued their own arrangement,
and envied the Misses Duff that were to be blessed all day with her
companionship. To Bell it seemed as if the wean were walking out of
their lives on that broad road that leads our bairns to other knowledge
than ours, to other dwellings, to the stranger's heart. Once the child
turned at the corner of the church and waved her hand; Miss Ailie took
it bravely, but oh, Miss Bell!--Miss Bell!--she flew to the kitchen and
stormed at Kate as she hung out at the window, an observer too.
Three-and-twenty scholars were there in the doo-cot of the
Duffs--sixteen of them girls and the remainder boys, but not boys
enough as yet to be in the grammar-school. Miss Jean came out and rang
a tea-bell, and Bud was borne in on the tide of youth that was still all
strange to her. The twins stood side by side behind a desk; noisily the
children accustomed found their seats, but Bud walked up to the teachers
and held out her hand.
“Good-morning; I'm Lennox Dyce,” she said, before they could get over
their astonishment at an introduction so unusual. Her voice, calm and
clear, sounded to the backmost seat and sent the children tittering.
“Silence!” cried Miss Jean, reddening with a glance at the delinquents,
as she dubiously took the proffered hand.
“Rather a nice little school,” said Bud, “but a little stuffy. Wants
air some, don't it? What's the name of the sweet little boy in the
Fauntleroy suit? It looks as if it would be apt to be Percy.”
She was standing between the twins, facing the scholars; she surveyed
all with the look of his Majesty's Inspector.
“Hush-h-h,” murmured Miss Amelia, Miss Jean being speechless. “You
will sit here,” and she nervously indicated a place in the front bench.
“By-and-by, dear, we will see what you can do.”
Bud took her place composedly, and rose with the rest to join in the
Lord's Prayer. The others mumbled it; for her it was a treat to have to
say it there for the first time in her life in public. Into the words
she put interest and appeal; for the first time the doo-cot heard that
supplication endowed with its appropriate dignity. And then the work
of the day began. The school lay in the way of the main traffic of the
little town: they could hear each passing wheel and footstep, the sweet
“chink, chink” from the smithy, whence came the smell of a sheep's head
singeing. Sea-gulls and rooks bickered and swore in the gutters of the
street; from fields behind came in a ploughman's whistle as he drove
his team, slicing green seas of fallow as a vessel cuts the green,
green wave. Four-and-twenty children, four-and-twenty souls, fathers and
mothers of the future race, all outwardly much alike with eyes, noses,
hands, and ears in the same position, how could the poor Misses Duff
know what was what in the stuff they handled? Luckily for their peace of
mind, it never occurred to them that between child and child there was
much odds. Some had blue pinafores and some white; some were freckled
and some had warts and were wild, and these were the banker's boys. God
only knew the other variations. 'Twas the duty of the twins to bring
them all in mind alike to the one plain level.
It was lucky that the lessons of that day began with the Shorter
Catechism, for it kept the ignorance of Lennox Dyce a little while in
hiding. She heard with amazement of Effectual Calling and Justification
and the reasons annexed to the fifth commandment as stammeringly and
lifelessly chanted by the others; but when her turn came, and Miss Jean,
to test her, asked her simply “Man's chief end,” she answered, boldly:
“Man's chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy Him forever.”
“Very good! _very_ good, indeed!” said the twin encouragingly. She was
passing on to the next pupil, when Bud burst out with her own particular
reason annexed, borrowed from the rapturous explanation of her uncle.
“Man is a harp,” she said, as solemnly as he had said it--“a har-r-rp
with a thousand strings; and we must sing, sing, sing, even if we're
timmer as a cask, and be grateful always, and glad in the mornings with
things.”
If the whistling ploughman and his team had burst into the school-room
it would have been no greater marvel, brought no more alarm to the
breasts of the little teachers. They looked at her as if she had been a
witch. The other pupils stared, with open mouths.
“What's that you say, my dear?” said Miss Amelia. “Did you learn that in
America?”
“No,” said Bud, “I just found it out from Uncle Dan.”
“Silence!” cried Miss Jean, for now the class was tittering again.
She went with her sister behind the black-board, and nervously they
communed. Bud smiled benignly on her fellows.
Just as disconcerting was her performance in geography. Had they tested
her in her knowledge of the United States she might have come out
triumphantly commonplace; but unfortunately they chose to ask her of
Scotland, and there her latest teacher had been Kate.
“What are the chief towns in Scotland?” asked Miss Jean.
“Oban, and Glasgow, and Toraoway,” replied Bud, with a touch of Highland
accent; and, tired of sitting so long in one place, calmly rose and
removed herself to a seat beside the Fauntleroy boy, who was greatly put
about at such a preference.
“You mustn't move about like that, Lennox,” explained Miss Amelia,
taking her back. “It's not allowed.”
“But I was all pins and needles,” said Bud, frankly, “and I wanted to
speak to Percy.”
“My dear child, his name's not Percy, and there's no speaking in
school,” exclaimed the distressed Miss Amelia.
“No speaking! Why, you're speaking all the time,” said the child. “It
ain't--isn't fair. Can't I just get speaking a wee teeny bit to that
nice girl over there?”
The twins looked at each other in horror: the child was a thousand times
more difficult than the worst her aunt had led them to expect. A sudden
unpleasant impression that their familiar pupils seemed like wooden
models beside her, came to them both. But they were alarmed to see that
the wooden models were forgetting their correct deportment under the
demoralizing influence of the young invader.
Once more they dived behind the black-board and communed.
There were many such instances during the day. Bud, used for all her
thinking years to asking explanations of what she did not understand,
never hesitated to interrogate her teachers, who seemed to her to be
merely women, like her mother, and Mrs. Molyneux, and Auntie Ailie, only
a little wilted and severe, grotesque in some degree because of their
funny affected manner, and the crochet that never was out of their hands
in oral exercises. She went further, she contradicted them twice, not
rudely, but as one might contradict her equals.
“You talk to her,” said Miss Jean behind the blackboard where they had
taken refuge again. “I declare I'll take a fit if this goes on! Did you
ever hear of such a creature?”
Miss Amelia almost cried. All her fixed ideas of children were shattered
at a blow. Here was one who did not in the least degree fit in with the
scheme of treatment in the doo-cot. But she went forward with a look of
great severity.
“Of course, coming from America and all that, and never having been at
school before, you don't know,” she said, “but I must tell you that you
are not behaving nicely--not like a nice little girl at all, Lennox.
Nice little girls in school in this country listen, and never say
anything unless they're asked. They are respectful to their teachers,
and never ask questions, and certainly never contradict them, and--”
“But, please, Miss Duff, I wasn't contradicting,” explained Bud, very
soberly, “and when respect is called for, I'm there with the goods. You
said honor was spelled with a 'u,' and I guess you just made a mistake,
same as I might make myself, for there ain't no 'u' in honor, at least
in America.”
“I--I--I never made a mistake in all my life,” said Miss Amelia,
gasping.
“Oh, Laura!” was all that Bud replied, but in such a tone, and with eyes
so widely opened, it set half of the other pupils tittering.
“What do you mean by 'Oh, Laura?'” asked Miss Jean. “Who is Laura?”
“You can search me,” replied Bud, composedly. “Jim often said 'Oh,
Laura!' when he got a start.”
“It's not a nice thing to say,” said Miss Jean. “It's not at all
ladylike. It's just a sort of profane language, and profane language is
an 'abomination unto the Lord.'”
“But it was so like Jim,” said Bud, giggling with recollection. “If
it's slang I'll stop it--at least I'll try to stop it. I'm bound to be a
well-off English undefied, you know; poppa--father fixed that.”
The school was demoralized without a doubt, for now the twins were
standing nervously before Bud and put on equal terms with her in spite
of themselves, and the class was openly interested and amused--more
interested and amused than it had ever been at anything that had ever
happened in the doo-cot before. Miss Amelia was the first to comprehend
how far she and her sister had surrendered their citadel of authority to
the little foreigner's attack. “Order!” she exclaimed. “We will now take
up poetry and reading.” Bud cheered up wonderfully at the thought of
poetry and reading, but alas! her delight was short-lived, for the
reading-book put into her hand was but a little further on than Auntie
Ailie's Twopenny. When her turn came to read “My sister Ella has a cat
called Tabby. She is black, and has a pretty white breast. She has long
whiskers and a bushy white tail,” she read with a tone of amusement that
exasperated the twins, though they could not explain to themselves why.
What completed Bud's rebellion, however, was the poetry. “Meddlesome
Matty” was a kind of poetry she had skipped over in Chicago, plunging
straightway into the glories of the play-bills and Shakespeare, and when
she had read that:
“One ugly trick has often spoiled
The sweetest and the best;
Matilda, though a pleasant child,
One ugly trick possessed”--
she laughed outright.
“I can't help it, Miss Duff,” she said, when the twins showed their
distress. “It looks like poetry, sure enough, for it's got the jaggy
edges, but it doesn't make any zip inside me same as poetry does. It
wants biff.”
“What's 'zip' and 'biff'?” asked Miss Amelia.
“It's--it's a kind of tickle in your mind,” said Bud. “I'm so tired,”
she continued, rising in her seat, “I guess I'll head for home now.” And
before the twins had recovered from their dumfounderment she was in the
porch putting on her cloak and hood.
“Just let her go,” said Miss Jean to her sister. “If she stays any
longer I shall certainly have a swoon; I feel quite weak.”
And so Bud marched out quite cheerfully, and reached home an hour before
she was due.
Kate met her at the door. “My stars! are you home already?” she
exclaimed, with a look at the town clock. “You must be smart at your
schooling when they let you out of the cemetery so soon.”
“It ain't a cemetery at all,” said Bud, standing unconcernedly in the
lobby; “it's just a kindergarten.”
Aunt Ailie bore down on her to overwhelm her in caresses. “What are you
home for already, Bud?” she asked. “It's not time yet, is it?”
“No,” said Bud, “but I just couldn't stay any longer. I'd as lief not go
back there. The ladies don't love me. They're Sunday sort of ladies, and
give me pins and needles. They smile and smile, same's it was done with
a glove-stretcher, and don't love me. They said I was using profound
language, and--and they don't love me. Not the way mother and Mrs.
Molyneux and you and Auntie Bell and Uncle Dan and Kate and Footles
does. They made goo-goo eyes at me when I said the least thing. They had
all those poor kiddies up on the floor doing their little bits, and they
made me read kindergarten poetry--that was the limit! So I just upped
and walked.”
The two aunts and Kate stood round her for a moment baffled.
“What's to be done now?” said Aunt Ailie.
“Tuts!” said Aunt Bell, “give the wean a drink of milk and some bread
and butter.”
And so ended Bud's only term in a dame school.