IN WHICH HE GOES TO SCHOOL
But an hour had passed since his protesting assertion that "Once doesn't
matter, Mother, and anyway, it's school time," had been followed by
flight to the many-windowed, red-brick building, and already the
surroundings of dreary blackboard, dingy-green calsomine, and
oft-revarnished yellow pine woodwork were becoming irksome. The spelling
lesson had not been so unpleasant, for he could sense the tricky "ei-s"
and "ie-s" with uncanny cleverness, but 'rithmetic--the very name
oppressed him. What use could be found in such prosy problems as "A and
B together own three-hundred acres of land. A's share is twice as much
as B's. How much does each own?" Or "A field contains four hundred
square yards. One side is four times as long as the other. What are its
dimensions?"
Miss Brown closed the hated, brown-covered book and turned to write the
arithmetic homework on the blackboard. Instantly John's attention
wandered to objects and sounds far more interesting than the barren,
sultry school room.
A couple of sparrows flew from the roof of the school to the window
ledge nearest him, intent on their noisy quarrel, and he gave a scarcely
perceptible sigh. Birds could enjoy the sunshine unmolested--why not he?
A horse sounded a rapid tattoo of hoof beats over the heated street
macadam below and he longed--as he had longed for the launch that
morning--for a vehicle which would take him along untraveled roads to a
country where schools were not, and small boys fished and played games
the long days through. Next, a three-year-old stubbed her toe against
the street curbing opposite the school and voiced her grief with
unrestrained and therefore enviable freedom. John stirred uneasily and
meditated upon the interminable stretch of four days which must elapse
before Saturday. Then a majestic thunderhead in the blazing September
sky caught his attention and the miracle happened.
He was on his back in the big field of his uncle's Michigan farm, gazing
upward at the white, rapidly shifting clouds. The unimpeded western
breeze made little harmonies of sound as it swept through the tall,
waving grass; strange birds carolled joyously from the orchard by the
road, and near at hand the old, brown Jersey lowed lovingly to her
ungainly calf. From the more distant chicken coop came the cackle of
hens and the boastful crowing of a rooster.
A shift of the thought current, and the fat, easy-going team dragged the
lumbering, slowly moving wagon over the four-mile stretch of sand road
to town, while he sat on the driver's seat to listen to the hired man's
tales of army service in the Philippines, or to watch the ever-shifting
panorama of flower and bird and animal life which he loved so well. Past
the ramshackle farm of the first neighbor to the north, past the little
deserted country school house, past the pressed-steel home of a would-be
agriculturist, which had rusted to an artistic red, and down to the
winding river which flanked the hamlet through banks lined with white
birches and graceful poplars--"popples" the hired man called them. There
was good fishing in the river, too. Once a twenty pound muskellunge had
been caught, and bass were plentiful.
But better still than that was his uncle's well-stocked trout stream.
Again he stumbled over the root-obstructed footpath which ran along the
east bank, stopping now and then to untangle his hook and line as he
forced his way past thick, second-growth underbrush, or to let his hook
float with the current past some particularly promising bit of
watercress. There was the fallen, half-rotted log under which the swift
current had dug a deep hole in the sandbed for the big fellows to haunt
and pounce out upon bits of food which floated by. How his heart had
gone pitapat when he had discovered it and had quietly, oh, so quietly,
dropped his baited hook into the clear, spring water. Then had come a
swift-darting something up stream, a jerk at his line to set his pulses
throbbing, a wild scurry for freedom and--
"John!" Miss Brown's voice brought him rudely back to present day
surroundings. He rose uncertainly, dimly conscious that his name had
been called.
"Yes, 'm," he stammered.
"What was I telling the class just now?"
He strove to collect his scattered faculties. Then his glance, roaming
the room, caught at the newly written problems on the blackboard. He
ventured an uncertain smile.
"You--w-was telling--" he began.
"'Were,' John."
"Yes, 'm," nervously. "Were telling the class to be sure and write
plain, and not to use pen and ink if we couldn't get along without blots
and--and--" What else did Miss Brown usually say to the class on such an
occasion?
Over in the far corner of the room, Sid DuPree snickered maliciously.
The boy two seats ahead of him turned with an exultant grin on his
freckled face. Several little girls seemed on the verge of foolish,
discipline-dispelling giggles, and he felt that something had gone
wrong. Teacher, herself, ended the suspense.
"Very good, John. Your inventive faculties do you credit. But it happens
that as yet, I haven't said anything."
The class broke into uproarious laughter while he stood in the aisle, to
all appearances, a submissive, conscience-stricken little mortal.
Inwardly he seethed with anger. What right had Miss Brown to trick a
fellow that way? It was mean, it was cowardly, worse than stealing.
"Now, John," she continued, looking sternly down from the raised
platform, "I spoke just six times to you last week. Finally you promised
me that you would pay strict attention. What have you to say for
yourself?"
He shot her a half-frightened glance and found her face seemingly stern
and remorseless. He had been tempted to explain how the great
out-of-doors called to him with an insistence which was irresistible,
but shucks, she wouldn't understand. How was he to know that under the
surface of it all, she sympathized with the culprit daydreamer
exceedingly? So he hung his head in silence.
There was a knock at the door. Miss Brown dismissed him with a curt nod.
He sank thankfully into his desk as Sid DuPree sprang forward to admit
the newcomer--a new girl and her mother. From the shelter of his big
geography, John surveyed the couple with that calmly critical stare
which only a ten-year-old is master of.
The mother was nice, he decided. Fat ones always were. It was your long,
thin woman who made trouble. Look at old lady Meeker, who lived next the
vacant lot on Southern Avenue, where the boys gathered occasionally on
their way from school for a game of marbles or to play split-top on one
of the loose, decayed fence planks. Never did a glassy go spinning from
the big dirt ring through a dexterous shot, or a soft, evenly grained
top split cleanly to the spear head amid the proper shouts of approval
than her fretful, piercing voice put an end to further fun. Such
goings-on made her head ache, she averred time and again. If they didn't
leave immediately, she'd telephone the police station. Once she had said
it was a "wonder some parents wouldn't keep their children in their own
back yards." She forgot that half the gang lived in apartment buildings
with back yards only designed for clothes-drying apparatus, and that the
other half lived in houses built upon so cramped an acreage that the
yards were no fun to play in. But grown-ups were in the habit of
committing such oversights--especially the skinny, cranky ones.
As for the little girl--ah! she was good to look upon.
Her chestnut hair hung in curly ringlets below her shoulders, almost to
the waist of her little white frock. Her face held a slight pallor which
was strangely fascinating to the sun-tanned urchin, and her eyes were a
deep, rich brown. As the conversation ended between teacher and parent,
she left the platform and walked to the front seat assigned her in a
timid, shrinking way which stamped her as just the sort of a girl the
fellows would make miserable on the slightest provocation. John's face
set in an expression of heroic determination until he looked as if he'd
swallowed a dose of castor oil!
[Illustration: _He imagines himself a hero._]
He'd like to catch Sid DuPree dancing around her in maddening circles,
some afternoon, while she shrank piteously from each cry of "'Fraid cat!
'Fraid cat!" Or that bully might throw pieces of chalk at her or pelt
her with snowballs in the winter time until she broke into incoherent
sobs. Then he, John Fletcher, would show that Sid where he got off at.
He'd punch his face in, he would!
The school room door closed upon the mother's broad back, and the hum of
excitement at the departure subsided into the normal undercurrent of
whispering between the pupils. Pencils scratched laboriously over rough
manila pads as their owners copied the questions from the board. The boy
two seats ahead of John took a wad of chewing gum from his mouth and
stuck it on the underside of his desk. Someone over on Sid DuPree's side
of the room dropped a book to the floor with a bang.
Then Miss Brown shoved back the test papers she had been correcting and
glanced at the clock.
"Clear the desks," she ordered sharply. "Class prepare for physical
culture."
They obeyed with alacrity, for the drills were ever a relief from the
enforced inactivity of restless little bodies. Moreover, they were
vastly more enjoyable than mathematical perplexities or troublesome
state and river boundaries.
"Rise on toes, inhale deeply, and exhale ver-y slowly!" came the crisp
command after the children had stumbled to their feet in the aisle.
"One, two, three, four; one, two, three, four."
Heated little faces grew even more flushed as the minute hand of the big
wall clock showed the passing of five flying minutes. Next came, "Thrust
forward, upwards, and from your sides," "bend trunks," to all points of
the compass, "lunge to the right and left, and thrust forward," and a
baker's dozen of other exercises designed to offset the weakening
influences of cramped city environments and impure air.
In conclusion, the class made a quarter-turn to the right and as they
thus stood in parallel rows, took hold of each other's hands. At
teacher's command, they swung their arms back and forth vigorously to an
accompaniment of the inevitable "one-two, one-two."
John's was a back seat, thanks to skillful maneuvering on the opening
day of school, and flaxen-haired Olga occupied the desk ahead. A day
earlier he had counted himself fortunate in having her for a neighbor,
for she was clever at studies which required plodding perseverance, and
not at all bashful about helping a fellow when teacher pounced on him
with a catch question.
Now he loathed her slow, insipid smile as his left hand released her
plump right fingers at the end of the exercise. If she were only the new
little girl!
Then he noticed, as a prosaic business man will notice suddenly, that a
skyscraper which he has passed daily for months is out of line with its
neighbor, that the seat behind the new little girl was unoccupied and
that she stood alone in the aisle during exercises. Would that he had
possession of it!
To sit next her, to be able to exchange the trivial, yet important,
little confidences in which fourth-graders indulge when teacher's back
is turned, or to win her quick, flashing smile as a reward for
sharpening her pencil or for judicious prompting during a spelling
lesson!
To achieve these things, he would be willing even to relinquish the
powers which he held by virtue of his aisle end seat. And to allow
voluntarily some other pupil to fill the inkwells, distribute pencils,
scratch pads, and drawing paper at their appointed intervals, and to
indulge in a hundred and one other little acts of monitorship is no
slight sacrifice for a boy to make.
The geography lesson began. With the disregarded map of Africa in front
of him as a blind, he fell to comparing the new girl with the other
maidens of his acquaintance.
Take poor, inoffensive Olga for example. Her placid being seemed clumsy
and her movements bovine as he pictured again the dainty grace of that
new arrival as she stepped down from the teacher's platform; or
Irish-eyed, boisterous, fun-loving Margaret! John had regarded her with
a great deal of favor during the past two weeks, for she was a jolly
little sprite with a mother who, thanks to the neighborhood's laundry
patronage, contrived to clothe her daughter in a constantly varying and
seldom-fitting assortment of dresses. Now echoes of her noisy laughter
returned to grate upon his memory. The new little girl wouldn't laugh
like that. Not she! No one with so sweet a smile had need of impudent
grins. And what a contrast between Margaret's untidy mop and those long,
silken curls which so fascinated him.
Yes, the boy decided that here was the being who was to be his girl for
the ensuing year--to be worshipped from afar in all probability, but to
be, nevertheless, his girl. So he drove ruthlessly from his heart all
memories of a certain gray-eyed Harriette, his third-grade charmer, and
erected a purely tentative shrine to the new divinity. As yet he was not
quite certain of his feelings--and there might be a later addition to
the room!
In the meantime, there was the vacant seat. Temporary idol or not, he
longed for possession of it, but he knew that although he moved heaven
and earth to support a direct request for transfer, Miss Brown would
never assign it to him. Many a past bitter experience had shown the most
harmless desires to mask deep-laid juvenile plots, and she was
singularly wary and distrustful. A way must be found to trick her into
giving him the occupancy.
He ate his meat and potatoes very quietly and thoughtfully that noon, a
procedure so contrary to his usual actions that his mother asked him if
he felt well. He nodded abstractedly, went upstairs to the big, sunny
sewing room, searched the family needlecase for a long stiff darning
needle and extracted several rubber bands from the red cardboard box on
the library table. Then he sauntered off to wait in the school yard for
assembly bell, with the air of a military strategist who has planned a
well-laid campaign and is sanguine of success.
The tramp of juvenile feet up the broad, school stairways grew steadily
less until silence reigned in the big, empty corridors. Miss Brown sat
down at her desk, drew out the black-covered record book from the
right-hand drawer, and gave a few reassuring pats to her dark, orderly
hair. Scurrying footsteps pounded up to the cloak room entrance. A
moment later, Thomas Jackson, still panting and breathless, stumbled
into his seat and mopped the beads of perspiration from his dark-skinned
forehead with his coatsleeve. Then the tardy bell rang and Miss Brown
began roll call.
"Anna Boguslawsky," came her clear, even tones as the "B" names were
reached. Hardly had Anna's timid "Here" reached her ears than a series
of subdued cluckings came from some small boy's throat. She rapped for
order and went on.
"Edna Bowman."
"Clu-wawk, clu-wawk," repeated the offender. Miss Brown laid her book
down with a snap and glared at the class, which hesitated between
ill-suppressed amusement and fear of teacher's wrath. She waited for one
long, dragging moment and spoke crisply:
"Children, you are no longer third-graders. Try to act as really
grown-up boys and girls ought to."
"Clu-wawk, clu-wawk," came the maddening repetition. She sprang to her
feet.
"That will be quite enough," she snapped. "If that boy makes that noise
again he will be sent to the office and suspended for two weeks." During
the awed silence which followed, she seated herself and took up the
black-covered book with impressive deliberation. All went well until the
"H's" were reached.
"Albert Harrison," she called, "Albert!"
[Illustration: _"Who shot that rubber band?"_]
"School doctor sent him home this morning," volunteered the boy nearest
Albert's empty desk.
As Miss Brown's eyes sought the record book again, an unseen something
whizzed through the air. Thomas Jackson jumped to his feet and rubbed a
chocolate ear belligerently.
"Who shot that rubber band? I'll fix him. Who done it? He's afraid to
let me know."
Miss Brown stepped down from the teacher's platform with an angry swish
of her skirts, and took up a position half-way down the aisle where she
had a better view of the class. John studied her carefully. The usually
smiling lips were set in a thin, nervous line, and the hand which held
the record book trembled ever so slightly. In an opposite corner of the
room, two little girls giggled hysterically. The ring of pupils around
him, true to the child's creed of no talebearing, glanced at school
books or lesson papers with preternaturally grave faces. Discipline had
been so badly broken that the class was at the stage where a dropped
piece of chalk or a sneeze will provoke an outburst of laughter.
John drew the needle from his coat lapel and wedged it carefully in the
joint between his desk and the back of Olga's seat. A glance at Miss
Brown found her watching Billy Silvey closely in the belief that he was
the miscreant. The time for his crowning bit of persecution had arrived.
Suddenly a nerve-wracking, ear-piercing vibration filled the room. Miss
Brown's face went white with rage. John caught the tip of the needle
with his fingernail and bent it back again.
"T-a-a-ang." The class gasped at the sheer audacity of the deed. A ray
of reflected light caught the teacher's eye, and she pounced upon the
boy before he could remove the incriminating bit of steel.
"John Fletcher," she screamed, as she stood beside him. "So it's you who
have been causing all this trouble!"
He admitted as much. Sober second thought would have counseled Miss
Brown to make good her threat of a visit to the principal's office and
consequent suspension, but an outraged sense of personal grievance
clamored for redress. She gained control of herself with perceptible
effort.
"Take out your books," she ordered.
He assembled his belongings on the top of his desk--geography, reader,
arithmetic, composition book and speller--all too new to be as yet
ink-scarred--a manila scratch pad, a ruled block of ink paper with a
cover crudely illustrated during his many bored moments, and a sundry
assortment of teeth-marked pencils and pens, and stood, a smiling,
incorrigible offender, in the aisle, awaiting further orders.
Miss Brown found that smile peculiarly irritating. "The first thing to
happen to you," she told him sternly, "is that you'll have to stay after
school an hour for the rest of the week. As for your back seat, I let
you keep it only on promise of good behavior, and this is the way you've
acted."
The maddening grin reappeared. That seat behind the new little girl was
the only vacant one in the room located at all near Miss Brown's desk.
The prize was all but in his possession. She was going to--she had to--
"And," went on the cold, inexorable voice, "as Louise is such a
well-behaved little girl, I'm going to let her exchange with you.
Louise, will you take out your books?"
He drew one piteous, gasping breath. Every vestige of sunlight seemed to
leave the room. Slowly he fumbled among his belongings as he gathered
them into his arms and, half-way up the aisle, stood aside to let his
divinity pass. Longingly his glance took in every detail of the silken
curls, the curving lashes which half hid the brown eyes the rosy,
petulant lips, and the unmistakably snub hose. Then he walked
uncertainly to the seat which she had just vacated.
A little later, Miss Brown looked up from a stack of composition papers
which had been collected by the monitors, and found John's lower lip
a-quiver. She was greatly puzzled, for boys did not usually take
detentions after school so much to heart. But fifteen minutes before
school ended for the day, she knew that his troubles had vanished, for
he was gazing out of the window with such vacant earnestness that she
felt called upon to reprove him again for daydreaming.
He eluded the watchful eye of authority as the exit bell rang, and filed
down stairs with the long line of pupils. Sid DuPree dashed past him as
he stood in the school yard, with a cry of "Just wait until teacher
fixes you for ducking." A friend called an enthusiastic invitation to
play tops on the smooth street macadam. Silvey stopped to convey the
important information that the "Tigers" were to hold their first fall
football practice in the big lot that afternoon. John promised his
appearance--later. Other and more important matters would claim his
attention for the next half-hour.
At last the new little girl came down the long walk leading from the
school yard to the street and hippity-hopped over the cement sidewalk
towards home, with school books swinging carelessly to and fro in her
strap.
He started after her with the unnecessary and therefore fascinating
stealth of an Indian, for he meant to find out where she lived. As she
left the cross street where the telephone exchange stood, her gait
slackened to a walk--still eastward. Past the little block of stores
which housed a struggling delicatessen, an ambitious, gilt-signed
"elite" tailoring establishment, and a dingy, dirty-windowed little
jewelry shop, across Southern Avenue where gray-eyed Harriette, that
divinity of the preceding year, lived, and still no sign of a change in
direction.
Once she turned and looked backward. John fled, panic-stricken, to the
shelter of the nearest store entrance; for you might be in love with a
girl, you might be obsessed with a desire to find her residence that you
might pass it occasionally and wonder in a dreamy sort of a way what she
might be doing, but the girl herself must never know it. That would be
contrary to every precept of the schoolboy code of ethics.
At last she turned a corner--his home corner--where the drug store
stood, and broke again into a hippity-hop down the shady, linden-lined
street. With heart gloriously a-thump, he watched the door of the big
apartment building at the end of the street close upon the little
white-clad form, and he knew that the van load of furniture which had
been carried in on the Friday preceding belonged to her parents. So he
retraced his steps across the street with a dolorously cheerful whistle
on his lips.
Over the railroad tracks he went as usual to the big, weed-grown,
rubbish-littered field north of the dairy farm, which served as baseball
grounds, athletic field, and football gridiron, according to the season.
There he found a baker's dozen of boys of his own age, who greeted him
joyously.
"Sid DuPree's gone to get his football," Silvey explained. "We'll be
practicing in a minute."
They were a ragged lot. Silvey boasted of a grimy, oft-patched pair of
football pants, which were a relic of his brother's high-school career;
Albert, the older Harrison boy, who did not seem very ill in spite of
the physician's dismissal, owned half of an old football casing, which
had been padded to make a head guard, and there was a scattering of
sweaters among them. Sid DuPree, thanks to parental affluence, was the
only boy who laid claim to a complete uniform, and presently he
sauntered over the tracks in shining headgear, heavy jersey, padded knee
trousers, and legs encased in shin-guards far too large for him. A new
collegiate ball was tucked securely under one arm.
"Here she is, fellows," he called, as he clambered into the field and
sent the pigskin spinning erratically through the air. "Isn't she a
peach?"
Last year, their combats had been fought with a light, cheap, dollar
toy, but here was one in their midst of the same weight, brand, and size
as that which the big university team used, and which cost as much as,
or more, than a new suit of clothes, according to the individual. They
gathered around it, poking at the staunchly sewn seams and thumping the
stony sides with a feeling akin to reverence.
Presently Silvey produced a frayed, dog-eared treatise _How to Play
Football_, which had survived two years of thumbing and tugging and
lying on the attic floor between seasons, and proceeded to lay down the
fundamental laws to the neophytes in the great American sport. Positions
were tentatively assigned, and the squad raced over weeds and stones in
an effort to master the rudimentary plays, while Silvey strutted and
blustered and administered corrective lectures in a manner that was a
ludicrous imitation of a certain high-school coach. Let John excel at
baseball if he would; he was the master of the hour now, and he marched
the boys back and forth until they panted and sweated and finally broke
into vociferous protest. Thus the "Tigers," whose name that season was
to spell certain defeat to similar ten-year-old teams, concluded their
first football practice.
[Illustration: _The "Tigers."_]
John dropped behind to talk to the elder Harrison boy as the team
sauntered noisily homeward. He wanted to learn the details of the
accommodating illness. Albert chuckled.
"Nothing the matter. Only the school doctor thought there was."
That official was a recent acquisition to the school personnel whose
duties, according to the school board's orders, were to "Make daily
visits, morning and afternoon, to examine all cases of suspected
illness, and prescribe, if poverty makes it necessary, that epidemics be
safeguarded against."
"What do you mean?" asked John.
"Well, my throat felt funny and I told Miss Brown. She sent me up to the
office to see him. 'Stay home a day, my boy, until we see if it gets
worse,'" Albert quoted. "Was I glad?"
So that was what the new school doctor did. Thumped you around and
looked down your throat and prescribed a day's holiday as a cure. He
wished he'd been Albert. He'd a' stayed on the pier all morning and
hooked the big carp again. Some folks seemed to be born lucky, anyway.
Couldn't he fall sick too, not badly enough to go to bed, but just
nicely sick as Al was?
He startled his parents at supper that evening by a sudden and seemingly
morbid thirst for information about diseases.
"Mother," he queried, between mouthfuls of bread and homemade marmalade,
"what's measles and scarlet fever and diphtheria start out like?"
His father chortled with amusement. Mother, after the manner of women,
remembered his actions that noon and grew anxious.
"You're not feeling sick, are you, dear?"
He didn't feel exactly well. Could she tell him about any of the
foregoing? Perhaps he had one of them.
"Put that marmalade right down, then. It'll upset your stomach. Here,
let me look at your tongue!"
He demurred. Jam wouldn't hurt him. There was nothing really wrong,
anyway. Only one of the boys at school had gone home with the measles
and he was wondering what it was like. Then he subsided into silence.
Late that evening, Mr. Fletcher found the library gas burning and
discovered his son sitting beside the desk, his eyes glued to the
portly, green-bound _Family Doctor_. Beside him on a pad were scribbled
copious notes. Nor would he even hint, as his father ordered him to bed,
what he wanted them for.
[Illustration: Johnny and Louise]