dignified forbearance. “Pray, go to my office.”
“Now, what have _I_ done!” The young lady moved belligerently toward
the hallway. “Always getting _jumped_ on for doin’ _nothin’_.”
What _had_ she done? Gorgas asked herself. But she did not ask aloud.
Nor did anyone else. Thirty youngsters watched the unlucky Wilcox
girl flounce out of the room, each knowing that it would mean a long
lecture, a detention after school, the punishment of much memorization
of Bible verses, and perhaps the writing out of a thousand replicas of
the sentence, “Children should be seen and not heard”; and certainly
it would mean a letter to the elder Wilcoxes, in which Bea would not
appear a heroine. There was no protest from her own mates, except the
mute flash of understanding from one to the other which implied that
here was one more irresistible victory of authority over justice.
Gorgas found herself marching in a silent line--silent save for
some furtive whispering as they turned safe corners in hall or
stairway--supervised by ferret-eyed teachers. She was tolled off to
a group that met in one of the western rooms on the second floor.
Trees--big chestnuts--shot above the windows and left a view of lawn
and rising hill beyond; and some of their leaves brushed just beyond
reach, so that they could be heard distinctly as they whisked back and
forth against the house.
Teachers came and went. They heard lessons mainly, and gave marks in
a book for every word spoken. While they were gracious in a sort of
unbending way, they seemed ever alert, like a Trappist lady superior,
to catch someone breaking the eternal vow of silence. Even as they
relieved one another on guard, they would watch the class with worried,
roving eyes, until the last reluctant moment. That vigilance crept
into their faces; it labeled them wherever they went, even in their
vacations!
Gorgas was mercifully permitted to look on during the long hours
of that first day, although she was given detailed instructions
for the lessons that were to be learned by the morrow. There was a
long spelling list, including Cambodia, peristyle, ratiocination,
caryatid, and other hard ones; a list of the mountains of the world
with the exact height of each; a section of American history to be
memorized--the story of John Smith and Pocahontas, which nobody
believes nowadays--the conjugation of several French verbs, and some
problem in arithmetic which aimed to discover that if fourteen men
working six hours a day could dig a ditch four feet wide, six feet deep
and ten feet long in three days, how many men working four days, seven
hours a day, it would require to dig a ditch three feet wide, five feet
deep and twelve feet long. And there was “literature”: the memorization
of the dates of birth and death of Cotton Mather and his contemporaries.
The French class offered hope at first. Mlle. Schwartz--German-Swiss--
looked French as she bobbed into the room, a vivacious, worried little
woman. She said, “I _hopp_ you do know the vairbs today.” It was a vain
“hopp.” The _pièce de resistance_ was a future perfect:
I shall have been regarded,
Thou shalt have been regarded,
He shall have been regarded.
Gorgas, who knew French, found the phrase new. She wondered if anyone
would ever need to “have been regarded.” But to Mlle. Schwartz it was
the open sesame to all of French; that and its even more bristling
negative interrogative:
Shall I not have been regarded?
Shalt thou not have been regarded? etc.
The prize of Mlle. Schwartz’s praise went to a little be-spectacled
girl on the front row who knew her “shall-have-been-regarded’s”
backward and forwards.
“Ah! Bessie,” Mlle. Schwartz would pounce on her in despair of the
others, “the past anterior!” Bessie knew the past anterior. “The
pluperfect!” Bessie knew the pluperfect. And the subjunctive, and the
indicative interrogative.
Gorgas felt ashamed. She knew no French, after all! In spite of all
her chatter with Bardek, she was ignorant of the language. So she edged
over to the Bessie girl at the fifteen minute recess, shyly, as one
would toward a superior.
“It was beautiful,” Gorgas spoke quickly in French, a nervous tribute
to the perfect scholar. “Ah! how it was beautiful, the conjugations
which you know so well!”
“Huh?” Bessie looked across her spectacles. She was munching a bun, and
spoke with difficulty.
“The French that you know so wonderfully!” Gorgas kept eagerly to
the French. “I speak it and read it, but I never knew about the
conjugations. Is it very hard? When I heard you speak I was ashamed not
to know them. They all seemed so familiar, yet I did not know them.”
“Don’t she talk funny!” Bessie smiled weakly at the group beside her.
Then she added, “I don’t understand her. Is it some foreign language?”
“But you know French!”
“Was that French what you just spoke?”
“Yes.”
“Gee! girls!” Bessie looked about her. “She can talk in French!”
“But you do, too,” Gorgas was fearful of being alone in this.
“Me?” inquired Bessie. “No. I don’t know any _speakin’_ French. I only
know conjugations. _Speakin’_ French don’t come for years--not till you
get to college.”
A heavy voice interrupted. It came from across the lawn.
“Whoo-oo!” it called joyfully and drew nearer. The owner was loping in
ungainly bounds. “I’m let out!” Bea Wilcox shouted. Then she glanced at
the office corridors and lowered her voice to a hoarse whisper which
penetrated almost as far as her normal tones. “I’m loose! Don’t come
too near, everybody.” She put her long arms around the nearest girls,
one of whom was Gorgas, and hugged them to her. “I’m dangerous, I am!
Old Bong-joor said I was--the sweet old Lavender-Box. She said I was
to be par-tic-u-lar-ly careful”--old Bong-joor was being imitated
now--“not to obflusticate the fiddlesticks of these deah innocent
guhls, especially the young lady, Miss, uh, Brownface, who had just
enrolled. Where’s Brownface?”
Brownface was being hugged gloriously by Bea’s strong right arm.
“Oh! Oh!” Bea cried as she loosed the other arm and hugged Gorgas to
her. “Be careful, Browny. Don’t get too close to me. I’m dangerous!”
Back and forth she rocked Gorgas. “I’m ketchin’. I’m the human colery
morbus.”
“And she can talk in French,” piped up Bessie of the spectacles.
Bea thrust Gorgas at arms length.
“Can you?”
“Yes.”
“Honest?”
“Yes.”
“Is it ketchin’?” This with mock fear.
Only laughter answered this question.
“Well, I want it to be.” Bea nodded her head vindictively. “I want to
ketch a whole lot of it. Old Bong-joor gave me ten pages of French
exercises to write out. Browny, you’re my lucky stone. I’m going to
love you.” She grabbed Gorgas once more and rocked her like a baby,
“Will you do every one of them for me?”
Gorgas said she would be glad to help.
“Help?” croaked Bea. “I don’t want help. I just want you to do the
whole biz for me. I can’t even punctuate in French. And see here,
Bessie Four-eyes,” she reached forward with her foot and drew that lady
nearer, “if anybody ‘spills’ this to Bong-joor--_anybody_, mind; I’m
not sayin’ who--they’ll have their backbones taken out _very carefully_
and dusted off--bone by bone.”
The good arm never left Gorgas. It protected her and warmed her and
temporarily drove off the chill of the school-house.
X
HONORIFICABILITUDINITATIBUS
But even the impetuous friendliness of Bea Wilcox could not quite
dispel the chill of the school-house. Until some arrangements could
be made for afternoon hours at the Applied Arts School Gorgas was to
spend her whole day at the Warren School. They were hours of dreary
inactivity, enforced silence, enforced immobility; and “lessons” that
appealed to no normal healthy instinct.
In two weeks Gorgas rebelled. Every night she had memorized dutifully
the odds and ends of unprofitable facts that had been detailed for home
study. But they would not stay fixed in her mind. She knew the exact
height in feet of Mt. Etna, the list of the counties of her native
State with the name of the chief city, innumerable pages of a stupid
political history of the United States, lists of births and deaths, and
the population of a score of cities. Bessie and her tribe, weaklings
physically, shone in the class-room. They “knew” everything. They were
eager to display and greedy for book-facts; but they never questioned
the usefulness of anything.
“The population of New York city, Miss Levering, please?” Miss Lewis,
the geography teacher, was quizzing.
“May I ask, Miss Lewis,” Gorgas plucked up courage to inquire, “why
anyone should have to know that?”
“Please do not be impertinent, Miss Levering.”
Miss Lewis was not a good disciplinarian and she knew it. A native
graciousness and meekness prevented her from succeeding in quelling
pupils; but she struggled hard to dominate.
“Oh, I don’t mean to be impertinent,” Gorgas went on eagerly. “But
population is always changing. Our book tells us the number of people
who lived in New York, but only for 1880. Why, that was eight years
ago! With millions of immigrants and--uh--births, you know, it must
be much bigger now. When you were a school girl you had to memorize
populations, but, you see, they’re of no use now. We’ll have to do it
all over again after the census of 1890; won’t we?”
“I--I--well, I suppose so; yes,” Miss Lewis had never questioned the
traditional pabulum of the school course. She was not of courageous
mould. “But I am afraid you will have to learn your lessons just the
same. So kindly answer my question: what is the population of New York?”
“But, don’t you see,” Gorgas did not notice the eager movement among
her classmates, who took sides instinctively in favor of every
rebellion against authority; nor did she see the weak look of fear
and determination in the eyes of her teacher. “But don’t you see, no
one can tell? And what do you mean by New York city? All the people
who live there? Or the people who visit New York--they say there are
thousands and thousands of visitors. And what about Brooklyn and Jersey
City--I’ve been looking at the map--it’s all one big city. I know a man
who lives in New Jersey who has his business in New York, and he says
there are thousands like him. How can you tell how many there are in
New York city this minute? Nobody could possibly count them.”
“If you do not know your lesson, Miss Levering, I must ask you to be
seated.”
“But you don’t understand,” Gorgas was enthusiastic in her childlike
earnestness. “Nobody knows that lesson. Even _you_ don’t know it, Miss
Lewis.”
All might have been well, but, unfortunately, the class broke into
an unpremeditated whoop. Tappings on the desk brought no respect for
authority. The youngsters saw nothing but lovely audacious baiting in
Gorgas’ innocent speech.
The tumult brought Miss Warren to the door. Gorgas was still standing,
conscious now, as evidenced by her flushed face, that she had caused
trouble. Silence fell like a blight on the group; one youngster tugged
at Gorgas’ skirt, aiming to be helpful; and another risked punishment
by boldly whispering that “Bong-joor” was at the door.
But Gorgas could not retreat. That would be to acknowledge wrongdoing.
So she not only stood her ground, but continued speaking.
“I don’t see the use of it, Miss Lewis, really I don’t.”
“What is it that the young lady does not see the use of?” Miss Warren
inquired majestically. Even Gorgas knew from the tone that she was
already judged and destined for her first punishment. Miss Lewis lamely
tried to put the case; she wanted to be fair, but her little four
hundred dollars a year, her very life, in fact, was at issue; she could
see failure hovering before her, so she plucked up a borrowed strength
from the orderly class and threw the blame upon Gorgas.
Miss Warren was quite calm. “I have noticed that Miss Levering, unlike
her sister, who was a great credit to our school, does not easily
conform to rules. She does not keep a good ‘line,’ and I notice that
she talks to others in the halls. I had meant to speak to her about
this, and other matters that have come to my attention, but preferred
to wait, hoping that as she was new to us she would eventually
understand and submit to authority. But it seems that my forbearance
was a mistake. We cannot have rebellious spirits in our school, Miss
Lewis. It would not be fair to the parents who have entrusted to us the
moral responsibility of training their children and who look upon our
school as an environment free from contaminating influences. At recess
time, Miss Lewis, will you be so good as to send the young lady to my
office?”
“I have done nothing wrong, Miss Warren,” Gorgas stirred her nervous
tongue to say.
Miss Warren fixed her with a smile.
“I can quite comprehend,” she said, “that you think you have done
nothing wrong. However, your parents, wisely or not, have permitted us
to be the sole judge in such matters. You will find us very fair and
very just; and also very firm.”
The interview with Miss Warren was full of the same numbing type of
monologue. But no other “punishment” followed. Gorgas was led to feel
that she was on probation; that mercy had been shown to her ignorance
of the rights of constituted authority; and that her future stay in the
school would be entirely dependent on herself. In the whole interview
Gorgas spoke not a single word.
But she raged, nevertheless, at the public humiliation. In the recess
periods the girls hailed her with delight, but she got no joy from
that. Mistily she thought of Bardek and the free play of thought that
he allowed, by which she learned prodigiously every minute; and she
thought of Allen Blynn, who treated her as a human being and opened
up springs of intellectual delight for her thirsty soul; and even of
Leopold, who talked science with her as if she were a colleague. And
in none of her conversations with those men had there been aught of
heights of mountains, and boundaries of counties, and populations of
cities.
One evening, when she had been struggling to memorize a list of uses of
the French subjunctive, she resolved to rebel. Leopold had dropped in
and had wasted the best part of her study period by chattering with her
in French. Together they had reviewed the French lesson for the morrow
and agreed that for them the French subjunctive did not exist.
“Even the French do not know those rules,” he told her. “And many
persons know them perfectly without knowing French at all.”
“Then I will not learn them,” Gorgas closed her book abruptly.
“I wouldn’t do that!” he laughed. “Miss Warren will send you kiting.
And then what will you do?”
“I will leave school,” she decided. “I can’t breathe in that place.”
But she resolved to tell Allen Blynn first. It grieved her to
disappoint him; so she would not take the decisive step until she had
informed him of all the necessities of the case. He had certain rights,
she admitted.
But Allen Blynn was hard to find. His visits to the Leverings had been
most infrequent and casual. A suspicion had come to her sensitive soul
that he had preferred not to see much of her. Her entrances had usually
been the sign for his leave-takings.
She tried to get courage to go directly to him; she had even got so
far as the house; but always she fled. So she took the weak course and
wrote him:
_Dear Mr. Blynn_:
I am going to leave school immediately.
I remain,
Very sincerely yours,
GORGAS LEVERING.
The next mail brought an answer.
_Dear Miss Gorgas_:
You are not going to do anything of the sort--at least not until we
have had a good talk on Saturday afternoon, beginning promptly at
three o’clock.
I also remain,
Very sincerely but very firmly yours,
ALLEN BLYNN.
On Saturday afternoon she was waiting for him on the old-fashioned
settle before the door of her home.
“Hello, missy!” he called to her from the gate. “When do you graduate?”
“S-sh!” she whispered, and nodded toward the house.
As he drew near he gave a mock whisper in return, “I’ve figured it out
that they must have promoted you a class every two days and a half. So
you’re to graduate immediately. Tell me about it.”
“We’ve got to walk,” she spoke low.
“Whither, fellow conspirator.”
“To the tennis-courts.”
“Ah!” he mimicked an actor, “’twas there we met.”
“This is no joke,” she declined to catch his spirit. “I’m going to
quit.”
It was October and the tennis-courts were bare; so they had the field
to themselves as they sat on the home-made judge’s bench.
“‘Begin at the beginning,’” said Blynn, “as the King said to the White
Rabbit, ‘go on until you come to the end, and then stop.’”
The tale was unfolded, populations, scoldings, subjunctive and all.
Blynn laughed. “Is it as bad as that? I had no idea the school was such
a dungeon. Why, it is supposed to be a first-class institution! I’ll
never believe another prospectus.”
“Do _you_ know, Mr. Blynn, how many people are in New York city at this
minute?”
“Bless my soul, no!” he shook his head ruefully. “I shouldn’t want to
have that on my conscience. It’s much easier to take the count of 1880.”
“But that wasn’t right, even in 1880,” she continued seriously.
“Yes,” he laughed; “New York has grown bigger even while we’ve been
talking; or maybe smaller, for half the town may have gone to Coney
Island for over Sunday.”
“What does it matter how many people live in New York?” she asked. “I
want to know; really. Miss Warren thinks it very important--although
she doesn’t know herself how many were there even in 1880.”
“Well, bless my soul, did you ask her?”
“Yes; she told me to come in and see her if ever I wanted to know
anything. So one morning I asked her about New York. She made a guess,
but she was thousands off. ‘Excuse me, Miss Warren,’ I said--I was
sticky with politeness, ‘but I think that’s what it was in 1820. I’m
_sure_ it’s grown bigger every year since that time; but I suppose that
was the correct answer when _you_ went to school.’”
“Ha! And what did she say to that?”
“She looked me over _very_ carefully, but decided that I didn’t look
bright enough. I didn’t. I flattened my face out--this way.” Her face
took on the appearance of a dull image; life went out of her eyes.
“Bless my soul, Gorgas, don’t! You look feeble-minded!” And Gorgas knew
that Allen Blynn was paying the actress a stupendous compliment. “Go
on!” he said. “Go on! This is great!”
“Then I told her the right number, but pretended to guess
it--1,202,299--that’s what the book says, anyway. All the time she was
hunting for a geography. ‘I’m sure that is not right, Miss Levering,’
but it was: 1,202,299. She hated me for knowing it, too; I could see it
in her eye, and I just knew she wouldn’t let me stay right. ‘In 1880,’
I helped her. ‘Ah!’ she swallowed the bait. ‘Of course, Miss Levering,
in 1880! But that was eight years ago. Since then, I have no doubt, it
has increased considerably--considerably.’ ‘How much is it now, Miss
Warren?’ I asked as if she knew everything; ‘how much exactly?’ She
swelled up and said, ‘Well, we shan’t be able to tell that until the
next census is completed. Of course, no one knows exactly.’”
“Treason!” cried Blynn. “She ought to have been scolded for that
speech!”
“And in public!” Gorgas was still vibrating from that open rebuke.
“That’s why I got my dressing down before the whole class, too. I’ll
never forgive her for that. It was beastly. So I just said sweetly, ‘I
am _so_ glad you say that, Miss Warren. That’s what I told Miss Lewis,
but she said it was still 1,202,299. It’s funny, too,’ I went on; ‘for
that’s what you reprimanded me for before the class. Thank you _so_
much. Goodby,’ and I shot out before she could recover.”
“That’s very subtle,” Blynn commented. “Do you really think she caught
your jab?”
“Oh, yes indeedy! If you could see the beady look in old Bong-jour’s
eye the next morning. She was ready for me, but so was I. When she
bong-joured me I bong-joured her back. Bong-jour! Huh! She doesn’t know
French, either.”
“Of course, she doesn’t,” Blynn chuckled. “Most of that school French
is the woodenest stuff. How did you find out, Missy?”
“Oh, when she Bong-joured me that morning, I came back fast. It took
her off her pins. I asked her questions in French, and then told her in
English that she hadn’t answered ’em. I came later than the rest so as
there’d be a crowd around. I made her own up that she couldn’t follow
me. She tried to talk me down high-and-mighty-like, and pretend that my
French was bad; but I jabbered right off to Mlle. Schwartz. Ma’m’selle
isn’t very strong on the French herself--”
“What! Another fraud!”
“Well, she can do the French all right, but she’s really German and got
her French mostly out of books. But she’s a demon on conjugations and
rules.”
“Well, did Ma’m’selle stand by you?”
“You bet. I just went a little slower for her. She’s afraid of me--more
afraid of me than she is of Bong-jour--so she always slams French back
at me, to show she understands.”
“Well!” Blynn was delighted. “Did the old lady own up?”
“Partly, but everybody in school knows she’s an old fraud. She cried,
‘Slower! Oh, slower! _ma cherie, s’il vouz plait_,’ with a gasp after
each word. But I never slower-ed a minute. I jabbered all the faster.”
“And so you’re going to chuck it?” he inquired mildly.
“Yes.”
He thought for awhile--to her a disconcerting thing; it made her feel
in the wrong.
“Oh, I shouldn’t mind the fool lessons, perhaps,” she took new ground,
“if it weren’t for the hours of silence, sitting at wooden desks
without so much as a squirm. Some day I’ll break out and scream.... You
don’t think I ought to stay, do you, Mr. Blynn?”
“Yes,” he nodded cheerfully. “Bad as it is, my advice is to stick.”
“Why?”
“It’s a part of my philosophy.”
“What’s philosophy?”
“Philosophy?” He dug his stick in the sod at the edge of the court.
“It’s one’s theory of life.”
She hugged both knees and settled back on the bench.
“I like your theories. Tell me about it.”
“My theory is--”
They both laughed at the memory of the time they had talked over
“Andrea del Sarto,” and he had been prolific of “theories.”
“It’s hard to put into words,” he mused. “You know, I’m what the Irish
call a ‘spoiled priest.’”
“What’s that?”
“It’s a man who starts out to be a priest, but falters on the way and
becomes a teacher. He’s a priest just the same; the religious strain is
strong in him; he will preach on the slightest provocation. No matter
what he does to earn a living, he will find his main interest in soul
saving. There’s always something of the religious zealot in him.”
A look came into his eyes that explained better than words what he
meant by zealot; it is the same sort of intense stare, a focusing on
some distant ideal, that gives the mark to ascetics and martyrs and
socialists, and certain types of reformers. It wasn’t a pleasant look,
but it made one confident in the man; confident that he would drive
himself, against his own interests, to fulfill the duty as he saw it.
“Well,” he made an attempt to begin, “it seems very unreasonable to you
that teachers should ask you to know what they don’t know themselves;
to learn things that are of no use; to walk ‘in line’ when you might
saunter out your own way; to keep silent when it would do no harm to
talk. It seems unreasonable, doesn’t it?”
“Well; it is!”
“I agree with you--absolutely senseless and unreasonable. At the same
time, I would obey the rules.”
“Why?”
“Because I am afraid of sensible and reasonable things.”
“I’m not!”
“If it were the custom everywhere to walk into the schoolroom
backwards, I should do just that.” His eyes narrowed, and the lines
about his mouth grew tense.
“That would be silly.”
“So is the commandment, ‘Thou shall not kill.’”
“What!”