MR. MUSTARD'S FIRST ASSISTANT
Yes, I was surprised. But there were several other and greater
surprises waiting me. I got one the very next day.
I met Dan McConchie on his way home from school, at the dinner hour.
He was kicking his bag before him in the way that was popular at our
school, where all self-respecting boys brought their books in a strap.
Girls had green baize bags and always swung them like pendulums as they
talked. But boys, if they had to have bags, used them as footballs.
This was what Dan was doing now.
He said, "Halloo, Joe Yarrow, your girl's gone and been made a teacher.
You had better come back. Old Mustard is as sweet to her as sugar
candy. She is teaching the babies in the little classroom--'A b--ab!
B a--baa!'"
He imitated the singsong of the lowest forms.
Now I put no faith in Dan or any other McConchie. But I clumped him
hard and sound for presuming to talk about Elsie at all or call her "my
girl."
Then I met little Kit Seymour, a girl from the south, who had reddish
hair, all crimpy, and spoke soft, soft English as if she were breathing
what she said at you. She lisped a little, too, was good-looking
(though I did not care for that), and did not tell lies--had not been
long enough in Breckonside to learn, I expect.
At any rate she told me in other words what I had just clouted Dan for.
Early the morning before, the school had been astonished to find Mr.
Mustard giving Elsie a lesson--when they came to spend a half hour in
the playground at marbles and steal-the-bonnets. Their wonder grew
greater when, as the bell rang, Elsie was found installed in the little
schoolroom, which hitherto had been used chiefly for punishments and
doing copybook writing. She was given the infant classes, and had been
there all day, so I was told, with Mr. Mustard popping in and out
giving her instructions, and smiling like a fusty old hawk that has
caught a goldfinch which he fears some one will take away from him.
Of course I did not care a button for Mr. Mustard. But he had always
been the Enemy of Youth so far as we were concerned. And it gave me a
queer feeling, I can tell you, to think of Elsie--my Elsie--teaching
alongside that snuffy old badger. He was neither snuffy nor yet very
old, but that is the way I felt toward him. Elsie, too--at least she
used to. But I could bet it was all the doing of that hook-nosed
sister of his--Betty Martin Mustard, we called her, though her name was
only Elizabeth, and not Martin at all.
Little Kit Seymour kept on lingering. She was smiling mischievously,
too, which she had no business to do. And she wouldn't have done it
long if she had been a boy. It got sort of irritating after a while,
though I wasn't donkey enough to let her see it. I knew better.
I just said that I hoped she, Elsie, would like school-teaching, and
that my father had always said that was what she should go in for. But
Kit went on swinging her green baize bag, like I've seen them do the
incense pot in Mr. Ablethorpe's church up at Breckonton. Father would
have skinned me alive if he knew I had gone there. He was a Churchman,
was father, but death on incense pots, confessions, and all apostolic
thingummies, such as Mr. Ablethorpe was just nuts on. He had even
stopped going to church at home because our old vicar had said that the
Anglican Church was a church catholic. I bet he didn't mean any harm.
He was a first-rate old fellow. But my father waited behind and told
him out loud that the Church of England is a Protestant church, and
"whoever says it isn't is a liar!"
That caused a coolness, of course. Yet I believe they both meant the
same thing. For our vicar wasn't one of Mr. Ablethorpe's sort, but
just wanted to let people alone, and was content if people left him
alone. But all things about churches made our Breckonside folk easily
mad--being, as I said before, actually on the border-line, or at least
very near to it.
Little Kit Seymour, with her lisp and soft south country English, was a
smart girl. I knew very well she was seeing how I would take the news
about Elsie. However, she did not get much change out of me.
"You aren't coming back to school again?" she said next, looking at the
toe of her boot.
"Oh, I don't know that," I told her; "old Mustard is well up in
mathematics and mensuration----"
"What's mensuration?" She said "men_th_uration," and curiously enough
it sounded rather nice. But if a boy had done it everybody would have
laughed. Some things are all in favour of girls--others again not.
Girls can't go into the army or the navy. Most boys can't, either.
But they think they can for a year or two, and that does just as well.
They can talk big about it till the fit goes off.
Well, I got rid of Kit Seymour. She went on to school, and as she
parted from me she said: "Well, I thuppose we shall be theeing you down
there by and by!"
She meant at the school--because Elsie was there. But I had something
else in my mind. I was keen to find out whether Elsie had gone there
because of our quarrel about Harriet Caw. The fault, of course, in any
other girl, would have been Elsie's. For she would not listen to any
justification--not even to the truth. But I never blamed Elsie. I
only thought she had been led into it by old Betty Martin--Mr.
Mustard's sister--who is so ugly that it gives you a gumboil only to
look at her.
Now the school of Breckonside--Mr. Mustard's, that is--lies right up
against the woods on a sloping piece of land, from which the grass has
long been worn off by generations of children playing. There is
another little yard with some grass at the back. That is where the
girls play, and across it with its gable to the big schoolhouse is the
little class-room where Elsie was teaching.
It was right bang in the woods. So I knew very well I could lie hidden
along the branch of a tree and look in at the window.
Mean, you say! Not a scrap. Elsie and I had always been such friends,
like brother and sister, that surely I had a right to look after her a
bit. Of course, if she had known she would have let out at me--scolded
I mean. But all the same she would have found it quite natural.
So I went and got hold of a ripping good place in a kind of sunk fence.
Here I found, not a beech, but the trunk of an old willow that had bent
itself down into the dry ditch as if feeling for the water. It was
just the shape, too, and when I lay down on my face it fitted me better
than my bed. There was even a rising bit at the bank for me to hook my
feet round. You never saw anything so well arranged. The hazel bushes
hid me from above, too, and unless you fairly stepped on me there was
nothing to be seen. I had only to put aside some leafy shoots to rake
the whole three windows of the little infant school.
Mean? I tell you not a bit. Why, I was really the only protector
Elsie had got, and though she was mad with me just at that moment, it
made no difference. Besides I had got an idea--I did not get them
often, and so hung on the tighter to those I did find. And this one
had really been forced upon me. It was that somehow Elsie was the key
to all the mysteries, and that through her would come the solution of
everything we had been trying to find out. Also--though this I would
not for the life of me have mentioned to Elsie herself--that some peril
hung imminent over her, and of this I should soon have proof if I
wanted any.
Now it is curious how different both things and people look when you
are watching them--as it were unbeknown. It is something like looking
through between your legs at a landscape. You see the colours
brighter, naturally, and as for the people--none of them do anything
unless as if with some horrid secret purpose. When Mr. Mustard wiped
his brow with a spotted handkerchief, or knocked a fly off the end of
his nose, I was lost in wonderment what he meant by it. When he called
Elsie to come down for her own private lessons in the big school-house,
I watched carefully to see that he had not a weapon concealed under his
rusty coat tails. I suppose policemen and detectives get used to this
sort of thing, but certainly I never did.
Then I had always thought that we all started for school together. We
seemed to. But Mr. Mustard's scholars certainly didn't--and I suppose
schools all over the world are the same. Nobody came alone. If they
started from home by themselves, they yelled and signalled till they
were joined by somebody else. Only a few groups arrived by the road,
generally hand-in-hand if they were girls, and the boys with their arms
about each other's waists. Most, however, ducked through hedges,
clambered over stone dykes, crossed ditches by planks, and so finally
got to school over broken-down pieces of wire fencing, or by edging
themselves between the gate post and the wall. I remember now that I
had generally done the same thing myself. But I never knew it till
that day I lay on the old willow, watching Mr. Mustard's school
gathering for morning lessons.
Seen from a distance Mr. Mustard was a youngish-looking man, getting
bald, however, except about his ears. He wore a perfect delta of
wrinkles at the corner of each eye. He was teaching Elsie about half
an hour, and during this time, his sister looked in twice from the
master's cottage, just to see how things were going. I lay still and
waited. From the big school-house there came the sound of a hymn sung
all together, with Elsie leading. I could distinguish her voice quite
well. And then Mr. Mustard said a prayer. It was always the same
prayer, and had been written by some bishop or other for the purpose.
Then Elsie came out followed by all the infant class, most of them
clinging to her skirts, the rest straggling behind, and pausing to pick
up stray toddlers of three or four who had fallen on their faces. In
Breckonside they send babies like that to school to be out of the way.
At first I did not get much out of my cramped position on the willow
trunk. True, Elsie did turn and look twice toward the tall black
paling of my father's storehouse yard. But even that I could not be
too sure of, for the next moment Elsie had opened the door of the
little class-room and passed within with all her tribe scuffling after
her.
Then I could hear her begin with another hymn, very simple. Then she
set the elder to learn the mysteries of "two and two make four," while
she combined a little drill with the teaching of the alphabet to the
most youthful of her flock behind a green rep curtain. After that came
the turn of the slates, and at the first rasp Elsie, long unaccustomed
to that music at close range, put her fingers to her ears. But when
she had set the children to their task of drawing lopsided squares,
drunken triangles, and wobbly circles, she left the infant class to
drone on in the heat of the morning. She arranged the windows, pulling
them down to their utmost limit, and springing up on the sill she
cleverly tacked bits of white netting over the open spaces. Elsie knew
that there is nothing so demoralizing to the average infant class as a
visiting wasp of active habits.
The drone of the infant department was behind her. I could see a soft
perspiration bedewing the tender skins. Hair clung moist and clammy
about bent necks. One or two slumbered openly, their brows on their
slates, only to awake when Mr. Mustard came smiling in, satisfied with
everything, and particularly commending the wasp protectors. Strange
that in twenty years he had never thought of such a thing! He would
get his sister to make some immediately.
No need of that! Elsie could tear the required size from her roll in a
moment. Would he have them now? No, he would wait till the interval,
and then she and Mr. Mustard would put them up together. There was no
use troubling Elizabeth. She had her own domestic duties to attend to.
Of course, she, that is Elsie, would partake with them of their simple
and frugal midday meal? It would be more convenient for all
parties--better than going all the way back to the cottage at the
Bridge End. Besides, Miss Edgar would doubtless be absent, and no
dinner would be ready. Yes (concluded Mr. Mustard), on all accounts it
would be much preferable to dine together. He had talked it over with
his sister the night before.
I could see her hesitate. But the arrangement was really so much more
convenient--indeed obvious, that Elsie, after provising that she would
have to arrange terms with Miss Elizabeth, ended by accepting.
I began to hate Mr. Mustard.
What could he be after? It could not be love--fancy that red-nosed,
blear-eyed, baldish old badger with the twitchy eyebrows in love! I
laughed on my branch. But whatever it was his sister was in it. Yes,
Betty Martin was a confederate--yet her brother's marriage would
(conceiving for a moment such a thing to be possible) put her out of a
place.
It was altogether beyond me. Only as I say, I did not love Mr. Mustard
any the better for all this, and if I could have pinked him cheerfully
with my catapult, without the risk of hitting Elsie, he would have got
something particularly stinging for himself.