THE FIXER
Inside the school, also, an excited, expectant throng waited. Special
permission had been given to the whole student body to view the parade
and every one of the many windows facing on Terrace Avenue was filled
with faces. Teachers (who are universally referred to as _old_ by their
pupils) were young again in those slow, expectant, listening moments.
“Old” Cartright, “Old” Johnson, “Grouchy” Gerry, “Keep-in” Keeler were
all there, with their clustering, elbowing charges about them, waiting
to see the parade.
The large windows of the gymnasium were packed. So were the windows of
the big assembly room. “Old” Granger, the music teacher, seemed almost
human for once, as he actually elbowed his way to a front place where
Doctor Sharpe smilingly awaited the coming of the great show.
The weather was too brisk for open windows, but the several hundred
waiters heard the muffled strains of music, three blocks, two blocks,
one block off, and in the renewed excitement and suspense many noses
grew flat in an instant, pressed eagerly against the glass.
One block away. Half a block away. The great bass drum sounded like
thunder. They could hear the complaining roar of a monarch lion. The
frightful but rousing din of the calliope (eternal voice of the circus)
smote their ears. Louder, louder, louder sounded the music. In a minute,
half a minute, the motley heralds of the fantastic, gorgeous, roaring
spectacle would show themselves.
Then the music seemed a trifle less stentorian and, presently becoming
more and more subdued, was muffled again by distance. The lion was
either losing his pep or retreating. His roar seemed less tremendous—at
last he seemed to speak in a kind of aggrieved whisper.
Even the terrible calliope modified its shrieking and discordant tones.
It seemed to be receding. Could the _Evening Bungle_ have committed the
greatest bungle of all its bungling career and misstated the line of
march? Impossible, perish the thought! Where but down the fine, broad
thoroughfare of Terrace Avenue would a circus parade make its
ostentatious way? The pupils waited, patient, confident, all suspense.
The procession had paused....
They waited five, ten, fifteen minutes, till the calliope had ceased
entirely to shock the air with its outlandish clamor and the lion had
ceased to roar.
Twenty minutes.
Then, suddenly, a procession appeared indeed before this thronging
grandstand of the school. It consisted of two people, little Irene Flynn
and Scout Pee-wee Harris. But it was not without music, for he was
demonstrating the powers of his official whistle for her especial
edification, his cheeks bulging with his official effort.
Straight along the thoroughfare they came, the eyes of the waiting
multitude upon them. They ascended the steps of the large central
entrance, then disappeared to view and presently reappeared in the main
corridor and entered the adjacent office of the principal, which awful
sanctum had been invaded by a score of pupils and teachers who still
crowded at the windows.
“I had to stay as late as this on account of making the parade turn into
Allerton Street,” said the small official, “because I made a truck
driver stop on account of his being—maybe—he was going to run over Irene
Flynn, but, anyway, I made him stop and his load went over—gee whiz,
awful funny—all over—and so then I made the parade turn into Allerton
Street and we stayed to watch it and, _oh, boy_, it was peachy. There
were wild animals and chariots with men in kind of white nightgowns in
’em and clowns and elephants and zebras and fat women and skinny men and
dwarfs and a kind of a man only not exactly a man that they held by a
chain and he was wild and uncivilized like—you know—like scouts, and he
growled and looked like a monkey, and, gee whiz, they had two giraffes
and a lady with a beard like Smith Brothers’ cough drops, and I sat on
Mrs. Ashley’s porch and a boy that sits in a window because he’s sick
saw the parade, so that shows how I did a good turn, even Mrs. Ashley
said so, and they had snakes in a glass wagon—gee whiz, you ought to
have seen all the things they had! Wasn’t it dandy, Irene?”
“You saw the procession?” said “Grouchy” Gerry.
“Oh, boy, did we! Geee whiz, you ought to have seen it. We saw it all
from beginning to end, didn’t we, Irene? And, anyway, she has to be
excused on account of a parade being something special. Oh, boy, if you
had seen it, you’d have said it was something special——”
He paused for breath and in the interval a boy student sank into
affected unconsciousness across a table. Another staggered to the wall,
leaning limp and helpless against it. A girl buried her head on another
girl’s shoulder, silently shaking. Principal Sharpe managed to reach his
revolving chair, swung around in it away from the scene of anguish,
leaned forward, placed his two hands before his face, and said nothing.
Miss Rossiter, proud teacher of our hero’s own class, gave one look at
him, an inscrutable look, then glanced at another teacher, turned around
and laid her face gently on the top of the Encyclopedia Britannica case
in a kind of last abandonment of laughing despair.
“He—he—boasts—he——” she tried to speak but could not. “He c-cl-_aims_
that his sp-ec—specialty is—f-f-fixing—fix—fixing. Oh, _dear_, I have
—a—a—_headache_!”
“So didn’t I fix it all right?” demanded Pee-wee proudly. “Gee whiz, you
can leave it to me to handle traffic out there, because I’m not scared
of them. Oh, boy! You should have seen those elephants!”
That afternoon, in composition hour, the pupils did not (as has been
planned) write upon the theme of “_What impressed me most in the
procession._” One waggish boy did, indeed, place that heading at the top
of his composition sheet and wrote nothing whatever underneath it, which
seemed a truthful enough composition when you come to think of it. But
he was kept in after school for essaying the rôle of humorist.