Kitabı oku: «The Daft Days», sayfa 5
Along the street came the two Miss Duffs, who kept the dame school, and he saw a hesitation in their manner when they realised a meeting was inevitable. If they had been folk that owed him anything he would not have wondered, from their manner, to see them tuck up their skirts and scurry down the lane. Twins they were – a tiny couple, scarcely young, dressed always in a douce long-lasting brown, something in their walk and colour that made them look like pigeon hens, and long ago conferred on them that name in Daniel Dyce’s dwelling. They met him in front of his own door, and seemed inclined to pass in a trepidation.
He took off his hat to them and stood, full of curiosity about Lennox.
“What a lovely winter day!” said Miss Jean, with an air of supplication, as if her very life depended on his agreement.
“Isn’t it perfectly exquisite!” said Miss Amelia, who usually picked up the bald details of her sister’s conversation and passed them on embroidered with a bit of style.
“It’s not bad,” said Mr Dyce, blinking at them, wondering what ailed the dears to-day. They were looking uneasily around them for some way of escape; he could almost hear the thump of their hearts, he noted the stress of their breathing. Miss Jean’s eyes fastened on the tree-tops over the banker’s garden wall; he felt that in a moment she would spread out her wings and fly. “You have opened the school again,” he said simply.
“We started again to-day,” cooed Miss Jean.
“Yes, we resumed to-day,” said Miss Amelia. “The common round, the daily task. And, oh Mr Dyce – ”
She stopped suddenly at the pressure of her sister’s elbow on her own, and lowered her eyes, that had for a second shown an appalling area of white. It was plain they were going to fly. Mr Dyce felt inclined to cry “Peas, peas!” and keep them a little longer.
“You have my niece with you to-day?” he remarked. “What do you think of her?”
A look of terror exchanged between them escaped his observation.
“She’s – she’s a wonderful child,” said Miss Jean, nervously twisting the strings of a hand-bag.
“A singularly interesting and – and unexpected creature,” said Miss Amelia.
“Fairly bright, eh?” said Mr Dyce.
“Oh, bright!” repeated Miss Jean. “Bright is not the word for it – is it, Amelia?”
“I would rather say brilliant,” said Amelia, coughing, and plucking a handkerchief out of her pocket to inhale its perfume and avert a threatening swound. “I hope – we both hope, Mr Dyce, she will be spared to grow up a credit to you. One never knows?”
“That’s it,” agreed Mr Dyce cheerfully. “Some girls grow up and become credits to their parents and guardians, others become reciters, and spoil many a jolly party with ‘The Woman of Mumbles Head’ or ‘The Coffee was not Strong.’”
“I hope not,” said Miss Jean, not quite understanding: the painful possibility seemed to be too much for Miss Amelia; she said nothing, but fixed her eyes on the distant tree-tops and gave a little flap of the wings of her Inverness cape.
“Peas, peas!” murmured Mr Dyce unconsciously, anxious to hold them longer and talk about his niece.
“I beg pardon,” exclaimed Miss Jean, and the lawyer got very red. “I hope at least you’ll like Bud,” he said. “She’s odd, but – but – but – ” he paused for a word.
“ – sincere,” suggested Miss Jean.
“Yes, I would say sincere – or perhaps outspoken would be better,’ said Miss Amelia.
“So clever too,” added Miss Jean.
“Preternaturally!” cooed Miss Amelia.
“Such a delightful accent,” said Miss Jean.
“Like linkèd sweetness long drawn out,” quoted Miss Amelia.
“But – ” hesitated Miss Jean.
“Still – ” more hesitatingly said her sister, and then there was a long pause.
“Oh, to the mischief!” said Mr Dyce to himself, then took off his hat again, said “Good afternoon,” and turned to his door.
He was met by Ailie in the lobby; she had seen him from a window speaking to the two Miss Duffs. “What were they saying to you?” she asked with more curiosity in her manner than was customary.
“Nothing at all,” said Mr Dyce. “They just stood and cooed. I’m not sure that a doo-cot is the best place to bring up an eagle in. How did Bud get on with them at school to-day?”
“So far as I can make out, she did not get on at all; she seems to have demoralised the school, and driven the Miss Duffs into hysterics, and she left of her own accord and came home an hour before closing-time. And – and she’s not going back!”
Mr Dyce stood a moment in amazement, then rubbed his hands gleefully. “I’m glad to hear it,” said he. “The poor birdies between them could not summon up courage to tell me what was wrong. I’m sorry for them; if she’s not going back, we’ll send them down a present”
CHAPTER IX
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 born, 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 d’oyley 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 d’oyley 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 neighbours 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 parlour, 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 for ever.”
“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 schoolroom 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 ’Tornoway,” 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 demoralising 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 black-board 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 spelt 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 demoralised 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.
