The Bent Twig Part 9

Professor Marshall drew a great breath of disheartenment. "As long as I can live without thinking of that element in American life--it's all right. But when anything brings it home--like this today--I feel that the mean compromise we all make must be a disintegrating moral force in the national character. I feel like gathering up all of you, and going away--away from the intolerable question--to Europe--and earning the family living by giving English lessons!"

Mrs. Marshall cried out, "It makes _me_ feel like going out right here in La Chance with a bomb in one hand and a rifle in the other!"

From which difference of impression it may perhaps be seen that the two disputants were respectively the father and mother of Sylvia and Judith.

Mrs. Marshall rose and began clearing away the luncheon dishes. As she disappeared into the kitchen, she paused a moment behind the door, a grim, invisible voice, remarking, "And what we shall do is, of course, simply nothing at all!"

CHAPTER VIII

SABOTAGE

Sylvia and Judith walked to school in a profound silence. Sylvia was shrinking with every nerve from the ordeal of facing again those four hundred hostile faces; from the new and painful relations with her playmates which lay before her. She was now committed irrevocably to the cause of the Fingals, and she felt a terrified doubt of having enough moral strength to stick to that position.

For the moment the problem was settled by their arriving at the schoolhouse almost too late. The lines were just marching into the building, and both girls barely slipped into their places in time.

Sylvia noticed with relief that Camilla was absent.

All the Five A girls had paper bags or pasteboard boxes, and in the air of the Five A cloakroom was a strong smell of vinegar. Gretchen Schmidt's pickles had begun to soak through the bag, and she borrowed the cover of a box to set them in. These sounds and smells recalled the picnic to Sylvia's mind, the picnic to which she had been looking forward with such inexpressible pleasure. For an instant she was aghast to think that she had forgotten her bananas, tied up all ready at home on the sideboard. But the next instant she thought sadly that she probably would not be welcome at the picnic. She went to her seat and sat forlorn through the changing lessons of the afternoon.

The teacher ground out the half-hour lessons wearily, her eyes on the clock, as unaware of the crisis in her cla.s.s as though she were in another planet. At four o'clock Sylvia filed out with the other children to the cloakroom, but there was not the usual quick, practised grab, each for his own belongings. The girls remained behind, exclaiming and lamenting. Such a clamor arose that the teacher came hurrying in, anxious for the reputation for good behavior of her cla.s.s. Good behavior in the Was.h.i.+ngton Street School, as in a penitentiary, was gauged by the degree of silence and immobility achieved by the inmates.

The girls ran to Miss Miller, crying out, "Somebody's stolen our lunches,--we left them here--all our boxes and things--and they're all gone--!"

Sylvia hung back in the door to the schoolroom, apart from the others, half relieved by the unexpected event which diverted attention from her.

One of the boys who had gone ahead in the line now came back, a large cuc.u.mber stuck in the corner of his mouth like a fat, green cigar. He announced with evident satisfaction in the girls' misfortune that the steps were strewn with pickles. The bag must have burst entirely as they were being carried downstairs. Gretchen Schmidt began to weep,--"all them good pickles--!" One of the girls flew at the boy who brought the bad news. "I just bet you did it yourself, Jimmy Weaver, you an' Frank Kennedy. You boys were mad anyhow because we didn't ask you to come to the picnic."

Jimmy's face a.s.sumed the most unmistakably genuine expression of astonishment and aggrieved innocence. "Aw, you're off yer base! I wouldn't ha' gone to your darned old picnic--an' wasn't I in the room every minute this afternoon?"

"No, you weren't--you weren't!" More of the girls had come to the attack, and now danced about the boy, hurling accusations at him. "You got excused to get a drink of water! And so did Pete Roberts! You did it then! You did it then! You did--"

"Hush, children! Not so loud!" said Miss Miller. "_You'll have the Princ.i.p.al down here_!"

At this terrible threat the children, in spite of their heat, lowered their voices. Jimmy was beginning an angry, half-alarmed protest--"Aw, 'twas a tramp must ha' got in an' saw--" when he was pushed out of the way by a small, vigorous hand. Judith Marshall walked in, her face very pale. She was breathing hard, and through her parted lips, as though she had been running fast, her small white teeth showed like those of an enraged squirrel. "I threw your picnic things in the river," she said.

The older children recoiled from this announcement, and from the small, tense figure. Even the teacher kept her distance, as though Judith were some dangerous little animal,

"What in the world did you do that for?" she asked in a tone of stupefaction.

"Because they are n-n-nasty, mean things," said Judith, "and if they weren't going to let C-C-Camilla go to the picnic, I wasn't going to let them _have_ any picnic!"

The teacher turned around to Sylvia, now almost as white as her sister, and said helplessly, "Sylvia, do you know what she's talking about?"

Sylvia went forward and took Judith's hand. She was horrified beyond words by what Judith had done, but Judith was her little sister. "Yes, ma'am," she said, to Miss Miller's question, speaking, for all her agitation, quickly and fluently as was her habit, though not very coherently. "Yes, ma'am, I know. Everybody was saying this morning that the Fingals' mother was a negro, and so the girls weren't going to invite Camilla to the picnic, and it made Judith mad."

"Why, _she_ didn't know Camilla very well, did she?" asked the teacher, astonished.

"No, ma'am," said Sylvia, still speaking quickly, although the tears of fright were beginning to stand in her eyes. "It just made her mad because the girls weren't going to invite her because she didn't think it was anyhow her fault."

"_Whose_ fault!" cried the teacher, completely lost.

"Camilla's," quavered Sylvia, the tears beginning to fall.

There was a pause. "_Well_--I _never_!" exclaimed the teacher, whose parents had come from New England. She was entirely at a loss to know how to treat this unprecedented situation, and like other potentates with a long habit of arbitrary authority, she covered her perplexity with a smart show of decision. "You children go right straight home, along out of the building this minute," she commanded. "You know you're not allowed to loiter around after school-hours. Sylvia and Judith, stay here. _I'm going to take you up to the Princ.i.p.al's office_."

The girls and Jimmy Weaver ran clattering down the stairs, in an agreeably breathless state of excitement. In their opinion the awfulness of the situation had been adequately recognized by the teacher and signaled by the equally awful expedient of a visit to the Princ.i.p.al's office, the last resort in the case of the rarely occurring insubordinate boy.

Because Miss Miller had not the least idea what to say in an event so far out of the usual routine, she talked a great deal during the trip through the empty halls and staircases up to the Princ.i.p.al's office on the top floor; chiefly to the effect that as many years as she had taught, never had she encountered such a bad little girl as Judith.

Judith received this in stony silence, but Sylvia's tears fell fast.

All the years of her docile school existence had trained her in the habit of horror at insubordination above every other crime. She felt as disgraced as though Judith had been caught stealing,--perhaps more so.

Miss Miller knocked at the door; the Princ.i.p.al, stooping and hollow-chested, opened it and stood confronting with tired, kind eyes the trio before him--the severe woman, with her pathetic, prematurely old face and starved flat body, the pretty little girl hanging down her head and weeping, the smaller child who gave him one black defiant look and then gazed past him out of the window.

"Well, Miss Miller--?" he asked.

"I've brought you a case that I don't know what to do with," she began. "This is Judith Marshall, in the third grade, and she has just done one of the naughtiest things I ever heard of--"

When she had finished her recital, "How do you know this child did it?" asked Mr. Bristol, always his first question in cases between teachers and pupils.

"She was so brazen as to come right back and tell us so," said Miss Miller, her tone growing more and more condemnatory.

Judith's face, capable of such rare and positive beauty, had now shut down into a hard, repellent little mask of hate. Mr. Bristol looked at her for a moment in silence, and then at Sylvia, sobbing, her arm crooked over her face, hiding everything but her s.h.i.+ning curls. "And what has this little girl to do with anything?" he asked.

"This is Sylvia Marshall, Judith's sister, and of course she feels dreadfully about Judith's doing such a dreadful thing," explained Miss Miller inelegantly.

Mr. Bristol walked back to his desk and sat down. "Well, I think I needn't keep you any longer, Miss Miller," he said. "If you will just leave the little girls here for a while perhaps I can decide what to do about it."

Thus mildly but unmistakably dismissed, the teacher took her departure, pus.h.i.+ng Sylvia and Judith inside the door and shutting it audibly after her. She was so tired as she walked down the stairs that she ached, and she thought to herself, "As if things weren't hard enough without their going and being naughty--!"

Inside the room there was a moment's silence, filled almost palpably by Sylvia's quivering alarm, and by Judith's bitter mental resistance.

Mr. Bristol drew out a big book from the shelf over his desk and held it out to Sylvia. "I guess you all got pretty excited about this, didn't you?" he said, smiling wisely at the child. "You and your sister sit down and look at the pictures in this for a while, till you get cooled off, and then I'll hear all about it."

Sylvia took the book obediently, and drew Judith to a chair, opening the pages, brus.h.i.+ng away her tears, and trying to go through the form of looking at the ill.u.s.trations, which were of the birds native to the region. In spite of her emotion, the large, brightly colored pictures did force their way through her eye to her brain, instinct in every fiber with the modern habit of taking in impressions from the printed page; and for years afterwards she could have told the names of the birds they saw during that long, still half-hour, broken by no sound but the tap-tap-tap of Mr. Bristol's typewriter. He did not once look towards them. This was partly a matter of policy, and partly because he was trying desperately to get a paper written for the next Convention of Public School Princ.i.p.als, which he was to address on the "Study of Arithmetic in the Seventh Grade." He had very fixed and burning ideas about the teaching of arithmetic in the seventh grade, which he longed with a true believer's fervor to see adopted by all the schools in the country. He often said that if they would only do so, the study of arithmetic would be revolutionized in a decade.

Judith sat beside her sister, not pretending to look at the book, although the rigidity of her face insensibly softened somewhat in the contagious quiet of the room.

When they had turned over the last page and shut the book, Mr. Bristol faced them again, leaning back in his swivel-chair, and said: "Now, children--all quiet? One of you begin at the beginning and tell me how it happened." Judith's lips shut together in a hard line, so Sylvia began, surprised to find her nerves steadied and calmed by the silent half-hour of inaction back of her. She told how they were met that morning by the news, how the children shouted after Camilla as she got into the carriage, how the Five A girls had decided to exclude her from the picnic, how angry Judith had been, and then--then--she knew no more to tell beyond the bare fact of Judith's pa.s.sionate misdeed.

Mr. Bristol began to cross-examine Judith in short, quiet sentences.

"What made you think of throwing the things into the river?"

"I was afraid they'd get them back somehow if I didn't," said Judith, as if stating a self-evident argument.

"Where did you go to throw them in? To the Monroe Street bridge?"