Читать книгу Growth of a Man - Mazo de la Roche - Страница 11

NOW Shaw gave his whole mind to his school work except for the brief hour of recreation at noon and on the way home from school. Then he played wildly, almost feverishly, as though he would force his body as he was forcing his mind. He and Ian became greater friends than ever; he and Louie Adams even more antagonistic. He would feel her round avid eyes boring into the back of his head in the classroom, and he would turn and discover her look of hate. In return he would screw his blunt features into as ferocious an expression as he could, forming with his lips the words—“Mean old pig Louie!” He would intensify his efforts to enter her class.

Elspeth was still a little embarrassed in his presence. She had not forgotten the humiliation of having to take back the paintbox. But she liked him. He was sure of that. She had a clear little voice, and on the Friday afternoons when they had songs and recitations she would look straight at him when she sang, as though, singing, she had a confidence in herself she could not ordinarily attain. And Ian could recite as well as his father could preach from the pulpit. Shaw had a self-depreciatory admiration for them both.

November was here and darkness fell swiftly on the countryside. By the time Shaw reached home from school the orchards and woods were dimly mysterious, the orange squares of lighted windows gleamed in the dusk. Perhaps a horse would come to the rail fence beside the lane and whinny to him in lonely recognition, but he would hasten on without turning his head. He was late. He would be scolded. And there were his chores to do.

When he had finished with the carrying in of wood and water he would open the oven door and take out the large plate of food that had been saved for him from dinner, carry it to a corner of the kitchen table, and eat it ravenously. Then he would drink deeply from the tin dipper and settle himself by the table where his grandfather read, to do his school work.

At first he would sit with his head in his hands, stupefied by violent play, the long walk home, the heavy meal. He would pull off his sodden boots and rub his stocking feet together to warm them. Between his fingers he would study his grandfather’s face, the smooth dome of his head, the strong flaring beard, the tranquil eyes fixed on his newspaper or on the glowing stove. From the contemplation of that face the desire to work was quickened, but whether from the transmission of purely physical energy or from an antagonistic stimulus against all his grandfather stood for cannot be said. Whatever the reason, Shaw would take out his books and not raise his eyes from them till he was sent to bed.

The house was not so quiet since the departure of Letitia and Beatrice as had been expected. One of the married daughters had come home to visit, bringing with her an ailing girl of four years. The child coughed and coughed. It was sick after the paroxysms. Shaw was told that it had whooping cough.

“Look out you don’t catch it,” said Esther, “or you’ll have to stay home from school.”

Shaw was aghast. The thought was horrible to him.

“Isn’t there anything I can do, so I’ll not catch it?” he asked.

“Eat lots of red pepper on your porridge,” said Leslie. He and Beatrice had come to dinner.

There was a guffaw from Mark and Luke. Beaty rocked with laughter. Shaw looked sullenly at his plate. He had no fun in him, they said.

He was, in truth, filled with apprehension. What if he took whooping cough and had to stay away from school? It would mean that he could not pass the entrance exam next summer. It would mean an extra year of the life he was now leading. He had a feeling of hate toward the whooping little cousin. She unfortunately took a fancy to him. She would follow him about, coughing and then making a noise like a cock crowing. He scowled at her and once got his ears boxed by her mother for giving her a pinch.

His desire for learning amounted to greed. He learned whole chapters of the history and geography textbooks by heart. He did the homework of two classes. He came downstairs at five in the morning and worked by lamplight in the kitchen while the milking was done. But he began to ail.

First he grew feverish and had a feeling of nausea. Still he did not suspect the cause. With his cheeks flushed and eyes glistening he pressed on in his pursuit of the textbooks, of everything that Miss McKay could teach him. Then one day she looked at him strangely and said:—

“Shaw, I think you are making yourself sick. You are working beyond your strength.”

“No, I’m not,” he denied. “I’m all right.”

“I wish I could talk to your mother.”

“But she wants me to work hard! She wants me to work as hard as ever I can!”

“Very well. But I think you’re overdoing it.”

That night he began to cough and the next day he was not allowed to go to school.

“How long will I be at home?” he asked miserably.

“Six weeks.” Jane Gower looked at him with some compassion. “Perhaps if you study at home you can keep up to the others.”

“Grandma, I wonder if I could find out what the homework is, every night.”

“You couldn’t every night, but perhaps we can get Miss McKay to let us know on Sundays.”

“She’d help me if she could, Grandma, I’m sure she would. Ask her, please, Grandma! I do want to pass the exam!”

“Well, I never did see such a boy! Fussing about exams when you’ve the whooping cough!”

But Jane had a certain pride in his bookishness. She saw Miss McKay and the result was that every Sunday the teacher brought an outline of the week’s homework to church and handed it to one of the Gowers. Shaw was feverish from excitement as he waited for the return from church. He would stand by the window watching for the buggy long before the time when it should come. He felt that he could not bear it if the paper were forgotten. But it never was. Week by week he did the work of the two classes.

Roger Gower had seemed oblivious of the coughing of his grandchildren, but one evening, returning from a visit to the village, his beard powdered by the first heavy snowfall, he brought two bottles of cough mixture and set down one in front of each child.

“There,” he said. “I’ve brought you a bottle of cough medicine apiece, so don’t quarrel over it.”

Jane was annoyed by the needless extravagance of the second bottle. She laid the supper table with her lip pushed forward and the back of her neck stiff. Roger buried himself in Dr. Chase’s next year’s almanac, which he had got at the drugstore, conning the dates of the births of famous people, the great fires, the battles and expositions. Shaw could scarcely endure the waiting till he might have possession of the almanac. “I know more about those things than Grandpa does,” he muttered to himself. “I bet he doesn’t know what he’s reading about!” Roger Gower looked up, met Shaw’s eyes, and buried himself still more stubbornly in the almanac. Jane drew a pan of tea biscuits from the oven and the delicious smell of them was mingled with the smell of the scorched oven cloth.

Shaw was glad when word came that Ian had whooping cough. If Ian had taken it perhaps other children would take it! Perhaps so many would take it that the school would be closed and he would not be far behind the others after all!

All this happened. The school was opened barely in time for the examinations shortly before Christmas.

Shaw was so happy that he scarcely knew what to do with himself on the morning when he first went to school. The sun was dazzling on the snow. The air was so deliciously, so cruelly sharp that it stung his nostrils, tender from coughing and hot indoor air. The lane was an arch of glory, with the snow-laden boughs meeting above and the untrodden whiteness below. His were the first steps to ruffle the lane’s purity and he ran along it leaping and bounding in his joy, watching the snow dust drift on the golden-blue air.

By the time he reached the gate he had a stitch in his side, his legs trembled from running. He wondered what had made him so weak. The two miles to the school along the snowy road seemed very far in prospect. He wished he might get a lift. He looked back along the road and saw approaching a team belonging to the neighboring farmer whose daughter had run away with the hired man, Jack Searle.

The team, red-roan in color, looked wild, dashing through the snow with their blond manes flying and steam curling from their nostrils. The farmer sat, whip in mittened hand, his ruddy face looking out between the lugs of his fur cap, a buffalo skin across his knees. The sleigh bells rang out joyously.

Shaw advanced to the side of the road and looked ingratiatingly into the farmer’s face. The man seemed not to see him, but the hand holding the whip was raised, the lash cracked lightly near the team’s flanks, and they broke into a gallop.

Shaw scowled. “He thinks he’ll keep me from hooking on behind!” he thought. “Guess he’s mistaken—mean old farmer!”

Timing the moment, he sprang on to the back of the sleigh, at first precariously, then edging his body on firmly, placing his schoolbag and his packet of lunch in safety, uttering a grunt of satisfaction.

He saw then that he was not the only one who had “hooked on.” Louie Adams was clinging desperately to the sleigh, her thin legs, terminating in overshoes much too large for her, dangling helplessly, a crocheted red woolen hood accentuating her mauvish pallor. Her round eyes rolled toward him appealingly.

“I’m falling off,” she whined. “I can’t get a good hold. My sakes, Shaw Manifold, give me a boost!”

He put out his hand and grasped her between the skinny shoulder blades. “Pull me on!” she whined. “Quick!”

He had a vibrant sense of power. He could pull her on or let her go, just as he chose. He pictured what she would look like sprawling in the snow with her schoolbag and the packet of bread and molasses which was invariably her lunch lying beside her.

But he was too happy this morning to be unkind to anyone, even Louie. He gave her a heave and she scrambled up beside him. They grinned into each other’s face.

“Did you have the whooping cough?” he asked.

“Did I? I nearly coughed my head off!”

“I nearly coughed myself into little bits. I had it first. I gave it to the whole school.”

“Where did you get it?”

“Off my little cousin. She nearly coughed herself to bits too. We had a special very bad sort of whooping cough.”

“If you were so sick I don’t s’pose you did any homework.”

“Homework, Louie! I did tons and oceans of homework! I’m going to pass into your class. I’m going to pass the entrance ahead of you next summer, see if I don’t!”

The grin faded from her face and again her eyes were hard with hate. The sleigh bells shattered the crisp air with their crisper jangling. One of the horses blew out his breath with a great b-r-r-r and the spray from his lips rose freezing. Coming from behind they saw the Blairs’ wine-colored sleigh and long-legged bay mare. A deep-toned bell rang from her breast. Little bells jingled all round her.

“That horse’s name is Lady Belle,” said Shaw. “That’s her name—Lady Belle.”

“She shall have music wherever she goes,” said Louie, out of her tight little mouth.

“You talk like a baby,” said Shaw.

Instead of being still more annoyed Louie looked pleased. The Blair children shouted and waved as their sleigh sped past. Ian made a grimace of horror at Shaw’s propinquity to Louie. Shaw smiled sheepishly and wished he had let her fall off the sleigh.

As they neared the schoolhouse the farmer looked over his shoulder at Louie and Shaw. Two icicles hanging from his big moustache looked like the teeth of a walrus. There was a malicious twinkle in his eyes. He flicked his long whip across the backs of the team and they sped swiftly forward past the gate of the school.

“Oo!” cried Louie. “He’s taking us way past! Oo—I daren’t jump!”

“You’ve got to!” shouted Shaw. He snatched up his school-bag and leaped to the road.

Desperately Louie jumped after him. She rolled over and over in the snow, clutching her packet of lunch and her bag of books. She gathered herself up and came stumbling toward Shaw over the gleaming prints of the sleigh runners. Together they turned and shouted after the farmer:—

“Did you ever get left? Did you ever get left?”

Then they trudged back to the school.

“That man’s daughter,” said Shaw, “ran away from him. She ran away with the hired man.”

“My father’s a hired man,” said Louie aggressively.

“Well, that’s all right. But a girl wouldn’t want to run away with one. A farmer’s daughter wouldn’t.”

“What are you going to be? I mean when you grow up.”

“Oh, I don’t know yet. Perhaps a doctor. But anyhow something a long way from here. I’m going to do something out in the world.”

“So am I.”

“You couldn’t. You’re only a girl.”

She hung her head.

The Blairs were waiting for them. At noon Ian wrote on the wall of the shed—“Shaw Manifold loves Louie Adams.” The words were chanted up and down the yard, producing a peculiar satisfaction in Louie and nothing but hilarity in Shaw. He was so happy to be at school again that nothing could trouble him.

He was beside himself with impatience for the examinations. He compared notes with Ian and found that he had never opened a book during his isolation. But Ian was already in the entrance class; it was a foregone conclusion that he would pass into the high school at midsummer.

Miss McKay smiled proudly at Shaw when she announced that he had passed both the examinations. He now felt himself the equal of any in the school, the equal of the big boys of fifteen who were head and shoulders taller. He was growing, too. Before the winter was over the trousers and coat of the new suit were not so ridiculously long on him. But he was pale. Many of the children were pale after the long bout of coughing. Many of them had colds as they plodded long miles to school through snowdrifts and piercing winds. The windows of the school were white with frost. Outside the windows hung long icicles as thick as a boy’s wrists. The stove at the end of the room was almost red-hot and the woolen scarves and hoods of the girls, the mittens and the knitted caps with pompoms on the tops, of the boys, hung round it to dry, gave off a strange oily odor.

Miss McKay announced that at Easter she would give a prize for the best map drawn by any pupil in the school. It was the first time a prize had been offered and it was felt by children and parents that a new element of worldliness had entered into their lives. Shaw knew that he would take the prize with the beautiful map of Asia he had colored from Elspeth’s paints. He had nothing to do but wait for the day of handing in the maps. He heard the others talk of theirs, with tolerance. He pictured their astonishment when his was hung on the wall. He hoped the prize would be a book.

When the day came the school was aquiver with excitement. The rolls of clean white paper were handed in to Miss McKay. After the children were gone she pinned the maps to the walls of the room. She was proud of her pupils’ accomplishments.

When the children crowded into the room the next morning the first thing that challenged their attention was Shaw’s brightly colored map, with its square-rigger, its dolphins and its whale, the crowding colors of its countries, the lovely blue of its sea.

“I know when you colored that!” exclaimed Ian. Elspeth turned scarlet.

It was Louie Adams’s map that took the prize. It was of Asia too. It was plain black and white, but Louie had spent many hours in laboriously inserting the names of a multitude of rivers, capes, and towns. The map was covered by them. There was not room for another.

As she returned to her seat carrying the prize, a twenty-five-cent edition of A Basket of Flowers, her eyes met Shaw’s. On her side there was triumph. On his a challenge. From then on he worked harder than ever.

But his boy’s body chafed at the long hours of sitting. On the way home from school he gave himself up to play. It seemed that he could not play violently enough. Races, leapfrog, hop-skip-and-jump; in that hour he strove to rid himself of his pent-up energy, to capture some of the joy in which Ian was so carelessly secure. Shaw laughed a great deal in his play but his eyes were always grave. When the laugh had passed his lips they resumed their line of set endurance.

After the Easter holidays Miss McKay told him that she had great hope of his passing the entrance examination. He was himself positive he could do it but it was pleasant to have this assurance from his teacher. He relaxed a little his work at home and drew out the enjoyment of the after-school play. He and Ian and two brothers named Scott found a deserted “root house” on a neighboring farm. It was still solid, with a good roof, a small-paned window, and a broad shelf. You went down two stone steps into it. You could bolt the door. The little building was almost hidden by weeds and creepers.

The boys discovered it on the first spring day when the warmth of the sun put a kind of madness into them. They clambered up the mossy roof and slid down shouting. “It’s a pirates’ cave!” declared Ian. “Let’s have it for a pirates’ cave!” There was a small wood between it and the cultivated land. If they were careful in their comings and goings there was little chance of their being found out.