Читать книгу Grain - Robert James Campbell Stead - Страница 5

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Gander had started to school the April he was five years old. Jackie was then thirteen, and too big to be spared from the work of the farm, but he walked the mile and a half with Gander to the prairie schoolhouse and presented him to the teacher, Miss Evelyn Fry.

"This is my brother Bill," he said. "Mother sent 'im to school."

Miss Fry regarded the little chap in the new cottonade pants with the pockets with some misgivings.

"Looks small," she said. "How old is he?"

"Five."

"Sure he's five, Jackson?"

"Well, he'll be five this week, if that'll do you," said Jackie, belligerently.

Miss Fry's second appraisal of Gander seemed more favorable. She had to be on guard against parents sending their children under school age as the easiest means of disposing of them. She meant that her school should not be exactly a nursery.

"All right, William," she said. "Are you going to be a good pupil?"

William was non-committal.

"I'm sure you are," she pressed, reaching down and taking up one of his lean hands in hers. An hour ago Susie Stake had scrubbed it clean as one scouring could make it, but the business of pelting clods of wet earth at venturesome spring gophers along the trail had left its marks of toil. Miss Fry was accustomed to soiled hands, with deep lines of mourning under the finger nails.

"I'm sure you're going to be a good pupil," she repeated, "and learn to read, and spell, and count numbers?"

Gander was in a difficulty, and he studied the dusty floor, as though in it he might find some solution of his problem. The fact is he had no idea what Miss Fry meant by pupil. But he was favorably impressed by this young person, so fresh and dainty in comparison with his over-worked mother, who was almost the only other woman he knew.

"Guess so," he compromised, twining his thin legs around each other as an outlet for his embarrassment.

"You will sit with Tommy Burge," Miss Fry told him. "Tommy, this is William Stake. Show him your desk and help him to feel at home."

The Burges lived south of the school, on the road to Plainville, and three miles from the Stake homestead. Gander had seen Tommy once or twice, and knew him by sight, but no acquaintance had been developed. He was as slim as Gander, with long legs and a fair face peppered with freckles in large flakes like oatmeal, a circumstance which had gained for him the cognomen of Porridge.

Jackie had left for home without further formality. He was a man now, helping his father to clean wheat, and he had been a little humiliated by having to go to the school at all, even to accompany his brother. Of course, Jackie attended school during the winter months along with the other big boys of the neighborhood, but that was different.

Tommy Burge took Gander in charge. "This is our seat," he explained. "If you got any books you can stick 'em in there," indicating a shelf under the desk.

"Ain't got any," said Gander. Thereupon the two boys for an instant looked into each other's eyes, blushed under the searching gaze of childhood, giggled, and Gander knew they would be friends.

Miss Fry rang a bell, and the children who had been playing outside while Gander was being introduced to his new surroundings came storming in. Storming is the word—there is no other for it. They jammed in the doorway, the bigger boys pushing or tripping the smaller ones and pulling the hair of the little girls, who squealed, and would have been offended had they been denied this playful gallantry. A stern word from Miss Fry checked the stampede, and the mass disentangled. As each child entered the room he or she developed an over-powering thirst, which deflected the procession toward the water pail sitting on a bench in a corner. There was but one drinking cup, and the water had been in the room since the previous Friday—this was Monday—but neither of these facts checked the thirst or, so far as ever could be learned, affected the health of the children. They drank in turns, and as each finished he threw what remained in the cup ostensibly on the floor, but actually on the legs of his companions. There was then a mild fight to be next in turn, in which the last user generally contrived to thrust the cup into a certain selected pair of hands—a mark of favoritism which never passed unnoticed or without comment.

Miss Fry regarded this behavior with disapproval. Before she had begun her career as teacher of Willow Green School she had entertained visions of well-trained and orderly children marching in double file to the "Left—right" which she would beat out with the precision of a drill sergeant. Her first day's teaching had been one of disillusionment. With a good deal of trouble she had lined the children up at the door, but just as her ruler began to beat time two of the bigger boys linked hands and rushed the whole group pell-mell into the school, almost trampling the teacher as they came.

"That's the way they load steers at the stockyards at Plainville," they explained to her proudly.

She had plans to stop all this—when she could. But she was only eighteen years old; she was a hundred miles from home, and a little terrified by this chaos of youthful energy. She noted the farm-bred muscles of her older boys and remembered that her parents had prophesied disaster. These boys were not accustomed to taking orders; if they obeyed it was because it pleased them to do so, or because they liked her—not because they were afraid of her. She took these things into consideration, and, being wise for her years, held her throne by judicious concessions.

When the children finally were herded into their seats they proved to be much less numerous than the rabble about the door and the water pail would have suggested. To be exact, there were just fourteen of them. Willow Green School District had twenty-seven pupils of school age on its register, but the attendance fell off sharply with the commencement of farm operations in the spring, when all the older boys, and most of the girls over twelve, were kept at home to help in the fields or about the house. True, there were always two or three new pupils—such as Gander—to take up the vacant spaces. So the dove-tailing of the generations goes on.

If Gander had been closely observant of his environment—he was not, as his entire attention was occupied with an approving and sometimes suggestive criticism of a drawing which Tommy Burge was perfecting under cover of his First Reader, and which was confidentially understood to portray Miss Fry, or an idealization of Miss Fry, as conceived by Master Tommy; a sort of Futurist art, of bold strokes and conspicuous angles, with height and breadth but without perspective—had Gander been observant of his environment he would have seen a room of four walls and a ceiling, with a door in the east, windows in the north, and blackboards above the wainscoting on the west and south. The walls were in need of whitewash, and the woodwork, of paint—a detail which Gander would not have noticed, had he been never so observant. Two rows of desks made of soft pine lumber, which lent itself admirably to the engraving of initials and other adornments, faced the teacher's table placed at the west end of the room on a platform raised a few inches above the floor. In the southwest corner was a dilapidated organ, bought by the Ladies' Aid of Willow Green School District with the proceeds of two box socials, as an incentive to singing at the church services held in the school on Sundays. On the south wall, over the blackboard, hung a map of Canada and a map of Manitoba, both of which were kept rolled up except during the period of geography lessons; and on the west wall, over the teacher's head, was a lithograph of Sir John Macdonald, for many years Prime Minister of Canada, but now sufficiently dead to have his portrait displayed in a schoolroom without suggestion of partizan designs upon the young minds exposed to its contagion. Even yet there were rumblings in the school board and at the annual meetings over the propriety of bringing the children under such sinister influences, and a movement to hang the portrait of Sir Wilfred Laurier beside that of Sir John had collapsed only when it was discovered that to have it framed would cost two dollars.

One object did, indeed, catch Gander's attention, and he consulted his friend and mentor, Tommy Burge, thereon. It was a black daub on the plaster ceiling above the huge box stove which occupied the centre of the room, between the two rows of seats, and served the purpose, in cold weather, of rendering the remote corners somewhat less Arctic and the seats immediately alongside insufferably torrid.

"What's that?" he whispered to Tommy, indicating the daub with an up-pointed finger safe behind his desk from the teacher's view.

"Ink," said Thomas. "Bottle blew up."

This was interesting. This was something worth while.

"How?" Gander demanded.

"Ink was froze, an' Dick Claus put it on the stove to thaw, an' forgot about it, an' it blew up, an——"

"Thomas, I'm afraid you're talking more than is necessary. William, this is your first day in school, but you must learn not to talk during the periods of study."

Gander had no idea what was meant by periods of study, but he understood that he had incurred the teacher's displeasure. He squirmed in his seat and felt uncomfortable, until Tommy, with a couple of deft touches, revised his portrait of Miss Fry in keeping with the mood of the moment, and restored Gander's good humor. Gander giggled.

"William, what are you laughing at?"

No answer, but a terrific heart-fluttering under Gander's blouse.

"William, you must tell me what you were laughing at."

Gander tried to speak, but the roof of his mouth had gone suddenly dry, and he made only an incoherent gasp. And Miss Fry was actually coming down the aisle!

Meanwhile the ill-fated work of art lay under Tommy's reader. With conspicuous presence of mind Tommy added another stroke or two while Miss Fry approached.

The teacher looked at the drawing for a moment as it lay on the desk, then lifted it in her hand. "Who is this supposed to represent, Tommy?" she demanded.

"John A." was Tommy's prompt rejoinder. The politics of Tommy's father, Martin Burge, were well known to be the antithesis of that espoused by the distinguished statesman whose portrait hung above the teacher's desk. Indeed, it had been Mrs. Burge who had offered to supply, for the more appropriate adornment of the room, the picture of Sir Wilfred which she had obtained as a premium with a year's subscription to the Winnipeg Tribune.

Miss Fry crumpled the paper in her hand, lifted the lid of the box stove, and with great deliberation dropped the scrap of Liberal propaganda inside. "You ought to set your new seat-mate a better example, Tommy," she said. "No more of this nonsense, or you will stay in at recess."

Tommy and Gander were sobered by this episode, but not for long. Percy Marsh, who occupied the seat immediately behind, came to the relief of their drooping spirits. He contrived to drop another scrap of paper between Tommy and Gander. This, when surreptitiously smoothed out, revealed a poem by Master Marsh:

"Miss Fry

Couldn't hurt a fly."

Tommy spelled this out laboriously, grasped its meaning, and managed to convey it to Gander while the subject of the poem was working out a problem in division on the blackboard for the Second Class. Gander felt reassured, not so much by this information as by the temerity which dared to express it almost under the teacher's eye. The poem was given a timely touch by Tommy's capture of a fly, almost at that moment, from which he proceeded to extract the legs and wings for his own and Gander's amusement.

At first recess Gander was initiated into a game known as Pom, Pom, Pull-away. His instincts ran more to baseball, but a considerable pond in the centre of the school-yard made that game impracticable; besides, no one had a ball. Pom, Pom, Pull-away could be played on the relatively dry area beside the school. It consisted of choosing sides and placing two bases, on each of which a "prisoner" was located. To rescue the prisoner one had to run across the enemy's flank, and, if captured by them, became an additional prisoner on the base. The game was conducted to the accompaniment of a chant:

"Pom, Pom, Pull-away,

If you don't come I'll pull you away!"

For some time Gander remained in the safety of his home camp, as was becoming in a raw recruit, but as the game proceeded his courage rose. He saw other boys distinguishing themselves and the call to glory fell not unheeded on his ears. A little girl about his own age—Josephine Burge, sister of his seat-mate Tommy—in a pink calico dress which Gander thought very beautiful, was languishing in jail. Percy Marsh had rushed to her rescue, and, being one of the bigger boys, had drawn all the enemy's fire. They were pursuing him over the school-yard, and, in the midst of this deployment, Gander went "over the top." Silently and unnoticed he dashed to the aid of the prisoner, whose hand was outstretched toward him as far as her lithe little body would reach, because it was a rule of the game that the moment she was touched by one of her side she was free. Their hands met, clasped, and home they ran in triumph together.

"Hurrah for Billie Stake! Good boy, young Stake!" cried his comrades. Glory was his, and a new joy of life was upon him.

That was the first time he ever held Jo Burge's hand....

At noon the boys ate their lunches squatted against the sunny side of the school building; the girls, always more fastidious, ate theirs from their desks inside. Miss Fry walked the half mile to her boarding-house on the Gordon farm, returning within the hour to resume her classes at one o'clock. Gander had brought his lunch in a school-bag which his mother had made from the better sections of a discarded grain sack, and he now produced it with some hesitation, being a shy boy, and struggling with an intense desire to go off somewhere and eat it by himself. But Tommy Burge had taken him under his wing, and before he knew it he had his bread-and-butter sandwiches spread out on his knees before him, and was attacking them with a will. There were two thick sandwiches, two cookies, and a hard-boiled egg. Gander noted that his luncheon—he called it his dinner—did not suffer by comparison with those about him, some of which consisted of bread and butter only; coarse, heavy bread such as Susie Stake would never have drawn from her oven, or, if she had, would have promptly thrown to her pigs or chickens.

They gulped their meal quickly, but interlarded it with conversation.

"You near caught it th' smornin', Porridge," Dick Claus—he of the ink-bottle episode—remarked to Tommy Burge. "Ol' Fry's on your trail, all right."

"Huh," said Tommy. "She ain't, neither."

"What you mean sayin' that was John A.?" Pete Loudy wanted to know. "Eh? I've a mind to bloody yer nose for it." Pete was Nine, and had the confidence of his years, especially when addressing Six.

"Don't take that, Porridge," one or two of the older boys, always eager for a fight which involved no risk to themselves, counselled. "Don' be scared of him because he's big. You can lick 'im, easy."

But Tommy had a well-developed sense of proportion. He knew—probably by experience—the difference between Six and Nine, so he smiled amiably upon Pete's truculent gestures, as though he were quite in sympathy with the champion of John A.'s memory.

Gander was less fortunate. His attention had been drawn to a portion of Peter's unfinished lunch; dark, soggy bread, incredibly uninviting. Gander was by no means fastidious but he always had been accustomed to wholesome food. This dark mass fascinated him and seemed to set some mechanism in his stomach in reverse gear. His intent observation did not escape Peter's notice.

"Well, what's a-matter with it?" Pete demanded.

"It's rotten," Gander observed, with great frankness.

This, of course, was too much. Pete bounced upon the little boy, punching at his head and face.

It was Gander's first engagement of any consequence and his tactics were simple and spontaneous. He wrapped his arms about his face and shrieked at the top of his voice. The other boys looked on, a little startled, but unwilling to interfere, partly from a wholesome respect for Pete's prowess, and partly from their natural human enjoyment of a fight. Only Tommy Burge, who felt a moral responsibility for his seat-mate, tugged half-heartedly at a broken end of Pete's suspenders.

Gander's screams brought the girls running out of the school. They formed a segment of a circle a little way from the centre of hostilities, horrified at the brutality of the master sex and eager to miss none of its manifestations. Suddenly from among them dashed a little figure in pink calico, and with cheeks blazing with indignation redder than her dress.

"Itth th' little Thtake boy!" she cried, and buried her fingers in Pete Loudy's hair. Her hands were small but her grip was astonishingly strong, and she had no squeamishness about her method of attack. Pete's shriek rose higher than the best of Gander's. He turned on his new assailant, but Tommy Burge, encouraged, or ashamed, as the case may be, by his sister's onset, seized him by the waist and down they went together. By the time Pete had wriggled loose his better judgment had cooled his fighting ardor. To hit a girl was considered bad form even in a school-yard where the boys fought with each other as their parents had fought with the wilderness—with the single idea of victory, and few compunctions about the method of attaining it. Besides, girls were notoriously tattle-tales. If he hit Jo Burge it surely would be reported to Miss Fry, and Pete had no great reserve of good conduct to his credit.

"Pete, Pete, tenderfeet!" the other boys ridiculed him, finding safety in his discomfiture. "Fightin' with the girls!"

"Didn't, neither," Pete defended himself, shame-facedly. "Whole fam'ly piled on me——"

Meanwhile Gander had disentangled himself, and, somewhat to his surprise, had found no serious injuries. A little miss, of whose acquaintance at that time he had not the honor, stuck a taunting finger in his face. "I know who your girl is," she said. "It's Jo Burge!"

Gander had no very clear idea what it meant to have a girl, but supposed it was quite reprehensible. Still, there had been something in that little tormentor's manner that suggested she would have been not unwilling to change places with Josephine Burge.

The incident excited within Gander an interest in Tommy's sister. During the afternoon he once or twice ventured to glance in Jo's direction, and, curiously enough, found that at the same moment she was glancing in his. A strange color flowed through Gander's dark skin as a result of these coincidences, and he found his attention distracted from a narrative concerning a cat, a hat, and a rat, in which Miss Fry had sought to interest him.

At afternoon recess the sport took another form. This was known as "Drowndin' Out Gophers." The school water pail, a broken baseball bat, and such sticks or clubs as could be found, were the necessary equipment. On a dry knoll near the school several gophers were rejoicing in the sun of early spring after their long winter indoors, and, sitting up staunchly upon their tails, were sending their challenging whistle forth to the world.

The game consisted in chasing a gopher into a hole and pouring water, carried from a nearby pond, down after him. When the hole was full of water the gopher, willy-nilly, must come out. The bedraggled, shivering little creature stirred no sympathy in the circle of children around the hole, each eager to prove his prowess by being the first to "lam" the victim. Half dazed with water and fright he would nevertheless put up a remarkable dash for liberty, twisting and doubling about among his pursuers' feet, and sometimes actually reaching another hole unharmed, but even in such case he only had postponed, he had not escaped, the inevitable end of the sport. More water would be carried, and again he would be forced into the open, more terrified and exhausted than before, until a merciful blow ended his suffering. Gander joined in the chase with shrieks of delight, and found running beside him, more than once, that little form in the pink calico. How she could run! Gander had counted himself speedy for his age, but this little girl was almost, if not quite, a match for him. As she ran her flimsy dress would billow high above her knees, but Gander and most of his companions were yet in the age of innocence. When, years later, he herded cows with Jo Burge, he used to think of those races.

At four o'clock Gander started for home, swinging his empty school-bag about his head and talking to himself after the manner of children who spend much of their time alone. As it happened no other pupils lived in Gander's direction, so he walked the mile and a half with no companionship except his own imaginings. These were busy with the events of the day, or, rather, with anticipated developments built on the day's events. The anticipations included a tremendous thrashing administered to Pete Loudy in the admiring presence of Josephine Burge; the persuasion of his mother to include another hard-boiled egg in his luncheon which he could share with Tommy Burge; and a little, elusive, shy half-resolution to gather a handful of crocuses for presentation to the most beautiful of all women, Miss Evelyn Fry.

Susie Stake watched from the south window for the coming of her boy from school. The promise (or threat?) of Genesis 3:16, postponed in the case of Susie Stake, was now being fulfilled. Minnie, two and a half years old, hung about her knees, and Hamilton, a babe of three months, occupied the cradle that once had been Gander's. These, with the growing herd of cows to be milked night and morning, the growing flocks of hens, geese, ducks, and turkeys to be fed and cared for, the growing area of garden to be planted and hoed and weeded for the growing appetites about her growing table, left the busy mother little time for sentiment. She had sat up the night before, making for Gander a pair of trousers from a new piece of cottonade bought in Sempter's store—the first occasion upon which Gander's trousers had not been salvaged from a worn-out pair of his father's—and a school-bag from remnants of a discarded grain sack, while the rest of her family slept the sleep of the unconcerned.

In the morning, above Gander's unavailing wails, his mother had scoured his hands and face and neck into some measure of cleanliness, made up his lunch, put in an extra cookie, told him to be careful of his new pants, and to be sure and do as Miss Fry bid him, kissed him, and sent him off to school. She followed his little figure down the path through the willows with something as like moisture in her eye as Susie Stake ever had time to entertain. More than once during the day, in the midst of her work, she had thought of him; when she saw his place vacant at the noon table it took her with a goneness under the waist which she would have been ashamed to confess, and by four o'clock she was beginning to send her glances down the road to the school. It was Gander's first little step into life.

It was after five o'clock when Gander came loitering along. Whatever sentiment or concern his mother had felt for him during his absence she now suppressed; it was a way with the Stakes to show no weaknesses toward each other.

"Well for the soul or sake o' me, I thought you was goin' to stay all night! Get off them good pants and go hunt the eggs."