Life Unveiled, by a Child of the Drumlins — Chapter 7 Part I - School Days

SCHOOL DAYS

Serious as was my girlhood, as the sombre experiences and the resolutions which grew out of them show, it was by no means always so shadowed as this record would indicate.

And it is a relief to turn from the detailed account of much of my inner life when a schoolgirl to more of the objective life, to sunnier memories, to the life within the school-house walls, even though to do so I go back for a little to the care-free days of early girlhood.

In school I was a dutiful little girl of the goody-good sort, but from about thirteen onward my badness cropped out and I became a little terror.

My mates were equally unmanageable.

In the senior department we could keep a teacher only a short time because of our “insubordination and irregularities,” as one dignified principal said when he came in to chastise us.

And I, though demure in appearance, was one of the chief offenders among the girls.

How fertile we were in devising ways to annoy the teacher!

We would agree to hum a tune in an undertone, so arranging it that when the teacher would steal up to the desks whence the humming issued, pupils in another part of the room would take up the tune, and the baffled teacher would wander from desk to desk trying in vain to “spot” the offenders.

The very diligence with which we were studying at such times should have enlightened her.

One day the whole roomfull broke out in paroxysms of sneezing.

The ring-leaders when discovered were made to promise never to bring snuff to school again.

I kept my word but sought to get a similar effect some other way: An arbor-vitæ tree grew near the school-yard, and somehow, I found that by irritating the nostrils with those rough sprigs, we could induce sneezing.

It worked, though less successfully than the snuff.

I had my triumph when the teacher accused me of having broken my word.

Flatly and indignantly I denied it; we had had no snuff, I declared emphatically.

No, and no pepper, either.

Nevertheless, she kept me after school, whipped my hands, then, taking me on her lap, wept and talked religion to me.

Her leniency should have melted me, but it did not.

I was unregenerate indeed.

I remember the casuistry I used, which she herself must have repeated, for one of the students in the academic department rallied me on the way I had defended myself for sneezing in school.

I had put a hypothetical question to her: If the Lord made something grow that tickled the lining of my nose, was I to blame that I could not control the sneeze?

The youth would get that off with variations till it teased me so that I was fairly punished for my naughtiness.

We also brought soda biscuit to school and ate them fast, inducing hiccough.

And the boys would strike matches, then report that they _thought_ they smelled something burning--all sorts of schemes were devised to annoy the poor teacher.

Finally the Board of Education sent one of their members to sit in the schoolroom and keep order.

He was a great fat man I had known from childhood.

When I was little he had called me “Sis Arnold,” and I had called him “Piggie Hanford.

” Mother used to remonstrate with me, but it was not so disrespectful as it sounded; we understood each other.

He always had a Jackson ball to give me when we met on the street, but first he would pretend to bite my hand.

Once, I remember, he did bite hard enough for the print of his teeth to show at the base of my thumb.

But he didn’t hurt--just liked to scare me, and I liked being scared.

It was such fun to see him coming toward me, big and black and frowning; to be snatched up, while he pretended to bite me; to struggle; then to be put down, when I would hold fast to him while he hunted for the Jackson ball, after which I would run away calling, “Good bye, Piggie, Piggie Hanford!

” It was years after that when he came to keep order for Miss O----.

I liked to have him there, for he helped me with my examples, and I needed help sorely then and always.

We were as good as pie when he was there.

But one day when he was strutting past my desk, a recollection of my childish freaks coming to me, I whispered mischievously, “Piggie, Piggie Hanford.

” He turned on me such a stern look that for an instant I almost screamed, as I used to when he would grab me up as a child.

But I soon saw the smile coming, and he bent down, saying in a low tone, “That won’t do here, Sis Arnold,” and walked solemnly away.

They hired a more competent teacher the next term, and “Piggie” came no more to keep us within bounds In the academic department, becoming interested in my studies, and having to work hard, I kept out of mischief.

Still there was nonsense going on even there--whispering and writing notes, and passing them surreptitiously, chiefly for the fun of disobeying the rules, especially with the preceptress.

More afraid of the new principal, we toed the mark better for him, dreading his ready sarcasm too much to risk it often.

Mathematics was always a bugbear to me.

Passing the Regents early in the other elementary branches, and also in many of the Intermediate studies, I was long in passing in arithmetic.

It was not only dry, it was incomprehensible.

I detested it.

Professor Durland was patient with me.

I verily believe he would have let me drop the study if he could have.

(To this day I often dream of being back in school and sneaking out of the arithmetic class, only to be discovered by “Prof. ” and sent back to my hated recitations.

What present-day duties am I longing to shirk, the Freudians will inquire?

) I tried Regents in arithmetic three times before I passed.

I well remember the last time: Professor Durland had coached me diligently for weeks, and I had felt desperately that I must succeed this time.

The whole department was interested.

It was unusual for one so advanced as I was in other studies to be so stupid in this.

It was Father’s day for being present during the Regents examination.

(The different members of the Board of Education took turns in coming, to see that all was fair play.

) How my heart thumped when the principal opened the sealed questions sent from Albany, handed a paper to Father, and glanced rapidly over the questions himself!

I knew how much he wanted me to succeed, and I wanted to for his sake as well as for my own.

Soon he nodded satisfactorily.

Knowing I was watching him, it was as though he said to me, “It isn’t so hard--you can do it,” and as he put the slip of printed questions on my desk he said in a low voice, “You will pass this time, Eugenia.

” That cheered me; it sounded so confident; and he knew my limitations.

He had drilled me so well on the ground covered by the questions that I myself felt, on setting to work, that there was a fair chance of getting through.

“Prof. ” came often to my desk, overlooking my paper.

Once (it was not fair, I know, and he knew), he drew his pencil across an example I had worked.

I did it over, somewhat conscience-stricken even at that hint, for at the close of each examination we had to listen to an oath read, stating that we had neither given nor received help from any source;

then had to write these solemn words: “I do so declare,” and sign our names.

Had I not been conscientious about this oath, I should long before that have cheated in arithmetic examinations.

When I handed in my paper, “Prof. ” said, “Don’t go home till I look it over.

” Returning to my desk, I waited.

The suspense while Professor Durland and Father were bent over my paper was harrowing.

It was a real vivisection for me.

I saw by their faces when an answer was right, and when one was wrong, and saw them estimate the number of counts the Regents would probably allow on each answer.

Other students, too, were eagerly watching the result--girls I had helped write compositions, who, in turn, had worked my examples for me, were anxious for me to be rid of the troublesome study.

Finally those two men lifted their heads.

They had evidently marked me strictly, so as to be sure beyond a doubt that the more rigid Regents Board would not turn me down.

Professor Durland now nodded his head vigorously, and Father beamed with joy.

How gaily I walked out into the hall, my feet scarcely touching the floor!

While I was putting on my wraps the door softly opened, “Prof. ” stepped out and said, “You are through this time, Eugenia!

” It was one of the happiest moments of my life; but though choking with emotion and gratitude to him, I don’t suppose I expressed it at all.

Still I think he knew; knew also that I was fond of him.

Along with several of the other girls, I had a schoolgirl’s infatuation for him.

He was our hero--a silly, sentimental fondness of the adolescent period, but then, and always afterward, redeemed by genuine affection and gratitude.

He was then, I suppose, a man in the thirties, and we were girls of sixteen and seventeen.

I have since thought how wise and kind he was never to seem to notice or to take advantage of our romantic feelings, and never to make us appear ridiculous on that score, for he must have seen it all.

(There was a time when we treasured everything he said or did.

I

even remember once that a certain girl and I kept count how many times he glanced at us in a forenoon; though his glances were doubtless of surveillance, we treasured them just the same.

) He pursued just the right course with us, and our sentimental adoration did us no harm.

It probably helped us in our studies.

We blossomed under his approval, and withered under his biting sarcasm.

Yet we often teased and annoyed him.

He was surprisingly forbearing at times, and especially indulgent with me, giving me freer rein than some others to indulge certain whims and idiosyncrasies.

I half consciously recognized this, girl that I was, and sometimes took advantage of it.

I used to love to hear him pronounce my name; he said it a different way from any one else.

What is it Whitman says-- Did you think there was but one pronunciation to your name?

I had nearly as hard a time with algebra as with arithmetic, and often became rebellious.

Feeling that I could not go through the struggles and humiliations that I had with arithmetic, I tried repeatedly to get out of going to the class.

I simply could not comprehend the study, and was always behind the others.

Girls that were as stupid as stupid could be about tasks that were play to me would do things on the blackboard as impossible for me as the labours of Hercules.

How glibly they explained what they had done!

How painfully I toiled to perform the simplest tasks!

Oh, those miserable days!

Professor Durland tried all kinds of methods with me; he sometimes lost patience and would make cutting remarks, not, however, without having first tried to persuade me to work harder.

I would not study if I could possibly help it, vainly hoping he would overlook me in class or give me something easy (which he often did), that my stupidity would not be so patent.

One day when sent to the blackboard, knowing that the task was beyond me, I refused to try.

He insisted, saying he would help me.

I hung back.

That angered him.

“You can go up to the blackboard, can’t you?

” he tauntingly asked.

I walked up to the board boiling with rage.

He stood near giving me points and explanations which, had I not been so incensed and obstinate, would have enabled me to do the work.

But I was angry to my fingertips.

I fumbled with the crayon and it broke.

I

was powerless to do a thing but stand there and sulk.

The tasks of the other students nearing completion, one by one they took their seats;

one by one rose to explain their work; and still I stood, alone now, before the long blackboard, my work untouched, my eyes blinded with angry tears, my listless hand holding that useless piece of crayon, and those meaningless symbols staring me in the face.

What an awareness I had of my figure as I stood there, my back to the school!

I could see just how the back of my drooping head looked, my long braids hanging below my waist.

It was such an uncomfortable awareness of my disgraced self that I had as I stood there.

The class-work ended, there was an ominous pause, I still standing helpless and hopeless.

Then the storm fell.

Before the whole school he launched forth a reprimand, every word of which cut me cruelly, the burden of it being that I was not so stupid as obstinate (I think he said “mulish”); that I thought I knew better than any one else what I ought to study; but that I would soon find that I was tremendously mistaken; that a “bird that can sing, and won’t sing, must be made to sing”; that algebra has its uses as well as rhetoric and physiology (oh, what scorn as he said these words--my pet studies!

) and that hereafter I was to get my algebra lessons before being allowed to recite in anything else.

I got so angry I was cold, and oh, so still!

I remember the awful stillness I felt within myself as I stood there.

I knew what he said was just, but it hurt my pride that he would speak that way to _me_, and before the whole school!

I don’t know how I ever left the blackboard and faced the others.

He kept me after school and patiently showed me how to do the work.

I was maddened for days after to see how, to conciliate me (who did not want to be conciliated), and perhaps to avoid the risk for me of another ignominious failure, he gave me such easy work that I could not fail to do it.

At that I felt insulted.

Perhaps I did study harder thereafter, but I went in and out of school for a period (perhaps only a week, but it seems ages) with an air of offended dignity that must have been absurd.

I thought myself a martyr.

Avoiding his glances at recitations, I refused to smile at his jests and pleasantries; showed no interest in the things about which I was wont to be enthusiastic; and was on my highest heels of offended dignity.

If I had the courage to look at some of my old diaries I should doubtless find my injured feelings faithfully and minutely recorded in them; but there is a limit to one’s endurance of self-scrutiny.

Some of “Prof. ’s” efforts at reconciliation were obvious; and though they pleased my vanity, my obduracy would not yield.

The girls pleaded with me to soften my heart; I hardened it instead--the memory of that hour at the blackboard froze me.

Then, too, I was pleased to be of so much importance.

I remember one of the things he tried to soften me: It was before I had studied Virgil, but always when the class in Virgil was reciting I had made little pretense of studying, listening to the translations instead.

At this “Prof. ” sometimes shook his head disapprovingly, motioning me to attend to my studies; and sometimes he suggested that it would be well if those not in the class in Virgil would kindly study their Cæsar; that there was abundant need of it, and so on.

But I had noticed that he seemed secretly pleased at my attention when, the students having given their lame translations, he would take it up and, in his beautiful, smooth rendering, read on and on, himself carried away by the beauty of it.

At such times I could not help but drink it in; it was a daily dissipation that I struggled against, but yielded to.

Time and again I would pretend to be studying, but really listening; till, in spite of myself, I would have to glance up, always to find him looking at me as he translated the beautiful epic.

I think he took a mischievous pleasure in this; he knew I could not resist it, and it was a tribute to his translation, as well as to the poet.

Well, after our “quarrel” he tried Virgil as a pacifier.

Knowing that he was seeking to draw some sign of interest from me, and pleased and angered at the same time, still was I deaf to the charm.

But, one day, in order to counteract its effect, I seized my algebra and, stimulated by the excitement of it all, dashed off a parody on Hamlet’s Soliloquy--on the study of algebra.

It was rather clever (the girls thought it wonderful), and it helped to relieve my wounded feelings, for in it I spoke rather freely of the principal.

Shortly after this, when things were running fairly smooth again, “Prof. ”, who was helping me with my algebra lesson one day, taking up my book to show me some rule, chanced to see that parody written on the fly leaves.

After reading a few lines he turned fairly white with rage.

In low tones of concentrated anger he said, “I always knew it was pure mulishness in you; you could master your algebra as well as anything else, if you would; you spend your time writing things like this, instead of honestly studying.

I have lost all patience with you--‘You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.

’” Then followed another period of strained relations when, after days of obduracy on my part, he enlisted Coleridge to break the spell.

It was in the literature class.

Whether by accident or design, I don’t know, but he read the sonnet on “Severed Friendship” in which are the words: “Each spoke words of high disdain and insult to the other,” and also, “And to be wroth with one we love doth work like madness on the brain.

” Reading this in class, as he always read poetry, beautifully, feelingly, while I sat bursting with this teapot-tempest which I was dignifying into a tragedy, he melted my stony heart.

I barely escaped dissolving in tears; and when the class was dismissed, the skies were again clear.

He had never again mentioned to me that wretched parody of the previous year till one day shortly before graduation: One of the lower-class girls had been using my algebra that term.

We were grouped together during recess, talking over the approaching Commencement, when “Prof. ” came up and asked where my algebra was.

“Lizzie has it,” I said, curious as to why he asked.

Thereupon he sat down at Lizzie’s desk and copied my wicked parody.

I mildly protested, but half smiling, he continued copying, looking grave as he proceeded.

Touched and flattered, the memory of my silly actions, and of his forbearance, and the thought that our school days were soon to end, made me repentant and remorseful.

I would have given a good deal to have changed some of the lines in the old thing that I had thought so clever; and would have given much more to have told him how sorry I then was for my stubbornness; how grateful for his help; but I couldn’t. He never knew until years after (when I obeyed an impulse and wrote him), unless he then divined my contrition.

One other time in school he was severe with me: I had habitually helped certain girls with their compositions.

It was play for me.

They were poor stuff, but better than the others could do, and I always made theirs inferior to my own.

One week I thought it would be fun to experiment a bit, so, instead of having the girls that I usually aided write a part of their own essays, I told each one that I would write her entire essay, if she would not tell a soul, and, after copying it, would destroy my copy.

Each girl jumped at the chance.

How the literary ardour possessed me that week!

To write four or five essays besides my own, all of which were to be read in one afternoon, I must vary my style so that no one could detect the authorship.

I flattered myself I was versatile enough to do this.

Glowing with pride I read them to myself before handing them over to the girls.

On the momentous afternoon I assumed a calm, indifferent manner while the various essays were being read; and when my turn came, at the last, read in my usual faltering voice, my knees trembling so that I felt I must run from the platform before I was half through.

As usual, mine was greeted with applause, and I took my seat with cheeks aflame, a sense of elation all through me.

It had been an exciting afternoon, but as I had sworn each girl to secrecy, I could share it with no one.

At the close “Prof. ” arose and said the exercises, though longer than usual, had been uncommonly interesting; that the choice of subjects had been varied, well chosen, well presented (I glowed more, with scarcely concealed pride); but--and here he paused--he would like to add that it seemed a little selfish, not to say conceited, for one person to be so pleased with her ability that she insisted on being represented five or six times in one afternoon!

Instantly every eye was turned upon me.

Each girl, knowing her own false position, suspected the others, and his remarks were so pointed that all the others guessed.

He rubbed it in by saying that it was a well-laid plan, but was rather unflattering to the instructors to suppose them incapable of detecting it.

Were we not aware that our teachers knew what each student was capable of?

Then he launched forth in withering scorn of those who had been so helped, not only then, but throughout the year.

But of what he said to them I cared little; for my own disgraceful part I felt the deepest chagrin.

He made me realize how culpable I had been in helping them to sail under false colours.

It was a bitter lesson for all of us, but did not keep me from lending a hand (or pen) when we graduated.

It was known then, I’m sure, but winked at.

One girl boldly said: “You’ve helped us all along, you can’t leave us in the lurch now.

” In fact, I wrote outright the graduating essay of an upper-class girl who graduated the year before I did; and of the fourteen essays in our class, I had a hand in six, two of which (my own and another’s) I wrote outright.

My itch for writing bothered me at an early age, and I _had_ to scratch.

Not that there was any merit in the schoolgirl effusions; it was only a facility for stringing words together, an aptness for quotation, and a tendency to moralizing and to figurative writing, that let themselves loose in them.

It has always irritated me to see persons too credulous, and I enjoyed punishing them for their credulity.

One of our classmates could be made to believe the most absurd things.

Sometimes we had spelling bouts the last few minutes before the close of school, and the principal would require us to define the words spelled.

Sprinkled in with the long columns of English words were occasional Latin ones.

A demon of some sort possessed me one day on seeing _Sal Atticum_ in the spelling lesson.

It was my first year of Latin and I chose Bessie Barnes, the credulous one, who had not studied Latin at all, for my victim.

Whispering to her I said, “Shall I tell you the definition of the Latin words in to-day’s lesson?

” Of course she was glad of help, so, telling her correctly the meaning of the others, when I came to _Sal Atticum_, pausing and laughing (perforce at the absurd joke I meant to perpetrate on her) I turned it off by saying that it was such a funny thing to have in the spelling lesson; and the little goose believed me when I told her it meant, “With Sal in the Attic”!

We both laughed at the absurdity of it, then I went on soberly to explain that “Sal” was just Sal, because proper names do not change; then, reminding her that in Latin the words do not come in consecutive order, as in English, I said that “_cum_” means “_with_”; that “attic” is the same in both languages, and that “attic” being in the ablative case, “in” is understood, thus making the translation, “With Sal in the attic.

” Then, drilling her on the meaning of all the foreign words in the column, I got heaps of fun every time she came to _Sal Atticum_ and gave the ludicrous definition.

And as we both laughed at the comical phrase, she said she hoped it would not fall to her to define it.

I have forgotten the outcome.

I can’t be sure, but think we gave “Prof. ” the tip and got him to ask her its meaning; but I remember distinctly her indignation when she learned how I had hoodwinked her.