his temper—which happened often—he spared nobody. He went out of his way to attack me. Lest this should read like the exaggeration of fancied slights to the self-willed, pert youngling he believed me to be, let me cull one or two sprigs of rue from the lush growth that embittered ten months of my existence:
I cut my finger to the bone one morning (I carry the scar still). My mother bound it up in haste, for the school-bell was ringing. I got into my seat just in time for the opening exercises. A chapter was read—verse by verse—in turn by the pupils, after which the prospective divine “offered” a prayer. He stood with his eyes shut and his forehead knitted into a frown. We knelt with our backs to him before our chairs around the room. It seems but natural to me, in reflecting upon that perfunctory “exercise,” that our reading “in course” should never, during Mr. Tayloe’s reign, have gone beyond the Old Testament. We read that exactly as it came—word for word. There was nothing of the New Testament in his walk or conversation.
On this day we had a chapter in Kings—First or Second—in which occurred a verse my father would have skipped quietly at our family worship. Sarah L. was the biggest girl in the class—in her sixteenth year, and quite grown up. She dexterously slipped past the bit of Bible history, taking the next verse, as if by accident.
“Go back and read your verse!” thundered the young theologue. “I will have no false modesty in my school.”
My cheeks flamed as redly with anger as Sarah’s had with maiden shame, as I followed suit with the next passage. I resented the coarse insult to a decent girl, and the manner thereof. I was faint with the pain of the wounded finger, and altogether so unnerved that my voice shook and fell below the pitch at which we were taught to read aloud.
Out barked the bulldog again over the top of the open Bible he held:
“What ails Miss High-and-Mighty to-day? In one of your tantrums, I see. Read that verse again, and loud enough to be heard by somebody besides your charming self!”
Where—will be asked by the twentieth-century reader—was parental affection all this while? How could a fearless gentleman like your father submit for an hour to the maltreatment of his young daughter and the daughters of friends who confided in his choice of a tutor?
My answer is direct. We never reported the worst of our wrongs to our parents. To “tell tales out of school” in that generation was an offence the enormity of which I cannot make the modern student comprehend. It was a flagrant misdemeanor, condemned by tradition, by parental admonition, and by a code of honor accepted by us all. I have known pupils to be expelled for daring to report at home the secrets of what was a prison-house for three-fourths of every working-day. And—strangest of all—their mates thenceforward shunned the tale-tellers as sinners against scholastic and social laws.
“If you get a flogging at school, you will get another at home!” was a stock threat that set the seal of silence upon the culprit’s lips. To carry home the tale of unjust punishment meted out to a school-fellow would be a gross breach of honorable usage.
The whole system smacked of inquisitorial methods, and gave the reactionary impetus to the pendulum in the matter of family discipline and school jurisdiction which helped on the coming of the Children’s Age in which we now live.
The despotism of that direful period, full of portents and pain, may have taught me fortitude. It awoke me to the possibilities of evil hitherto undreamed of in my sunny life. I have lain awake late into the night, again and again, smarting in the review of the day’s injuries, and dreading what the morrow might bring of malicious injustice and overt insult, and cudgelling my hot brain to devise some method of revenge upon my tormentor. Childish schemes, all of them, but the noxious seed was one with that which ripens into murder in the first degree.
One absurd device that haunted and tempted me for weeks was that I should steal into the tutor’s room some day, when he had gone to ride or walk, and strew chopped horsehair between the sheets. The one obstacle to the successful prosecution of the scheme was that we had no white horses. Ours were dark bay and “blooded chestnut.” No matter how finely I might chop the hairs, which would prick like pins and bite like fleas, the color would make them visible when the sheets were turned down.
It was a crime!—this initiation of a mere infant into the mysteries of the innate possibilities of evil in human nature. I had learned to hate with all my heart and soul. In all my childish quarrels I had never felt the temptation to lift my hand against a playmate. I understood now that I could smite this tyrant to the earth if I had the power and the opportunity. This lesson I can never forget, or forgive him who taught it to me. It was a new and a soiled page in the book of experience.
Despite the continual discouragement that attended the effort to keep my promise to study diligently, I worked hard in school, partly from love of learning, partly to please my parents—chiefly, it must be confessed, because I shrank, as from the cut of a cowhide, from the pitiless ridicule and abuse that followed upon the least lapse from absolute perfection in recitation.
Mathematics was never my strong point, and the tutor quickly detected this one of many weak joints in my armor. There was meaning in the grin with which he informed me one day, not long after Christmas, that he had set a test-sum for each of the second class in arithmetic.
“If you can do that sum without, any, help, from, anybody,” slowly, the grin widening at each comma, “you may go on with the next chapter in arithmetic. If not, you will be turned back to Simple Division. Of course, you will do yours, if nobody else can work out the answer!”
Sneer and taunt stung and burned, as he meant they should. I took the slate from his hand, and carried it to my desk before glancing at it. It was a horrible sum! I knew it would be, and I forthwith made up my mind not to try to do it. He might turn me back to Addition, for all I cared. The worm had turned and stiffened in stubborn protest.
At recess I discovered that not another girl of the six in our class had an imposition half so severe as my enemy had set for me. The effect was totally unlike what he had anticipated. My spirit leaped to arms. I would do that sum and keep up with my class—or die!
I bore the slate off to my room as soon as school was out that afternoon, and wrought mightily upon the task until the supper-bell rang. My work covered both sides of the slate, and after supper I waylaid my sister in the hall and begged her to look at what I had done. She was the crack arithmetician of the school, and I could trust her decision. She sat down upon the stairs—I standing, wretched and suspenseful, beside her—and went patiently over it all.
Then she said, gently and regretfully: “No, it is not right. I can’t, of course, tell you what is wrong, but you have made a mistake.”
With a hot lump in my throat I would not let break into tears, I rushed off up-stairs, rubbed out every figure of my making, and fell to work anew upon the original example. Except when I obeyed the summons to prayers, I appeared no more below that night. My sister found me bent over the slate when she came up to bed, and said not a word to distract my attention. By ten o’clock the room was so cold that I got an old Scotch plaid of my father’s from the closet, and wrapped myself in it. Still, my limbs were numb and my teeth chattered when, at one o’clock in the morning, I laid the slate by, in the joyous conviction that I had conquered in the fight. I had invented a proof-method of my own—truly ingenious in a child with no turn for mathematics—but this I did not suspect. I honestly believed, instead, that it was an inspiration from Him to whom I had been praying through all the hours of agonized endeavor. I thanked the Author before I slept.
When the class was called upon to show their sums next morning, it appeared, to my unspeakable amazement and rapture,
