adroit to hold a small boy’s attention, and a child’s ear closes out the words of a person who dislikes him. I felt not the slightest interest in my new studies; I made no effort to comprehend them or anything the new teacher said to us. I was agin the government, a rebel, and daily, almost hourly, recognized as such.
Schoolhouse Ishmael
It seems evident that being a praised pupil, a “teacher’s pet” sort of little boy, had been one of the compensations I’d given myself for my ineptness in sports and for social blows I’d received. Vanity dies hard. It’s a cat of more than nine lives: kill it in the front yard and you find it purring in the cellar. My cellar had been the schoolhouse; but Miss Jeffson had stopped the purring there, and the effect was a long disaster.
Probably it’s dangerously injurious to any human being to brush away, even temporarily, his last shreds of self-conceit—revolutions can rise from it—and the result upon me was an impairment of that still mysterious equipment sometimes called “the nervous system.”
I wasn’t aware of any impairment; I knew only that I felt dull and twitchy and itchy and that batting my eyes, moving the greater part of my nose rapidly in various directions, wobbling my head on its slender neck, and making uncouth sounds afforded brief relief. The trouble was that the more outrageously I did these things, the more extensively I seemed compelled to continue and develop them.
They annoyed Miss Jeffson excessively—she said I was deliberately making faces—and they worried my mother so much that she called in the family physician to look at me. I didn’t see why I was subjected to his scrutiny. Twitchiness had begun to seem to me my natural condition; but after I’d jerked my nose and clucked and glunked at the friendly doctor for a quarter of an hour he withdrew with my mother; and I, listening covertly, heard some murmurings about St. Vitus’s dance that sounded rather attractive.
On the contrary, the doctor prescribed a remedy—“one tablespoonful after each meal”—and when the first of these tablespoonfuls had been inserted, the next day, I could have cursed the hour that I was born, if I’d known how. The medicine was in a quart-sized bottle; poisonous-looking weeds were suspended in a brown liquid, and the ingenuity of a great brain seemed to have exhausted itself in its search for a flavor that should be, of all combinations possible in the universal laboratory, the utmost in repugnance to the human palate. The sense of taste is incomparably more vivacious in children than in adults; my mother, to encourage me by example, was able to swallow a soupçon of this medicine with only a slight leap of her shoulders, while with superb self-control she maintained the strained semblance of a smile upon her face. Three times a day arguments so passionate on my part took place that I wonder she didn’t wholly weary of me.
I had now the medicine at home in addition to ignominies in school and on the playground; so I clucked and glunked, twisted, scratched, jerked, and made more horrible faces than ever. I found that I could flutter my nostrils almost like a rabbit’s and could wiggle my ears so well that their motion could be seen at quite a distance. Miss Jeffson could see it, for instance, the whole length of the schoolroom, and she sometimes grew red rather than ask me again what I meant by it. My troubles approached a climax, and so did Miss Jeffson.
I can’t remember precisely what she said to me one day when, upon her own request, I gave her my honest opinion of a picture; but I know that she used hard words. In the reading class we’d just finished a celebrated poem by James T. Fields—one bit of which is still popularly extant:
“We are lost!” the captain shouted,
As he staggered down the stairs.
Artistic Heresy
Many will remember with pleasure that the captain’s little daughter was present and calmed everybody—and apparently the tempest also—by uttering a few admonitory words; but I didn’t like the poem or the captain or anybody. Under Miss Jeffson I’d become modern before my time, a skeptical analyst, and, above all, an antisentimentalist. The poem said: “Then we kissed the little maiden”; but I was against her; to me she was repellent. I even disliked the illustration in our reader—a woodcut that showed the little maiden taking the captain’s icy hand after he’d staggered down the stairs. It wasn’t a good woodcut. Miss Jeffson called upon me.
“Describe the picture of the captain’s little daughter in the reader.”
“She looks cross-eyed,” I said with dogged accuracy.
The shock to the class was profound. A multitudinously long-drawn whispered “Oh!” filled the room; and then Miss Jeffson summed up and told everybody, and me, the whole of what she really felt about me. I stood, with burning cheeks, rapidly vibrant features, ears working and all. I hated Miss Jeffson, the school, all the pupils, and the captain. Insanely, I hated the little maiden worst of all. Miss Jeffson’s speech about me accomplished nothing of good; I even failed to comprehend that art criticism at the wrong time or in the wrong place is never useful.
I think it was only a few days afterward when in return I gave Miss Jeffson a lesson especially gratifying to myself because it left her with no possible repartee. This was upon a morning when my medicine had agreed with my breakfast rather less than it usually did, and, more and more aware that something was very, very wrong inside me, I sat uneasily at my desk, looking at the two tight pigtails and neatly checked gingham back of the little girl in the seat before me. Sometimes the pigtails seemed to sway and the gingham checks to swirl displeasingly. I put up my hand, and Miss Jeffson frowned at it.
Retort Discourteous
“May I be excused?” I asked thickly.
“You may not.”
I sat for some moments; then put up my hand again. “I’m sick. May I go home?”
“No, you may not.”
“I’d better,” I said, more thickly. ‘I’m getting sicker.”
“That will do!”
Miss Jeffson spoke with such sternness that what had all along been inevitable took place immediately: the genuineness of my illness was proved to her and to everybody. When the convulsion was over I rose, walked up the aisle to the cloakroom door; but paused there—though I could have reached the cloakroom—and had another. All that remained was placed in evidence. Then, over the turned and interested heads of my colleagues, I wanly gave Miss Jeffson a look that said, “There! How about that? You believe it now, don’t you?”
Not a little pleased with myself, I floundered home and was put to bed.
It’s not easy to say just when children reach the age of class reticence; but it’s certain that sometimes the most sympathetic parents in the world can’t overcome a child’s withholdings. A small boy in particular usually wishes to avoid evoking an interfering sympathy and is embarrassed by tender condolences. I didn’t tell my parents about my troubles with Miss Jeffson. I didn’t myself understand that she was really what was the matter with me or, of course, that I was just a bit of machinery and she the wrong mechanic to operate it. I didn’t and couldn’t explain; and so my mother and my father and the doctor, after medicating me and achieving no results except anguish three times a day, were seriously puzzled. They came to one of the strangest conclusions I’ve ever known intelligent people to reach: they decided that I was studying too much, working too hard in school. I was sent to visit my grandmother.
On a shelf of the whatnot in Grandmother Booth’s front parlor, in Terre Haute, there was a dried brown plant from the South Seas. On the whatnot it looked a little like a wooden spider the size of a small tomato; but if you put it in a soup bowl
