Chapter 12

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_ Chapter XII

The next spring Ellen went to school. When a child who has reigned in undisputed sovereignty at home is thrust among other children at school, one of two things happens: either she is scorned and rebelled against, and her little crown of superiority rolled in the dust of the common playground, or she extends the territories of her empire. Ellen extended hers, though involuntarily, for there was no conscious thirst for power in her.

On her first morning at school, she seated herself at her desk and looked forth from the golden cloud of her curls, her eyes full of innocent contemplation, her mouth corners gravely drooping. She knew one little girl who sat not far from her. The little girl's name was Floretta Vining. Floretta was built on the scale of a fairy, with tiny, fine, waxen features, a little tossing mane of flaxen hair, eyes a most lovely and perfect blue, with no more depth in them than in the blue of china, and an expression of the sweetest and most innocent inanity and irresponsibility. Nobody ever expected anything of this little Floretta Vining. She was always a negative success. She smiled around from the foot of her curving class, and never had her lessons, but she never disobeyed the rules, except that of punctuality.

Floretta was late at school. She came daintily up the aisle, two cheap bangles on one wrist slipping over a slim hand, and tinkling. Floretta's mother had a taste for the cheaply decorative. There was an abundance of coarse lace on Floretta's frock, and she wore a superfluous sash which was not too fresh. Floretta toed out excessively, her slender little feet pointing out sharply, almost at right angles with each other, and Ellen admired her for that. She watched her coming, planting each foot as carefully and precisely as a bird, her lace frills flouncing up and down, her bangles jingling, and thought how very pretty she was.

Ellen felt herself very loving towards the teacher and Floretta Vining. Floretta leaned forward as soon as she was seated and gazed at her with astonishment, and that deepening of amiability and general sweetness which one can imagine in the face of a doll after persistent scrutiny. Ellen smiled decorously, for she was not sure how much smiling was permissible in school. When she smiled guardedly at Floretta, she was conscious of another face regarding her, twisted slightly over a shabby little shoulder covered with an ignominious blue stuff, spotted and faded. This little girl's wisp of brown braid was tied with a shoe-string, and she looked poorer than any other child in the school, but she had an honest light in her eyes, and Ellen considered her to be rather more beautiful than Floretta.

She was Maria Atkins, Joseph Atkins's second child. Ellen sat with her book before her, and the strange, new atmosphere of the school-room stole over her senses. It was not altogether pleasant, although it was considered that the ventilation was after the most approved modern system. She perceived a strong odor of peppermints, and Floretta Vining was waving ostentatiously a coarse little pocket-handkerchief scented with New-mown Hay. There was also a strong effusion of stale dinners and storm-beaten woollen garments, but there was, after all, that savor of festivity which Ellen was apt to discover in the new. She looked over her book with utter content. In a line with her, on the boys' side, there appeared a covertly peeping face under a thatch of light hair, and Ellen, influenced insensibly by the boy's shyly worshipful eyes, looked and saw Granville Joy. She remembered the Christmas top, and blushed very pink without knowing why, and flirted all her curls towards the boys' side.

Ellen, from having so little acquaintance with boys, had had no very well-defined sentiments towards them, but now, on being set apart with her feminine element, and separated so definitely by the middle aisle of the school-room, she began to experience sensations both of shyness and exclusiveness. She did not think the boys, in their coarse clothes, with their cropped heads, half as pretty as the girls.

The teacher coming down the aisle laid a caressing hand on Ellen's curls, and the child looked up at her with that confidence which is exquisite flattery.

After she had passed, Ellen heard a subtle whisper somewhere at her back; it was half audible, but its meaning was entirely plain. It signified utmost scorn and satirical contempt. It was fine-pointed and far-reaching. A number looked around. It was as expressive as a whole sentence, and, being as concentrated, was fairly explosive with meaning.

"H'm, ain't you pretty? Ain't you dreadful pretty, little dolly-pinky-rosy. H'm, teacher's partial. Ain't you pretty? Ain't you stuck up? H'm."

Ellen, not being used to the school vernacular, did not fairly apprehend all this, and least of all that it was directed towards herself. She cast a startled look around, then turned to her book. She leaned back in her seat and held her book before her face with both hands, and began to read, spelling out the words noiselessly. All at once, she felt a fine prick on her head, and threw back one hand and turned quickly. The little girl behind was engrossed in study, and all Ellen could see was the parting in her thick black hair, for her head was supported by her two hands, her elbows were resting on her desk, and she was whispering the boundaries of the State of Massachusetts.

Ellen turned back to her reading-book, and recommenced studying with the painful faithfulness of the new student; then came again that small, fine, exasperating prick, and she thrust her face around quickly to see that same faithfully intent little girl.

Ellen rubbed her head doubtfully, and tried to fix her attention again upon her book, but presently it came again; a prick so small and fine that it strained consciousness; an infinitesimal point of torture, and this time Ellen, turning with a swift flirt of her head, caught the culprit. It was that faithful little girl, who held a black-headed belt-pin in her hand; she had been carefully separating one hair at a time from Ellen's golden curls, and tweaking it out.

Ellen looked at her with a singular expression compounded of bewilderment, of injury, of resentment, of alarm, and of a readiness to accept it all as a somewhat peculiar advance towards good-fellowship and a merry understanding. But the expression on that dark, somewhat grimy little face, looking out at her from a jungle of coarse, black locks, was fairly impish, almost malicious. There was not merriment in it so much as jibing; instead of that soft regard and worshipful admiration which Ellen was accustomed to find in new eyes, there was resentful envy.

Then Ellen shrank, and bristled with defiance at the same time, for she had the spirit of both the Brewsters and the Louds in her, in spite of her delicacy of organization. She was a fine instrument, capable of chords of tragedy as well as angelic strains. She saw that the little girl who was treating her so was dressed very poorly, that her dress was not only shabby, but actually dirty; that she, as well as the other girl whom she noticed, had her braid tied with an old shoe-string, and that a curious smell of leather pervaded her. Ellen continued to regard the little girl, then suddenly she felt a hand on her shoulder, and the teacher, Miss Rebecca Mitchell, was looking down at her. "What is the trouble?" asked Miss Mitchell. That look of half-wondering admiration to which Ellen was accustomed was in the teacher's eyes, and Ellen again thought her beautiful.

One of the first, though a scarcely acknowledged principle of beauty, is that of reflection of the fairness of the observer. Ellen being as innocently self-seeking for love and admiration as any young thing for its natural sustenance, was quick to recognize it, though she did not understand that what she saw was herself in the teacher's eyes, and not the teacher. She gazed up in that roseate face with the wide mouth set in an inverted bow of smile, curtained, as it were, with smoothly crinkled auburn hair clearly outlined against the cheeks, at the palpitating curve of shiny black-silk bosom, adorned with a festoon of heavy gold watch-chain, and thought that here was love, and beauty, and richness, and elegance, and great wisdom, calling for reverence but no fear. She answered not one word to the teacher's question, but continued to gaze at her with that look of wide-eyed and contemplative regard.

"What is the trouble, Ellen?" repeated Miss Mitchell. "Why were you looking around so?" Ellen said nothing. The little girl behind had her head bent over her book so low that the sulky curves of her mouth did not show. The teacher turned to her--"Abby Atkins," said she, "what were you doing?"

Abby Atkins did not raise her studious head. She did not seem to hear.

"Abby Atkins," said the teacher, sharply, "answer me. What were you doing?" Then the little girl answered, with a sulky note, half growl, half whimper, like some helpless but indomitable little trapped animal, "Nothin'."

"Ellen," said the teacher, and her voice changed indescribably. "What was she doing?" Ellen did not answer. She looked up in the teacher's face, then cast down her eyes and sat there, her little hands folded in tightly clinched fists in her lap, her mouth a pink line of resistance. "Ellen," repeated the teacher, and she tried to make her voice sharp, but in spite of herself it was caressing. Her heart had gone out to the child the moment she had seen her enter the school-room. She was as helpless before her as before a lover. She was wild to catch her up and caress her instead of pestering her with questions. "Ellen, you must answer me," she said, but Ellen sat still.

Half the scholars were on their feet, reaching and craning their necks. The teacher turned on them, and there was no lack of sharpness in her tone. "Sit down this moment, every one of you," she called. "Abby Atkins, if there is any more disturbance, I shall know what is at the root of the matter. If I see you turning around again, Ellen, I shall insist upon knowing why." Then the teacher placed a caressing hand upon Ellen's yellow head, and passed down the aisle to her desk.

Ellen had no more trouble during the session. Abby Atkins was commendably quiet and studious, and when called out to recitation made the best one in her class. She was really brilliant in a defiant, reluctant fashion. However, though she did not again disturb Ellen's curls, she glowered at her with furtive but unrelaxed hostility over her book. Especially a blue ribbon which confined Ellen's curls in a beautiful bow fired her eyes of animosity. She looked hard at it, then she pulled her black braid over her shoulder and felt of the hard shoe-string knot, and frowned with an ugly frown of envy and bitterest injury, and asked herself the world-wide and world-old question as to the why of inequality, and, though it was based on such trivialities as blue ribbons and shoe-strings, it was none the less vital to her mind. She would have loved, have gloried, to pull off that blue ribbon, put it on her own black braid, and tie up those yellow curls with her own shoe-string with a vicious yank of security. But all the time it was not so much because she wanted the ribbon as because she did not wish to be slighted in the distribution of things. Abby Atkins cared no more for personal ornament than a wild cat, but she wanted her just allotment of the booty of the world. So at recess she watched her chance. Ellen was surrounded by an admiring circle of big girls, gushing with affection. "Oh, you dear little thing," they said. "Only look at her beautiful curls. Give me a kiss, won't you, darling?" Little reverent fingers twined Ellen's golden curls, red apples were thrust forward for her to take bites, sticky morsels of candy were forced secretly into her hands. Abby Atkins stood aloof. "You mean little thing," one of the big girls said suddenly, catching hold of her thin shoulder and shaking her--"you mean little thing, I saw you."

"So did I," said another big girl, "and I was a good mind to tell on you."

"Yes, you had better look out, and not plague that dear little thing," said the other.

"You ought to be ashamed of yourself," chimed in still another big girl. "Only look how pretty she is, the little darling--the idea of your tormenting her. You deserve a good, hard whipping, Abby Atkins."

This big girl was herself a beauty and wore a fine and precise blue-ribbon bow, and Abby Atkins looked at her with a scowl of hatred.

"She's an ugly little thing," said the big girls among themselves as they went edging gently and imperceptibly away towards a knot of big boys, and then Abby Atkins's chance had come. She advanced with a spring upon Ellen Brewster, and she pulled that blue ribbon off her head so cruelly and fiercely that she pulled out some of the golden hairs with it and threw it on the ground, and stamped on it. Then she seized Ellen by the shoulders and proceeded to shake her for wearing a blue ribbon when she herself wore a shoe-string, but she reckoned without Ellen. One would as soon have expected to meet fight in a little child angel as in this Ellen Brewster, but she did not come of her ancestors for nothing.

Although she was so daintily built that she looked smaller, she was in reality larger than the other girl, and as she straightened herself in her wrath she seemed a head taller and proportionately broad. She tossed her yellow head, and her face took on an expression of noble courage and indignation, but she never said a word. She simply took Abby Atkins by the arms and lifted her off her feet and seated her on the ground. Then she picked up her blue ribbon, and walked off, and Abby scrambled to her feet and looked after her with a vanquished but untamed air. Nobody had seen what happened except Abby's younger sister Maria and Granville Joy. Granville pressed stealthily close to Ellen as she marched away and whispered, his face blazing, his voice full of confidence and congratulation, "Say, if she'd been a boy, I'd licked her for you, and you wouldn't hev had to tech her yourself;" and Maria walked up and eyes her prostrate but defiantly glaring sister--"I ain't sorry one mite, Abby Atkins," she declared--"so there."

"You go 'long," returned Abby, struggling to her feet, and shaking her small skirts energetically.

"Your dress is jest as wet as if you'd set down in a puddle, and you'll catch it when you get home," Maria said, pitilessly.

"I ain't afraid."

"What made you touch her, anyhow; she hadn't done nothin'?"

"If you want to wear shoe-strings when other folks wear ribbons, you can," said Abby Atkins. She walked away, switching, with unabated dignity in the midst of defeat, the draggled tail of her poor little dress. She had gone down like a cat; she was not in the least hurt except in her sense of justice; that was jarred to a still greater lack of equilibrium. She felt as if she had been floored by Providence in conjunction with a blue bow, and her very soul rose in futile rebellion. But, curiously enough, her personal ire against Ellen vanished.

At the afternoon recess she gave Ellen the sound half of an old red Baldwin apple which she had brought for luncheon, and watched her bite into it, which Ellen did readily, for she was not a child to cherish enmity, with an odd triumph. "The other half ain't fit to eat, it's all wormy," said Abby Atkins, flinging it away as she spoke.

"Then you ought to have kept this," Ellen cried out, holding towards her the half, minus one little bite. But Abby Atkins shook her head forcibly. "That was why I gave it to you," said she. "Say, didn't you never have to tie up your hair with a shoe-string?" Ellen shook her head, looking at her wonderingly. Then with a sudden impulse she tore off the blue ribbon from her curls. "Say, you take it," she said, "my mother won't care. I'd just as lief wear the shoe-string, honest."

"I don't want your blue ribbon," Abby returned, stoutly; "a shoe-string is a good deal better to tie the hair with. I don't want your blue ribbon; I don't want no blue ribbon unless it's mine."

"It would be yours if I give it to you," Ellen declared, with blue eyes of astonishment and consternation upon this very strange little girl.

"No, it wouldn't," maintained Abby Atkins.

But it ended in the two girls, with that wonderful and inexplicable adjustment of childhood into one groove after harsh grating on different levels, walking off together with arms around each other's waist, and after school began Ellen often felt a soft, cat-like pat on her head, and turned round with a loving glance at Abby Atkins.

Ellen talked more about Abby Atkins than any other of the children when she got home, and while her mother looked at it all easily, her grandmother was doubtful. "There's others that I should rather have Ellen thick with," said she. "I 'ain't nothin' against the Atkinses, but they can't have been as well brought up as some, they have had so little to do with, and their mother's been ailin' so long."

"Ellen may as well begin as she can hold out, and be intimate with them that will be intimate with her," Eva said, rather bitterly. Eva was married by this time, and living with Jim and his mother. She wore in those days an expression of bitterly defiant triumph and happiness, as of one who has wrested his sweet from fate under the ban of the law, and is determined to get the flavor of it though the skies fall. "I suppose I did wrong marrying Jim," she often told her sister, "but I can't help it."

"Maybe Jim will get work before long," her sister would say, consolingly.

"I have about given up," Eva would reply. "I guess Jim will have to roost on a flour-barrel at Munsey's store the rest of his days; but as long as he belongs to me, it don't make so much difference."

Eva had taken up an agency for a cosmetic which was manufactured by a woman in Rowe. She had one window of the north parlor in the Tenny cottage, which had been given up to her when she married Jim, filled with the little pink boxes containing the "Fairy Cream," and a great sign, but the trade languished. Both Eva and Jim had tried in vain to obtain employment in factories in other towns.

Lloyd's had not reopened, although it was April, and Andrew was drawing on his savings. Fanny had surreptitiously answered an advertisement purporting to give instructions to women as to the earning of large sums of money at home, and was engaged with a stock of glass and paints which she hurriedly swept out of sight when any one's shadow passed the window, and later she found herself to be the victim of a small swindling conspiracy, and lost the dollar which she had invested. But Ellen knew nothing of all this. She lacked none of her accustomed necessaries nor luxuries, and with her school a new life full of keen, new savors or relish began for her. There were also new affections in it.

Ellen was as yet too young, and too confident in love, to have new affections plunge her into anything but a delightful sort of anti-blossom tumult. There was no suspense, no doubt, no jealousy, only utter acquiescence of single-heartedness, admiration, and trust. She thought Abby Atkins and Floretta Vining lovely and dependable; she parted from them at night without a pang, and looked forward blissfully to the meeting next morning. She also had sentiments equally peaceful and pronounced, though instinctively more secret, towards Granville Joy. She used to glance over towards the boys' side and meet his side-long eyes without so much a quickening of her pulses as a quickening of her imagination.

"I know who your beau is," Floretta Vining, who was in advance of her years, said to her once, and Ellen looked at her with half-stupid wonder.

"His first name begins with a G and his last with a J," Floretta tittered, and Ellen continued to look at her with the faintest suspicion of a blush, because she had a feminine instinct that a blush was in order, not because she knew of any reason for it.

"He is," said Floretta, with another exceedingly foolish giggle. "My, you are as red as a beet."

"I ain't old enough to have a beau," Ellen said, her soft cheeks becoming redder, and her baby face all in a tremor.

"Yes, you be," Floretta said, with authority, "because you are so pretty, and have got such pretty curls. Ben Simonds said the other day you were the prettiest girl in school."

"Then do you think he is my beau, too?" asked Ellen, innocently. But Floretta frowned, and tittered, and hesitated.

"He said except one," she faltered out, finally.

"Well, who was that?" asked Ellen.

"How do I know?" pouted Floretta. "Mebbe it was me, though I don't think I'm so very pretty."

"Then Ben Simonds is your beau," said Ellen, reflectively.

"Yes, I guess he is," admitted Floretta.

That night, amid much wonder and tender ridicule, Ellen told her mother and Aunt Eva, and her father, that Ben Simonds was Floretta's beau, and Granville Joy was hers. But Andrew laughed doubtfully.

"I don't want that little thing to get such ideas into her head yet a while," he told Fanny afterwards, but she only laughed at him, seeing nothing but the childish play of the thing; but he, being a man, saw deeper.

However, Ellen's fondest new love was not for any of her little mates, but for her school-teacher. To her the child's heart went out in worship. All through the spring she offered her violets--violets gathered laboriously after school in the meadow back of her grandmother's house. She used to skip from hillock to hillock of marsh grass with wary steps, lest she might slip and wet her feet in the meadow ooze and incur her mother's displeasure, for Fanny, in spite of her worship of the child, could speak with no uncertain voice. She pulled up handfuls of the flowers, gleaming blue in the dark-green hollows. Later she carried roses from the choice bush in the yard, and, later, pears from her grandmother's tree. She used to watch for Miss Mitchell at her gate and run to meet her, and seize her hand and walk at her side, blushing with delight. Miss Mitchell lived not far from Ellen, in a tidy white house with a handsome smoke-tree on one side of the front walk and a willow with upside-down branches on the other. Miss Mitchell had been born and brought up in this house, but she had been teaching school in a distant town ever since Ellen's day, so they had never been acquainted before she went to school. Miss Mitchell lived alone with her mother, who was an old friend of Mrs. Zelotes. Ellen privately thought her rather better-looking than her own grandmother, though her admiration was based upon wholly sentimental reasons. Old Mrs. Mitchell might have earned more money in a museum of freaks than her daughter in a district school. She was a mountain of rotundity, a conjunction of palpitating spheres, but the soul that dwelt in this painfully ponderous body was as mellow with affection and kindliness as a ripe pear, and the voice that proceeded from her ever-smiling lips was a hoarse and dove-like coo of love. Ellen at first started a little aghast at this gigantic fleshliness, this general slough and slump of outline, this insistency of repellent curves, and then the old woman spoke and thrust out a great, soft hand, and the heart of the child overleaped her artistic sense and her reason, and she thought old Mrs. Mitchell beautiful. Mrs. Mitchell never failed to regale her with a superior sort of cooky, and often with a covert peppermint, and that although the Mitchells were not well off. The old place was mortgaged, and Miss Mitchell had hard work to pay the interest. Ellen had the vaguest ideas about the mortgage, and was half inclined to think it might be a disfiguring patch in the plastering of the sitting-room, which hung down in an unsightly fashion with a disclosure of hairy edges, and threatened danger to the heads underneath.

Often of a Saturday afternoon Ellen went to visit Miss Mitchell and her mother, and really preferred them to friends of her own age. Miss Mitchell had a store of superannuated paper dolls which dated from her own childhood. Their quaint costumes, and old-fashioned coiffures, and simpers were of overwhelming interest to Ellen. Even at that early age she had a perception of the advantages of an atmosphere to art, and even to the affections. Without understanding it, she loved those obsolete paper-dolls and those women of former generations better because they gave her breathing-scope for her imagination. She could love Abby Atkins and Floretta Vining at one bite, as it were, and that was the end of it, but she could sit and ponder and dream over Miss Mitchell and her mother, and see whole vistas of them in receding mirrors of affection.

As for the teacher and her mother, they simply adored the child--as indeed everybody did. She continued at her first school for a year, which was one of the hardest financially ever experienced in Rowe. Norman Lloyd during all that time did not reopen his factory, and in the autumn two others shut down. The streets were full of the discontented ranks of impotent labor, and all the public buildings were props for the weary shoulders of the unemployed. On pleasant days the sunny sides of the vacant factories, especially, furnished settings for lines of scowling faces of misery.

This atmosphere affected Ellen more than any one realized, since the personal bearing of it was kept from her. She did not know that her father was drawing upon his precious savings for daily needs, she did not know how her aunt Eva and her uncle Jim were getting into greater difficulties every day, but she was too sensitive not to be aware of disturbances which were not in direct contact with herself. She never forgot what she had overheard that night Lloyd's had shut down; it was always like a blot upon the face of her happy consciousness of life. She often overheard, as then, those loud, dissenting voices of her father and his friends in the sitting-room, after she had gone to bed; and then, too, Abby Atkins, who was not spared any knowledge of hardship, told her a good deal. "It's awful the way them rich folks treat us," said Abby Atkins. "They own the shops and everything, and take all the money, and let our folks do all the work. It's awful. But then," continued Abby Atkins, comfortingly, "your father has got money saved in the bank, and he owns his house, so you can get along if he don't have work. My father 'ain't got any, and he's got the old-fashioned consumption, and he coughs, and it takes money for his medicine. Then mother's sick a good deal too, and has to have medicine. We have to have more medicine than most anything else, and we hardly ever have any pie or cake, and it's all the fault of them rich folks." Abby Atkins wound up with a tragic climax and a fierce roll of her black eyes.

That evening Ellen went in to see her grandmother, and was presented with some cookies, which she did not eat.

"Why don't you eat them?" Mrs. Zelotes asked.

"Can I have them to do just what I want to with?" asked Ellen.

"What on earth do you want to do with a cooky except eat it?" Ellen blushed; she had a shamed-faced feeling before a contemplated generosity.

"What do you want to do with them except eat them?" her grandmother asked, severely.

"Abby Atkins don't have any cookies 'cause her father's out of work," said Ellen, abashedly.

"Did that Atkins girl ask you to bring her cookies?"

"No, ma'am."

"You can do jest what you are a mind to with 'em," Mrs. Zelotes said, abruptly.

Ellen never knew why her grandmother insisted upon her drinking a little glass of very nice and very spicy cordial before she went home, but the truth was, that Mrs. Zelotes thought the child so angelic in this disposition to give up the cookies which she loved to her little friend that she was straightway alarmed and thought her too good to live.

The next day she told Fanny, and said to her, with her old face stern with anxiety, that the child was lookin' real pindlin', and Ellen had to take bitters for a month afterwards because she gave the cookies to Abby Atkins. _

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