CHAPTER XI
BOBBY'S MEANEST DAY
Four boys and four girls rang the Blossom door-bell that night after supper, eager to take part in the stuffed animal play. With the four little Blossoms, that made twelve children, a most convenient number, Aunt Polly said.
"I'll show you what we're going to do," she promised them, beckoning to Twaddles and Dot to follow her. "Since the twins will have to go to bed in half an hour, we'll let them be the first demonstrators."
Aunt Polly and the twins went out of the room, and in three minutes there pranced back the cunningest little bear you ever saw. He wobbled about on his four legs, opened a red flannel mouth and yawned, shook hands with the delighted boys and girls and behaved altogether as a well-brought-up bear should.
"Let me do it!" shouted the other boys and girls. "Let me! Let me!"
The bear was unbuttoned down his back by smiling Aunt Polly, and the flushed and triumphant twins stepped out.
"Didn't we do it right?" they demanded happily. "Isn't it fun? But you can't be a bear—Aunt Polly said so. There's only one of everything."
Then Aunt Polly, who had cut out and stitched the white muslin case for the bear and painted his nose and lined his red flannel mouth, explained that for every two children there could be an animal. The play would be an animal play. They would act and talk as people would, only the actors would be lions and tigers and other animals.
"Choose what you would like to be to-night, and I will measure you and start work on the cases," she said. "And if you do not tell outsiders what kind of an animal you are going to be, that will double the fun."
So the other children, long after the twins had gone reluctantly up to bed, paired off and argued about their choice of an animal and changed their minds and finally decided. Then they were measured by Aunt Polly, and it was announced that three rehearsals a week would be held till the Saturday set for the fair. Mother Blossom brought in a plate of cookies and a basket of apples, and after these were eaten it was time to go home.
With all the preparations for the play and fair, school went on as usual. The children sometimes thought that it might be interrupted for a week or two without loss to any one, but the school committee never took kindly to this idea. They were sure that nothing in the wide world could be of more importance than regular attendance at school.
"I know enough now," grumbled Bobby one morning, scowling at his oatmeal.
"We could stay at home and play with the animal bags," said Meg, who never tired of trying on the muslin cases that so quickly transformed them into different animals. "It's really snowing ever so hard, Mother."
"Not half as hard as it often has when you have plowed cheerfully through it," Mother Blossom reminded her. "Come, Bobby, finish your oatmeal. Norah has your lunches packed."
Dot and Twaddles stared at the two older children in astonishment. They wanted to go to school with all their hearts, and the idea that any one could tire of that magical place, where chalk and blackboards and goldfish and geography globes mingled in riotous profusion, had never entered their busy minds.
"It's an awful long walk," mourned Bobby.
"I'll take you in the car," said Father Blossom quickly. "Hurry now, and get your things on. I think there's been too much staying up till nine o'clock lately, Mother."
"I think so, too," agreed Mother Blossom. "We'll go back to eight o'clock bedtime beginning with to-night. What is it, Dot?"
"Can we go, too?" urged Dot. "Sam will bring us back."
"Oh, for goodness' sake!" frowned Bobby, pulling on his rubber boots and stamping in them to make sure they were well on. "Why do you always want to tag along every place we go?"
Dot looked hurt, and Bobby was really ashamed of himself. He wasn't cross very often, but nothing seemed to go right this morning. No one said anything, but Mother Blossom sent the twins out into the kitchen on some errand, and then the car came around and Meg and Bobby and Father Blossom tramped through the snow and climbed in under the snug curtains. Bobby would have felt better if some one had scolded him.
"Guess we're going to have enough snow this winter to make up for last," remarked Sam Layton cheerfully. He was not cross, and he was blissfully unconscious that any one else had been. "Fill-Up and me is getting kind of tired of clearing off walks every single morning," he went on, giving the dog his nickname.
Philip, who sat beside Sam on the front seat, wagged his tail conversationally.
"Maybe we'll have another snow fight," suggested Meg. "That would be fun, wouldn't it, Bobby?"
"No, it wouldn't," snapped Bobby ungraciously. For the life of him, he did not seem able to feel pleasant.
Meg talked to Father Blossom and Sam after that, and in a few moments they were set down at the school, and the car rolled on to the foundry office.
Bobby had bad luck—bad luck or something else—all the morning. He blotted his copy book; he had the wrong answer to the example he was sent to work out at the board; at recess he was so cross to Palmer Davis that that devoted friend slapped him and they had a tussle that ended in both being forced to spend the remainder of the play time sitting quietly at two front desks under Miss Mason's eye. Altogether Bobby seemed to be in for a bad day.
"Everybody's so mean," he scolded, going off in a corner by himself to eat his lunch at noon. "I never saw such a lot of horrid folks."
To add to his unhappiness, Norah had forgotten that he didn't like tuna fish sandwiches and had given him all that kind. Bobby knew that very likely she had packed egg or some other good mixture in Meg's box and that by merely asking he could trade with his sister. But no, it suited him to feel that Norah had deliberately spoiled his lunch for him.
"Robert, you haven't been out of the room this morning," cried Miss Mason, swooping down on him. "Go out and get some fresh air and see if you can't be pleasanter this afternoon. What you need is to play in the snow."
Bobby dashed downstairs and out into the yard, wishing violently that he could punch some one. He even rolled several snowballs in the hope that some of his friends would come along and offer themselves as targets. Then a mischievous idea popped into his mind.
"I'll fill up Miss Mason's desk," he chuckled. "She needs to play in the snow, too."
This very bad boy proceeded to fill his arms with snowballs and stole up the back stairway, where he would be less likely to meet any one, into his classroom. The room was empty, and Bobby arranged his snowballs neatly in Miss Mason's desk, which happened to be an old-fashioned affair with a hinged lid.
"She can play with it," murmured Bobby, closing the lid softly and running downstairs again so that he might come in with the others when the bell rang.
It had stopped snowing, and the sun was shining warm and bright, dazzling to the eyes. Bobby felt better already, for some mysterious reason, and he plunged into a hilarious game of tag that lasted until the signal rang.
When he went into his classroom he glanced quickly at Miss Mason's desk. It looked as usual, and when the reading lesson was given out, he quickly forgot the hidden snowballs. Palmer Davis was standing up to read a paragraph when the class first heard something.
"Drip! drip! drip!" went a soft little tapping noise.
Miss Mason heard it, too. She thought the pipes in the cloak room had sprung a leak perhaps.
"Teacher!" Tim Roon's hand waved wildly. "Teacher, your desk's leaking!"
Tim, for once, did not have a guilty conscience in connection with a piece of mischief, and he was delighted to have an opportunity to call attention to the fact.
"It's leaking all over!" he volunteered.
"That will do, Tim," said Miss Mason calmly.
She raised her desk lid and peered in. Then she closed it and surveyed her class. Bobby could feel his face getting red. He looked down at his book.
"Robert Blossom," said Miss Mason, "come here to me."
Bobby went up the aisle which seemed at least two miles long. Miss Mason did not ask him if he had put the snow in her desk. She merely raised the lid again and pointed to the half melted snowballs.
"Take those out," she commanded coldly. "Throw them out of the window.
Then get a cloth and dry the inside of this desk and mop up the floor.
And you may stay an hour after school to-night."
Bobby had to make a separate trip for each mushy snowball, the eyes of the class following him from the desk to the window and back again with maddening interest. When he came back from a trip to the cellar to get a cloth from the janitor, for Miss Mason refused to help him, and began to dry the inside of the desk, they snickered audibly; but when he got down on his hands and knees and mopped the floor under the desk, they seemed to think it was the biggest kind of joke. They did not dare laugh aloud, but Bobby could feel them smiling and nudging one another.
"Next time, I hope, you will leave the snow outside where it belongs," said Miss Mason, when he had stayed his hour after school that night and she dismissed him.
"Yes'm," murmured Bobby meekly.
"My, it's been the worst day," he confided to Father Blossom that evening. "Nothing went right. I had the meanest time!"