The four hundred children in the Washington Street School were, therefore, a mass more homogeneous than alarmists would have us believe it possible to find in this country. They were, for all practical purposes, all American, and they were all roughly of one class. Their families were neither rich nor poor (at least so far as the children's standards went). Their fathers were grocers, small clerks, merchants, two or three were truck-farmers, plumbers, carpenters, accountants, employees of various big businesses in town.
It was into this undistinguished and plebeian mediocrity that the
Marshall children were introduced when they began going to school.
The interior of the school-building resembled the outside in being precisely like that of ten thousand other graded schools in this country. The halls were long and dark and dusty, and because the building had been put up under contract at a period when public contract-work was not so scrupulously honest as it notably is in our present cleanly muck-raked era, the steps of the badly built staircase creaked and groaned and sagged and gave forth clouds of dust under the weight of the myriads of little feet which climbed up and clown those steep ascents every day. Everything was of wood. The interior looked like the realized dream of a professional incendiary.
The classrooms were high and well-lighted, with many large windows, never either very clean or very dirty, which let in a flood of our uncompromisingly brilliant American daylight upon the rows of little seats and desks screwed, like those of an ocean liner, immovably to the floor, as though at any moment the building was likely to embark upon a cruise in stormy waters.
Outwardly the rows of clean-faced, comfortably dressed, well-shod American children, sitting in chairs, bore no resemblance to shaven-headed, barefooted little Arabian students, squatting on the floor, gabbling loud uncomprehended texts from the Koran; but the sight of Sylvia's companions bending over their school-books with glazed, vacant eyes, rocking back and forth as a rhythmical aid to memorizing, their lips moving silently as they repeated over and over, gabblingly, the phrases of the printed page, might have inclined a hypothetical visitor from Mars to share the bewildered amusement of the American visitors to Moslem schools. Sylvia rocked and twisted a favorite button, gabbled silently, and recited fluently with the rest, being what was known as an apt and satisfactory pupil. In company with the other children she thus learned to say, in answer to questions, that seven times seven is forty-nine; that the climate of Brazil is hot and moist; that the capital of Arkansas is Little Rock; and that "through" is spelled with three misleading and superfluous letters.
What she really learned was, as with her mates, another matter—for, of course, those devouringly active little minds did not spend six hours a day in school without learning something incessantly. The few rags and tatters of book-information they acquired were but the merest fringes on the great garment of learning acquired by these public-school children, which was to wrap them about all their lives. What they learned during those eight years of sitting still and not whispering had nothing to do with the books in their desks or the lore in their teachers' brains. The great impression stamped upon the wax of their minds, which became iron in after years, was democracy—a crude, distorted, wavering image of democracy, like every image an ideal in this imperfect world, but in its essence a reflection of the ideal of their country. No European could have conceived how literally it was true that the birth or wealth or social position of a child made no difference in the estimation of his mates. There were no exceptions to the custom of considering the individual on his own merits. These merits were often queerly enough imagined, a faculty for standing on his head redounding as much, or more, to a boy's credit as the utmost brilliance in recitation, or generosity of temperament, but at least he was valued for something he himself could do, and not for any fortuitous incidents of birth and fortune.
Furthermore there lay back of these four hundred children, who shaped their world to this rough-and-ready imitation of democracy, their families, not so intimately known to each other, of course, as the children themselves, but still by no means unknown in their general characteristics; four hundred American families who were, on the whole, industrious, law-abiding, who loved their children, who were quite tasteless in matters of art, and quite sound though narrow in matters of morals, utterly mediocre in intelligence and information, with no breadth of outlook in any direction; but who somehow lived their lives and faced and conquered all the incredible vicissitudes of that Great Adventure, with an unconscious, cheerful fortitude which many an acuter mind might have envied them.
It is possible that the personal knowledge of these four hundred enduring family lives was, perhaps, the most important mental ballast taken on by the children of the community during their eight years' cruise at school. Certainly it was the most important for the sensitive, complicated, impressionable little Sylvia Marshall, with her latent distaste for whatever lacked distinction and external grace, and her passion for sophistication and elegance, which was to spring into such fierce life with the beginning of her adolescence. She might renounce, as utterly as she pleased, the associates of her early youth, but the knowledge of their existence, the acquaintance with their deep humanity, the knowledge that they found life sweet and worth living, all this was to be a part of the tissue of her brain forever, and was to add one to the conflicting elements which battled within her for the mastery during all the clouded, stormy radiance of her youth.
The families which supplied the Washington Street School being quite stationary in their self-owned houses, few new pupils entered during the school-year. There was, consequently, quite a sensation on the day in the middle of March when the two Fingál girls entered, Camilla in the "Fifth A" grade, where Sylvia was, and Cécile in the third grade, in the next seat to Judith's. The girls themselves were so different from other children in school that their arrival would have excited interest even at the beginning of the school-year. Coming, as they did, at a time when everybody knew by heart every detail of every one else's appearance from hair-ribbon to shoes, these two beautiful exotics, in their rich, plain, mourning dresses were vastly stared at. Sylvia's impressionable eyes were especially struck by the air of race and breeding of the new-comer in her class. Everything about the other child, from her heavy black hair, patrician nose, and large dark eyes to her exquisitely formed hands, white and well-cared-for, seemed to Sylvia perfection itself.
During recess she advanced to the new-comer, saying, with a bright smile: "Aren't you thirsty? Don't you want me to show you where the pump is?" She put out her hand as she spoke and took the slim white fingers in her own rough little hand, leading her new schoolmate along in silence, looking at her with an open interest.