CHAPTER IX
THE END OF CHILDHOOD
That afternoon a couple of children who came to play in the Marshall orchard brought news that public opinion, after the fashion of that unstable weathercock, was veering rapidly, and blowing from a wholly unexpected quarter. "My papa says," reported Gretchen Schmidt, who never could keep anything to herself, even though it might be by no means to her advantage to proclaim it—"my papa says that he thinks the way American people treats colored peoples is just fierce; and he says if he'd ha' known about our not letting Camilla go to the picnic, he'd ha' taken the trouble to me 'mit der flachen Hand schlagen.' That means he'd have spanked me good and plenty."
Maria Perkins, from the limb where she hung by her knees, responded,
"Yup, my Uncle Eben says he likes Judy's spunk."
"I guess he wouldn't have, if it'd ha' been his pickles!" Gretchen made a last stand against the notorious injustice of fickle adult prejudices.
But the tide had begun to turn. On Monday morning Sylvia and Judith found themselves far from ostracized, rather the center of much respectful finger-pointing on the part of children from the other grades who had never paid the least attention to them before. And finally when the Principal, passing majestically from room to room in his daily tour of inspection, paused in his awful progress and spoke to Judith by name, asking her quite familiarly and condescendingly what cities you would pass through if you went from Chicago to New Orleans, the current set once and for all in the other direction. No mention was ever made of the disappearance of the Fingáls, and the Marshall children found their old places waiting for them.
It was not long before Judith had all but forgotten the episode; but Sylvia, older and infinitely more impressionable, found it burned irrevocably into her memory. For many and many a week, she did not fall asleep without seeing Camilla's ashy face of wretchedness. And it was years before she could walk past the house where the Fingáls had lived, without feeling sick.
Her life was, however, brimming with active interests which occupied her, mind and body. There was rarely a day when a troop of children did not swarm over the Marshall house and barn, playing and playing and playing with that indomitable zest in life which is the birthright of humanity before the fevers and chills of adolescence begin. Sylvia and Judith, moreover, were required to assume more and more of the responsibility of the housework, while their mother extracted from the Marshall five acres an ever increasing largesse of succulent food. Sylvia's séances with old Reinhardt and the piano were becoming serious affairs: for it was now tentatively decided that she was to earn her living by teaching music. There were many expeditions on foot with their mother, for Mrs. Marshall had become, little by little, chief nurse and adviser to all the families of the neighborhood; and on her errands of service one of her daughters was needed to carry supplies and act as assistant. And finally, as the children grew older, and the family tradition of bookishness took hold of them, there were shelves and shelves to be devoured, a strange mixture—Thackeray, Maeterlinck, Fielding, Hakluyt, Ibsen, Dickens, Ruskin, Shaw, Austen, Molière, Defoe, Cervantes, Shakespeare,—the children dipped, or tasted or swallowed whole, according to their temperaments and the books they happened on.
When Sylvia was thirteen, almost fourteen years old, she "graduated" from the eighth grade of the public schools and was ready to enter the High School. But after a good many family councils, in most of which, after the unreticent Marshall manner, she herself was allowed to be present, it was decided not to send her to the huge new Central High School, which had cost La Chance such a big slice of its taxes, but to prepare her at home for her course at the State University. She had been growing very fast, was a little thin and white, and had been outgrowing her strength. This at least was the reason given out to inquirers. In reality her father's prejudice against High School life for adolescents was the determining cause. In the course of his University work he was obliged to visit a good many High Schools, and had acquired a violent prejudice against the stirring social life characteristic of those institutions.
Sylvia's feelings about this step aside from the beaten track were, like many of Sylvia's feelings, decidedly mixed. She was drawn towards the High School by the suction of the customary. A large number of her classmates expected as a matter of course to pass on in the usual way; but, with an uneasy qualm, half pride and half apprehension, Sylvia was beginning to feel her difference from ordinary children. She was not altogether sorry to say good-bye to her playmates, with whom she no longer had much in common. She would miss the fun of class-life, of course; but there was a certain distinction involved in being educated "differently." She might be queer, but since she was apparently fated to be queer, she might as well not be "common" as well. Finally, because she was still, at fourteen, very much of a child, the scale was tipped by her thinking what fun it would be to go down-town on errands in school hours. Charles Lamb, lost in painful wonder at his own leisure after thirty-six years of incessant office-hours, could savor no more acutely than an American school-child the exquisite flavor of freedom at an hour formerly dedicated to imprisonment.