The minister and his wife sat very prim and quiet. Mrs. McKenzie felt that her darling had fallen from his pedestal, while Captain McKenzie strode to the bay window and looked out with smiling eyes—secretly delighted—and proud to know that he had a son that was “all boy.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Two years at the Gregg Street Public School saw Donald in that exalted grade of learning known as the “Ex-sixth”—a sort of educational Valhalla which conferred a brevet rank upon one and caused the scholars of lesser degree to look up to its members with awe. The pupils of the Ex-sixth were supposed to have out-grown “the strap,” and their curriculum led them into the envied precincts of the school laboratory, where, at certain times, they could do all sorts of wonderful things with Bunsen burners, and test tubes, and hydrometers and such like. In this class a fellow could make gun-powder on the sly and color his knife or a white-metal watch and chain to look like gold by dipping it in copper sulphate.
Though Donald could boast of no prowess at the strenuous athletic games of football, running, jumping, etc., yet he developed remarkable ability as a swimmer. Swimming lessons were compulsory in the Gregg Street School and a fine swimming bath was attached to the institution, and the scholars had to take at least two lessons a week under the tutelage of a master of the natatory art. Young McKenzie took to the water like a duck, and his proficiency made him a favorite with the master and a contestant in inter-school matches, and during his year in the Ex-sixth he won the Glasgow Amateur Swimming Shield for schoolboys under 14 years of age.
His educational progress at the school had been marked by commendation and praise. He was an example to all, and on the “Prize Day” he invariably trotted home loaded with gift-books marked inside the cover, “Presented to Donald P. McKenzie for Excellence in Drawing,” or maybe it was for history, composition, geography, or some such subject in which he excelled. The constant repetition of McKenzie’s name on “Prize Day” caused less-favored youngsters to feel bored and to express their desire to give the clever one “a punch on th’ noase” for being so mentally efficient. This desideratum was expressed sotto voce and to intimates, as McKenzie’s fame as a fighter had been established since his encounter with Luggy Wilson, and who McKenzie couldn’t fight, his chum, Joak McGlashan could, so he was treated with considerable respect for a “toff that wuz clever at learnin’.”
Joak’s intellectual powers kept him to the Fifth Standard, and it was doubtful if he would go beyond that grade. He would never have retained his place in it were it not for Donald, who primed him and did his home work for him during the time the two were class-mates. Bos’n McGlashan used to regard with some wonder a prize book which his son had won for “General Excellence in Drawing” while with Donald in the Fifth Standard, and wonder still more when during Joak’s second year in the Fifth his drawing percentage was the lowest of any in the class. Joak explained this inexplicable loss of artistic ability by stating that he had sprained his thumb and couldn’t hold a pencil like during the prize-winning year, but to Donald he regretted the deception as one which gave him a lot of unnecessary work in trying to live up to it. The “sprained thumb” excuse came as a grateful relief.
Though separated by the gulf of learning, Donald and Joak fraternized as of yore, but Mrs. McKenzie absolutely refused to allow the McGlashan boy to come to the villa in Maxwell Park. Donald’s frequent lapses from the ethics of polite society in occasional interlardings of his conversation with “Glesca” vernacular, and in lengthy absences on Saturdays and holidays from the precincts of the villa, were laid to the baneful influence of Joak. Joak was blamed for Donald’s home-comings with dirt-bespattered clothing and grimy face. Joak was the leading spirit in those all-day pilgrimages “doon to the Docks,” and Joak was to be indicted for sending Donald home one day soaked to the skin after he had fallen off a raft which they had constructed to sail on the stagnant waters of a railway cut.
Saturday was a day of days with the boys. It was the day in which they toured the Port of Glasgow and conned its multifarious shipping; when they trudged from dock to dock, and basin to basin and appraised the model and rig of every craft that lay therein. “There’s a bonny boat fur ye noo, Donal’,” Joak would say as he eyed a liner with white-painted upper works and yarded masts. “She’s a big yin—an Injia boat, Ah’m thinkin’!” Donald would scan her with a sailorly eye. “She’s not an India boat, Joak. She’s in the North Atlantic trade. There’s no coolies aboard her. There’s always coolies on an India boat. Now, just look at that big sailing-ship beyond the bend. There’s a boat for ye! Let’s go down and maybe we can get aboard her.” Thus the pilgrims would go—dodging shunting engines and rumbling coal-trucks, cargo hoisting cranes and Dock Police—and the middle of the day would find them trudging up the odoriferous and noisy confines of M’Clure street, where at number thirty-seven, up three flights of stone stairs, Donald would find a welcome and a bite to eat from the big-hearted Mistress McGlashan. Of course, Mrs. McKenzie knew nothing of these social calls on her son’s part. If she did, Donald’s Saturday pilgrimaging would have been ruthlessly cut short.