“Guiding a squeaking pencil across a protesting slate.”
Among other things incident to that first year, too, had been Recess. At that time everybody was turned out into a brick-paved yard, the boys on one side of a high fence, the girls on the other. And here, waiting without the wooden shed where stood a row of buckets each holding a shiny tin dipper, Emmy Lou would stop on the sloppy outskirts for the thirst of the larger girls to be assuaged, that the little girls’ opportunity might come—together with the dregs in the buckets. And at Recess, too, along with the danger of being run into by the larger girls at play and having the breath knocked out of one’s little body, which made it necessary to seek sequestered corners and peep out thence, there was The Man to be watched for and avoided—the low, square, black-browed, black-bearded Man who brandished a broom at the little girls who dropped their apple-cores and crusts on the pavements, and who shook his fist at the jeering little boys who dared to swarm to the forbidden top and sit straddling the dividing fence. That Uncle Michael, the janitor, was getting old and had rheumatic twinges was indeed Uncle Michael’s excuse, but Emmy Lou did not know this, and her fear of Uncle Michael was great accordingly.
But somehow the Primer year wore away; and one day, toward its close, in the presence of Miss Clara, two solemn-looking gentlemen requested certain little boys to cipher and several little girls to spell, and sent others to the blackboard or the chart, while to Emmy Lou was handed a Primer, open at Page 17, which she was told to read. Knowing Page 17 by heart, and identifying it by its picture, Emmy Lou arose, and her small voice droned forth in sing-song fashion:
How old are you, Sue?
I am as old as my cat.
And how old is your cat?
My cat is as old as my dog.
And how old is your dog?
My dog is as old as I am.
Having so delivered herself, Emmy Lou sat down, not at all disconcerted to find that she had been holding her Primer upside down.
Following this, Emmy Lou was told that she had “passed;” and seeing from the jubilance of the other children that it was a matter to be joyful over, Emmy Lou went home and told the elders of her family that she had passed. And these elders, three aunties and an uncle, an uncle who was disposed to look at Emmy Lou’s chubby self and her concerns in jocular fashion, laughed: and Emmy Lou went on wondering what it was all about, which never would have been the case had there been a mother among the elders, for mothers have a way of understanding these things. But to Emmy Lou “mother” had come to mean but a memory which faded as it came, a vague consciousness of encircling arms, of a brooding, tender face, of yearning eyes; and it was only because they told her that Emmy Lou remembered how mother had gone away South, one winter, to get well. That they afterward told her it was Heaven, in no wise confused Emmy Lou, because, for aught she knew, South and Heaven and much else might be included in these points of the compass. Ever since then Emmy Lou had lived with the three aunties and the uncle; and papa had been coming a hundred miles once a month to see her.
When Emmy Lou went back to school for the second year, she was told that she was now in the First Reader. If her heart had jumped at the sharp accents of Miss Clara, it now grew still within her at the slow, awful enunciation of the Large Lady in black bombazine who reigned over the department of the First Reader, pointing her morals with a heavy forefinger, before which Emmy Lou’s eyes lowered with every aspect of conscious guilt. Nor did Emmy Lou dream that the Large Lady, whose black bombazine was the visible sign of a loss by death that had made it necessary for her to enter the school-room to earn a living, was finding the duties incident to the First Reader almost as strange and perplexing as Emmy Lou herself.
Emmy Lou from the first day found herself descending steadily to the foot of the class; and there she remained until the awful day, at the close of the first week, when the Large Lady, realizing perhaps that she could no longer ignore such adherence to that lowly position, made discovery that while to Emmy Lou “d-o-g” might spell “dog” and “f-r-o-g” might spell “frog,” Emmy Lou could not find either on a printed page, and, further, could not tell wherein they differed when found for her, that, also, Emmy Lou made her figure 8’s by adding one uncertain little o to the top of another uncertain little o; and that while Emmy Lou might copy, in smeary columns, certain cabalistic signs off the blackboard, she could not point them off in tens, hundreds, thousands, or read their numerical values, to save her little life. The Large Lady, sorely perplexed within herself as to the proper course to be pursued, in the sight of the fifty-nine other First-Readers pointed a condemning forefinger at the miserable little object standing in front of her platform: and said, “You will stay after school, Emma Louise, that I may examine further into your qualifications for this grade.”