“Help?” croaked Bea. “I don’t want help. I just want you to do the whole biz for me. I can’t even punctuate in French. And see here, Bessie Four-eyes,” she reached forward with her foot and drew that lady nearer, “if anybody ‘spills’ this to Bong-joor—anybody, mind; I’m not sayin’ who—they’ll have their backbones taken out very carefully and dusted off—bone by bone.”
The good arm never left Gorgas. It protected her and warmed her and temporarily drove off the chill of the school-house.
X
HONORIFICABILITUDINITATIBUS
BUT even the impetuous friendliness of Bea Wilcox could not quite dispel the chill of the school-house. Until some arrangements could be made for afternoon hours at the Applied Arts School Gorgas was to spend her whole day at the Warren School. They were hours of dreary inactivity, enforced silence, enforced immobility; and “lessons” that appealed to no normal healthy instinct.
In two weeks Gorgas rebelled. Every night she had memorized dutifully the odds and ends of unprofitable facts that had been detailed for home study. But they would not stay fixed in her mind. She knew the exact height in feet of Mt. Etna, the list of the counties of her native State with the name of the chief city, innumerable pages of a stupid political history of the United States, lists of births and deaths, and the population of a score of cities. Bessie and her tribe, weaklings physically, shone in the class-room. They “knew” everything. They were eager to display and greedy for book-facts; but they never questioned the usefulness of anything.
“The population of New York city, Miss Levering, please?” Miss Lewis, the geography teacher, was quizzing.
“May I ask, Miss Lewis,” Gorgas plucked up courage to inquire, “why anyone should have to know that?”
“Please do not be impertinent, Miss Levering.”
Miss Lewis was not a good disciplinarian and she knew it. A native graciousness and meekness prevented her from succeeding in quelling pupils; but she struggled hard to dominate.
“Oh, I don’t mean to be impertinent,” Gorgas went on eagerly. “But population is always changing. Our book tells us the number of people who lived in New York, but only for 1880. Why, that was eight years ago! With millions of immigrants and—uh—births, you know, it must be much bigger now. When you were a school girl you had to memorize populations, but, you see, they’re of no use now. We’ll have to do it all over again after the census of 1890; won’t we?”