CHAPTER XXV
THE LIFTING VEIL
Jean, and Alison Evans, and Mary Stuart found the tubby youngsters, and especially the little round, brown babies, irresistibly attractive. Such merry, mischievous little imps the former, and each newcomer such a wonder of soft, sleek, dimpled, black-velvet-eyed brownness, that their hearts went out to them, and the mothers laughed at their doting absorption and cackled strenuously and meaningly among themselves. And Aunt Jannet, never having had any children of her own, knew more about the rights and wrongs of their upbringing than any single mother ever knew in this world before, and had to be restrained by main force at times from putting some of her more strenuous theories into practice. But the good-natured brown women came to understand even Aunt Jannet's peculiarities in time, and to accept her efforts, so far as they accorded with their own ideas, with something like appreciation.
For educative purposes the children were, up to a certain age, left entirely to the care of the ladies, and it would have been hard to say whether pupils or teachers enjoyed most the time spent in nominal study in the wide, open schoolroom, or the still merrier jinks on the beach and river bank.
If Jean Blair's quondam friends in London could have seen her at play with her naked brown boys and girls on Kapaa'a front—well, in the first place they would not have known her, and when they did they would have renounced her acquaintance at once.
For the purpose of opening their little minds to better things than their fathers and mothers had known, she brought herself down to their level, became almost one of themselves, romped and played and danced with them, in the water and out of it, and captured all their hearts. And she enjoyed this partial and temporary reversion to nature as she had never enjoyed life before. The children learned many things without knowing that they were being taught, and Jean herself learned not a little also.
Aunt Jannet looked on with surprise, and spasms of doubt at times—it was all so different from her ideas of missionary work. But she had much to occupy her in connection with the other women, and as regards things generally she held an open mind, with a reserve of gentle sarcasm in case these extremely odd ways should turn out worse than she knew her own more precise methods would have done.
The men took the older boys in hand and employed ways quite as unconventional and with equally happy results, and the girls of size were well left to the care of Alison Evans and Mary Stuart, whose special training had fitted them excellently for the work.
In addition to the extraordinary curriculum of their school, the men were working hard at the new foundations of life in Kapaa'a.