The Portion of Labor Part 16

"What is the trouble, Ellen?" repeated Miss Mitch.e.l.l. "Why were you looking around so?" Ellen said nothing. The little girl behind had her head bent over her book so low that the sulky curves of her mouth did not show. The teacher turned to her--"Abby Atkins," said she, "what were you doing?"

Abby Atkins did not raise her studious head. She did not seem to hear.

"Abby Atkins," said the teacher, sharply, "answer me. What were you doing?" Then the little girl answered, with a sulky note, half growl, half whimper, like some helpless but indomitable little trapped animal, "Nothin'."

"Ellen," said the teacher, and her voice changed indescribably.

"What was she doing?" Ellen did not answer. She looked up in the teacher's face, then cast down her eyes and sat there, her little hands folded in tightly clinched fists in her lap, her mouth a pink line of resistance. "Ellen," repeated the teacher, and she tried to make her voice sharp, but in spite of herself it was caressing. Her heart had gone out to the child the moment she had seen her enter the school-room. She was as helpless before her as before a lover.

She was wild to catch her up and caress her instead of pestering her with questions. "Ellen, you must answer me," she said, but Ellen sat still.

Half the scholars were on their feet, reaching and craning their necks. The teacher turned on them, and there was no lack of sharpness in her tone. "Sit down this moment, every one of you," she called. "Abby Atkins, if there is any more disturbance, I shall know what is at the root of the matter. If I see you turning around again, Ellen, I shall insist upon knowing why." Then the teacher placed a caressing hand upon Ellen's yellow head, and pa.s.sed down the aisle to her desk.

Ellen had no more trouble during the session. Abby Atkins was commendably quiet and studious, and when called out to recitation made the best one in her cla.s.s. She was really brilliant in a defiant, reluctant fas.h.i.+on. However, though she did not again disturb Ellen's curls, she glowered at her with furtive but unrelaxed hostility over her book. Especially a blue ribbon which confined Ellen's curls in a beautiful bow fired her eyes of animosity. She looked hard at it, then she pulled her black braid over her shoulder and felt of the hard shoe-string knot, and frowned with an ugly frown of envy and bitterest injury, and asked herself the world-wide and world-old question as to the why of inequality, and, though it was based on such trivialities as blue ribbons and shoe-strings, it was none the less vital to her mind. She would have loved, have gloried, to pull off that blue ribbon, put it on her own black braid, and tie up those yellow curls with her own shoe-string with a vicious yank of security. But all the time it was not so much because she wanted the ribbon as because she did not wish to be slighted in the distribution of things. Abby Atkins cared no more for personal ornament than a wild cat, but she wanted her just allotment of the booty of the world. So at recess she watched her chance. Ellen was surrounded by an admiring circle of big girls, gus.h.i.+ng with affection. "Oh, you dear little thing," they said.

"Only look at her beautiful curls. Give me a kiss, won't you, darling?" Little reverent fingers twined Ellen's golden curls, red apples were thrust forward for her to take bites, sticky morsels of candy were forced secretly into her hands. Abby Atkins stood aloof.

"You mean little thing," one of the big girls said suddenly, catching hold of her thin shoulder and shaking her--"you mean little thing, I saw you."

"So did I," said another big girl, "and I was a good mind to tell on you."

"Yes, you had better look out, and not plague that dear little thing," said the other.

"You ought to be ashamed of yourself," chimed in still another big girl. "Only look how pretty she is, the little darling--the idea of your tormenting her. You deserve a good, hard whipping, Abby Atkins."

This big girl was herself a beauty and wore a fine and precise blue-ribbon bow, and Abby Atkins looked at her with a scowl of hatred.

"She's an ugly little thing," said the big girls among themselves as they went edging gently and imperceptibly away towards a knot of big boys, and then Abby Atkins's chance had come. She advanced with a spring upon Ellen Brewster, and she pulled that blue ribbon off her head so cruelly and fiercely that she pulled out some of the golden hairs with it and threw it on the ground, and stamped on it. Then she seized Ellen by the shoulders and proceeded to shake her for wearing a blue ribbon when she herself wore a shoe-string, but she reckoned without Ellen. One would as soon have expected to meet fight in a little child angel as in this Ellen Brewster, but she did not come of her ancestors for nothing.

Although she was so daintily built that she looked smaller, she was in reality larger than the other girl, and as she straightened herself in her wrath she seemed a head taller and proportionately broad. She tossed her yellow head, and her face took on an expression of n.o.ble courage and indignation, but she never said a word. She simply took Abby Atkins by the arms and lifted her off her feet and seated her on the ground. Then she picked up her blue ribbon, and walked off, and Abby scrambled to her feet and looked after her with a vanquished but untamed air. n.o.body had seen what happened except Abby's younger sister Maria and Granville Joy.

Granville pressed stealthily close to Ellen as she marched away and whispered, his face blazing, his voice full of confidence and congratulation, "Say, if she'd been a boy, I'd licked her for you, and you wouldn't hev had to tech her yourself;" and Maria walked up and eyes her prostrate but defiantly glaring sister--"I ain't sorry one mite, Abby Atkins," she declared--"so there."

"You go 'long," returned Abby, struggling to her feet, and shaking her small skirts energetically.

"Your dress is jest as wet as if you'd set down in a puddle, and you'll catch it when you get home," Maria said, pitilessly.

"I ain't afraid."

"What made you touch her, anyhow; she hadn't done nothin'?"

"If you want to wear shoe-strings when other folks wear ribbons, you can," said Abby Atkins. She walked away, switching, with unabated dignity in the midst of defeat, the draggled tail of her poor little dress. She had gone down like a cat; she was not in the least hurt except in her sense of justice; that was jarred to a still greater lack of equilibrium. She felt as if she had been floored by Providence in conjunction with a blue bow, and her very soul rose in futile rebellion. But, curiously enough, her personal ire against Ellen vanished.

At the afternoon recess she gave Ellen the sound half of an old red Baldwin apple which she had brought for luncheon, and watched her bite into it, which Ellen did readily, for she was not a child to cherish enmity, with an odd triumph. "The other half ain't fit to eat, it's all wormy," said Abby Atkins, flinging it away as she spoke.

"Then you ought to have kept this," Ellen cried out, holding towards her the half, minus one little bite. But Abby Atkins shook her head forcibly. "That was why I gave it to you," said she. "Say, didn't you never have to tie up your hair with a shoe-string?" Ellen shook her head, looking at her wonderingly. Then with a sudden impulse she tore off the blue ribbon from her curls. "Say, you take it," she said, "my mother won't care. I'd just as lief wear the shoe-string, honest."

"I don't want your blue ribbon," Abby returned, stoutly; "a shoe-string is a good deal better to tie the hair with. I don't want your blue ribbon; I don't want no blue ribbon unless it's mine."

"It would be yours if I give it to you," Ellen declared, with blue eyes of astonishment and consternation upon this very strange little girl.

"No, it wouldn't," maintained Abby Atkins.

But it ended in the two girls, with that wonderful and inexplicable adjustment of childhood into one groove after harsh grating on different levels, walking off together with arms around each other's waist, and after school began Ellen often felt a soft, cat-like pat on her head, and turned round with a loving glance at Abby Atkins.

Ellen talked more about Abby Atkins than any other of the children when she got home, and while her mother looked at it all easily, her grandmother was doubtful. "There's others that I should rather have Ellen thick with," said she. "I 'ain't nothin' against the Atkinses, but they can't have been as well brought up as some, they have had so little to do with, and their mother's been ailin' so long."

"Ellen may as well begin as she can hold out, and be intimate with them that will be intimate with her," Eva said, rather bitterly. Eva was married by this time, and living with Jim and his mother. She wore in those days an expression of bitterly defiant triumph and happiness, as of one who has wrested his sweet from fate under the ban of the law, and is determined to get the flavor of it though the skies fall. "I suppose I did wrong marrying Jim," she often told her sister, "but I can't help it."

"Maybe Jim will get work before long," her sister would say, consolingly.

"I have about given up," Eva would reply. "I guess Jim will have to roost on a flour-barrel at Munsey's store the rest of his days; but as long as he belongs to me, it don't make so much difference."

Eva had taken up an agency for a cosmetic which was manufactured by a woman in Rowe. She had one window of the north parlor in the Tenny cottage, which had been given up to her when she married Jim, filled with the little pink boxes containing the "Fairy Cream," and a great sign, but the trade languished. Both Eva and Jim had tried in vain to obtain employment in factories in other towns.

Lloyd's had not reopened, although it was April, and Andrew was drawing on his savings. f.a.n.n.y had surrept.i.tiously answered an advertis.e.m.e.nt purporting to give instructions to women as to the earning of large sums of money at home, and was engaged with a stock of gla.s.s and paints which she hurriedly swept out of sight when any one's shadow pa.s.sed the window, and later she found herself to be the victim of a small swindling conspiracy, and lost the dollar which she had invested. But Ellen knew nothing of all this. She lacked none of her accustomed necessaries nor luxuries, and with her school a new life full of keen, new savors or relish began for her.

There were also new affections in it.

Ellen was as yet too young, and too confident in love, to have new affections plunge her into anything but a delightful sort of anti-blossom tumult. There was no suspense, no doubt, no jealousy, only utter acquiescence of single-heartedness, admiration, and trust. She thought Abby Atkins and Floretta Vining lovely and dependable; she parted from them at night without a pang, and looked forward blissfully to the meeting next morning. She also had sentiments equally peaceful and p.r.o.nounced, though instinctively more secret, towards Granville Joy. She used to glance over towards the boys' side and meet his side-long eyes without so much a quickening of her pulses as a quickening of her imagination.

"I know who your beau is," Floretta Vining, who was in advance of her years, said to her once, and Ellen looked at her with half-stupid wonder.

"His first name begins with a G and his last with a J," Floretta t.i.ttered, and Ellen continued to look at her with the faintest suspicion of a blush, because she had a feminine instinct that a blush was in order, not because she knew of any reason for it.

"He is," said Floretta, with another exceedingly foolish giggle.

"My, you are as red as a beet."

"I ain't old enough to have a beau," Ellen said, her soft cheeks becoming redder, and her baby face all in a tremor.

"Yes, you be," Floretta said, with authority, "because you are so pretty, and have got such pretty curls. Ben Simonds said the other day you were the prettiest girl in school."

"Then do you think he is my beau, too?" asked Ellen, innocently. But Floretta frowned, and t.i.ttered, and hesitated.

"He said except one," she faltered out, finally.

"Well, who was that?" asked Ellen.

"How do I know?" pouted Floretta. "Mebbe it was me, though I don't think I'm so very pretty."

"Then Ben Simonds is your beau," said Ellen, reflectively.

"Yes, I guess he is," admitted Floretta.

That night, amid much wonder and tender ridicule, Ellen told her mother and Aunt Eva, and her father, that Ben Simonds was Floretta's beau, and Granville Joy was hers. But Andrew laughed doubtfully.

"I don't want that little thing to get such ideas into her head yet a while," he told f.a.n.n.y afterwards, but she only laughed at him, seeing nothing but the childish play of the thing; but he, being a man, saw deeper.

However, Ellen's fondest new love was not for any of her little mates, but for her school-teacher. To her the child's heart went out in wors.h.i.+p. All through the spring she offered her violets--violets gathered laboriously after school in the meadow back of her grandmother's house. She used to skip from hillock to hillock of marsh gra.s.s with wary steps, lest she might slip and wet her feet in the meadow ooze and incur her mother's displeasure, for f.a.n.n.y, in spite of her wors.h.i.+p of the child, could speak with no uncertain voice. She pulled up handfuls of the flowers, gleaming blue in the dark-green hollows. Later she carried roses from the choice bush in the yard, and, later, pears from her grandmother's tree. She used to watch for Miss Mitch.e.l.l at her gate and run to meet her, and seize her hand and walk at her side, blus.h.i.+ng with delight. Miss Mitch.e.l.l lived not far from Ellen, in a tidy white house with a handsome smoke-tree on one side of the front walk and a willow with upside-down branches on the other. Miss Mitch.e.l.l had been born and brought up in this house, but she had been teaching school in a distant town ever since Ellen's day, so they had never been acquainted before she went to school. Miss Mitch.e.l.l lived alone with her mother, who was an old friend of Mrs. Zelotes. Ellen privately thought her rather better-looking than her own grandmother, though her admiration was based upon wholly sentimental reasons. Old Mrs.

Mitch.e.l.l might have earned more money in a museum of freaks than her daughter in a district school. She was a mountain of rotundity, a conjunction of palpitating spheres, but the soul that dwelt in this painfully ponderous body was as mellow with affection and kindliness as a ripe pear, and the voice that proceeded from her ever-smiling lips was a hoa.r.s.e and dove-like coo of love. Ellen at first started a little aghast at this gigantic fleshliness, this general slough and slump of outline, this insistency of repellent curves, and then the old woman spoke and thrust out a great, soft hand, and the heart of the child overleaped her artistic sense and her reason, and she thought old Mrs. Mitch.e.l.l beautiful. Mrs. Mitch.e.l.l never failed to regale her with a superior sort of cooky, and often with a covert peppermint, and that although the Mitch.e.l.ls were not well off. The old place was mortgaged, and Miss Mitch.e.l.l had hard work to pay the interest. Ellen had the vaguest ideas about the mortgage, and was half inclined to think it might be a disfiguring patch in the plastering of the sitting-room, which hung down in an unsightly fas.h.i.+on with a disclosure of hairy edges, and threatened danger to the heads underneath.

Often of a Sat.u.r.day afternoon Ellen went to visit Miss Mitch.e.l.l and her mother, and really preferred them to friends of her own age.

Miss Mitch.e.l.l had a store of superannuated paper dolls which dated from her own childhood. Their quaint costumes, and old-fas.h.i.+oned coiffures, and simpers were of overwhelming interest to Ellen. Even at that early age she had a perception of the advantages of an atmosphere to art, and even to the affections. Without understanding it, she loved those obsolete paper-dolls and those women of former generations better because they gave her breathing-scope for her imagination. She could love Abby Atkins and Floretta Vining at one bite, as it were, and that was the end of it, but she could sit and ponder and dream over Miss Mitch.e.l.l and her mother, and see whole vistas of them in receding mirrors of affection.