The Fifty-Cent Kind

THERE are times when the very best children develop criminal tendencies. And these were not the very best children. The School Board, indeed, had declared them the worst. Anyway, the time had come.

The mistress of the grammar grades had foreseen this moment occasionally on nervous days, but it was worse than her forecast.

‘If I only had complete control of myself, the children might not be so bad,’ she reproached herself.

However, that could not be helped either. Her own teachers in the past had not had perfect self-control, nor perhaps theirs before them.

The children were bad. Nobody had any recess in the morning. They all had to stay in. And when they are bad in the morning, the afternoon session looms ominous.

‘ If the next two classes do not recite better and behave better, we shall have to omit The Reds of the Midi,' she announced.

Brief silence fell upon the school. The teacher read stories aloud on fortunate days. One more reading would finish the Reds, and Easter holidays would begin to-morrow.

‘Aw, please, they’ll be good,’ remonstrated Samuel.

Samuel was an oaf. The teacher had never really understood what an oaf might be, until she met Samuel. He had a chronic grievance, and roared with dissatisfaction at everything any one said to him. The principal had frequently offered to suspend Samuel, and only the teacher’s weakness for bad boys kept him in the school.

But he liked the Reds. When the nuns and butchers danced through the streets of Avignon, Samuel’s little eyes snapped with interest. When the hero helped to make guillotines, Samuel’s clumsy head craned forward on his heavy shoulders. To any ill-advised child who rustled or coughed, he turned a threatening face.

The teacher rang her bell.

‘Sixth geography,’ she announced.

As the Sixth rose in their places, obstructing the view, a suppressed shriek was heard.

‘ Somebody shot water down my collar,’ the grocer’s boy angrily justified himself.

The grocer’s boy was a pale, thin, little soul. He did not legally belong to the grocer, only industrially. All the little boys worked after hours and on holidays. Most of them bought their own clothes with what they earned in this way.

‘George, come here,’ the schoolmistress said severely to the boy behind, who was telegraph boy out of hours.

But the telegraph boy, with demoniacal astuteness, had passed the waterpistol to his prochain ami immediately after his nefarious act, and, thus journeying from hand to hand, it had disappeared. It took several minutes of the teacher’s time to bring it to light again.

‘I ought to keep you in after school,’ said the disgusted teacher.

But she did not want to stay in herself. She felt that without the safetyvalve provided by the noon hour, she might explode. So she stood the telegraph boy in a corner, which he did not mind in the least, as she very well knew.

While he wriggled in his corner, and Samuel displayed vast ignorance of the boundaries of Russia, notes were passing to and fro in the back of the room. The teacher weakly pretended to ignore them. Soon the best little girls were whispering. This could not be ignored.

‘Martha,’ warned the school-mistress.

Martha was not one of the best, but she was incontestably one of the loudest. She stopped and bent her enchanting eye-brows at the tyrant.

‘... on the south by Denmark,’ concluded Samuel hopefully, and sat down.

Martha resumed her whispering.

‘Dismissed.’

The geography class thundered to their seats. Classes were decidedly too short. There were ten or fifteen minute periods for lessons, and by night the teacher’s head usually spun. Very likely the children’s heads spun too; but there was so little in theirs, it could not mix things much.

‘Martha, come here, please.’

Martha, a black cloud overshadowing her arch little face with its impeccable coloring, moved slowly forward and stood by the chair of state.

‘I spoil you, don’t I, Marfa?’ said the teacher fondly. ‘And so you won’t do what I tell you.’

Martha squirmed.

‘ I always want to do what you tell me to,’ she admitted; ‘but often I get so mad I can’t.’

‘I sometimes have an inclination to eat you, Marfa,’ divulged the teacher, ‘beginning at your tan hair and stopping only at your missing shoe-buttons. But not to-day. You are not good enough to eat to-day.’

Martha grinned appreciatively.

‘ Do you think you could be quiet until noon?’ inquired the teacher.

And Martha promised.

‘Probably I’m too easy,’ reflected the school-mistress with misgivings. After all, she did not really care a cent for discipline, and the children were well aware of it.

She wanted them to be clean, she wanted to improve their manners and awaken their minds, and sometimes she had hopes of these things; but just now she remembered the warning of the cynical old school-director when she entered this experiment in psychology.

’They’re young devils,’ said the director. ‘You’ve got to rule them with a rod of iron. No one’s ever been able to manage them.’

Probably he knew, too.

Anna Mixner, the professional tattletale, raised a signal. Her malicious black eyes snapped.

‘Teacher, Jim Cole is reading a detecatif story.’

Privately the teacher would have been very glad to let sleeping dogs lie. She did not mind detective stories much, and she knew well how fortunate was Jim’s preoccupation on such a day as this. But officially she had to take notice.

‘James, please put away the story and study your lessons,’ she suggested.

Jim burst into sudden fury.

‘I would n’t be a sneak like Anna Mixner,’ he said in stentorian tones. ‘I ain’t reading any more than Sam Seaman. But Sam there, anything he does is all right.’

This was horrid and unprincipled in Jim, because he himself was the teacher’s pet, and knew it.

‘Some one’s always pickin’ on me,’ began Sam in the manner of a complaining hippopotamus.

But the teacher interrupted him. She was flaming indignation at her inopportune favorite.

‘ You two boys will stay after school,’ was all she said.

But James and Samuel subsided.

When the children had gone, Sam brought his ‘detecatif’ story and laid it before her.

‘I don’t mind stories in their place, Samuel,’ she began; then glanced down at the colored frontispiece, and hesitated.

A fainting woman in white reclined upon a sofa. ‘As the gigantic black flourished his knife above her, Henry rushed in, revolver in hand. “Stop!” he commanded.’

‘The principal disapproves of these five-cent tales. He thinks they are — unsettling. He tells me to take them from you.’

‘’T is n’t mine,’ grumbled Samuel. ‘It belongs to pop. You take it, and he’ll get after me to pay for it.’

‘Then, Samuel, please return it to your father at once.’

Samuel promised and departed. She turned to Janies.

James, his round, fresh face sulking above his childish blouse, stamped heavily up the aisle and stood beside the desk.

‘How could, yon act so abominably when you know how I depend on you? ’ inquired the teacher in the sanctimonious voice of authority.

Her gaze fell on his hand extended over her white blotter.

‘Goodness, James! Look at your hand! ’ she exclaimed, dropping her grief-stricken tone.

She laid her hand suggestively beside his on the blotter.

He studied his huge, purple, dirt-encrusted fist. His face grew as red as his hand.

‘But you don’t have to look after no horse,’ he murmured defensively.

‘No,’ she admitted, feeling that into such a chaos of negatives she might safely cast another. ‘ I do have to manage a hateful mule sometimes though, now don’t I?’

His gloom lightened at her brilliant witticism.

‘Jimmy,’ she added ingratiatingly, with her clean hand on his solid little shoulder, ‘I’m awfully hungry, and I can’t keep you in without keeping myself in too. Let’s both go home now, and try to behave like human beings this afternoon.’

But make what haste she might, she was a bit late returning. The principal stopped her as she hurried by his door. He was smiling broadly.

‘Mrs. Seaman was here this morning,’ he said. ‘She wants Samuel to study French next term. She told me she spoke of it to Samuel, and asked him if you could teach it. And Samuel laughed her to scorn. He said you knew everything.’

Well, that was gratifying. But how noisy the children were in that upper hall.

‘ If she’d come in this morning, she’d have thought she was in the Zoo,’ confessed the teacher frankly. ‘They behaved like hyenas.’

She flew up the stairs, snatching off her gloves.

‘Hurry in, children,’ she urged.

They were whispering, giggling, jumping about. They followed her through the door.

On her desk stood a tall gilt basket. It had an immense satin bow tied upon its handle. It was filled with candy, and in the middle reposed a huge chocolate egg, on whose surface a white china dove punctuated the teacher’s name.

Eager, joyous little faces crowded around her.

‘That’s why we were so bad,’ explained Martha. She was hopping on and off the rung of the teacher’s chair, shouting in the teacher’s ear. ‘My mamma put the bow on.’

‘We were whispering about it,’ said Samuel, with the only smile she had ever seen on his injured countenance.

‘Why, you darling children!’ said the teacher inarticulately.

All those shabby little suits surging around her, bought by their industrious little wearers; all those hard-earned pennies contributed with love to buy this for her — the teacher felt herself choking.

‘ It’s perfectly beautiful,’ she assured them.

But they needed no assurance. They knew it.

‘You’re the best children in the world,’ asserted the teacher recklessly, ‘and it’s the most beautiful basket. Let’s simply rush through our lessons, and then we’ll have time to finish The Reds of the Midi.’

‘Did you notice the dove?’ inquired the emaciated grocer-boy with crafty nonchalance.

‘Of course I did. The very first thing.’

‘I said to the woman, “Are n’t you forgetting the dove? ” I reminded her. I said, “Look here, there belongs a dove on that kind of an egg.” ’

He paused and fingered the dove, then added in an off-hand manner, ‘They only come on the fifty-cent kind.’