The Daft Days

So Ailie had gone reluctant to the Misses Duff and told them that on the morrow the child would start in their academy. They currookity-cooed at the prospect, put past their crocheting, brought out their celebrated silver spoons, and made of the afternoon tea a banquet with the aid of a seed-cake hurriedly brought from P. & A. MacGlashan’s. Their home was like a stall in a bazaar and smelt of turpentine. Ailie, who loved wide spaces, sat cramped between a laden what-not and a white-enamelled spinning-wheel, the feathers of her hat colliding with a fretwork bracket on the wall behind her chair, and thinking not unkindly of the creatures, wished that she could give them a good shaking. Oh! they were so prim, pernickety, and hopelessly in all things wrong! She was not very large herself, for stature, but in their company she felt gigantic. And oddly there rose in her, too, a sense of gladness that she was of a newer kind of women than those gentle slaves, prisoned in their primness, manacled by stupid old conceits. She was glad she was free, that her happy hours were not so wasted in futilities, that she saw farther, that she knew no social fears, that custom had not crushed her soul, and yet she someway liked and pitied them.

“You’ll find her somewhat odd,” she explained as she nibbled the seed-cake, with a silly little d’oyley of Miss Jean’s contrivance on her knee, and the doves fluttering round her as timid of settling down as though they had actual feathers and she were a cat. “She has got a remarkably quick intelligence; she is quite unconventional, – quite unlike other children in many respects, and it may be difficult at first to manage her.”

“Dear me!” said Miss Jean. “What a pity she should be so odd! I suppose it’s the American system; but perhaps she will improve.”

“Oh, it’s nothing alarming,” explained Miss Ailie, recovering the d’oyley from the floor to which it had slid from her knee, and replacing it with a wicked little shake. “If she didn’t speak much you would never guess from her appearance that she knew any more than – than most of us. Her mother, I feel sure, was something of a genius – at least it never came from the Dyce side; we were all plain folk, not exactly fools, but still not odd enough to have the dogs bite us, or our neighbours cross to the other side of the street when they saw us coming. She died two years ago, and when William – when my brother died, Lennox was staying with professional friends of himself and his wife, who have been good enough to let us have her, much against their natural inclination.”

“The dear!” said Miss Jean, enraptured.

“Quite a sweet romance!” cooed Miss Amelia, languishing.

“You may be sure we will do all we can for her,” continued Miss Jean, pecking with unconscious fingers at the crumbs on her visitor’s lap, till Ailie could scarcely keep from smiling.

“She will soon feel quite at home among us in our little school,” said Miss Amelia. “No doubt she’ll be shy at first – ”

“Quite the contrary!” Ailie assured them, with a little mischievous inward glee, to think how likely Bud was to astonish them by other qualities than shyness. “It seems that in America children are brought up on wholly different lines from children here; you’ll find a curious fearless independence in her.”

The twins held up their hands in amazement, “tcht-tcht-tchting” simultaneously. “What a pity!” said Miss Jean, as if it were a physical affliction.

“But no doubt by carefulness and training it can be eradicated,” said Miss Amelia, determined to encourage hope.

At that Miss Ailie lost her patience. She rose to go, with a start that sent the doves more widely fluttering than ever in their restless little parlour, so crowded out of all comfort by its fretful toys.

“I don’t think you should trouble much about the eradication,” she said with some of her brother’s manner at the bar. “Individuality is not painful to the possessor like toothache, so it’s a pity to eradicate it or kill the nerve.”

The words were out before she could prevent them; she bit her lips, and blushed in her vexation to have said them, but luckily the Pigeons in their agitation were not observant.

“Like all the Dyces, a little daft!” was what they said of her when she was gone, and they were very different women then, as they put on their aprons, rolled up the silver spoons in tissue-paper and put them in a stocking of Amelia’s, before they started to their crochet-work again.

It was a bright, expectant, happy bairn that set out next day for the school. No more momentous could have seemed her start for Scotland across the wide Atlantic; her aunties, looking after her going down the street alone, so confident and sturdily, rued their own arrangement, and envied the Misses Duff that were to be blessed all day with her companionship. To Bell it seemed as if the wean were walking out of their lives on that broad road that leads our bairns to other knowledge than ours, to other dwellings, to the stranger’s heart. Once the child turned at the corner of the church and waved her hand; Miss Ailie took it bravely, but oh, Miss Bell! – Miss Bell! she flew to the kitchen and stormed at Kate as she hung out at the window, an observer too.

Three-and-twenty scholars were there in the doo-cot of the Duffs – sixteen of them girls and the remainder boys, but not boys enough as yet to be in the Grammar School. Miss Jean came out and rang a tea-bell, and Bud was borne in on the tide of youth that was still all strange to her. The twins stood side by side behind a desk; noisily the children accustomed found their seats, but Bud walked up to the teachers and held out her hand.

“Good morning; I’m Lennox Dyce,” she said, before they could get over their astonishment at an introduction so unusual. Her voice, calm and clear, sounded to the backmost seat and sent the children tittering.

“Silence!” cried Miss Jean, reddening, with a glance at the delinquents, as she dubiously took the proffered hand.

“Rather a nice little school,” said Bud, “but a little stuffy. Wants air some, don’t it? What’s the name of the sweet little boy in the Fauntleroy suit? It looks as if it would be apt to be Percy.”

She was standing between the twins, facing the scholars; she surveyed all with the look of his Majesty’s Inspector.

“Hush-h-h,” murmured Miss Amelia, Miss Jean being speechless. “You will sit here,” and she nervously indicated a place in the front bench. “By-and-by, dear, we will see what you can do.”

Bud took her place composedly, and rose with the rest to join in the Lord’s Prayer. The others mumbled it; for her it was a treat to have to say it there for the first time in her life in public. Into the words she put interest and appeal; for the first time the doo-cot heard that supplication endowed with its appropriate dignity. And then the work of the day began. The school lay in the way of the main traffic of the little town: they could hear each passing wheel and footstep, the sweet “chink, chink” from the smithy, whence came the smell of a sheep’s head singeing. Sea-gulls and rooks bickered and swore in the gutters of the street; from fields behind came in a ploughman’s whistle as he drove his team, slicing green seas of fallow as a vessel cuts the green, green wave. Four-and-twenty children, four-and-twenty souls, fathers and mothers of the future race, all outwardly much alike with eyes, noses, hands, and ears in the same position, how could the poor Misses Duff know what was what in the stuff they handled? Luckily for their peace of mind, it never occurred to them that between child and child there was much odds. Some had blue pinafores and some white; some were freckled and some had warts and were wild, and these were the banker’s boys. God only knew the other variations. ’Twas the duty of the twins to bring them all in mind alike to the one plain level.

It was lucky that the lessons of that day began with the Shorter Catechism, for it kept the ignorance of Lennox Dyce a little while in hiding. She heard with amazement of Effectual Calling and Justification and the reasons annexed to the fifth commandment as stammeringly and lifelessly chanted by the others; but when her turn came, and Miss Jean, to test her, asked her simply Man’s Chief End, she answered boldly —

“Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy Him for ever.”

“Very good! very good indeed!” said the twin encouragingly. She was passing on to the next pupil, when Bud burst out with her own particular reason annexed, borrowed from the rapturous explanation of her uncle.

“Man is a harp,” she said as solemnly as he had said it – “a har-r-rp with a thousand strings; and we must sing, sing, sing, even if we’re timmer as a cask, and be grateful always, and glad in the mornings with things.”

If the whistling ploughman and his team had burst into the schoolroom it would have been no greater marvel, brought no more alarm to the breasts of the little teachers. They looked at her as if she had been a witch. The other pupils stared, with open mouths.

“What’s that you say, my dear?” said Miss Amelia. “Did you learn that in America?”

“No,” said Bud, “I just found it out from Uncle Dan.”

“Silence!” cried Miss Jean, for now the class was tittering again. She went with her sister behind the black-board, and nervously they communed. Bud smiled benignly on her fellows.

Just as disconcerting was her performance in geography. Had they tested her in her knowledge of the United States she might have come out triumphantly commonplace; but unfortunately they chose to ask her of Scotland, and there her latest teacher had been Kate.

“What are the chief towns in Scotland?” asked Miss Jean.

“Oban, and Glasgow, and ’Tornoway,” replied Bud with a touch of Highland accent; and, tired of sitting so long in one place, calmly rose and removed herself to a seat beside the Fauntleroy boy, who was greatly put about at such a preference.

“You mustn’t move about like that, Lennox,” explained Miss Amelia, taking her back. “It’s not allowed.”

“But I was all pins and needles,” said Bud frankly, “and I wanted to speak to Percy.”

“My dear child, his name’s not Percy, and there’s no speaking in school,” exclaimed the distressed Miss Amelia.

“No speaking! Why, you’re speaking all the time,” said the child. “It ain’t – isn’t fair. Can’t I just get speaking a wee teeny bit to that nice girl over there?”

The twins looked at each other in horror: the child was a thousand times more difficult than the worst her aunt had led them to expect. A sudden unpleasant impression that their familiar pupils seemed like wooden models beside her, came to them both. But they were alarmed to see that the wooden models were forgetting their correct deportment under the demoralising influence of the young invader.

Once more they dived behind the black-board and communed.

There were many such instances during the day. Bud, used for all her thinking years to asking explanations of what she did not understand, never hesitated to interrogate her teachers, who seemed to her to be merely women, like her mother, and Mrs Molyneux, and Auntie Ailie, only a little wilted and severe, grotesque in some degree because of their funny affected manner, and the crochet that never was out of their hands in oral exercises. She went further, she contradicted them twice, not rudely, but as one might contradict her equals.

“You talk to her,” said Miss Jean behind the black-board where they had taken refuge again. “I declare I’ll take a fit if this goes on! Did you ever hear of such a creature?”

Miss Amelia almost cried. All her fixed ideas of children were shattered at a blow. Here was one who did not in the least degree fit in with the scheme of treatment in the doo-cot. But she went forward with a look of great severity.

“Of course, coming from America and all that, and never having been at school before, you don’t know,” she said, “but I must tell you that you are not behaving nicely – not like a nice little girl at all, Lennox. Nice little girls in school in this country listen, and never say anything unless they’re asked. They are respectful to their teachers, and never ask questions, and certainly never contradict them, and – ”

“But, please, Miss Duff, I wasn’t contradicting,” explained Bud very soberly, “and when respect is called for, I’m there with the goods. You said honor was spelt with a ‘u,’ and I guess you just made a mistake, same as I might make myself, for there ain’t no ‘u’ in honor, at least in America.”

“I – I – I never made a mistake in all my life,” said Miss Amelia, gasping.

“Oh, Laura!” was all that Bud replied, but in such a tone, and with eyes so widely opened, it set half of the other pupils tittering.

“What do you mean by ‘Oh, Laura’?” asked Miss Jean. “Who is Laura?”

“You can search me,” replied Bud composedly. “Jim often said ‘Oh, Laura!’ when he got a start.”

“It’s not a nice thing to say,” said Miss Jean. “It’s not at all ladylike. It’s just a sort of profane language, and profane language is an ‘abomination unto the Lord.’”

“But it was so like Jim,” said Bud, giggling with recollection. “If it’s slang I’ll stop it, – at least I’ll try to stop it. I’m bound to be a well-off English undefied, you know; poppa – father fixed that.”

The school was demoralised without a doubt, for now the twins were standing nervously before Bud and put on equal terms with her in spite of themselves, and the class was openly interested and amused – more interested and amused than it had ever been at anything that had ever happened in the doo-cot before. Miss Amelia was the first to comprehend how far she and her sister had surrendered their citadel of authority to the little foreigner’s attack. “Order!” she exclaimed. “We will now take up poetry and reading.”

Bud cheered up wonderfully at the thought of poetry and reading, but, alas! her delight was short-lived, for the reading-book put into her hand was but a little further on than Auntie Ailie’s Twopenny. When her turn came to read “My sister Ella has a cat called Tabby. She is black, and has a pretty white breast. She has long whiskers and a bushy white tail,” she read with a tone of amusement that exasperated the twins, though they could not explain to themselves why. What completed Bud’s rebellion, however, was the poetry. “Meddlesome Matty” was a kind of poetry she had skipped over in Chicago, plunging straightway into the glories of the play-bills and Shakespeare, and when she had read that —

“One ugly trick has often spoiledThe sweetest and the best;Matilda, though a pleasant child,One ugly trick possessed” —

she laughed outright.

“I can’t help it, Miss Duff,” she said when the twins showed their distress. “It looks like poetry, sure enough, for it’s got the jaggy edges, but it doesn’t make any zip inside me same as poetry does. It wants biff.”

“What’s ‘zip’ and ‘biff’?” asked Miss Amelia.

“It’s – it’s a kind of tickle in your mind,” said Bud. “I’m so tired,” she continued, rising in her seat, “I guess I’ll head for home now.” And before the twins had recovered from their dumfounderment she was in the porch putting on her cloak and hood.

“Just let her go,” said Miss Jean to her sister. “If she stays any longer I shall certainly have a swoon; I feel quite weak.”

And so Bud marched out quite cheerfully, and reached home an hour before she was due. Kate met her at the door. “My stars! are you home already?” she exclaimed, with a look at the town clock. “You must be smart at your schooling when they let you out of the cemetery so soon.”

“It ain’t a cemetery at all,” said Bud, standing unconcernedly in the lobby; “it’s just a kindergarten.”

Aunt Ailie bore down on her to overwhelm her in caresses. “What are you home for already, Bud?” she asked. “It’s not time yet, is it?”

“No,” said Bud, “but I just couldn’t stay any longer. I’d as lief not go back there. The ladies don’t love me. They’re Sunday sort of ladies, and give me pins and needles. They smile and smile, same’s it was done with a glove-stretcher, and don’t love me. They said I was using profound language, and – and they don’t love me. Not the way mother and Mrs Molyneux and you and Auntie Bell and Uncle Dan and Kate and Footles does. They made goo-goo-eyes at me when I said the least thing. They had all those poor kiddies up on the floor doing their little bits, and they made me read kindergarten poetry – that was the limit! So I just upped and walked.”

The two aunts and Kate stood round her for a moment baffled.

“What’s to be done now?” said Aunt Ailie.

“Tuts!” said Aunt Bell, “give the wean a drink of milk and some bread and butter.”

And so ended Bud’s only term in a dame school.

CHAPTER X

It was a saying of Daniel Dyce’s that all the world is under one’s own waistcoat. We have a way of spaeing fortunes in the North, when young, in which we count the waistcoat buttons from top to bottom, and say —

Tinker,

Tailor,

Soldier,

Sailor,

Rich man,

Poor man,

Prodigal, or

Thief?

Whichever name falls upon the last button tells what is your destiny, and after the county corps has been round our way recruiting, I see our schoolboys with all their waistcoat buttons, but three at the top, amissing. Dan Dyce had a different formula: he said “Luckiness, Leisure, Ill or Well, Good World, Bad World, Heaven or Hell?”

“Not Heaven, Dan!” said Bell. “The other place I’ll admit, for whiles I’m in a furious temper over some trifle;” to which he would answer, “Woman! the Kingdom of Heaven is within you.”

So, I think sometimes, all that’s worth while in the world is in this little burgh, except a string quartette and a place called Florence I have long been ettling to see if ever I have the money. In this small town is every week as much of tragedy and comedy and farce as would make a complete novel full of laughter and tears, that would sell in a jiffy. I have started, myself, a score of them – all the essential inspiration got from plain folk passing my window, or from hearing a sentence dropped among women gossiping round a well. Many a winter night I come in with a fine catch of tales picked up in the by-going, as we say, and light the candles in a hurry, and make a gallant dash at “Captain Consequence. Chapter I.” or “A Wild Inheritance. Part I. The Astounding Mary.” Only the lavishness of the material hampers me: when I’m at “Captain Consequence” (which would be a splendid sombre story of an ill life, if I ever got beyond Chapter I. and the old scamp’s fondness for his mother), my wife runs in with something warm to drink, and tells me Jonathan Campbell’s goat has broken into the minister’s garden, and then I’m off the key for villainy; there’s a shilling book in Jonathan’s goat herself.

But this time I’m determined to stick by the fortunes of the Dyce family, now that I have got myself inside their door. I hope we are friends of that household, dearer to me than the dwellings of kings (not that I have cognisance of many). I hope that no matter how often or how early we rap at the brass knocker, or how timidly, Kate will come, and in one breath say, “What is’t? Come in!” We may hear, when we’re in, people passing in the street, and the wild geese call, – wild geese, wild geese! this time I will not follow where you tempt to where are only silence and dream, – the autumn and the summer days may cry us out to garden and wood, but if I can manage it I will lock the door on the inside, and shut us snugly in with Daniel Dyce and his household, and it will be well with us then. Yes, yes, it will be well with us then.

The wild-goose cry, heard in the nights, beyond her comprehension, was all that Bud Dyce found foreign in that home. All else was natural and familiar and friendly, for all else she knew was love. But she feared at first the “honk, honk” of the lone wild things that burdened her with wonder and awe. Lying in her attic bower at night, they seemed to her like sore mistaken wanderers, wind-driven, lost; and so they are, I know. Hans Andersen and Grimm for her had given to their kind a forlorn and fearsome meaning. But Kate MacNeill had helped, to some degree, these childish apprehensions.

The Highland maid had brought from Colonsay a flesh that crept in darkness, a brain with a fantastic maggot in it; she declared to goodness, and to Bud sometimes, that she had no life of it with ghosts in her small back room. But Bud was not to let on to her aunties. Forbye it was only for Kate they came, the ghosts; did Bud not hear them last night? Geese! No, not geese, Kate knew different, and if the thing lasted much longer she would stay no more in this town; she would stay nowhere, she would just go back to Colonsay. Not that Colonsay was better; there were often ghosts in Colonsay – in the winter-time, and then it behoved you to run like the mischief, or have a fine strong lad with you for your convoy. If there were no ghosts in America it was because it cost too much to go there on the steamers. Harken to yon – “Honk, honk!” – did ever you hear the like of it? Who with their wits about them in weather like that would like to be a ghost? And loud above the wind that rocked the burgh in the cradle of the hills, loud above the beating rain, the creak of doors and rap of shutters in that old house, Bud and Kate together in the kitchen heard again the “honk, honk!” of the geese. Then it was for the child that she missed the mighty certainty of Chicago, that Scotland somehow to her mind seemed an old unhappy place, in the night of which went passing Duncan, murdered in his sleep, and David Rizzio with the daggers in his breast, and Helen of Kirkconnel Lee. The nights but rarely brought any fear for her in spite of poor Kate’s ghosts, since the warmth and light and love of the household filled every corner of lobby and stair, and went to bed with her. When she had said her prayer the geese might cry, the timbers of the old house crack, Bud was lapped in the love of God and man, and tranquil. But the mornings dauntened her often when she wakened to the sound of the six o’clock bell. She would feel, when it ceased, as if all virtue were out of last night’s love and prayer. Then all Scotland and its curious scraps of history as she had picked it up weighed on her spirit for a time; the house was dead and empty; not ghost nor goose made her eerie, but mankind’s old inexplicable alarms. How deep and from what distant shores comes childhood’s wild surmise! There was nothing to harm her, she knew, but the strangeness of the dawn and a craving for life made her at these times the awakener of the other dwellers in the house of Dyce.

She would get out of bed and go next door to the room of Ailie, and creep in bed beside her to kiss her for a little from her dreams. To the aunt these morning visitations were precious: she would take the bairn to her bosom and fall asleep with sighs of content, the immaculate mother. Bud herself could not sleep then for watching the revelation of her lovely auntie in the dawn – the cloud on the pillow that turned to masses of hazel hair, the cheeks and lips that seemed to redden like flowers as the day dawned, the nook of her bosom, the pulse of her brow.

Other mornings Wanton Wully’s bell would send her in to Bell, who would give her the warm hollow of her own place in the blankets, while she herself got up to dress briskly for the day’s affairs. “Just you lie down there, pet, and sleepy-baw,” she would say, tying her coats with trim tight knots. “You will not grow up a fine, tall, strong girl like your Auntie Ailie if you do not take your sleep when you can get it. The morning is only for done old wives like me that have things to do and don’t grudge doing them.”

She would chatter away to Bud as she dressed, a garrulous auntie this, two things always for her text – the pride of Scotland, and the virtue of duty done. A body, she would say, was sometimes liable to weary of the same things to be done each day, the same tasks even-on, fires and food and cleansing, though the mind might dwell on great deeds desirable to be accomplished, but pleasure never came till the thing was done that was the first to hand, even if it was only darning a stocking. What was Bud going to be when she grew up? Bud guessed she wasn’t going to be anything but just a lady. Ah, yes, but even ladies had to do something wise-like; there was Ailie – to go no farther – who could have managed a business though her darning was but lumpy. Even for a lady there was nothing nobler than the making of her own bed; besides the doctors said it was remarkably efficacious for the figure.