Read Ebook: Atlantic Narratives: Modern Short Stories; Second Series by Antin Mary Ashe Elizabeth Carman Kathleen Comer Cornelia A P Cornelia Atwood Pratt De La Roche Mazo Donnell Annie Hamilton Dunning James Edmund Eastman Rebecca Hooper Ganoe William Addleman Huffaker Lucy Husband Joseph Kemper S H Krysto Christina Mackubin

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Ebook has 2463 lines and 120294 words, and 50 pages

'It's something like the Psalms!' he said suddenly, himself surprised at the discovery.

'What is like the Psalms, dear?'

He hesitated. Now that he had to explain, he was not sure any more. Miss Ralston helped him out.

'You mean "America," sounds like the Psalms to you?' David nodded. His teacher beamed her understanding. How did she guess wherein the similarity lay? David had in mind such moments as this when he said of Miss Ralston, 'Teacher talks with her eyes.'

Miss Ralston went to get her coat and hat from the closet.

'Get your things, David,' she repeated. 'The janitor will come to chase us out in a minute.'

He was struggling with the torn lining of a coat-sleeve in the children's dressing-room, when he heard Miss Ralston exclaim,--

'Oh, David! I had almost forgotten. You must try this on. This is what you're going to wear when you speak the dialogue with Annie and Raymond. We used it in a play a few years ago. I thought it would do for you.'

She held up a blue-and-buff jacket with tarnished epaulets. David hurried to put it on. He was to take the part of George Washington in the dialogue. At sight of the costume, his heart started off on a gallop.

Alas for his gallant aspirations! Nothing of David was visible outside the jacket except two big eyes above and two blunt boot-toes below. The collar reached to his ears; the cuffs dangled below his knees. He resembled a scarecrow in the cornfield more than the Father of his Country.

Miss Ralston suppressed her desire to laugh.

'It's a little big, isn't it?' she said cheerily, holding up the shoulders of the heroic garment. 'I wonder how we can make it fit. Don't you think your mother would know how to take up the sleeves and do something to the back?'

She turned the boy around, more hopeless than she would let him see. Miss Ralston understood more about little boys' hearts than about their coats.

'How old are you, David?' she asked, absently, wondering for the hundredth time at his diminutive stature. 'I thought the boy for whom this was made was about your age.'

David's face showed that he felt reproved. 'I'm twelve,' he said, apologetically.

Miss Ralston reproached herself for her tactlessness, and proceeded to make amends.

'Twelve?' she repeated, patting the blue shoulders. 'You speak the lines like a much older boy. I'm sure your mother can make the coat fit, and I'll bring the wig--a powdered wig--and the sword, David! You'll look just like George Washington!'

Her gay voice echoed in the empty room. Her friendly eyes challenged his. She expected to see him kindle, as he did so readily in these days of patriotic excitement. But David failed to respond. He remained motionless in his place, his eyes blank and staring. Miss Ralston had the feeling that behind his dead front his soul was running away from her.

This is just what was happening. David was running away from her, and from himself, and from the image of George Washington, conjured up by the scene with the military coat. Somewhere in the jungle of his consciousness a monster was stirring, and his soul fled in terror of its clutch. What was it--what was it that came tearing through the wilderness of his memories of two worlds? In vain he tried not to understand. The ghosts of forgotten impressions cackled in the wake of the pursuing monster, the breath of whose nostrils spread an odor of evil sophistries grafted on his boyish thoughts in a chimerical past.

His mind reeled in a whirlwind of recollection. Miss Ralston could not have understood some of the things David reviewed, even if he had tried to tell her. In that other life of his, in Russia, had been monstrous things, things that seemed unbelievable to David himself, after his short experience of America. He had suffered many wrongs,--yes, even as a little boy,--but he was not thinking of past grievances as he stood before Miss Ralston, seeing her as one sees a light through a fog. He was thinking of things harder to forget than injuries received from others. It was a sudden sense of his own sins that frightened David, and of one sin in particular, the origin of which was buried somewhere in the slime of the evil past. David was caught in the meshes of a complex inheritance; contradictory impulses tore at his heart. Fearfully he dived to the bottom of his consciousness, and brought up a bitter conviction: David Rudinsky, who called himself an American, who worshiped the names of the heroes, suddenly knew that he had sinned, sinned against his best friend, sinned even as he was planning to impersonate George Washington, the pattern of honor.

His white forehead glistened with the sweat of anguish. His eyes sickened. Miss Ralston caught him as he wavered and put him in the nearest seat.

'Why, David! what's the matter? Are you ill? Let me take this off--it's so heavy. There, that's better. Just rest your head on me, so.'

This roused him. He wriggled away from her support, and put out a hand to keep her off.

David's head felt heavy and wobbly, but he stood up and began to put on his coat again, which he had pulled off in order to try on the uniform. To Miss Ralston's anxious questions he answered not a syllable, neither did he look at her once. His teacher, thoroughly alarmed, hurriedly put on her street things, intending to take him home. They walked in silence through the empty corridors, down the stairs, and across the school yard. The teacher noticed with relief that the boy grew steadier with every step. She smiled at him encouragingly when he opened the gate for her, as she had taught him, but he did not meet her look.

It was now that he spoke, and Miss Ralston was astonished at the alarm in his voice.

'Miss Ralston, where are you going? You don't go this way.'

'I'm going to see you home, David,' she replied firmly. 'I can't let you go alone--like this.'

In the February dusk, Miss Ralston saw the tears rise to his eyes. Whatever was wrong with him, it was plain that her presence only made him suffer the more. Accordingly she yielded to his entreaty.

'I hope you'll be all right, David,' she said, in a tone she might have used to a full-grown man. 'Good-bye.' And she turned the corner.

All the way home Miss Ralston debated the wisdom of allowing him to go alone, but as she recalled his look and his entreating voice, she felt anew the compulsion that had made her yield. She attributed his sudden breakdown entirely to overwrought nerves, and remorsefully resolved not to subject him in the future to the strain of extra hours after school.

Her misgivings were revived the next morning, when David failed to appear with the ringing of the first gong, as was his habit. But before the children had taken their seats, David's younger brother, Bennie, brought her news of the missing boy.

'David's sick in bed,' he announced in accents of extreme importance. 'He didn't come home till awful late last night, and he was so frozen, his teeth knocked together. My mother says he burned like a fire all night, and she had to take little Harry in her bed, with her and papa, so's David could sleep all alone. We all went downstairs in our bare feet this morning, and dressed ourselves in the kitchen, so David could sleep.'

'What is the matter with him? Did you have the doctor?'

'No, ma'am, not yet. The dispensary don't open till nine o'clock.'

Miss Ralston begged him to report again in the afternoon, which he did, standing before her, cap in hand, his sense of importance still dominating over brotherly concern.

'He's sick, all right,' Bennie reported. 'He don't eat at all--just drinks and drinks. My mother says he cried the whole morning, when he woke up and found out he'd missed school. My mother says he tried to get up and dress himself, but he couldn't anyhow. Too sick.'

'Did you have the doctor?' interrupted Miss Ralston, suppressing her impatience.

'No, ma'am, not yet. My father went to the dispensary but the doctor said he can't come till noon, but he didn't. Then I went to the dispensary, dinner time, but the doctor didn't yet come when we went back to school. My mother says you can die ten times before the dispensary doctor comes.'

'What does your mother think it is?'

'Oh, she says it's a bad cold; but David isn't strong, you know, so she's scared. I guess if he gets worse I'll have to stay home from school to run for the medicines.'

'I hope not Bennie. Now you'd better run along, or you'll be late.'

'Yes, ma'am. Good-bye.'

'Will you come again in the morning and tell me about your brother?'

'Yes, ma'am. Good-bye.--Teacher.'

'Yes, Bennie?'

Miss Ralston was touched by this tribute to her pupil, but she could not promise to mend the broken record.

'Tell David not to worry. He has the best record in the school, for attendance and everything. Tell him I said he must hurry and get well, as we must rehearse our pieces for Washington's Birthday.'

The next morning Bennie reeled off a longer story than ever. He described the doctor's visit in great detail, and Miss Ralston was relieved to gather that David's ailment was nothing worse than grippe; unless, as the doctor warned, his run-down condition caused complications. He would be in bed a week or more, in any case, 'and he ought to sleep most of the time, the doctor said.'

'I guess the doctor don't know our David!' Bennie scoffed. 'He never wants at all to go to sleep. He reads and reads when everybody goes to bed. One time he was reading all night, and the lamp went out, and he was afraid to go downstairs for oil, because he'd wake somebody, so he lighted matches and read little bits. There was a heap of burned matches in the morning.'

'Dear me!' exclaimed Miss Ralston. 'He ought not to do that. Your father ought not--Does your father allow him to stay up nights?'

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