CHAPTER II
MR. PITZER
Christine stepped over the threshold and dropped a curtsy which dipped her dress in the dust. Matilda followed and was taken with a similar convulsion on the same spot. Then the smallest bobbed violently; all this homage being paid to a somewhat threadbare man who sat behind a high desk opposite the door.
Continuous high desks on a raised platform extended around the walls, and continuous benches ran in front of them. Here sat the elders of the school--the big boys and girls, with their backs to smaller fry who camped on long benches set along the middle of the floor, swinging their heels and holding spellers in their hands. The benches were made of split logs, the flat sides planed smooth, and the round sides bored with holes into which legs were stuck; as these legs were not always even, boys at opposite ends of a bench could “teeter-totter” the whole row of urchins between them. There were no backs against which you might rest your shoulders, but any tired little fellow might lie down if he took his own risks about rolling off. There had been teachers who would not allow the muscles thus to relax. But Mr. Pitzer was a kind, soft-hearted old man, who, as Matilda has hinted, was not considered strict enough. He had taught the school many seasons.
The directors said he might do for summer, but each winter they determined to engage some strapping modern pedagogue who could control the young men and wild young women who sallied knowledge-ward during the long term. Still Mr. Pitzer was found in his place. He taught manners and morals as well as the common branches, and his sweet, severe face under iron-gray hair became stamped on every mind that entered the double doors.
The tardy pupils, unchallenged, hung their bonnets and dinner-bags on nails in the wall, Teeny took her big-girls’ seat, and straightway lay flat on her desk in the agonies of writing a morning copy, while the other two sat side by side on a bench murmuring the first reading-lesson. A hum like the music of many hives sounded all over the room. “D-i-s--dis, d-a-i-n, dain, disdain,” crossed “in-com-pat-i-bil-i-ty;” and the important scratching of slate-pencils in the hands of ciphering big boys, seemed to supplement a breathing and occasional sputter of quill pens.
“Second Reader may stand up!” cried the master.
Bluebell’s class, including her tall friend Matilda, formed in a row in front of the master’s desk, each holding his reader clinched before his face.
A polished walnut ferule lay at Mr. Pitzer’s hand, and the text-book sprawled on the desk. He wore spectacles of so slight an iron frame that the glasses seemed suspended miraculously between his stern eyes and the eyes turned up to him. Like a commander giving some military order, he now cried out: “Attention!”
At the signal every girl dipped low and every boy bent forward with a bow. It would have been a misdemeanor for the girls to bow and the boys to curtsy, and they knew it. Then the boy at the top of the class began to read in a voice which could be heard on the opposite side of the road; he was followed by a timid little girl who put her nose close to the book and spelled and whispered; and she in turn by a merry girl who had been put back from the Third Reader when the master was cross, for pronouncing ships wrecked, “shipses rick-ed.” Very little did she care, for, knowing the Second Reader by heart, it was easy for her to rattle off the story of The Three Boys and the Three Cakes, with a moral. Bluebell read in a clear, sensitive, appreciative voice, and Tildy followed. They spelled the words which the master pronounced to them, and had another lesson set. The military order was then varied:
“Obedience!”
At this they saluted as before, and took their seats.
Business went on as usual. The large girls recited in smart, high voices, and the boys blundered in monotone, excepting little Joe Hall, who was such a mite of a fellow, yet so smart that he knew almost as much as the master. Joe had ciphered farther into the jungles of arithmetic than anybody else, and could parse as fast as his tongue would run. He always had his atlas lessons, and some said had been clear through the geography, while his writing was so wonderful that the master sometimes let him set copies when he himself was very busy.
“Somethin’s the matter with the master this mornin’,” whispered Tildy to Bluebell, as they wriggled around trying to rest their backs.
It was true. He stalked about with his hands under his coat-tails, sticking his under lip out. Even Joe Hall’s grandiloquent rendering of Fourth Reader text could not draw his mind from some internal strain; and after recess the trouble came out.
Mr. Pitzer read the rules of the school. Whenever he had heard complaint, he brought out those ponderous rules and visited them upon the pupils that they might know what he required of them, even if he did not exact it. Every listener, except the new or very dull ones, knew these rules by heart. They were written on tall cap sheets in the best of flourishes, and covered the whole duty of boy and girl.
To-day the master read them with frowns and a sonorous voice.
“ARTICLE THIRTEENTH!” he thundered at last; “_Every boy or girl in going to or from school shall treat with civility all persons whom they meet upon the highway, he or she making a bow or a curtsy as the case may be. It shall be a high misdemeanor to treat impolitely any stranger or strangers in the schoolroom, or the play-ground, or the highway._”
And here as if to test Mr. Pitzer’s pupils in their behavior, a strange man did step over the threshold, taking off his hat as he did so.
The schoolmaster stopped and glared. But Bluebell’s heart came into her mouth. She felt unreasonably terrified and trapped by fate. For it was the curly, glittering gentleman who had promised to come to the school-house, possibly on that dread errand suggested by Tildy--to whip the whole school!