pg28948 [194]
Though she did not give in, she never succeeded. Her class was getting in worse condition, she knew herself less and less secure in teaching it. Ought she to withdraw and go home again? Ought she to say she had come to the wrong place, and so retire? Her very life was at test.
She went on doggedly, blindly, waiting for a crisis. Mr. Harby had now begun to persecute her. Her dread and hatred of him grew and loomed larger and larger. She was afraid he was going to bully her and destroy her. He began to persecute her because she could not keep her class in proper condition, because her class was the weak link in the chain which made up the school.
One of the offences was that her class was noisy and disturbed Mr. Harby, as he took Standard Seven at the other end of the room. She was taking composition on a certain morning, walking in among the scholars. Some of the boys had dirty ears and necks, their clothing smelled unpleasantly, but she could ignore it. She corrected the writing as she went.
"When you say 'their fur is brown', how do you write 'their'?" she asked.
There was a little pause; the boys were always jeeringly backward in answering. They had begun to jeer at her authority altogether.
"Please, miss, t-h-e-i-r", spelled a lad, loudly, with a note of mockery.
At that moment Mr. Harby was passing.
"Stand up, Hill!" he called, in a big voice.
Everybody started. Ursula watched the boy. He was evidently poor, and rather cunning. A stiff bit of hair stood straight off his forehead, the rest fitted close to his meagre head. He was pale and colourless.
"Who told you to call out?" thundered Mr. Harby.
The boy looked up and down, with a guilty air, and a cunning, cynical reserve.
"Please, sir, I was answering," he replied, with the same humble insolence.
"Go to my desk."
The boy set off down the room, the big black jacket hanging in dejected folds about him, his thin legs, rather knocked at the knees, going already with the pauper's crawl, his feet in their big boots scarcely lifted. Ursula watched him in his crawling, slinking progress down the room. He was one of her boys! When he got to the desk, he looked round, half furtively, with a sort of cunning grin and a pathetic leer at the big boys in Standard VII. Then, pitiable, pale, in his dejected garments, he lounged under the menace of the headmaster's desk, with one thin leg crooked at the knee and the foot struck out sideways his hands in the low-hanging pockets of his man's jacket.
Ursula tried to get her attention back to the class. The boy gave her a little horror, and she was at the same time hot with pity for him. She felt she wanted to scream. She was responsible for the boy's punishment. Mr. Harby was looking at her handwriting on the board. He turned to the class.
"Pens down."
The children put down their pens and looked up.
"Fold arms."
They pushed back their books and folded arms.
Ursula, stuck among the back forms, could not extricate herself.
"What is your composition about?" asked the headmaster. Every hand shot up. "The ——" stuttered some voice in its eagerness to answer.
"I wouldn't advise you to call out," said Mr. Harby. He would have a pleasant voice, full and musical, but for the detestable menace that always tailed in it. He stood unmoved, his eyes twinkling under his bushy black eyebrows, watching the class. There was something fascinating in him, as he stood, and again she wanted to scream.