“I suppose you have finished those sums, Emily?”
Emily had not finished even one sum — she had only covered her slate with verses — verses that Miss Brownell must not see — must not see! Emily sprang to her feet and clutched wildly after her slate. But Miss Brownell, with a smile of malicious enjoyment on her thin lips, held it beyond her reach.
“What is this? It does not look — exactly — like fractions. ‘Lines on the View — v-e-w — from the Window of Blair Water School.’ Really, children, we seem to have a budding poet among us.”
The words were harmless enough, but — oh, the hateful sneer that ran through the tone — the contempt, the mockery that was in it! It seared Emily’s soul like a whiplash. Nothing was more terrible to her than the thought of having her beloved “poems” read by stranger eyes — cold, unsympathetic, derisive, stranger eyes.
“Please — please, Miss Brownell,” she stammered miserably, “don’t read it — I’ll rub it off — I’ll do my sums right away. Only please don’t read it. It — it isn’t anything.”
Miss Brownell laughed cruelly.
“You are too modest, Emily. It is a whole slateful of — poetry — think of that, children — poetry. We have a pupil in this school who can write — poetry. And she does not want us to read this — poetry. I am afraid Emily is selfish. I am sure we should all enjoy this — poetry.”
Emily cringed every time Miss Brownell said “poetry” with that jeering emphasis and that hateful pause before it. Many of the children giggled, partly because they enjoyed seeing a “Murray of New Moon” grilled, partly because they realized that Miss Brownell expected them to giggle. Rhoda Stuart giggled louder than any one else; but Jennie Strang, who had tormented Emily on her first day at school, refused to giggle and scowled blackly at Miss Brownell instead.
Miss Brownell held up the slate and read Emily’s poem aloud, in a sing-song nasal voice, with absurd intonations and gestures that made it seem a very ridiculous thing. The lines Emily had thought the finest seemed the most ridiculous. The other pupils laughed more than ever and Emily felt that the bitterness of the moment could never go out of her heart. The little fancies that had been so beautiful when they came to her as she wrote were shattered and bruised now, like torn and mangled butterflies—”vistas in some fairy dream,” chanted Miss Brownell, shutting her eyes and wagging her head from side to side. The giggles became shouts of laughter.
“Oh,” thought Emily, clenching her hands, “I wish — I wish the bears that ate the naughty children in the Bible would come and eat you.”
There were no nice, retributive bears in the school bush, however, and Miss Brownell read the whole “poem” through. She was enjoying herself hugely. To ridicule a pupil always gave her pleasure and when that pupil was Emily of New Moon, in whose heart and soul she had always sensed something fundamentally different from her own, the pleasure was exquisite.
When she reached the end she handed the slate back to the crimson-cheeked Emily.
“Take your — poetry, Emily,” she said.
Emily snatched the slate. No slate “rag” was handy but Emily gave the palm of her hand a fierce lick and one side of the slate was wiped off. Another lick — and the rest of the poem went. It had been disgraced — degraded — it must be blotted out of existence. To the end of her life Emily never forgot the pain and humiliation of that experience.
Miss Brownell laughed again.
“What a pity to obliterate such — poetry, Emily,” she said. “Suppose you do those sums now. They are not — poetry, but I am in this school to teach arithmetic and I am not here to teach the art of writing — poetry. Go to your own seat. Yes, Rhoda?”
For Rhoda Stuart was holding up her hand and snapping her fingers.
“Please, Miss Brownell,” she said, with distinct triumph in her tones, “Emily Starr has a whole bunch of poetry in her desk. She was reading it to Ilse Burnley this morning while you thought they were learning history.”
Perry Miller turned around and a delightful missile, compounded of chewed paper and known as a “spit pill,” flew across the room and struck Rhoda squarely in the face. But Miss Brownell was already at Emily’s desk, having reached it one jump before Emily herself.
“Don’t touch them — you have no right!” gasped Emily frantically.
But Miss Brownell had the “bunch of poetry” in her hands. She turned and walked up to the platform. Emily followed. Those poems were very dear to her. She had composed them during the various stormy recesses when it had been impossible to play out of doors and written them down on disreputable scraps of paper borrowed from her mates. She had meant to take them home that very evening and copy them on letterbills. And now this horrible woman was going to read them to the whole jeering, giggling school.
But Miss Brownell realized that the time was too short for that. She had to content herself with reading over the titles, with some appropriate comments.
Meanwhile Perry Miller was relieving his feelings by bombarding Rhoda Stuart with spit pills, so craftily timed that Rhoda had no idea from what quarter of the room they were coming and so could not “tell” on any one. They greatly interfered with her enjoyment of Emily’s scrape, however. As for Teddy Kent, who did not wage war with spit pills but preferred subtler methods of revenge, he was busy drawing something on a sheet of paper. Rhoda found the sheet on her desk the next morning; on it was depicted a small, scrawny monkey, hanging by its tail from a branch; and the face of the monkey was as the face of Rhoda Stuart. Whereat Rhoda Stuart waxed wrath, but for the sake of her own vanity tore the sketch to tatters and kept silence regarding it. She did not know that Teddy had made a similar sketch, with Miss Brownell figuring as a vampirish-looking bat, and thrust it into Emily’s hand as they left school.
“‘The Lost Dimond — a Romantic Tale,’” read Miss Brownell. “‘Lines on a Birch Tree’ — looks to me more like lines on a very dirty piece of paper, Emily—’Lines Written on a Sundial in our Garden’ — ditto—’Lines to my Favourite Cat” — another romantic tail, I presume—’Ode to Ilse’—’Thy neck is of a wondrous pearly sheen’ — hardly that, I should say. Ilse’s neck is very sunburned—’A Deskripshun of Our Parlour,’ ‘The Violets Spell’ — I hope the violet spells better than you do, Emily—’The Disappointed House’ —
“Lilies lifted up white cups
For the bees to dr — r — i — i — nk.”
“I didn’t write it that way!” cried tortured Emily.