She met us at the door and without speaking, but sustaining a kindly smile, sent us with a strong thin finger on our shoulders along the aisles where we would find our desks. We gave her wary glances to see what she was like. She had a narrow little face above a bird’s body. Her hair was like short grey feathers. Before her large, steady, pale eyes she wore a pair of nose glasses that trembled in response to her quivering nerves and sent a rippling line of light along the gold chain that attached her glasses to a small gold spring spool pinned to her shirtwaist.
John and I were at desks side by side. When all the room was filled, Miss Mendtzy closed the door, and our hearts sank. There we were, in jail. She moved trimly to her platform. Her slim feet in black, high-buttoned shoes looked like feet in a newspaper advertisement because she stood them at such polite angles to each other. On her desk she had placed a vase of flowers with a great silk bow to give a festive air to the opening day. Touching the blossoms with a flourish of artistic delicacy, she launched into a pleasant little speech. Everyone sat quietly out of strangeness while she said,
“Now I want all of my new first-graders to come up here one by one, beginning with this aisle on my left” — she showed where in a gesture of bloodless grace — “and shake hands with me and tell me their names, for we are going to be working together for months and years, as I will be your homeroom teacher until the sixth grade. Think of it! Quite like a family! And so we are going to become great friends, and we must know each other well. Miss Mendtzy is ready to love each and every one of you, and she hopes each and every one of you will leave love her. We are going to get along splendidly together, if everybody is polite and works hard and remembers that he is not the only by in this world or in this school or in this room, but that he is a boy among other boys, to whom he must show respect, even while playing. Now, shall we start here, with this boy at the front of the first row?”
One by one we went to her platform, stepped up on it, shook hands, spoke our names, received a bright, lens-quivered smile and deep look into our eyes, and then were sent on across her little stage and down the other side and back to our seats. Some among us swaggered, others went rapidly and shyly, hiding from such a public world, one or two winked on the final trip up the aisles, and all felt some thumping at the heart of dread followed by pride as we went and returned.
There was no incident until John’s turn came. When it did, he would not rise and go forward.
“Come,” said Miss Mendtzy, beckoning over her desk and twinkling with her chained glasses. “We are waiting for the next boy.”
I leaned over to John and whispered,
“It’s your turn, John. Go on. Go on.”
He went lower in his seat and began to buzz his lips against his thumbs, terrified of rising before a crowd of small strangers, who were now beginning to nudge each other and whisper excitedly at the diversion. I heard someone whisper, “John, John, the dog-faced one,” and I could not tell whether John heard it. But, a professional, Miss Mendtzy heard it. She smartly whacked her ruler on the flat of her desk. It was like a nice pistol shot. Silence fell.
She put on her face a look that we all knew well at home — that look of aloof, pained regret at unseemly behavior.
“I must say I am surprised,” she said quietly, “that some of us are not polite enough to sit silently when we see someone in a fit of shyness. Some of the finest people I know are shy at times. I have been told that our bishop, that humble, great man, is shy himself when he has to meet people personally. Now I am going down from my platform and down the aisle and” — she glanced at her seating plan of the classroom — “I am going to bring John Burley up here myself as my guest and help him over his shyness, and the only way to do that is by helping him to do the same things everybody else has done. So.”
She went to John and took his hand and led him to the platform and stood him where each of us had stood, facing her, in profile to the rest of the room. Speaking as though he had just come there by his own will, she said,
“Good morning, John. I am Miss Mendtzy. We are pleased that you are with us,” first giving us a sidelong glare to command our agreement, and then, like a lady, holding forth her hand to John, with a slightly arched wrist and drooping fingers.
John put his hands behind him and buzzed his lips and looked out the window.
“John?”
“John, John, the dog-faced one,” again said an unplaceable voice in the rear of the classroom, softly but distinctly.
“Who said that!” demanded Miss Mendtzy, going pink and trembling until her lenses shimmered. The very first day of school, she seemed to say, and already there was an unfortunate incident. “I simply will not have bad manners in my room, and I simply will not have one of my boys treated like this. Whoever said that is to stand up and apologize instantly. I think I know who it was” — but clearly she did not — “and if he apologizes now and promises never, never to do such a rude thing again, we shall all be friends again as we want to be. Well? I am waiting.”
The silence and the tension grew and grew.
John stood with head hanging. I saw his hands twitching behind his back. He was trying not to clasp them over himself in front.
“One more minute,” declared Miss Mendtzy, “and then I will do something you will all be very sorry for.”
Silence, but for a clock ticking on the wall above her blackboard.
John could not bear it. Moving as fast as a cat, he threw himself forward to Miss Mendtzy’s desk and swept her vase of flowers to the floor where it shattered and spilled.
All the boys broke into hoots and pounded their hinged desktops upon their desks, making such a clamor that in a moment the door was majestically opened and the principal, always called Madame de St. Etienne, who came from nobility in France, heavily entered the room. Even as she arrived, someone in the rear of the room, carried on by the momentum of events, called out, “Crazy, lazy, John’s a daisy.”
The principal was a monument of authority. Above her heavy pink face with its ice-blue eyes rose a silvery pompadour like a wave breaking back from a headland. Her bosom was immense in her starched shirtwaist. Over it she wore a long gold chain which fell like a maiden waterfall into space below her bust and ended in a loop at her waist where she tucked a large gold watch. Her dark skirt went straight down in front, for she had to lean continuously forward, we thought, if the vast weight and size behind her were not to topple her over backward.
She now glared at Miss Mendtzy with frigid reproach at the breach of discipline in her classroom loud enough to be heard down the hall, and then faced us all, saying in a voice like pieces of broken glass scraped together at the edges,
“Children, you will rise when the principal enters the classroom.”
She clapped her hands once and we rose, scared and ashamed.
“Now who is this?” she demanded, turning to the tableau at the teacher’s platform.
“This is John Burley, Madame,” replied Miss Mendtzy, and got no further, for John, seeing the open door, bolted for the hall and freedom.
Madame de St. Etienne gave another queenly, destructive look at Miss Mendtzy, and said,
“Pray continue with the exercises, Miss Mendtzy.”
She then left the room, moving as though on silent casters, for her skirt swept the floor all about her short, light steps, amazing in a woman so heavy and so enraged.