Psyche

by Phyllis Young

  These rough and ready men were, without exception, kind to her. They were her friends. And she saw nothing odd in the fact that they were her only friends; her only continuing association with anyone, other than Butch and Mag, until the day when the truant officer for the district discovered both her presence at the shack and her absence from school.

  It was on a warm September morning that Psyche came into the shack to announce that there was a “funny lookin’ man outside.”

  Mag pushed a loose strand of hair from one side of her moist forehead to the other, gave a wriggling hitch to her crumpled calico dress, and advanced impressively to challenge the uninvited intruder. He proved to be a slight, bald man of fifty-odd in a neat, dark suit. He wore gold-rimmed glasses, and carried a leather dispatch-case. Dormant memories of travelling salesmen, whom it had once been her duty to dispense with while in service, satisfied Mag that this was a situation which she was more than competent to handle.

  “We don’t want nothin’ we ain’t got, bo,” she said with hauteur, and wheeled about in order to re-enter her residence. She was arrested, however, in mid-manoeuvre, by a voice which was, considering its apparently mild source, surprising in its forcefulness.

  “You have a child here, madam, of school age. Either you will make immediate arrangements to send her to school, or you and your husband will appear in court on Thursday of next week.”

  4

  PSYCHE was twelve when her formal education began. She was nearly fifteen when she herself assumed the responsibility for an abrupt and final departure from an odorous, overcrowded classroom that she hated from the first moment she stepped into it.

  Her preparations that first morning were of the simplest nature. Her one skirt was pressed. A faded blue shirt was patched. And Mag provided her with a yellowed block of writing paper and a carefully sharpened pencil.

  Butch, who had been deputed to take her on her first morning, asked, “Who do I say the kid is?”

  Mag had thought of this. “You better say she’s Moran, like us. Make out she’s a relative like. We don’t want no nasty little kids askin’ no questions of her.”

  Butch began to scratch. “What about t’other name?”

  Mag was nonplussed. “I ain’t thought of that.”

  Psyche, who had been silent up to this time, astonished them by saying quite fiercely, “I got a first name. It’s writ plain on that there little dress I come in.”

  “We ain’t sure that that’s——” Mag began.

  “I’m sure!”

  “Now, look, kid, there’s no call to go gettin’ excited.”

  “I ain’t excited. I’m just sayin’ I got a name, that’s all.”

  Mag wavered, moved by the desperate insistence she saw in Psyche’s thin, brown face. “Well, you may be right, kid, but it ain’t no name nobody round here’s goin’ to recognize like.”

  “That don’t matter. I can spell it. I’ve learned it good.”

  “I ain’t goin’ spellin’ no names,” Butch said.

  Mag looked at him doubtfully. “You could, mebbe.”

  But Butch was for once not to be moved. “I ain’t goin’ up to no fancy-pants teacher an’ say I can’t say the kid’s name right. I’ll be buggered if I will.”

  Psyche pleaded and coaxed to no avail.

  “I ain’t agoin’ to make no more of a fool of myself than what God done a’ready,” he said stubbornly.

  Mag, eventually settling the problem, said, “Margaret’s a good name, kid, even if it’s my own. It ain’t goin’ to hurt you none to answer to Maggie.”

  “But I ain’t Maggie!”

  “You’ll get used to it,” Mag told her firmly. “See if you don’t.”

  Psyche had often seen the school, a one-storey, flat-roofed, brick building on the edge of the town, encircled by a bare expanse of sun-baked mud. A long plank walk led from the road to the front door and a blackened stone portico that failed to lend dignity to architecture depressing in its squat, four-square lack of imagination. Following Butch up the walk, concentrating on boards that lifted and fell under her reluctant feet, she tried unsuccessfully to overcome nervousness that made the palms of her hands sticky and the roof of her mouth dry and sore. It was early, and the barren playground was still deserted, but even so she could not raise her eyes from boards that rose and fell until, too soon, she found herself climbing four worn stone steps.

  It was dim in the entrance hall, and it smelled.

  Butch, if possible even more uneasy than Psyche, stood still and looked uncertainly around him. On his left, through an open door, he could see a large class-room; opposite him were two doors, side by side, labelled respectively, “Boys” and “Girls”; on his right was another class-room. Mag, coaching him carefully, had told him to go to the office. That there should be no office was a blow that left him floundering, incapable either of going on or of going back. He would have continued to stand there indefinitely if the heavy silence had not been broken by a short, dry cough from the class-room on the left.

  Clearing his throat loudly, he said, “Come on, kid. That’ll be Teacher.”

  Propelled by the shocking echoes of his own hoarse voice, as much as by his failing courage, he lumbered through the classroom doorway with Psyche close behind him.

  The next hour, culminating in a humiliation she would never forget, was one of the worst Psyche ever had to live through. Tongue-tied, she heard herself introduced.

  “This here’s Maggie Moran.”

  Dumbly she shook hands with the tall, spare woman who was to be her teacher. Agonized, she watched Butch leave, and then went to the desk assigned to her, at the back of the room. Haltingly she answered the questions that the tall woman asked her, knowing that each time she opened her mouth she was being further condemned by cold grey eyes that found her wanting in every possible way.

  But if this had been bad, how much worse it was to sit, biting her nails, while the room filled up with noisy, laughing children who, while seeming to ignore her, yet studied her with sly, curious glances, followed by spoken asides which, although she could not hear them, she knew instinctively were uncomplimentary. Only one of them spoke to her, a big black-haired girl of fourteen or fifteen.

  “Hello, who let you in?”

  The words were not unfriendly, but Psyche, although she wanted desperately to reply, was quite unable to utter a sound.

  “Snooty, huh?” said the girl. And the remark, falling across a momentary lull, was a brand Psyche was destined to carry for as long as she went to the school.

  “I gotta get outa here,” she thought incoherently. “I gotta get out. I can’t not bear it!” She had actually half risen from her seat when the sharp, peremptory period of a hand bell reduced the tumult of the previous moment to a stillness in which any sound or movement would have been so conspicuous she could not contemplate making one. Sinking back, her hands clenched beneath her desk, she sat rigidly staring at her pencil and writing block.

  “We will now repeat the Lord’s Prayer.”

  The prayer was repeated, exactly that and nothing more, by over sixty voices intoning the required phrases with an automatic, monotonous precision which robbed them not only of beauty but of meaning.

  “We will now sing the National Anthem.”

  Scrambling to her feet long after all the others had done so, Psyche, her cheeks flaming with embarrassment, for the first time heard vocal homage paid to her country.

  “We will now call the roll.”

  When her own turn came, Psyche knew precisely what was expected of her. As all the others before her had done, she had only to stand up, say ‘Here, ma’am’, and sit down again. It was perfectly simple.

  “Maggie Moran.”

  Psyche stood up.

  “Maggie Moran!”

  What combined folly and courage drove her to do what she did then, she would never know. “I ain’t—I ain’t Maggie. I’m P-S-Y-C-H-E.”

  The tittering of the class rose and swelled a
round her, beating in her ears like a flood-tide in which she wished she could drown, in which she could sink down and down, never to be seen again. Wave upon wave it rose, battering, suffocating, hurting as nothing had ever hurt before. When it receded, and finally died away, she was numb, cast up only half-conscious on a beach where nothing mattered any more, where a name that was not hers was no longer important.

  A voice she did not recognize as her own, said, “Here, ma’am.” And Maggie Moran sat down, insulated by shock from all further barbs.

  She was graded by age, regardless of the fact that she knew less than most of the kindergarten children. She was twelve, and therefore she belonged in the eighth grade. No other yardstick was employed. It was a perfidious system, but it would have been difficult to improve on it under the conditions that existed in the rural schools in that part of the world. The law of the land stipulated that all children must attend school with a fair degree of regularity until they reached the age of sixteen. The law did not, however, insist that they learn anything, nor did it make provision for enough funds to underwrite its own enforcements in a proper manner. The result was overcrowded, understaffed schools in which a teacher must attempt both to instruct and control as many as four or five grades in a single room. Split age groups, with the increased restlessness this would encourage, could not be tolerated, and individual attention was, of course, out of the question.

  No one ever failed a year. In order to make room at the bottom for the six-year-olds whom the law insisted must be taken in, classes moved up en masse every September with the heavy irresistibility of a steam-roller. Since everyone automatically “graduated” at sixteen if he so desired—and only a very few were ever undesirous of this distinction as soon as it became available—it actually mattered very little from what grade they graduated.

  In a community that recognized the mines as the East to which all faces turned, advanced learning, or, for that matter, learning of any kind, was a luxury unnecessary in the essential business of making a living. Neither the War of 1812 nor the Einstein theory were of any interest or intrinsic value to a man destined to spend the greater portion of his waking hours a hundred feet or more underground. That the rock wall at which he hacked was half as old as time meant nothing to him, made the quartz no less hard, his job no less back-breaking.

  Psyche, her ignorance mistaken for stupidity, was almost immediately classified as mentally retarded. Her burning anxiety to learn thwarted from the start, she withdrew into an impassive unresponsiveness.

  Her term reports were awful, but since neither Butch nor Mag could read the teacher’s handwriting, they got nothing from them other than the fact that she had passed. Unaware that everybody always passed, they were very pleased.

  “Good for you, kid,” Mag would say.

  And Butch’s comment was always the same. “The kid’s real smart, ain’t she?”

  Psyche never told them how unhappy she was at school. She never allowed them to guess that the boys and girls to whom she referred were not her friends, that she had no friends at all. For, her natural gaiety and friendliness disguised by her initial shyness, she was as great a social failure as an intellectual one. Eventually she got over the shyness, but by then it was too late to make successful advances to a group who had reached the uneasy, intuitive conclusion that she was, in some way they could not quite define, ‘different’. This very difference, for which she might have been persecuted, was fortunately it itself a protection. The clear blue eyes under the straight dark eyebrows were capable of communicating such cool contempt that most of the class, although they would never have admitted it, were more than a little afraid of her. Aloof and lonely, taking care never again to make a fool of herself in public, she somehow managed to create the impression that she ignored the others, rather than they her.

  They talked about her, but not to her.

  “That Maggie! I ain’t never seen nobody so stuck-up.”

  “Yeah, an’ what’s she got to be stuck-up about? Nothin’.”

  “You can say that again. Why, she ain’t even smart at her books.”

  “I bet that hair ain’t natural.”

  “An’ them airs she puts on, like she was the queen, or somethin’.”

  They said the same things over and over again, but they were never able to convince themselves of their truth. The blonde hair was natural, and they knew it. The straight, graceful carriage, and quiet refusal to be drawn into arguments where weight of numbers alone would defeat her, were not airs, but also natural, and they knew this too. With more insight than the teacher, they guessed at an intelligence far superior to their own.

  Baffled, irritated, made unsure of themselves by something beyond their comprehension, they kept their distance from a changeling who would gladly have given everything she possessed for a single friend—for someone, anyone, with whom she could share the lonely lunch hours, with whom she could exchange sandwiches, and gossip, and little jokes which would not need to be very funny. Someone who would smile at her when she came into the crowded, untidy cloak-room, who would linger to talk with her at the front door before she set out on her long walk home through the deserted slag hills.

  Without realizing that the protective wall she had built around herself was already unscalable, she went on hoping for a whole year that some miracle would produce this friend for whom she so longed. When she came back to school in September of her second year, she had given up any such hope, and, in so doing, became, if possible, even more unapproachable than before. Tall, unsmiling, and to all appearances offensively self-sufficient, she became accepted as a familiar part of the scene if in no other way.

  She learned to write, after a fashion, forming her words with a pathetic, cramped attempt at neatness. She picked up the rudiments of simple arithmetic, and some fragments of history which, with no basis of previous knowledge, she soon forgot. The one thing she learned to do well was to read, and this she did entirely on her own.

  Coincidence one day led her to open her book of Short Stories and Essays at a page from which the seniors were reading aloud. Mag had taught her just enough, combined with the little she had absorbed in the school, to enable her to follow what was being read, at first with great difficulty, and then with increasing ease. Shaping phrases and sentences under her breath, concentrating as she had never done before, in the space of a few months she became, and was aware of it, a better reader than any of the fifteen-year-olds to whom she listened so intently. The teacher failed to discover this accomplishment because she had long ago given up asking Psyche any questions at all, and no proof of it appeared in the poor written work which she was from time to time required to hand in. Certainly it produced no change in her way of speaking, for she never saw any real connection between the words she read and the distorted version of the King’s English which she was accustomed to using; they were, to her, simply two different languages.

  Excluded from active participation in either work or play, she fell back on the only thing left to her—the role of spectator. Sitting quietly in the back corner of the room to which she had been more or less permanently relegated, she watched—except when the top class was reading—all the time. It became an absorbing pastime, and, judge and jury both, she developed a calm, detached contempt for the weaknesses unconsciously displayed by nearly every one of her sixty-odd classmates.

  She learned to detect a lie almost before it was spoken. She soon could distinguish the difference between a genuine desire to learn and the slick imitation of the show-off who wanted only to be thought knowledgeable. When one of the boys began paying attention to one of the girls, she knew, almost at once, not only the exact nature of his intentions, but also the measure of success he would achieve. Although the bruises were invisible to her, she knew instinctively when a child had been whipped the night before. She saw friendships formed solely to gain an advantage, perhaps social advancement, perhaps protection, perhaps nothing more than the sharing of a lunch-box more appetizing
than the general run. She saw girls scream when pinched by the boys, and fail to run away. She knew, but never said, where most ‘missing’ articles could have been brought to light. With cool, disillusioned eyes, she saw the sins of an adult world in embryo.

  From all these things she drew conclusions, one-sided, but basically sound. However, if she had been called upon to state them in even the simplest language, she could not have done it. They became, for the time being, things she knew which must wait for additional maturity before they could be fully useful.

  That nearly all her observations were adverse was her unrecognized retaliation for being made an outcast. Her normal tendency to like people she satisfied by evolving the naïve theory that God put mostly bad people, and mostly good, in separate groupings so that they might be with their own kind. She pictured, in the fairy-tale ‘outside’, large concentrations of human beings activated at all times by only the highest ideals of thought and behaviour. In this way she comforted herself, and saved herself from bitterness, while continuing to dislike the school and every living thing in it. God, she reasoned, had not originally intended her to pass her life amongst these people, and, when He was less occupied, would undoubtedly put right the mistake. Meanwhile it was up to her to be patient.

  Two events alone broke the steady monotony of her second year at the school, both of them purely personal, and neither of them happy.

  The first occurred in late January when heavy snows made the slag impassable except for a narrow path beaten between the shack and the highway. Psyche, forced, as Butch was, to follow the open road and a route much longer than she usually took, dressed by lamplight, and set out while morning was still no more than a vague promise in the east, her lunch pail frozen to her mitten before the shack was out of sight. Warmly, if untidily, bundled up in thick layers of mismatched clothing, her feet protected by heavy fleece-lined boots, she never minded the cold no matter how low the thermometer dropped.