“No.”
“Why don’t you know?”
“I ain’t been taught.”
He swung round to the teacher, disappointment he would not admit to himself making his tone sharper than it had been. “Why is this girl in the ninth grade when she appears to know less than one of the beginners?”
The teacher, feeling, in this instance at least, on firm ground, said, “She’s retarded. We move the retarded ones up as a matter of form so they won’t feel too inferior.”
Psyche, forgetting the defensive caution which had governed her every move since the horrible blunder of her first day, conscious of nothing but pure, blinding rage, broke out of her shell with the force of an explosion.
Stamping her foot, her eyes flashing, she cried, “I ain’t retarded! I ain’t inferior! Do you hear me—I ain’t inferior to no one!”
A sigh, like a gust of wind, swept across the room as all eyes turned to this self-elected scapegoat.
“Sit down, Maggie!” The teacher’s voice echoed the cruel relief on more than sixty faces. By comparison their faults were now negligible. They were safe again.
“Not till he knows I ain’t retarded!”
“Maggie! Do as I say. At once.”
“No!”
The inspector, on the verge of reinforcing the teacher’s command, paused, and, thick eyebrows frowning above piercing eyes, looked slowly around the room. He was an imaginative man, and for a moment he felt as if he stood on the edge of a dark wood watching a pack of wolves close in on a young doe at bay.
“Maggie.” He spoke to her, and to her alone.
Psyche, meeting his direct, enquiring gaze, knew that if she could justify herself she had found a friend. Her knees suddenly weak, she supported herself against the wall, and waited mutely for him to go on.
“Maggie—is there anything you’ve learned that you can tell me about? Anything at all. It doesn’t matter what it is.”
“I—I can read—real good.”
There was an audible snort from one of the boys. Psyche, hearing it, stopped trembling. “I can read better nor anybody in this school,” she said decisively.
“This is absurd!” the teacher put in furiously. “She can’t read at all. I tell you the girl’s simple.”
The inspector ignored her. “I would like you to get out your book, choose a story, and read it to me, if you will, Maggie.”
Psyche leaned forward, lifted the lid of her desk with steady hands, and took out a book. The pages were thick and dog-eared from much handling, but she leafed through them swiftly, knowing just what she sought for. Then, looking up with an astonishing, gamin smile, she said, “You don’t need to be scairt. I can do it. I’ve chose The Doll’s House by Katherine Mansfield. It ain’t the hardest story in the book, but I likes it the best.”
When he was a tired old man, with few illusions left, the inspector would still be able to recall the sound of a husky young voice that mourned the lot of the Kelvey children shunned by their playmates; that comprehended the magic of a single, stolen glimpse at a small doll’s lamp; that saved itself from what might have been a wooden parroting of words and phrases by its sympathy with a theme only too well understood.
Although it was obvious to him that she did not know the meaning of much that she was reading, she was still, as she herself had said, a better reader than anyone else in the school. He let his glance rove over a class whose frozen immobility made it plain that they thought themselves exposed to something very close to witchcraft, and knew he was witnessing a Pyrrhic victory.
When she had finished, he said, “You did that very well, Maggie.” He spoke quietly, and without emphasis. Still quietly, he said, “The class is dismissed for the rest of the day.”
Briefly a thick silence held, then, with a clatter and scramble, they escaped, crowding each other at the doorway, their voices rising in a shrill babble of comment as soon as they cleared the threshold. Only a few of the smallest and slowest noticed that Psyche had been called up to the desk, for she was, as always, the last to leave the room.
The inspector turned to the teacher. “I would like to see you here after lunch. Would two o’clock suit you?”
The teacher, dismissed almost as summarily as her pupils had been, rose stiffly. Suppressing her outrage and anger as well as she could, she said shortly, “I shall be here at two precisely.”
After she had gone, the inspector looked up at Psyche with dark eyes which, though unsmiling, were very kind. “How old are you, Maggie?”
“Fourteen, goin’ on fifteen next fall.”
“How long have you been going to school?”
“I begun last year.”
“Why didn’t you begin sooner?”
“I dunno. I guess my folks didn’t give it no thought afore then.”
The inspector tapped the desk absently with the pencil he held. “You want to learn, don’t you?”
“More’n anythin’ in the world,” Psyche told him simply.
“Yes, I think you’ve given proof of that.” He looked out of the window at slag hills bathed in noon-day sunlight, and knew bitterly that there was little or nothing he could do for her. He could, and would, recommend that the teacher be replaced, but it was unlikely any change could be made under a year, and even a really conscientious teacher would be too heavily burdened to have much time to spare for a girl who would, by local standards, be almost ready to ‘graduate’.
“Look,” he said abruptly, “I can’t help you as I would like to. All I can do is to give you two pieces of advice. The first is to get away from this place as soon as you are old enough. The second is to read, meanwhile, anything you can lay your hands on, but you must do this intelligently. To-day you gave evidence of a good ear, and an excellent memory, but half the time you didn’t know what you were saying, did you?”
“Well—mebbe not exactly.”
The man smiled. “In future you must see that you know exactly. Don’t ever read anything again without a dictionary beside you. Look up every single word, and if the meaning is explained in words you don’t fully understand, then look up those words too.”
Psyche dropped her eyes, and slowly pleating and unpleating a fold in the skirt of her dress, said, “I—I ain’t got no dictionary.”
“Isn’t there one here in the classroom?”
“Yeah, but I ain’t allowed to use it. Only the kids what Teacher thinks is bright is allowed to use it for fear it’ll get worn out.”
“Good God!” Pulling a heavy briefcase across the desk, he opened it, searched its contents, and produced a small green-bound volume which he held out to her. “My father gave me this on my twelfth birthday. It is now yours.”
“Oh—no!” Psyche said, swiftly putting her hands behind her back. “No—I can’t. Thank you, thank you—but I can’t——”
“On the contrary,” the man said, “you can’t refuse it. And all the thanks I want is the certainty that you will use it, and use it often.” Getting up, he came around the desk, and, disengaging her hands, placed the dictionary in them. “Run along now. And— good luck.”
That night Psyche slept with the small green book under her pillow, and even after she had blown out her candle she could still see, as plainly as when she had had it in front of her, a fly-leaf with two names on it; one written in ink, a dark, forceful script; the other inscribed with pencil in awkward block letters—Psyche.
It became, in the following weeks, a talisman without which she might not have been able to endure the vindictive persecution of a teacher who, knowing her days were numbered, chose her as an object on which to vent her fear and malice.
Whenever anyone failed to answer a question, Psyche would be called upon. “Perhaps Maggie can give us the answer. Maggie!”
A dozen times a day she was forced to stand up and underline her own ignorance with the only answer possible. “I dunno.”
Bearing it with stoic composure, keeping her temper, she eventually found herself left alon
e again in her corner, free to read and scrawl out words which she would look up later in a dictionary she never took the risk of bringing to school.
Sharon pulled her grey-squirrel coat more closely around her. On this sunless November afternoon the streets were cold, and she had already three times passed the shop that she could not quite find courage enough to enter. The pattern of the thing she was forcing herself to do was not a new one, but repetition made it no easier. Across the years the shops had varied, as had her purchases, but it had always been in November because a birthday inevitably falls on the same date.
Circling the block again, she told herself: “I won’t think about what I am doing until 1 am inside and it’s too late to run away. I’ll think about Dwight, about going south after Christmas—about anything else, until a saleswoman is beside me, asking me what I want.”
“Has madam been waited on?”
The hot, scented atmosphere, after the sharp outside air, made Sharon feel a little sick. “No,” she said, “no one is waiting on me.”
“Were you looking for something for yourself?”
“I want a party dress for a fifteen-year-old girl,” Sharon said steadily. “Blue, or perhaps rose colour, but not too unsophisticated. Size fourteen.”
“Would you please come this way, madam.”
Passing a wall of mirrors, Sharon saw her own reflection, and thought, I look perfectly natural.
The saleswoman paused before a glass case. “I have something here which I think might be just what you are looking for, madam, if she’s at all like you. Does she resemble you?”
“I don’t know,” Sharon said bleakly. Then, catching sight of the woman’s blank expression, she added coolly, “It’s difficult to see oneself in one’s daughter.”
Twenty minutes later she sat in her car, a grey-and-silver dress box beside her, and knew that she was not fit to drive home at once. With shaking fingers she lit a cigarette, and stared through the windshield at a busy downtown street that she did not see at all. Instead she saw a lair-haired girl, tall and slender, dancing with partner after eager partner, her cheeks, flushed with happiness, almost the same colour as the dress that had pleased her so much.
5
IT was a sunless November afternoon when psyche turned her back on the dirty red-brick schoolhouse for—although she did not know it—the last time. Heavy clouds formed a Grey gothic arch across the sky from horizon to horizon, creating a false twilight that had nothing of night in it, yet that seemed to have severed any true relation with day. And all across the colourless, devastated landscape there lay a windless hush as complete as any that might prevail in the frozen tundras further to the north.
When the last mean fringes of the town dropped away behind her, she quickened her pace, and shivering a little with the cold, pulled her worn jacket more closely around her.
Normally she found nothing to alarm her in the lonely walk through the slag hills; rather she drew assurance from the thought that the very emptiness of the route she travelled robbed it of any personal threat, made unlikely an encounter of any kind. But to-day a vague sense of apprehension caused her to hesitate at the place where she was accustomed to leave the road for the trackless desolation of the slag. She could, she knew, continue to follow the highway to within two hundred yards of the shack as she did in the wintertime, but this would mean adding nearly two miles to the distance she must cover.
“I ain’t got nothin’ to worry me,” she murmured to herself, and, resolutely turning away from the road, set off across the tarnished undulations of a desert in its own way as remote as the central wastes of the Sahara. Like any nomad Bedouin, born and bred amongst uncharted sands, she went into the arid sameness of slopes and gullies, endlessly repeated, without need of direction from sun, or moon, or stars.
Before the road was lost from sight entirely, she paused at the crest of a bare rise to glance back over her shoulder, and suddenly her nebulous uneasiness became a solid core of raw terror.
They had already turned off the road in her wake, two tall, strong-muscled youths, moving at an easy lope just short of running.
Psyche, good vision enabling her to recognize them instantly, knew as instantly what their purpose was in following her, and the exact manner in which they would carry it out. Whispers overheard in a dingy cloak-room; a girl who had left school without warning, and had not returned; her own acute, long-term observation of these two—all these things combined to give her knowledge that was no less terrifying because it lacked any real understanding.
Nausea, born of her own overwhelming fear, held her rigid on the summit of the blackened hillock, a slender, defenseless figure sharply silhouetted against a leaden sky. Then, as though released from an invisible catapult, she wheeled and threw herself headlong down the farther side of the slope toward a depression which, angling off to the right, led into a winding trough more than a mile long. At the end of this trough there was a series of haphazard climbs and descents where, if she could only outdistance them on the level, she might hope to shake them off just long enough to reach the shack and safety.
Her breath coming in short, harsh gasps, she ran for perhaps a quarter of a mile before she dared to look back. A single, rasping sob broke from her. Running side by side, in a silence more deadly than any uttered sound could have been, her pursuers were closing in on her with terrible rapidity. She forced herself to a spurt of speed which turned her whole body into a fiery lance of pain. Bright sparks jumped before her eyes, and her teeth, cutting into her lower lip, brought the warm taste of blood onto her dry tongue.
She was no more than half-way along the length of the trough when she stumbled. She scarcely felt the sharp impact of her knees on the rough ground. Struggling to her feet, she tried to run again while she muttered incoherently. “They ain’t gonna touch me—ain’t gonna touch—they ain’t”
The strong jerk of cruel fingers bit into her shoulder, almost lifting her off her feet. Swung round on her own momentum, she sensed rather than saw a hulking figure which seemed to tower over her, blotting out the grey ugliness of the slag with its own far uglier intent. Beyond thought or reason, for the moment scarcely sane, she kicked out with all the strength she had, while scream after scream, shrill and inhuman, tore from her restricted throat.
The youth who had caught her doubled up and dropped to the ground, writhing in agony. The other lunged too fast for her to kick again, and she was borne down, fighting like a wildcat, under a weight almost twice as great as her own. Clawing and spitting, primitive in her savage resistence, she heard neither the groans of one, nor the grating voice of the other, saying, “Shut up, you little bitch, or, by Jesus, I’ll kill you!” All she heard was the high, piercing rhythm of her own screams, vibrating through her skull, drowning out everything but their own soul-shattering echoes.
Butch, a leviathan forging steadily toward its home port on a course where no other craft ever challenged its right of way, came to a sudden ponderous anchorage in a spot where he had never previously found cause to halt before. All around him rose dark ramparts, lifeless and cold, but from close at hand there came to his ears a sound so anguished in its pain and terror that the sweat sprang out on his low forehead, and his great barrel of a chest swelled with the furious intake of his breath. Turning in his tracks, he plunged forward with a wordless roar in the direction from which the sound came.
To the two youths—one in the act of pulling himself groggily upright, murder in his small eyes; the other tearing Psyche’s skirt from her while he brought an open hand down over her mouth with brutal force—the big man was an appalling sight as he appeared over the ridge above them. A giant resurrected from the past, his huge arms already reaching out to crush them, his deep voice thundering his terrible wrath, he bore down upon them as if his sole thought was their utter annihilation.
The first of the attackers, forgetful of pain which was still excruciating, turned and fled. The second, scrambling to his feet, tripping clumsily over
the girl in his awful haste, was too slow to escape. Even as he started to run, he was picked up bodily and hurled through the air, landing more than ten feet away with a sickening thud, to lie where he fell until nightfall when, one arm dangling from a smashed shoulder, he staggered away after the companion who had deserted him.
That he did not die, trampled to death under the enormous boots of an avenger who had no mercy, was a debt he owed to Psyche.
Butch, rage a red mist before his eyes, swayed for a full minute between finishing the job he had begun, and going to Psyche who, screaming no longer, crouched on the ground, twitching convulsively. His anxiety overcoming his fury, he went to her, and, dropping to his knees beside her, put an immense arm around her shaking shoulders.
“You’re all right, kid. Butch is here. They won’t try to hurt you no more. You hear me, kid? Butch got to you in time. You’re all right. You don’t need to worry no more.”
Over and over again he repeated his inarticulate reassurances until, at last, Psyche raised her white, bruised face from her hands, and looked up at him.
Butch, telling Mag about it later, made no effort to keep the pride and wonder out of his voice when he reached this point in his recital. “An’ you know what the kid did then, Mag? She smiled, an honest-to-God smile, an’ she says, ‘Butch,’ she says, ‘you don’t need to worry none over me. I’m okay now.’ An’ comin’ home she wouldn’t let me carry her nor nothin’. I’m tellin’ you, Mag, that’s the best an’ bravest kid I ever seen.”
“You’re right about that. But it wouldn’t have done her no good if you hadn’t of come along,” Mag said soberly.
“Why do you reckon they picked on our kid? She ain’t even growed proper.”
The wisdom of the ages was in Mag’s slow reply. “She may be kinda skinny-like, but the kid’s got somethin’—somethin’ that ain’t gonna bring her all joy.”
Mag sat up that night by Psyche’s bedside.
“She won’t sleep the night out,” she told Butch. “She’ll wake an’ mebbeneed somebody.”
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