 | CHAPTER XI.
THE CRISIS. Oldtown folks |  |
11. CHAPTER XI.
THE CRISIS.
MATTERS between Miss Asphyxia and her little subject
began to show evident signs of approaching some crisis,
for which that valiant virgin was preparing herself with mind
resolved. It was one of her educational tactics that children, at
greater or less intervals, would require what she was wont to
speak of as good whippings, as a sort of constitutional stimulus
to start them in the ways of well-doing. As a school-teacher,
she was often fond of rehearsing her experiences, — how she had
her eye on Jim or Bob through weeks of growing carelessness
or obstinacy or rebellion, suffering the measure of iniquity gradually
to become full, until, in an awful hour, she pounced down on
the culprit in the very blossom of his sin, and gave him such a
lesson as he would remember, as she would assure him, the longest
day he had to live.
The burning of rebellious thoughts in the little breast, of internal
hatred and opposition, could not long go on without slight
whiffs of external smoke, such as mark the course of subterranean
fire. As the child grew more accustomed to Miss Asphyxia,
while her hatred of her increased, somewhat of that native hardihood
which had characterized her happier days returned; and
she began to use all the subtlety and secretiveness which belonged
to her feminine nature in contriving how not to do the
will of her tyrant, and yet not to seem designedly to oppose. It
really gave the child a new impulse in living to devise little plans
for annoying Miss Asphyxia without being herself detected. In
all her daily toils she made nice calculations how slow she could
possibly be, how blundering and awkward, without really bringing
on herself a punishment; and when an acute and capable
child turns all its faculties in such a direction, the results may be
very considerable.
Miss Asphyxia found many things going wrong in her establishment
in most unaccountable ways. One morning her sensibilities
were almost paralyzed, on opening her milk-room door, to
find there, with creamy whiskers, the venerable Tom, her own
model cat, — a beast who had grown up in the very sanctities of
household decorum, and whom she was sure she had herself shut
out of the house, with her usual punctuality, at nine o'clock the
evening before. She could not dream that he had been enticed
through Tina's window, caressed on her bed, and finally sped
stealthily on his mission of revenge, while the child returned to
her pillow to gloat over her success.
Miss Asphyxia also, in more than one instance, in her rapid
gyrations, knocked down and destroyed a valuable bit of pottery
or earthen-ware, that somehow had contrived to be stationed
exactly in the wind of her elbow or her hand. It was the more
vexatious because she broke them herself. And the child assumed
stupid innocence: “How could she know Miss Sphyxy
was coming that way?” or, “She did n't see her.” True, she
caught many a hasty cuff and sharp rebuke; but, with true
Indian spirit, she did not mind singeing her own fingers if she
only tortured her enemy.
It would be an endless task to describe the many vexations
that can be made to arise in the course of household experience
when there is a shrewd little elf watching with sharpened faculties
for every opportunity to inflict an annoyance or do a mischief.
In childhood the passions move with a simplicity of action unknown
to any other period of life, and a child's hatred and a
child's revenge have an intensity of bitterness entirely unalloyed
by moral considerations; and when a child is without an
object of affection, and feels itself unloved, its whole vigor of
being goes into the channels of hate.
Religious instruction, as imparted by Miss Asphyxia, had
small influence in restraining the immediate force of passion.
That “the law worketh wrath” is a maxim as old as the times
of the Apostles. The image of a dreadful Judge — a great God,
with ever-watchful eyes, that Miss Asphyxia told her about —
roused that combative element in the child's heart which says in
the little sceptic, “how does she know? She never saw him.”
Perhaps, after all, then, it might be only a fabrication of her
tyrant to frighten her into submission. There was a dear Father
that mamma used to tell her about; and perhaps he was the one,
after all. As for the bear story she had a private conversation
with Sol, and was relieved by his confident assurance that
there “had n't been no bears seen round in them parts these
ten year”; so that she was safe in that regard, even if she should
call Miss Asphyxia a bald-head, which she perfectly longed to do,
just to see what would come of it.
In like manner, though the story of Ananias and Sapphira,
struck down dead for lying, had been told her in forcible and
threatening tones, yet still the little sinner thought within herself
that such things must have ceased in our times, as she had told
more than one clever lie which neither Miss Asphyxia nor any
one else had found out.
In fact, the child considered herself and Miss Asphyxia as in
a state of warfare which suspends all moral rules. In the stories
of little girls who were taken captives by goblins or giants or
witches, she remembered many accounts of sagacious deceptions
which they had practised on their captors. Her very blood tingled
when she thought of the success of some of them, — how
Hensel and Grettel had heated an oven red-hot, and persuaded
the old witch to get into it by some cock-and-bull story of what
she would find there; and how, the minute she got in, they shut
up the oven door, and burnt her all up! Miss Asphyxia thought
the child a vexatious, careless, troublesome little baggage, it is
true; but if she could have looked into her heart and seen her
imaginings, she would probably have thought her a little fiend.
At last, one day, the smothered fire broke out. The child had
had a half-hour of holiday, and had made herself happy in it by
furbishing up her little bedroom. She had picked a peony, a
yellow lily, and one or two blue irises, from the spot of flowers
in the garden, and put them in a tin dipper on the table in her
room, and ranged around them her broken bits of china, her red
berries and fragments of glass, in various zigzags. The spirit
seen her brother make pretty garlands of oak-leaves; and, running
out to an oak hard by, she stripped off an apronful of the
leaves, and, sitting down in the kitchen door, began her attempts
to plait them into garlands. She grew good-natured and happy
as she wrought, and was beginning to find herself in charity even
with Miss Asphyxia, when down came that individual, broom in
hand, looking vengeful as those old Greek Furies who used to
haunt houses, testifying their wrath by violent sweeping.
“What under the canopy you up to now, making such a litter
on my kitchen floor?” she said. “Can't I leave you a minute
'thout your gettin' into some mischief, I want to know? Pick
'em up, every leaf of 'em, and carry 'em and throw 'em over the
fence; and don't you never let me find you bringing no such rubbish
into my kitchen agin!”
In this unlucky moment she turned, and, looking into the little
bedroom, whose door stood open, saw the arrangements there.
“What!” she said; “you been getting down the tin cup to
put your messes into? Take 'em all out!” she said, seizing the
flowers with a grasp that crumpled them, and throwing them into
the child's apron. “Take 'em away, every one of 'em! You 'd
get everything out of place, from one end of the house to the
other, if I did n't watch you!” And forthwith she swept off the
child's treasures into her dust-pan.
In a moment all the smothered wrath of weeks blazed up in
the little soul. She looked as if a fire had been kindled in her
which reddened her cheeks and burned in her eyes; and, rushing
blindly at Miss Asphyxia, she cried, “You are a wicked woman,
a hateful old witch, and I hate you!”
“Hity-tity! I thought I should have to give you a lesson
before long, and so I shall,” said Miss Asphyxia, seizing her with
stern determination. “You 've needed a good sound whipping
for a long time, miss, and you are going to get it now. I 'll whip
you so that you'll remember it, I 'll promise you.”
And Miss Asphyxia kept her word, though the child, in the
fury of despair, fought her with tooth and nail, and proved herself
quite a dangerous little animal; but at length strength got
culprit was put to bed without her supper.
In those days the literal use of the rod in the education of children
was considered as a direct Bible teaching. The wisest, the
most loving parent felt bound to it in many cases, even though
every stroke cut into his own heart. The laws of New England
allowed masters to correct their apprentices, and teachers their
pupils, — and even the public whipping-post was an institution of
New England towns. It is not to be supposed, therefore, that
Miss Asphyxia regarded herself otherwise than as thoroughly
performing a most necessary duty. She was as ignorant of the
blind agony of mingled shame, wrath, sense of degradation, and
burning for revenge, which had been excited by her measures, as
the icy east wind of Boston flats is of the stinging and shivering
it causes in its course. Is it the wind's fault if your nose is
frozen? There is not much danger in these days that such measures
will be the fashionable ones in the bringing up of children.
But there is a class of coldly-conscientious, severe persons, who
still, as a matter of duty and conscience, justify measures like
these in education. They, at all events, are the ones who ought
to be forbidden to use them, and whose use of them with children
too often proves a soul-murder, — a dispensation of wrath
and death. Such a person is commonly both obtuse in sensibility
and unimaginative in temperament; but if his imagination could
once be thoroughly enlightened to see the fiend-like passions, the
terrific convulsions, which are roused in a child's soul by the irritation
and degradation of such correction, he would shrink back
appalled. With sensitive children left in the hands of stolid and
unsympathizing force, such convulsions and mental agonies often
are the beginning of a sort of slow moral insanity which gradually
destroys all that is good in the soul. Such was the danger
now hanging over the hapless little one whom a dying mother
had left to God. Is there no stirring among the angel wings on
her behalf?
As the child lay sobbing in a little convulsed heap in her bed,
a hard, horny hand put back the curtain of the window, and the
child felt something thrown on the bed. It was Sol, who, on
whole story, and who, as a matter of course, sympathized entirely
with the child. He had contrived to slip a doughnut into his
pocket, when his hostess was looking the other way. When the
child rose up in the bed and showed her swelled and tear-stained
face, Sol whispered: `There 's a doughnut I saved for ye. Darn
her pictur'! Don't dare say a word, ye know. She 'll hear me.”
“O Sol, can't you get Harry to come here and see me?” said
the child, in an earnest whisper.
“Yes, I 'll get him, if I have to go to thunder for 't,” said Sol.
“You jest lie down now, there 's a good girl, and I 'll work it, —
ye see if I don't. To-morrow I 'll make her go off to the
store, and I 'll get him down here, you see if I don't. It 's a tarnal
shame; that 'ere critter ain't got no more bowels than a file.”
The child, however, was comforted, and actually went to sleep
hugging the doughnut. She felt as if she loved Sol, and said so
to the doughnut many times, — although he had great horny fists,
and eyes like oxen. With these, he had a heart in his bosom,
and the child loved him.
| CHAPTER XI.
THE CRISIS. Oldtown folks | |