CHAPTER XXII

MRS. WAVERLEE’S SCHOOL

Old Czarina, who came from Russia, says the most wonderful thing to her in this Green Hill district, is the school for children in Neighbourhood Hall.

This is the building that master and Mr. Bonstone put up on the village square. It is a big white erection with colonial pillars and plenty of verandas, and it has a garden round it, and a playground for little children, and inside is a library, a restaurant, a swimming pool, a pretty parlour where young people can dance and play games, and a big hall where moving pictures are given.

The country people just pour into it in the evening. Every one pays five cents, and after a certain length of time, the village will own the whole place, for Mr. Bonstone and my master believe in public ownership of public amusements.

One rule of the moving picture hall delights us dogs greatly. No trainer of animals can ever exhibit his creatures there. That is in the charter.

One good-sized room in the hall was reserved for a school for the children of the village, and Mrs. Waverlee is their teacher.

To come back to Czarina. She says that if all children in Russia could have such a teacher as Mrs. Waverlee, there would not be so much misery among them. She says that in her country, great pains is taken with the education of the children of the rich. They are made to speak French, and if a child forgets and addresses the mother in Russian, he or she is made to say the sentence over again in French, and sometimes in English, for they have governesses and nurses of different nationalities.

“In this wonderful country of America,” says Czarina, “you educate everybody. I was amazed to see a little Russian Jewess with her arms round Mrs. Waverlee’s neck the other day. In her own country, the child would be kept down, and if she had a teacher, would not dare to embrace her. Imagine the delight of her parents, at having a rich, cultured woman like Mrs. Waverlee devoting herself to the education of their child.”

All the dogs love Mrs. Waverlee, but Gringo is her stoutest admirer, partly on account of the English blood in his veins, and he often runs down to her school and calls on her, or visits her in the pretty cottage in which she lives with Egbert.

She welcomes any well-behaved dog to her school, and the other day Gringo and I sauntered down to the village and approached Neighbourhood Hall.

It was a lovely day, and the doors were all wide open. We trotted across the tennis court, and the place where the boys and girls play basket-ball, to the garden at the back of the hall.

There is a big patch of greensward there, with a pond in the middle, where some white ducks, pets of the children, are always paddling about.

The children were all out on the grass, the most of them with bare feet.

When Mrs. Waverlee caught sight of us, she called with her pretty English accent, “Good morning, dogs, come to me.”

We walked toward her, Gringo with his queer sidewise gait like that of a racking horse. He never picks up his paws, the way a fox-terrier does.

“How fortunate,” exclaimed Mrs. Waverlee, as we lay down on the grass beside her. “Our lesson this morning is on the dog, and I had not a single dog caller. Now, children, do these two friends of mine suggest anything?”

“Tell us about bulldogs, please,” the most of them cried. Two little girls were for fox-terriers, but they were in the minority.

Some people blame Mrs. Waverlee because she allows the children to follow their own bent so much. One day, before the war closed, I heard her say to a lady, “Would it not be cruel when these little creatures come to school, bursting with questions about affairs in Europe that they hear you older ones discussing, for me to pin them down to a lesson in grammar, for example? No, I find out which way their minds lead me, and I follow it. Mornings when they want to know how the Germans and the Allies are getting on, I spread out a map on the grass and give them a united geography, history and peace lesson.”

Mrs. Waverlee shut her eyes, as she spoke. No one knew what agony it cost her to discuss the war, but she was not a woman to dodge her duty. She met it squarely in the face.

The lady who was criticising her, said with reluctant admiration, “My boy certainly does display an unusual knowledge of current events, but I am conservative in my ideas, and would like him brought up along old lines.”

“Then you must take him from here,” said Mrs. Waverlee sweetly. “The best and newest in an educational way is what Mr. Bonstone and Mr. Granton insist on.”

The lady didn’t take her son away, and a little later I heard her gushing to Mrs. Bonstone over the school.

“I never heard of anything like it,” she said. “The other day my husband brought home to dinner a distinguished Swiss scholar. When my Frankie heard our guest was from Switzerland, he ran to him, climbed on his knee, and asked him the most intelligent questions about his own country. He knew about the different cantons, the fine system of military service, the high mountains, the villages in the cup-like valleys, the big hotels, the peasants, the German-Swiss and the French-Swiss, and the coolness between them that the war has brought to a close, and he even yodelled for Monsieur de la Bontaine who is French-Swiss. The man was in an ecstasy. He pressed my child to his heart; he exclaimed, ‘Madame, I have not heard any grown man or woman talk in so picturesque a way about my country, since I came to America. It is a marvel. When did you have him in Switzerland?’

“I never had him there, I told him, and at first he could scarcely believe me. Frankie came to my assistance. ‘Mrs. Waverlee makes a country out in the garden,’ he said. ‘We have sand, and toy trees, and houses, and men and women, and stones, and we build mountains and make villages and forests, and then we go in the big hall, and see the moving pictures of it. Oh! it is great fun.’

“Monsieur de la Bontaine asked permission to visit the school, and he quite fell in love with Mrs. Waverlee. No, I shall not take Frankie away. I am going to give Mrs. Waverlee five hundred dollars to spend on further equipment for the school.”

Mrs. Bonstone was enchanted, and told her husband and my master how well their scheme was working out.

Master sighed. He was never satisfied with what he had done. He was always looking ahead. “Oh! for such a school for every young child in New York,” he said.

Now, to stop wandering, and go back to the day of our call--Gringo often says, “Boy, you are an A number one dog, but you reminisce too much”--Mrs. Waverlee put him up on the top of a box, then didn’t she exhaust the bulldog subject. She went away back to the days in old England, when cruel sports flourished. She told how men can take breeds of animals and birds and change them. The bulldog was inbred, until they got an animal perfectly adapted to the sport of bull-baiting.

She had some of the boys wheel out-of-doors an almost life-sized cow that is part of the school plant. She opened Gringo’s mouth, and the old fellow rolled his eyes kindly, while she showed the vise-like construction of his jaws. Then she asked him if he would make a spring at the cow, to show the children how the ancient bulldog used to leap at the bull’s head, and hold on by his teeth.

Gringo crooked his hind legs, gave one of his cat leaps, and landed on the cow’s upper lip. I don’t know what that old cow was made of, but there Gringo hung, and Mrs. Waverlee showed the children how his lay-back nose enabled him to breathe, while he retained his grip.

Bye and bye, the lip broke off, and then some of the children cried.

“This is too realistic,” said Mrs. Waverlee, “but the cow is not hurt, and the wicked sport of bull-baiting is all over.”

I may say, in passing, that some people blame Mrs. Waverlee because she does not keep everything painful from the children.

“I do not wish to make them soft,” she says with flashing eyes. “Evil and suffering are all about them. They must have some acquaintance with them in order to be able to overcome them. I make my own boy sit in school beside a beautiful and innocent German lad, to teach him to overcome his hatred for the nation.”

After the cow had been wheeled away, and her broken nose hidden in a young lilac bush, Mrs. Waverlee said, “Now, let us examine doggie’s points.”

I opened my eyes. I didn’t know she knew so much about dogs. She made Gringo walk away from her, and toward her, and she felt his back and his head, and had him sit down and get up, and she turned over his rose ears to show the children the pink lining, and pinched his brisket, and lifted his feet to see if they were sound, showed the children the set-out of the shoulders that enabled a bulldog to crouch low between the horns of an angry bull who tried to gore him. Then she explained that sometimes twenty or thirty dogs would be killed before the bull could be thrown.

That was news to me, and I whispered to Gringo, “I didn’t know you actually had to throw the bull.”

“Certainly,” he replied, “a heavy dog with a good grip could do it easily, if he knew how.”

After Mrs. Waverlee penalised Gringo slightly, because the wheel of his back wasn’t quite perfect, he stepped off the box, and everybody went home to lunch.

Mrs. Waverlee invited Gringo and me to accompany her and Egbert to their cottage, and we had a fine lunch with Patsie, Egbert’s fox-terrier who had been confined to the house with a sore paw. They had a lovely little cottage, but it had a small garden only. One day I heard Mrs. Bonstone, who has become very intimate with Mrs. Waverlee, say to her, “Bretwalda, you are a rich woman. Why do you not buy a larger place than this?”

“Why should I?” said Mrs. Waverlee indifferently. “I have Neighbourhood Hall close by, and the river and the meadows are open to me, and the lanes and high-road, and the pretty winding village street. It is all mine.”

“You queer creature,” said Mrs. Bonstone, but her tone was admiring.

Mrs. Waverlee glanced up at the sky with her strange other-world look. I don’t believe anything in this world counts much with her, except getting human beings ready to go to the next one.

Shall I be there, oh! shall I be there with my dear master? just burst from my dog-heart, one day when I was sitting watching her as she gazed up at the sky.

We were all alone, and that clairvoyante, beautiful woman understood me.

“Dog,” she said with exquisite gentleness, as she laid her hand on my head, “do you think the Creator of this marvellous universe, would ever destroy anything utterly, in which he had placed the spark of life? No--we shall all live again--purified, immortalised, made perfect.”

I licked all the dust off her pretty feet. In her own garden, she wore sandals and no stockings. I wished there was something hard I could do for her--I adore her.