The Gerund

At seven o'clock on Treesong morning, twenty children sat down at twenty new benches in the old wash-house, and turned their faces up to Ione Fairlie all at once.

She had been ready for it. She had stood at the door for a quarter of an hour with her hand on the latch, saying to herself that it was only a room and that they were only children. She had walked to the desk with her chin up and her satchel under her arm. She had turned round, and opened her mouth to say good morning; and twenty faces had come up to meet her, small and large, clean and not quite clean, open as a field of flowers, and she had found that she could not say anything at all.

It was not the faces. It was the turning. It was the exact soft turn of a great many heads towards a single place in the room, and the silence after, and the sense of being the one lamp in a dark house; and for a moment she was not in the wash-house at all. She stood on a landing in a white dress, in a cold light, with her heart going like a bird's, and below her a whole green hall looked up. I thought I would like to be looked at, said a thin small voice somewhere at the back of her skull. But I didn't know it was like that.

"Miss," said a voice.

It was Marit. She sat in the front row, with her plait over her shoulder and her hands folded on the bench, and she had not moved; but she was looking, with her grave severe face, not at Ione, but a little above and to the left of her.

"We're looking at the board," said Marit. "Not at you."

Ione drew a breath.

She turned round. There was the blackboard, black and clean and enormous. She looked at it, and the twenty pairs of eyes went with hers, patiently, as sheep go with a dog, and rested on it; and she felt the ground come back under her feet.

"Thank you," she said. "That is exactly right."

"It's what Mr. Pike used to say," said Marit. "He said, Look at the board, and let the teacher breathe."

"Mr. Pike was a wise man."

"He had a whistle," said Dunny, with feeling.

That was the best of it.

She had a plan. It was one line long, and it said Introduction, and so she introduced herself. She said that her name was Miss Fairlie, and that she had been at the Academy of Letters, and that the Academy had been founded in the year 2411 by a company of scribes who held that a sentence was a house and that a good grammar was the roof. It was a speech that she had given to a hundred examiners in her head. She delivered it to twenty children in the clear, level, slightly breathless voice of a girl reading aloud at a funeral, and when she reached the end she saw that every single one of them was asleep with its eyes open.

"Are there any questions?" she said.

There was a long pause. In the second row a hand went up, a very small one.

"Yes, Tobbin?"

"Do you want your frog?" said Tobbin.

Ione stared at him. Tobbin was five. He had porridge on his collar from the morning, and he was gazing up at her with perfect and trustful candour; and he was pointing, with a round finger, at the drawer of her desk.

She opened it.

In the drawer, on a bed of damp moss, sat a frog. It was a small green frog of an extremely solid kind, and it looked up at her with a gold unwinking eye, and swelled its throat once, and said hrrrp.

A sound went through the benches like the first drop of a rainstorm. Nobody laughed. Every child in the room was suddenly and intensely engaged in not looking, as only children can do it, with the whole of their faces. Dunny had his hand in front of his mouth. The twins had gone crimson. At the back, Hob had folded his arms and gone very far away, with his eyes on the ceiling. In the front, Marit sat bolt upright, a monument of disapproval, and said nothing at all.

"He's a gift," said Tobbin, with great sweetness.

Ione looked at the frog. The frog looked at Ione.

Then she did something that was not in any plan. She reached into the drawer, and lifted the frog out in both hands, very gently, as she would have lifted a loaf, and held him up to the light, and examined his green and gold belly with a thoughtful and professional air.

"What is his name?" she said.

The room held its breath.

"Corbet," said Tobbin.

"Mr. Corbet," said Ione gravely. "I see. He seems to be in excellent health. I shall give him the window sill, where he will have the sun, and I should be obliged if everyone would be so kind as to remember that he is a member of the class." She carried him across the room, and set him on the broad sill, among the dust and the sunshine; and the frog sat down on the stone, and settled himself, and said hrrrp.

She did not know, then, what she had done. She knew only that Marit was staring at her with her mouth very slightly open, and that somebody at the back had begun to breathe in a curious squeaking way, as a person does who has been asked not to laugh at a funeral.

It was the only thing that went well that day.

By nine she had lost them over the parts of speech. By ten she had lost them over the verb. At half-past ten she wrote the word participle on the board and a boy of nine asked her, with real interest, whether it was catching. By noon she had been addressed as Mrs. Hale four times, once Mr. Pike, and once, by a small child who was evidently confused about the whole business, Mother; and when the stove had been fed for the sixth time by the tall boy in the scorched cuffs, who had volunteered for it at nine o'clock and had hardly left it since, she was wrung out like a cloth.

"Hob's very good with the stove," said Marit, kindly, at the door. She had stayed behind to collect the slates. "He doesn't like it when you ask people to read out. Mistress said we weren't to say."

"Oh," said Ione. "I see. I'm sorry. Thank you."

"It's all right, Miss," said Marit. "It's only Day One."

Day Two was worse.

It was worse in an instructive way. She had resolved overnight that she would be firm, because Mrs. Hale, who had cried, had been loved but not obeyed, and Mr. Pike, who had whistled, had been obeyed but not loved; and so she stood at the desk in a stiff straight line with her hands clasped behind her, and told them that she should expect silence. They gave it to her. They gave it with an air of such profound obedience that it was an hour before she understood that nobody was learning anything. At eight she set them to copy a paragraph. The twins changed places with a swiftness and a smoothness that would have done credit to a conjuror, and she spent twenty minutes trying to find out which one of them had done the copying, until one said, in a clear voice, "I'm Pell," and the other said, "No, I'm Pell," and both burst into tears of helpless laughter, and had to be sent to the pump. Dunny whistled through his teeth. Nan, in the third row, sang something under her breath, tunelessly, steadily, with her eyes on the window, and when asked to stop said, with an air of astonishment, that she had not known she was doing it. At eleven the Workshop, on a day that Dunny announced to the room as the Ironforge one, made a single deep clang like a dropped anvil; and the frog fell off the sill.

By noon she was in despair.

She sat on at the desk after the others had gone through to Elise, with her chin in her hand and the frog in her lap, and looked at the long empty room with its twenty benches. I have been trying, she thought, to be a teacher. It was quite plain. She had been trying to be a certain person: a firm and splendid person with her hands behind her back who stood in front of a blackboard and knew things; and it was not a person that she was. It was a costume. She had worn costumes before. She had worn a white one on a landing in the dark.

A child learns what you love, Elise had said, out loud.

"I don't know what I love," she said aloud, to the frog.

The frog considered it. Then it said hrrrp, with a certain finality, and went to sleep.

She went on sitting there, and as she sat the sun moved across the flags, and from the kitchen came the warm rise and fall of Elise's voice, and the small, heavy, helpless laughter of twenty children at the bit about the baker's wife; and it came to her, quite slowly, as it does, that she had not asked them a single question. She had told them things. She had set them things. She had not asked them what they knew.

When the class came back at two she was waiting on the front of the platform, sitting on the edge of the desk with her ankles crossed like a girl at a dance. She was not holding anything.

"I have a confession," she said.

They stared at her.

"I don't know how to do this. I have a certificate, and I know a great deal about grammar, and I have not the least idea how to teach it to you. It seems to me that I had better learn. So I should like you to teach me something." She looked along the rows. "Anything you know. Anything at all, that I do not. Who will go first?"

There was a very long silence.

And then, from the back of the room, a long, raw, rather hoarse voice said, "I can bank a stove."

It was Hob. He had not moved; he sat with his arms folded and his scorched cuffs and his big sullen hands; but he was looking straight at her, for the first time, and there was something fierce and uncertain in his face. "Anybody can make a fire," he said. "It's keeping it that's the thing. You don't want it hot. You want it low, and slow, and so it'll be there in the morning when you come down in the cold. You pack the ash round the coals, so, and shut the damper to a finger, and you leave it. It's not hard. Nobody does it right."

"Will you show me?" said Ione.

He got up. He walked down the aisle and across the platform, and knelt in front of the new black stove with its brass rail, and raked and banked it with long deft hands; and he said, as he worked, in a low steady rumble, ash, and ash, and ash, and the damper to a finger, until the fire sank in the grate to a fat red eye; and when he had done he sat back on his heels and looked at it, and a light of complete and sombre pride came into his face.

"There," said Hob. "That'll last till Windwhisper."

"It is beautiful," said Ione, and meant it.

After that they could not be stopped.

Dunny knew the bangs. It was his subject. He rose on the bench, with his gap-toothed whistle, and delivered it in order: Moonglow was a cough, a little one, to clear the throat; Starsight was a thump; Windwhisper was a proper bang, the one with the pigeons; Earthstrong was a rattle, the kind with a lot of small parts; Firespark was the long one, a hiss and then a pop; Watertide was a sort of wet slap that smelled of kettles; Treesong was a whoomph; Ironforge was the clang; Spiriteve was a double, one and then another a little behind, like a man who has dropped something and tries again; and Sunmorn was the big one, on the rest day, when the whole house shook, and the gnomes said that it was the machine having a lie-in. Nan sang her counting song, which was fourteen verses long and began One for the loaf and two for the stove, and which, Ione discovered, stopped at every ten and began again; so that when it was done, without a pencil, Nan had counted to a hundred and forty. The twins explained that there were two sure ways of telling them apart, and showed the first, which was that Pell had a freckle behind her left ear, and the second, which was that Posy had a freckle behind her right, and when it was pointed out that these were the same freckle the whole room fell about.

She wrote all of it on the board, in her small round clear hand, as it came: banking, damper to a finger, the nine bangs, the counting song, two freckles. When she turned round, the board was full from corner to corner, and twenty children were looking at it, and not at her, and there was a kind of astonished stillness in the room, as of people who have just been shown their own faces in a looking-glass and found that they were good ones.

"That," said Ione, "is a great deal of learning. You have taught me a stove, a calendar, a song, and the principle of the freckle. I had no idea. I should like to hear it all again tomorrow."

"All of it?" said Dunny.

"All of it. And then I shall tell you a thing."

"What thing?"

"A very dull one," said Ione. "It's called a gerund. I am afraid I love it."

Spiriteve began wet and ended gold.

It was the ninth of Sunpeak; the sky had cleared at seven; the long windows of the wash-house were open on a wet bright morning and the smell of the baker's wagon, which on Spiriteve brought the honey bun, the sticky one, that was eaten with the fingers and licked from them; and at twenty minutes to eleven, with the whole class sticky to the elbows and the frog on the sill, Ione stood in front of the blackboard with a piece of chalk, and wrote on it in large clear letters:

SWIMMING IS GOOD FOR YOU.

"What is the verb?" she said.

"Is," said Nan.

"And what is swimming?"

"It's a verb," said Dunny, with confidence. "It's a thing you do."

"It is a thing you do. Now: is it doing anything in this sentence? Is the sentence about someone swimming?"

"No," said Marit, slowly. "It's about swimming. It's the thing itself. It's like a, like a—"

"Like a noun," said Ione.

There was a pause in which one could hear the frog.

"It's a verb that acts like a noun," said Posy.

"It's a verb dressed up as a noun," said Pell.

"It's a gerund," said Ione, and the word came out of her in a rush of pure delight, so simply and unaffectedly that twenty heads came round at once; for she was smiling, and the smile took ten years off her. "That is all it is. A verb that has put on a noun's coat. Whistling is a gerund. Eating is a gerund. Banking a stove is a gerund. Who can give me a sentence?"

They gave her sentences. They gave her forty. Whistling is my best thing, said Dunny; Eating is the best part of Mistress Lili's, said Nan, and was cheered; Counting is easy if you do it in verses. Hob, who had gone to the stove, said from over there in his rumbling voice, "Banking is knowing when to stop," and then went very red and bent over the grate. Tobbin said, "Frog is good." "That is not a gerund, Tobbin," said Ione gently, "but it is true." Wick, at the back, with his jar on the bench, did not say anything; but she saw his lips move on a sentence, and a very small shy light go across his face, and settle there like a bird on a rail.

"Now," said Ione. "The wicked cousin."

She wrote on the board:

WALKING DOWN THE LANE, THE SUN WAS HOT.

"Who was walking?"

"The sun," said Dunny.

"The sun was walking down the lane?"

"With its hat," said Tobbin.

"With its hat," said Ione, and was obliged to turn and look hard at the window. "This is called a dangling participle. It is a modifier that has lost its subject. It is looking for someone to be, and it has taken the nearest thing, which happens to be the sun. Draw it for me."

They drew it. They had the slates, the twelve of them that had come in the box, and two to a slate, and the stubs of pencil on their threads; and in five minutes the room was full of suns. A sun with a stick and a pack. A sun with a hat, a long coat, a very sulky mouth. A sun, drawn by Tobbin, with legs like a spider's, clumping heavily down a lane with a lantern and a bag of buns. Marit drew a sun with a stern grey eye and a ruler, and held it up, and it was so exactly like Mistress Lili at a late supper that the room dissolved. Nan was laughing so hard that she had to put down her slate. Hob had come across, in the end, and was hanging over the bench with his big scorched hand over his mouth, shaking silently. And at the back, Wick held up his slate without a word: a sun walking down a lane with a candle in a jar.

She was laughing herself. She was holding the blackboard rail, with the chalk in her fist and the tears starting, and she thought, from a long way off, oh. This is what it is. She did not finish the thought.

It was a quarter to eleven by the Workshop's clock.

There was a pause in the room, a little one; one of those pauses that fall when a whole company has run out of breath at the same moment; and in it, from across the road, there came a sound like a very large man clearing his throat.

"That's the Spiriteve one," said Dunny, happily. "It's a double."

The first bang was soft. The second was not.

The wash-house rang like a bell. The windows shivered in their frames; the frog leaped from the sill and landed on Tobbin's head; the slates jumped on the benches; and from the wall behind Ione's shoulder, with a long slow tearing groan, the great black board came away from both of its nails together, and leaned out from the plaster, and hung for the space of a breath at a thoughtful angle, and fell flat on its face on the platform in a huge soft cloud of chalk.

Nobody breathed.

Ione stood in the white cloud with her arms out, like a woman in a snowstorm. There was chalk in her hair and on her collar and on her eyelashes. She looked down at the fallen board; she looked at the twenty faces in front of her, wide-eyed and white as dumplings, waiting; and every one of them was looking at her, and at nothing else, and she knew exactly what they were waiting for. It was the moment at which the sixth teacher went through the window.

She sneezed.

It was a small and rather elegant sneeze. Then she sneezed again, and then she sat down on the edge of the platform with chalk coming off her in puffs, and began to laugh. She laughed until she could not speak. And behind her, in a long ragged wave that began with Dunny and went down the row of benches like a fire in dry grass, twenty children laughed with her, and Marit, severe Marit, who had not smiled since Windwhisper, put her head down on her arms and rocked.

"I'm so sorry," said a small voice at the door.

It was a gnome. He stood in the doorway in a pair of goggles pushed up on his forehead, with singed grey hair standing up on end, a ledger the size of a bread-board under one arm and a sack over the other, and he was a good deal paler than the chalk. He was about four feet high. He was holding the sack against his chest, and his round face under the soot was crumpled with anguish.

"I'm so sorry," he said again. "It's a feature. It's only that it's, the second stage doesn't, it, I was told it would, I'll fix the board, I've men coming, they'll be here by one, we're so very very sorry. Is anybody hurt?"

"No," said Ione. She wiped her eyes. "Nobody is hurt. We have been learning about the participle."

"Oh," said the gnome. He looked at the board, and the chalk, and the twenty children in various stages of collapse, and he put the ledger down. "I have, um. I brought, because of the, we always bring something. After." He put his hand into the sack, and out of it, one by one, he drew a quantity of small round objects that glinted in the sun. They were gears. They were small brass gears, each the size of a crown, each with a ring of tiny teeth, each filed so smooth that the edges were soft; and he laid them out on the edge of the platform in a long bright row, twenty of them, and counted them aloud, with the slow lips of a man who is afraid of getting it wrong. "One for each of you. They were, um. They were the spares."

"Thank you, Mr. Tinkwick," said Marit, from her bench, in a muffled voice.

"I'm so sorry," said Tinkwick, and to his own evident astonishment began to cry, quietly, over his ledger.

The men came at one. They put up the board on bolts, with two braces, and a gnomish notice in neat square capitals that said PLEASE DO NOT LEAN ON THIS BOARD DURING BANGS; and afterward the children went through to Elise, with their brass gears clutched in their fists, and came back with them tied round their necks on bootlaces. Dunny's was twice as bright as anyone's. He had been polishing it.

At the end of the day, when the rest were gone, Marit stayed behind by the blackboard with a stub of chalk. She did not say anything. She reached up, as high as she could on her toes, to the very corner of the new black board where it met the brace, and wrote in thick white letters, DAY 3; and stood back, and looked at it; and then, rather severely, and without turning round, she said, "It isn't the record, Miss."

"No."

"It's only three."

"I know."

"But it's more than Miss Anselm," said Marit, and went out.

Ione sat on at the desk with the chalk-dust settling softly round her in the evening light. The frog was on the sill. The stove ticked, banked low and red. She sat with her hands in her lap and looked at those two words on the board, and the brace, and the small bright gear that someone had left on her desk, and she thought, with a sudden and quiet astonishment, that she had been looked at for a whole day, by twenty pairs of eyes; and that she had not once wanted it to stop, and had not once wanted it to go on, but had simply been there, which was a different matter altogether.

When she went up the stair, she was smiling. It was not the bright, brave, careful smile that she had been wearing since she crossed the High Road. It was crooked and tired, and had chalk at the corner, and she did not know she had it until she saw it in the little looking-glass on the washstand, and stood for a while, looking at it, with a kind of respect.