She, as teacher, must bring them all as scholars, into
subjection. And this she was going to do. All else she would
forsake. She had become hard and impersonal, almost avengeful on
herself as well as on them, since the stone throwing. She did
not want to be a person, to be herself any more, after such
humiliation. She would assert herself for mastery, be only
teacher. She was set now. She was going to fight and subdue.
She knew by now her enemies in the class. The one she hated
most was Williams. He was a sort of defective, not bad enough to
be so classed. He could read with fluency, and had plenty of
cunning intelligence. But he could not keep still. And he had a
kind of sickness very repulsive to a sensitive girl, something
cunning and etiolated and degenerate. Once he had thrown an
ink-well at her, in one of his mad little rages. Twice he had
run home out of class. He was a well-known character.
And he grinned up his sleeve at this girl-teacher, sometimes
hanging round her to fawn on her. But this made her dislike him
more. He had a kind of leech-like power.
From one of the children she took a supple cane, and this she
determined to use when real occasion came. One morning, at
composition, she said to the boy Williams: "Why have you made this blot?"
"Please, miss, it fell off my pen," he whined out, in the
mocking voice that he was so clever in using. The boys near
snorted with laughter. For Williams was an actor, he could
tickle the feelings of his hearers subtly. Particularly he could
tickle the children with him into ridiculing his teacher, or
indeed, any authority of which he was not afraid. He had that
peculiar gaol instinct.
"Then you must stay in and finish another page of
composition," said the teacher.
This was against her usual sense of justice, and the boy
resented it derisively. At twelve o'clock she caught him
slinking out.
"Williams, sit down," she said.
And there she sat, and there he sat, alone, opposite to her,
on the back desk, looking up at her with his furtive eyes every
minute.
"Please, miss, I've got to go an errand," he called out
insolently.
"Bring me your book," said Ursula.
The boy came out, flapping his book along the desks. He had
not written a line.
"Go back and do the writing you have to do," said Ursula. And
she sat at her desk, trying to correct books. She was trembling
and upset. And for an hour the miserable boy writhed and grinned
in his seat. At the end of that time he had done five lines.
"As it is so late now," said Ursula, "you will finish the
rest this evening."