CHAPTER VIII

SABOTAGE

Sylvia and Judith walked to school in a profound silence.  Sylvia was shrinking with every nerve from the ordeal of facing again those four hundred hostile faces; from the new and painful relations with her playmates which lay before her.  She was now committed irrevocably to the cause of the Fingals, and she felt a terrified doubt of having enough moral strength to stick to that position.

For the moment the problem was settled by their arriving at the schoolhouse almost too late.  The lines were just marching into the building, and both girls barely slipped into their places in time.  Sylvia noticed with relief that Camilla was absent.

All the Five A girls had paper bags or pasteboard boxes, and in the air of the Five A cloakroom was a strong smell of vinegar.  Gretchen Schmidt’s pickles had begun to soak through the bag, and she borrowed the cover of a box to set them in.  These sounds and smells recalled the picnic to Sylvia’s mind, the picnic to which she had been looking forward with such inexpressible pleasure.  For an instant she was aghast to think that she had forgotten her bananas, tied up all ready at home on the sideboard.  But the next instant she thought sadly that she probably would not be welcome at the picnic.  She went to her seat and sat forlorn through the changing lessons of the afternoon.

The teacher ground out the half-hour lessons wearily, her eyes on the clock, as unaware of the crisis in her class as though she were in another planet.  At four o’clock Sylvia filed out with the other children to the cloakroom, but there was not the usual quick, practised grab, each for his own belongings.  The girls remained behind, exclaiming and lamenting.  Such a clamor arose that the teacher came hurrying in, anxious for the reputation for good behavior of her class.  Good behavior in the Washington Street School, as in a penitentiary, was gauged by the degree of silence and immobility achieved by the inmates.

The girls ran to Miss Miller, crying out, “Somebody’s stolen our lunches,—­we left them here—­all our boxes and things—­and they’re all gone—!”

Sylvia hung back in the door to the schoolroom, apart from the others, half relieved by the unexpected event which diverted attention from her.

One of the boys who had gone ahead in the line now came back, a large cucumber stuck in the corner of his mouth like a fat, green cigar.  He announced with evident satisfaction in the girls’ misfortune that the steps were strewn with pickles.  The bag must have burst entirely as they were being carried downstairs.  Gretchen Schmidt began to weep,—­“all them good pickles—!” One of the girls flew at the boy who brought the bad news.  “I just bet you did it yourself, Jimmy Weaver, you an’ Frank Kennedy.  You boys were mad anyhow because we didn’t ask you to come to the picnic.”