“Bluh.”

“What? Speak up. What do you say?”

“Yes, Miss McGladdery.”

McNab would slink to his seat, as boys held hands in front of their mouths, and girls, greatly daring, sharpened their fingers at him in disdain. It was useless for McNab to snarl in the schoolyard that Miss McGladdery was a dirty old bitch and her pants stank. He had lost face. Miss McGladdery had the total authority of the captain of a pirate ship.

She knew what happened in the schoolyard, but she did not interfere. Young Cornish’s grandfather was the leading Grit—the hated Liberal Party—and Miss McGladdery was an unwavering Conservative, or Tory. If the boy had so much grit in him, let him show it; she would do nothing until he complained, in which case she would take steps, but she would despise him as a complainer.

He did not complain, but one day a boy hit him in the eye hard enough to blacken it, and he went home knowing that there would be trouble.

It was not the kind of trouble he expected.

Aunt Mary-Ben, horrified, took him at once to Dr. J. A. Jerome. A black eye was nothing, said the doctor; no great harm at all. But then—

“They’re giving you a rough time, Frank? You don’t have to tell me. I know. I know everything that goes on in this town. Did you know that? They’re a rough lot at Carlyle Rural. Do you know the Queensberry Rules?”

Francis had heard something of this code from his father. You didn’t hit below the belt.

“Do you not? Well, Frank, the Queensberry Rules are all very fine in the ring but they’ve never heard of them at Carlyle Rural, or anywhere in Blairlogie, so far as I know. Did you never see the lumbermen fighting on a Saturday night? No, I don’t suppose you have. Those French boys know something about rough fighting. Now look here: you have two fists, and they wouldn’t dent a pound of butter. But you’ve two feet and good strong boots. So the trick is to let your man get close, then you rear back and let him have your right boot slap in his wind. Don’t kick him in the groin; that’s for later. But get his wind. He’ll probably fall down, if you do it right. Then jump on him and beat the stuffing out of him. Give it all you’ve got. He’ll be too busy trying to get his breath to do much. Don’t kill him, but get as near it as you dare. Get him by the ears and bang his head on the ground; you can’t hurt their heads.”

“Oh, Joe, you’ll make a tough of the boy,” said Mary-Ben, in distress.

“Just so, my dear. That’s the whole idea. If you’ve got any brains at Carlyle Rural you have to be a tough in order to keep them for yourself. In fact, Frank, it’s a good principle of life to let people understand that you’re really a terrible tough; then they’ll let you alone and you can be as delicate as you please, so long as they don’t find you out. Now, here’s some arnica to paint on the eye. Twice a day is enough. And keep him at home for the rest of the week, Mary-Ben, just to give Miss McGladdery a fright. Let her think she’s gone too far.”

And it all came to pass very much as Dr. J.A. expected. When Frank did not appear at school. Miss McGladdery was worried, and when she was worried her haemorrhoids tormented her. Of course she would not dream of consulting a Catholic doctor, but when Dr. J.A. buttonholed her on the steps of the Post Office on Saturday she could not escape.

“I hear Carlyle Rural is just as rough as it’s always been. Did you ever think you might have an ugly situation there one of these days, Miss McGladdery? It’d be a sad thing if anybody was seriously injured.”

A nod was as good as a wink to Miss McGladdery, and on Monday morning she announced that there had been too much fighting in the schoolyard, and if there were any more of it, she would strap the fighters.

Of course Frank was blamed; he had squealed. But obviously he wielded some power, and he had no more trouble with fighting. He was no better liked, and when the great spring game began, he watched from the sidelines.

Most of the boys were watchers, but unlike Frank they enjoyed what they saw. It fed something deep in them.

There was a pond in a field across the road from Carlyle Rural, and in spring it was full of frogs. The game was to catch a frog, stick a straw up its cloaca, and blow it up to enormous size. As the frog swelled, there was a delightful apprehension that it might burst. There was an even more splendid hope that the boy who was blowing might, if enough funny things were said to him, stop blowing for a moment and suck and then—why, he might even die, which would richly crown the fun.

Frank’s eyes were upon the frog, whose contortions and wildly waving legs pierced his heart with a vivid sense of the sufferings of Jesus, which Aunt had begun to describe to him. When His Name was used as an oath, Jesus suffered, and when boys were naughty Jesus’ wounds were opened and bled afresh. How Jesus must have been agonized by the tortures of the frogs! And—horror!—what must Jesus have felt the day some boys caught a tomcat and cut off its testicles, and let it loose to rush away, howling and bleeding! Francis was dimly becoming aware of his own testicles which were somehow associated with something Awful about which he could not get any exact information.

Animals did it, as you hurried past with blushes and shame. But surely the boys could not be right who said that people did it, too? That your own parents—but that did not bear thinking of; it was horrible and wholly incredible. Frank’s mind was becoming a horror of sick speculation. And, young as he was, his body seemed to be in the conspiracy against him.

Aunt was not his only source of information about the mysteries of life. He found great solace in the company of Victoria Cameron, his grandfather’s cook. Aunt did not like him to talk too much to Victoria, who was not simply a Protestant but a Presbyterian of the darkest hue. She knew what was going on in the Senator’s house, and she knew it was wrong. Miss McRory was trying to suck that poor boy into the abyss of Catholicism and, although Victoria, as a great artist of the kitchen, was glad enough of the high wages—a resounding thirty-seven dollars a month, and board!—that the Senator paid her, she called her soul her own, and resisted Rome as stoutly as she could without provoking a row. She knew enough about the McRorys to hang them, she told herself, but she held her tongue. Judge not that ye be not judged. Of course, you can’t be a Calvinist without judging, but as a Calvinist you know what God’s ordinances are, so it isn’t really judging. It is just knowing right from wrong.

As is so often the case with people who hold their tongues, Victoria had a vast accretion of bottled-up disapproval, and it could be sensed from the darkeness of her gaze, and spells of breathing deeply through her nose that could be heard at a considerable distance.

All she could properly do, as a loyal servant, eating the Senator’s bread, was to befriend that boy, and befriend him she did, in her own stern fashion.

He asked her outright about the great mystery: did people do what animals did? Her reply was that there was an awful lot of Bad in the world, and the less you knew about it the luckier you were, and he was not to ask that question again.

Aunt Mary-Ben, dimly aware but not well informed about the opposition in the kitchen, told Frank many a wondrous story about the mercy of God’s Mother, as she had seen it evinced in the visible world. Oh, you could always go to Her, Frankie, when you were troubled. Aunt kept her promise, and during the trouble of the black eye she gave him a pretty little rosary, which she told him had been blessed by the Bishop in Ottawa; he was to keep it under his pillow, and soon she would teach him the poetry that went with it.

Frank was deeply troubled, but it would never do to ask her the question he had put to Victoria. She wouldn’t know about such things, or if she did she would be sorrowful because he knew about them. And there was always the risk of opening the wounds of Jesus afresh.