picnic and Miss Smith had to wait impatiently, telling the class that James would have to have his legs stretched. And at the party she heaped his plate with seed-cake because she imagined, so she said, that he was the kind of child who enjoyed such fare.
Once James found himself alone with Miss Smith in the classroom. She was sitting at her desk correcting some homework. James was staring in front of him, admiring a fountain pen that the day before his mother had bought for him. It was a small fountain pen, coloured purple and black and white. James believed it to be elegant.
It was very quiet in the classroom. Soundlessly Miss Smith’s red pencil ticked and crossed and underlined. Without looking up, she said: ‘Why don’t you go out and play?’
‘Yes, Miss Smith,’ said James. He walked to the door, clipping his pen into his pocket. As he turned the handle he heard Miss Smith utter a sound of irritation. He turned and saw that the point of her pencil had broken. ‘Miss Smith, you may borrow my pen. You can fill it with red ink. It’s quite a good pen.’
James crossed the room and held out his pen. Miss Smith unscrewed the cap and prodded at the paper with the nib. ‘What a funny pen, James!’ she said. ‘Look, it can’t write.’
‘There’s no ink in it,’ James explained. ‘You’ve got to fill it with red ink, Miss Smith.’
But Miss Smith smiled and handed the pen back. ‘What a silly boy you are to waste your money on such a poor pen!’
‘But I didn’t –’
‘Come along now, James, aren’t you going to lend me your pencil-sharpener?’
‘I haven’t got a pencil-sharpener, Miss Smith.’
‘No pencil-sharpener? Oh James, James, you haven’t got anything, have you?’
When Miss Smith married she stopped teaching, and James imagined he had escaped her for ever. But the town they lived in was a small one and they often met in the street or in a shop. And Miss Smith, who at first found marriage rather boring, visited the school quite regularly. ‘How’s James?’ she would say, smiling alarmingly at him. ‘How’s my droopy old James?’
When Miss Smith had been married for about a year she gave birth to a son, which occupied her a bit. He was a fine child, eight pounds six ounces, with a good long head and blue eyes. Miss Smith was delighted with him, and her husband, a solicitor, complimented her sweetly and bought cigars and drinks for all his friends. In time, mother and son were seen daily taking the air: Miss Smith on her trim little legs and the baby in his frilly pram. James, meeting the two, said: ‘Miss Smith, may I see the baby?’ But Miss Smith laughed and said that she was not Miss Smith any more. She wheeled the pram rapidly away, as though the child within it might be affected by the proximity of the other.
‘What a dreadful little boy that James Machen is,’ Miss Smith reported to her husband. ‘I feel so sorry for the parents.’
‘Do I know him? What does the child look like?’
‘Small, dear, like a weasel wearing glasses. He quite gives me the creeps.’
Almost without knowing it, James developed a compulsion about Miss Smith. At first it was quite a simple compulsion: just that James had to talk to God about Miss Smith every night before he went to sleep, and try to find out from God what it was about him that Miss Smith so despised. Every night he lay in bed and had his conversation, and if once he forgot it James knew that the next time he met Miss Smith she would probably say something that might make him drop down dead.
After about a month of conversation with God James discovered he had found the solution. It was so simple that he marvelled he had never thought of it before. He began to get up very early in the morning and pick bunches of flowers. He would carry them down the street to Miss Smith’s house and place them on a window-sill. He was careful not to be seen, by Miss Smith or by anyone else. He knew that if anyone saw him the plan couldn’t work. When he had picked all the flowers in his own garden he started to pick them from other people’s gardens. He became rather clever at moving silently through the gardens, picking flowers for Miss Smith.
Unfortunately, though, on the day that James carried his thirty-first bunch of blooms to the house of Miss Smith he was observed. He saw the curtains move as he reached up to lay the flowers on the window-sill. A moment later Miss Smith, in her dressing-gown, had caught him by the shoulder and pulled him into the house.
‘James Machen! It would be James Machen, wouldn’t it? Flowers from the creature, if you please! What are you up to, you dozy James?’
James said nothing. He looked at Miss Smith’s dressing-gown and thought it was particularly pretty: blue and woolly, with an edging of silk.
‘You’ve been trying to get us into trouble,’ cried Miss Smith. ‘You’ve been stealing flowers all over the town and putting them at our house. You’re an underhand child, James.’
James stared at her and then ran away.
After that, James thought of Miss Smith almost all the time. He thought of her face when she had caught him with the flowers, and how she had afterwards told his father and nearly everyone else in the town. He thought of how his father had had to say he was sorry to Miss Smith, and how his mother and father had quarrelled about the affair. He counted up all the things Miss Smith had ever said to him, and all the things she had ever done to him, like giving him seed-cake at the Christmas party. He hadn’t meant to harm Miss Smith as she said he had. Giving people flowers wasn’t unkind; it was to show them you liked them and wanted them to like you.
‘When somebody hurts you,’ James said to the man who came to cut the grass, ‘what do you do about it?’
‘Well,’ said the man, ‘I suppose you hurt them back.’
‘Supposing you can’t,’ James argued.
‘Oh, but you always can. It’s easy to hurt people.’
‘It’s not, really,’ James said.
‘Look,’ said the man, ‘all I’ve got to do is to reach out and give you a clip on the ear. That’d hurt you.’
