Page:Following darkness (IA followingdarknes00reid).pdf/37



broke out in the village in the spring of that year, a week or two before my sixteenth birthday. There were not many cases, and all were mild, but there was much talk of closing the school. My father, for I know not what reason, was against this, and in the end got his own way, but about a month later he had the satisfaction of seeing me catch the infection just when everybody else was getting better. I can remember quite distinctly the day I took ill. I had not been feeling well the day before, but had said nothing about it, and that morning I went to school as usual. I might as well have stayed at home for all the work I did. I sat there with a book before me, my head aching, my throat dry and painful. The noise of the classes saying their lessons at the tops of their voices, especially the junior class, to whom Miss McWaters was repeating a stanza of poetry, line by line, while they screamed it after her, irritated, even while it amused, me. Miss McWaters was a thin and angular person, no longer young, endowed by nature with a high-pitched voice, prominent teeth, and a red nose, and by art with a yellow, fuzzy fringe. All these qualities now loomed particularly large in my vision of her, though at other times I knew she was a kind and friendly person. Her red nose and her fringe haunted me, her whole face seemed to undergo extraordinary, kaleidoscopic changes; she became a sort of fantastic witch who was exercising horrible spells on these small children standing in a circle round her chair; her mouth grew larger, her big white teeth seemed thirsting to