Free The Lesson by Jesse Ball Page B

hourglass on it. The hourglass, of course, would tell one when the tea was appropriately steeped.
    She filled the tiny basket with tea leaves, shut it, and set it in the teapot. Then she went to the window.
    Below, in the field, the teacher’s class was again playing.
    Things must be bad in the schoolhouse if they are forced out of doors on every possible occasion, thought Loring. For the children did not look like they wanted to be out of doors. They were sitting in a line in the grass, trying to read from a book. Every other child had a book. While the one was reading, the other was looking over the shoulder. Each of those other ones wrote in a notebook occasionally with pencils that were tied to the notebooks with string.
    And yet, the teacher was the very picture of gaiety and joy. In a loose dress with her limbs bare, she ran back and forth in the field, calling to the children, as if to tempt them away from their work. Yet not a one went to her. There must be some secret punishment at work, and she is testing their resolve, thought Loring approvingly.
    The pot shrieked from above the flames, and Loring attended to it, and to the remaining preparations of the tea. From the pantry she took some sort of cookie or cake, from a cabinet, two cups, from elsewhere, milk, sugar, spoons of overmastering delicacy, and with all such things assembled on a tray, went back upstairs, slowly negotiating the steps, and passing in the process, the eighty-three episodes of Goya’s
Los Desastres de la Guerra,
framed plates placed in order up and down the staircase. No. 51 caught her eye,
Gracias á la almorta
, the brutalized, impoverished figures huddled around a bowl of millet in a dimly unknowable place of suffering. She felt they were so cheerful, these drawings. One couldn’t help but smile. Is that how it is? Must brutality point to kindess, lack to plenty? Or does one just grin willfully at one’s tormentors, even when it seems they are not present, they have long gone away.
    When she opened the door to the bedroom, Stan was asleep. She set the tray down on a high table by the bed and went to stand there over him. He had taken the jacket off and covered his face with it. He was lying there, with the jacket over his face.
    Loring moved so that she stood sideways to the bed. Her eye could now regard it only in the edges. She looked again and saw a figure, lying in the bed, half covered in a grey jacket, of a sort she knew well.
    She stood there quietly, the pleasure of this small but persistent, until at length the boy awoke.

The Fourth Visit, 3
    —What is that? asked the boy cheerfully.
    —Tea, said Loring. Tea and a bit of something to eat.
    —Can I have some?
    —It’s for you, of course. Come over here.
    The light had changed a bit in the room. So, too, had the sound. With her entry, the noise of wind and the limbs of trees battering against one another and against the house.
    —It is nice to be in a small house, observed Stan. Then you have the outside as well.
    —That’s so, said Loring. The main thing is—that you can feel the weather. If you can ignore it entirely, your life is a bit sadder—which is something no one would have predicted.
    The boy began to eat. Loring poured his tea and added sugar and milk for him.
    —Do you like tea? she asked.
    —I must, he said. Because the smell woke me up, and I was in the middle of a good dream.
    His voice sounded fuller and richer. It sounded, in short, much more like her husband’s. Loring listened carefully. She shut her eyes, trying to hear every bit of it.
    —What was the dream? she asked.
    —I was reading a book of myths last night. I think it came from that.
    Loring nodded.
    —I was at a kind of doorway between one kingdom and another. There was a long wall stretching in either direction. I had a little house…
    —A hut?
    —Yes, a hut, on top of the wall. When people came, I was supposed to ask them questions. This was my dream.
    —What kind of questions did