This is the first of a half dozen or so stories featuring the character Cuthbert.

From the Improvement Era, November 1933 –

Cuthbert Tells the Truth

By Estelle Webb Thomas

How Cuthbert ever reached the Sixth Grade was a mystery to all concerned, himself, his father and mother and most of all to the new teacher who was guilty of many bitter and disloyal thoughts concerning her predecessors who had spinelessly allowed this outrage. Not that it had happened suddenly or easily. Not at all. It had been a matter of tearful pleading on the part of his mother, stern exhortation descending in moments of stress to awful threats on the part of his father, grilling effort which brought his teacher every day nearer nervous prostration, and even occasional bursts of diligence and head scratching on the part of Cuthbert himself; of report cards with an alarming tendency to descend the scale of the alphabet and hover threateningly over the fatal letter D.

But now, owing to the combined efforts of parents and pedagogues with what feeble assistance Cuthbert was able to give, the twelfth year of his life found him hurled into the unequal struggle with an armful of Sixth Grade books.

And then the cataclysm! His father announced calmly that he was through. No more homework for him. He never had liked decimal fractions anyway, even when he had to do them, and he’d be hanged if he’d tackle them again any more than he would take on a second attack of measles. Besides, he argued, what did he pay taxes for? For the privilege of helping his child dig out his education evenings? “You tell that teacher,” roared father, now fully aroused to the sense of his wrongs, “that if she’ll teach you your lessons in school I’ll hear you recite ’em in the evening, but hanged if I’m going to do the teaching any more and her draw the salary!” Well, that was that!

Cuthbert’s father was long suffering but the worm had turned. Tears and expostulations were useless. There was still Mother and she would undoubtedly have shouldered the double burden cast upon her by Father’s defection and carried on until she dropped, that being her way, had not Fate, who loves to strew misfortune with a liberal hand, chosen this time to smite Grandmother Baker with lumbago, and called Cuthbert’s mother to her bedside in a neighboring village for an indefinite period, leaving Cuthbert to the mercies of a cruel world and an unsympathetic teacher who regarded offerings of red apples and flaming bouquets of chrysanthemums as merely fruit and flowers and let them mitigate not at all the severity of her blue pencil.

Cuthbert felt there was no sympathy and understanding left in the world. At home, Father, who callously asserted that he felt ten years younger since he quit teaching night school was blandly impervious to broad hints and “wonders,” “I wonder where the Obi river is?’ Father would turn to another page of his paper and remark, “I see the Milleses have gone home from California.”

“I wonder what nine times twelve is?”

“Well, the chances for Mother coming home this month seem slim so far.”

Cuthbert knew now why the fathers of great men always died early in the story. Fathers were an unsympathetic race. How could Abraham Lincoln have made a name for himself by lying flat on his stomach before the fire to “figger” on a board if his father had. made him get up and come to the library table and stop trying to spoil his eyes. Kind of seemed like it was Lincoln’s mother that died, though. No matter. A feller never had a chance now-a-days. There had been times when considering his assortment of features in the mirror he had concluded that he was quite unbeautiful enough for Fame to have marked him for its own, and he felt with pardonable pride that he was every bit as dumb in school as Bobby Burns and so would doubtless turn out to be a poet.

Perhaps he was nearer right than he knew. At any rate, his teacher, whose views on most subjects were diametrically opposed to Cuthbert’s, agreed with him unreservedly as to his dumbness. His wits were always woolgathering. Patiently, with a martyr’s patience truly touching, she would go over and over something she was particularly anxious to “put across” to Cuthbert. Although his well-scrubbed ears stood out in a deceptively listening attitude and his blue eyes looked earnestly, if unseeingly, at her, his thoughts were usually busy planning a beautiful tattooed design on his right arm in which the letter H. W. — which stood for Hilda Ward across the isle were interwoven with a gorgeous floral design, and the teacher’s voice, buzzing unceasingly, like a tormenting bee, annoyed him. Would the woman never stop?

Thus it happened that after a detailed explanation of the paper to be read for English review on Friday — The Trend of Exploration Toward the West — Cuthbert came out of his day-dream with a very hazy idea of what it was all about. His teacher’s voice still rang annoyingly in his ears and the insistent tones seemed to reiterate the one word West. “It was some- thing about the West, I know,” said Cuthbert to himself. He had asked the subject so often of the other children that he felt sensitive about it and preferred to trust to his inattentive ears rather than to face their derision again. He felt an affinity for this subject not usual for the topics Miss Grey selected, and set to work with enthusiasm. His composition finished, he was pleased with the result and indeed, a wonderful idea had occurred to him. He would make a continued story of it and ask Miss Grey if he might produce a chapter each Friday. How that would simplify this writing business!

Miss Grey’s reception of his initial effort, however, discouraged him. That was the way with women, no knowing how they’d take things!

This, then, was Cuthbert’s answer to Miss Grey’s request for a paper on the Westward Trend of Civilization! No wonder black despair filled her soul and she felt that in certain cases murder was not only permissible but almost imperative!

“EXPERIENCES IN THE WEST

Chapter One

Surrounded

“Shorty was sitting in the shade of a big cottonwood when he heard a voice say hands up Shorty, Shorty terned around and their stood a big greeser. A cold chill ran up his back he was afrade to holler to his pal in camp. He heard steps as if someone else was coming he terned around and their stood 3 other Mexcans. This is the time for quick acshun thot Shorty, quick acshun is required, and he sprung to his feet —”

“That will do, Cuthbert!” Miss Grey’s tone was icy. “That gives us practically no light on Westward Exploration. Rather to the contrary! You may take your seat!”

Cuthbert and his enthralled audience gave a concerted sigh of disappointment.

Well, teachers will be teachers! No use to expect human understanding from them!

It was just before Washington’s birthday that Mr. Bryce, the principal of the Brookdale school, conceived the brilliant idea of an Essay Contest for the Sixth, Seventh and Eighth Grades, the subject to be “Truth,” and himself to examine and judge each paper. The prize, a “Life of Washington,” which he considered very appropriate, to be presented at the special exercises held on that illustrious truth-teller’s birthday.

Miss Grey, whose temper these days was uncertain at the best, was frankly cynical in discussing this move with Miss Brady, the Seventh Grade room teacher.

“If Charles Bryce doesn’t already know that Sixth Grade pupils can’t write on abstract subjects, he’s due to find out something!” she remarked. “He’s welcome to wade through those papers without any offers of assistance from me, for one!”

“Me, either,” said Miss Brady, airily, “What’s one man’s poison is another’s meat. If anybody gets a kick out of reading a lot of kid’s ravings that isn’t actually required by law, he ought to be allowed the privilege. Live and let live, I say!”

“Maybe,” she added, with a keen glance at Miss Grey, “he’s sort of tired of Kelly’s honeyed sweetness and craves an antidote.”

“Humph!” snorted Miss Grey, inelegantly, and turned abruptly back to her own door.

Mr. Bryce, young and filled with high ideals which had not yet been destroyed by cantankerous parents and trustees and a desire to magnify his noble calling, was just now, at 7:30 of a Friday evening, tired, bored and utterly disillusioned. Hair rumpled, cheeks flushed, tie awry, he sat submerged in papers. Smeary papers, on the whole, in which the word truth occurred a great many times without sense or sequence.

On his right was a neat pile of manuscripts, badly defaced with blue pencil marks, on his left a stack yet to be attacked, revealing he knew not what horrors. With a sigh he shifted his position, bade his inner man cease clamoring for food, and picked up a smudged and bulky manuscript. As he read, his expression, had anyone been present to observe the fact, underwent various changes, none of them betokening boredom — Mr. Bryce was being entertained for the first time that afternoon.

THE TRUTH

Told by Cuthbert Carroll

Grown folks don’t want a guy to really tell the truth. They always say they do but don’t you bleave it. When the principle reads this paper he will make me go to the OfFis and probly expel me for simply telling the truth. I have always been taut to tell the truth and when I have done it I have been punished. Once I told Aunt Mable that she was not ugly enufF to stop a clock and it made her awful mad. It was the truth because I put Dad’s alarm clock rite on the table by the side of her and it did not stop. I would of thot she would rather not stop it than to stop it. And once I told her sweety that he looked lots like my bull pup and I was sent to bed without any supper. It was the truth only if anybody got mad it ought to been the pup. And once when the Bensons from Kansas City was to dinner Mother spanked me for telling them that the teaspoons were Aunt Ednas. And once when Gramma ast me if I wanted to be like Lincoln and I said No, he looks like a horse, she said, Tom, this boy needs to be punished and I bet Gramma has told me 1000 times to always tell the truth. This shows that grown people don’t really want you to tell the truth even when they say they do.

But the teacher has ast us to rite on the subject of truth and I am going to do it alltho I will get expeled and I know it.

The Truth About My Father

My father has forgot he was ever a boy and is callus to other people’s sufferings.

The Truth About My Mother

My mother thinks more of Gramma than she does of her only child or she would not leave him in his hour of nead.

The Truth About Gramma

She is always giving me something but it would be a hole lot better if she would give me back my own mother that writefully belongs to me.

The Truth About My Teacher

My teacher used to be pretty good, but since her and the principle quit going together she has been cross and cranky and they aren’t no way of pleasing her. Some of the kids say she has got a broken hart but I figger that ain’t no fault of mine but the principles becaus he broke it and it is no excuse for treating us all like morans becaus some are not. And here is something what is the truth about all teachers becaus other kids has told me the same, if a guy will not ever forget to wear a neck tie and will pussy-foot around, and look like a little angle that butter would not melt in his mouth he will always be teacher’s pet, and it don’t make no differens if he ain’t got sense enuff to know a baseball from a soccer. And this is the truth and not becaus I know it ain’t no use, I have not got no desire to be teacher’s pet.

The Truth About the Principle

When he reads this essay he will send for me to come to the Offis and expell me and I will not care becaus what I am going to be I won’t need a education.

All this is the TRUTH.

The End.

P. S. — If I do take up a life of crime it will be becaus I was drove to it when but a boy by telling

THE TRUTH

Cuthbert had lived the days intervening between the handing in of his paper and the following Monday in a peace of spirit heretofore unknown to him. He failed cheerfully and methodically in his lessons and took Miss Grey’s withering remarks with a kindly tolerance that puzzled that harrassed young lady. Let the poor thing scold if she got any kick out of it. It would only be a matter of days now, until she would need another victim. He could stand it a few days longer.

It was with no surprise, therefore, that he received his summons to the Principal’s office on Monday afternoon. He cast a farewell glance about the room that had witnessed so many mental struggles, and bade his teacher and schoolmates a silent farewell before he strode forth a martyr to the truth.

His righteous exaltation carried him bravely to the very door of the office and then he began to wish furtively but sincerely, that he had not said that about Mr. Bryce and Miss Grey.

Thus doth the truth make cowards of us all ! And it was not without some hard swallowing and a strange sensation in the pit of his stomach that he finally brought himself to tap timidly on the fatal door.

Mr. Bryce surveyed Cuthbert with a peculiar expression through his thick lensed glasses. He cleared his throat several times and shuffled the papers about on his desk, and otherwise showed that he was at a loss how to begin.

“He kinda hates to expel me!” thought Cuthbert with surprise. He had supposed this to be one of the major delights of teaching.

“I wished to see you in regard to your paper for the Contest,” Mr. Bryce began at length. “I — you ought to know — ” he consulted the paper in question for the author’s name — “er — Cuthbert, I consider it the most original paper of all those submitted. In that respect I may say that it merits the prize, as originality was one of the points I stressed. But,” here to Cuthbert’s surprise, his eyes twinkled, and he gave the lad a man-to-man smile, “As you say, the truth — especially the bald, unadorned truth, as you tell it — is not appreciated in this wicked world, and I think it better, considering everything, that your paper remain
a secret between you and me, don’t you?”

Cuthbert was stunned!

This teacher was not acting in the normal manner, at all.

“Y-yes, sir!” he faltered, in a weak little voice, then the truth breaking in upon him gradually, he asked in an aggrieved voice, “Ain’t — aren’t you going to expel me:

“Well, no, not this time, my boy, if you’ll promise never to be so truthful again!” said Mr. Bryce, jovially. “One grain of truth to an ounce of tact, hereafter, I’d advise.”

“Oh, by the way,” he said casually, as the frustrated martyr turned slowly away, “About that last — do you — it is generally believed — are you sure your supposition is the truth?”

Cuthbert stared at him. light began to dawn.

“About Miss Grey? Oh, yes. Everybody knows Miss Grey was — the big kids say she was crazy about you, and you quit her when Miss Kelly came, and — .”

“Wrong!” said Mr. Bryce, sharply. “Since you seem possessed of a lot of misinformation about my private affairs — er — Cuthbert, for an ardent seeker after truth, I’ll tell you the truth about this. Miss Grey sent me packing before Miss Kelly ever came, over a slight disagreement regarding a certain gentleman in California. I was merely trying to show my in- difference by my attentions to Miss Kelly. What you said in your paper was the first intimation that” I have had that I was of the slightest consequence to Miss Grey any more.”

Although Cuthbert’s well-scrubbed ears had stood out in a deceptive listening attitude, and his mouth was slightly ajar, he had assimilated very little of Mr. Bryce’s remarks. He was trying to readjust his one-track mind to the prospect of three months more of gruelling labor rather than an attractive life of crime. Thus when the principal, shocked at his own incredible frankness to this strange child said hastily, “O, I say, now Cuthbert, I’ll keep your paper a secret if you’ll do the same by what I’ve told you!”

He said stupidly, “Huh? Oh, sure, that’s all right!” and shuffled out dejectedly.

It was no great surprise to Cuthbert, though a matter of much gratification and some mystification to his mother when he received from the young Bryces, honeymooning in Europe, a little statuette of “Truth,” represented by a scantily clad young woman with a torch, with an attached card on which Mr. Bryce had scrawled, “Never desert her, Cuthbert, long may she wave!”

“I believe you did better in school last term than we thought,” said his mother fondly, “the teachers seem unusually interested in you!”

“Humph!” grunted Cuthbert, noncomittally. Let the woman be happy in her ignorance. He had learned better than to tell the truth.