Miriam propped “The Story of AdÈle” open against the three Bibles on the dressing-table. It would be wasteful to read it upstairs. It was the only story-book amongst the rows of volumes which filled the shelves in the big schoolroom and would have to last her for tea-time reading the whole term. The “Fleurs de l’Eloquence?” Shiny brown leather covered with little gold buds and tendrils, fresh and new although the parchment pages were yellow with age. The Fleurs were so short ... that curious page signed “Froissart” with long s’s, coming to an end just as the picture of the French court was getting clear and interesting. That other thing, “The Anatomy of Melancholy.” Fascinating. But it would take so much reading, on and on forgetting everything; all the ordinary things, seeing things in some new way, some way that fascinated people for a moment if you tried to talk about it and then made them very angry, made them hate and suspect you. Impossible to take it out and have it on the schoolroom table for tea-time reading. What had made the Pernes begin allowing tea-time reading? Being shy and finding it difficult to keep conversation going with the girls for so long? They never did talk to the girls. Perhaps because they did not see through them and understand them. North London girls. So different from the Fairchild family and the sort of girls they had been accustomed to when they were young. Anyhow, they hardly ever had to talk to them. Not at breakfast or dinner-time when they were all three there; and at tea-time when there was only one of them, there were always the books. How sensible. On Sunday afternoons, coming smiling into the schoolroom, one of them each Sunday—perhaps the others were asleep—reading aloud; the Fairchild family, smooth and good and happy, everyone in the book surrounded with a sort of light, going on and on and on towards heaven, tea-time seeming so nice and mean and ordinary afterwards—or a book about a place in the north of England called Saltcoats, brine, and a vicarage and miners; the people in the book horrible, not lit up, talking about things and being gloomy and not always knowing what to do, never really sure about Heaven like the Fairchild family, black brackish book. The “Fairchild Family” was golden and gleaming.
“The Anatomy of Melancholy” would not be golden like “The Fairchild Family” ... “the cart was now come alongside a wood which was exceedingly shady and beautiful”; “good manners and civility make everybody lovely”; but it would be round and real, not just chilly and moaning like “Saltcoats.” The title would be enough to keep one going at tea-time. Anat—omy of Mel—ancholy, and the look of the close-printed pages and a sentence here and there. The Pernes would not believe she really wanted it there on the table. The girls would stare. When “The Story of AdÈle” was finished she would have to find some other book; or borrow one. Nancie Wilkie, sitting at tea with her back to the closed piano facing the great bay of dark green-blinded window, reading “Nicholas Nickleby.” Just the very one of all the Dickens volumes that would be likely to come into her hands. Impossible to borrow it when Nancie had finished with it. Impossible to read a book with such a title. “David Copperfield” was all right; and “The Pickwick Papers.” “Little Dorritt”—“A Tale of Two Cities”—“The Old Curiosity Shop.” There was something suspicious about these, too.
2
AdÈle—the story of AdÈle. The book had hard, unpleasant covers with some thin cottony material—bright lobelia blue—strained over them and fraying out at the corners. Over the front of the cover were little garlands and festoons of faded gold, and in the centre framed by an oval band of brighter gold was the word AdÈle, with little strong tendrils on the lettering. There was some secret charm about the book. The strong sunlight striking the window just above the coarse lace curtains that obscured its lower half, made the gilding shine and seem to move—a whole wild woodland. The coarse white toilet-cover on the chest of drawers, the three Bibles, the little cheap mahogany-framed looking-glass, Nancie Wilkie’s folding hand-glass, the ugly gas bracket sticking out above the mirror, her own bed in the corner with its coarse fringed coverlet, the two alien beds behind her in the room, and the repellant washstand in the far corner became friendly as the sun shone on the decorated cover of the blue and gold book.
She propped it open again and began tidying her hair. It must be nearly tea-time. A phrase caught her eye. “The old chÂteau where the first years of AdÈle’s life were spent was situated in the midst of a high-walled garden. Along one side of the chÂteau ran a terrace looking out over a lovely expanse of flower-beds. Beyond was a little pleasaunce surrounded by a miniature wall and threaded by little pathways lined with rose trees. Almost hidden in the high wall was a little doorway. When the doorway was open you could see through into a deep orchard.” The first tea-bell rang. The figure of AdÈle flitting about in an endless summer became again lines of black print. In a moment the girls would come rushing up. Miriam closed the book and turned to the dazzling window. The sun blazed just above the gap in the avenue of poplars. A bright yellow pathway led up through the green of the public cricket ground, pierced the avenue of poplars and disappeared through the further greenery in a curve that was the beginning of its encirclement of the park lake. Coming slowly along the pathway was a little figure dressed bunchily in black. It looked pathetically small and dingy in the bright scene. The afternoon blazed round it. It was something left over. What was the explanation of it? As it came near it seemed to change. It grew real. It was hurrying eagerly along, quite indifferent to the afternoon glory, with little rolling steps that were like the uneven toddling of a child, and carrying a large newspaper whose great sheets, although there was no wind, balled out scarcely controlled by the small hands. Its feathered hat had a wind-blown rakish air. On such a still afternoon. It was thinking and coming along, thinking and thinking and a little angry. What a rum little party, murmured Miriam, despising her words and admiring the wild thought-filled little bundle of dingy clothes. Beastly, to be picking up that low kind of slang—not real slang. Just North London sneering. Goo—what a rum little party, she declared aloud, flattening herself against the window. Hotly flushing, she recognised that she had been staring at Miss Jenny Perne hurrying in to preside at tea.
3
“We’ve been to Jones’s this afternoon, Miss Jenny.”
Each plate held a slice of bread and butter cut thickly all the way across a household loaf, and the three-pound jar of home-made plum jam belonging to Nancie Wilkie was going the round of the table. It had begun with Miriam, who sat on Miss Jenny’s right hand, and had Nancie for neighbour. She had helped herself sparingly, unable quite to resist the enhancement of the solid fare, but fearing that there would be no possibility of getting anything from home to make a return in kind. Things were so bad, the dance had cost so much. One of Mary’s cakes, big enough for five people, would cost so much. And there would be the postage.
Piling a generous spoonful on to her own thick slice, Nancie coughed facetiously and repeated her remark which had produced no result but a giggle from Charlotte Stubbs who sat opposite to her.
“Eh? Eh? What?”
Miss Jenny looked down the table over the top of her newspaper without raising her head. Her pince-nez were perched so that one eye appeared looking through its proper circle, the other glared unprotected just above a rim of glass.
“Miss Haddie took us to Jones’s this afternoon,” said Nancie almost voicelessly. Miriam glanced at the too familiar sight of Nancie’s small eyes vanishing to malicious points. She was sitting as usual very solid and upright in her chair, with her long cheeks pink flushed and her fine nose white and cool and twitching, her yellow hair standing strongly back from her large white brow. She stabbed keenly in her direction as Miriam glanced, and Miriam turned and applied herself to her bread and jam. If she did not eat she would not get more than two slices from the piled dishes before the others had consumed four and five apiece and brought tea to an end.
“Eh? What for? Why are ye laughing, Nancie?”
“I’m not laughing, Miss Jenny.” Nancie’s firm lips curved away from her large faultless teeth. “I’m only smiling and telling you about our visit to Jones’s.”
Miss Jenny’s newspaper was lowered and her pince-nez removed. “Eh? What d’ye say? Nonsense, Nancie, you know you were laughing. Why do you say you weren’t? What do you mean? Eh?”
“I’m sorry, Miss Jennie. Something tickled me.”
“Yes. Don’t be nonsensical. D’ye see? It’s nonsensical to say no when you mean yes. D’ye understand what I mean, Nancie? It’s bad manners.” Hitching on her pince-nez, Miss Jenny returned to her paper.
Miriam gave herself up to the luxury of reading AdÈle to the accompaniment of bread and jam. She would not hurry over her bread and jam. As well not have it. She would sacrifice her chance of a third slice. She reflected that it would be a good thing if she could decide never to have more than two slices, and have them in peace. Then she could thoroughly enjoy her reading. But she was always so hungry. At home she could not have eaten thick bread and butter. But here every slice seemed better than the last. When she began at the hard thick edge there always seemed to be tender places on her gums, her three hollow teeth were uneasy and she had to get through worrying thoughts about them—they would get worse as the years went by, and the little places in the front would grow big and painful and disfiguring. After the first few mouthfuls of solid bread a sort of padding seemed to take place and she could go on forgetful.
“They’d got,” said Trixie Sanderson in a velvety tone, “they’d got some of their Christmas things out, Miss Jenny.” She cleared her throat shrilly on the last word and toned off the sound with a sigh. Inaudible laughter went round the table, stopping at Miriam, who glanced fascinated across at Trixie. Trixie sat in her best dress, a loosely made brown velveteen with a deep lace collar round her soft brown neck. Her neck and her delicate pale face were shaded by lively silky brown curls. She held her small head sideways from her book with a questioning air. One of her wicked swift brown eyes was covered serenely with its thin lid.
She uttered a second gentle sigh and once more cleared her throat, accompanying the sound with a rapid fluttering of the lowered lid.
Miriam condemned her, flouting the single eye which tried to search her, hating the sudden, sharp dimpling which came high up almost under Trixie’s cheek bones in answer to her own expression. “Miss Jenny,” breathed Trixie in a high tone, twirling one end of the bow of black ribbon crowning her head.
Beadie Fetherwell, at the far end of the table opposite the tea-tray, giggled aloud.
“Eh? What? Did somebody speak?” said Miss Jenny, looking up with a smile. “Are ye getting on with yer teas? Are ye ready for second cups?”
“Beadie spoke,” murmured Trixie, glancing at Beadie whose neat china doll’s face was half hidden between her cup and the protruding edge of her thatch of tight gold curls.
Miriam disgustedly watched Beadie prolong the irritating comedy by choking over her tea.
It was some minutes before the whole incident was made clear to Miss Jenny. Reading was suspended. Everyone watched while Charlotte Stubbs, going carefully backwards, came to the end at last of Miss Jenny’s questions, and when Miss Jenny rapidly adjudicating—well! you’re all very naughty children. I can’t think what’s the matter with you? Eh? Ye shouldn’t do it. I can’t think what possesses you. What is it, eh? Ye shouldn’t do it. D’you see?—and having dispensed the second allowance of tea with small hesitating preoccupied hands returned finally to her newspaper, it was Charlotte who sat looking guilty. Miriam stole a glance at the breadth of her broad flushed face, at its broadest as she hung over her book. Her broad flat nose shone with her tea-drinking, and her shock of coarse brown-gold hair, flatly brushed on the top, stuck out bushily on either side, its edges lit by the afternoon glow from the garden behind her. The others were unmoved. Trixie sat reading, the muscles controlling her high dimples still faintly active. She and Nancie and Beadie, whose opaque blue eyes fixed the table just ahead of her book with their usual half-squinting stare, had entered on their final competition for the last few slices.
Miriam returned to her book. The story of AdÈle had moved on through several unassimilated pages. “My child,” she read, “it is important to remember”—she glanced on gathering a picture of a woman walking with AdÈle along the magic terrace, talking—words and phrases that fretted dismally at the beauty of the scene. Examining later chapters she found conversations, discussions, situations, arguments, “fusses”—all about nothing. She turned back to the early passage of description and caught the glow once more. But this time it was overshadowed by the promise of those talking women. That was all there was. She had finished the story of AdÈle.
A resounding slam came up from the kitchen.
“Poor cook—another tooth,” sighed Trixie.
Smothering a convulsion, Miriam sat dumb. Her thwarted expectations ranged forth beyond control, feeling swiftly and cruelly about for succour where she had learned there was none.... Nancie, her parents abroad, her aunt’s house at Cromer, with a shrubbery, the cousin from South Africa coming home to Cromer, taking her out in a dog-cart, telling her she was his guiding star, going back to South Africa; everything Nancie said and did, even her careful hair-brushing and her energetic upright walk, her positive brave way of entering a room, coming out through those malicious pin-points—things she said about the Misses Perne and the girls, things she whispered and laughed, little rhymes she sang with her unbearable laugh.
... Beadie still shaking at intervals in silent servile glancing laughter, her stepmother, her little half-brother who had fits, her holidays at Margate, “you’d look neat, on the seat, of a bicyka made for two”—Beadie brought Miriam the utmost sense of imprisonment within the strange influence that had threatened her when she first came to Banbury Park. Beadie was in it, was an unquestioning part of it. She felt that she could in some way, in some one tint or tone, realise the whole fabric of Beadie’s life on and on to the end, no matter what should happen to her. But she turned from the attempt—any effort at full realisation threatened complete despair. Trixie too, with a home just opposite the Banbury Empire.... Miriam slid over this link in her rapid reflections—a brother named Julian who took instantaneous photographs of girls, numbers and numbers of girls, and was sometimes “tight.” ...
Charlotte. Charlotte carried about a faint suggestion of relief. Miriam fled to her as she sat with the garden light on her hair, her lingering flush of distress rekindled by her amusement, her protective responsible smile beaming out through the endless blue of her eyes. Behind her painstaking life at the school was a country home, a farm somewhere far away. Of course it was dreadful for her to be a farmer’s daughter. She evidently knew it herself and said very little about it. But her large red hands, so strange handling school-books, were comforting; and her holland apron with its bib under the fresh colouring of her face—do you like butter? A buttercup under your chin—brought to Miriam a picture of the farm, white amidst bright greenery, with a dairy and morning cock-crow and creamy white sheep on a hillside. It was all there with her as she sat at table reading “The Lamplighter.” The sound of her broad husky voice explaining to Miss Jenny had been full of it. But it was all past. She too had come to Banbury Park. She did not seem to mind Banbury Park. She was to study hard and be a governess. She evidently thought she was having a great chance—she was fifteen and quite “uncultured.” How could she be turned into a governess? A sort of nursery governess, for farms, perhaps. But farms did not want books and worry. Miriam wanted to put her back into her farm, and sometimes her thoughts wearily brushed the idea of going with her. Perhaps, though, she had come away because her father could not keep her? The little problem hung about her as she sat sweetly there, common and good and strong. The golden light that seemed to belong specially to her came from a London garden, an unreal North London garden. Resounding in its little spaces were the blatterings and shouts of the deaf and dumb next door.
4
Miss Jenny left “The Standard” with Miriam after tea, stopping suddenly as she made her uncertain way from the tea-table to the door and saying absently, “Eh, you’d better read this, my dear. There’s a leader on the Education Commission. Would ye like to? Yes, I think you’d better.” Miriam accepted the large sheets with hesitating expressions of thanks, wondering rather fearfully what a leader might be and where she should find it. She knew the word. Her mother read “the leaders” in the evening—“excellent leader” she sometimes said, and her father would put down his volume of “Proceedings of the British Association,” or Herbert Spencer’s “First Principles,” and condescendingly agree. But any discussion generally ended in his warning her not to believe a thing because she saw it in print, and a reminder that before she married she had thought that everything she saw in print was true, and quite often he would go on to general remarks about the gullibility of women, bringing in the story of the two large long-necked pearly transparent drawing-room vases with stems and soft masses of roses and leaves painted on their sides that she had given too much for at the door to a man who said they were Italian. Brummagem, Brummagem, he would end, mouthing the word and turning back to his book with the neighing laugh that made Miriam turn to the imagined picture of her mother in the first year of her married life, standing in the sunlight at the back door of the Babington house, with the varnished coach-house door on her right and the cucumber frames in front of her sloping up towards the bean-rows that began the kitchen garden; with her little scallopped bodice, her hooped skirt, her hair bunched in curls up on her high pad and falling round her neck, looking at the jugs with grave dark eyes. And that neighing laugh had come again and again all through the years until she sat meekly, flushed and suffering under the fierce gaslight, feeling every night of her life winter and summer as if the ceiling were coming down on her head, and read “leaders” cautiously, and knew when they were written in “a fine chaste dignified style.” But that was “The Times.” “The Standard” was a penny rag and probably not worth considering at all. In any case she would not read it at evening study. She had never had a newspaper in her hand before as far as she could remember. The girls would see that she did not know how to read it, and it would be snubby towards them to sit there as if she were a Miss Perne, scrumpling a great paper while they sat with their books. So she read her text-books, a page of Saxon Kings with a ten-line summary of each reign, a list of six English counties with their capitals and the rivers the capitals stood on and the principal industries of each town, devising ways of remembering the lists and went on to “Bell’s Standard Elocutionist.” She had found the book amongst the school books on the schoolroom shelves. It was a “standard” book and must therefore be about something she ought to know something about if she were to hold her own in this North London world. There had been no “standard” books at school and the word offended her. It suggested fixed agreement about the things people ought to know and that she felt sure must be wrong, and not only wrong but “common” ... standard readers ... standard pianoforte tutors. She had learned to read in “Reading without Tears,” and gone on to “Classical Poems and Prose for the Young,” her arithmetic book instead of being a thin cold paper-covered thing called Standard I, had been a pleasant green volume called “Barnard Smith,” that began at the beginning and went on to compound fractions and stocks. There was no Morris’s Grammar at Banbury Park, no Wetherell or English Accidence, no bits from “Piers Plowman” and pages of scraps of words with the way they changed in different languages and quotations, just sentences that had made her long for more ... “up-clomb” ... “the mist up-clomb.” She opened “Bell’s Standard Elocutionist” apprehensively, her mind working on possible meanings for elocutionist. She thought of ventriloquist and wondered dismally whether it was a book of conjuring tricks. It was poems, poems and prose, all mixed up together anyhow. The room was very still, the girls all sitting reading with their backs to the table so that nobody “poked.” She could not go on vaguely fluttering pages, so she read a solid-looking poem that was not divided up into verses.
“Robert of Sicily, brother of Pope Urbane And Valmond Emperor of Allemaine, Apparelled in magnificent attire, With retinue of many a knight and squire, On St. John’s eve, at vespers, proudly sat And heard the priests chant the Magnificat.” Should she go on? It was like the pieces in Scott’s novels, the best bits, before the characters began to talk.
... “and bay the moon than such a Roman and bay the moon than such a Roman,” muttered Nancie rapidly, swinging her feet. It would not be fair to read a thing that would take her right away and not teach her anything whilst the girls were learning their things for Monday. She hesitated and turned a page. The poem, she saw, soon began to break up into sentences with quotation signs; somebody making a to-do. Turning several pages at once, she caught sight of the word Hanover. “Hamelin Town’s in Brunswick, by famous Hanover city.” That was irresistible. But she must read it one day away from the gassy room and the pressure of the girls. The lines were magic; but the rush that took her to the German town, the sight and smell and sound of it, the pointed houses, wood fires, the bÜrgers, had made her cheeks flare and thrown her out of the proper teacher’s frame of mind. She wanted to stand up and pull up the blinds hiding the garden and shout the poem aloud to the girls. They would stare and giggle and think she had gone mad. “The mountain has gone mad,” Nancie would mutter. “There is a mountain in Banbury Park, covered over with yellow bark,” Nancie’s description of herself. That was how the girls saw her stiff hair—and they thought she was “about forty.” Well, it was true. She was, practically. She went on holding Bell up before her face, open at a page of prose, and stared at the keyboard of the piano just beyond her crossed knees. It aroused the sight and sense of the strangely moving hands of the various girls whose afternoon practice it was her business to superintend, their intent faces, the pages of bad unclassical music, things with horrible names, by English composers, the uselessness of the hours and terms and years of practice.
5
Presently the bread and butter and milk came up for the girls, and then there was prayers—the three servants lined up in front of the bookshelves; cook wheezing heavily, tall and thin and bent, with a sloping mob cap and a thin old brown face with a forehead that was like a buttress of shiny bone and startling dark eyes that protruded so that they could be seen even when she sat looking down into her lap; and Flora the parlourmaid, short and plump and brown with an expression of perfectly serene despair, this was part of Miriam’s daily bread; and Annie the housemaid, raw pink and gold and grinning slyly at the girls—Miss Perne, sitting at the head of the table with the shabby family Bible and the book of family prayers, Miss Jenny and Miss Haddie one on each side of the fireplace, Miss Jenny’s feet hardly reaching the floor as she sat bunched on a high schoolroom chair, Miss Haddie in her cold slate-grey dress sitting back with her thin hands clasped in her lap, her grey face bent devotionally so that her chin rested on her thin chest, her eyes darting from the servants to the girls who sat in their places round the table during the time it took Miss Perne to read a short psalm. Miriam tried to cast down her eyes and close her ears. All that went on during that short interval left her equally excluded from either party. She could not sit gazing at Flora, and Miss Perne’s polite unvarying tone brought her no comfort. She sometimes thought longingly of prayers in Germany, the big quiet saal with its high windows, its great dark doors, its annexe of wooden summer-room, FrÄulein’s clear, brooding undertone, the pensive calm of the German girls; the strange mass of fresh melodious sound as they all sang together. Here there seemed to be everything to encourage and nothing whatever to check the sudden murmur, the lightning swift gesture of Nancie or Trixie.
The moment Miss Perne had finished her psalm they all swung round on to their knees. Miriam pressed her elbows against the cane seat of her chair and wondered what she should say to Miss Jenny at supper about the newspaper, while Miss Perne decorously prayed that they might all be fed with the sincere milk of the Word and grow thereby.
After the Lord’s Prayer, a unison of breathy mutterings against closed fingers, they all rose. Then the servants filed out of the room followed by the Misses Perne. Miss Perne stopped in the doorway to shake hands with the girls on their way to bed before joining her sisters in the little sitting-room across the hall. One of the servants reappeared almost at once with a tray, distributed its contents at the fire-place end of the long table and rang the little bell in the hall on her way back to the kitchen. The Misses Perne filed back across the hall.
6
“Eh, Deborah, are ye sure?” said Miss Jenny, getting into her chair at Miss Perne’s right hand.
Perhaps the newspaper would not be mentioned after all. If it were she would simply say she had been preparing for Monday and was going to read it after supper. Anyhow there was never any threat with the Pernes of anything she would not be able to deal with. She glanced to see what there was to eat, and then, feeling Miss Haddie’s eye from across the table, assumed an air of interested abstraction to cover her disappointment. Cold white blancmange in a round dish garnished with prunes, bread and butter, a square of cream cheese on a green-edged dessert plate, a box of plain biscuits, the tall bottle of lime juice and the red glass jug of water. Nothing really sweet and nice—the blancmange would be flavoured with laurel—prussic acid—and the prunes would be sweet in the wrong sort of way—wholesome, just sweet fruit. Cheese—how could people eat cheese? “Well, my dear, I tell you only what I saw with my own eyes—Polly Allen and Eunice Dupont running about in the park without their hats.”
“Ech,” syphoned Miss Haddie, drawing her delicate green-grey eyebrows sharply towards the deep line in the middle of her forehead. She did not look up but sat frowning sourly into her bowl of bread and milk, ladling and pouring the milk from the spoon.
Miriam kept a nervous eye on her acid preoccupation. No one had seen the behaviour of her own face, how one corner of her mouth had shot up so sharply as to bring the feeling of a deeply denting dimple in her cheek. She sat regulating her breathing and carefully extracting the stone from a prune.
“Did ye speak to them?” asked Miss Jenny, fixing her tall sister over her pince-nez.
Miss Perne sat smilingly upright, her black eyes blinking rapidly at the far-off bookshelves.
“I did not speak to them——”
“Eh, Deborah, why not?” scolded Miss Jenny as Miss Perne drew breath.
“I did not speak to them,” went on Miss Deborah, beaming delightedly at the bookcase, “for the very good reason that I was not sufficiently near to them. I was walking upon the asphalt pathway surrounding the lake and had just become engaged in conversation with Mrs. Brinkwell, who had stopped me for the purpose of giving me further details with regard to Constance’s prolonged absence from school, when I saw Polly and Eunice apparently chasing one another across the recreation ground in the condition I have described to you.”
Miriam, who had felt Miss Haddie’s scorn-filled eyes playing watchfully over her, sat pressing the sharp edge of her high heel into her ankle.
“Eh, my dear, what a pity you couldn’t speak to them. They’ve no business at all in the recreation ground where the rough boys go.”
“Well, I have described to you the circumstances, my dear, and the impossibility of my undertaking any kind of intervention.”
“Eh, well, Deborah my dear, I think I should have done something. Don’t you think you ought? Eh? Called someone perhaps—eh?—or managed to get at the gels in some way—dear, dear, what is to be done? You see it is hardly of any use to speak to them afterwards. You want to catch them red-handed and make them feel ashamed of themselves.”
“I am fully prepared to admit, my dear Jenny, the justice of all that you say. But I can only repeat that in the circumstances in which I found myself I was entirely unable to exercise any control whatever upon the doings of the gels. They were running; and long before I was free from Mrs. Brinkwell they were out of sight.”
Miss Perne spoke in a clear, high, narrative tone that seemed each moment on the point of delighted laughter, her delicate head held high, her finely wrinkled face puckering with restrained pleasure. Miriam saw vividly the picture in the park, the dreadful, mean, grubby lake, the sad asphalt pathway all round it, the shabby London greenery, the October wind rushing through it, Miss Perne’s high stylish arrowy figure fluttered by the wind, swaying in her response to Mrs. Brinkwell’s story, the dreadful asphalt playground away to the left, its gaunt swings and bars—gallows.... Ingoldsby—the girls rushing across it, and held herself sternly back from a vision of Miss Perne chasing the delinquents down the wind. Why did Miss Perne speak so triumphantly? As much as to say There, my dear Jenny, there’s a problem you can’t answer. She enjoyed telling the tale and was not really upset about the girls. She spoke exactly as if she were reading aloud from “Robinson Crusoe.” Miss Haddie was watching again, flashing her eyes about as she gently spooned up her bread and milk. Miriam wished she knew whether Miss Haddie knew how difficult it was to listen gravely. She was evidently angry and disgusted. But still she could watch.
“Did ye go that way at all afterwards—the way the girls went?”
“I did not,” beamed Miss Perne, turning to Miss Jenny as if waiting for a judgment.
“Well, eh, I’m sure, really, it’s most diffikilt. What is one to do with these gels? Now, Miriam, here’s something for you to exercise your wits upon. What would ye do, eh?”
Miriam hesitated. Memories kept her dumb. Of course she had never rushed about in a common park where rough boys came. At the same time—if the girls wanted to rush about and scream and wear no hats nobody had any right to interfere with them ... they ought to be suppressed though, North London girls, capable of anything in the way of horridness ... the Pernes did not seem to see how horrid the girls were in themselves, common and knowing and horrid. “Dear, funny little O.M.’s” ... they were something much more than that. They were wrong about the hats, but it was good, heavenly to be here like this with them. She turned to Miss Jenny, her mind in a warm confusion, and smiled into the little red face peering delicately from out its disorderly Gorgon loops.
“Well?”
“My dear Jenny,” said Miss Haddie’s soft hollow voice, “how should the child judge?”
Miriam’s heart leapt. She smiled inanely and eagerly accepted a second helping of blancmange suddenly proffered by Miss Perne, who was drawing little panting breaths and blinking sharply at her.
“Nonsense, Haddie. Come along, my dear, it’s a chance for you. Come along.”
“Tomboys,” said Miss Haddie indignantly.
Miriam drew a breath. It was wrong, they were not tomboys—she knew they had not run like tomboys—they had scuttled, she was sure—horrid girls, that was what they were, nothing the Pernes could understand. The Pernes ought not to be bothered with them.
“Well,” she said, feeling a sudden security, “are we responsible for them out of school hours?”
Miss Haddie’s eyebrows moved nervously, and Miss Perne’s smile turned to a dubious mouthing.
“Eh, there you are. D’ye see, Deborah. That’s it. That’s the crucial point. Are we responsible? I’m sure I can’t say. That places the whole difficulty in a nutshell. Here are these gels, not even day boarders. How far can we control their general behaviour? Eh? I’m sure I don’t know.”
“My dear Jenny,” said Miss Haddie quickly, her hollow voice reverberating as if she were using a gargle, “it’s quite obvious that we can’t have gels known to belong to the school running about in the park with nothing on.”
“I agree, my dear Haddie. But, as Jenny says, how are we to prevent such conduct?”
“Don’t let us lose sight of Miriam’s point. Are we responsible for their play-times? I suppose we’re not, you know, Deborah, really after all. Not directly, perhaps. But sheerly we are indirectly responsible. Sheerly. We ought to be able to make it impossible for them to carry on in this unseemly fashion.”
“Yes, yes,” said Miss Deborah eagerly, “sheerly.”
“Is it education?” suggested Miriam.
“That’s it, my dear. It is education. That’s what’s wanted. That’s what these gels want. I don’t know, though. All this talk of education. It ought to be the thing. And yet look at these two gels. Both of them from Miss Cass’s. There’s her school now. Famous all over London. Three hundred gels. We’ve had several here. And they’ve all had that objectionable noisy tone. Eh, Deborah? I don’t know. How is it to be accounted for? Eh?”
“I’ve never heard of Miss Cass’s,” said Miriam.
“My dear child! It’s not possible! D’ye mean to say ye don’t know Miss Cass’s high school?”
“Oh, if it’s a high school, of course.”
All three ladies waited, with their eyes on her, making a chorus of inarticulate sounds.
“Oh well, high schools are simply fearful.”
Miriam glowed in a tide of gentle cackling laughter.
“Well, you know, I think there’s something in it,” giggled Miss Jenny softly. “It’s the number perhaps. That’s what I always say, Deborah. Treating the gels like soldiers. Like a regiment. D’ye see? No individual study of the gels’ characters——”
“Well. However that may be, I am sure of one thing. I am sure that on Monday Polly and Eunice must be reprimanded. Severely reprimanded.”
“Yes. I suppose they must. They’re nice gels at heart, you know. Both of them. That’s the worst of it. Well, I hardly mean that. Only so often the naughty gels are so thoroughly—well—nice, likable at bottom, ye know, eh? I’m sure. I don’t know.”
7
Miriam sat on in the schoolroom after supper with the newspaper spread out on the brown American cloth table cover under the gas. She found a long column headed “The Royal Commission on Education.” The Queen, then, was interesting herself in education. But in England the sovereign had no power, was only a figurehead. Perhaps the Queen had been advised to interest herself in education by the Privy Council and the Conservatives, people of leisure and cultivation. A commission was a sort of command—it must be important, something the Privy Council had decided and sent out in the Queen’s name.
She read her column, sitting comfortlessly between the window and the open door. As she read the room grew still. The memory of the talking and clinking supper-table faded, and presently even the ticking of the clock was no longer there. She raised her head at last. No wonder people read newspapers. You could read about what was going on in the country, actually what the Government was doing at that very moment. Of course; men seemed to know such a lot because they read the newspapers and talked about what was in them. But anybody could know as much as the men sitting in the armchairs if they chose; read all about everything, written down for everybody to see. That was the freedom of the Press—Areopagitica, that the history books said so much about and was one of those new important things, more important than facts and dates. Like the Independence of Ireland. Yet very few people really talked like newspapers. Only angry men with loud voices. Here was the free Press that Milton had gone to prison for. Certainly it made a great difference. The room was quite changed. There was hardly any pain in the silent cane-seated chairs. There were really people making the world better. Now. At last. Perhaps it was rather a happy fate to be a teacher in the Banbury Park school and read newspapers. There were plenty of people who could neither read nor write. Someone had a servant like that who did all the marketing and never forgot anything or made any mistake over the change—none the worse for it, pater said, people who wanted book-learning could get it, there must always be hewers of wood and drawers of water, laissez faire. But Gladstone did not believe that. At this moment Gladstone was saying that because the people of England as a whole were uneducated their “condition of ignorance” affected the whole of the “body politic.” That was Gladstone. He had found that out ... with large moist silky eyes like a dog and pointed collars seeing things as they were and going to change them.... Miriam stirred uneasily as she felt the beating of her heart.... If only she were at home how she could rush up and down the house and shout about it and shake Mary by the shoulders. She shrank into herself and sat stiffly up, suddenly discovering she was lounging over the table. As she moved she reflected that probably Gladstone’s being so very dark made him determined that things should not go on as they were. In that case Gladstonians would be dark—perhaps not musical. Someone had said musical people were a queer soft lot. Laissez faire. Lazy fair. But perhaps it was possible to be fair and musical and to be a Gladstonian too. You can’t have your cake and eat it. No. It was a good thing, one’s best self knew it was a good thing that someone had found out why people were so awful; like a dentist finding out a bad tooth however much it hurt. Only if education was going to be the principal thing and all teachers were to be ‘qualified’ it was no use going on. Miss Jenny had said private schools were doomed.
8
For a long time she sat blankly contemplating the new world that was coming. Everyone would be trained and efficient but herself. She was not strong enough to earn a living and qualify as a teacher at the same time. The day’s work tired her to death. She must hide somewhere.... She would not be wanted.... If you were not wanted.... If you knew you were not wanted—you ought to get out of the way. Chloroform. Someone had drunk a bottle of carbolic acid. The clock struck ten. Gathering up the newspaper she folded it neatly, put it on the hall table and went slowly upstairs, watching the faint reflection of the half-lowered hall gas upon the polished balustrade. The staircase was cold and airy. Cold rooms and landings stretched up away above her into the darkness. She became aware of a curious buoyancy rising within her. It was so strange that she stood still for a moment on the stair. For a second, life seemed to cease in her and the staircase to be swept from under her feet.... “I’m alive.” ... It was as if something had struck her, struck right through her impalpable body, sweeping it away, leaving her there shouting silently without it. I’m alive.... I’m alive. Then with a thump her heart went on again and her feet carried her body warm and happy and elastic easily on up the solid stairs. She tried once or twice deliberately to bring back the breathless moment standing still on a stair. Each time something of it returned. “It’s me, me; this is me being alive,” she murmured with a feeling under her like the sudden drop of a lift. But her thoughts distracted her. They were eagerly talking to her declaring that she had had this feeling before. She opened her bedroom door very quietly. The air of the room told her that Nancie and Beadie were asleep. Going lightly across to the chest of drawers dressing-table by the window as if she were treading on air, she stood holding its edge in the darkness. Two forgotten incidents flowed past her in quick succession; one of waking up on her seventh birthday in the seaside villa alone in a small dark room and suddenly saying to herself that one day her father and mother would die and she would still be there, and after a curious moment when the darkness seemed to move against her, feeling very old and crying bitterly, and another of standing in the bow of the dining-room window at Barnes looking at the raindrops falling from the leaves through the sunshine and saying to Eve, who came into the room as she watched, “D’you know, Eve, I feel as if I’d suddenly wakened up out of a dream.” The bedroom was no longer dark. She could see the outlines of everything in the light coming from the street lamps through the half-closed Venetian blinds. Beadie sighed and stirred. Miriam began impatiently preparing for bed without lighting the gas. “What’s the use of feeling like that if it doesn’t stay? It doesn’t change anything. Next time I’ll make it stay. It might whisk me right away. There’s something in me that can’t be touched or altered. Me. If it comes again. If it’s stronger every time.... Perhaps it goes on getting stronger till you die.”
