SUPERSEDED
BY MAY SINCLAIR
_Author of "The Divine Fire"_
1906
PUBLISHERS' NOTE
Miss Sinclair has expressed a desire to have this book republished in
America, because she considers it the best of her work previous to "The
Divine Fire." It originally appeared with another work in a volume
entitled "Two Sides of a Question," a small imported edition of which is
now exhausted.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I. PROLOGUE.--MISS QUINCEY STOPS THE WAY
II. HOUSEHOLD GODS
III. INAUGURAL ADDRESSES
IV. BASTIAN CAUTLEY, M.D.
V. HEALERS AND REGENERATORS
VI. SPRING FASHIONS
VII. UNDER A BLUE MOON
VIII. A PAINFUL MISUNDERSTANDING
IX. THROUGH THE STETHOSCOPE
X. MISS QUINCEY STANDS BACK
XI. DR. CAUTLEY SENDS IN HIS BILL
XII. EPILOGUE.--THE MAN AND THE WOMAN
SUPERSEDED
CHAPTER I
Prologue.--Miss Quincey Stops the Way
"Stand back, Miss Quincey, if you please."
The school was filing out along the main corridor of St. Sidwell's. It
came with a tramp and a rustle and a hiss and a tramp, urged to a trot by
the excited teachers. The First Division first, half-woman, carrying
itself smoothly, with a swish of its long skirts, with a blush, a dreamy
intellectual smile, or a steadfast impenetrable air, as it happened to be
more or less conscious of the presence of the Head. Then the Second
Division, light-hearted, irrepressible, making a noise with its feet,
loose hair flapping, pig-tails flopping to the beat of its march. Then
the straggling, diminishing lines of the Third, a froth of white
pinafores, a confusion of legs, black or tan, staggering, shifting,
shuffling in a frantic effort to keep time.
On it came in a waving stream; a stream that flickered with innumerable
eyes, a stream that rippled with the wind of its own flowing, that
flushed and paled and brightened as some flower-face was tossed upwards,
or some crest, flame-coloured or golden, flung back the light. A stream
that was one in its rhythm and in the sex that was its soul, obscurely or
luminously feminine; it might have been a single living thing that
throbbed and undulated, as girl after girl gave out the radiance and
pulsation of her youth. The effect was overpowering; your senses judged
St. Sidwell's by these brilliant types that gave life and colour to the
stream. The rest were nowhere.
So at least it seemed to Miss Cursiter, the Head. That tall, lean,
iron-grey Dignity stood at the cross junction of two corridors, talking
to Miss Rhoda Vivian, the new Classical Mistress. And while she talked
she watched her girls as a general watches his columns wheeling into
action. A dangerous spot that meeting of the corridors. There the
procession doubles the corner at a swinging curve, and there, time it as
she would, the little arithmetic teacher was doomed to fall foul of the
procession. Daily Miss Quincey thought to dodge the line; daily it caught
her at the disastrous corner. Then Miss Quincey, desperate under the eye
of the Head, would try to rush the thing, with ridiculous results. And
Fate or the Order of the day contrived that Miss Cursiter should always
be there to witness her confusion. Nothing escaped Miss Cursiter; if her
face grew tender for the young girls and the eight-year-olds, at the
sight of Miss Quincey it stiffened into tolerance, cynically braced to
bear. Miss Cursiter had an eye for magnificence of effect, and the
unseemly impact of Miss Quincey was apt to throw the lines into disorder,
demoralising the younger units and ruining the spectacle as a whole.
To-day it made the new Classical Mistress smile, and somehow that smile
annoyed Miss Cursiter.
She, Miss Quincey, was a little dry, brown woman, with a soft pinched
mouth, and a dejected nose. So small and insignificant was she that she
might have crept along for ever unnoticed but for her punctuality in
obstruction. As St. Sidwell's prided itself on the brilliance and
efficiency of its staff, the wonder was how Miss Quincey came to be
there, but there she had been for five-and-twenty years. She seemed to
have stiffened into her place. Five-and-twenty years ago she had been
arithmetic teacher, vaguely attached to the Second Division, and she was
arithmetic teacher still. Miss Quincey was going on for fifty; she had
out-lived the old Head, and now she was the oldest teacher there, twice
as old as Miss Vivian, the new Classical Mistress, older, far older than
Miss Cursiter. She had found her way into St. Sidwell's, not because she
was brilliant or efficient, but because her younger sister Louisa already
held an important post there.
Louisa was brilliant and efficient enough for anybody, so brilliant and
so efficient that the glory of it rested on her family. And when she
married the Greek master and went away Juliana stayed on as a matter of
course, wearing a second-hand aureole of scholarship and supporting a
tradition.
She stayed on and taught arithmetic for one thing. And when she was not
teaching arithmetic, she was giving little dictations, setting little
themes, controlling some fifty young and very free translators of _Le
Philosophe sous les Toils_. Miss Quincey had a passion for figures and
for everything that could be expressed in figures. Not a pure passion,
nothing to do with the higher mathematics, which is the love of the soul,
but an affection sadly alloyed with baser matter, with rods and perches,
firkins and hogsheads, and articles out of the grocer's shop.
Among these objects Miss Quincey's imagination ran voluptuous riot. But
upon such things as history or poetry she had a somewhat blighting
influence. The flowers in the school Anthology withered under her
fingers, and the flesh and blood of heroes crumbled into the dust of
dates. As for the philosopher under the roofs, who he was, and what was
his philosophy, and how he ever came to be under the roofs at all, nobody
in St. Sidwell's ever knew or ever cared to know; Miss Quincey had made
him eternally uninteresting. Yet Miss Quincey's strength was in her
limitations. It was the strength of unreasoning but undying conviction.
Nothing could shake her belief in the supreme importance of arithmetic
and the majesty of its elementary rules. Pale and persistent and
intolerably meek, she hammered hard facts into the brain with a sort of
muffled stroke, hammered till the hardest stuck by reason of their
hardness, for she was a teacher of the old school. Thus in her own way
she made her mark. Among the other cyphers, the irrelevant and
insignificant figure of Miss Quincey was indelibly engraved on many an
immortal soul. There was a curious persistency about Miss Quincey.
Miss Quincey was not exactly popular. The younger teachers pronounced her
cut and dried; for dryness, conscientiously acquired, passed for her
natural condition. Nobody knew that it cost her much effort and industry
to be so stiff and starched; that the starch had to be put on fresh every
morning; that it was quite a business getting up her limp little
personality for the day. In five-and-twenty years, owing to an incurable
malady of shyness, she had never made friends with any of her pupils.
Her one exception proved her rule. Miss Quincey seemed to have gone out
of her way to attract that odious little Laura Lazarus, who was known at
St. Sidwell's as the Mad Hatter. At fourteen, being still incapable of
adding two and two together, the Mad Hatter had been told off into an
idiot's class by herself for arithmetic; and Miss Quincey, because she
was so meek and patient and persistent, was told off to teach her. The
child, a queer, ugly little pariah, half-Jew, half-Cockney, held all
other girls in abhorrence, and was avoided by them with an equal
loathing. She seemed to have attached herself to the unpopular teacher
out of sheer perversity and malignant contempt of public opinion.
Abandoned in their corner, with their heads bent together over the sums,
the two outsiders clung to each other in a common misery and isolation.
Miss Quincey was well aware that she was of no account at St. Sidwell's.
She supposed that it was because she had never taken her degree. To be
sure she had never tried to take it; but it was by no means certain that
she could have taken it if she had tried. She was not clever; Louisa had
carried off all the brains and the honours of the family. It had been
considered unnecessary for Juliana to develop an individuality of her
own; enough for her that she belonged to Louisa, and was known as
Louisa's sister. Louisa's sister was a part of Louisa; Louisa was a part
of St. Sidwell's College, Regent's Park; and St. Sidwell's College,
Regent's Park, was a part--no, St. Sidwell's was the whole; it was the
glorious world. Miss Quincey had never seen, or even desired to see any
other. That college was to her a place of exquisite order and light.
Light that was filtered through the high tilted windows, and reflected
from a prevailing background of green tiles and honey-white pine, from
countless rows of shining desks and from hundreds of young faces. Light,
the light of ideas, that streamed from the platform in the great hall
where three times in the year Miss Cursiter gave her address to the
students and teachers of St. Sidwell's.
Now Miss Cursiter was a pioneer at war with the past, a woman of vast
ambitions, a woman with a system and an end; and she chose her
instruments finely, toiling early and late to increase their brilliance
and efficiency. She was new to St. Sidwell's, and would have liked to
make a clean sweep of the old staff and to fill their places with women
like Rhoda Vivian, young and magnificent and strong. As it was, she had
been weeding them out gradually, as opportunity arose; and the new staff,
modern to its finger-tips, was all but complete and perfect now. Only
Miss Quincey remained. St. Sidwell's in the weeding time had not been a
bed of roses for Miss Cursiter, and Miss Quincey, blameless but
incompetent, was a thorn in her side, a thorn that stuck. Impossible to
remove Miss Quincey quickly, she was so very blameless and she worked so
hard.
She worked from nine till one in the morning, from two-thirty till
four-thirty in the afternoon, and from six-thirty in the evening till any
hour in the night. She worked with the desperate zeal of the superseded
who knows that she holds her post on sufferance, the terrified tenacity
of the middle-aged who feels behind her the swift-footed rivalry of
youth. And the more she worked the more she annoyed Miss Cursiter.
So now, above all the tramping and shuffling and hissing, you heard the
self-restrained and slightly metallic utterance of the Head.
"Stand back, Miss Quincey, if you please."
And Miss Quincey stood back, flattening herself against the wall, and the
procession passed her by, rosy, resonant, exulting, a triumph of life.