Inaugural Addresses
It was evening, early in the winter term, and Miss Cursiter was giving
her usual inaugural address to the staff. Their number had increased so
considerably that the little class-room was packed to overflowing. Miss
Cursiter stood in the free space at the end, facing six rows of eager
faces arranged in the form of a horse-shoe. She looked upon them and
smiled; she joyed with the joy of the creator who sees his idea incarnate
before him.
A striking figure, Miss Cursiter. Tall, academic and austere; a keen
eagle head crowned with a mass of iron-grey hair; grey-black eyes burning
under a brow of ashen grey; an intelligence fervent with fire of the
enthusiast, cold with the renunciant's frost. Such was Miss Cursiter. She
was in splendid force to-day, grappling like an athlete with her enormous
theme--"The Educational Advantages of General Culture." She delivered her
address with an utterance rapid but distinct, keeping one eye on the
reporter and the other on Miss Rhoda Vivian, M.A.
She might well look to Rhoda Vivian. If she had needed a foil for her own
commanding personality, she had found it there. But the new Classical
Mistress was something more than Miss Cursiter's complement. Nature,
usually so economical, not to say parsimonious, seemed to have made her
for her own delight, in a fit of reckless extravagance. She had given her
a brilliant and efficient mind in a still more brilliant and efficient
body, clothed her in all the colours of life; made her a creature of
ardent and elemental beauty. Rhoda Vivian had brown hair with sparkles of
gold in it and flakes of red fire; her eyes were liquid grey, the grey of
water; her lips were full, and they pouted a little proudly; it was the
pride of life. And she had other gifts which did not yet appear at St.
Sidwell's. There was something about her still plastic and unformed; you
could not say whether it was the youth of genius, or only the genius of
youth. But at three-and-twenty she had chosen her path, and gone far on
it, and it had been honours all the way. She went up and down at St.
Sidwell's, adored and unadoring, kindling the fire of a secret worship.
In any other place, with any other woman at the head of it, such a vivid
individuality might have proved fatal to her progress. But Miss Cursiter
was too original herself not to perceive the fine uses of originality.
All her hopes for the future were centred in Rhoda Vivian. She looked
below that brilliant surface and saw in her the ideal leader of young
womanhood. Rhoda was a force that could strike fire from a stone; what
she wanted she was certain to get; she seemed to compel work from the
laziest and intelligence from the dullest by the mere word of her will.
What was more, her nature was too large for vanity; she held her
worshippers at arm's length and consecrated her power of personal
seduction to strictly intellectual ends. At the end of her first term her
position was second only to the Head. If Miss Cursiter was the will and
intelligence of St. Sidwell's, Rhoda Vivian was its subtle poetry and its
soul. And Miss Cursiter meant to keep her there; being a woman who made
all sacrifices and demanded them.
So now, while Miss Cursiter stood explaining, ostensibly to the entire
staff, the unique advantages of General Culture, it was to Rhoda Vivian
as to a supreme audience that she addressed her deeper thought and her
finer phrase. If Miss Cursiter had not had to consult her notes now and
again, she must have seen that Rhoda Vivian's mind was wandering, that
the Classical Mistress was if anything more interested in her companions
than in the noble utterances of the Head. As her grey eyes swept the
tiers of faces, they lingered on that corner where Miss Quincey seemed
perpetually striving to suppress, consume, and utterly obliterate
herself. And each time she smiled, as she had smiled earlier in the day
when first she saw Miss Quincey.
For Miss Quincey was there, far back in the ranks of the brilliant and
efficient. Note-book on desk, she followed the quick march of thought
with a fatigued and stumbling brain. She was painfully, ludicrously out
of step; yet to judge by the light that shone now and then in her eyes,
by the smile that played about the corners of her weak, tender mouth, she
too had caught the sympathetic rapture, the intellectual thrill. Ready to
drop was Miss Quincey, but she would not have missed that illuminating
hour, not if you had paid her--three times her salary. It was her one
glimpse of the larger life; her one point of contact with the ideal. Her
pencil staggered over her note-book as Miss Cursiter flamed and lightened
in her peroration.
"We have looked at our subject in the light of the ideals by which and
for which we live. Let us now turn to the practical side of the matter,
as it touches our business and our bosoms. Do not say we have no room for
poetry in our crowded days." A score of weary heads looked up; there was
a vague inquiry in all eyes. "You have your evenings--all of you. Much
can be done with evenings; if your training has done nothing else for you
it has taught you the economy of time. You are tired in the evenings,
yes. But the poets, Shakespeare, Tennyson, and Browning, are the great
healers and regenerators of worn-out humanity. When you are faint and
weary with your day's work, the best thing you can do is to rise and
refresh yourselves at the living wells of literature."
Long before the closing sentence Miss Quincey's MS. had become a
sightless blur. But she had managed to jot down in her neat arithmetical
way: "Poets = healers and regenerators."
The address was printed and a copy was given to each member of the staff.
Miss Quincey treasured up hers as a priceless scripture.
Miss Quincey was aware of her shortcomings and had struggled hard to mend
them, toiling pantingly after those younger ones who had attained the
standard of brilliance and efficiency. She joined the Teachers' Debating
Society. Not that she debated. She had once put some elementary questions
in an inaudible voice, and had been requested to speak a little louder,
whereupon she sank into her seat and spoke no more. But she heard a great
deal. About the emancipation of women; about the women's labour market;
about the doors that were now thrown open to women. She was told that all
they wanted was a fair field and no favour. (The speaker, a rosy-cheeked
child of one-and-twenty, was quite violent in her repudiation of favour.)
And Miss Quincey believed it all, though she understood very little about
it.
But it was illumination, a new gospel to her, this doctrine of General
Culture; it was the large easy-fitting formula which she had seemed to
need. With touching simplicity she determined to follow the course
recommended by the Head. Though by the time she had corrected some
seventy manuscripts in marble-backed covers, and prepared her lesson for
the next day, she had nothing but the fag-end of her brain to give to the
healers and regenerators; as for rising, Miss Quincey felt much more like
going to bed, and it was as much as she could do to drag her poor little
body there. Still Miss Quincey was nothing if not heroic; night after
night twelve o'clock would find her painfully trying to draw water from
the wells of literature. She had begun upon Browning; set herself to read
through the whole of _Sordello_ from beginning to end. It is as easy as a
sum in arithmetic if you don't bother your head too much about the
Guelphs and Ghibellines and the metaphors and things, and if you take it
in short fits, say three pages every evening. Never any more, or you
might go to sleep and forget all about it; never any less, or you would
have bad arrears. As there are exactly two hundred and thirteen pages,
she calculated that she would finish it in ten weeks and a day. There was
no place for Miss Quincey and her pile of marble-backed exercise-books in
the dim and dingy first-floor drawing-room (Mrs. Moon and the
bandy-legged cabinet would have had something to say to that). All this
terrific intellectual travail went on in a dimmer and dingier dining-room
beneath it.
Then one night, old Martha, disturbed by sounds that came from Miss
Juliana's bedroom, groped her way fumblingly in and found Miss Juliana
sitting up in her sleep and posing the darkness with a problem.
"If," said Miss Juliana, "three men can finish one hundred and nineteen
hogsheads of Browning in eight weeks, how long will it take seven women
to finish a thousand and forty-five--forty-five--forty-five, if one woman
works twice as hard as eleven men?"
Martha shook her head and went fumbling back to bed again; and being a
conscientious servant she said nothing about it for fear of frightening
the old lady.
About a fortnight later, Rhoda Vivian, sailing down the corridor, came
upon the little arithmetic teacher all sick and tremulous, leaning up
against the hot-water pipes beside a pile of exercise-books. The sweat
streamed from her sallow forehead, and her face was white and drawn. She
could give no rational account of herself, but offered two hypotheses as
equally satisfactory; either she had taken a bad chill, or else the hot
air from the water-pipes had turned her faint. Rhoda picked up the pile
of exercise-books and led her into the dressing-room, and Miss Quincey
was docile and ridiculously grateful. She was glad that Miss Vivian was
going to take her home. She even smiled her little pinched smile and
pressed Rhoda's hand as she said, "A friend in need is a friend indeed."
Rhoda would have given anything to be able to return the pressure and the
sentiment, but Rhoda was too desperately sincere. She was sorry for Miss
Quincey; but all her youth, unfettered and unfeeling, revolted from the
bond of friendship. So she only stooped and laced up the shabby boots,
and fastened the thin cape by its solitary button. The touch of Miss
Quincey's clothes thrilled her with a pang of pity, and she could have
wept over the unutterable pathos of her hat. In form and substance it was
a rock, beaten by the weather; its limp ribbons clung to it like seaweed
washed up and abandoned by the tide. When Miss Quincey's head was inside
it the hat seemed to become one with Miss Quincey; you could not conceive
anything more melancholy and forlorn. Rhoda was beautifully attired in
pale grey cloth. Rhoda wore golden sables about her throat, and a big
black Gainsborough hat on the top of her head, a hat that Miss Quincey
would have thought a little daring and theatrical on anybody else; but
Rhoda wore it and looked like a Puritan princess. Rhoda's clothes were
enough to show that she was a woman for whom a profession is a
superfluity, a luxury.
Rhoda sent for a hansom, and having left Miss Quincey at her home went
off in search of a doctor. She had insisted on a doctor, in spite of Miss
Quincey's protestations. After exploring a dozen dingy streets and
conceiving a deep disgust for Camden Town, she walked back to find her
man in the neighbourhood of St. Sidwell's.