Miss Quincey Stands Back
As it happened on a Saturday morning she had plenty of time to think
about it. All the afternoon and the evening and the night lay before her;
she was powerless to cope with Sunday and the night beyond that.
The remarkable revelation made to her by Mrs. Moon was so great a shock
that her mind refused to realize it all at once. It was an outrage to all
the meek reticences and chastities of her spirit. But she owned its
truth; she saw it now, the thing they all had seen, that she only could
not see.
She had sinned the sin of sins, the sin of youth in middle-age.
Now it was not imagination in Miss Quincey, so much as the tradition of
St. Sidwell's, that gave her innocent affection the proportions of a
crime. Miss Quincey had lived all her life in ignorance of her own
nature, having spent the best part of five-and-forty years in acquiring
other knowledge. She had nothing to go upon, for she had never been
young; or rather she had treated her youth unkindly, she had fed it on
saw-dust and given it nothing but arithmetic books to play with, so that
its experiences were of no earthly use to her.
And now, if they had only let her alone, she might have been none the
wiser; her folly might have put on many quaint disguises, friendship,
literary sympathy, intellectual esteem--there were a thousand delicate
subterfuges and innocent hypocrisies, and under any one of them it might
have crept about unchallenged in the shadows and blind alleys of thought.
As love pure and simple, if it came to that, there was no harm in it.
Many an old maid, older than she, has just such a secret folded up and
put away all sweet and pure; the poor lady does not call it love, but
remembrance, which is so to speak love laid in lavender; and she--who
knows? She might have contrived a little shrine for it somewhere; she had
always understood that love was a holy thing.
Unfortunately, when a holy thing has been pulled about and dragged in the
mud, it may be as holy as ever but it will never look the same. In Miss
Quincey's case mortal passion had been shaken out of its sleep and forced
to look at itself before it had time to put on a shred of immortality. In
the sudden glare it stood out monstrous, naked and ashamed; she herself
had helped to deprive it of all the delicacies and amenities that made it
tolerable to thought. With her own hands she had delivered it up to the
stethoscope.
He knew, he knew. In the mad rush of her ideas one sentence detached
itself from the torrent. "_He_ knows well enough what's the matter with
you."
The nature of the crime was such that there was no possibility or
explanation or defence against the accuser whose condemnation weighed
heaviest on her soul. He loomed before her, hovered over her, with the
tubes of the heart-probing stethoscope in his ears (as a matter of fact
they gave him a somewhat grotesque appearance, remotely suggestive of a
Hindoo idol; but Miss Quincey had not noticed that); his bumpy forehead
was terrible with intelligence; his eyes were cold and comprehensive; the
smile of a foregone conclusion flickered on his lips.
He must have known it all the time. There never had been any
misunderstanding. That was the clue to his conduct; that was the reason
why he had left off coming to the house; for he was the soul of delicacy
and honour. And yet she had never said a word that might be
interpreted--He must have seen it in her face, then,--that day--when
she allowed herself to sit with him in the park. She remembered--things
that he had said to her--did they mean that he had seen? She saw it all
as he had seen it. "Delicacy" and "honour" indeed! Disgust and contempt
would be more likely feelings.
She lay awake all Saturday night and all Sunday night, until four o'clock
on Monday morning; always reviewing the situation, always going over the
same patch of ground in the desperate hope of finding some place where
her self-respect could rest, and discovering nothing but the traces of
her guilty feet. A subtler woman would have flourished lightly over the
territory, till she had whisked away every vestige of her trail; another
would have seen the humour of the situation and blown the whole thing
into the inane with a burst of healthy laughter; but subtlety and humour
were not Miss Quincey's strong points. She could do nothing but creep
shivering to bed and lie there, face to face with her own enormity.
On Monday morning and on many mornings after she crept out into the
street stealthily, like a criminal seeking some shelter where she could
hide her head. She acquired a habit--odd enough to the casual
onlooker--of slinking cautiously round every turning and rushing every
crossing in her abject terror of meeting Bastian Cautley.
There was nobody to tell her that it would not matter if she did meet
him; no cheerful woman of the world to smile in her frightened face and
say: "My dear Miss Quincey, there is nothing remarkable in this. We all
do it, sooner or later. Too late? Not a bit of it; better too late than
never, and if it's that Cautley man I'm sure I don't wonder. I'm in love
with him myself. Lost your self-respect, have you? Self-respect, indeed,
why bless your soul, you are all the nicer for it. As for hiding your
head I never heard such rubbish in my life. Nobody is looking at
you--certainly not the Cautley man. In fact, to tell you the truth,
at this moment he is particularly engaged in looking the other way."
But Miss Quincey did not know that lady. She knew no one but Rhoda and
Mrs. Moon; and if Mrs. Moon was too old, Rhoda was too young to take that
view; besides, Mrs. Moon was not a woman of the world and no ridiculous
delicacy prompted her to look the other way. In any case Juliana's state
of mind, advertised as it was by her complexion and many eccentricities
of behaviour, could not have escaped her notice.
The Old Lady had reverted to her former humorous attitude, and was trying
whether Juliana's state of mind would not yield to skilfully directed
banter. In these tactics she was not left unsupported. Louisa had written
a long letter about her husband and her children, with a postscript.
"P.S.--I don't half like what you tell me about Juliana and Dr. C--. For
goodness' sake don't encourage her in any of that nonsense. Sit on it.
Laugh her out of it. I agree with you that it would be better if she
cultivated her mind a little more.
"P.P.S.--Andrew has just come in. He says we oughtn't to call her
Juliana, but Fooliana."
So laughed Louisa, the married woman.
And Fooliana she was called. The joke was quite unworthy of the Greek
Professor's reputation, but for Mrs. Moon's purposes he could hardly have
made a better one.
Louisa had put a terrible weapon into the Old Lady's hands. It was
many weapons in one. It could be turned on in all its broad robust
humour--"Fooliana!" Or refined away into a playful or delicate
suggestion, pointed with an uplifted finger--"Fooli!" Or cut down and
compressed into its essential meaning--"Fool!"
But whichever missile came handy, the effect was much the same. Juliana's
complexion grew redder or grayer, but her state of mind remained
unchanged. Sometimes the Old Lady tried a graver method.
"If you would cultivate your mind a little in the evenings you would have
no time for all this nonsense."
But Juliana had abandoned the cultivation of her mind. She made no
attempt to pay off that small outstanding debt to _Sordello._ There was
an end of the intellectual life; for the living wells of literature were
tainted; Browning had become a bitter memory and Tennyson a shame.
But if Miss Quincey had no heart for General Culture, she was busier than
ever in the discharge of her regular duties. At the end of the midsummer
term the pressure on the staff was heavy. Her work had grown with the
growth of St. Sidwell's, and the pile of marble and granite copy-books
rose higher than ever; it was monumental, and Miss Quincey was glad
enough to bury her grief under it for a time. Indeed it looked as if in
St. Sidwell's she had found the shelter where she could hide her head;
and a very desirable shelter too, as long as Mrs. Moon continued in that
lively temper. Gradually she began to realize that of all those five
hundred pairs of eyes there was none that had discovered her secret; that
not one of those busy brains was occupied with her affairs. It was a
relief to lose herself among them all and be of no account again.
In the corner behind Rhoda Vivian she and the Mad Hatter seemed to be
clinging together more than ever in an ecstasy of isolation.
After all, above the turmoil of emotion a little tremulous, attenuated
ideal was trying to raise its head. Her duty. She dimly discerned a
possibility of deliverance, of purification from her sin. Therefore she
clung more desperately than ever to her post. Seeing that she had served
the system for five-and-twenty years, it was hard if she could not get
from it a little protection against her own weakness, if she could not
claim the intellectual support it professed to give. It was the first
time she had ever put it to the test. If she could only stay on another
year or two--
And now at the very end of the midsummer term it really looked as if St.
Sidwell's was anxious to keep her. Everybody was curiously kind; the
staff cast friendly glances on her as she sat in her corner; Rhoda was
almost passionate in her tenderness. Even Miss Cursiter seemed softened.
She had left off saying "Stand back, Miss Quincey, if you please"; and
Miss Quincey began to wonder what it all meant.
She was soon to know.
One night, the last of the term, the Classical Mistress was closeted with
the Head. Rhoda, elbow-deep in examination papers, had been critically
considering seventy variously ingenious renderings of a certain chorus,
when the sudden rapping of a pen on the table roused her from her
labours.
"You must see for yourself, Rhoda, how we are placed. We must keep up to
a certain standard of efficiency in the staff. Miss Quincey is getting
past her work."
(Rhoda became instantly absorbed in sharpening a pencil.)
"For the last two terms she has been constantly breaking down; and now
I'm very much afraid she is breaking-up."
The Head remained solemnly unconscious of her own epigram.
"No wonder," said Rhoda to herself, "first love at fifty is new wine in
old bottles; everybody knows what happens to the bottles."
The flush and the frown on the Classical Mistress's face might have been
accounted for by the sudden snapping of the pencil.
"You see," continued Miss Cursiter, as if defending herself from some
accusation conveyed by the frown, "as it is we have kept her on a long
while for her sister's sake."
(A murmur from the Classical Mistress.)
"Of course we must put it to her prettily, wrap it up--in tissue paper."
(The Classical Mistress is still inarticulate.)
"You are not giving me your opinion."
"It seems to me I've said a great deal more than I've any right to say."
"Oh you. We know all about that. I asked for your opinion."
"And when I gave it you told me I was under an influence."
"What if I did? And what if it were so?"
"What indeed? You would get the benefit of two opinions instead of one."
Now if Miss Cursiter were thinking of Dr. Cautley there was some point in
what Rhoda said; for in the back of her mind the Head had a curious
respect for masculine judgment.
"There can be no two opinions about Miss Quincey."
"I don't know. Miss Quincey," said Rhoda thoughtfully to her pencil, "is
a large subject."
"Yes, if you mean that Miss Quincey is a terrible legacy from the past.
The question for me is--how long am I to let her hamper our future?"
"The future? It strikes me that we're not within shouting distance of the
future. We talk as if we could see the end, and we're nowhere near it,
we're in all the muddle of the middle--that's why we're hampered with
Miss Quincey and other interesting relics of the past."
"We are slowly getting rid of them."
At that Rhoda blazed up. She was young, and she was reckless, and she had
too many careers open to her to care much about consequences. Miss
Cursiter had asked for her opinion and she should have it with a
vengeance.
"It's not enough to get rid of them. We ought to provide for them. Who or
what do we provide for, if it comes to that? We're always talking about
specialisation, and the fact is we haven't specialised enough. Don't we
give the same test papers to everybody?"
"I shall be happy to set separate papers for each girl if you'll
undertake to correct them."
The more Rhoda fired the more Miss Cursiter remained cold.
"That's just it--we couldn't if we tried. We know nothing about each
girl. That's where we shall have to specialise in the future if we're to
do any good. We've specialised enough with our teachers and our subjects;
chipped and chopped till we can't divide them any more; and we've taken
our girls in the lump. We know less about them than they do themselves.
As for the teachers--"
"Which by the way brings us back to Miss Quincey."
"Everything brings us back to Miss Quincey. Miss Quincey will be always
with us."
"We must put younger women in her place."
Rhoda winced as though Miss Cursiter had struck her.
"They will soon grow old. Our profession is a cruel one. It uses up the
finest and most perishable parts of a woman's nature. It takes the best
years of her life--and throws the rest away."
"Yet thousands of women are willing to take it up, and leave comfortable
homes to do it too."
"Yes," sighed Rhoda, "it's the rush for the open door."
"My dear Rhoda, the women's labour market is the same as every other. The
best policy is the policy of the open door. Don't you see that the remedy
is to open it wider--wider!"
"And when we've opened all the doors as wide as ever they'll go, what
then? Where are we going to?"
"I can't tell you." Miss Cursiter looked keenly at her. "Do you mean that
you'll go no further unless you know?"
Rhoda was silent.
"There are faults in the system. I can see that as well as you, perhaps
better. I am growing old too, Rhoda. But you are youth itself. It is
women like you we want--to save us. Are you going to turn your back on
us?"
Miss Cursiter bore down on her with her steady gaze, a gaze that was a
menace and an appeal, and Rhoda gave a little gasp as if for breath.
"I can't go any farther."
"Do you realize what this means? You are not a deserter from the ranks.
It is the second in command going over to the enemy."
The words were cold, but there was a fiery court-martial in Miss
Cursiter's eyes that accused and condemned her. If Rhoda had been dashing
her head against the barrack walls her deliverance was at hand. It seemed
that she could never strike a blow for Miss Quincey without winning the
battle for herself.
"I can't help it," said she. "I hate it--I hate the system."
"The system? Suppose you do away with it--do away with every woman's
college in the kingdom--have you anything to put in its place?"
"No. I have nothing to put in its place."
"Ah," said Miss Cursiter, "you are older than I thought."
Rhoda smiled. By this time, wrong or right, she was perfectly reckless.
If everybody was right in rejecting Miss Quincey, there was rapture in
being wildly and wilfully in the wrong. She had flung up the game.
Miss Cursiter saw it. "I was right," said she. "You are under an
influence, and a dangerous one."
"Perhaps--but, influence for influence" (here Rhoda returned Miss
Cursiter's gaze intrepidly), "I'm not far wrong. I honestly think that if
we persist in turning out these intellectual monstrosities we shall hand
over worse incompetents than Miss Quincey to the next generation."
Rhoda was intrepid; all the same she reddened as she realized what a
mouthpiece she had become for Bastian Cautley's theories and temper.
"My dear Rhoda, you're an intellectual monstrosity yourself."
"I know. And in another twenty years' time they'll want to get rid of
_me_."
"Of me too," thought the Head. Miss Cursiter felt curiously old and worn.
She had invoked Rhoda's youth and it had risen up against her. Influence
for influence, her power was dead.
Rhoda had talked at length in the hope of postponing judgment in Miss
Quincey's case; now she was anxious to get back to Miss Quincey, to
escape judgment in her own.
"And how about Miss Quincey?" she asked.
Miss Cursiter had nothing to say about Miss Quincey. She had done with
that section of her subject. She understood that Rhoda had said in
effect, "If Miss Quincey goes, I go too." Nevertheless her mind was made
up; in tissue paper, all ready for Miss Quincey.
Unfortunately tissue paper is more or less transparent, and Miss Quincey
had no difficulty in perceiving the grounds of her dismissal when
presented to her in this neat way. Not even when Miss Cursiter said to
her, at the close of the interview they had early the next morning,
"For your own sake, dear Miss Quincey, I feel we must forego your
valuable--most valuable services."
Miss Cursiter hesitated, warned by something in the aspect of the tiny
woman who had been a thorn in her side so long. Somehow, for this
occasion, the most incompetent, most insignificant member of her staff
had contrived to clothe herself with a certain nobility. She was
undeniably the more dignified of the two.
The Head, usually so eloquent at great moments, found actual difficulty
in getting to the end of her next sentence.
"What I was thinking of--really again entirely for your own sake--was
whether it would not be better for you to take a little longer holiday. I
do feel in your case the imperative necessity for rest. Indeed if you
found that you _wished_ to retire at the end of the holidays--of course
receiving your salary for the term--"
Try as she would to speak as though she were conferring a benefit, the
Head had the unmistakable air of asking a favour from her subordinate, of
imploring her help in a delicate situation, of putting it to her honour.
Miss Quincey's honour was more than equal to the demand made on it. She
had sunk so low in her own eyes lately that she was glad to gain some
little foothold for her poor pride. She faced Miss Cursiter bravely with
her innocent dim eyes as she answered: "I am ready to go, Miss Cursiter,
whenever it is most convenient to you; but I cannot think of taking
payment for work I have not done."
"My dear Miss Quincey, the rule is always a term's notice--or if--if any
other arrangement is agreed upon, a term's salary. There can be no
question--you must really allow me--"
There Miss Cursiter's address failed her and her voice faltered. She had
extracted the thorn; but it had worked its way deeper than she knew, and
the operation was a painful one. A few compliments on the part of the
Head, and the hope that St. Sidwell's would not lose sight of Miss
Quincey altogether, and the interview was closed.
It was understood by the end of the morning that Miss Quincey had sent in
her resignation. The news spread from class to class--"Miss Quincey is
going"--and was received by pupils and teachers with cries of
incredulity. After all, Miss Quincey belonged to St. Sidwell's; she was
part and parcel of the place; her blood and bones had been built into its
very walls, and her removal was not to be contemplated without dismay.
Why, what would a procession be like without Miss Quincey to enliven it?
And so, as she went her last round, a score of hands that had never
clasped hers in friendship were stretched out over the desks in a wild
leave-taking; three girls had tears in their eyes; one, more emotional
than the rest, sobbed audibly without shame. The staff were unanimous in
their sympathy and regret. Rhoda withdrew hastily from the painful scene.
Only the Mad Hatter in her corner made no sign. She seemed to take the
news of Miss Quincey's departure with a resigned philosophy.
"Well, little Classical Mistress," said Miss Quincey, "we must say
good-bye. You know I'm going."
The child nodded her small head. "Of course you're going. I might have
known it. I did know it all along. You were booked to go."
"Why, Laura?" Miss Quincey was mystified and a little hurt.
"Because"--a sinister convulsion passed over the ugly little
pariah face--"because"--the Mad Hatter had learnt the force of
under-statement--"because I _like_ you."
At that Miss Quincey broke down. "My dear little girl--I am going because
I am too old to stay."
"Write to me, dear," she said at the last moment; "let me know how you
are getting on."
But she never knew. The Mad Hatter did not write. In fact she never wrote
anything again, not even verses. She was handed over next term to Miss
Quincey's brilliant and efficient successor, who made her work hard, with
the result that the Mad Hatter got ill of a brain fever just before the
Christmas holidays and was never fit for any more work; and never became
Classical Mistress or anything else in the least distinguished. But this
is by the way.
As the College clock struck one, Miss Quincey walked home as usual and
went up into her bedroom without a word. She opened a drawer and took
from it her Post Office Savings Bank book and looked over her account.
There stood to her credit the considerable sum of twenty-seven pounds
four shillings and eight pence. No, not quite that, for the blouse, the
abominable blouse, had been paid for out of her savings and it had cost a
guinea. Twenty-six pounds three shillings and eight pence was all that
she had saved in five-and-twenty years. This, with the term's salary
which Miss Cursiter had insisted on, was enough to keep her going for a
year. And a year is a long time. She came slowly downstairs to the
drawing-room where her aunt was dozing and dreaming in her chair. There
still hung about her figure the indefinable dignity that had awed Miss
Cursiter. If she was afraid of Mrs. Moon she was too proud to show her
fear.
"This morning," she said simply, "I received my dismissal."
The old lady looked up dazed, not with the news but with her dream. Miss
Quincey repeated her statement.
"Do you mean you are not going back to that place there?" she asked
mildly.
"I am never going back."
Still with dignity she waited for the burst of feeling she felt to be
justifiable in the circumstances. None came; neither anger, nor
indignation, nor contempt, not even surprise. In fact the Old Lady was
smiling placidly, as she was wont to smile under the spell of the dream.
Slowly, very slowly, it was dawning upon her that the reproach had been
taken away from the memory of Tollington Moon. Henceforth his niece Miss
Quincey would be a gentlewoman at large. At the same time it struck her
that after all poor Juliana did not look so very old.
"Very well then," said she, "if I were you I should put on that nice silk
blouse in the evenings."