CHAPTER ONE.
VOWEL-SOUNDS
I
You could never be quite sure how Mrs. Lysaght would take anything. Even
thin Miss Winter, the Secretary, who must have loved her or she could
never have stood it, went about her duties murmuring, “I _hope_ I’ve
done right....” And, as Miss Fairfax said, you could feel the pit of the
poor thing’s stomach sink on _hope_. Miss Fairfax was a little coarse at
times: like a man. It was the result of a classical tripos. Gillian had
gathered this from Mrs. Lysaght on the bewildering occasion when she had
first received the head mistress’s instructions, at tea. Mrs. Lysaght
had been in bed that afternoon.
“I seize every opportunity of rest—facing the light—so revealing—and
thick bread and butter—you will not mind, dear.”
Gillian did mind being called “dear,” and the bread and butter was
certainly thick; but she was so much engrossed in wondering how Mrs.
Lysaght either rested or enjoyed whatever revelation the faced light
might bring (though quite in bed) while eating thick bread and butter,
interviewing a junior mistress and writing what might be a diary and
again might at the same time be a prospectus, with one of those
collapsible gold pencils which requires to be un-collapsed every
half-page or so, that she missed the next two hundred words—you couldn’t
call any of Mrs. Lysaght’s utterances sentences—and only caught up with
those on which she left Miss Fairfax.
“Sound scholarship but coarseness—very sad—still the Greeks—_and_ the
Romans—passages in the Epistles—and the Joint Board’s set-books this
year—Satires, dear—Horace—_such_ a pity—English purity—French
refinement—Yours so different.”
Gillian, whose subjects were English and Foreign Literature (“foreign”
being a term comprehending French and German only), found her mind
rocketing between _Le Misanthrope_ and _Hamlet_, also “set-books” that
year, with horrid memories of lines the full significance of which she
had never quite explored herself, but which in her new capacity she was
now about to purvey to the young and inquisitive. What, for example, was
the grosser name that liberal shepherds gave...?
“Correlate—always correlate.” Mrs. Lysaght was getting a little
breathless and the lead had sunk below the rim of the gold case of her
pencil. “References to History—dear Miss Parratt, so essentially
refined—to Geography and Botany—the whole time-table—especially in the
middle forms, and, whenever possible in _dramatic_ form. The teaching of
the Church, dear, Miracle and Mystery Plays—on the chest of drawers,
dear—a little red box. Thank you—the school motto—_our utmost for the
highest_—once a week for five minutes in every subject—and _low_-heeled
shoes—ah! no—that was little Miss Battinson—but Saint Paul—infallible—if
only _all_ women—but you with such a father will know how right....”
On the way home Gillian met Miss Fairfax.
“Well, child,” said the classical mistress, “did you count the finite
verbs? Parratt and I keep a book of them and the one who gets ten in one
week wins. But she’s a great woman once you’ve got out of the mist.”
But Gillian never got out of the mist; not quite. It is true that the
improbable connexion between her father (dead long ago of black-water
fever in Burma) and Saint Paul, turned out, like the low-heeled shoes,
to be proper to little Miss Battinson whose heels were very high and
whose father was a well-known Dissenting Minister. And, little by
little, she learnt to follow, with surprising success, the flying leaps
taken by Mrs. Lysaght’s conversation from branch to branch of the Tree
of Life, as she passed in and out of the great old Georgian house and
across the spreading lawns, in which her famous school was lodged.
It was when the squirrel talk leapt—not only in the Tree of Life, but
across the spaces which divide its branches from those of the Tree of
Knowledge of Good and Evil that Gillian failed, and it was this failure
which had brought her to the disaster she was now facing.
There was, Gillian had gathered this from the conversation in the
Assistant Mistresses’ Room, one week in the year when Mrs. Lysaght
deserted her post to make a pilgrimage. Colonel Lysaght was buried in
Jersey, where he had died, and his death had synchronized with the dates
not only of his own, but of his mother’s birthday as well. Old Lady
Alice Lysaght, who had married at seventeen, was a woman of indomitable
sentimentality, and, as her widowed daughter-in-law was her only
surviving relative, the celebration of this triple anniversary on the
spot where a comprehensive monument had been erected to it, was an event
before which even the routine of Pelham House broke down.
In June, in the first week of June, Mrs. Lysaght always went to Jersey
and left Miss Fairfax to rule in her stead. The one lesson a week which
the head mistress gave in each form was distributed among the staff, and
until you had occupied one of these forsaken posts during the annual
retreat, you were not really established at Pelham House. It would
generally take a new mistress eighteen months to attain what, in
deference to the Colonel’s military shade, was called her majority,
especially if, as Gillian had, she only joined the staff at the
beginning of the summer term. But in Gillian’s case, the confirmation
was swift and took place before she had been at Pelham House for more
than six weeks.
“I _hope_ I’m doing right in telling you, Miss Armstrong,” poor Miss
Winter had said, “but Mrs. Lysaght wishes you to take the Scripture
Class in V.B. next week while she is away.”
“Me?” said Gillian, looking up from the French Composition she was
correcting. “What book are they doing?”
Miss Winter consulted her sheaf of notes.
“Psalms,” she discovered; “but you are to do whatever you like. A single
lesson is what Mrs. Lysaght always asks for. She prefers not to have her
own treatment of the set-books interrupted. She thinks it might confuse
the girls’ minds.” Miss Winter was incapable of disrespect and Gillian’s
gurgle of delight died away in the long silence into which it travelled.
“I’ll do Naaman the Syrian,” she said. “It’s the finest short story in
the world. I always want to send it in for one of those competitions.”
“You’ve got a horrid, secular mind, my girl,” said Miss Fairfax. “And
you don’t seem to realize the signal honour bestowed on you.”
“No,” said Gillian, “it doesn’t seem very honourable—extra work. That’s
why I chose Naaman. I know him by heart. Besides, it’s so well done.”
Miss Fairfax snorted.
“The mind of your principal is still a sealed book to you,” and she left
the room without further argument.
On the following Tuesday, after Recreation, Gillian took V.B. through
the finest short story in the world and felt her own enthusiasm merge in
the collective excitement of the class as the drama turned on itself and
worked back from healing to destruction in the great anticlimax:—
“Went not my heart with thee when the man turned again from his
chariot to meet thee?”
Miss Parratt, whose subject was History, and whose essential refinement
was a quality attributed to her by Mrs. Lysaght on account of her
fretful manner rather than in consequence of any real knowledge of her
character, complained about it at luncheon:
“I took V.B. for the last lesson this morning, after you, Miss
Armstrong. They were all quite excited. As though they’d been to the
theatre.”
“Well, it was rather like that,” Gillian admitted; “it was bound to be.
I got terribly excited myself.”
“It’s not at all the state I’m used to for that class,” said Miss
Parratt.
“Do you think they _ought_ to be excited after a Scripture lesson?”
asked little Miss Battinson, not without malice.
“Don’t be silly, Battinson,” said Miss Fairfax; “all Armstrong’s lessons
are exciting. I can’t hear myself speak in the Shell when the Third
Form’s singing French verbs at her next door. I’m going to bring it up
at the next mistresses’ meeting.”
Gillian apologized.
“They do make a noise, I know. But it was the only way I could think of
to keep them quiet.”
“I do see what you mean, though I don’t think you put it very
accurately; however, that is only a passing problem. What I really
should like to know is why Mrs. Lysaght gave you, of all people, V.B.
for her Scripture hour. The confirmation class. It was mine by right.
You’ve cut me out. You’re a thruster. I’m now in the outer darkness with
Science and Physical Exercise. Praise God!” and Miss Fairfax helped
herself to a great deal of rather weak mustard which ran down into the
gravy on her plate.
Two days later, Mrs. Lysaght having returned to Pelham House, Miss
Fairfax learned the truth.
“It seems,” she told Gillian, “that she was looking in on your
Literature lesson one day and found the Fourth Form standing in serried
ranks saying as one girl:
“‘And so the whole round world in every way
Bound by gold chains about the feet of God.’
She says the deep devotional note you had so patiently got out of that
particularly callous set—what’s the matter?”
“In the first place,” said Gillian, “how _do_ you understand all that
from what she says?”
“I’m used to it. How _did_ you get the Fourth Form...?”
“But I was making them use their chest notes on all those o’s and ou’s,
_whole_, _round_, _bound_, _gold_.”
“You’d chosen a particularly high-class sentiment.”
“Goodness!” Gillian was really alarmed. “But I’d just told them that the
_meaning_ didn’t matter. I’d told them—oh, Miss Fairfax—but I’d told
them—I felt they were young and must be told—that what the words said
was just silly—an image of God like a convict with a weight chained to
_both_ feet.... A God, a false image.”
“Well, I don’t know. It must be rather like hard labour—being
responsible for the lot of us.”
“That isn’t how I think of God,” said Gillian; “and I don’t think it’s
what Tennyson meant. He’d a silly mind. I was only using it as an
exercise in vowel-sounds.”
“Bless the child! And it got her the confirmation class!”
“Anyhow they enjoyed it.”
“The vowel-sounds, or the confirmation class?”
“Both,” said Gillian and felt her cheeks burn again with the unfailing
thrill of that tremendous tale.
“Well, it’s the aim of all you very modern people to make the children
enjoy. I was brought up to teach them facts and make them sit up and
work.” Miss Fairfax was fifty and made no bones about it. She belonged
to a generation which kept Kindergarten methods well inside the
Kindergarten. “I don’t coddle my classes,” had been her much-quoted
observation, so ran the legend, when she made her first appearance at
Pelham House. An undertone of the disapproving surprise and pain which
such a statement must have caused her, always ran through any reference
to Miss Fairfax when Mrs. Lysaght discussed her staff. And yet——
“Results, dear—scholarships—honours—even through the Universities.
Classical tripos, every year since she has been with us.”
Gillian’s own education was a picaresque affair consisting of all her
father had ever told her to read and a panoramic memory of class-rooms
and lecture-theatres, art-galleries and concert-halls in Dresden,
Munich, Vienna, Lausanne and Bournemouth through which she had followed
her young, eager, inconsequent mother for six years after her father’s
death. She envied Miss Fairfax the solid weight of Cheltenham and
Girton, confirmed by a London degree. Professor Fairfax had not grudged
the extra years necessary for this. He was not minded to leave his only
daughter without the outward and visible recognition of those erudite
inheritances of gifts and environment which she derived from him, and
which, as he was given to telling people, had she been a man, would have
made her a Fellow of All Souls.
Miss Fairfax, however, did not pity Gillian for her lack of these
regularized advantages.
“Your state is the more gracious,” she said when Gillian told her that
she had not the ghost of a degree, not the half of a certificate to her
name. “You’ll not stay here. How, with a face like the National Gallery
Botticelli and the mind of a revolutionary baby, you ever got here I
still wonder.”
“I think,” said Gillian, “I must be cheap, and I do a great deal of work
for the money.”
“How much?” said Miss Fairfax.
Gillian told her.
“The sweater!” said Miss Fairfax.
“But I get extra for French Conversation twice a week,” said Gillian.
“So does she,” said Miss Fairfax.
Miss Fairfax was right. Gillian was not staying. There had been a letter
from a Parent. As a matter of fact there had been two, but the first was
really Mrs. Lysaght’s own affair, though the complaint had been launched
at Gillian by name.
But it was not only the letters. Gillian had begun to lose ground on the
very day of Mrs. Lysaght’s return. The head mistress had come back from
Jersey invigorated by the journey and by the sense of duty done, and not
at all chastened by memories of those humiliations inseparable from a
Channel passage which affect less-balanced frames.
It was in connexion with this immunity that Gillian had been made aware
of an error in tact.
“And, I suppose, as usual, you were quite well throughout both
crossings.”
This was poor Miss Winter saying the right thing at luncheon on the day
of Mrs. Lysaght’s return.
“Yes, indeed,” said Mrs. Lysaght. “Never on the horizon
and—semi-horizontal—— But Dean Webster, so deplorable—the clergy—and on
deck.”
“Mrs. Lysaght always lies in a deck-chair lowered as much as possible
and keeps her eyes off the horizon through the whole crossing,” Miss
Winter explained.
“Oh, Mrs. Lysaght, if you stood up suddenly and caught sight of the
horizon, would you be sick?” asked Gillian, elated by the thought of a
new and useful light on a problem, in which for the moment she was
keenly interested.
Mrs. Lysaght flushed a stormy red and bit her bottom lip. Miss Winter
took off her thick eye-glasses for a moment, revealing the singular
blackness all short-sighted people show when their eyes are uncovered,
and Miss Fairfax drank half a tumblerful of water with rather more noise
than anyone not supported by a Classical Tripos would be allowed to make
without reproof in such company. The conversation at the other side of
the table swooned into the silence that emanated from Mrs. Lysaght.
Gradually and astonishingly Gillian knew that she was being isolated,
put into a moral cell and that every mouthful she raised from her plate
was now an infraction of some Code for the Guilty of which until that
moment she had been unaware. It was clearly wrong to go on eating, and
yet Gillian was conscious of the old childish sense of ostracism
attached to the end of nursery dinner when you were left alone at table
and everyone was forbidden to speak to you until you _had_ finished
“every scrap of that good batter-pudding—and you eating all the raisins
out of it first, you greedy little girl.”
It was batter-pudding again. And she had eaten all the raisins; not from
conscious greed, but because they came that way, and, automatically, she
was clearing her plate of the yellow residue, shovelling a path back to
society again. And now _this_ was wrong. Mrs. Lysaght’s mist was no
longer an amusing vapour with image after image looming through; it had
thickened and dulled into a fog in which Gillian had lost her way. But
the old compulsion prevailed. Bad little girls redeemed themselves and
became good little girls by swallowing mouthfuls of cold, displeasing
food in spite of stiff throats and mounting nausea; the way to salvation
lay through physical anguish. By that old beacon she must steer across
these unfamiliar waters. The unknown offence she had done must be
mitigated by the known correctness. Gillian ate on. Around her spoons
were laid down, forks mutely aligned with them, and the silence was
augmented by this unanimous and simultaneous discarding of the tools of
nutrition. But Gillian still ate with conscientious deliberation. One
more spoonful and her plate would be cleared. As she pushed the yellow
stickiness over the brim of the spoon, Gillian became aware of a
pressure on her foot, slight but intentional. She looked up from her
plate. Miss Fairfax was glaring at her.
“Put it down, you fool.” She caught the undertone and dropped her spoon
with a clatter. All the plates but hers had been cleared away. The
youngest mistress was keeping the whole High Table waiting.
Jessie, the waitress, was standing at Gillian’s elbow, and even as she
whipped the plate away Mrs. Lysaght rose and pronounced an elaborate
benediction on the meal her staff, with one exception, had only
partially consumed.
“Gracious and most bountiful Father, we Thy most unworthy
servants render unto Thee thanksgiving and praise for these Thy
mercies vouchsafed so plenteously unto us alike both just and
unjust, and by us received in the name of and for the sake of Thy
dear Son our Lord. Amen.”
“I’ve never heard that grace before,” said Gillian to Miss Fairfax as
the school filed out of the dining-hall.
“No,” said Miss Fairfax, “it’s the one used for criminals, and we’ve had
very little crime this term, so far.”
“But whose crime was she denouncing?”
“Yours, my blue-eyed angel. Yours.”
“I felt I’d done _some_thing. Do you know what it was?”
“You asked Mrs. Lysaght at the top of your voice if she could be
sea-sick—and at table. It isn’t done.”
“Well,” said Gillian, “my sister wouldn’t go to Mentone when she was ill
in the winter because she’s always so horribly sick crossing the
Channel, and I thought if keeping your eyes off the horizon really
did——”
“You could have waited and asked the wretched Winter for details, and
not suggested at the top of your voice that our august head could under
any conditions whatever be sick in public. Didn’t you hear what she said
about the Dean?”
“Not exactly—it was Miss Winter said—and I _do_ think the punishment
severe.”
“That wasn’t the punishment, it was only the tocsin. Danger lies ahead.”