Gillian sat in the class-room after Mrs. Lysaght had left her. The three
windows were wide open and the voices of the girls playing tennis in the
courts beyond the lawn came up to her as they cried the score. It was
after five o’clock and in half an hour the school-house would be closed.
Already the sunlight was thrusting golden swords between the flat
branches of the cedar-tree that darkened the window until evening, and
the scent of the tobacco plants outside the Sixth Form Room was
beginning to creep into the air which came in from the garden. And still
she sat in the little chair on the teacher’s platform, her arms lying
across the desk in front of her, her hands, smooth and beautiful and
strange like the hands of some other woman, some woman whom she loved.
In her lap she held a fat, blue leather manuscript book with double
brass clasps, the book her father had given her on her ninth birthday
into which she had copied prose and verse when she found it worthy, from
the books she could not afford to buy. It lay in the green gingham
valley of her dress, between her knees, and she had covered it with
three rather fatigued roses and a bunch of pansies with black cotton
round their brittle juicy stalks, the offerings of two of the class that
afternoon. The pansies came from little Gertie Wentworth, a pink-faced,
rather solemn child who made it her business to see that all the
mistresses were supplied with flowers in turn, and who suited her
offerings to the age and status of the recipient in a spirit of
calculating frankness. The week usually opened or closed with fruit from
the Wentworth hot-houses for Mrs. Lysaght. Miss Fairfax and Miss Parratt
had hot-house flowers; so did Mademoiselle de Vanges, who had a tiny
crown embroidered on her handkerchiefs. But, for Miss Winter and Miss
Battinson, Gertie went into the open air and Fräulein Kühn had made a
really dreadful scene on the morning on which the well-meaning Gertie
brought her broad beans done up in brown paper. Pinks and lavender from
the kitchen-garden borders, marsh-marigolds and scentless cabbage-roses
did for Gillian; but they came more often than the nobler flowers, and
Gertie, who had no veils over her heart, explained that she got them
herself, the other flowers being her regular allowance for purposes of
ingratiation ordered by her mother and supplied by the gardeners. In
justice to Mrs. Wentworth it must be admitted that she had no idea of
the scaling to which her daughter subjected the carrying out of her
original half-shrewd half-kindly arrangement.
“You see, Mrs. Armstrong,” said Gertie, apologizing for the pinks, “you
are new and I only get one bunch a day from Jennings. So I went into the
kitchen garden and got these myself as I always give the irises to Miss
Battinson and Jennings sent irises this morning.”
Gillian was so enchanted at this glimpse of a really ordered mind, as
well as being glad to have the fragrant pinks, that she forebore to pick
out Gertie’s “only” and replace it next the subject of this sentence as
a good school-mistress is bound in duty to do. But she went about with a
little grit in the wheels of her conscience for the rest of the day.
“Why should I correct her grammar out of class?” she kept asking
herself. “When she took all that trouble to be kind to me with flowers
suitable to my station? I hope she’ll marry the Lord Mayor of London
when she grows up, so as not to waste her instinct for suiting the gift
to the taker.”
So Gertie’s pansies lay like a funeral wreath on the cover of Gillian’s
commonplace book, and beside them, Jane Bird’s roses.
Jane Bird was one of Gillian’s problems. Jane Bird was really the only
problem of which Gillian had been consciously aware at Pelham House. The
intricacies of Mrs. Lysaght’s mind and conversation always presented
themselves to her most junior mistress as amusements—labyrinths and
jig-saws in which you wandered or which you took away with you to work
out when you had time. But Jane Bird was a different, a rather
frightening problem. She was also the only figure which stood out with
any real distinction from the confused crowd of girls, mistresses,
servants and visiting professors who surged on the attention of the
dazed new-comer at Pelham House.
She was a tall, gaunt Sixth Form girl with a high colour and steel-black
hair parted in the middle and twisted into hard round knobs over each
ear, and she made her one-piece frocks herself, usually out of bright
blue casement cloth. She wore round-glassed spectacles and no stays and
was known to the Middle School as the Dutch Doll. To her coevals and to
the staff she was “Bird” without a Christian name, the only girl in the
school to be distinguished in that particular way. There were two
legends about her: one that she bathed naked in the sea in Cornwall
every summer; the other, that she had killed a young man who had called
her “Jinny” a third time, and had buried the remains in Richmond Park at
midnight.
Bird was known to take pride in both these legends and had illustrated
them in a series of spirited drawings accompanied by a ballad. This work
filled one of the Pelham House note-books, the red-covered kind issued
from the Stationery Room for Greek and Latin only, and nobody quite knew
how Bird came to possess it. Miss Fairfax, who had discovered its
existence when correcting Latin Proses, always declared that Bird had
stolen it and was daring the staff to denounce her to Mrs. Lysaght for
theft. But nobody denounced Bird, and even if anybody had, it is more
than likely that Miss Winter, who had charge of the Stationery Room,
would have suffered alone. For, there was no doubt about it, the wretch
was a marvel. “She drinks-in Greek like a sponge,” said Miss Fairfax,
who was coaching her for Responsions much to the disgust of Mr.
Reppington the Art Master who had never in all his experience had such a
gift for drawing as Bird’s to develop. Bird’s name had headed every
examination list in every subject as she passed up the school from the
Lower Fourth Form, which she had entered at the age of twelve,
positively smothered in scholarships; and it was to Jane Bird that Mrs.
Lysaght looked during the next decade for the greatest glories ever
earned for Pelham House.
Until mid-term Gillian had only known this star of the Upper School by
sight. But one rainy morning at Middle School Recreation Bird, being
Chief Monitor, descended upon an over-noisy game in the Hall, and
rescued Gillian from her single-handed combat against the forces of
disorder by playing dance-music on the piano until the restless children
were all waltzing happily together.
“D’y recognize the tune?” said Bird over her shoulder to Gillian, who
had gone up to the platform steps to thank her.
“No,” said Gillian, “but it’s a very good waltz.”
“It’s this week’s hymn,” said Bird. “_The day Thou gavest_, three-four
time. _The two-three—Thou two-three, O Lor-three—is enDED._ Go and dance
with Molly Carpenter—she’s perishing with love and lack of exercise. _To
Thee-ee our mor-or-ning Son-ongs a-scend-ded_—You’ll enjoy it.”
And Gillian had gone meekly up to the other monitor, a sickly girl in
the Upper Fifth who used to waylay her in the mornings as she walked
across the Heath from the 22-omnibus, and had danced with her till the
bell for Fourth Lesson rang.
Margaret Carpenter knew all about the origin of the swinging waltz.
“She made a ripping two-step out of _Hark! the Herald Angels_, but Mrs.
Lysaght won’t allow anything but waltzing in the school,” she complained
to Gillian when the dance was over, “and Bird’s never played any of them
at Recreation before.”
Two days later the door of the class-room opened, ten minutes after
Gillian had settled down to the afternoon French Conversation class by
means of which she brought her salary up to a living wage, and in walked
Bird.
“Mrs. Lysaght has given me permission to change from Mademoiselle’s
Senior French Conversation to yours, Miss Armstrong,” she explained in a
loud, clear voice. “It is felt that one Englishwoman will be more ready
to appreciate and to assist another Englishwoman in her difficulties
with a foreign tongue than anyone to whom these difficulties are by
nature non-existent.”
She recited this speech in the manner of one having learnt the whole of
it by heart, and then stalked down the class-room, only half-filled by
the girls who took this extra subject, and settled herself in a desk by
the window at the farther end of the room.
Gillian’s oddly excited alarm at this apparition was not diminished when
it became evident that Jane Bird was taking no active part in the
conversation class. To all remarks addressed to her by name she replied
with the same phrase delivered in a strong Britannic accent:
“Mais-oui, mademoiselle, vous avez raison,” and then fell back into a
concentrated silence so removed from inattention that it baffled Gillian
as Bird clearly intended it to do.
At her second appearance she took copious notes, and once questioned the
construction of a line Gillian quoted; at her third she remained silent
and intent on some drawing before her. When the class was dismissed
Gillian had, her heart beating with fright, asked the Chief Monitor to
remain behind. Bird, calm and still speechless, stood to attention,
facing the light so that its reflection in her thick glasses completely
hid her eyes from her terrified interlocutor.
“I want to know,” said Gillian, her tongue thickening in her mouth as
she spoke. “I want to know why you come to this class.”
“But, Miss Armstrong,” Bird’s voice was silky with polite surprise, “to
learn to speak French.”
“But you never speak.”
“I listen to you. That helps me enough.”
Gillian changed her line.
“What have you been drawing all this afternoon?”
“Lit-tel Armstrongs,” said Bird, “dee-licious little Armstrongs
backwards through the centuries. Some of them better than others. Look,”
and she placed her sketch-book on the desk before Gillian.
“Eighteen-eighty, bustle and fringe, Du Maurier—_not_ very
good—but Cranford and a crinoline—delightful. First Empire—a
failure—Elizabeth—too stiff and concealing. Medieval henna and veil much
better. I shall do you Greek next week—and Egyptian—I’m strong on
Egypt—and then—Eve in the Garden—oh, only the head and shoulders——”
“How dare you?” said Gillian, breathless.
“But they’re _very_ clever,” said Bird. “Of course, if you object, you
can report me to Mrs. Lysaght. You can’t very well report me to myself,
though if you’d like to do that—I—as Chief Monitor will naturally come
to your aid—I am bound by the beautiful Pelham House Code of Honour to
do so.”
“Very well then,” said Gillian, “I _do_ report you to yourself. Go home
now and bring yourself to me at Second Recreation to-morrow in the Third
Form Room, and tell me what you’re going to do about it.”
The next day at Second Recreation Gillian had found Jane Bird waiting
for her in the empty class-room.
“Well,” said Gillian.
“I’ve thought over the case you reported to me yesterday, Miss
Armstrong,” said Bird coldly, “and I have not only confiscated the
drawings you complain of, but destroyed them.”
“Destroyed the drawings,” Gillian gasped.
“By fire. They _were_ very clever. I hope you are satisfied.” And with
enormous dignity to which she contrived to add a touch of pathos as of
some wounded giant, Bird had stalked away.
She continued to come to French Conversation and Gillian grew to dread
her speech more than her silence. For Bird now came armed with questions
so subtly framed, so intelligently asked, that it was impossible to
convict the questioner of any object in asking them other than the
entirely laudable determination to make the best of her opportunities;
and so searching, that, more than once, Gillian was obliged to confess
her inability to deal with one or another of them.
Then, to her own great relief and pleasure, Gillian found that Bird was
as keenly eager for the beauty of words as she was herself, and on the
last afternoon but one before the Midsummer Examination set in, she had
had what she called a miracle hour—one of those moments when Beauty
slips away from all the obscuring considerations which hide her from
busy people and they pause from their blinding pursuits while the vision
is granted. It was part of the puzzle that she could sometimes take a
class with her into the revelation—but not always. That day they had
come—all of them—but it was Bird, Jane Bird, who had been filled with
the glory, who had pursued each lovely line with Gillian, who had from
her own reading, caught gleaming syllables herself and had added them to
the jewelled minutes of that shared excitement.
And it was out of this glow, this splendour, that the thunderbolt had
fallen!
The second French Conversation class in the week was held on Friday
afternoon, and for it Gillian, still in the haze of heavenly sounds
which had enclosed her consciousness ever since the Tuesday class, had
brought with her the fat, blue commonplace book, because, after the
flowing of verse she had been constrained to hear the march of prose,
and there were passages copied out there which she must let forth to
fill the channels freshly made in the minds of the girls she taught, and
most of all (she knew this with a deep satisfaction) in Jane Bird’s
mind, by the poetry she had made them all hear.
All the morning long she had gone about her other duties waiting until
the hour when, in the class-room overlooking the lawn, in the shade of
the great cedar-tree outside, she could take her own class—and oh! most
specially Jane Bird—back into the enchanted country. _Mon âme est un
colombier_, how the molten phrases flowed!—_Presse le pas, ô mon
rêve_—she could hear the quickened breathing, see the flush which burned
her own cheeks flame in the faces before her, as the spirit quickened
within each one of them.
And it had been almost as good to do as to dream of, this sharing of her
private hoard. As she read the passages aloud, the voice, the level,
grave and beautiful voice of her father reading them to her in the
larch-woods above Sils-Maria, seemed to be leading her own. She could
see his small, fine features, his soft, blue, very clear eyes, his thin
hands, holding the yellow-paper book, the great length of him, six long
feet and more, stretched in the grass, almost on the edge of the rock
above the lake. The breeze seemed to sigh around them again with faint
icy breath from the glaciers behind; and all the light and colour and
love of that last summer before he died gathered and increased in her as
she read, and drove through her, and reached the listening girls.
When the singing phrases were finished, Gillian looked across the wide
room to Jane Bird sitting erect and motionless at the far end of the
aisle of desks. And Jane Bird’s eyes were welling over with great
glistening tears which ran down her flat, red cheek and fell on the
flat, blue bosom of her home-made frock, unheeded.
Bird, the arrogant, contemptuous, terrible Bird was crying! Gillian
looked at the roses on her desk with changed eyes. When Bird, following
Gertie Wentworth with her pansies, had laid the three heavy Frau Karl
Droushkys across the pen-tray on the reading-desk as the rest of the
class took their seats, Gillian had hardly been able to thank the girl
for them. Her action had been abrupt, slightly mocking. She suggested
more than so simple a gift need imply.
“They’re like pale girls with red rims to their eyes,” she’d said, and
Gillian had felt caricatured. But the faint resentment Bird had aroused
was gone now, washed away by those heavy, silent tears.
And then, suddenly, the whole class had risen to its feet. Mrs. Lysaght
was in the room. How long she had been there Gillian did not know. The
door had been left open because of the heat.
“Who is the author?” Mrs. Lysaght was flustered, displeased.
“Théophile Gautier,” said Gillian. “It’s a famous passage from
_Mademoiselle de Maupin_.”
“Go!” Mrs. Lysaght had dismissed the class, but Gillian had remained
reading the letter the head mistress had thrust into her hand. It was
from the Bishop of Putney whose twin daughters were salient features of
the Upper Fifth and of Gillian’s conversation class.