"French is to be talked from the time the rising-bell rings in the
morning to the time the dressing-bell rings for supper at night."
So ran Rule 9, at St. Dorothea's Home School for Girls. It was
relaxed on Saturdays at twelve after the hour in the gymnasium.
At ten minutes to twelve the gloomy cavern, known as the Glory Hole,
rang with noise which, according to the ancient series of L. T.
Meade's school-stories, stocking the library, should have been
punctuated with "silvery ripples of girlish laughter." It wasn't.
The parrot-house at the Zoo would have been nearer the mark. A
harassed prefect presided, noting the names of people who insisted on
forestalling the cuckoo-clock.
"Parlez-vous Français, Margery, ou je dirai Mademoiselle."
"Ma foi! N'est-ce pas que c'est douze heures?"
"Le cuckoo a cuckooé, je suis positive."
"Doris, vous sotte-ane, c'est ma place que vous prendre."
Moods and tenses were blandly ignored at St. Dorothea's outside the
actual French class.
"Naw," denied Doris, resolutely blocking the partition wherein she
had thrust her own gym shoes. "Je partage cet morceau de le shelf
avec Ferlie."
"Mais, avant Ferlie, j'ai avez baggé!"
This last effort could not pass muster even on a Saturday.
"Margery, 'bag' n'est pas Français et c'est argot. Prenez un point
de conversation."
"Mais si je fait cela je ne peut pas jouez hockey. Soyez une sport,
Mary."
There was an understanding that whosoever lost six marks during the
week for failing to observe Rule 9 was relegated to the ranks of the
crocodile, with the junior class of all, after lunch, instead of
being permitted to join in the usual Saturday games.
Margery was a constant offender; and the Fourth Form A. were to play
the Fourth Form B.!
"Si vous ne jouerez pas, ce sera un tiroir," prophesied Ferlie
ingeniously, after pausing an instant to consider the French for a
"draw" at hockey.
The clock whirred. "Cuckoo! Cuckoo!"
"Thank God!" said Margery Craven, piously.
The prefect fled, pretending not to hear.
"I thought you weren't playing either, Ferlie?"
"I am not--that's why I said if you can't play centre-forward in my
place the A's will be about level with the B's. You and I combined
give the A's the advantage."
"Why isn't Ferlie playing?" asked Doris Martell.
"Don't you know?" and Margery's air was fraught with mystery. "The
co-_rr_espondent from Far Cathay has asked--and obtained--permission
to take the Favourite of the Upper Fourth to the Zoo."
"Lucky little beast!"
"How long is he going to stop in England, Ferlie?"
"Only six months this time. Father and Mum never take such short
leave, but Cyprian has had malaria..."
"It's a beautiful name," mused Doris with upturned eyes. "No wonder
she blushes!"
"Silly ass!"
"What beats me," said Margery, "is how Martha and Mary allow Ferlie
to gad about with a genuine trousered male in an expensive tailored
suit and all the appurtenances thereof. Because even if he does look
forty he's not really your uncle, is he, Ferlie?"
"No, thank the Lord! I shouldn't feel nearly so comfy with him if he
were."
"She confesses to feeling comfy with him," Margery informed the
others. "Brazen hussy! And she a 'Sunlight Fairy'!"
Ferlie forgot Cyprian in a sudden righteous indignation. "You shut
it, Margery! Lot of grinning shriekers! Thought yourselves very
funny, didn't you? You wouldn't laugh if it were your mess."
For Ferlie's instinctive courtesy, rooted in a horror of hurting
people's feelings and combined with a certain dreamy trustfulness in
human nature, characteristic of her, had landed her in a false
position which, during the past week, had been the joke of the school.
A dean's wife, far-famed for excellent work among the business girls
of the suburbs, and convinced that the road to salvation for all
budding womanhood lay via the fold of a Purity Society organized by
her, had now conceived the idea of interesting the girls' schools in
a campaign of mutual prayer and interchange of friendly letters with
these unknown female correspondents of the working-class, all virgin
pilgrims up the Hill of Difficulty, pledged not to permit male
travellers to carry their bundles nor waste their time in frivolous
communications. The Misses Mayne, generally known to their pupils,
in terms of disrespectful affection, as "Martha" and "Mary," approved
of the plan and accorded the dean's wife half an hour one Sunday
afternoon, following Bible Class, to set forth her appeal for
supporters in the school.
At the close of an earnest address she had suggested that any of them
willing to join the League and correspond with another young woman,
forlornly in search of true friendship, would hold up a hand.
Ferlie, having arrived late from an imperfectly learnt collect,
happened to be sitting at a front desk, eschewed by early arrivals as
too nearly under the eye of Martha for perfect ease. Not having paid
particular attention to the proceedings, but gleaning from the
speaker's tense expression that something was expected of the
school--possibly a penny a week to the Blind Babies' Fund--she
mechanically raised her hand, wondering the while whether there would
be time after the Zoo to take Cyprian to that new tea-shop where you
could always get hot dough-nuts, fresh and jammy. Hers was the only
hand raised. The role of "Sunlight Fairy," by letter, to a factory
girl did not appeal to the Margeries and Dorises of the Upper Fourth,
and the senior school members were struggling with finishing exams
and wanted no extra correspondence thrust upon them in their scant
leisure. Had she only known it, the dean's wife was about the fourth
of a series of well-meaning women that term obsessed with schemes for
benefiting England's blossoming womanhood. To put it coarsely, St.
Dorothea's had "had some."
Margery was the most interested in Ferlie's future radiance as a
"Fairy." The dean's wife, impressed by such single-minded strength
of character, had invited her to tea and presented her with a blue
card depicting a rising sun shooting an inquisitive searchlight on
the face of a worried-looking young woman wending her way up a
crowded thoroughfare either in quest of true friendship or a factory.
"And it's quite time you began," said Margery severely, at the
termination of Ferlie's bitter harangue.
The bell for the reading of the week's marks interrupted them;
following which rite a strong smell of Irish stew combined with apple
pudding, in the hall, did duty for a lunch menu.
And, "I will not eat the bottom bit of my suet to-day," Margery
resolved in a fierce whisper as they filed to their seats.
The conversation over the gravied onions made about four times the
volume of sound as on a French day.
The Misses Mayne, one at each end of the long table, beamed
indulgently. "Martha," the practical one, who was also the junior of
the two sisters, confined her remarks to the state of the hockey
field and reminders that stockings were to be changed immediately on
the team's return.
"Mary" brightened life at her post by little reminiscences of the
ways in which she had spent her Saturdays at school, "when hockey for
girls was quite out of the question, my dears," and the Magic
Lantern, with views of foreign countries in colours, existed still as
a delirious mid-term treat.
All went contentedly until the last helping of apple pudding had been
served out, and then Mary settled her glasses and allowed her kindly
faded eyes to rest on one particular plate.
"Now, Margery"--a sudden hush followed the raising of the gentle
tones--"are you going to conquer that pudding or are you going to let
that pudding conquer you?"
The luckless Margery, who had brought an empty paper bag to lunch
with felonious intent, started guiltily and reddened to the forehead.
"You know it is by overcoming--always by overcoming--the weaknesses
in ourselves that we develop into worth-while members of the world's
community," Mary continued.
"Or by coming it over other people," muttered Ferlie, sympathizing
with Margery's sensations towards the grey mound of suet pushed to
one side of her plate.
"It--it always makes me feel sick, Miss Mayne," faltered Margery
hysterically.
"Imagination!" came from Martha's end of the table. "How can good
wholesome food make anyone feel sick?"
Margery's mouth took an obstinate curve. She was not going to be
intimidated by Martha, anyhow.
That lady, with twenty years' experience of Margeries behind her,
probably sensed rebellion and decided the moment had arrived for
brisk disciplinary methods.
"Eat it up, Margery, and don't be foolish," she said.
Margery sat very still.
The rest of the table did not want to witness her downfall, nor seem,
by respectful silence, to approve the idiosyncrasies of Martha and
Mary. Why should anyone eat the beastly pudding who did not want to?
The fees were paid just the same.
Strained low-toned comments on the progress of the new tennis court
began to be heard; but Mary was wiser than Martha, as of old. Far
wiser. Long and humble study of the New Testament had inclined her
heart to keep its Law. She ruled, in fact, by love.
"I think we'll leave it to Margery's own Brave Self," she told her
sister. "She understands that it is for her own good, mentally and
physically, that we desire her to eat it. Do not distress yourself,
my child. Just think the matter over carefully and then decide which
of your two natures is to Win the Fray. If, to-day, you decide to
leave it..."
She smiled watery encouragement at Margery, by this time incapable of
eating anything. Lunch finished a little hurriedly.
Said Martha that night in the private sitting-room, where she and
Mary were wont to dissect characters and debate the handling of them:
"A little giddy."
"But warm-hearted," defended Mary.
"Shallow," said Martha.
"It is a question of guidance, Sister," insisted Mary.
Martha remained unconverted.
"Obstinacy must be dealt with firmly," she said. "You will be at a
loss next Saturday over the apple pudding."
Came a knock at the door, and Margery stood beside the tinted
reproduction of the Good Shepherd near it, looking at Mary over the
stand crammed with photos of dear departed pupils who, with Youth's
heartlessness, had supplied her, since, with no other memories of
their passing.
"I've decided to c-conquer the p-pudding," announced Margery. And
felt almost rewarded by the spiritual ecstasy of affection in Mary's
little eyes.
* * * * * *
Cyprian did not recognize the sisters for the last of a long line of
sanctified Englishwomen who, in the past, have run Happy Home-Schools
for the daughters of unmodern mothers, many of whom lived abroad and
who cherished the suspicion that dear Daphne or Nora would not be
prevented from over-working to the detriment of her health at a
modern establishment which dealt in Oxford examiners rather than in
embroidery classes.
It was Ferlie who grew critical of the Miss Maynes's curriculum, with
the conclusion of her fourteenth birthday, and so of their blatant
efforts to coerce in the straight and narrow way.
To Cyprian, the sisterless bookworm, the ladies recalled his deceased
aunts, a couple who belonged, by rights, to a Victorian novel and at
whose separate funerals a special hearse had to be requisitioned for
the wreaths.
And all the flowers were symbolically white.
Ferlie, the out-reaching experimentalist, wondered whether such of
Cyprian's aunts as remained above ground were exactly the type of
people to direct the electrical currents in a houseful of twentieth
century youth.
"Mary could have whistled for my brave and better nature," she told
Cyprian this afternoon, in relating the incident of the pudding, with
a resentment he considered entirely out of proportion to the fact
that she had not minded the suet herself. He admitted that, as a
sane man, he never ate things which he did not like, nor did he know
anybody who, having attained years of discretion, believed such a
course necessary to salvation.
"But, you see, it must be difficult, Ferlie, to legislate for so many
tastes and, despite certain things of which you may disapprove, the
Misses Mayne seem kind to you all."
"I think I could do with less kindness and more common sense," she
persisted, "and far less prayer!"
He looked at the eager profile, bordered by a riot of autumn-tinted
curls, and wondered, a little anxiously, whether Ferlie was growing
up a sceptic like her father. And himself. And most of his friends.
He would rather she took both Testaments at a gulp like a pill, in
the unquestioning faith that they would purge her as with hyssop
according to promise.
He recognized his attitude to be decidedly illogical. Perhaps the
simplicity of Mrs. Carmichael was not quite such a matter for
humorous reflection, after all. Supposing the Woman-of-the-Future,
no longer sheltered from the rough and tumble of things, began
universally to don the materialistic armour suited to her defence,
and ceased to set her marching song to the awe-inspiring chant:
"We love Thine altar, Lord;
Oh, what on earth so dear?
For there in faith adored,
We find Thy presence near!"
The singers might possess the undeveloped minds of little children.
They might. Nevertheless...
"They are such good women, Ferlie."
"I don't consider them any better members of the world's community
than you," Ferlie informed him carelessly, adding, "and they have,
according to their ideas, much more to gain by being good."
Cyprian did not quite know what to answer. A less humble man might
have suspected that he was fast becoming the child's ideal. He only
knew that they cared a great deal for one another and that Life, for
him, seemed less meaningless, though more unreal, when they were
together.
He had chosen the Zoo because it was the nearest open-air
entertainment within reach, by tram, of the suburb which contained
St. Dorothea's, and Ferlie was not, under Rule 6, allowed to attend
indoor places of amusement in term-time. And surely, at fourteen, it
was a reasonable spot to take Ferlie, the animal-lover, for
recreation.
"But the tea here is beastly," she stated candidly, and he undertook
to follow where she should lead when the hour for nourishment
approached.
There were long stretches of walking between the enclosures of the
Big and Bloodthirsty caged inhabitants which Ferlie favoured. The
two strolled along contentedly, exchanging current news.
Presently: "You know she's abroad, Cyprian?"
"Really!"
"You didn't try to find out?"
"Not this time, Ferlie. What's the use?"
Ferlie was frowning.
"Aunt Brillianna asked me for a visit at Christmas. And I went. I
like her. She doesn't talk rot to me just because I am not grown up.
She goes on like you do. And one wet afternoon another woman came in
and said that the Vane girl had gone abroad after a nervous
break-down, and Aunt B. said, 'Oh, that's what they've decided to
call it? The uttermost ends of the earth would not effect a cure.'
And I am telling you, Cyprian, because I feel that if it means that
she has been ill, you would rather know."
"Thanks, old lady."
"But, Cyprian----"
"Dear!"
"I can't be a hypocrite about it. I don't really hope it is as bad
as smallpox, but if anything does make me hope that Martha and Mary's
Day of Judgment is true in every detail, it's her."
"But why, Ferlie?"
"If she came back would you ask her again now?" she asked, ignoring
explanation.
He revolved the possibility in his mind, seeking, as ever with her,
the meticulously accurate answer her candid eyes deserved.
"I hardly know. I have never met another woman whom I wanted--that
way. But then, in my life out East, I see very few Englishwomen, and
they are generally married. I have guarded the thought of her, as
the Perfect One for me, so long in my heart that, sometimes, I doubt
whether any woman could be all that one imagines her when one--cares.
It is not fair to endow your Ideal with the qualities which suit you
and then blame her for not acting always according to your
conceptions."
She walked on silently for some way with bent head and her cheeks
unusually flushed. Then she spoke again, rapidly.
"I have got to tell you, Cyprian. From what I have heard, now and
again, I think that if you did ask now, you--you'd get the answer you
wanted once. There aren't a lot of men like there used to be,
and--and I don't understand what it is all about but there is
Something.... Well, anyway, you'd stand a good chance now. So I've
got to tell you."
"You don't want me to take that chance, Ferlie?"
She turned her face from him, unanswering. And Cyprian
incomprehensibly knew that he would never seek out Muriel Vane with
that question on his lips; that her image would slowly drift out of
his dreams and that before it receded for ever he could make no
effort to call it back. Could not? Then it was true that no man
worshipped only at one shrine in a lifetime? It was the Ideal and
not the Individual to which he burnt his incense! The most startling
part of this discovery was that nothing mattered at the moment save
that Ferlie would be glad of it.
"As the years go by, one must change," he said diffidently.
She drew a long breath and spoke nonchalantly lest it should be
interpreted as relief.
"She must be quite an old woman by now. At least twenty-six or
twenty-seven."
Cyprian's laughter shattered the imperceptible barrier of restraint.
"How old do you think I am, Ferlie?"
She surveyed him critically. "Well, you are never any particular age
to me because, underneath, I feel you are about mine; but the other
girls don't think you look more than forty."
"They are a little premature. I am only thirty-five."
"It's a good age, you know," said Ferlie gravely. "How terribly
short Life is; over before you have got anywhere."
"You think I have wasted mine, up to date?"
"It all depends on what you want in the end. Do you know I have a
feeling sometimes that we are all just as much in cages as these
animals, and can't get out without breaking something. The cages
Chance dropped us into when we were born. Think how enormous and how
interesting the earth is! And how much of it shall you and I ever
see unless we break away from the particular bits we are imprisoned
in? Just look at that old lion. He has settled down, quite pleased,
forgetting that there was a time when he, or his ancestors, walked
where they wished for miles in the jungle. And a lot of us copy him.
Satisfied in captivity because it is comfortable. We don't remember
what it was like in the days of our freedom but common-sense tells us
it was unsheltered and unsure. My ancestors may have been gipsies
and, if I had the courage, I might be one again by breaking things.
Ordinarily, Martha and Mary have got me till I am seventeen; then it
will be some finishing place in France for a year, and then Mother
comes home and I shall be considered luckier than most girls in
squeezing a Season or so out of Burma before Dad retires."
"During which you will marry, Ferlie, and settle down like a
well-behaved little lioness and..."
"Live Mother's life all over again for her--ugh!"
She stared at the lion.
"No I shan't. It can stay there if it likes, and all the other
fool-animals who don't know their own strength. I've got some
inkling of mine. I am going to get out of the cage."
A passing keeper warned her not to shake the bars and not to go so
near, Miss.
She ignored him, clinging fervently to her subject.
"That old elephant could turn the howdah off his back, kill at least
twenty people and overset the monkey-house inside quarter of an hour.
And, instead, he just walks stupidly up and down, up and down."
"Please don't put ideas into his head in passing," begged Cyprian.
"Well, he's only an animal and so would misuse his regained power.
But a man needn't," said Ferlie, hot-footed on the trail of great
discoveries, "a man needn't... Are you happy, Cyprian?"
"I--I've hardly thought about it."
"You ought to have thought about it. You have been thirty-five years
in a world where there is unlimited happiness and unlimited misery.
And you haven't yet decided which you want to choose: Spring days,
and stars, and the smell of the sea, and flowers, and experiments in
queer forces electrifying every creature that lives and breathes, or
somnambulisticism ... listen, I made that word up, I think--in a
stuffy old cage, the bars of which are conventions which ought to be
broken into smither----"
"Ferlie, you are making that lion angry by beating the umbrella on
his bars."
"He can have it if he wants it," she said, hurling it into the cage.
"Martha made me bring it because she knows I hate carrying one. Said
you always knew a gentlewoman by the make of her umbrella. I should
think that anyone having to carry a special sort of umbrella to prove
her gentility must be----"
"Good Lord!" exclaimed Cyprian as the lion crunched through silk and
spokes, roaring insults at Ferlie the while, "Do come away. The
keeper is on his way back here and everybody is looking at us."
Everybody is looking at us! That last truth would have vexed him
more but for the tolerant amusement on the face of a lady standing
near them. She seemed past middle age and indifferent to the fact,
being practically and severely costumed in dark grey, while her
iron-grey hair fitted so tidily into her toque that one immediately
divined it was shingled. She fixed Cyprian with a placid eye.
"The unfortunate lion," she said, "breaking his teeth, like the rest
of us, on an illusion flung like a challenge at his head by Youth in
rebellion!"
Cyprian lifted his hat awkwardly in acknowledgment of the remark,
inwardly deciding, a little acidly, that she might have realized he
was, possibly, as near Ferlie's age as hers. But Ferlie, herself,
twisted about with a rapturous greeting.
"Why, it's Aunt Brillianna!"
Aunt Brillianna accompanied them to the tea-shop, picking up the
thread of Ferlie's discourse just where the end had blown loose.
"And when you have got out of your cage, Ferlie, and are no more
mentioned by the long-suffering Misses Mayne, except in secret and
grieving prayer, and when you have trodden on your mother's heart and
taken unholy satisfaction in the fascinatingly soft squelch of it,
and when you have seen the iron enter into your unbelieving father's
soul on your flat refusal to mate with the most promising and
dyspeptically desk-chained member of his service, and when you have
laid the foundations for a new Utopia where everyone will find
himself uncaged and free and--if I mistake not--naked, will there
really be enough blue-birds in the trees to go round?"
"You are only pretending to laugh at me, Aunt B.; you know quite well
what I want."
"Six eclairs, four dough-nuts, two cream-buns, a strawberry-ice and a
dose of castor oil," Aunt Brillianna promptly informed the attendant
in lace cap and apron: adding with a scrutinizing glance at her white
face, "you look as if you could do with that list and some over,
yourself, my dear child."
The tea-girl blushed and, reading sincerity in the friendly smile,
admitted that she had had a particularly long day owing to Them being
shorthanded.
"Never mind," encouraged Aunt B., "I'll stand you treat with this
niece of mine, provided the moment you get off duty you settle down
to it at any place where the cakes are not so well-known to you as
these."
Cyprian protested at her making herself responsible for their own
three teas.
"Don't be silly," she advised him, "I am quite old enough to make a
nephew of you if I wish. Ferlie is my great-niece and it is quite
useless to try and hide the ghastly fact. And I have quite a lot of
money scattered about in odd corners of the earth. Some day Ferlie
shall have some to build a Temple to her Freedom goddess or god. She
will find, sooner or later, that the bars she objects to are made of
gold. You ought to know that. How are rubies?"
"Ferlie has told you what I do?"
"Ferlie has told me much more of all you have left undone. Quite
unintentionally she has painted a portrait of you in your true
colours. I doubt if you could paint her--or any woman--in hers."
"I hope the picture did not impress you altogether unfavourably?"
"We are discarding the fallacy nowadays that Love is blind," said
Aunt B. inconsequently. "While young and clear-eyed it has excellent
sight. Later, it takes to dark-glasses of its own choice, and so
gives an impression of sightlessness. Ferlie knows you better now
than she ever will know you, Edward ... or, no, that's not the
name--What is it, Ferlie?"
"It's 'Cyprian,'" announced Ferlie from a bath of cream and jam, "and
you're frightening him to death, Aunt B."
"Can't help that. He's rather embarrassing me by being so palpably
embarrassed. Don't blink like that, Cyprian. Are you young enough
to join Ferlie in those poisonous cakes or would you prefer a scone?"
Cyprian coldly selected an éclair.
"Happy man!" said Aunt B., twinkling all over, "The sweets of life
are tasteless against my false teeth. A watercress sandwich, now..."
She was a startling contrast to Cyprian's late-lamented aunts,
influencing the life of Little Puddington, even under their heavy
slabs of marble, by the trail of Guilds, Club-rooms, and Organ
endowments left behind them. And Martha and Mary would have said,
with one accord, that a woman's glory was her hair. A wig, or at
least, a discreet frame, if not an actual transformation, would be
preferable to that shameless modern shingling.
Brillianna Trefusis was too obviously one of those new elderly women
who no longer found the Presence on the altar of wood and stone, and
as obviously was Ferlie in love with her.
She caused Cyprian to leap finally in his chair at this stage of his
conclusions. Intercepting his interrogative glance at Ferlie,
exceeding the Safety First limit as to ice-cream, "You'll like me
when you come to know me better," Aunt B. assured him.