the suspended drama. “That’s tea,” said Newton eagerly, dropping his
fists. “It’s no good starting on him now.”
“You’ll have to fight him later,” said Probyn. “Now he’s hit you.”
“It’s up to you, Newton,” said the cadaverous boy, evidently following
Probyn’s lead.
“Cavé. It’s Noser,” said a voice.
There was a little pause.
“Toke!” cried Probyn.
“Toke, Simon Peter,” said the cadaverous boy informingly....
Peter found himself no longer in focus. Every one was moving towards the
door whence Peter had descended to the playground, and at this door
there now stood a middle-aged man with a large nose and a sly
expression, surveying the boys.
Impelled by gregarious instincts, Peter followed the crowd.
He did not like these hostile boys. He did not like this shabby-looking
place. He was quite ready to believe that presently he would have to go
on fighting Newton. He was not particularly afraid of Newton, but he
perceived that Probyn stood behind him. He detested Probyn already. He
was afraid of Probyn. Probyn was like a golliwog. He knew by instinct
that Probyn was full of disagreeable possibilities for him, and that it
would be very hard to get away from Probyn. And what did it all mean?
Was he never going back to Limpsfield again?
The bell had had exactly the tone of the tea bell at Miss Murgatroyd’s
school. It might have been the same bell. And it had made his heart
homesick for the colour and brightness of the School of St. George and
the Venerable Bede, and for the friendly garden and familiar rooms of
Ingle-Nook. For the first time he realized that he had fallen into this
school as an animal falls into a trap, that his world had changed, that
home was very far away....
And what had they done to Joan?...
Had he to live here always?...
It struck Mr. Noakley, the assistant master with the large nose, as he
watched the boys at tea, that the new boy had a face like a doll, but
really that face with its set, shining, expressionless eyes was only the
mask, the very thin mask, that covered a violent disposition to
blubber....
Well, no one was going to see Peter blub. No one was going to hear him
blub....
Tonight perhaps in bed.
He had still to realize the publicity of a school dormitory....
He knew he couldn’t box, but he had seen something in Newton’s eyes that
made him feel that Newton was not invincible. He would grip his fists in
a very knobby way and hit Newton as hard as he could in the face.
Oh!—_frightfully_ hard....
Peter was not eating very much. “Bags I your slice of Toke,” said the
cadaverous boy.
“Take the beastly stuff,” said Peter.
“Little spoilt mammy coddle,” thought old Nosey Noakley. “We aren’t good
enough for him.”
§ 7
So it was that Mr. Grimes, acting for Lady Charlotte, set about the
rescue of Joan and Peter from, as she put it, “the freaks, faddists and
Hill-Top philosophies of the Surrey hills,” and their restoration to the
established sobrieties and decorums of English life. Very naturally this
sudden action came as an astonishing blow to the two advanced aunts. At
nine o’clock that evening Miss Murgatroyd was called down to see Miss
Phyllis Stubland, who had ridden over on her bicycle. “Where are the
children?” asked Aunt Phyllis.
“You sent for them,” said Miss Murgatroyd.
“Sent for them!”
“Yes. I remember now. The young man said it was Lady Charlotte Sydenham.
Didn’t you know? She is going abroad tomorrow or the next day.”
“Sent for them!” Aunt Phyllis repeated....
Two hours later Aunt Phyllis was telling the terrible news to Mary. Aunt
Phœbe was in London for the night to see Mr. Tree play _Richard II_, and
there were no means of communicating with her until the morning. The
Ingle-Nook was much too Pre-Raphaelite to possess a telephone, and Aunt
Phœbe was sleeping at the flat of a friend in Church Row, Hampstead.
Next morning a telegram found her still in bed.
“Children kidnapped by Lady Charlotte consult Sycamore Phyllis”
said the telegram.
“_No!_” cried Aunt Phœbe sharply.
Then as the little servant-maid was on the point of closing the door,
“Tell Miss Jepson,” Aunt Phœbe commanded....
Miss Jepson found Aunt Phœbe out of bed and dressing with a rapid
casualness. It was manifest that some great crisis had happened. “An
outrage upon all women,” said Aunt Phœbe. “I have been outraged.”
“My dear!” said Miss Jepson.
“Read that telegram!” cried Aunt Phœbe, pointing to a small ball of pink
paper in the corner of the room.
Miss Jepson went over to the corner with a perplexed expression, and
smoothed out the telegram and read it.
“A _Bradshaw_ and a hansom!” Aunt Phœbe was demanding as she moved
rapidly about the room from one scattered garment to another. “No
breakfast. I can eat nothing. Nothing. I am a tigress. A maddened
tigress. Maddened. Beyond endurance. Oh! Can you reach these buttons,
dear?”
Miss Jepson hovered about her guest readjusting her costume in
accordance with commonplace standards while Aunt Phœbe expressed herself
in Sibylline utterances.
“Children dedicated to the future.... Reek of ancient corruptions....
Abomination of desolation.... The nine fifty-three.... Say half an
hour.... Remonstrance.... An avenging sword.... The sword of the Lord
and of Gideon.”
“Are you going to this Mr. Sycamore?” asked Miss Jepson suddenly.
Aunt Phœbe seemed lost for a time and emerged with, “Good God!—_No!_
This is an occasion when a woman must show she can act as a man. This
tries us, Amanda. I will have no man in this. No man at all! Are women
to loll in hareems for ever while men act and fight? When little
children are assailed?...”
“Chastlands,” said Aunt Phœbe to the cabman, waving Miss Jepson’s
_Bradshaw_ in her hand.
The man looked stupid.
“Oh! Charing Cross,” she cried scornfully. “The rest is beyond you.”
And in the train she startled her sole fellow-traveller and made him get
out at the next station by saying suddenly twice over in her loud, clear
contralto voice the one word “_Action_.” She left Miss Jepson’s
_Bradshaw_ in the compartment when she got out.
She found Chastlands far gone in packing for Lady Charlotte’s flight
abroad. “I demand Lady Charlotte,” she said. She followed up old Cashel
as he went to announce her. He heard her coming behind him, but his
impression of her was so vivid that he deemed it wiser not to notice
this informality. And besides in his dry, thin way he wanted to hear why
she demanded Lady Charlotte. He perceived the possibilities of a
memorable clash. He was a quiet, contemplative man who hid his humour
like a miser’s treasure and lived much upon his memories. Weeks after a
thing had happened he would suddenly titter, in bed, or in church, or
while he was cleaning his plate. And none were told why he tittered.
For a moment Aunt Phœbe hovered on the landing outside the Chastlands
drawing-room.
“I can’t see her,” she heard Lady Charlotte say, with something like a
note of terror. “It is impossible.”
“Leave her to me, me Lady,” said a man’s voice.
“Tell her to wait, Cashel,” said Lady Charlotte.
Aunt Phœbe entered, trailing her artistic robes. Before her by the
writing-table in the big window stood Lady Charlotte, flounced,
bonneted, dressed as if for instant flight. A slender, fair, wincing man
in grey stood nearer, his expression agitated but formidable. They had
evidently both risen to their feet as Aunt Phœbe entered. Cashel made
insincere demonstrations of intervention, but Aunt Phœbe disposed of him
with a gesture. A haughty and terrible politeness was in her manner, but
she sobbed slightly as she spoke.
“Lady Charlotte,” she said, “where are my wards?”
“They are _my_ wards,” said Lady Charlotte no less haughtily.
“Excuse me, Lady Charlotte. Permit me,” said Mr. Grimes, with soothing
gestures of his lean white hands.
“Please do not intervene,” said Aunt Phœbe.
“Mr. Grimes, madam, is my solicitor,” said Lady Charlotte. “You may go,
Cashel.”
Cashel went reluctantly.
Mr. Grimes advanced a step and dandled his hands and smiled
ingratiatingly. Italian and Spanish women will stab, he had heard, and
fishwives are a violent class. Otherwise he believed all women, however
terrible in appearance, to be harmless. This gave him courage.
“Miss Stubland, I believe,” he said. “These young people, young Stubland
and his foster-sister to wit, are at present in my charge—under
instructions from Lady Charlotte.”
“Where?” asked Aunt Phœbe.
“Our case, Miss Stubland, is that they were not being properly educated
in your charge. That is our case. They were receiving no sound moral and
religious training, and they were being brought up in—to say the least
of it—an eccentric fashion. Our aim in taking them out of your charge is
to secure for them a proper ordinary English bringing up.”
“Every word an insult,” panted Aunt Phœbe. “Every word. What have you
done with them?”
“Until we are satisfied that you will consent to continue their training
on proper lines, Miss Stubland, you can scarcely expect us to put it in
your power to annoy these poor children further.”
Mr. Grimes’ face was wincing much more than usual, and these involuntary
grimaces affected Aunt Phœbe in her present mood as though they were
deliberate insults. He did not allow for this added exasperation.
“Annoy!” cried Aunt Phœbe.
“That is the usual expression. We are perfectly within our rights in
refusing you access. Having regard to your manifest determination to
upset any proper arrangement.”
“You refuse to let me know where those children are?”
“Unless you can get an order against us.”
“You mean—go to some old judge?”
Mr. Grimes gesticulated assent. If she chose to phrase it in that way,
so much the worse for her application.
“You won’t—— You will go on with this kidnapping?”
“Miss Stubland, we are entirely satisfied with our present course and
our present position.”
Lady Charlotte endorsed him with three great nods.
Aunt Phœbe stood aghast.
Mr. Grimes remained quietly triumphant. Lady Charlotte stood quietly
triumphant behind him. For a moment it seemed as if Aunt Phœbe had no
reply of any sort to make.
Then suddenly she advanced three steps and seized upon Mr. Grimes. One
hand gripped his nice grey coat below the collar behind, the other, the
looseness of his waistcoat just below the tie. And lifting him up upon
his toes Aunt Phœbe shook him.
Mr. Grimes was a lean, spare, ironical man. Aunt Phœbe was a
well-developed woman. Yet only by an enormous effort did she break the
instinctive barriers that make a man sacred from feminine assault. It
was an effort so enormous that when at last it broke down the dam of
self-restraint, it came through a boiling flood of physical power. It
came through with a sort of instantaneousness. At one moment Mr. Grimes
stood before Lady Charlotte’s eyes dominating the scene; at the next he
was, as materialists say of the universe, “all vibrations.” He was a
rag, he was a scrap of carpet in Aunt Phœbe’s hands. The appetite for
shaking seemed to grow in Aunt Phœbe as she shook.
From the moment when Aunt Phœbe gripped him until she had done shaking
him nobody except Lady Charlotte made an articulate sound. And all that
Lady Charlotte said, before astonishment overcame her, was one loud
“Haw!” The face of Mr. Grimes remained set, except for a certain
mechanical rattling of the teeth in a wild stare at Aunt Phœbe; Aunt
Phœbe’s features bore that earnest calm one may see upon the face of a
good woman who washes clothes or kneads bread. Then suddenly it was as
if Aunt Phœbe woke up out of a trance.
“You make—you make me forget myself!” said Aunt Phœbe with a low sob,
and after one last shake relinquished him.
Mr. Grimes gyrated for a moment and came to rest against a massive
table. He was still staring at Aunt Phœbe.
For a moment the three people remained breathing heavily and
contemplating the outrage. At last Mr. Grimes was able to
raise a wavering, pointing finger to gasp, “You have—you
have—yes—indeed—forgotten yourself!”
Then, as if he struggled to apprehend the position, “You—you have
assaulted me.”
“Let it be—let it be a warning to you,” said Aunt Phœbe.
“That is a threat.”
“Agreed,” panted Aunt Phœbe with spirit, though she had not meant to
threaten him at all.
“If you think, madam, that you can assault me with impunity——”
“I shouldn’t have thought it—before I took hold of you. A bag of
bones.... Man indeed!” And then very earnestly—“_Yes._”
She paused. The pause held all three of them still.
“But why—oh, why!—should I bandy words with such a thing as you?” she
asked with a sudden belated recovery of her dignity. “_You—_”
She sought her word carefully.
“Flibber-gib!”
And forgetting altogether the mission upon which she had come, Aunt
Phœbe turned about to make her exit from the scene. It seemed to her,
perhaps justly, that it was impossible to continue the parley further.
“Legalized scoundrel!” she said over her shoulder, and moved towards the
door. In that first tremendous clash of the New Woman and the Terrific
Old Lady, it must be admitted that the New Woman carried off, so to
speak, the physical honours. Lady Charlotte stood against the fireplace
visibly appalled. Only when Aunt Phœbe was already at the door did it
occur to Lady Charlotte to ring the bell to have her visitor “shown
out.” Her shaking hand could scarcely find the bell handle. For the rest
she was ineffective, wasting great opportunities for scorn and dignity.
She despised herself for not having a larger, fiercer solicitor. She
doubted herself. For the first time in her life Lady Charlotte Sydenham
doubted herself, and quailed before a new birth of time.
Upon the landing appeared old Cashel, mutely respectful. He showed out
Aunt Phœbe in profound silence. He watched her retreating form with
affectionate respect, stroking his cheek slowly with two fingers. He
closed the door.
He stood as one who seeks to remember. “Flibber-jib,” he said at last
very softly, without exultation or disapproval. He simply wanted to have
it exactly right. Then he went upstairs to have a long, mild, respectful
look at Mr. Grimes, and to ask if he could do anything for him....
§ 8
Aunt Phœbe’s return to The Ingle-Nook blended triumph and perplexity.
“I could never have imagined a man so flimsy,” she said.
“But where are the children?” asked Aunt Phyllis.
“If all men are like him—then masculine ascendancy is an imposture.”
(“Yes, but where are the children?”)
“So a baulked tigress might feel.”
Aunt Phyllis decided to write to Mr. Sycamore.
§ 9
Mr. Mainwearing was the proprietor of a private school for young
gentlemen, not by choice but by reason of the weaknesses of his
character. It was card-playing more than anything else that had made him
an educator. And it was vanity and the want of any sense of proportion
that had led to the card-playing.
Mr. Mainwearing’s father had been a severe parent, severe to the pitch
of hostility. He had lost his wife early, and he had taken a grudge
against his only son, whose looks he did not like. He had sent him to
Cambridge with a bitter assurance that he would do no good there; had
kept him too short of money to be comfortable, spent most of his
property—he was a retired tea-broker—in disappointing and embittering
jaunts into vice, and died suddenly, leaving—unwillingly, but he had to
leave it—about three thousand pounds to his heir. Young Mainwearing had
always been short of pocket-money, and for a time he regarded this
legacy as limitless wealth; he flashed from dingy obscurity into
splendour, got himself coloured shirts and remarkable ties, sought the
acquaintance of horses, slipped down to London for music-halls and
“life.” When it dawned upon him that even three thousand pounds was not
a limitless ocean of money, he attempted to maintain its level by
winning more from his fellow undergraduates. Nap and poker were the
particular forms of sport he affected. He reckoned that he was, in a
quiet way, rather cleverer than most fellows, and that he would win. But
he was out in his reckoning. He left Cambridge with a Junior Optime in
the Mathematical Tripos and a residuum of about seven hundred pounds. He
was a careful cricketer, and he had liked football at school in his
concluding years when he was big enough to barge into the other chaps.
Surveying the prospect before him, he decided that a school was the best
place for him, he advertised himself as “of gentlemanly appearance” and
“good at games,” and he found his billet in a preparatory school at
Brighton. Thence he went to a big grammar school, and thence came to the
High Cross School to remain first as assistant, then as son-in-law and
partner, and now as sole proprietor. Mrs. Mainwearing was not very
useful as a helpmeet, as she was slightly but not offensively defective
in her mind; still one must take life as one finds it. She was, at any
rate, regular in her habits, and did not interfere with the housekeeper,
a worthy, confidence-creating woman, much tipped by the tenderer sort of
parent.
Of course Mr. Mainwearing had no special training as a teacher. He had
no ideas about education at all. He had no social philosophy. He had
never asked why he was alive or what he was up to. Instinct, perhaps,
warned him that the answer might be disagreeable. Much less did he
inquire what his boys were likely to be up to. And it did not occur to
him, it did not occur to any one in those days, to consider that these
deficiencies barred him in any way from the preparation of the genteel
young for life. He taught as he had been taught; his teachers had done
the same; he was the last link of a long chain of tradition that had
perhaps in the beginning had some element of intention in it as to what
was to be made of the pupil. Schools, like religions, tend perpetually
to forget what they are for. High Cross School, like numberless schools
in Great Britain in those days, had forgotten completely; it was a
mysterious fated routine; the underlying idea seemed to be that boys
must go to school as puppies have the mange. Certain school books
existed, God alone knew why, and the classes were taken through them. It
was like reading prayers. Certain examination boards checked this
process in a way that Mr. Mainwearing felt reflected upon his honour,
and like all fundamentally dishonest people he was inclined to be touchy
about his honour. But parents wanted examination results and he had to
give in. Preparation for examinations dominated the school; no work was
done in the school that did not lead towards an examination paper; if
there had been no examinations, no work would have been done at all. But
these examinations might have been worse than they were. The examiners
were experienced teachers and considerate for their kind. They respected
the great routine. The examiners in classics had, at best, Babu Latin
and less Greek, and so they knew quite well how to set a paper that
would enable the intelligent candidate to conceal an entire incapacity
for reading, writing, or speaking a classical language; the examiners in
mathematics knew nothing of practical calculations, and treated the
subject as a sort of Patience game; the foreign language examiners stuck
loyally to the grammar; in drawing the examiners asked you to copy
“copies,” they did not, at any rate, require you to draw things; and
altogether the “curse of examinations” might have pressed on Mr.
Mainwearing harder than it did. Suppose the language papers had been
just long passages to translate into and out of English, and that the
mathematical test had been all problems, and the drawing test had been a
test of drawing anything! What school could have stood the strain?
To assist him in the work of his school Mr. Mainwearing had gathered
about him a staff of three. He had found a young man rather of his own
social quality, but very timid, a B.A. Cantab. by way of the botanical
special; then there was Noakley, a rather older, sly creature, with a
large overbalancing nose, who had failed to qualify years ago as an
elementary assistant schoolmaster and so had strayed into the uncharted
and uncertificated ways of a private school; and finally there was Kahn,
an Alsatian, who taught languages and the piano. With these three and
the active assistance of Mrs. Rich, the housekeeper, the school
maintained its sluggish routines.
The boys slept in two long rooms that had been made by knocking through
partitions in the two upper floors, and converted into dormitories by
the simple expedient of crowding them with iron bedsteads and small
chests of drawers. It was the business of Noakley—who had a separate
room on the top floor—to arouse the boys at seven with cries and
violence for the business of the day. But there was a tacit
understanding between him and the boys not to molest each other until
about twenty minutes past.
It was a rule, established by Mr. Mainwearing in a phase of hygienic
enthusiasm some years before, that on fine mornings throughout the year
the boys should go for a sharp run before breakfast. It was a modern and
impressive thing to do and it cost him nothing. It was Noakley’s duty to
accompany them on this run. He was unable to imagine any more loathsome
duty. So that he had invented a method of supplementing the rains of
heaven by means of a private watering-pot. His room was directly above
Mr. Mainwearing’s, and Mr. Mainwearing slept with his window shut and
his blinds down, and about seven-fifteen or so every morning the curious
passer-by might have seen a lean, sly man with an enormous nose, his
mouth wide open and his tongue out with effort, leaning far out of an
upper bedroom of High Cross School and industriously and carefully
watering the window and window-sill of the room two storeys below him.
Later, perhaps, a patient observer might have been rewarded by the
raising of Mr. Mainwearing’s blind and a glimpse of Mr. Mainwearing,
unshaven and in a white cotton nightgown, glancing out at the
weather....
So generally the morning began with a tedious, sticky, still sleepy hour
called Early Prep. in the schoolroom on the ground floor. It was only
during Kahn’s alternate week of morning duty that the run ever occurred.
Then it wasn’t a run. It began as a run and settled down as soon as it
was out of sight of the school to a sulky walk and a muttered monologue
by Kahn in German—he never spoke any language but German before
breakfast—about his “magen.”
Noakley’s method in early prep. was to sit as near to the fire as
possible in the winter and at the high desk in summer, and to leave the
boys alone so long as they left him alone. They conversed in undertones,
made and threw paper darts at one another, read forbidden fiction, and
so forth. Breakfast at half-past eight released them, and there was a
spell of playground before morning school at half-past nine. At
half-past nine Mr. Mainwearing and Mr. Smithers, the botanical Cantab,
appeared in the world, gowned and a little irritable, and prayers and
scripture inaugurated the official day. Mr. Mainwearing’s connexion was
a sound Church connexion, and he opened the day with an abbreviated
Matins and the collect and lessons for the day. Then the junior half of
the school went upstairs to the second class-room with Mr. Smithers,
while Mr. Mainwearing dealt tediously with Chronicles or Kings.
Meanwhile Kahn and Noakley corrected exercise-books in the third
class-room, and waited their time to take up their part in the great
task of building up the British imperial mind. By eleven o’clock each of
the four class-rooms was thoroughly stuffy and the school was in full
swing; Mr. Mainwearing, who could not have translated a new satire by
Juvenal to save his life, was “teaching” Greek or Latin or history, Mr.
Smithers was setting or explaining exercises on the way to quadratic
equations or Euclid Book II., which were the culminating points of High
Cross mathematics; Kahn, hoarse with loud anger, was making a personal
quarrel of the French class; and Noakley was gently setting the feet of
the younger boys astray in geography or arithmetic or parsing. This was
the high-water mark of the day’s effort.