the spirit of such dreams. The disposition of Highmorton was towards a
scorn of males. What Joan knew surely to be lovely, Highmorton denounced
as “soppy.” “Soppy” was a terrible word in boys’ schools and girls’
schools alike, a flail for all romance. But in the girls’ schools it was
used more particularly against tender thoughts of men. Highmorton taught
the revolt of women from the love of men—in favour of the love of women.
The school resounded always with the achievements of the one important
sex, hitherto held back by man-made laws from demonstrating an all-round
superiority. The staff at Highmorton had all a common hardness of
demeanour; they were without exception suffragettes, and most of them
militant suffragettes. They played hockey with great violence, and let
the elder girls hear them say “damn!” The ones who had any beauty
aspired to sub-virile effects; they impressed small adorers as if they
were sexless angels. There was Miss Oriana Frobisher (science) with the
glorious wave in her golden hair and the flash of lightning in her
glasses. She had done great feats with love, it was said; she had
refused a professor of botany and a fabulously rich widower, and the
mathematical master was “gone” on her. There was Miss Kellaway, dark and
pensive, known to her worshippers as “Queen of the Night,” fragile, and
yet a swift and nimble forward. Aunt Phœbe also had become a leading
militant, and Aunt Phyllis, who wavered on the verge of militancy,
continued the Highmorton teaching in the holidays. “Absolute equality
between the sexes,” was their demand; their moderate demand, seeing what
men were. Joan would have been more than human not to take the colour of
so universal a teaching. And yet in her reveries there was always one
man exempt from that doom of general masculine inferiority. She had no
use for a dream lover—unless he was dying of consumption or, Tristram
fashion, of love-caused wounds—who could not out-run, out-fence,
out-wrestle and out-think her, or for a situation of asserted equality
which could not dissolve into caressing devotion.
§ 6
And of these preoccupations with the empire and the duties and destinies
of the empire and the collective affairs of mankind, which to Oswald
were the very gist and purpose of education, Highmorton taught Joan
practically nothing. Miss Jevons, the Head, would speak now and then of
“loyalty to the crown” in a rather distant way—Miss Murgatroyd had been
wont to do the same thing—and for the rest left politics alone. Except
that there was one thing, one supreme thing, the Vote. When first little
Joan heard of the Vote at Limpsfield she was inclined to think it was a
flattened red round thing rather like the Venerable Bede at the top of
the flagstaff. She learned little better at Highmorton. She gathered
that women were going to “get the vote” and then they were to vote. They
were going to vote somehow against the men and it would make the world
better, but there was very little more to it than that. The ideas
remained strictly personal, strictly dramatic. Wicked men like Mr.
Asquith who opposed the vote were to be cast down; one of the dazzling
Pankhurst family, or perhaps Miss Oriana Frobisher, was to take his
place. Profound scepticisms about this vote—in her heart of hearts she
called it the “old Vote,” were hidden by Joan from the general
observation of the school. She had only the slightest attacks of that
common schoolgirl affliction, schoolmistress love; she never idolized
Miss Jevons or Miss Frobisher or Miss Kellaway. Their enthusiasm for the
vote, therefore, prevented hers.
Later on it was to be different. She was to find in the vote a symbol of
personal freedom—and an excellent excuse for undergraduate misbehaviour.
It is true Highmorton School presented a certain amount of history and
geography to Joan’s mind, but in no way as a process in which she was
concerned. She grew up to believe that in England we were out of
history, out of geography, eternally blessed in a constitution that we
could not better, under a crown which was henceforth for ever, so to
speak, the centre of an everlasting social tea-party, and that party
“politics” in Parliament and the great Vote struggle had taken the place
of such real convulsions of human fortune as occurred in other countries
and other times. Wars, famine, pestilence; the world had done with them.
Nations, kings and people, politics, were for Joan throughout all her
schooldays no more than scenery for her unending private personal
romance.
But because much has been told here of Joan’s reveries it is not to be
imagined that she was addicted to brooding. It was only when her mind
was unoccupied that the internal story-teller got to work. Usually Joan
was pretty actively occupied. The Highmorton ideal of breezy activity
took hold of her very early; one kept “on the Go.” In school she liked
her work, even though her unworshipping disposition got her at times at
loggerheads with her teachers; there was so much more in the lessons
than there had been at Miss Murgatroyd’s. Out of school she became
rather a disorderly influence. At first she missed Peter dreadfully.
Then she began to imitate Peter for the benefit of one or two small
associates with less initiative than her own. Then she became
authentically Peter-like. She tried a mild saga of her own in those
junior days, and taught her friends to act a part in it as Peter had
taught her to be a companion of the great Bungo. She developed the same
sort of disposition to go up ladders, climb over walls, try the fronts
of cliffs, go through open doors and try closed ones, that used to make
Peter such agreeable company. Once or twice she and a friend or so even
got lost by the mistress in charge of a school walk, and came home by a
different way through the outskirts of Broadstairs. But that led to an
awe-inspiring “fuss.” Moreover, it took Joan some years to grasp the
idea that the physical correction of one’s friends is not ladylike. When
it came to other girls she perceived that Peter’s way with a girl was
really a very good way—better than either hauteur or pinching. Holding
down, for instance, or the wrist wrench.
All the time that she was at Highmorton Joan found no friend as good as
Peter. Tel Wymark, with the freckles, became important about Joan’s
fifteenth birthday as a good giggling associate, a person to sit with in
the back seats of lectures and debates and tickle to death with dry
comments on the forward proceedings. To turn on Tel quietly and slowly
and do a gargoyle face at her was usually enough to set her off—or even
to pull a straight face and sit as if you were about to gargoyle. Tel’s
own humour was by no means negligible, and she had a store of Limericks,
the first Limericks Joan had encountered. Joan herself rarely giggled;
on a few occasions she laughed loudly, but for most comic occasions her
laughter was internal, and so this disintegration of Tel by merriment
became a fascinating occupation. It was no doubt the contrast of her
dark restraint that subjected her to the passionate affection of Adela
Murchison.
That affair began a year or so before the friendship with Tel. Adela was
an abundant white-fleshed creature rather more than a year older than
Joan. She came back from the Easter holidays, stage struck, with her
head full of Rosalind. She had seen Miss Lillah McCarthy as Rosalind in
_As You Like it_, and had fallen violently in love with her. She went
over the play with Joan, and Joan was much fascinated by the Rosalind
masquerade; in such guise Joan Stubland might well have met her king for
the first time. Then Adela and Joan let their imaginations loose and
played at Shakespearian love-making. They would get together upon walks
and steal apart whenever an opportunity offered. Adela wanted to kiss a
great deal, and once when she kissed Joan she whispered, “It’s not
Rosalind I love, not Lillah or any one else; just Joan.” Joan kissed her
in return. And then something twisted over in Joan’s mind that drove her
to austerity; suddenly she would have no more of this kissing, she
herself could not have explained why or wherefore. It was the queerest
recoil. “We’re being too soppy,” she said to Adela, but that did not in
the least express it. Adela became a protesting and urgent lover; she
wrote Joan notes, she tried to make scenes, she demanded Was there any
one else?
“No,” said Joan. “But I don’t like all this rot.”
“You did!” said Adela with ready tears shining in her pretty eyes.
“And I don’t now,” said Joan....
Joan herself was puzzled, but she had no material in her mind by which
she could test and analyse this revulsion. She hid a dark secret from
all the world, she hid it almost from herself, that once before, in the
previous summer holidays, one afternoon while she was staying with her
aunts at The Ingle-Nook, she had walked over by the Cuspard house on the
way to Miss Murgatroyd’s. And she had met young Cuspard, grown tall and
quaintly good-looking, in white flannels. They had stopped to talk and
sat down on a tree together, and suddenly he had kissed her. “You’re
lovely, Joan,” he said. It was an incredible thing to remember, it was a
memory so astounding as to be obscure, but she knew as a fact that she
had kissed him again and had liked this kissing, and then had had just
this same feeling of terror, of enormity, as though something vast
clutched at her. It was fantastically disagreeable, not like a real
disagreeable thing, but like a dream disagreeable thing. She resolved
that in fact it had not happened, she barred it back out of the current
of her thoughts, and it shadowed her life for days.
§ 7
The modern world tells the young a score of conflicting stories—more or
less distinctly—about every essential thing. While men like Oswald dream
of a culture telling the young plainly what they are supposed to be for,
what this or that or the other is for, the current method of instruction
about God and state and sex alike is a wrangle that never joins issue.
For every youth and maiden who is not strictly secluded or very stupid,
adolescence is a period of distressful perplexity, of hidden hypotheses,
misunderstood hints, checked urgency, and wild stampedes of the
imagination. Joan’s opening mind was like some ill-defended country
across which armies marched. Came the School of St. George and the
Venerable Bede, led by Miss Murgatroyd and applauded by Aunt Phœbe,
baring its head and feet and knees, casting aside corsets, appealing to
nature and simplicity, professing fearlessness, and telling the young a
great deal less than it had the air of telling them. Came Highmorton, a
bracing wind after that relaxing atmosphere.
But Limpsfield had at least a certain honesty in its limited initiation;
Highmorton was comparatively an imposture. With an effect of going right
on beyond all established things to something finer and newer,
Highmorton was really restoring prudery in a brutalized form. It is no
more vigorous to ban a topic by calling it “soppy” and waving a muddy
hockey-stick at it in a threatening manner, than it is to ban it by
calling it “improper” and primly cutting it dead. There the topic
remains.
A third influence had made a contributory grab at Joan; Aunt Charlotte
Sydenham’s raid on the children’s education was on behalf of all that
was then most orthodox. Hers was indeed the essential English culture of
the earlier Victorian age; a culture that so far as sex went was pure
suppression—tempered by the broad hints and tittering chatter of
servants and base people....
Stuck away, shut in, in Joan’s memory, shut in and disregarded as bees
will wax up and disregard the decaying body of some foul intruder, were
certain passages with Mrs. Pybus. They carried an impression at once
vague and enormous, of a fascinating unclean horror. They were
inseparably mixed up with strange incredulous thoughts of hell that were
implanted during the same period. Such scenery as they needed was
supplied by the dusty, faded furnishings of the little house in Windsor,
they had the same faintly disagreeable dusty smell of a home only
cleansed by stray wipes with a duster and spiritless sweeping with
tea-leaves.
That period had been a dark patch upon the sunlit fabric of Joan’s life.
Over it all brooded this Mrs. Pybus, frankly dirty while “doing” her
house in the morning, then insincerely tidy in the afternoon. She talked
continually to, at, and round about Joan. She was always talking. She
was an untimely widow prone to brood upon the unpleasant but enormously
importunate facts that married life had thrust upon her. She had an
irresistible desire to communicate her experiences with an air of
wisdom. She had a certain conceit of wisdom. She had no sense of the
respect due to the ignorance of childhood. Like many women of her class
and type she was too egotistical to allow for childhood.
Never before had Joan heard of diseases. Now she heard of all the
diseases of these two profoundly clinical families, the Pybuses and the
Unwins. The Pybus family specialized in cancers, “chumors” and morbid
growths generally; one, but he was rather remote and legendary, had had
an “insec’ in ’is ’ed”; the distinction of the Unwins on the other hand
was in difficult parturitions. All this stuff was poured out in a
whining monologue in Joan’s presence as Mrs. Pybus busied herself in the
slatternly details of her housework.
“Two cases of cancer I’ve seen through from the very first pangs,” Mrs.
Pybus would begin, and then piously, “God grant I never see a third.”
“Whatever you do, Joan, one thing I say never do—good though Pybus was
and kind. Never marry no one with internal cancer, ’owever ’ard you may
be drove. Indigestion, rheumatism, even a wooden leg rather. Better a
man that drinks. I say it and I know. It doesn’t make it any easier,
Joan, to sit and see them suffer.
“You’ve got your troubles yet to come, young lady. I don’t expec’ you
understand ’arf what I’m telling you. But you will some day. I sometimes
think if I ’adn’t been kep’ in ignorance things might have been better
for me—all I bin called upon to go through.” That was the style of
thing. It was like pouring drainage over a rosebud. First Joan listened
with curiosity, then with horror. Then unavailingly, always overpowered
by a grotesque fascination, she tried not to listen. Monstrous fragments
got through to her cowering attention. Here were things for a little
girl to carry off in her memory, material as she sickened for measles
for the most terrifying and abominable of dreams.
“There’s poor ladies that has to be reg’lar cut open....
“I ’ad a dreadful time when I married Pybus. Often I said to ’im
afterwards, you can’t complain of _me_, Pybus. The things one lives
through!...
“’Is sister’s ’usband didn’t ’ave no mercy on ’er....
“Don’t you go outside this gate, Joan—ever. If one of these ’ere Tramps
should get hold of you.... I’ve ’eard of a little girl....”
If a congenial gossip should happen to drop in Joan would be told to sit
by the window and look at the “nice picture book”—it was always that one
old volume of _The Illustrated London News_—while a talk went on that
insisted on being heard, now dropping to harsh whispers, now rising
louder after the assurance of Mrs. Pybus:
“Lord! _She_ won’t understand a word you’re saying.”
If by chance Mrs. Pybus and her friend drifted for a time from personal
or consanguineous experiences then they dealt with crimes. Difficulties
in the disposal of the body fascinated these ladies even more than the
pleasing details of the act. And they preferred murders of women by men.
It seemed more natural to them....
The world changed again. Through the tossing distress of the measles
Aunt Phyllis reappeared, and then came a journey and The Ingle-Nook and
dear Petah! and Nobby. She was back in a world where Mrs. Pybus could
not exist, where the things of which Mrs. Pybus talked could not happen.
Yet there was this in Joan’s mind, unformulated, there was a passionate
stress against its formulation, that all the other things she thought
about love and beauty were poetry and dreaming, but this alone of all
the voices that had spoken over and about her, told of something real.
In the unknown beyond to which one got if one pressed on, was something
of that sort, something monstrous, painful and dingy....
Reality!
Wax it over, little dream bees; cover it up; don’t think of it! Back to
reverie! Be a king’s mistress, clad in armour, who sometimes grants a
kiss.
§ 8
It was in the nature of Mrs. Pybus to misconceive things. She never
grasped the true relationship of Joan and Peter; Mr. Grimes had indeed
been deliberately vague upon that point in the interests of the Sydenham
family, the use of the Stubland surname for Joan had helped him; and so
there dropped into Joan’s ears a suggestion that was at the time merely
perplexing but which became gradually an established fact in her mind.
“Ow! don’t you know?” said Mrs. Pybus to her friend. “Ow, no! She’s——”
(Her voice sank to a whisper.)
For a time what they said was so confidential as to convey nothing to
Joan but a sense of mystery. “Ow ’is mother ever stood ’er in the ’ouse
passes my belief,” said Mrs. Pybus, coming up to the audible again.
“Why! I’d ’ave _killed_ ’er. But ladies and gentlemen don’t seem to ’ave
no natural affections—not wot I call affections. There she was brought
into the ’ouse and treated just as if she was the little chap’s sister.”
“She’d be——?” said the friend, trying to grasp it.
“’Arf sister,” said Mrs. Pybus. “Of a sort. Neither ’ere nor there, so
to speak. Not in the eyes of the law. And there they are—leastways they
was until Lady Charlotte Sydenham interfered.”
The friend nodded her head rapidly to indicate intelligent appreciation.
“It isn’t like being _reely_ brother and sister,” said Mrs. Pybus,
contemplating possibilities. “It’s neither one thing nor another. And
all wrop up in mystery as you might say. Why, oo knows? They might go
falling in love with each other.”
“_’Orrible!_” said Mrs. Pybus’s friend.
“It ’ad to be put a stop to,” said Mrs. Pybus.
Confirmatory nodding, with a stern eye for the little figure that sat in
a corner and pretended to be interested in the faded exploits of
vanished royalties, recorded in that old volume of _The Illustrated
London News_....
That conversation sank down into the deeps of Joan’s memory and remained
there, obscured but exercising a dim influence upon her relations with
Peter. One phrase sent up a bubble every now and then into her conscious
thoughts: “half-sister.” It was years after that she began to piece
together the hidden riddle of her birth. Mummy and Daddy were away; that
had served as well for her as for Peter far beyond the Limpsfield days.
It isn’t until children are in their teens that these things interest
them keenly. It wasn’t a thing to talk about, she knew, but it was a
thing to puzzle over. Who was really her father? Who was her mother? If
she was Peter’s half-sister, then either his father was not hers or his
mother....
When people are all manifestly in a plot to keep one in the dark one
does not ask questions.
§ 9
After the first violent rupture that Mr. Grimes had organized, Joan and
Peter parted and met again in a series of separations and resumptions.
They went off to totally dissimilar atmospheres, Joan to the bracing and
roughening air of Highmorton and Peter first to the brightness of White
Court and then to the vigorous work and play of Caxton; and each time
they returned for the holidays to Margate or Limpsfield or Pelham Ford
changed, novel, and yet profoundly familiar. Always at first when
holidays brought them together again they were shy with each other and
intensely egotistical, anxious to show off their new tricks and make the
most of whatever small triumphs school life had given them. Then in a
day or so they would be at their ease together like a joint that has
been dislocated and has slipped into place again. Cambridge at last
brought them nearer together, and ended this series of dislocations.
After much grave weighing of the situation by Miss Fairchild, the
principal of Newton Hall, Peter, when Joan came up, was given the status
of a full brother.
They grew irregularly, and that made some quaint variations of
relationship. Peter, soon after he went to Caxton, fell to expanding
enormously. He developed a chest, his limbs became great things. There
was a summer bitten into Joan’s memory when he regarded her as nothing
more than a “leetle teeny female tick,” and descanted on the minuteness
of her soul and body. But he had lost some of his lightness, if none of
his dexterity and balance, as a climber, and Joan got her consolations
among the lighter branches of various trees they explored. Next
Christmas Joan herself had done some serious growing, and the gap was
not so wide. But it was only after her first term at Newnham that Joan
passed from the subservience of a junior to the confidence of a senior.
She did it at a bound. She met him one day in the narrow way between
Sidney Street and Petty Cury. Her hair was up and her eyes were steady;
most of her legs had vanished, and she had clothes like a real woman. We
do not foregather even with foster brothers in the streets of Cambridge,
but a passing hail is beyond the reach of discipline. “Hullo, Petah!”
she said, “what a gawky great thing you’re getting!”
Peter, a man in his second year, was so taken aback he had no adequate
reply.
“You’ve grown too,” he said, “if it comes to that”;—a flavourless reply.
And there was admiration in his eyes.
An encounter for subsequent regrets. He thought over it afterwards. The
cheek of her! It made his blood boil.
“So long, Petah,” said Joan, carrying it off to the end....
They were sterner than brother and sister with each other. There was
never going to be anything “soppy” between them. At fourteen, when Peter
passed into the Red Indian phase of a boy’s development, when there can
be no more “blubbing,” no more shirking, he carried Joan with him. She
responded magnificently to the idea of pluck. Spartan ideals ruled them
both. And a dark taciturnity. Joan would have died with shame if Peter
had penetrated the secret romance of Joan Stubland, and the days of
Peter’s sagas were over for ever. When Peter was fifteen he was consumed
by a craving for a gun, and Oswald gave him one. “But kill,” said
Oswald. “If you let anything get away wounded——”
Peter took Joan out into the wood at the back. He missed a pigeon, and
then he got one.
“Pick it up, Joan,” he said, very calmly and grandly.
Joan was white to the lips, but she picked up the bloodstained bird in
silence. These things had to happen.
Then out of a heap of leaves in front darted a rabbit. Lop, lop, lop,
went its little white scut. _Bang!_ and over it rolled, but it wasn’t
instantly killed. Horror came upon Joan. She was nearest; she ran to the
wretched animal, which was lying on its side and kicking automatically,
and stood over it. Its eyes were bright and wide with terror. “Oh, how
am I to _kill_ it?” she cried, with agony in her voice; “what am I to
do-o?” She wrung her hands. She felt she was going to pieces, giving
herself away, failing utterly. Peter would despise her and jeer at her.
But the poor little beast! The poor beast! There is a limit to pride.
She caught it up. “Petah!” she cried quite pitifully, on the verge of a
whimper.
Peter had come up to her. He didn’t look contemptuous. He was
white-lipped too. She had never seen him look scared before. He snatched
the rabbit from her and killed it by one, two, three—she counted—quick
blows—she didn’t see. But she had met his eyes, and they were as
distressed as hers. Just for a moment.
Then he was a fifth form boy again. He examined his victim with an
affectation of calm. “Too far back,” he said. “Bad shot. Mustn’t do that
again.”...
The rabbit was quite still and limp now, dangling from Peter’s hand, its
eye had glazed, blood dripped and clotted at its muzzle, but its
rhythmic desperate kicking was still beating in Joan’s brain.
Was this to go on? Could she go on?
Peter’s gun and the pigeon were lying some yards away. He regarded them
and then looked down at the rabbit he held.
“Now I know I can shoot,” he said, and left the sentence unfinished.
“Bring the pigeon, Joan,” he said, ending an indecision, and picked up
his gun and led the way back towards the house....
“We got a pigeon and a rabbit,” Joan babbled at tea to Oswald. “Next
time, Petah’s going to let me have the gun.”
Our tone was altogether sporting.
But there was no next time. There were many unspoken things between Joan
and Peter, and this was to be one of them. For all the rest of their
lives neither Joan nor Peter went shooting again. Men Peter was destined
to slay—but no more beasts. Necessity never compelled them, and it would
have demanded an urgent necessity before they would have faced the risk
of seeing another little furry creature twist and wriggle and of marking
how a bright eye glazes over. But they were both very bitterly ashamed
of this distressing weakness. They left further shooting for “tomorrow,”
and it remained always tomorrow. They said nothing about their real
feelings in the matter, and Peter cleaned and oiled his new gun very
carefully and hung it up conspicuously over the mantelshelf of their
common room, ready to be taken down at any time—when animals ceased to
betray feeling.
§ 10