In the train from Bristol to Paddington for the last time: July,
eighteen-eighty.
She would never see any of them again: Ada and Geraldine; Mabel and
Florrie and little Lena and Kate; Miss Wray with her pale face and angry
eyes; never hear her sudden, cold, delicious praise. Never see the bare,
oblong schoolroom with the brown desks, seven rows across for the lower
school, one long form along the wall for Class One where she and Ada and
Geraldine sat apart. Never look through the bay windows over the lea to
the Channel, at sunset, Lundy Island flattened out, floating, gold on
gold in the offing. Never see magenta valerian growing in hot white grey
walls.
Never hear Louie Prichard straining the little music room with Chopin's
_Fontana_ Polonaise. Never breathe in its floor-dust with the _Adagio_ of
the "Pathetic Sonata."
She was glad she had seen it through to the end when the clergymen's and
squires' daughters went and the daughters of Bristol drapers and
publicans and lodging-house keepers came.
("What do you think! Bessie Parson's brother marked all her
underclothing. In the shop!")
But they taught you quite a lot of things: Zoology, Physiology, Paley's
Evidences, British Law, Political Economy. It had been a wonderful school
when Mrs. Propart's nieces went to it. And they kept all that up when the
smash came and the butter gave out, and you ate cheap bread that tasted
of alum, and potatoes that were fibrous skeletons in a green pulp.
Oh--she had seen it through. A whole year and a half of it.
Why? Because you promised Mamma you'd stick to the Clevehead School
whatever it was like? Because they taught you German and let you learn
Greek by yourself with the old arithmetic master? (Ada Clark said it was
a mean trick to get more marks.) Because of the Beethoven and Schumann
and Chopin, and Lundy Island, and the valerian? Because nothing mattered,
not even going hungry?
She was glad she hadn't told about that, nor why she asked for the "room
to herself" that turned out to be a servants' garret on a deserted floor.
You could wake at five o'clock in the light mornings and read Plato, or
snatch twenty minutes from undressing before Miss Payne came for your
candle. The tall sycamore swayed in the moonlight, tapping on the window
pane; its shadow moved softly in the room like a ghost.