Dothegirls Hall.
Such was our name for it. But such was only our American name for an
establishment which in reality bore a much more imposing title. St.
John's Priory was the name we were known by in the guide-books and to
all the country round about. A noble Priory we were at our front, with
heavy stone walls veiled in centuries-old ivy, and gables and finials
outlined against the sky; and it was only at the rear, where were our
dank court-yard, our wheezing pump, a dark vista into our dirty kitchen,
and where often were strident Miss Betsy and Miss Sally, that we looked
our deserving the name "Dothegirls Hall."
It was in lovely Warwickshire, where green meadows sweep to the gentle
Avon, which glides only a few miles away through Stratford and past
Shakespeare's home. Many of our countrypeople drove past the stately
front of our Priory every day, visiting, as all good Americans do,
Kenilworth Castle, with Amy Robsart's story in their hands, and
Coventry, with Lady Godiva on their tongues and silk book-markers on
their minds.
Our brother and sister Yankees always gazed with admiration, not
unmingled with awe, upon our Priory, and gushed over it to each other.
For not only is it one of the most picturesque objects of a famously
picturesque Elizabethan town, but it has an added interest to Americans
in having been mentioned in Hawthorne's "Our Old Home."
Our countrypeople gazed upon us with admiration, little dreaming the
dark secrets we had discovered concerning that impressive pile, whose
peaked roofs and soaring gables sheltered monk and prior before yet our
own country had a name, and in whose cavernous cellars only the bravest
of the servants dared to go, lest gowned and hooded spectres should ask
what her business was.
Of course to profane and worldly eyes these ghosts assumed the mean
guise of empty boxes, decaying barrels and timbers, old kitchen-refuse,
and such-like ghostly fowl. But there were spirits in mortal form among
us imaginative enough to penetrate this sordid masquerade and to know
that subterraneanly we were haunted by goblins damned, if ever a priory
was since goblins and priories were invented. Our servants could not
disbelieve in our delightful ghosts, we _would_ not: hence we found our
Priory as stimulative to the historic, poetic, and supernatural
imagination as it was shocking to our moral sense and inflammatory to
our tempers.
But these last two effects resulted from a _rear_ knowledge of St.
John's; our _front_ view was always worthy of picture and poem, having
wide portals, over which was the date of their last repair in 1622,
humped Tudor gables, and mullioned windows set with diamond panes.
St. John's belongs to a noble earl, whose castle overhangs the Avon only
a stone's throw away. As is so often the case in England, it has been
occupied by the same family for more than a hundred years, the family
never owning stick or stone of it, but paying regular rent, as if here
to-day and gone to-morrow, like the tenants of a city flat. The
grandfather of the present occupants brought his bride here and here
raised a numerous family. Of that family no representatives now live
save two grand-daughters, the shrill and strident spinsters who made us
so often forego our more impressive title to call ourselves after the
flourishing institution made immortal by the deathless Squeers.
It is confidently asserted in England, and by those who really think
they know whereof they speak, that although such torture-houses as
Dotheboys Hall certainly did exist, even so lately as Dickens wrote, the
publication of "Nicholas Nickleby," by turning attention upon the abuse,
effectually swept it out of English civilization. We "smile bitterly,"
as romance people do, whenever we hear this assertion. For were we not
ourselves inmates of Dothegirls Hall not very long ago, and do we not
positively know, without perhaps or peradventure, that it lives and
thrives and tortures yet, at the very instant of this writing?
Miss Sally kept a boarding-school and Miss Betsy took lodgers in the
wide chambers of St. John's. We were among the lodgers, and our
dining-room overlooked the gorse-golden meadows and the Avon, one
side-window, however, commanding the court-yard of the house. Our way
out of doors from our rooms led past the "dormitory" of the school and
down-stairs through the "refectory." Thus we had ample opportunity for
observation and to embitter our souls with knowledge of the interior
life of English Dothegirls Halls.
The "school" occupied four rooms,--dining-room, school-room, and two
bedrooms, the boys' dormitory and the girls'. The interior of the boys'
room we never saw, but the girls' we have surreptitiously stolen into,
and a more wretched, dingy, comfortless place it would be difficult to
imagine. All the girls--and there were ten or twelve of them--slept in
this limited space; they made their toilets, with one single towel for
the whole school, at the groaning pump beneath our window, and they
looked miserable and forlorn wherever we saw them, whether waiting upon
us as servants at our table or staring up anxiously from the court below
waiting the shaking of our table-cloth and the possible crusts that
might fall therefrom.
The school-room also chanced to be just beneath, and all through
school-hours of the long summer days we heard the shrill scoldings and
vicious threats with which Miss Sally fulfilled her mission.
"What ever is a noun?" came floating into our ivied windows a dozen
times a day.
"A noun's a-a-a--a noun's a-a-a--"
"Go to the dormitory, you good-for-nothing, and find out on dry bread
that a noun's a name of anything, like helefunt, hantelope, heagle,
'and, 'eart, ighway."
Miss Sally, with furtive eyes and sly movements, always reminded us by
her speech of the _ci-devant_ butcher we once saw in London, who assured
us he was "heducated at Hoxford."
The refectory had a sunken stone floor, and bare walls enclosing space
enough to feed a hundred monks. It was principally used for drying
clothes in wet weather and for storage of trunks and rough objects. At
one end, where were fewest signs of volcanic upheaval or the passing of
centuries of busy feet, stood always the table at which the pupils took
their scanty fare. No white cloth ever covered this banqueting-board. In
the daytime it was draped in a coarse green baize spotted with ink and
grease. The pupils feasted upon this cloth, each with coarse mug and
plate; at night it was removed to serve as cover for one of the beds!
Once upon a time came an unexpected cold snap in the very heart of the
soft Warwickshire summer. The sheets and blankets upon our beds, as also
the silver and linen of our private table, were all marked with the
pupils' names,--the school prospectus announcing that both linen and
silver must come with each pupil. The supply of blankets, however,
proved insufficient for such unseasonable weather, and, like Oliver
Twist, we asked for "more."
"More" came.
And what, think you, was that "more"?
Nothing more nor less than that self-same inky and buttery baize, which
we indignantly rejected, equally for our own sake as for the sake of
those hapless girls shivering in their defrauded bed that we might be
warm.
At Dothegirls Hall pupils were "taken in and done for," fed, lodged,
taught, for twenty pounds--or _one hundred dollars_--a year. The luxury
of bare comfort could scarcely be expected for that price. Yet Miss
Sally must have made profit out of her starvelings, or Dothegirls Hall
would not have existed. We always observed that a certain punishment was
the usual one for every offence that children are likely to commit.
Almost never a day that we did not hear low moanings from one or both of
the dormitories, and thus knew that one, sometimes two or three, were
incarcerated there "on dry bread" for twenty-four hours.
Once we questioned a victim, our interrogation-points assuming the shape
of huge wedges of bread and jam.
"We are sent here on dry bread for missing our lessons, for having our
shoes untied, for saying 'Yes' instead of 'Yes, Miss Sally,' for
everything we do. I am sometimes three days of the week on dry bread."
"Why don't you write to your papa?" blurted a young American of wrathful
turkey-cock aspect.
"Oh, I never had any papa," answered the poor child simply, "and I don't
know where mamma lives."
Alas! this innocent remark expressed volumes. We knew that most of the
poor creatures "had no papa and didn't know where mamma lived," that
they were mere jetsam and flotsam thrown up on this quiet shore from the
waves of the great ocean of London and forgotten by all the world save
those whose business it was to pay and to receive the twenty pounds a
year which was their sole importance.
Of course the best of St. John's belonged to the lodgers, and the best
was delightful to tastes that prefer picturesqueness with moderate
comfort to smug and dapper luxury. Miss Betsy did our cooking, the
school-girls waited upon our table, the boys blacked our boots,
"Mam'zel," the French governess from Kilkenny, made our beds when there
was no servant, as often happened, birds nested in the ivy of our
latticed windows, bees floated up from the fragrant meadows below to hum
us to our afternoon naps, and our table-cloth we shook every day
ourselves, having a deep purpose in refusing to allow it to be shaken by
other hands.
It somehow always happened that the children's recess coincided with
that white fluttering from our diamonded window.
One day, when we first came to St. John's, we heard two quiet whispers
at the ivy's roots:
"Sometimes um shakes out bread-'n'-butter."
"'N' sometimes um shakes out _tart_!"
"O-o-o!" answered the first whisper. "_Tart?_ Truly _tart_?"
"Bet yer heye! One day I hadn't had nothink to heat all day, an' I was
a-'idin' 'ere, 'cos Miss Sally howed me a trouncin'. I were just
a-starvin'; an' I said to myself, 'Good Lord, don't I jest wish I had
a-somethin' to heat!' Jest then, bang came a great piece o' goose-berry
tart right on to my 'ead!"
"_Tart!_" murmured the first whisper, in utter amazement. "_Tart!_ Do ye
s'pose we could get some more?"
"Let's see."