The years glided by fairly smoothly so far as outward events were
concerned.
Maggie won a scholarship which enabled her to take a three years’
course at a better school—and Deborah afterwards won the same.
Maggie became a pupil-teacher in the school where they had gone
when they first came to the town, and afterwards Deborah became a
pupil-teacher there too.
Deborah did not like teaching; it had only been in father’s lifetime
that it had appeared to her the least bit nice. You see she had a great
many infirmities, some easily discernible, some less so.
But there was nothing else that she could be, so the inevitable had to
be accepted.
Not that she was distinctly unhappy at teaching, far from it.
“If there is one class of people I despise it’s the people who grumble
at the work they have to do,” she used to say. “Pride alone should keep
them from it.”
So whenever anyone asked her how she liked teaching she always said,
“Very much indeed;” but if they still asked if there was anything she
would like to be better than a teacher she always told the truth and
said, “Yes—a nurse.”
She had quite made up her mind that when she had passed all the
examinations necessary for teaching, and was old enough, she would go
into training for a hospital nurse, because she loved to look after
sick people.
Sometimes some people, just for the sake of talking, probably, would
press the question further and ask if she would like nursing best of
anything, and then she would look at them and laugh, and say, “Yes,
best of anything;” but they didn’t understand the look, and they didn’t
understand the laugh, and so they let the matter be.
Deborah at school had indeed always been reckoned a dreamer, and one
teacher had made her life a species of mild misery by perpetually and
unceasingly calling her by that name.
Did she raise her pencil one minute from her work there would come
across the class that everlasting voice,—
“Now, Deborah, there you are again! dreaming as usual. Dear me! What a
wonderful brain yours must be!”
And the other girls would laugh; but because she had never been able to
form a single friendship she could never join in.
When she became a teacher she used often to ponder on these words.
“Well, anyway, I can’t be so bad,” she used to think. “Because if any
of these children talk or play or are lazy I know it at once, and if I
never did anything else but dream I should never know it at all.”
There was a deal of hard work to be done in those days too.
It was in the days when pupil-teachers taught all day and learnt
all night, and went early to school in the morning for an hour’s
instruction.
It was about this time that Jack and Deborah became very great friends.
The friendship, on her side at least, grew out of gratitude.
There had come to the town some short while before a very great actor,
whom for her own reasons she badly wanted to see.
Deborah rarely if ever went to theatres, and was not sorry to miss the
treat, as they did not appeal to her.
“I never forget that it’s only acting, and at the most serious parts I
always feel inclined to laugh,” she remarked.
That was probably because her experience had been somewhat narrowly
limited to a few pantomimes and still fewer plays.
The pantomimes, with the exception of one, had been intensely coarse
and tawdry. That one indeed, “The Forty Thieves,” had been all that
beauty and taste and brightness could make it, but it had not been
brought out on the same scale afterwards because it had not paid.
The thing that seemed to take was an intensely vulgar woman with an
intensely vulgar face, dressed in an intensely vulgar costume, singing
an intensely vulgar song to an —— —— audience.
At the finish of each verse loud laughter and applause greeted her,
which naturally only aggravated her intensities, and every time she
appeared it was the occasion for a fresh outburst of feeling.
Whether the audience were laughing at the woman or at her song it would
be hard to say; probably they knew best themselves. That was some
years ago. Things have no doubt improved since then.
However that may be, the theatre had never held any great interest for
Deborah beyond this one man. But he probably made up for whatever lack
she might have, since she would rather have gone to see him than any
sovereign or statesman ever born.
So it was a wonderful piece of good fortune when Jack promised to take
her to see him.
It was a terribly stormy night on which they went, and the wind and
rain came in great gusts and showers.
When they came home Deborah looked at the picture on the wall, and it
seemed even more lifelike than it had ever been before.
“I never knew before I had any respect for theatres,” she thought.
“What a difference one man can make! What a very great difference!”
Some time after, Maggie went away to college and the family dwindled
down to three.