Those standing by laughed, and a girl from the Riverina said: "Oh, no,
of course not!" in a tone that made Laura wince and regret her
readiness.
Before tea, she had to practise. The piano stood in an outside
classroom, where no one could hear whether she was diligent or idle,
and she soon gave up playing and went to the window. Here, having
dusted the gritty sill with her petticoat, she leaned her chin on her
two palms and stared out into the sunbaked garden. It was empty now,
and very still. The streets that lay behind the high palings were
deserted in the drowsy heat; the only sound to be heard was a gentle
tinkling to vespers in the neighbouring Catholic Seminary. Leaning thus
on her elbows, and balancing herself first on her heels, then on her
toes, Laura went on, in desultory fashion, with the thoughts that had
been set in motion during the afternoon. She wondered where Annie Johns
was now, and what she was doing; wondered how she had faced her mother,
and what her father had said to her. All the rest of them had gone back
at once to their everyday life; Annie Johns alone was cut adrift. What
would happen to her? Would she perhaps be turned out of the house? ...
into the streets?--and Laura had a lively vision of the guilty
creature, in rags and tatters, slinking along walls and sleeping under
bridges, eternally moved on by a ruthless London policeman (her only
knowledge of extreme destitution being derived from the woeful tale of
"Little Jo").--And to think that the beginning of it all had been the
want of a trumpery tram-fare. How safe the other girls were! No wonder
they could allow themselves to feel shocked and outraged; none of THEM
knew what it was not to have threepence in your pocket. While she,
Laura ... Yes, and it must be this same incriminating acquaintance with
poverty that made her feel differently about Annie Johns and what she
had done. For her feelings HAD been different--there was no denying
that. Did she now think back over the half-hour spent in Number One,
and act honest Injun with herself, she had to admit that her
companions' indignant and horrified aversion to the crime had not been
hers, let alone their decent indifference towards the criminal. No, to
be candid, she had been deeply interested in the whole affair, had even
managed to extract an unseemly amount of entertainment from it. And
that, of course, should not have been. It was partly Mr. Strachey's
fault, for making it so dramatic; but none the less she genuinely
despised herself, for having such a queer inside.
"Pig--pig--pig!" she muttered under her breath, and wrinkled her nose
in a grimace.
The real reason of her pleasurable absorption was, she supposed, that
she had understood Annie Johns' motive better than anyone else. Well,
she had had no business to understand--that was the long and the short
of it: nice-minded girls found such a thing impossible, and turned
incuriously away. And her companions had been quick to recognise her
difference of attitude, or they would never have dared to accuse her of
sympathy with the thief, or to doubt her chorusing assertion with a
sneer. For them, the gap was not very wide between understanding and
doing likewise. And they were certainly right.--Oh! the last wish in
the world she had was to range herself on the side of the sinner; she
longed to see eye to eye with her comrades--if she had only known how
to do it. For there was no saying where it might lead you, if you
persisted in having odd and peculiar notions; you might even end by
being wicked yourself. Let her take a lesson in time from Annie's fate.
For, beginning perhaps with ideas that were no more unlike those of her
schoolfellows than were Laura's own, Annie was now a branded thief and
an outcast.--And the child's feelings, as she stood at the window, were
not very far removed from prayer. Had they found words, they would have
taken the form of an entreaty that she might be preserved from having
thoughts that were different from other people's; that she might be
made to feel as she ought to feel, in a proper, ladylike way--and
especially did she see a companion convicted of crime.
Below all this, in subconscious depths, a chord of fear seemed to have
been struck in her as well--the fear of stony faces, drooped lids, and
stretched, pointing fingers. For that night she started up, with a cry,
from dreaming that not Annie Johns but she was being expelled; that an
army of spear-like first fingers was marching towards her, and that,
try as she would, she could not get her limp, heavy legs to bear her to
the schoolroom door.
And this dream often returned.