IN THE BIG OAK HALL
“Attention! Patrols, form lines! Right turn! Lead out!”
Suddenly, at the close of the little speech, the orders had come.
Just as Betty was wondering why it was that Miss Carey’s words--even
although she could understand very little of their meaning--had yet
left a queer restful sort of feeling in her excited mind, the
headmistress had paused, her tone had changed, and the orders had
been uttered in quiet but clear and decisive tones.
And in response every girl in the room had drawn herself up. Then,
in amazement, Betty had watched as four of the prefects had stood out
from the rest, and as the other girls, each evidently understanding
the meaning of the orders, had quietly taken a place in one of the
four lines. Betty, following Geraldine’s movements with her eyes,
had noticed that her late companion now stood quietly at the end of a
row of juniors which seemed to be under the charge of Sybil, the head
girl. Six other juniors stood there with her, one of whom Betty
recognized as Mona, though the rest were as yet unknown. While she
was wondering whether she, too, had a place in the ranks, the second
order had come from the lips of the headmistress, and quietly, in
orderly fashion, the four prefects had led their patrols from the
room.
On the floor of the big Oak Hall Betty found herself alone; but as
she turned, wondering whether to follow the rest, the new girl found
the headmistress at her side.
“You are Betty Carlyle, my dear?”
[Illustration: “You are Betty Carlyle, my dear?”]
It was quite impossible to be afraid of Miss Carey. Betty suddenly
thought, as she looked up and met the kind look in the headmistress’s
eyes, of deep pools of blue water--deep, very deep.
But it was depths of feeling, hidden deeper still but mirrored in the
eyes, which unconsciously she had noticed. Buried there were the
signs of sorrows bravely borne, but hidden now; buried deep were all
the troubles that life had brought her. But buried deep, too, were
reserves of strength wrought from triumph over trial; reserves of
sympathy gained after sorrows bravely borne. Betty did not
understand this. She only somehow felt that the lines on the face
which looked kindly and keenly into her own had “fallen in pleasant
places”; that the eyes seemed as true as they were blue; and that the
smile on the quiet lips was the sweetest smile that she had ever seen.
“Yes,” she whispered.
“And you think you will be happy here, my dear?”
“Yes, only--” Betty’s voice quivered a little. For the “only” meant
a great deal just then. School, wonderful though it was, seemed to
hold so many mysteries still. The other girls seemed still beings
apart. Just as she stood alone in the big Oak Hall now she felt
alone somehow. And at home it had been so different.
“Only you do not feel in touch with our ways yet?” The voice had
seemed as kind as the eyes. “To-morrow, by this time, you will feel
differently, I am quite sure. And then--” Miss Carey had crossed
the room while she spoke, while Betty walked at her side. Together
they had reached the corridor again. “And then you may come to me at
this time,” said the headmistress, “and tell me if what I say now has
not come true. Now can you find your way up to your dormitory alone?
Nurse is up there waiting for you, I know.”
Very few words; but Betty suddenly felt different. It had needed
just that to settle her, she decided. Even although the girls seemed
sometimes to speak a different language from her own, to have ways
quite different from any she had known, yet soon they would be her
ways too. She went upstairs on flying wings.
Flying wings, however, met with a poor reception from Nurse, the
disciplinarian of the dormitories. Order and method were the burden
of her speech. Betty, during the half-hour which preceded the
arrival upstairs of her dormitory companions, underwent an
introductory training in dormitory behaviour.
“Who packed your box for you? You yourself? You’ll pack it
differently to go home with! See these creases? Fine work wasted,
that’s what _that_ is! Down to the laundry these go to-night for
some one else to iron. And that’s poor thanks to the one who spent
time in doing the work before!”
Betty found herself flushing, half with surprise and half with shame.
“Now this chest of drawers is your own, of course; but each girl
keeps her linen in the top long drawer, and her blouses--” On wound
the lesson while the new girl stood submissively by. “The right-hand
small drawer you may keep for what you like. Your handkerchiefs and
gloves go into the left-hand small drawer.”
Nurse was by this time locking the box.
“They’re in, Nurse. Everything is. It’s finished,” replied Betty,
longing for praise from this stern critic.
“‘In,’ you say? Let me see. Now why waste time by saving it to do
nothing in? That’s what you’ve done. Hurry-scurried over the
business and don’t know where your things are. Tell me without
looking inside now, which end of the drawer did you put your Sunday
gloves?”
“I--” Betty stood still, unable to remember.
“You don’t know. I don’t blame you to-day. But you’ll arrange this
differently, I hope, before I’ve done with you. We’ve all got the
same amount of time--all the time there is! Some of you think that
if you hurry-scurry over what you’ve got to do, that you save some of
it for something else. They’ve generally wasted it instead, as they
find out! Now there’s ten minutes of the half-hour left before the
rest come up, so you can take your things out of this drawer and lay
them in again. ‘A place for everything, and everything in its
place,’ may be an old-fashioned proverb in some places,” finished up
Nurse, “but not at St. Benedick’s. And neither is the tale of the
‘Hare and Tortoise.’ It comes true _here_ every day!”
There was much wisdom in Nurse’s words. In her own characteristic
way she was voicing, as Betty somehow realized, the spirit that lay
under the school motto. The new girl slowly and methodically did as
she was told while Nurse stood looking on. Anyhow, so she told
herself, she was already learning one way of being like the rest of
the girls!
For how different the drawers looked from those in her bedroom chest
at home. A muddled jumble of her own things and Jill’s had generally
to be stirred round about before an odd glove, or a possible
bootlace, or a cleaner handkerchief could be found. Even while
Nurse’s first words of commendation were sounding in Betty’s ears,
even although she was beginning to feel herself more like the rest,
Betty’s heart gave a terrible thump of longing for home.
It was at that juncture that “the rest” came upstairs to bed--each of
the two dormitory companions with whom she had not as yet made
friends, evidently as keen to know Betty as Geraldine had been.
“Gerry’s just behind. She stopped for something. You’re Betty
Carlyle, aren’t you? Rene and I have been longing to talk to you.”
Thus Mona in a breathless torrent. “I tried to smile across at tea,
because we don’t talk over the table; only you weren’t looking. And
then came Miss Carey’s speech, of course, and then came the Guide
meeting, and so--” The curtains of Mona’s cubicle had been drawn
right back, and she was waving a hair-brush while Rene, although it
was evidently difficult for her to get a word in edgeways, smiled and
nodded in friendly fashion, as though in perfect agreement with her
friend’s sentiments.
Rene was small and dark; Mona was tall, and owned a corn-coloured
pigtail. They were both jolly looking, Betty thought; though perhaps
not quite so specially jolly as Geraldine. The latter entered the
bedroom three minutes after the other pair, panting as she came.
“I was dreadfully afraid I’d be late. I waited to ask Sybil
something after Guides. You see----”
“‘Guides’?” It was the second time the word had been used. So the
girls had been “Guiding,” had they, during the half-hour which Betty
had spent unpacking!
“Guiding! Rather.” Rene and Mona took up the word and smiled.
“Gerry says you’re not one. She was telling Sybil. Sybil said she
knew already, and she said, too, that it’s a dreadful pity we can’t
fit you into the Daisies. But, of course, we can’t _possibly_,
because--” Mona stopped short and shook her hair out of its pigtail,
while Rene took up the tale.
“Nor into the Foxgloves either, can they? They’re as full as us.
And the Buttercups too. Cowslips could have taken you in last term;
but Bunty’s here now. She came last half-term, and as she’d been a
Guide before, she went straight in.”
“_Oh!_” cried Betty disappointedly. She knew suddenly how very much
she had wanted to be a Daisy, if only because then she would
definitely belong to something which held Sybil and Gerry too. She
looked across at Gerry, who hadn’t contributed one word yet to the
conversation, but who was labouring solidly with her mop of hair.
There was rather an excited look in her eyes, however, as they met
Betty’s pair of disappointed ones. “I _did_ so hope--” began Betty
quaveringly.
“There’s eight girls in the Daisies, you see, already,” said Mona
informatively. “And there’s eight in each of the other patrols,
because this term there’s thirty-three at school; and four eights
make thirty-two. Of course, you’re an extra, counting that way.
Sybil said that if there’d been more new girls we might have had
another patrol; but with only _you_----!”
Mona was well-meaning if tactless; she did not guess that Betty felt
a gulp in her throat at the words.
“Not, of course, that you could exactly be in _any_ patrol _yet_,”
went on Mona in a would-be comforting tone, “because you don’t know
_anything_! Not the Guide law, do you? Nor the promises? Nor the
Union Jack? Nor even knots? So----”
Betty’s face grew longer and longer. She seemed to be going farther
and farther into loneliness and insignificance at each mention of
these qualifications, none of which she possessed. She didn’t know
_anything_, she agreed mentally, that these girls did. If only Gerry
would speak up for her it would have been some comfort, but Gerry
still steadily brushed at her hair. Betty’s heart gave a leap of
hope, however, as Rene, comb suspended, gave a sudden excited cry.
“I tell you what Sybil might let you do!”
“_What?_” inquired Betty breathlessly.
“There’s a thing you could be! It’s in the Guiding Book. You don’t
know anything, you see, like Mona says. But you might be a Lone
Guide, I believe.”
A big tear, the existence of which she had been hitherto unaware of,
suddenly half-blinded one of Betty’s eyes. For she didn’t want, she
told herself, to be any more “alone” than she felt already. She
didn’t know what Guiding was, one bit; but she felt quite sure that
she didn’t want to be a Lone one! The very sound of the word made
her feel so dreadfully home-sick that she couldn’t believe Miss
Carey’s promise to her _could_ come true, and that this time
to-morrow she would be feeling like one of the rest. As she turned
to look in the glass and to wink away the tear, there came a tap at
the door, and Gerry, springing suddenly forward, gave a squeak of joy.
“_There!_” said Gerry, throwing a dimply look at Betty. “I knew
Sybil would manage it. I _knew_ she’d come!”