I feared at first that Lalage was not going to write to me. Nearly three
weeks passed before I got a letter from her and I was inclined to
blame her for neglect of an old friend. When the letter did arrive I
understood that I had no right to be angry. Lalage was better than I had
dared to hope. She kept a kind of irregular diary in an exercise book
and sent it to me. It was, like all diaries, in disconnected paragraphs,
evidently written down when the mood for recording experiences was on
Lalage. There were no dates attached, but the first entry must, I think,
embody the result of a very early series of impressions. One, at least,
of the opinions expressed in it was modified later on:
“When I arrived I was hustled into a room by a small fat lady dressed in
purple; not the old Pet, which is what we call Miss Pettigrew. I waited
for ten minutes. Then I was hustled upstairs by the same purple-clothed
lady, and shown a locker, Number 73. There I stayed for about five
minutes and then was driven down again by the purple-clothed lady and
pushed into the same room as I had been before. Again I was herded off
(after about five minutes), needless to say by the purple-robed woman,
and shoved into a waiting-room.”
Lalage’s patience must by this time have been wearing thin. It is
noticeable that the “lady” had become a mere “woman” in the last
sentence.
“There I stayed twenty minutes, a long twenty minutes, and lo! there
came the purple-dressed woman unto me and bore me away to be examined.
She slung me at the mercy of a mistress who gave me a desk (with a chair
clamped to the ground) paper, pen and examination papers. Could you
answer the following: Who succeeded (a) Stephen, (b) John, (c) Edward
III? I said to the old Pet, ‘This is all rotten.’ (By the way, I had
been sent off to her when I had done.) And she replied, ‘Oh, that’s not
at all a nice word for a young lady to use. We can’t have that here.’
She’s rather an ass.
“I was made to feel exactly like Lady Macbeth to-day at algebra. When
Miss Campbell turned her back, another girl dared me to put my pen
in Miss Campbell’s red ink. (This is strictly against the law.) So
of course I did. But instead of mopping it straight off like a fool I
displayed it with pride. Consequently it fell all over my hands. Miss
Campbell was just coming up so I had to hide them murmuring ‘Out, damned
spot!’ etc. Luckily she didn’t see, for she’s just the sort that would
report you like a shot.”
“The names of suburban houses are awfully funny.”
This entry evidently followed one of Lalage’s first outings. I felt
acutely the contrast between the pleasant chestnut tree, the fragrant
sty, and the paved footways along which she is now condemned to tramp.
“An awful, staring, backgardenly looking house, with muslin curtains,
frilly and a jumpy looking pattern on the side is called ‘Sans Souci!’
One ass calls his stable Cliftonville, although I bet he’s never seen
Clifton. Ardenbough and Honeysuckle Arbour are common.
“To-day we heard a frightful row in the corridor, laughing, talking,
and trampling. Miss Campbell half rose and said: ‘I must put a stop to
this.’ Before she could, the door was flung open and in bounced--the old
Pet and three visitors! After a moment’s conversation with Miss Campbell
she retired, banging the door in a way she’d expel any one else for.
“This letter _is_ lasting on. Hilda gets sixpence every time she is
top, threepence second, and twopence third, but does not get any regular
pocket money. She’s very rich at present, as she’s been top three times
running. How I’d like to play Rugby football. It looks enticing to be
let knock a person down. It _is_ a pity girls can’t, only lucky boys. I
wonder why I feel poorer here than at home and yet have more money.”
The Canon had, I am sure, provided Lalage with a suitable amount of
pocket money. I myself gave her five shillings the day before she
left home. She ought not to feel poor. Compared to Hilda, who has
one-and-sixpence, earned in the sweat of her brow, Lalage must seem a
millionaire.
“Do you know the kind of person who you hate and yet can’t help loving
although you are afraid of her? That is the sort the old Pet is. As I
was going into school to-day she was standing at the door. The beast
promptly spotted the fact that I had no hair ribbon, and remarked in
awe-inspiring tones, ‘Lalage, where is your hair ribbon?’ ‘Forgot it,’
said I, and took a lecture with a polite grin. The old Pet may be a
beast, but is _not_ an ass. I hope the weather will improve soon.
“There is no doubt that I am of a persevering nature or I would not
continue to write this letter. I fear it is so long that you’ll never
get through it, though I did not know it until now. I know a girl who is
learning Greek. She’s awful, and so clever. She is in my Latin class and
prime favourite with Carpy.
“Your affect.
“Lalage.”
Carpy cannot be the real name of the lady who teaches Latin to Lalage
and Greek to the awful girl. I have tried to reconstruct her name from
its corruption, but have hitherto failed to satisfy myself. She may be
a Miss Chartres. Perhaps she is the purple-gowned woman who hustled,
pushed, herded and slung Lalage on the day of her arrival. She cannot,
in any case, be identified with the mathematician who uses red ink. No
ingenuity in nicknaming could extract Carpy from Campbell.
There was, in spite of its great length, a postscript to Lalage’s
letter. There was also an enclosure.
“P.S. What does ‘flippant’ mean? The old Pet said my comp. was flippant,
and I don’t know what that is. It was my first comp.”
I unfolded the “comp.” and read it carefully:
Composition on Politeness by Lalage Beresford
Politeness is a very difficult art to acquire. It is altogether an
acquired art, for no one is polite when he is born. Some sorts of
politeness are sensible and they are comparatively easy to learn.
Begging a person’s pardon when we tread on their toes is polite and is a
reasonable thing to do. But there are many silly things to learn before
we become really polite. For instance, a boy must learn to open the door
for ladies and walk after them always. This does the ladies no good and
is sometimes very inconvenient for the boy. He may be in a hurry. It is
not polite for a girl to sit with her legs crossed and her head leaning
aback on her hands. This is a position which does no one any harm, so it
is absurd that it should be considered unpolite. In old days politeness
was carried to much greater extremities than it is now. In the days
when they used to fight duels, when two gentlemen felt really annoyed,
instead of one of them saying to the other, “Go and get your sword
and let me kill you,” and the other replying, “All right, I shall be
delighted to kill a man whom I detest,” they demanded “satisfaction”
of each other in most polite tones and parted with low bows and polite,
though sneering, smiles. Politeness is a very good thing in moderation,
but not if carried too far.
Skeat traces the word “flippant” back through “flip” and the old
Northumbrian present participle ending “an” to the Icelandic “fleipa,”
which means to prattle--I found this out in a dictionary and copied it
down for Lalage. Miss Pettigrew was not, I think, justified in applying
the word, supposing that she used it in its strict etymological sense,
to Lalage’s composition. There was more in the essay than mere prattle.
But Miss Pettigrew may have had reasons of her own, reasons which I can
only guess, for wishing to depreciate this particular essay. It is quite
possible that she was herself the person who told Lalage that it is rude
for a girl to sit with her lees crossed. My mother, to whom I showed the
composition when I consulted her about the probable meaning of flippant,
refused to entertain this suggestion. She knows Miss Pettigrew and
does not think she is the kind of person who would attach excessive
importance to the position of Lalage’s legs. She thinks that the maxim
referred to by Lalage--there evidently was a maxim in her mind when
she wrote--must have fallen from the lips of Miss Campbell, the
mathematician, Carpy, or the purple-gowned woman. If she is right, I
can only suppose that Miss Pettigrew in using the word flippant meant
to support the authority of her subordinates and to snub Lalage for
attempting to rebel against time-honoured tradition.
I walked across to the rectory after luncheon, intending to show my
letter and the composition on politeness to the Canon. I found him
seriously upset. He had received a letter from Lalage, and he had also
enjoyed a visit from the Archdeacon. He was ill-advised in showing the
letter to the Archdeacon. I should have had more sense. I suppose he
thought that, dealing as it did almost entirely with religious subjects,
it was likely to interest the Archdeacon. It did interest him. It
interested him excessively, to an extent which occasioned a good deal of
trouble.
“Dear Father: I have read nearly the whole of the ‘Earthly Paradise’
since I came here. It is an awfully jolly book. [‘Little Folks’ is
Miss Campbell’s idea of literature for the young; but that’s all rot
of course.) Who wrote the Litany? If you do not know please ask the
Archdeacon when you see him. I’ve come to the conclusion that some of it
is very well written.”
“I did ask the Archdeacon,” said the Canon, looking up from the letter,
“and he said he’d hunt up the point when he went home.”
“Lalage,” I said, “has quite a remarkable feeling for style. See the way
she writes about the ‘Earthly Paradise.’ It must be the way you brought
her up on quotations from Horace. Miss Campbell hardly appreciates her,
I’m afraid. But of course you can’t expect a mathematician to rise much
above ‘Little Folks’ in the way of literature. I suppose the Archdeacon
was greatly pleased with that conundrum about the Litany.”
“It was what followed,” said the Canon, “which excited him.”
He began to read again:
“There is a clergyman who comes once a week to give us a scripture
lesson. He is only a curate and looks very shy. We had a most exciting
time with him yesterday. We all shied paper wads, and he moved nearly
every one up and sent one girl out of the room.”
“He can’t,” I said, “have been as shy as he looked. But I’m beginning to
understand why the Archdeacon was shocked.”
“He didn’t mind that,” said the Canon; “at least not much.”
Lalage’s letter went on:
“I was glad, that it wasn’t me, who was just as bad, that he didn’t what
he calls ‘make an example of.’ Even that didn’t calm the excited
class and he said, ‘Next person who laughs will be reported to Miss
Pettigrew.’ It was not me, but the girl next me, Eileen Fraser. I was
the innocent cause of the offence. (A mere wink at Hilda when I had my
belt round her neck.) She was not, however, reported, even to Carpy.”
“By the way,” I said, “who is Carpy? She comes into my letter too.”
The Canon did not know and seemed uninterested in the point. He went on
reading:
“Another day he committed an unforgivable offence. He said to us, ‘You
must stand up when quoting the words of the Bible.’”
“Isn’t that always considered essential?” I asked. “The unforgivable
offence,” said the Canon, “is in the next sentence.”
“But _he_ sat with his feet on the fender, the pig. I do hate that
sort. Even when Hilda said that Ananias told a lie and was turned into
a pillar of salt he did not laugh. He said he’d turn one girl out of the
room to-day for nothing but dropping her pen.”
“The Archdeacon,” I said, “could of course sympathize with that curate.”
“It wasn’t that which made him really angry,” said the Canon, “although
he didn’t like it.”
“There must be something pretty bad coming, if it’s worse than that.”
The Canon sighed heavily and went on reading
“Hilda taught me the two-step at rec. Another girl (also in my class and
jolly nice) played them.”
The Canon looked up with a puzzled expression. I explained as well as I
could.
“The two-step,” I said, “is a dance. What the jolly, nice girl played
is a little obscure, but I think it must have been tunes suitable to the
performance of the two-step. ‘Rec.’ is a shortened form of recreation.
Lalage is fond of these contractions. She writes to me about her comp.”
The canon read: “On the other days, the old Pet takes us herself at
Scrip: We were at Genesis, and she read out, ‘In the beginning God
created the heaven, and the earth.’ ‘But of course you all know He
didn’t. Modern science teaches us----’ Then she went on with a lot of
rot about gases and forces and nebulous things.”
“The Archdeacon,” said the Canon, “is going to write to the Archbishop
of Dublin about it. He says that kind of teaching ought not to be
allowed.”
“We must head him off somehow,” I said, “if he really means it. But he
hardly can. I don’t expect he’ll run into extremes. He certainly
won’t without taking advice. The Archdeacon isn’t a man to do anything
definite in a hurry. He’s told me over and over again that he deprecates
precipitancy of action.”
“He feels very strongly about the Higher Criticism. Very strongly
indeed. He says it’s poisoning the wells of religion in the home.”
“Last time he lunched with us he said it was sapping the foundations.
Still I scarcely think he’ll want to institute a heresy prosecution
against Miss Pettigrew.”
“I’m very much afraid--he seemed most determined----”
“We must switch him off on to some other track,” I said. “If you funk
tackling him----”
“I did my best.”
“I suppose that I’d better try him. It’s a nuisance. I hate arguing with
archdeacons; but of course we can’t have Lalage put into a witness box
and ballyragged by archbishops and people of that kind, and she’d be
the only available witness. Hilda can’t be in a position to give a clear
account of what happened, considering that she was half strangled by
Lalage’s belt at the time.”
“It was at the curate’s class that the belt incident occurred,” said the
Canon, “just after they had been throwing paper wads.”
“So it was. All the same I don’t think Hilda would be much use as a
witness. The memory of that choking would be constantly with her and
would render every scripture lesson a confused nightmare for months
afterward. The other girls would probably lose their heads. It’s all
well enough to pelt curates with paper wads. Any one could do that. It’s
quite a different thing to stand up before an ecclesiastical court and
answer a string of questions about nebulous things. That Archbishop will
find himself relying entirely on Lalage to prove the Archdeacon’s case,
which won’t be a nice position for her. I’ll go home now and drive over
at once to see the Archdeacon.”
“Do,” said the Canon. “I’d go with you only I hate this kind of fuss.
Some men like it. The Archdeacon, for instance. Curious, isn’t it, how
differently we’re made, though we all look very much alike from the
outside. ‘Sunt quos cumculo----’” I did not wait to hear the end of the
quotation.
I approached the Archdeacon hopefully, relying, I confess, less on the
intrinsic weight of the arguments I meant to use than on the respect
which I knew the Archdeacon entertained for my position in the county.
My mother is the sister of the present Lord Thormanby, a fact which
by itself predisposes the Archdeacon in my favour. My father was a
distinguished soldier. My grandfather was a still more distinguished
soldier, and there are pictures of his most successful battle hanging
in my dining-room. The Archdeacon has often seen them and I am sure
appreciates them. I am also, for an Irish landlord, a well-off man. I
might, so I believed, have trusted entirely to these facts to persuade
the Archdeacon to give up the idea of communicating Miss Pettigrew’s
lapse into heterodoxy to the Archbishop. But I worked out a couple of
sound arguments as well, and I was greatly surprised to find that I
produced no effect whatever on the Archdeacon. He bluntly refused to
modify his plan of action.
I quoted to him the proverb which warns us to let sleeping dogs lie.
Under any ordinary circumstances this would have appealed strongly to
the Archdeacon. It was just the kind of wisdom by which he guides his
life. I was taken aback when he replied that Miss Pettigrew, so far
from being a sleeping dog, was a roaring lion. A moment later he called
her a ravenous evening wolf; so I gave up my proverb as useless. I then
reminded him that Lalage was evidently quite unaffected by the teaching
which she received, had in fact described modern science as a lot of
rot. The Archdeacon replied that, though Lalage escaped, others might
be affected; and that he was not quite sure even about Lalage, because
insidious poisons are most to be feared when they lie dormant in the
system for a time.
This brought me to the end of my two arguments and I had to invent
another on the spot. I am always rather ashamed to think of the one I
actually used, but I was driven against the wall and the position seemed
almost desperate. I suggested that Lalage’s account of the scripture
lesson was in all probability quite unreliable.
“You know, Archdeacon,” I said, “that all little girls are horrid
liars.”
The insinuation that Lalage ever spoke anything but the truth was
treacherous and abominable. She has her faults; but I have not the
slightest doubt in my mind that her description of Miss Pettigrew’s
scripture lesson was a perfectly honest account of the impression it
produced on her mind. The Archdeacon hesitated, and, hoping for the
best, I plunged deeper.
“Lalage in particular,” I said, “is absolutely reckless about the
truth.”
The Archdeacon shook his head mournfully.
“I wish I could think so,” he said. “I should be glad, indeed, if I
could take your view of the matter; but in these days when the Higher
Criticism is invading our pulpits and our school rooms----”
His voice faded away into the melancholy silence and he continued
shaking his head.
This shows how much more important dogmatic truth is than the ordinary
everyday correspondence between statement and fact. To the Archdeacon a
lie of Lalage’s would have been a minor evil in every way preferable,
if it came to a choice between the two, to Miss Pettigrew’s unorthodox
interpretation of the Mosaic narrative. I could argue the matter no more
and fell back upon a last plan.
“Archdeacon,” I said, “come out and dine with us to-night. Talk the
whole business over with my mother before you take any definite action.”
The Archdeacon agreed to do this. I went home at once and prepared my
mother for the conflict.
“You must use all your influence,” I said. “It is a most serious
business.”
“My dear boy,” said my mother, “it’s quite the most ridiculous storm in
a tea cup of which I’ve ever heard.”
“No,” I said solemnly, “it’s not. If the Archdeacon makes his charge
formally the Archbishop will be obliged to take it up. Miss Pettigrew
will be hauled up before him----”
“Miss Pettigrew,” said my mother, “would simply laugh. She’s not in the
very least the sort of woman----”
“I know. She’s one of those people that you hate awfully and yet can’t
help loving though you are rather afraid of her. It’s for her sake more
than Lalage’s that I’m asking you to interfere.”
“If I interfere at all it will be for the Archdeacon’s sake. It’s a pity
to allow him to make a fool of himself.”
I do not know what line my mother actually took with the Archdeacon.
I left them together after dinner and when the time came for saying
good-night I found that the Archdeacon had been persuaded not to attempt
a formal protest against Miss Pettigrew’s teaching. He has never,
however, trusted her since then and he still shakes his head doubtfully
at the mention of her name.
I wrote to Lalage next day and told her not to send home any more
accounts of scripture lessons. English compositions, I said, we should
be glad to receive. Latin exercises would always be welcome, and algebra
sums, especially if worked in Miss Campbell’s red ink, would be regarded
as treasured possessions.
“All letters,” I added, “suspected of containing ecclesiastical news of
any kind will be returned to you unopened.”
I also called on the Canon and spoke plainly to him about the danger and
folly of showing letters to the Archdeacon.
“I was wrong,” said the Canon apologetically. “I can see now that I was
wrong, but I thought at the time that he’d enjoy the joke.”
“You ought,” said I severely, “to have had more sense. The Archdeacon
expects to be a bishop some day. He can’t afford to enjoy jokes of that
kind. By the way, did he tell you who wrote the Litany?”