A bell clanged. Brazen, insistent, maddening.
Through the quiet corridors came the din of it, making hideous the peace of the morning. From each of the yawning windows of the little quadrangle the noise poured out on to the still, sunlit garden where the grass was grey yet with dew.
Little Miss Pym stirred, opened one doubtful grey eye, and reached blindly for her watch. There was no watch. She opened the other eye. There seemed to be no bedside table either. No, of course not; now she remembered. There was no bedside table; as she had found last night. Her watch had had of necessity to be put under her pillow. She fumbled for it. Good heavens, what a row that bell was making! Obscene. There seemed to be no watch under the pillow. But it must be there! She lifted the pillow bodily, revealing only one small sheer-linen handkerchief in a saucy pattern of blue-and-white. She dropped the pillow and peered down between the bed and the wall. Yes, there was something that looked like a watch. By lying flat on her front and inserting an arm she could just reach it. Carefully she brought it up, lightly caught between the tips of first and second fingers. If she dropped it now she would have to get out of bed and crawl under for it. She turned on her back with a sigh of relief, holding the watch triumphantly above her.
Half-past five, said the watch.
Half-past five!
Miss Pym stopped breathing and stared in unbelieving fascination. No, really, did any college, however physical and hearty, begin the day at half-past five! Anything was possible, of course, in a community which had use for neither bedside tables nor bedside lamps, but-half-past five! She put the watch to her small pink ear. It ticked faithfully. She squinted round her pillow at the garden which was visible from the window behind her bed. Yes, it certainly was early; the world had that unmoving just-an-apparition look of early morning. Well, well!
Henrietta had said last night, standing large and majestical in the doorway: “Sleep well. The students enjoyed your lecture, my dear. I shall see you in the morning;” but had not seen fit to mention half-past-five bells.
Oh, well. It wasn’t her funeral, thank goodness. Once upon a time she too had lived a life regulated by bells, but that was long ago. Nearly twenty years ago. When a bell rang in Miss Pym’s life now it was because she had put a delicately varnished finger-tip on the bell-push. As the clamour died into a complaining whimper and then into silence, she turned over to face the wall, burrowing happily into her pillow. Not her funeral. Dew on the grass, and all that, was for youth: shining resplendent youth; and they could have it. She was having another two hours’ sleep.
Very childlike she looked with her round pink face, her neat little button of a nose, and her brown hair rolled in flat invisible-pinned curls all over her head. They had cost her a spiritual struggle last night, those curls. She had been very tired after the train journey, and meeting Henrietta again, and the lecture; and her weaker self had pointed out that she would in all probability be leaving after lunch on the morrow, that her permanent wave was only two months old, and that her hair might very well be left unpinned for one night. But, partly to spite her weaker self with whom she waged a constant and bitter war, partly so that she might do Henrietta justice, she had seen to it that fourteen pins were pressed to their nightly duty. She was remembering her strong-mindedness now (it helped to cancel out any twinge of conscience about her self-indulgence this morning) and marvelling at the survival of that desire to live up to Henrietta. At school, she, the little fourth-form rabbit, had admired the sixth-form Henrietta extravagantly. Henrietta was the born Head Girl. Her talent lay exclusively in seeing that other people employed theirs. That was why, although she had left school to train in secretarial work, she was now Principal of a college of physical culture; a subject of which she knew nothing at all. She had forgotten all about Lucy Pym, just as Lucy had forgotten about her, until Miss Pym had written The Book.
That is how Lucy herself thought of it. The Book.
She was still a little surprised about The Book herself. Her mission in life had been to teach schoolgirls to speak French. But after four years of that her remaining parent had died, leaving her two hundred and fifty pounds a year, and Lucy had dried her eyes with one hand and given in her resignation with the other. The Headmistress had pointed out with envy and all uncharitableness that investments were variable things, and that two hundred and fifty didn’t leave much margin for a civilised and cultured existence such as people in Lucy’s position were expected to live. But Lucy had resigned all the same, and had taken a very civilised and cultured flat far enough from Camden Town to be nearly Regents Park. She provided the necessary margin by giving French lessons now and then when gas bills were imminent, and spent all her spare time reading books on psychology.
She read her first book on psychology out of curiosity, because it seemed to her an interesting sort of thing; and she read all the rest to see if they were just as silly. By the time she had read thirty-seven books on the subject, she had evolved ideas of her own on psychology; at variance, of course, with all thirty-seven volumes read to date. In fact, the thirty-seven volumes seemed to her so idiotic and made her so angry that she sat down there and then and wrote reams of refutal. Since one cannot talk about psychology in anything but jargon, there being no English for most of it, the reams of refutal read very learnedly indeed. Not that that would have impressed anyone if Miss Pym had not used the back of a discarded sheet (her typing was not very professional) on which to write:
Dear Mr Stallard,
I should be so grateful if you would not use your wireless after eleven at night. I find it so distracting.
Yours sincerely
Lucy Pym.
Mr Stallard, whom she did not know (his name was on the card outside his door on the floor below) arrived in person that evening. He was holding her letter open in his hand, which seemed to Lucy very grim indeed, and she swallowed several times before she could make any coherent sound at all. But Mr Stallard wasn’t angry about the wireless. He was a publishers’ reader, it seemed, and was interested in what she had unconsciously sent him on the back of the paper.
Now in normal times a publisher would have rung for brandy at the mere suggestion of publishing a book on psychology. But the previous year the British public had shaken the publishing world by tiring suddenly of fiction, and developing an interest in abstruse subjects, such as the distance of Sirius from the earth, and the inward meaning of primitive dances in Bechuanaland. Publishers were falling over themselves, therefore, in their effort to supply this strange new thirst for knowledge, and Miss Pym found herself welcomed with open arms. That is to say, she was taken to lunch by the senior partner, and given an agreement to sign. This alone was a piece of luck, but Providence so ordained it that not only had the British public tired of fiction, but the intellectuals had tired of Freud and Company. They were longing for Some New Thing. And Lucy proved to be it. So Lucy woke one morning to find herself not only famous, but a best-seller. She was so shocked that she went out and had three cups of black coffee and sat in the Park looking straight in front of her for the rest of the morning.
She had been a best-seller for several months, and had become quite used to lecturing on “her subject” to learned societies, when Henrietta’s letter had come; reminding her of their schooldays together and asking her to come and stay for a while and address the students. Lucy was a little wearied of addressing people, and the image of Henrietta had grown dim with the years. She was about to write a polite refusal, when she remembered the day on which the fourth form had discovered her christened name to be Laetitia; a shame that Lucy had spent her life concealing. The fourth form had excelled themselves, and Lucy had been wondering whether her mother would mind very much about her suicide, and deciding that anyhow she had brought it on herself by giving her daughter such a high-falutin name. And then Henrietta had waded into the humourists, literally and metaphorically. Her blistering comment had withered humour at the root, so that the word Laetitia had never been heard again, and Lucy had gone home and enjoyed jam roly-poly instead of throwing herself in the river. Lucy sat in her civilised and cultured living-room, and felt the old passionate gratitude to Henrietta run over her in waves. She wrote and said that she would be delighted to stay a night with Henrietta (her native caution was not entirely obliterated by her gratitude) and would with pleasure talk on psychology to her students.
The pleasure had been considerable, she thought, pushing up a hump of sheet to shut out the full brilliance of the daylight. Quite the nicest audience she had ever had. Rows of shining heads, making the bare lecture-room look like a garden. And good hearty applause. After weeks of the polite pattering of learned societies it was pleasant to hear the percussion of hollowed palm on hollowed palm. And their questions had been quite intelligent. Somehow, although psychology was a subject on their timetable, as shown in the common-room, she had not expected intellectual appreciation from young women who presumably spent their days doing things with their muscles. Only a few, of course, had asked questions; so there was still a chance that the rest were morons.
Oh well, tonight she would sleep in her own charming bed, and all this would seem like a dream. Henrietta had pressed her to stay for some days, and for a little she had toyed with the idea. But supper had shaken her. Beans and milk pudding seemed an uninspired sort of meal for a summer evening. Very sustaining and nourishing and all that, she didn’t doubt. But not a meal one wanted to repeat. The staff table, Henrietta had said, always had the same food that the students had; and Lucy had hoped that that remark didn’t mean that she had looked doubtfully upon the beans. She had tried to look very bright and pleased about the beans; but perhaps it hadn’t been a success.
“Tommy! Tom-mee! Oh, Tommy, darling, waken up. I’m desperate!”
Miss Pym shot into wakefulness. The despairing cries seemed to be in her room. Then she realised that the second window of her room gave on to the courtyard; that the courtyard was small, and conversation from room to room through the gaping windows a natural method of communication. She lay trying to quiet her thumping heart, peering down over the folds of sheet to where, beyond the hump of her toes, the foreshortened oblong of the window framed a small piece of distant wall. But her bed lay in the angle of the room, one window to her right in the wall behind her, and the courtyard window to her left beyond the foot of her bed, and all that was visible from her pillow through the tall thin strip of brightness was half of an open window far down the courtyard.
“Tom-mee! Tom-mee!”
A dark head appeared in the window Miss Pym could see.
“For God’s sake, someone,” said the head, “throw something at Thomas and stop Dakers’ row.”
“Oh, Greengage, darling, you are an unsympathetic beast. I’ve bust my garter, and I don’t know what to do. And Tommy took my only safety-pin yesterday to pick the winkles with at Tuppence-ha’penny’s party. She simply must let me have it back before —Tommy! Oh, Tommy!”
“Hey, shut up, will you,” said a new voice, in a lowered tone, and there was a pause. A pause, Lucy felt, full of sign language.
“And what does all that semaphoring mean?” asked the dark head.
“Shut up, I tell you. She’s there!” This in desperate sotto voce.
“Who is?”
“The Pym woman.”
“What rubbish, darling,”— it was the Dakers voice again, high and unsubdued; the happy voice of a world’s darling —“she’s sleeping in the front of the house with the rest of the mighty. Do you think she would have a spare safety-pin if I was to ask her?”
“She looks zipp-fastener to me,” a new voice said.
“Oh, will you be quiet! I tell you, she’s in Bentley’s room!”
There was a real silence this time. Lucy saw the dark head turn sharply towards her window.
“How do you know?” someone asked.
“Jolly told me last night when she was giving me late supper.” Miss Joliffe was the housekeeper, Lucy remembered, and appreciated the nickname for so grim a piece of humanity.
“Gawd’s truth!” said the “zipp-fastener” voice, with feeling.
Into the silence came a bell. The same urgent clamour that had wakened them. The dark head disappeared at the first sound of it, and Dakers’ voice above the row could be heard wailing her desperation like a lost thing. Social gaffes were relegated to their proper unimportance, as the business of the day overwhelmed them. A great wave of sound rose up to meet the sound of the bell. Doors were banged, feet drummed in the corridor, voices called, someone remembered that Thomas was still asleep, and a tattoo was beaten on her locked door when objects flung at her from surrounding windows had failed to waken her, and then there was the sound of running feet on the gravel path that crossed the courtyard grass. And gradually there were more feet on the gravel and fewer on the stairs, and the babble of voices swelled to a climax and faded. When the noises had grown faint with distance or died into lecture-room silence, a single pair of feet pattered in flight across the gravel, a voice saying: “Damn, damn, damn, damn, damn —” at each footfall. The Thomas who slept, apparently.
Miss Pym felt sympathetic to the unknown Thomas. Bed was a charming place at any time, but if one was so sleepy that neither riotous bell-ringing nor the wails of a colleague made any impression, then getting up must be torture. Welsh, too, probably. All Thomases were Welsh. Celts hated getting up. Poor Thomas. Poor, poor Thomas. She would like to find poor Thomas a job where she would never have to get up before afternoon.
Sleep ran over her in waves, drawing her deeper and deeper under. She wondered if “looking zipp-fastener” was a compliment. Being a safety-pin person couldn’t be thought exactly admirable, so perhaps —
She fell asleep.
She was being beaten with knouts by two six-foot cossacks because she persisted in using the old-fashioned safety-pin when progress decreed a zipp-fastener, and the blood had begun to trickle down her back when she woke to the fact that the only thing that was being assaulted was her hearing. The bell was ringing again. She said something that was neither civilised nor cultured, and sat up. No, definitely, not a minute after lunch would she stay. There was a 2.41 from Larborough, and on that 2.41 she would be; her goodbyes said, her duty to friendship done, and her soul filled with the beatitude of escape. She would treat herself to a half-pound box of chocolates on the station platform as a sort of outward congratulation. It would show on the bathroom scales at the end of the week, but who cared?
The thought of the scales reminded her of the civilised and cultured necessity of having a bath. Henrietta had been sorry about its being so far to the staff bathrooms; she had been sorry altogether to put a guest into the student block, but Fr?ken Gustavsen’s mother from Sweden was occupying the only staff guest-room, and was going to stay for some weeks until she had seen and criticised the result of her daughter’s work when the annual Demonstration would take place at the beginning of the month. Lucy doubted very much whether her bump of locality — a hollow according to her friends — was good enough to take her back to that bathroom. It would be awful to go prowling along those bright empty corridors, arriving perhaps at lecture-rooms unawares. And still more awful to ask in a crowded corridor of up-since-dawners where one could perform one’s belated ablutions.
Lucy’s mind always worked like that. It wasn’t sufficient for it to visualise one horror; it must visualise the opposite one too. She sat so long considering the rival horrors, and enjoying the sensation of doing nothing, that still another bell rang and still another wave of drumming feet and calling voices rose up and swamped the quiet of the morning. Lucy looked at her watch. It was half-past seven.
She had just decided to be uncivilised and uncultured and “go in her mook” as her daily woman called it — after all, what was this immersion in water but a modern fad, and if Charles the Second could afford to smell a little high, who was she, a mere commoner, to girn at missing a bath? — when there was a knock on her door. Rescue was at hand. Oh, joy, oh, glory, her marooned condition was at an end.
“Come in,” she called in the glad tones of a Crusoe welcoming a landing party. Of course Henrietta would come to say good-morning. How silly of her not to have thought of that. She was still at heart the little rabbit who didn’t expect Henrietta to bother about her. Really, she must cultivate a habit of mind more suitable to a Celebrity. Perhaps if she were to do her hair differently, or say over something twenty times a day after the manner of Coué—“Come in!”
But it was not Henrietta. It was a goddess.
A goddess with golden hair, a bright blue linen tunic, sea-blue eyes, and the most enviable pair of legs. Lucy always noticed other women’s legs, her own being a sad disappointment to her.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” said the goddess. “I forgot that you might not be up. In college we keep such odd hours.”
Lucy thought that it was nice of this heavenly being to take the blame for her sloth.
“I do apologise for interrupting your dressing.” The blue eye came to rest on a mule which was lying in the middle of the floor, and stayed there as if fascinated. It was a pale blue satin mule; very feminine, very thriftless, very feathery. A most undeniable piece of nonsense.
“I’m afraid it is rather silly,” Lucy said.
“If you only knew, Miss Pym, what it is to see an object that is not strictly utilitarian!” And then, as if recalled to her business by the very temptation of straying from it: “My name is Nash. I’m the Head Senior. And I came to say that the Senior students would be very honoured if you would come to tea with them tomorrow. On Sundays we take our tea out into the garden. It is a Senior privilege. And it really is very pleasant out there on a summer afternoon, and we really are looking forward to having you.” She smiled with eager benevolence on Miss Pym.
Lucy explained that she would not be there tomorrow; that she was departing this afternoon.
“Oh, no!” protested the Nash girl; and the genuine feeling in her tone caused Lucy a rush of warmth to the heart. “No, Miss Pym, you mustn’t! You really mustn’t. You have no idea what a god-send you are to us. It’s so seldom that anyone — anyone interesting comes to stay. This place is rather like a convent. We are all so hard-worked that we have no time to think of an outside world; and this is the last term for us Seniors, and everything is very grim and claustrophobic — Final Exams, and the Demonstration, and being found posts, and what not — and we are all feeling like death, and our last scrap of sense of proportion is gone. And then you come, a piece of the outside, a civilised being —” She paused; half laughing, half serious. “You can’t desert us.”
“But you have an outside lecturer every Friday,” Lucy pointed out. It was the first time in her life she had been a god-send to anyone, and she was determined to take the assertion with a grain of salt. She didn’t at all like the gratified feeling that was sniffing round the edge of her emotions.
Miss Nash explained with clarity, point, and no small bitterness that the last three lecturers had been: an octogenarian on Assyrian inscriptions, a Czech on Central Europe, and a bonesetter on scoliosis.
“What is scoliosis?” asked Lucy.
“Curvature of the spine. And if you think that any of them brought sweetness and light into the College atmosphere, you are wrong. These lectures are supposed to keep us in touch with the world, but if I must be both frank and indiscreet”— she was obviously enjoying being both —“the frock you wore last night did us more good than all the lectures we have ever heard.”
Lucy had spent a really shocking sum on that garment when first her book became a best-seller, and it still remained her favourite; she had worn it to impress Henrietta. The gratified feeling came a little nearer.
But not near enough to destroy her common sense. She could still remember the beans. And the lack of bedside lamps. And the lack of any bells to summon service. And the everlasting bells that rang to summon others. No, on the 2.41 from Larborough she would be, though every student of the Leys Physical Training College lay down in her path and wept aloud. She murmured something about engagements — leaving it to be inferred that her diary bulged with pressing and desirable appointments — and suggested that Miss Nash might, meanwhile, direct her to the Staff bathrooms. “I didn’t want to go prowling through the corridors, and I couldn’t find a bell to ring.”
Miss Nash, having sympathised with her about the lack of service —“Eliza really should have remembered that there are no bells in the rooms here and come to call you; she’s the Staff house-maid”— suggested that, if Miss Pym didn’t mind using the students’ baths, they were much nearer. “They are cubicles, of course; I mean, they have walls only part of the way; and the floor is a sort of greenish concrete where the Staff have turquoise mosaic with a tasteful design in dolphins, but the water is the same.”
Miss Pym was delighted to use the students’ bathroom, and as she gathered her bathing things together the unoccupied half of her mind was busy with Miss Nash’s lack of any studentlike reverence for the Staff. It reminded her of something. And presently she remembered what it reminded her of. Mary Barharrow. The rest of Mary Barharrow’s form had been meek and admiring young labourers in the field of irregular French verbs, but Mary Barharrow, though diligent and amiable, had treated her French mistress as an equal; and that was because Mary Barharrow’s father was “nearly a millionaire.” Miss Pym concluded that in the “outside”— strange how one already used Klondyke terms about College — Miss Nash, who had so markedly Mary Barharrow’s charming air of social ease and equality, had also a father very like Mary Barharrow’s. She was to learn later that it was the first thing that anyone remarked on when Nash’s name was mentioned. “Pamela Nash’s people are very rich, you know. They have a butler.” They never failed to mention the butler. To the daughters of struggling doctors, lawyers, dentists, business men and farmers, he was as exotic as a negro slave.
“Shouldn’t you be at some class or other?” asked Miss Pym, as the quietness of the sunlit corridors proclaimed an absorption elsewhere. “I take it that if you are wakened at half-past five you work before breakfast.”
“Oh, yes. In the summer we have two periods before breakfast, one active and one passive. Tennis practice and kinesiology, or something like that.”
“What is kin — whatever-it-is?”
“Kinesiology?” Miss Nash considered for a moment the best way of imparting knowledge to the ignorant, and then spoke in imaginary quotation. “I take down a jug with a handle from a high shelf; describe the muscle-work involved.” And as Miss Pym’s nod showed that she had understood: “But in winter we get up like anyone else at half-past seven. As for this particular period, it is normally used for taking outside certificates — Public Health, and Red Cross, and what not. But since we have finished with these we are allowed to use it as a prep. hour for our final exams, which begin next week. We have very little prep. time so we are glad of it.”
“Aren’t you free after tea, or thereabouts?”
Miss Nash looked amused. “Oh, no. There is afternoon clinic from four o’clock till six; outside patients, you know. Everything from flat feet to broken thighs. And from half-past six to eight there is dancing. Ballet, not folk. We have folk in the morning; it ranks as exercise not art. And supper doesn’t finish much before half-past eight, so we are very sleepy before we begin our prep. and it is usually a fight between our sleepiness and our ignorance.”
As they turned into the long corridor leading to the stairs, they overtook a small scuttling figure clutching under one arm the head and thorax of a skeleton and the pelvis and legs under the other arm.
“What are you doing with George, Morris?” asked Miss Nash as they drew level.
“Oh, please don’t stop me, Beau,” panted the startled Junior, hitching her grotesque burden more firmly on to her right hip and continuing to scuttle in front of them, “and please forget that you saw me. I mean that you saw George. I meant to waken early and put him back in the lecture-room before the half-past five bell went, but I just slept.”
“Have you been up all night with George?”
“No, only till about two. I—”
“And how did you manage about lights?”
“I pinned my travelling rug over the window, of course,” said the Junior, in the testy tones of one explaining the obvious.
“A nice atmosphere on a June evening!”
“It was hellish,” said Miss Morris, simply. “But it really is the only way I can swot up my insertions, so please, Beau, just forget that you saw me. I’ll get him back before the Staff come down to breakfast.”
“You’ll never do it, you know. You’re bound to meet someone or other.”
“Oh, please don’t discourage me. I’m terrified enough now. And I really don’t know if I can remember how to hook up his middle.” She preceded them down the stairs, and disappeared into the front of the house.
“Positively Through-the-Looking-Glass,” commented Miss Pym, watching her go. “I always thought insertion was something to do with needlework.”
“Insertions? They’re the exact place on a bone where a muscle is attached to it. It’s much easier to do it with the skeleton in front of you, than with just a book. That is why Morris abducted George.” She expelled a breath of indulgent laughter. “Very enterprising of her. I stole odd bones from the drawers in the lecture-room when I was a Junior, but I never thought of taking George. It’s the dreadful cloud that hangs over a Junior’s life, you know. Final Anatomy. It really is a Final. You’re supposed to know all about the body before you begin practising on it, so Final Anatomy is a Junior exam, not a Senior one like the other finals. The bathrooms are along here. When I was a Junior the long grass at the edge of the cricket field was simply stiff on Sundays with hidden Juniors hugging their Gray. It is strictly forbidden to take books out of College, and on Sundays we are supposed to go all social and go out to tea, or to church, or to the country. But no Junior in the summer term ever did anything on a Sunday except find a quiet spot for herself and Gray. It was quite a business getting Gray out of College. Do you know Gray? About the size of those old family Bibles that rested on the parlour table. There was actually a rumour once that half the girls at Leys were pregnant, but it turned out that it was only the odd silhouette that everyone made with Gray stuffed up the front of their Sunday bests.”
Miss Nash stooped to the taps and sent a roar of water rushing into the bath. “When everyone in College bathes three or four times a day, in the matter of minutes, you have to have a Niagara of a tap,” she explained above the row. “I’m afraid you are going to be very late for breakfast.” And as Miss Pym looked dismayed and oddly small-girlish at the prospect: “Let me bring up something for you on a tray. No, it won’t be any trouble, I’d love to do it. There isn’t any need for a guest to appear at eight o’clock breakfast, anyhow. You’d much better have it in peace in your room.” She paused with her hand on the door. “And do change your mind about staying. It really would give us pleasure. More pleasure than you can imagine.”
She smiled and was gone.
Lucy lay in the warm soft water and thought happily of her breakfast. How pleasant not to have to make conversation among all those chattering voices. How imaginative and kind of that charming girl to carry a tray to her. Perhaps after all it would be nice to spend a day or two among these young —
She nearly leaped from her bath as a bell began its maniacal yelling not a dozen yards from where she lay. That settled it. She sat up and soaped herself. Not a minute later than the 2.41 from Larborough, not one minute later.
As the bell — presumably a five-minute warning before the gong at eight o’clock — died into silence, there was a wild rush in the corridor, the two doors to her left were flung open, and as the water cascaded into the baths a high familiar voice was heard shrieking: “Oh, darling, I’m going to be so late for breakfast, but I’m in a muck sweat, my dear. I know I should have sat down quietly and done the composition of plasma, of which I know ab-solutely noth-ing, my dear, and Final Phys. is on Tuesday. But it is such a lovely morning — Now what have I done with my soap?”
Lucy’s jaw slowly dropped as it was borne in upon her that in a community which began the day at half-past five and ended it at eight in the evening, there were still individuals who had the vitality to work themselves into a muck sweat when they need not.
“Oh, Donnie, darling, I’ve left my soap behind. Do throw me over yours!”
“You’ll have to wait till I’ve soaped myself,” said a placid voice that was in marked contrast to Dakers’ high emphasis.
“Well, my angel, do be quick. I’ve been late twice this week, and Miss Hodge looked distinctly odd the last time. I say, Donnie, you couldn’t by any chance take my ‘adipose’ patient at twelve o’clock clinic, could you?”
“No, I couldn’t.”
“She really isn’t so heavy as she looks, you know. You have only to —”
“I have a patient of my own.”
“Yes, but only the little boy with the ankle. Lucas could take him along with her ‘tortis colli’ girl —”
“No.”
“No, I was afraid you wouldn’t. Oh, dear, I don’t know when I’m going to do that plasma. As for the coats of the stomach, they simply baffle me, my dear. I don’t really believe there are four, anyhow. It’s just a conspiracy. Miss Lux says look at tripe, but I don’t see that tripe proves anything.”
“Soap coming up.”
“Oh, thank you, darling. You’ve saved my life. What a nice smell, my dear. Very expensive.” In the momentary silence of soaping she became aware that the bath on her right was occupied.
“Who is next door, Donnie?”
“Don’t know. Gage, probably.”
“Is that you, Greengage?”
“No,” said Lucy, startled, “it’s Miss Pym.” And hoped it wasn’t as prim as it sounded.
“No, but really, who is it?”
“Miss Pym.”
“It’s a very good imitation, whoever you are.”
“It’s Littlejohn,” suggested the placid voice. “She does imitations.”
Miss Pym fell back on a defeated silence.
There was the hurr-oosh of a body lifted suddenly from the water, the spat of a wet foot placed firmly on the edge of the bath, eight wet finger-tips appeared on the edge of the partition, and a face peered over it. It was a long pale face, like an amiable pony’s, with the straight fair hair above it screwed up into a knob with a hasty hairpin. An oddly endearing face. Even in that crowded moment, Lucy understood suddenly how Dakers had managed to reach her final term at Leys without being knocked on the head by exasperated colleagues.
First horror, then a wild flush together with a dawning amusement, invaded the face above the partition. It disappeared abruptly. A despairing wail rose from beyond.
“Oh, Miss Pym! Oh, dear Miss Pym! I do apologise. I abase myself. It didn’t occur to me even to think it might be you —”
Lucy could not help feeling that she was enjoying her own enormity.
“I hope you’re not offended. Not terribly, I mean. We are so used to people’s skins that — that —”
Lucy understood that she was trying to say that the gaffe was less important in these surroundings than it would have been elsewhere, and since she herself had been decently soaping a big toe at the operative moment, she had no feelings on the subject. She said kindly that it was entirely her own fault for occupying a student’s bathroom, and that Miss Dakers was not to worry about it for a moment.
“You know my name?”
“Yes. You woke me in the dawn this morning yelling for a safety-pin.”
“Oh, catastrophe! Now I shall never be able to look you in the face!”
“I expect Miss Pym is taking the first train back to London,” said the voice in the further bath, in a now-look-what-you’ve-done tone.
“That is O’Donnell next door,” said Dakers. “She’s from Ireland.”
“Ulster,” said O’Donnell, without heat.
“How d’you do, Miss O’Donnell.”
“You must think this is a mad-house, Miss Pym. But don’t judge us by Dakers, please. Some of us are quite grown up. And some of us are even civilised. When you come to tea tomorrow you will see.”
Before Miss Pym could say that she was not coming to tea, a low murmur began to invade the cubicles, rising rapidly into the deep roar of a gong. Into the tumult Dakers’ banshee wail rose like the voice of a sea-gull in a storm. She was going to be so late. And she was so grateful for the soap, which had saved her life. And where was the girdle of her tunic? And if dear Miss Pym would promise to overlook her failings up to date, she would yet show her that she was a sensible female and a civilised adult. And they were all looking forward so much to that tea tomorrow.
With a rush and a bang the students fled, leaving Miss Pym alone with the dying pulse of the gong and the throaty protest of bath water running away.
At 2.41, when the afternoon fast train to London was pulling out of Larborough prompt to the minute, Miss Pym sat under the cedar on the lawn wondering whether she was a fool, and not much caring anyhow. It was very pleasant there in the sunlit garden. It was also very quiet, since Saturday afternoon was, it appeared, match afternoon, and College en masse was down at the cricket field playing Coombe, a rival establishment from the other side of the County. If they had nothing else, these young creatures, they had versatility. It was a far cry from the lining of the stomach to the placing of a cricket field, but they seemingly took it in their stride. Henrietta, coming into her bedroom after breakfast, had said that if she stayed over the week-end she would at least find it a new experience. “They are a very varied and lively crowd, and the work is very interesting.” And Henrietta had certainly been right. There was no moment when some new facet of this odd existence was not being presented to her. She had sat through luncheon at the Staff table, eating unidentifiable dishes that were “balanced” to a dietetic marvel, and making the closer acquaintance of the Staff. Henrietta sat in lonely state at the top of the table and gobbled her food in an abstracted silence. But Miss Lux was talkative. Miss Lux — angular, plain, and clever — was Mistress of Theory, and as befitted a lecturer on theory had not only ideas but opinions. Miss Wragg, on the other hand, the Junior Gymnast — big, bouncing, young, and pink — had apparently no ideas at all and her only opinions were reflections of Madame Lefevre’s. Madame Lefevre, the ballet mistress, spoke seldom, but when she did it was in a voice like dark brown velvet and no one interrupted her. At the bottom of the table, with her mother by her side, sat Fr?ken Gustavsen, the Senior Gymnast, who talked not at all.
It was to Fr?ken Gustavsen that Lucy found her eyes going during that lunch. There was a sly amusement in the handsome Swede’s clear pale eyes that Lucy found irresistible. The heavy Miss Hodge, the clever Miss Lux, the dumb Miss Wragg, the elegant Madame Lefevre — what did they all look like through the eyes of a tall pale enigma from Sweden?
Now, having spent lunch wondering about a Swede, she was waiting the advent of a South American. “Desterro doesn’t play games,” Henrietta had said, “so I’ll send her to keep you company this afternoon.” Lucy had not wanted anyone to keep her company — she was used to her own company and liked it — but the thought of a South American at an English college of physical training teased her. And when Nash, running into her after lunch, had said: “I’m afraid you’re going to be deserted this afternoon, if you don’t care for cricket,” another Senior passing in the crush had said: “It’s all right, Beau, The Nut Tart is going to look after her.” “Oh, good,” Beau had said, apparently so accustomed to the nickname that it had ceased to have either meaning or oddity for her.
But Lucy looked forward to meeting a Nut Tart, and sitting in the sunlit garden digesting the dietetic marvels she pondered the name. “Nut” was Brazil, perhaps. It was also the modern slang for “dippy” or “daft,” she believed. But “tart”? Surely not!
A Junior, running past her on the way to the bicycle shed, flashed her a smile, and she remembered that they had met in the corridor that morning. “Did you get George back safely?” she called after her.
“Yes, thank you,” beamed little Miss Morris, pausing to dance on one toe, “but I think I’m in a different sort of trouble now. You see, I had my arm round George’s waist, sort of steadying him after hanging him up, when Miss Lux came in. I’ll never be able to explain away that, I’m afraid.”
“Life is difficult,” agreed Lucy.
“However, I think I really do know my insertions now,” called little Miss Morris, speeding away over the grass.
Nice children, thought Miss Pym. Nice, clean, healthy children. It was really very pleasant here. That smudge on the horizon was the smoke of Larborough. There would be another smudge like that over London. It was much better to sit here where the air was bright with sun and heavy with roses, and be given friendly smiles by friendly young creatures. She pushed her plump little feet a little further away from her, approved the Georgian bulk of the “old house” that glowed in the sunlight across the lawn, regretted the modern brick wings that made a “Mary Ann” back to it, but supposed that as modern blocks go the Leys ensemble was pleasant enough. Charmingly proportioned lecture-rooms in the “old house,” and neat modern little bedrooms in the wings. An ideal arrangement. And the ugly bulk of the gymnasium decently hidden behind all. Before she went away on Monday she must see the Seniors go through their gym. There would be a double pleasure in that for her. The pleasure of watching experts trained to the last fine hair of perfection, and the ineffable pleasure of knowing that never, never as long as she lived, would she herself have to climb a rib-stall again.
Round the corner of the house, as she gazed, came a figure in a flowered silk dress and a plain, wide-brimmed shady hat. It was a slim, graceful figure; and watching it come Lucy realised that she had unconsciously pictured the South American plump and over-ripe. She also realised where the “tart” came from, and smiled. The outdoor frocks of the austere young students of Leys would not be flowered; neither would they be cut so revealingly; and never, oh never, would their hats be broad-brimmed and shady.
“Good afternoon, Miss Pym. I am Teresa Desterro. I am so sorry that I missed your lecture last night. I had a class in Larborough.” Desterro took off her hat with a leisurely and studied grace, and dropped to the grass by Lucy’s side in one continuous smooth movement. Everything about her was smooth and fluid: her voice, her drawling speech, her body, her movements, her dark hair, her honey-brown eyes.
“A class?”
“A dancing class; for shop girls. So earnest; so precise; so very bad. They will give me a box of chocolates next week because it is the last class of the season, and because they like me, and because it is after all the custom; and I shall feel like a crook. It is false pretences. No one could teach them to dance.”
“I expect they enjoy themselves. Is it usual? I mean, for students to take outside classes?”
“But we all do, of course. That is how we get practice. At schools, and convents, and clubs, and that sort of thing. You do not care for cricket?”
Lucy, rousing herself to this swift change of subject, explained that cricket was only possible to her in the company of a bag of cherries. “How is it that you don’t play?”
“I don’t play any games. To run about after a little ball is supremely ridiculous. I came here for the dancing. It is a very good dancing college.”
But surely, Lucy said, there were ballet schools in London of an infinitely higher standard than anything obtainable at a college of physical training.
“Oh, for that one has to begin young, and to have a métier. Me, I have no métier, only a liking.”
“And will you teach, then, when you go back to — Brazil, is it?”
“Oh, no; I shall get married,” said Miss Desterro simply. “I came to England because I had an unhappy love affair. He was r-r-ravishing, but qu-ite unsuitable. So I came to England to get over it.”
“Is your mother English, perhaps?”
“No, my mother is French. My grandmother is English. I adore the English. Up to here”— she lifted a graceful hand, wrist properly leading, and laid it edge-wise across her neck —“they are full of romance, and from there up, plain horse sense. I went to my grandmother, and I cried all over her best silk chairs, and I said “What shall I do? What shall I do?” About my lover, you understand. And she said: “You can blow your nose and get out of the country.” So I said I would go to Paris and live in a garret and paint pictures of an eye and a seashell sitting on a plate. But she said: “You will not. You will go to England and sweat a bit.” So, as I always listen to my grandmother, and since I like dancing and am very good at it, I came here. To Leys. They looked a little sideways on me at first when I said I wanted just to dance —”
This is what Lucy had been wondering. How did this charming “nut” find a welcome in this earnest English college, this starting-place of careers?
“— but one of the students had broken down in the middle of her training — they often do, and do you wonder? — and that left a vacant place in the scheme, which was not so nice, so they said: ‘Oh, well, let this crazy woman from Brazil have Kenyon’s room and allow her to come to the classes. It will not do any harm and it will keep the books straight.’”
“So you began as a Senior?”
“For dancing, yes. I was already a dancer, you understand. But I took Anatomy with the Juniors. I find bones interesting. And to other lectures I went as I pleased. I have listened to all subjects. All but plumbing. I find plumbing indecent.”
Miss Pym took “plumbing” to be Hygiene. “And have you enjoyed it all?”
“It has been a li-beral education. They are very naive, the English girls. They are like little boys of nine.” Noticing the unbelieving smile on Miss Pym’s face: there was nothing naive about Beau Nash. “Or little girls of eleven. They have ‘raves.’ You know what a ‘rave’ is?” Miss Pym nodded. “They swoon if Madame Lefevre says a kind word to them. I swoon, too, but it is from surprise. They save up their money to buy flowers for Fr?ken, who thinks of nothing but a Naval Officer in Sweden.”
“How do you know that?” asked Lucy, surprised.
“He is on her table. In her room. His photograph, I mean. And she is Continental. She does not have ‘raves.’”
“The Germans do,” Lucy pointed out. “They are famous for it.”
“An ill-balanced people,” said Desterro, dismissing the Teutonic race. “The Swedes are not like that.”
“All the same, I expect she likes the little offerings of flowers.”
“She does not, of course, throw them out of the window. But I notice she likes better the ones who do not bring her offerings.”
“Oh? There are some who do not have ‘raves,’ then?”
“Oh, yes. A few. The Scots, for instance. We have two.” She might have been talking of rabbits. “They are too busy quarrelling to have any spare emotions.”
“Quarrelling? But I thought the Scots stuck together the world over.”
“Not if they belong to different winds.”
“Winds?”
“It is a matter of climate. We see it very much in Brazil. A wind that goes ‘a-a-a-ah’” [she opened her red mouth and expelled a soft insinuating breath] “makes one kind of person. But a wind that goes ‘s-s-s-s-ss’” [she shot the breath viciously out through her teeth] “makes another person altogether. In Brazil it is altitude, in Scotland it is West Coast and East Coast. I observed it in the Easter holidays, and so understood about the Scots. Campbell has a wind that goes ‘a-a-a-ah,’ and so she is lazy, and tells lies, and has much charm that is all of it quite synthetic. Stewart has a wind that goes ‘s-s-s-s-ss,’ so she is honest, and hardworking, and has a formidable conscience.”
Miss Pym laughed. “According to you, the east coast of Scotland must be populated entirely by saints.”
“There is also some personal reason for the quarrel, I understand. Something about abused hospitality.”
“You mean that one went home with the other for holidays and — misbehaved?” Visions of vamped lovers, stolen spoons, and cigarette burns on the furniture, ran through Lucy’s too vivid imagination.
“Oh, no. It happened more than two hundred years ago. In the deep snow, and there was a massacre.” Desterro did full justice to the word “massacre.”
At this Lucy really laughed. To think that the Campbells were still engaged in living down Glencoe! A narrow-minded race, the Celts.
She sat so long considering the Celts that The Nut Tart turned to look up at her. “Have you come to use us as specimens, Miss Pym?”
Lucy explained that she and Miss Hodge were old friends and that her visit was a holiday one. “In any case,” she said, kindly, “I doubt whether as a specimen a Physical Training Student is likely to be psychologically interesting.”
“No? Why?”
“Oh, too normal and too nice. Too much of a type.”
A faint amusement crossed Desterro’s face; the first expression it had shown so far. Unexpectedly, this stung Lucy; as if she too had been found guilty of being naive.
“You don’t agree?”
“I am trying to think of someone — some Senior — who is normal. It is not easy.”
“Oh, come!”
“You know how they live here. How they work. It would be difficult to go through their years of training here and be quite normal in their last term.”
“Do you suggest that Miss Nash is not normal?”
“Oh, Beau. She is a strong-minded creature, and so has suffered less, perhaps. But would you call her friendship for Innes quite normal? Nice, of course,” Desterro added hastily, “quite irreproachable. But normal, no. That David and Jonathan relationship. It is a very happy one, no doubt, but it”— Desterro waved her arm to summon an appropriate word —“it excludes so much. The Disciples are the same, only there are four of them.”
“The Disciples?”
“Mathews, Waymark, Lucus, and Littlejohn. They have come up the College together because of their names. And now, believe me, my dear Miss Pym, they think together. They have the four rooms in the roof”— she tilted her head to the four dormer windows in the roof of the wing —“and if you ask any one of them to lend you a pin she says: ‘We have not got one.’”
“Well, there is Miss Dakers. What would you say was wrong with Miss Dakers?”
“Arrested development,” said Miss Desterro dryly.
“Nonsense!” said Lucy, determined to assert herself. “A happy, simple, uncomplicated human being, enjoying herself and the world. Quite normal.”
The Nut Tart smiled suddenly, and her smile was frank and unstudied. “Very well, Miss Pym, I give you Dakers. But I remind you that it is their last term, this. And so everything is e-norrrmously exaggerated. Everyone is just the least little bit insane. No, it is true, I promise you. If a student is frightened by nature, then she is a thousand times more frightened this term. If she is ambitious, then her ambition becomes a passion. And so on.” She sat up to deliver herself of her summing-up. “It is not a normal life they lead. You cannot expect them to be normal.”
“You cannot expect them to be normal,” repeated Miss Pym to herself, sitting in the same place on Sunday afternoon and looking at the crowd of happy and excessively normal young faces clustered below her on the grass. Her eye ran over them with pleasure. If none of them was distinguished, at least none of them was mean. Nor was there any trace of morbidity, nor even of exhaustion, in their sunburnt alertness. These were the survivors of a gruelling course — that was admitted even by Henrietta — and it seemed to Miss Pym that the rigours might perhaps have been justified if the residue were of such excellence.
She was amused to note that the Disciples, by much living together, had begun to look vaguely alike — as husband and wife often do, however different their features. They all seemed to have the same round face with the same expression of pleased expectancy; it was only later that one noticed differences of build and colouring.
She was also amused to observe that the Thomas who slept was most undeniably Welsh; a small, dark aborigine. And that O’Donnell, who had now materialised from a voice in the bath, was equally unmistakably an Irishwoman; the long lashes, the fine skin, the wide grey eyes. The two Scots — separated by the furthest possible distance that still allowed them to be part of the group — were less obvious. Stewart was the red-haired girl cutting up cake from one of the plates that lay about on the grass. (“It’s from Crowford’s,” she was saying, in a pleasant Edinburgh voice, “so you poor creatures who know nothing but Buzzards will have a treat for a change!”) Campbell, propped against the bole of the cedar, and consuming bread-and-butter with slow absorption, had pink cheeks and brown hair and a vague prettiness.
Apart from Hasselt, who was the girl with the flat, calm, early-Primitive face and who was South African, the rest of the Seniors were, as Queen Elizabeth said, “mere English.”
The only face that approached distinction, as opposed to good looks, was that of Mary Innes, Beau Nash’s Jonathan. This pleased Miss Pym in an odd fashion. It was fitting, she felt, that Beau should have chosen for friend someone who had quality as well as looks. Not that Innes was particularly good-looking. Her eyebrows, low over her eyes, gave her face an intensity, a brooding expression, that robbed her fine bones of the beauty they might have had. Unlike Beau, who was animated and smiled easily, she was quiet and so far Miss Pym had not seen her smile, although they had had what amounted in the milieu to a lengthy conversation. That was last night, when Miss Pym was undressing after having spent the evening in the company of the Staff. There had come a knock on her door, and Beau had said: “I just came to see if you had everything you want. And to introduce you to your next-door neighbour, Mary Innes. Any time you want to be rescued, Innes will see to it.” And Beau had said good-night and gone away, leaving Innes to finish the interview. Lucy had found her attractive and very intelligent, but just a shade disconcerting. She did not bother to smile if she was not amused, and though friendly and at her ease made no effort to be entertaining. In the academic and literary circles that Lucy had recently frequented this would not have been remarkable, but in the gay over-accented college world it had the effect almost of a rebuff. Almost. There was certainly nothing of rebuff in Innes’s interest in her book — the Book — and in herself.
Looking at her now, sitting in the cedar shade, Lucy wondered if it were just that Mary Innes did not find life very amusing. Lucy had long prided herself on her analysis of facial characteristics, and was beginning nowadays to bet rather heavily on them. She had never, for instance, come across eyebrows beginning low over the nose and ending high up at the outer end without finding that their owner had a scheming, conniving mind. And someone — Jan Gordon, was it? — had observed that of the crowd round a park orator it was the long-nosed people who stayed to listen and the short-nosed people who walked away. So now, looking at Mary Innes’s level eyebrows and firm mouth, she wondered whether the concentration of purpose they showed had forbidden any compensating laughter. It was in some way not a contemporary face at all. It was — was what?
An illustration from a history book? A portrait in a gallery?
Not, anyhow, the face of a games mistress at a girls’ school. Definitely not. It was round faces like Mary Innes’s that history was built.
Of all the faces turning to her so constantly and turning away with chatter and badinage, only two were not immediately likeable. One was Campbell’s; too pliant, too soft-mouthed, too ready to be all things to all men. The other belonged to a girl called Rouse; and was freckled, and tight-lipped, and watchful.
Rouse had come late to the tea-party, and her advent had caused an odd momentary silence. Lucy was reminded of the sudden stillness that falls on chattering birds when a hawk hovers. But there was nothing deliberate about the silence; no malice. It was as if they had paused in their talk to note her arrival, but had none of them cared sufficiently to welcome her into their own particular group.
“I’m afraid I’m late,” she had said. And in the momentary quiet Lucy had caught the monosyllabic comment: “Swot!”, and had concluded that Miss Rouse had not been able to drag herself away from her text-books. Nash had introduced her, and she had dropped to the grass with the rest, and the interrupted conversations flowed on. Lucy, always sympathetic to the odd-man-out, had caught herself being sorry for the latecomer; but a further inspection of Miss Rouse’s North-Country features had convinced her that she was wasting good emotion. If Campbell, pink and pretty, was too pliant to be likeable, then Rouse was her complement. Nothing but a bull-dozer, Lucy felt, would make an impression on Miss Rouse.
“Miss Pym, you haven’t had any of my cake,” said Dakers, who, quite unabashed, had appropriated Lucy as an old acquaintance, and was now sitting propped against her chair, her legs straight out in front of her like a doll’s.
“Which is yours?” asked Lucy, eyeing the various tuck-box products, which stood out from the college bread-and-butter and “Sunday” buns like Creed suits at a country fair.
Dakers’ contribution, it seemed, was the chocolate sandwich with the butter icing. Lucy decided that for friendship’s sake (and a little for greed) she would forget her weight this once.
“Do you always bring your own cakes to Sunday tea?”
“Oh, no, this is in your honour.”
Nash, sitting on her other side, laughed. “What you see before you, Miss Pym, is a collection of skeletons out of cupboards. There is no physical training student who is not a Secret Eater.”
“There has been no moment in my whole college career, my dears, when I wasn’t sick with hunger. Only shame makes me stop eating at breakfast, and half an hour afterwards I’m hungry enough to eat the horse in the gym.”
“That is why our only crime is —” Rouse was beginning, when Stewart kicked her so hard in the back that she almost fell forward.
“We have spread our dreams under your feet,” mocked Nash, covering Rouse’s broken sentence. “And a fine rich carpet of carbohydrate they are, to be sure.”
“We also had a solemn conclave as to whether we ought to dress for you,” said Dakers, cutting up chocolate sandwich for the others and unaware that there had been any gaffe in the offing. “But we decided that you didn’t look very particular.” As this raised a laugh, she added hastily, “In the very nicest sense, I mean. We thought you would like us as we are.”
They were wearing all sorts of garments; as the taste of the wearer or the need of the moment dictated. Some were in shorts, some in blue linen games tunics, some in washing-silk dresses of suitably pastel shades. There were no flowered silks; Desterro was taking tea with the nuns of a convent in Larborough.
“Besides,” said Gage, who looked like a Dutch doll and who was the dark head that appeared at a courtyard window at five-thirty yesterday morning and prayed someone to throw something at Thomas and so put a period to the wails of Dakers, “besides, much as we would like to do you honour, Miss Pym, every moment counts with our finals so oppressively near. Even a quick-change artist like a P.T. Senior needs five full minutes to achieve Sunday-bests, and by accepting us in our rags you have contributed”— she paused to count the gathering and do some mental arithmetic —“you have contributed one hour and twenty minutes to the sum of human knowledge.”
“You can subtract my five minutes from that, my dear,” said Dakers, licking a protuberant piece of butter-icing into safety with an expert tongue. “I’ve spent the whole afternoon doing the cortex of the brain, and the only result is a firm conviction that I personally haven’t got a cortex.”
“You must have a cortex,” said Campbell, the literal-minded Scot, in a Glasgow drawl like syrup sliding from a spoon. But no one took any notice of this contribution to the obvious.
“Personally,” said O’Donnell, “I think the vilest part of physiology are the villi. Imagine drawing cross-sections of something that has seven different parts and is less than a twentieth of an inch high!”
“But do you have to know the human structure in such detail?” asked Lucy.
“On Tuesday morning we do,” said the Thomas who slept. “After that we can forget it for the rest of our lives.”
Lucy, remembering the Monday morning visit to the gymnasium which she had promised herself, wondered if physical work ceased during Final Examinations week. Oh, no, they assured her. Not with the Dem. only a fortnight ahead. The Demonstration, she was given to understand, ranked only a short head behind Final Examinations as a hazard.
“All our parents come,” said one of the Disciples, “and —”
“The parents of all of us, she means,” put in a fellow Disciple.
“— and people from rival colleges, and all the —”
“All the civic swells of Larborough,” put in a third. It seemed that when one Disciple burst into speech the others followed automatically.
“And all the County big-wigs,” finished the fourth.
“It’s murder,” said the first, summing it up for them.
“I like the Dem.,” said Rouse. And again that odd silence fell.
Not inimical. Merely detached. Their eyes went to her, and came away again, expressionlessly. No one commented on what she had said. Their indifference left her marooned in the moment.
“I think it’s fun to show people what we can do,” she added, a hint of defence in her tone.
They let that pass too. Never before had Lucy met that negative English silence in its full perfection; in its full cruelty. Her own edges began to curl up in sympathy.
But Rouse was less easily shrivelled. She was eyeing the plates before her, and putting out her hand for something to eat. “Is there any tea left in the pot?” she asked.
Nash bent forward to the big brown pot, and Stewart took up the talk from where the Disciples had left it.
“What really is murder is waiting to see what you pull out of the Post lottery.”
“Post?” said Lucy. “You mean jobs? But why a lottery? You know what you apply for, surely?”
“Very few of us need to apply,” Nash explained, pouring very black tea. “There are usually enough applications from schools to go round. Places that have had Leys gymnasts before just write to Miss Hodge when they have a vacancy and ask her to recommend someone. If it happens to be a very senior or responsible post, she may offer it to some Old Student who wants a change. But normally the vacancies are filled from Leaving Students.”
“And a very fine bargain they get,” said a Disciple.
“No one works so hard as a First-Poster does,” said a second.
“For less money,” supplemented a third.
“Or with a better grace,” said a fourth.
“So you see,” Stewart said, “the most agonising moment of the whole term is when you are summoned to Miss Hodge’s room and told what your fate is going to be.”
“Or when your train is pulling out of Larborough and you haven’t been summoned at all!” suggested Thomas, who evidently had visions of being engulfed, jobless, by her native mountains again.
Nash sat back on her heels and smiled at Lucy. “It is not nearly as grim as it sounds. Quite a few of us are provided for already and so are not in the competition at all. Hasselt, for instance, is going back to South Africa to work there. And the Disciples en masse have chosen medical work.”
“We are going to start a clinic in Manchester,” explained one.
“A very rheumaticky place.”
“Full of deformities.”
“And brass”— supplemented the other three automatically.
Nash smiled benevolently on them. “And I am going back to my old school as Games Coach. And the Nut — and Desterro, of course, doesn’t want a post. So there aren’t so many of us to find places for.”
“I won’t even be qualified if I don’t go back to the liver pretty soon,” Thomas said, her beady brown eyes blinking in the sun. “What a way to spend a summer evening.”
They shifted their positions lazily, as if in protest, and fell to chatter again. But the reminder pricked them, and one by one they began to gather up their belongings and depart, trailing slowly across the sunlit grass like disconsolate children. Until presently Lucy found herself alone with the smell of the roses, and the murmur of insects, and the hot shimmer of the sunlit garden.
For half an hour she sat, in great beatitude, watching the slow shadow of the tree creep out from her feet. Then Desterro came back from Larborough; strolling slowly up the drive with a Rue de la Paix elegance that was odd after Lucy’s hour of tumbled youth at tea. She saw Miss Pym, and changed her direction.
“Well,” she said, “did you have a profitable afternoon?”
“I wasn’t looking for profit,” said Lucy, faintly tart. “It was one of the happiest afternoons I have ever spent.”
The Nut Tart stood contemplating her.
“I think you are a very nice person,” she said irrelevantly, and moved away, leisurely, to the house.
And Lucy suddenly felt very young, and didn’t like the feeling at all. How dared a chit in a flowered frock make her feel inexperienced and foolish!
She rose abruptly and went to find Henrietta and be reminded that she was Lucy Pym, who had written The Book, and lectured to learned societies, and had her name in Who’s Who, and was a recognised authority on the working of the Human Mind.
“What is the college crime?” she asked Henrietta, as they went upstairs after supper. They had paused by the big fan-lighted window on the landing to look down on the little quadrangle, letting the others precede them up to the drawing-room.
“Using the gymnasium as a short cut to the field-path,” Henrietta said promptly.
“No, I mean real crime.”
Henrietta turned to look at her sharply. After a moment she said: “My dear Lucy, when a human being works as hard as these girls do, it has neither the spare interest to devise a crime nor the energy to undertake it. What made you think of that subject?”
“Something someone said at tea this afternoon. About their ‘only crime.’ It was something to do with being perpetually hungry.”
“Oh, that!” Henrietta’s brow cleared. “Food pilfering. Yes, we do now and then have that. In any community of this size there is always someone whose power of resisting temptation is small.”
“Food from the kitchen, you mean?”
“No, food from the students’ own rooms. It is a Junior crime, and usually disappears spontaneously. It is not a sign of vice, you know. Merely of a weak will. A student who would not dream of taking money or a trinket can’t resist a piece of cake. Especially if it is sweet cake. They use up so much energy that their bodies are crying out for sugar; and though there is no limit to what they may eat at table they are for ever hungry.”
“Yes, they do work very hard. What proportion of any one set finishes the course, would you say?”
“Of this lot”— Henrietta nodded down to where a group of Seniors were strolling out across the courtyard to the lawn —“eighty per cent are finishing. That is about average. Those who fall by the wayside do it in their first term, or perhaps their second.”
“But not all, surely. There must be accidents in a life like this.”
“Oh, yes, there are accidents.” Henrietta turned and began to climb the further flight.
“That girl whose place Teresa Desterro took, was it an accident that overtook her?”
“No,” said Henrietta shortly, “she had a breakdown.”
Lucy, climbing the shallow steps in the wake of her friend’s broad beam, recognised the tone. It was the tone in which Henrietta, the head-girl, used to say: “And see that no goloshes are left lying about the cloakroom floor.” It did not permit of further discussion.
Henrietta, it was to be understood, did not like to think of her beloved College as a Moloch. College was a bright gateway to the future for deserving youth; and if one or two found the gateway a hazard rather than an opening, then it was unfortunate but no reflection on the builders of the gateway.
“Like a convent,” Nash had said yesterday morning. “No time to think of an outside world.” That was true. She had watched a day’s routine go by. She had also seen the Students’ two daily papers lying unopened in the common-room last night as they went in to supper. But a nunnery, if it was a narrow world, was also a placid one. Uncompetitive. Assured. There was nothing of the nunnery about this over-anxious, wildly strenuous life. Only the self-absorption was the same; the narrowness.
And yet was it so narrow, she wondered, considering the gathering in the drawing-room? If this were any other kind of college that gathering would have been homogeneous. If it were a college of science the gathering would consist of scientists; if it were a college of divinity, of theologians. But in this long charming room, with its good “pieces” and its chintzes, with its tall windows pushed up so that the warm evening flowed in through them full of grass and roses, in this one room many worlds met. Madame Lefevre, reclining in thin elegance on a hard Empire sofa and smoking a yellow cigarette in a green holder, represented a world theatrical; a world of grease-paint, art, and artifice. Miss Lux, sitting upright in a hard chair, represented the academical world; the world of universities, text-books, and discussion. Young Miss Wragg, busy pouring out coffee, was the world of sport; a physical, competitive, unthinking world. And the evening’s guest Dr Enid Knight, one of the “visiting” Staff, stood for the medical world. The foreign world was not present: Sigrid Gustavsen had retired with her mother, who spoke no English, to her own room where they could chatter together in Swedish.
All these worlds had gone to make the finished article that was a Leaving Student; it was at least not the training that was narrow.
“And what do you think of our students, Miss Pym, now that you have had a whole afternoon with them?” Madame Lefevre asked, turning the battery of her enormous dark eyes on Lucy.
A damn silly question, thought Lucy; and wondered how a good respectable middle-class English couple had produced anything so like the original serpent as Madame Lefevre. “I think,” she said, glad to be able to be honest, “that there is not one of them who is not an advertisement for Leys.” And she saw Henrietta’s heavy face light up. College was Henrietta’s world. She lived and moved and had her being in the affairs of Leys; it was her father, mother, lover, and child.
“They are a nice lot,” agreed Doreen Wragg happily, not yet far removed from her own student days and regarding her pupils with cameraderie.
“They are as the beasts that perish,” said Miss Lux incisively. “They think that Botticelli is a variety of spaghetti.” She inspected with deep gloom the coffee that Miss Wragg handed to her. “If it comes to that, they don’t know what spaghetti is. It’s not long since Dakers stood up in the middle of a Dietetics lecture and accused me of destroying her illusions.”
“It surprises me to know that anything about Miss Dakers is destructible,” observed Madame Lefevre, in her brown velvet drawl.
“What illusion had you destroyed?” the young doctor asked from the window-seat.
“I had just informed them that spaghetti and its relations were made from a paste of flour. That shattered for ever, apparently, Dakers’ picture of Italy.”
“How had she pictured it?”
“Fields of waving macaroni, so she said.”
Henrietta turned from putting two lumps of sugar in a very small cup of coffee (How nice, thought Lucy wistfully, to have a figure like a sack of flour and not to mind!) and said: “At least they are free from crime.”
“Crime?” they said, puzzled.
“Miss Pym has just been enquiring about the incidence of crime at Leys. That is what it is to be a psychologist.”
Before Lucy could protest against this version of her simple search for knowledge, Madame Lefevre said: “Well, let us oblige her. Let us turn out the rag-bag of our shameful past. What crime have we had?”
“Farthing was had up last Christmas term for riding her bike without lights,” volunteered Miss Wragg.
“Crime,” said Madame Lefevre. “Crime. Not petty misdemeanours.”
“If you mean a plain wrong-un, there was that dreadful creature who was man-crazy and used to spend Saturday evenings hanging round the barrack gate in Larborough.”
“Yes,” said Miss Lux, remembering. “What became of her when we tossed her out, does anyone know?”
“She is doing the catering at a Seamen’s Refuge in Plymouth,” Henrietta said, and opened her eyes when they laughed. “I don’t know what is funny about that. The only real crime we have had in ten years, as you very well know, was the watches affair. And even that,” she added, jealous for her beloved institution, “was a fixation rather than plain theft. She took nothing but watches, and she made no use of them. Kept them all in a drawer of her bureau, quite openly. Nine, there were. A fixation, of course.”
“By precedent, I suppose she is now with the Goldsmiths and Silversmiths,” said Madame Lefevre.
“I don’t know,” said Henrietta, seriously. “I think her people kept her at home. They were quite well-to-do.”
“Well, Miss Pym, the incidence appears to be point-something per cent.” Madame Lefevre waved a thin brown hand. “We are an unsensational crowd.”
“Too normal by half,” Miss Wragg volunteered. “A little spot of scandal would be nice now and again. A nice change from hand-stands and upward-circlings.”
“I should like to see some hand-stands and upward-circlings,” Lucy said. “Would it be all right if I came and watched the Seniors tomorrow morning?”
But of course she must see the Seniors, Henrietta said. They were busy with their Demonstration programme, so it would be a private Demonstration all for herself. “They are one of the best sets we ever had,” she said.
“Can I have first go of the gym. when the Seniors are doing their Final Phys. on Tuesday?” Miss Wragg asked; and they began to discuss time-tables.
Miss Pym moved over to the window-seat and joined Dr Knight.
“Are you responsible for the cross-section of something called the villi?” she asked.
“Oh, no; physiology is an ordinary college subject: Catherine Lux takes that.”
“Then what do you lecture on?”
“Oh, different things at different stages. Public Health. The so-called ‘social’ diseases. The even more so-called Facts of Life. Your subject.”
“Psychology?”
“Yes. Public Health is my job, but psychology is my specialty. I liked your book so much. So common sensical. I admired that. It is so easy to be high-falutin about an abstract subject.”
Lucy flushed a little. There is no praise so gratifying as that of a colleague.
“And of course I am the College medical advisor,” Dr Knight went on, looking amused. “A sinecure if ever there was one. They are a disgustingly healthy crowd.”
‘But —” Lucy began. It is the outsider, Desterro (she was thinking), who insists on their abnormality. If it is true, then surely this trained observer, also from the outside, must be aware of it.
“They have accidents, of course,” the doctor said, misunderstanding Lucy’s ‘but.’ “Their life is a long series of minor accidents — bruises, and sprains, and dislocated fingers, and what not — but it is very rarely that anything serious happens. Bentley has been the only instance in my time — the girl whose room you have. She broke a leg, and won’t be back till next term.”
“But — it is a strenuous training, a gruelling life; do they never break down under it?”
“Yes. That’s not unknown. The last term is particularly trying. A concentration of horrors from the student’s point of view. Crit. classes, and —”
“Crit. classes?”
“Yes. They each have to take a gym. and a dancing class in the presence of the united Staff and their own set, and are judged according to the show they make. Nerve-shattering. These are all over, the crit. classes; but there are still the Finals, and the Demonstration, and being given jobs, and the actual parting from student life, and what not. Yes, it is a strain for them, poor dears. But they are amazingly resilient. No one who wasn’t would have survived so long. Let me get you some more coffee. I’m going to have some.”
She took Lucy’s cup and went away to the table; and Lucy leaned back in the folds of the curtain and looked at the garden. The sun had set, and the outlines were growing blurred; there was the first hint of dew in the soft air that blew up against her face. Somewhere on the other side of the house (in the students’ common-room?) a piano was being played and a girl was singing. It was a charming voice: effortless and pure, without professional tricks and without fashionable dealing in quarter-tones. The song, moreover, was a ballad; old-fashioned and sentimental, but devoid of self-pity and posing. A frank young voice and a frank old song. It shocked Lucy to realise how long it was since she had heard any voice raised in song that was not a product of valves and batteries. In London at this moment the exhausted air was loud with radios; but here, in this cool, scented garden, a girl was singing for the love of it.
I have been too long in London, she thought; I must have a change. Find a hotel on the South Coast, perhaps. Or go abroad. One forgets that the world is young.
“Who is singing?” she asked, as her cup was handed to her again.
“Stewart, I think,” Dr Knight said, not interested. “Miss Pym, you can save my life if you like to.”
Lucy said that to save a doctor’s life would give her immense satisfaction.
“I want to go to a medical conference in London,” Dr Knight said in a conspiratorial undertone. “It is on Thursday, but that is the day of my psychology lecture. Miss Hodge thinks I am for ever going to conferences, so I can’t possibly beg off again. But if you were to take that lecture for me, everything would be grand.”
“But I am going back to London myself tomorrow after lunch.”
“No!” said Dr Knight, much dashed. “Do you have to?”
“Oddly enough, I was just thinking how much I should hate going back.”
“Then don’t go. Stay on for a day or two, and save my life. Do, Miss Pym.”
“And what would Henrietta think of the substitution?”
“That, of course, is sheer affectation, and you ought to be ashamed of yourself. I’m not a best-seller, I’m not a celebrity, I’m not the author of the latest text-book on the subject —”
Lucy made a small gesture acknowledging her fault, but her eyes were on the garden. Why should she go back to London yet? What was there to take her back? Nothing and nobody. For the first time that fine, independent, cushioned, celebrated life of hers looked just a little bleak. A little narrow and inhuman. Could it be? Was there, perhaps, a lack of warmth in that existence she had been so content with? Not a lack of human contact, certainly. She had her fill of human contact. But it was a very all-of-a-piece contact, now that she thought of it. Except for Mrs Montmorency from one of the suburbs of Manchester, who was her daily help, and her Aunt Celia down in Walberswick, who sometimes had her for weekends, and the tradespeople, she never talked to anyone who wasn’t somehow connected with the publishing or the academic worlds. And though all the ladies and gentlemen belonging to these two worlds were, of course, both intelligent and amusing, there was no denying that their interests were limited. You couldn’t, for instance, talk to one and the same person about Social Security, hill-billy songs, and what won the 3.30. They each had their “subject.” And their subject, she found to her cost, was only too likely to be royalties. Lucy herself had only the vaguest idea about royalties; especially her own, and could never keep her end up in this sort of conversation.
Besides, none of them was young.
At least, not young as these children here were young. Young in years a few of her acquaintances might be, but they were already bowed down with the weight of the world’s wrongs and their own importance. It was nice to meet a morning-of-the-world youngness for a change.
And it was nice to be liked.
There was no good in trying to diddle herself about why she wanted to stay a little longer; why she was seriously prepared to forgo the delights of civilisation that had seemed so desirable — so imperatively desirable — only yesterday morning. It was nice to be liked.
In the last few years she had been ignored, envied, admired, kow-towed to, and cultivated; but warm, personal liking was something she had not had since the Lower Fourth said goodbye to her, with a home-made pen-wiper and a speech by Gladys Someone-or-other, shortly after her legacy. To stay in this atmosphere of youth, of liking, of warmth, she was willing to overlook for a space the bells, the beans, and the bathrooms.
“Knight,” said young Miss Wragg, raising her voice from the conversation behind them, “did the Disciples ask you about giving them an introduction to some doctor or other in Manchester?”
“Oh, yes, they asked me. In concert. I said yes, of course. As a matter of fact, I was glad to; I think they will be a great success.”
“Individually, the Disciples are null and void,” Miss Lux said. “But collectively they have a quadruple ruthlessness that will be very useful in Lancashire. It is the only occasion I have ever come across when nothing multiplied by four became something like six-and-a-half. If nobody wants the Sunday Times I shall take it to bed with me.”
No one apparently wanted it. It had been lying unopened in the drawing-room after lunch when Lucy had been the first to look at it, and as far as she had noticed no one except Miss Lux had picked it up since.
“This set of Seniors are planting themselves out very nicely. Almost without our help,” Madame Lefevre said. “There will be less heart-burning than usual.” She did not sound very sorry about the heart-burning; just sardonic.
“It continually surprises me,” said Miss Hodge, not at all sardonic, “how each year the students slip into their appropriate places in the world’s work. The openings come up as the students are ready to fill them. Almost like — like two pieces of the same machine. So surprising and so satisfactory. I don’t think we have had a misfit in all my years at Leys. I had a letter from the Cordwainers School, by the way; in Edinburgh, you know. Mulcaster is getting married and they want someone in her place. You will remember Mulcaster, Marie?” She turned to Madame Lefevre who, except for Henrietta, was the Oldest Inhabitant — and who, incidentally, had been christened plain Mary.
“Of course I remember her. A lump without leaven,” said Madame, who judged everyone by their capacity to execute rondes de jambes.
“A nice girl,” Henrietta said placidly. “I think Cordwainers will be a very good place for Sheena Stewart.”
“Have you told her about it?” Miss Wragg asked.
“No, oh, no; I always like to sleep on things.”
“Hatch them out, you mean,” Madame said. “You must have heard about Cordwainers before lunch-time yesterday because that was the last post, and it is only now we hear about it.”
“It was not very important,” Henrietta said defensively; and then added with what was nearly a simper: “But I have heard rumours of a ‘plum,’ a really wonderful chance for someone.”
“Tell us,” they said.
But Henrietta said no; that no official notice had come, that no official notice or application might come at all, and until it did it was better not to talk about it. But she still looked pleased and mysterious.
“Well, I’m going to bed,” Miss Lux said, picking up the Times and turning her back on Henrietta’s elephantine coyness. “You are not going before lunch tomorrow, are you, Miss Pym?”
“Well,” said Lucy, pitchforked of a sudden into decision, “I wondered if I might stay on for a day or two? You did ask me to, you know,” she reminded Henrietta. “It has been so nice — So interesting to watch a world so different — And it is so lovely here, so —” Oh, dear, why must she sound so idiotic. Would she never learn to behave like Lucy Pym the Celebrity?
But her stammerings were swamped in the loud wave of their approval. Lucy was touched to note a gleam of pleasure even on the face of Miss Lux.
“Stay on till Thursday and take my Senior Psychology lecture, and let me go to a conference in London,” Dr Knight suggested, as if it had just occurred to her.
“Oh, I don’t know whether —” began Lucy, all artistic doubt, and looked at Henrietta.
“Dr Knight is always running away to conferences,” Miss Hodge said, disapproving but without heat. “But of course we would be delighted and honoured, Lucy, if you agreed to give the students a second lecture.”
“I should like to. It would be nice to feel myself a temporary member of the Staff, instead of a mere guest. I should like to very much.” She turned in rising to wink at Dr Knight, who was squeezing her arm in a rapture of gratitude. “And now I think I must get back to the student wing.”
She said goodnight and went out with Miss Lux.
Lux eyed her sideways as they moved together to the back of the house, but Lucy, catching the glance, thought that there was a friendly gleam in that ice-grey eye.
“Do you really like this menagerie?” Lux asked. “Or are you just looking for things to stick on cardboard with pins?”
That was what The Nut Tart had asked yesterday afternoon. Have you come looking for specimens? Well, she would make the same answer and see what Lux’s reaction would be.
“Oh, I’m staying because I like it. A college of Physical Training wouldn’t be a very good place to look for the abnormal, anyhow, would it.” She made it a statement, not a question; and waited.
“Why not?” asked Miss Lux. “Sweating oneself into a coma may stultify the reason but it doesn’t destroy the emotions.”
“Doesn’t it?” Lucy said, surprised. “If I were dog-tired I’m certain I wouldn’t have any feelings about anything but going to sleep quickly.”
“Going to sleep dead tired is all right; normal, and pleasant, and safe. It is when one wakens up dead tired that the trouble begins.”
“What trouble?”
“The hypothetical trouble of this discussion,” Lux said, smoothly.
“And is wakening up dead tired a common thing, would you say?”
“Well, I’m not their medical adviser so I can’t run round with a stethoscope and fond inquiries, but I should say that five Seniors out of six in their last term are so tired that each morning is a mild nightmare. It is when one is as tired as that that one’s emotional state ceases to be normal. A tiny obstacle becomes an Everest in the path; a careless comment becomes a grievance to be nursed; a small disappointment is all of a sudden a suicidal affair.”
There swam up in Lucy’s mind a vision of that circle of faces at tea-time. Brown, laughing, happy faces; careless and for the most part notably confident. Where in that relaxed and healthy crowd had there been the least hint of strain, of bad temper? Nowhere. They had moaned over their hard lot certainly, but it was a humourous and detached complaint.
Tired they might be; in fact tired they certainly were — it would be a miracle if they were not; but tired to the point of abnormality, no. Lucy could not believe it.
“This is my room,” Lux said, and paused. “Have you something to read? I don’t suppose you brought anything if you meant to go back yesterday. Can I lend you something?”
She opened the door, exhibiting a neat bed-sitting-room of which the sole decorations were one engraving, one photograph, and an entire wainscotting of books. From next-door came the babble of Swedish chat.
“Poor Fr?ken,” Lux said unexpectedly, as Lucy cocked an ear.
“She has been so homesick. It must be wonderful to be able to talk family gossip in one’s own tongue again.” And then, seeing Lucy’s eyes on the photograph: “My young sister.”
“She is very lovely,” Lucy said; and hoped instantly that there had been no hint of surprise in her tone.
“Yes.” Lux was drawing the curtains. “I hate moths. Do you? She was born when I was in my teens, and I have practically brought her up. She is in her third year at Medical school.” She came and stood for a moment looking at the photograph with Lucy. “Well, what can I give you to read? Anything from Runyon to Proust.”
Lucy took The Young Visiters. It was a long time since she had read it last, but she found that she was smiling at the very sight of it. A sort of reflex action; quite involuntary. And when she looked up she found that Lux was smiling too.
“Well, that is one thing I shall never do,” Lucy said regretfully.
“What?”
“Write a book that makes all the world smile.”
“Not all the world,” Lux said, her smile broadening. “I had a cousin who stopped half-way through. When I asked her why, she said: ‘So unlikely.’”
So Lucy went smiling away towards bed, glad that she was not going to catch that train tomorrow, and thinking about the plain Miss Lux who loved a beautiful sister and liked absurdity. As she turned into the long corridor of the E-wing she saw Beau Nash standing at the angle of the stairs at the far end, in the act of lifting a hand-bell to shoulder height, and in another second the wild yelling of it filled the wing. She stood where she was, her hands over her ears, while Beau laughed at her and swung the evil thing with a will. Lovely, she was, standing there with that instrument of torture in her hands.
“Is ringing the ‘bedroom’ bell the Head Girl’s duty?” Lucy asked, as Beau at last ceased to swing.
“No, the Seniors take week-about; it just happens to be my week. Being well down the list alphabetically I don’t have more than one week each term.” She looked at Miss Pym and lowered her voice in mock-confidence. “I pretend to be glad about that — everyone thinks it a frightful bore to have to watch the clock — but I love making a row.”
Yes, thought Lucy; no nerves and a body brimming with health; of course she would love the row. And then, almost automatically, wondered if it was not the row that she liked but the feeling of power in her hands. But no, she dismissed that thought; Nash was the one that life had been easy for; the one who had, all her life, had only to ask, or take, in order to have. She had no need of vicarious satisfactions; her life was one long satisfaction. She liked the wild clamour of the bell; that was all.
“Anyhow,” Nash said, falling into step with her, “it isn’t the ‘bedroom bell.’ It’s ‘Lights Out.’”
“I had no idea it was so late. Does that apply to me?”
“Of course not. Olympus does as it likes.”
“Even a boarded-out Olympus?”
“Here is your hovel,” Nash said, switching on the light and standing aside to let Lucy enter the bright little cell, so gay and antiseptic in the unshaded brilliance. After the subtleties of the summer evening and the grace of the Georgian drawing-room, it was like an illustration from one of the glossier American magazines. “I am glad I happened to see you because I have a confession to make. I won’t be bringing your breakfast tomorrow.”
“Oh, that is all right,” Lucy was beginning, “I ought to get up in any case —”
“No, I don’t mean that. Of course not. It is just that young Morris asked if she might do it — she is one of the Juniors — and —”
“The abductor of George?”
“Oh, yes, I forgot you were there. Yes, that one. And she seemed to think that her life would not be complete unless she had brought up your breakfast on your last morning, so I said that as long as she didn’t ask for your autograph or otherwise make a nuisance of herself, she could. I hope you don’t mind. She is a nice child, and it would really give her pleasure.”
Lucy, who didn’t mind if her breakfast was brought by a wall-eyed and homicidal negro so long as she could eat the leathery toast in peace and quiet, said she was grateful to young Morris, and anyhow it wasn’t going to be her last morning. She was going to stay on and take a lecture on Thursday.
“You are! Oh, that’s wonderful. I’m so glad. Everyone will be glad. You are so good for us.”
“A medicine?” Lucy wrinkled her nose in protest.
“No, a tonic.”
“Somebody’s Syrup,” Lucy said; but she was pleased.
So pleased that even pushing little hairpins into their appointed places did not bore her with the customary frenzy of boredom. She creamed her face and considered it, unadorned and greasy in the bright hard light, with unaccustomed tolerance. There was no doubt that being a little on the plump side kept the lines away; if you had to have a face like a scone it was at least comforting that it was a smooth scone. And, now she came to think of it, one was given the looks that were appropriate; if she had Garbo’s nose she would have to dress up to it, and if she had Miss Lux’s cheek-bones she would have to live up to them. Lucy had never been able to live up to anything. Not even The Book.
Remembering in time that there was no bedside light — students were discouraged from working in bed — she switched the light off and crossed to pull aside the curtains of the window looking out on the courtyard. She stood there by the wide-open window, smelling the cool scented night. A great stillness had settled on Leys. The chatter, the bells, the laughter, the wild protests, the drumming of feet, the rush of bath water, the coming and going, had crystallised into this great silent bulk, a deeper darkness in the quiet dark.
“Miss Pym.”
The whisper came from one of the windows opposite.
Could they see her, then? No, of course not. Someone had heard the small noise of her curtains being drawn back.
“Miss Pym, we are so glad you are staying.”
So much for the college grape-vine! Not fifteen minutes since Nash said goodnight, but already the news was in the opposite wing.
Before she could answer, a chorus of whispers came from the unseen windows round the little quadrangle. Yes, Miss Pym. We are glad. Glad, Miss Pym. Yes. Yes. Glad, Miss Pym.
“Goodnight, everyone,” Lucy said.
Goodnight, they said. Goodnight. So glad. Goodnight.
She wound her watch and pulled up a chair to put it on — the chair, rather: there was only one — so that there should be no burrowing under pillows for it in the morning; and thought how odd it was that only yesterday morning she could not wait to get out of this place.
And perhaps it was because no self-respecting psychologist would have anything to do with a thing so outmoded as Premonition that no small helpful imp from the Unexplainable was there to whisper in her drowsy ear: “Go away from here. Go away while the going is good. Go away. Away from here.”
The chairs scraped on the parquet floor as the students rose from their kneeling position, and turned to wait while the Staff filed out of morning prayers. Lucy, having become “temporary Staff,” had made the gesture of attending this 8.45 ceremony as an off-set to the un-staff-like indulgence of breakfast in bed; and she had spent the last few minutes considering the collective legs of College as spread before her in kneeling rows and marvelling at their individuality. Dress was uniform at this hour of the morning, and heads were bowed in dutiful hands, but a pair of legs were as easy to identify as a face, she found. There they were: stubborn legs, frivolous legs, neat legs, dull legs, doubtful legs — already she needed only a turn of calf and piece of ankle to say: Dakers, or Innes, or Rouse, or Beau, as the case might be. Those elegant ones at the end of the first row were The Nut Tart. Did the nuns not mind that their protégé should listen to Anglican prayers, then? And those rather stick-like ones were Campbell, and those —
“Amen,” said Henrietta, with unction.
“Amen,” murmured the students of Leys, and rose to their feet with the scraping of chairs. And Lucy filed out with the Staff.
“Come in and wait while I arrange this morning’s post,” Henrietta said, “and then I’ll go over to the gymnasium with you,” and she led the way into her own sitting-room, where a meek little part-time secretary was waiting for instructions. Lucy sat down on the window-seat with the Telegraph, and listened with only half an ear to the professional conversation that followed. Mrs So-and-so had written to ask the date of the Demonstration, Mrs Someone-else wanted to know whether there was a hotel near-by where she and her husband could stay when they came to see their daughter perform, the receipt for the butcher must be looked out and presented to his disbelieving eye, the special lecturer for the last Friday of term had cried off, three Prospective Parents wanted prospectuses.
“All quite straightforward, I think,” Henrietta said.
“Yes,” agreed the meek little secretary. “I’ll get on with them at once. There was a letter from Arlinghurst. It doesn’t seem to be here.”
“No,” Henrietta said. “That can be answered later in the week.”
Arlinghurst, Lucy’s mind said. Arlinghurst. The school for girls, of course. A sort of female Eton. “I was at Arlinghurst,” they said, and that settled it. She took her attention from the Telegraph leader for a moment and thought that if the “plum” that Henrietta had been waiting for was Arlinghurst then indeed it was going to create more than the usual stir among the interested Seniors. She was on the point of asking whether Arlinghurst was in fact the “plum,” but was stopped partly by the presence of the meek little secretary but more immediately by the expression on Henrietta’s face. Henrietta — there was no denying it — Henrietta had a wary, a sort of guilty, look. The look of a person who is Up To Something.
Oh, well, thought Lucy, if she is merely hugging her lovely secret to herself, let her. I shan’t spoil it for her. She followed her friend down the long corridor that ran the length of the wing, and out to the covered way that continued the corridor to the gymnasium. The gymnasium lay parallel to the house and to the right-angled wing, so that from the air the buildings made a complete letter E; the three horizontal strokes being “old house,” the right-angled wing, and the gymnasium; the vertical stroke being the connecting wing and the covered way.
The door to which the covered way led was open, and from inside the gymnasium came the sounds of uncoordinated activity; voices, laughter, thudding feet. Henrietta paused by the open door and pointed through to the door on the other side, now closed. “That is the college crime,” she said. “Crossing the gymnasium to the field-path instead of using the appointed covered way round the building. That is why we have had to lock it up. One wouldn’t think that a few extra steps would mean much to students who took so many in the day, but there was no argument or threat which would stop them using the short cut through. So we removed the temptation altogether.”
She turned from the open door and led the way to the other end of the building, where a small porch held the stairway to the gallery. As they climbed the stairs Henrietta paused to point to a piece of mechanism on a low trolley, which filled the well of the staircase. “That,” she said, “is the most famous College character of all. That is our vacuum cleaner; known from here to New Zealand as The Abhorrence.”
“Why abhorrent?” Lucy asked.
“It used to be Nature’s Abhorrence, but it became shortened to The Abhorrence. You remember the tag one is taught at school: Nature abhors a vacuum.” She looked a moment longer at the monstrous object, caressing it with her eyes. “It cost us a deplorable sum, The Abhorrence, but it was money well spent. However well the gymnasium was cleaned in the old days, there was always a residue of dust, which was beaten into the air by the students’ feet and sucked up, of course, by the students’ respiratory passages; and the result was catarrh. Not universal, of course, but there never was a time, summer or winter, when some student or other was not having a bout of catarrh. It was Dr Knight’s predecessor who suggested that it might be invisible dust that was responsible, and she was right. Since we squandered that immense sum on The Abhorrence there has been no more catarrh. And of course,” she added happily, “it was a saving in the end since it is Giddy the gardener’s job to vacuum the gymnasium now, and we don’t have to pay cleaners.”
Lucy stopped as they reached the top of the stairs, and looked over the railings into the well again. “I don’t think I like it. It is very well named, it seems to me. There is something obscene about it.”
“It is unbelievably powerful. And very easy to work. It takes Giddy only about twenty minutes every morning, and when he has finished there is, as he says himself, ‘nothing left but the fixtures.’ He is very proud of The Abhorrence. He grooms it as if it were an animal.” Henrietta opened the door at the top of the stairs and they entered the gallery.
A gymnasium as a building does not permit of architecture. It is purely functional. It is an oblong box, lit by windows which are either in the roof or high up the walls. The gymnasium at Leys had windows where the walls met the roof, which is not a beautiful arrangement; but through their far-away panes at no hour of any day could direct sunlight blind a student’s eyes, and so cause an accident. The great oblong box of a building was filled with the reflected radiance of a summer morning; golden and soft. Across the floor were scattered the Senior students, limbering up, practising, criticising, and in a few happy instances playing the fool.
“Do they mind an audience?” Lucy asked as they sat down.
“They are very used to one. Hardly a day goes by without a visitor of some kind.”
“What is under the gallery? What is it they watch all the time?”
“Themselves,” said Henrietta succinctly. “The whole wall below the gallery is one long mirror.”
Lucy admired the impersonal interest on the faces of the students as they watched their reflected performances. To be able to view one’s physical entity with such critical detachment was surely no bad thing.
“It is one of the griefs of my life,” the dutch-doll Gage was saying, looking at her up-stretched arms, “that my arms have that kink at the elbow.”
“If you listened to that Friday-friend and used your will-power, you’d have them straight by now,” Stewart observed, not pausing in her own contortions.
“Probably bent back the other way,” Beau Nash mocked, from a doubled-up position at the rib-stalls.
Lucy deduced that a Friday-friend was the “interest” lecturer who appeared on Friday evenings; and wondered idly whether that particular one had called his subject “faith” or “mind-over-matter”; was it Lourdes or was it Coué?
Hasselt, the South African with the flat Primitive face, was clutching Innes’s ankles in the air while Innes stood on her hands. “Reeeee-ly on thee arrrrms, Mees Innes,” Hasselt was saying, in a would-be Swedish accent that was evidently a quotation from Fr?ken; and Innes laughed and collapsed. Looking at them, flushed and smiling (this, she thought, is the first time I have seen Mary Innes smile) Lucy felt again how out-of-place these two faces were. Hasselt’s belonged above a Madonna-blue robe, with a tiny landscape of hills and castles and roads somewhere at her left ear. And Innes’s to a portrait on some ancestral staircase — seventeenth century, perhaps? No, too gay, too adaptable, too arched-of-eye-brow. Sixteenth century, rather. Withdrawn, uncompromising, unforgiving; the-stake-or-nothing.
Away by herself in a far corner was Rouse, painstakingly stretching her ham-strings by walking her palms up to her feet. She couldn’t really need to stretch her ham-strings, not after years of continued stretching, so presumably this was merely a North-Country example of “makking siccar.” There was no fooling about for Miss Rouse; life was real, life was earnest; life was long ham-strings and a good post in the offing. Lucy wished she liked Miss Rouse better, and looked round for Dakers as a sort of antidote. But there was no tow-head and cheerful pony-face among the collection.
And then, suddenly, the desultory noise and the chatter faded.
No one had come in by the open door at the far end, but there was beyond doubt a Presence in the place. Lucy could feel it coming up through the gallery floor at her feet. She remembered that there was a door at the foot of the stairway; where The Abhorrence stood. Someone had come in down there.
There was no audible word of command, but the students, who a moment before had been scattered over the floor like beads from a broken string, were now, as if by magic, standing in a still, waiting line.
Fr?ken Gustavsen walked out from under the gallery, and surveyed them.
“Unt wvere ees Mees Dakers?” she asked in a cool small voice. But even as she said it a flustered Dakers ran in through the open door, and stopped short as she saw the picture that waited her.
“Oh, catastrophe!” she wailed, and darted to the gap that someone had accommodatingly left for her. “Oh, I am sorry, Fr?ken. Abyssmally sorry. It was just that —”
“Ees eet proposed to be laate at the Demonstraation?” asked Fr?ken, with almost scientific interest.
“Oh, no, of course not, Fr?ken. It was just that —”
“We know. We know. Something was lost, or broke. Eef eet wass possible to come to thees plaace naakid, Mees Dakers would still find something to lose or break. Attention!”
They came to attention, and were motionless except for their quick breathing.
“Eef Mees Thomas were to pull een her stow-mach the line would be improved, I theenk.”
Thomas obliged instantly.
“Unt Mees Appleyard shows too much cheen.”
The plump little girl with the red cheeks pulled her chin further into her neck. “So!”
They right-turned into file, covered, and marched in single file down the gymnasium; their feet falling so lightly on the hard wood floor that they were almost inaudible.
“Quieter, quieter. Lightly, lightly!”
Was it possible?
But it was possible, apparently. Still more quietly fell those long-trained feet, until it was unbelievable that a collection of solid young females weighing individually anything up to ten stones were marching, marching, round the hall.
Lucy slid an eye round to Henrietta; and almost instantly switched it away again. The fond pride on Henrietta’s large pale countenance was startling, almost painful, to see; and for a little Lucy forgot the students below and thought about Henrietta. Henrietta of the sack-line figure and the conscientious soul. Henrietta who had had elderly parents, no sisters, and the instincts of a mother hen. No one had ever lain awake at night over Henrietta; or walked back and fore in the darkness outside her house; or even, perhaps, sent her flowers. (Which reminded her to wonder where Alan was nowadays; there had been several weeks, one spring, when she had thought quite seriously of accepting Alan, in spite of his Adam’s apple. It would be nice, she had thought, to be cherished for a change. What had stopped her was the realisation that the cherishing would have to be mutual. That she would inevitably have to mend socks, for instance. She didn’t like feet. Even Alan’s.) Henrietta had been apparently doomed to a dull if worthy life. But it had not turned out like that. If the expression on her unguarded face had been any criterion, Henrietta had built for herself a life that was full, rich, and satisfying. She had said, in her first re-union gossip with Lucy, that when she took over Leys a decade ago it had been a small and not very popular college, and that she and Leys had flourished together; that she was, in fact, a partner now as well as Principal, and a partner in a flourishing concern. But until she had surprised that look on Henrietta’s face, Lucy had not realised how much her old friend identified herself with her work. That College was her world, she knew; Henrietta talked of little else. But absorption in a business was one thing, and the emotion on Henrietta’s face was quite another.
She was roused from her speculations by the sound of apparatus being dragged out. The students had stopped arching themselves into bows at the rib-stalls, puffed out like figureheads on a ship, and were now bringing out the booms. Lucy’s shins ached with remembered pain; how often had she barked her bones against that unyielding piece of wood; certainly one of the compensations of middle-age was not having to do uncomfortable things.
The wooden upright was now standing in the middle of the floor, and the two booms were fitted into its grooved sides and hoisted as high as hands could reach. The iron pins with wooden handles shot home through their appointed holes in the upright to hold the booms up, and there was the instrument of torture ready. Not that it was shin-barking time yet; that would come later. Just now it was only “travelling.” Two by two, one at each end, the students proceeded along the boom, hanging by their hands, monkey-wise. First sideways, then backwards, and lastly with a rotary movement, like a travelling top. All this was done with monotonous perfection until it was Rouse’s turn to rotate. Rouse had bent her knees for the spring to the boom, and then dropped her hands and looked at her instructor with a kind of panic on her tight, freckled face.
“Oh, Fr?ken,” she said, “I’m not going to be able to do it.”
“Nonsense, Mees Rouse,” Fr?ken said, encouraging but not surprised (this was apparently a repetition of some previous scene), “you have done eet perfectly since you were a Junior. You do it now of course.”
In a strained silence Rouse sprang to the boom and began her progress along it. For half its length she performed with professional expertness, and then for no apparent reason her hand missed the boom as she turned, and her body swung away, suspended by her other hand. She made an effort to recover herself, pulling up with her sustaining hand, but the rhythm had broken and she dropped to her feet.
“I knew it,” she said. “I’m going to be like Kenyon, Fr?ken. Just like Kenyon.”
“Mees Rouse; you are not going to be like anyone. It is knack, that. And for a moment you haf lost the knack, that is all. You will try again.”
Rouse sprang once more to the boom above her head.
“No!” said the Swede with emphasis; and Rouse came back to the ground looking inquiring.
“Not saying: Oh, dear, I cannot do eet. But saying: This I do often, with ease, and now also. So!”
Twice more Rouse tried, and failed.
“Ve-ry well, Mees Rouse. That will do. One half of the boom will be put up last thing at night, as it is now, and you will come een the morning early and practise, until the knack has come back.”
“Poor Rouse,” Lucy said, as the booms were being reversed for balance exercises, flat side up instead of rounded.
“Yes, such a pity,” Henrietta said. “One of our most brilliant students.”
“Brilliant?” said Lucy, surprised. It was not an adjective she would have applied to Rouse.
“In physical work, anyhow. Most brilliant. She finds written work a difficulty, but makes up for it by hard work. A model student, and a great credit to Leys. Such a pity about this little nervous development. Over-anxiety, of course. It happens sometimes. Usually over something quite simple, strangely enough.”
“What did she mean by ‘being like Kenyon’? That is the girl whose place Teresa Desterro took, isn’t it?”
“Yes. How clever of you to remember. That was a case in point. Kenyon suddenly decided that she could not balance. She had always had abnormally good balance, and there was no reason why she should lose it. But she began by being wobbly, took to jumping off in the middle of an exercise, and ended by being unable to get up from sitting position on the boom. She sat there and clung to the boom like a frightened child. Sat there and cried.”
“Some inner insufficiency.”
“Of course. It was not the balance that she was frightened of. But we had to send her home. We are hoping that she will come back to finish her training when she has had a long rest. She was very happy here.”
Was she? thought Lucy. So happy that she broke down. What had reduced the girl who was good at balance to a crying and shivering piece of misery, clutching at the boom?
She watched with a new interest the progress of the balancing that had been poor Kenyon’s Waterloo. Two by two the students somersaulted upwards on to the high boom, turned to a sitting position sideways, and then slowly stood up on the narrow ledge. Slowly one leg lifted, the muscles rippling in the light, the arms performed their appointed evolution. The faces were calm, intent. The bodies obedient, sure, and accustomed. When the exercise was finished they sank until they were sitting on their heels, upright and easy, put forward blind hands to seize the boom, descended to sideways sitting once more, and from there to a forward somersault and so the ground again.
No one fluffed or failed. The perfection was unblemished. Even Fr?ken found no word to say. Lucy found that she had been holding her breath. She sat back and relaxed and breathed deeply.
“That was lovely. At school the balance was much lower, wasn’t it, and so it was not exciting.”
Henrietta looked pleased. “Sometimes I come in just to see the balance and nothing else. So many people like the more spectacular items. The vaulting and so on. But I find the quiet control of the balance very satisfying.”
The vaulting, when it came, was spectacular enough. The obstacles were, to Lucy’s eyes, horrific; and she looked with uncomprehending wonder at the delighted faces of the students. They liked this. They liked launching themselves into nothingness, flying through the air to problematical landings, twisting and somersaulting. The restraint that had characterised their attitude up to now had vanished; there was verve in their every movement, a sort of laughter; living was good and this was a physical expression of their joy in living. Amazed, she watched the Rouse who had stumbled and failed over the simple boom exercise, performing hair-raising feats of perfection that must require the maximum of courage, control, and “knack.” (Henrietta had been right, her physical performance was brilliant. She was also, no doubt, a brilliant games player; her timing was excellent. But still that “brilliant” stuck in Lucy’s throat. “Brilliant” meant someone like Beau; an all-round fineness; body, mind, and spirit.)
“Mees Dakers! Take the left hand off at wons. Is eet mountaineering you are?”
“I didn’t mean to leave it so long, Fr?ken. Really I didn’t.”
“That is understood. It is the not meaning to that ees rrreprehensible. Come again, after Mees Mathews.”
Dakers came again, and this time managed to make her rebellious hand release its grip at the appropriate moment.
“Ha!” she said, delighted with her own success.
“Ha indeed,” agreed Fr?ken, a smile breaking. “Co-ordination. All is co-ordination.”
“They like Fr?ken, don’t they,” Lucy said to Henrietta, as the students tidied away the implements of their trade.
“They like all the Staff,” Henrietta said, with a faint return of her Head-Girl tone. “It is not advisable to keep a mistress who is unpopular, however good she may be. On the other hand it is desirable that they should be just a little in awe of their preceptors.” She smiled in her senior-clergy-making-a-joke manner; Henrietta did not make jokes easily. “In their different ways, Fr?ken, Miss Lux, and Madame Lefevre all inspire a healthy awe.”
“Madame Lefevre? If I were a student, I don’t think it would be awe that would knock my knees together, but sheer terror.”
“Oh, Marie is quite human when you know her. She likes being one of the College legends.”
Marie and The Abhorrence, thought Lucy; two College legends. Each with identical qualities; terrible and fascinating.
The students were standing in file, breathing deeply as they raised their arms and lowered them. Their fifty minutes of concentrated activity had come to an end, and there they were: flushed, triumphant, fulfilled.
Henrietta rose to go, and as she turned to follow Lucy found that Fr?ken’s mother had been sitting behind them in the gallery. She was a plump little woman with her hair in a bun at the back, and reminded Lucy of Mrs. Noah, as portrayed by the makers of toy Arks. Lucy bowed and smiled that extra-wide-for-foreigners smile that one uses to bridge the gap of silence, and then, remembering that although this little woman spoke no English she might speak German, she tried a phrase, and the little woman’s face lit up.
“To speak with you, Fr?ulein, is such pleasure that I will even speak German to do it,” she said. “My daughter tells me that you are very distinguished.”
Lucy said that she had had a success, which was not the same thing as being distinguished unfortunately; and expressed her admiration for the work she had just witnessed. Henrietta who had taken Classics instead of Modern Languages at school, washed her hands of this exchange of civilities, and preceded them down the stairs. As Lucy and Fru Gustavsen came out into the sunlight the students were emerging from the door at the other end, running or dawdling across the covered way to the house. Last of the group came Rouse, and Lucy could not help suspecting that her emergence was timed to coincide with the passing of Henrietta. There was no need for her to linger a yard or two behind the others like that; she must see out of the tail of her eye that Henrietta was bearing down on her. In similar circumstances Lucy would have bolted, but Rouse was lingering. She liked Miss Rouse even less than usual.
Henrietta overtook the girl and paused to speak to her; and as Lucy and her companion passed them Lucy saw the expression on the tight freckled face turned up to receive the Principal’s words of wisdom, and remembered what they had called that at school. “Being smarmy.” And laying it on with a trowel, too, she thought with vulgar satisfaction.
“And I’ve always liked freckles, too,” she said regretfully.
“Bitte?”
But this was not a subject that could be done justice to in German. The Significance of Freckles. She could see it: a thick tome full of portmanteau words and portentousness. No, it would need French to do it justice. Some distilled essence of amiable cynicism. Some pretty little blasting phrase.
“Is this your first visit to England?” she asked; and instead of entering the house with the others they strolled together through the garden towards the front of the house.
Yes, this was Fru Gustavsen’s first visit to England, and it amazed her that a people who created gardens like this should also create the buildings in them. “Not this, of course,” she said, “this old house is very pleasant. It is of a period that was good, yes? But what one sees from train and taxi; after Sweden it is horrible. Please do not think that I am Russian about things. It is —”
“Russian?”
“Yes. Naive, and ignorant, and sure that no one can do anything as well as my own country can do it. It is just that I am used to modern houses that are good to look at.”
Lucy said that she might as well get over the subject of our cooking while she was at it.
“Ach, no,” said the little woman surprisingly, “it is not so, that. My daughter has told me. Here in College it is according to regime”— Lucy thought that “according to regime” was tact of the most delicate —“and so is not typical. Nor in the hotels is it typical, my daughter says. But she has stayed in private houses in holiday time, and the dishes of the country, she says, are delicious. Not everything she liked. Not everyone likes our raw herring, after all. But the joint roasted in the oven, and the apple tart with cream, and the cold ham very pink and tender, all that is most admirable. Most admirable.”
So, walking through the summer garden Lucy found herself expatiating on herrings fried in oatmeal, and parkins, and Devonshire splits, and hot-pot, and collops, and other regional delicacies. She concealed the existence of the pork pie, which she privately considered a barbarism.
As they turned the corner of the house towards the front door, they passed the windows of a lecture-room where the Seniors were already engaged in listening to Miss Lux. The windows were pushed up from the bottom as far as they would go, so that the room was visible in all its details, and Lucy cast an idle glance at the assembled profiles presented to her.
She had looked away before she realised that these were not the faces she had seen only ten minutes ago. She looked back again, startled. Gone was the excitement, the flush of exercise, the satisfaction of achievement. Gone for the moment was even the youth. The faces were tired and spiritless.
Not all of them, of course. Hasselt still had her air of calm well-being. And Beau Nash’s face had still its bright indestructible good looks. But the majority looked sunken; indescribably weary. Mary Innes, seated nearest the window, had a marked line from nostrils to chin; a line that had no business there for thirty years yet.
A little saddened and uncomfortable, as one is at the unexpected discovery of an unhappiness in the middle of delight, Lucy turned her head away, and her last glimpse as she walked past was the face of Miss Rouse. And the expression on the face of Miss Rouse surprised her. It reminded her of Walberswick.
Now why Walberswick?
The wary freckled countenance of Miss Rouse had nothing in common with that formidable grande dame who was Lucy’s aunt.
Certainly not.
Then why — but stop! It wasn’t her aunt; it was her aunt’s cat. The expression on that North-Country face in the lecture-room was the expression on the face of Philadelphia when she had had cream instead of milk in her saucer. And there was only one word for that expression. The word smug.
Lucy felt, not unreasonably, that someone who had just failed to perform a routine exercise had no right to be looking smug. And the last faint lingering inclination to be sorry for Miss Rouse died in her.
“Miss Pym,” said The Nut Tart, materialising at Lucy’s elbow, “let us run away together.”
It was Wednesday morning, and College was sunk in the thick silence of Final Examinations. Lucy was leaning over a five-barred gate behind the gymnasium, staring at a field of buttercups. It was here at the end of the Leys garden that the country began; the real country, free of the last tentacles of Larborough, unraped and unlittered. The field sloped to a stream, beyond which was the cricket field; and beyond that into the far distance stretched the unbroken pattern of hedge and tree and pasture; yellow, and white, and green; asleep in the morning sunshine.
Lucy took her eyes with difficulty from the shimmering yellow of the buttercups that had been mesmerising her, and wondered how many flowered silk frocks the Brazilian possessed. Here was yet another one, shaming the English subtleties with its brilliance.
“Where do you propose that we run to?” she asked.
“Let’s go to the village.”
“Is there a village?”
“There is always a village in England; it is that kind of country. But more especially there is Bidlington. You can see the weather thing of the church steeple just over those trees there.”
“It looks a long way,” said Lucy, who was no great walker, and was greatly content where she was; it was a long time since she had had a field of buttercups to look at and all time to do it in. “Is it much of a place?”
“Oh yes. It is a two-pub village,” Desterro said, as one quoting a calibre. “Besides, it has everything a village in England should have. Queen Elizabeth slept there, and Charles the Second hid there; and Crusaders are buried in the church — there is one just like the manager of our ranch in Brazil — and all the cottages are obtainable on postcards at the shop; and it appears in books, the village does —”
“Guide books, you mean?”
“No, no. It has an author who specialised in it, you understand. I read one of his books when I came first to Leys. Rain Over The Sky it was called. All breasts and incest. And it has the Bidlington Martyrs — that is six men who threw stones at the police station last century some time and got put in jail. Imagine a country that remembers a thing like that! In my country they use knives — when they can’t afford revolvers — and we smother the corpses with flowers, and cry a lot, and forget all about it next week.”
“Well —”
“We can have some coffee at The Teapot.”
“A little Hibernian, surely?”
But that was too much for even an intelligent stranger to these shores. “It is real coffee, I may tell you. It both smells and tastes. Oh, come on, Miss Pym. It is a small fifteen minutes away, and it is not yet ten o’clock. And there is nothing to do in this place until we are summoned to eat beans at one o’clock.”
“Are you not taking any of the examinations?” Lucy asked, passing meekly through the gate that was held open for her.
“Anatomy I shall take, I think. Just, as you say, for the hell of it. I have taken all the lectures, so it will be fun to find out how much I know. It is worth knowing anatomy. It is a great labour, of course; it is a subject in which imagination is not appreciated, but it is worth learning.”
“I suppose so. One wouldn’t feel a fool in an emergency.”
“Emergency?” said Desterro, whose mind had apparently not been running along these lines. “Oh, yes, I see. But what I meant is that it is a subject that does not get out of date. Now your subject, if you will forgive me, Miss Pym, is continually getting out of date, no? To listen to it is charming, but to work at it would be very foolish. An idea today may be nonsense tomorrow, but a clavicle is a clavicle for all time. You see?”
Lucy saw, and envied such economy of effort.
“So tomorrow, when the Juniors take their Final Anatomy, I take it too. It is a respect-worthy thing; my grandmother would approve of it. But today they are busy about conundrums, and so me, I walk to Bidlington with the charming Miss Pym and we have coffee.”
“Conundrums?”
The Nut Tart fished a folded paper from the minute pocket of her frock and read from it: “If the ball is over the touch line but has not reached the ground and a player standing inside hits or catches the ball and brings it into the court again, what decision would you give?”
In a silence more eloquent than speech she folded up the cyclostyled sheet and put it away again.
“How did you get a copy of their paper if they are still busy on the subject of games?”
“Miss Wragg gave me one. She said it might amuse me. It does.”
Down between the yellow field and the may-white hedge the path led them to the stream. They paused by the small bridge to stare at the shadowed water under the willows.
“Over there,” Desterro said, pointing at the level ground across the stream, “is the games field. In winter it is deep in mud, and they have bars across their shoes to keep them from slipping in it.” Lucy thought that if she were saying: “They wear rings through their noses to add to their attraction” the tone would be identical. “Now we walk down-stream to the next little bridge and get on to the road there. It is not a road; just a lane.” She moved in silence down the shaded path, a bright dragon-fly of a creature, graceful and alien; and Lucy was surprised to find that she was capable of so unbroken a quiet.
As they came up on to the road at last she said: “Have you any money, Miss Pym?”
“No,” said Lucy, stopping in dismay.
“Neither have I. But it is all right. Miss Nevill will finance us.”
“Who is Miss Nevill?”
“The lady who runs the tea-house.”
“That is rather unusual, isn’t it?”
“Not with me. I am always forgetting my money. But Miss Nevill is charming. Do not feel bad about it, dear Miss Pym, I am in good standing in the village, you will see.”
The village was all the Desterro had claimed for it; and so was Miss Nevill. So indeed, was The Teapot. It was one of those tea-shops so much despised by the bread-and-cheese-and-beer school, and so gladly welcomed by a generation of tea-drinkers who remember the fly-blown rooms behind village bakers’ shops, the primitive buns with currants like dead insects, the cracked and ill-washed cups, and the black evil tea.
It had all the properties stigmatised by the literary frequenters of village inns: the Indian-tree-pattern china, the dark oak tables, the linen curtains in a Jacobean design, the herbaceous bouquets in unglazed brown jugs; yes, even the arts and crafts in the window. But to Lucy, who in the Alan period had had her share of undusted “snugs,” it was quite frankly charming. There was a rich scent of spiced cakes straight from the oven; there was, as well as the long window on the street, a further window that gave on a garden bright with colour; there was peace, and coolness, and welcome.
Miss Nevill, a large lady in a chintz apron, received Desterro as an old and valued acquaintance, and asked if she were “playing hookey, as you say on your side of the Atlantic.” The Nut Tart ignored this identification with the back streets of Brooklyn. “This is Miss Pym who writes books about psychology and is our guest at Leys,” she said, politely introducing Lucy. “I have told her that here one can drink real coffee, and be in general civilised. We have no money at all, either of us, but we will have a great deal to eat and pay you back later.”
This appeared to Miss Nevill to be quite a normal proposition, and she went away to the kitchen to get the coffee with neither surprise nor demur. The place was empty at this hour of the morning, and Lucy wandered round inspecting the old prints and the new crafts — she was pleased to observe that Miss Nevill drew the line at Brummagem brass door-knockers even if there were raffia mats — and then sat down with Desterro at the table looking on to the village street. Before their coffee arrived, they were joined by a middle-aged couple, husband and wife, who drove up in a car as if they were searching for the place. The car was the kind that a provincial doctor might use; low in petrol consumption and in its third or fourth year of wear. But the woman who came round from the further seat with a laughing remark to her husband was not a typical doctor’s wife. She was grey, and slim, with long legs and narrow feet in good shoes. Lucy watched her with pleasure. It was not often nowadays that one saw good bones; smartness had taken the place of breeding.
“In my country,” said Desterro, looking with a considering eye at the woman and with a contemptuous eye on the car, “that woman would have a chauffeur and a footman.”
It was not often, moreover, that one saw a middle-aged husband and wife so pleased with each other, Lucy thought, as she watched them come in. They had a holiday air. They came in and looked about them expectantly, questioningly.
“Yes, this is it,” the woman said. “That is the window on the garden that she talks about, and there is the print of Old London Bridge.”
They moved about looking at things, quietly, unselfconsciously, and then took the table at the other window. Lucy was relieved to see that the man was the mate she would have chosen for such a woman; a little saturnine, perhaps, more self-absorbed than the woman; but quite admirable. He reminded her of someone, but she could not think of whom; someone whom she admired. The eyebrows, it was. Dark level brush-marks low over the eyes. His suit was very old, she noticed; well-pressed and kept, but with that much-cleaned air that overtakes a garment in its old age. The woman’s suit, a tweed, was frankly shabby, and her stockings were darned — very neatly darned — at the heels. Her hands, too, looked as if they were accustomed to household tasks, and her fine grey hair was washed at home and unwaved. What had she got to look so happy about, this woman who struggled with straitened means? Was it just being on holiday with a husband she loved? Was it that that gave her grey luminous eyes their almost childlike happiness?
Miss Nevill came in with the coffee and a large plate of spiced cakes shining with newness and crisp at the edges. Lucy decided to forget her weight just this once and enjoy herself. This was a decision she made with deplorable frequency.
As she poured the coffee she heard the man say: “Good morning. We have come all the way from the West Country to taste your griddle cakes. Do you think you could make us some, or are you too busy at this hour of the morning?”
“If you are too busy it doesn’t matter,” said the woman with the hard-worked hands. “We shall have some of the cakes that smell so good.”
But Miss Nevill would not be a minute in preparing the griddle cakes. She had no batter standing, she said, so the griddle cakes would not be as wonderful as when the batter was allowed to stand; but she was not often asked for them in summer time.
“No, I expect not. But our daughter at Leys has talked so often of them, and this may be our only chance of tasting them.” The woman smiled, half it seemed at the thought of her daughter, half at their own childish desire.
So they were College parents.
Whose? Lucy wondered, watching them over the rim of her coffee cup.
Beau’s, perhaps. Oh, no; Beau was rich, of course. Then whose?
She wouldn’t mind giving them to Dakers, but there were objections. That tow-head could not be sired by that dark grave man; nor could that adult and intelligent woman have given birth to the through-other piece of nonsense that was Dakers.
And then, quite suddenly, she knew whose eyebrows those were.
Mary Innes’s.
They were Mary Innes’s parents. And in some odd way they explained Mary Innes. Her gravity; her air of belonging to a century other than this one; her not finding life very amusing. To have standards to live up to, but to have little money to live up to them with, was not a happy combination for a girl burdened with the need to make a success of her training.
Into the silence that had succeeded Miss Nevill’s departure, Lucy heard her own voice saying: “Forgive me, but is your name Innes?”
They turned to her, puzzled for a moment; then the woman smiled. “Yes,” she said. “Have we met somewhere?”
“No,” said poor Lucy, growing a little pink as she always did when her impulsiveness had led her into an unexpected situation. “But I recognised your husband’s eyebrows.”
“My eyebrows,” said Mr Innes.
But his wife, quicker-witted, laughed. “Of course,” she said. “Mary! Are you from Leys, then? Do you know Mary?” Her face lit and her voice sang as she said it. Do you know Mary? Was it because she was going to see her daughter that she was happy today?
Lucy explained who she was, and introduced Desterro, who was pleased to find that this charming couple knew all about her. “There is very little we don’t know about Leys,” Mrs Innes said, “even if we have never seen the place.”
“Not seen it? Won’t you come over and have your coffee with us, by the way?”
“It was too far for us to inspect it before Mary went there. So we decided that we would wait until her training was finished and then come to the Demonstration.” Lucy deduced that if fares had not been a problem, Mary Innes’s mother would not have had to wait these years before seeing Leys; she would have come if only so that she could picture her daughter in her setting.
“But you are going there now, surely?”
“No. Oddly enough, we are not. We are on our way to Larborough, where my husband — he’s a doctor — has to attend a meeting. We could go to Leys, of course, but it is the week of the Final Examinations, and it would only distract Mary to have her parents descending suddenly on her for no reason. It is a little difficult to pass by when we are so near, but we have waited so long that we can wait another ten days or so. What we couldn’t resist was turning off the main West road as far as Bidlington. We didn’t expect to run into any College people at this hour of the morning, especially in Examination week, and we did want to see the place that Mary had talked so much about.”
“We knew that we shouldn’t have time on Demonstration Day,” Dr Innes said. “There will be so much to see then. A surprisingly varied training, isn’t it?”
Lucy agreed, and described her first impression of the staff-room with its varying worlds.
“Yes. We were a little puzzled when Mary chose that for her career — she had never shown any great interest in games, and I had thoughts that she might take a medical training — but she said she wanted a career with a great many facets; and she seems to have found it!”
Lucy remembered the concentration of purpose in those level brows; she had been right in her face-reading; if Mary Innes had an ambition it would not lightly be given up. Really, eyebrows were the most helpful things. If psychology ever went out of fashion she would write a book about face-reading. Under another name, of course. Face-reading was not well seen among the intelligentsia.
“She is very beautiful, your daughter,” said Desterro unexpectedly. She polished off a large mouthful of spice cake, and then, feeling the surprise in their silence, looked up at them. “Is it not a proper thing in England to compliment parents on their daughter’s looks?”
“Oh, yes,” Mrs Innes said hastily, “it is not that, it is just that we had not thought of Mary as beautiful. She is nice to look at, of course; at least we think so, but then parents are apt to be fatuous about an only daughter. She —”
“When I came first to this place,” Desterro said, reaching out for another cake from the plate (how did she keep that figure!), “it was raining, and all the dirty leaves were hanging down from the trees like dead bats and dripping on everyone, and everyone was rushing round College and saying: ‘Oh darling, how are you? Did you have nice hols? Darling, you won’t believe it but I left my new hockey stick on Crewe platform!’ And then I saw a girl who was not running about and not talking, and who looked a little like my great-grandmother’s grandmother who is in the dining-room at the house of my grandmother’s great-nephew, so I said: ‘It is not after all a barbarism. If it were as it seems to be that girl would not be here. I shall stay.’ Is there more coffee, Miss Pym, please? She is not only beautiful, your daughter, she is the only beautiful person at Leys.”
“What about Beau Nash?” asked Lucy loyally.
“In England at Christmas time —very little milk, Miss Pym, please — the magazines go all gay and give away bright pretty pictures that one can frame and hang above the kitchen mantel-piece to make glad the hearts of the cook and her friends. Very shiny, they are, with —”
“Now that,” said Mrs Innes, “is sheer libel! Beau is lovely, quite lovely, and you know it. I forgot that you would know Beau, too,” she turned to Lucy, “that you would know them all, in fact. Beau is the only one we know because she came to us for the holidays once; at Easter time when the West is kinder than the rest of England; and Mary went to them once for some weeks in the summer. We admired Beau so much.” She looked to her husband for confirmation; he had been too withdrawn.
Dr Innes roused himself — he had the wrung-out look of the overworked G.P. when he sank into repose — and the saturnine face took on a boyish and faintly malicious, if tender, amusement. “It was very odd to see our competent and self-reliant Mary being looked after,” he said.
Mrs Innes evidently felt that this was not the contribution she had been looking for, but decided to make the best of it. “Perhaps,” she said, as if thinking of it for the first time, “we have always taken Mary’s self-reliance so much for granted that she finds it pleasant to be looked after.” And to Miss Pym: “It is because they are complementary, I think, that they are such great friends. I am glad about it because we like Beau so much, and because Mary has never made intimate friends easily.”
“It is a very strenuous training, isn’t it?” Dr Innes said. “I sometimes look at my daughter’s notebooks and wonder why they bother with stuff that even a doctor forgets as soon as he leaves medical school.”
“The cross-section of the villi,” remembered Lucy.
“Yes; that sort of thing. You seem to have picked up a remarkable amount of physical lore in four days.”
The crumpets came, and even without the ritual standing of the batter they were worth coming even from the West Country for, supposing that had been true. It was a happy party. Indeed, Lucy felt that the whole room was soaked in happiness; that happiness bathed it like a reflexion from the sunlight outside. Even the doctor’s tired face looked content and relaxed. As for Mrs Innes, Lucy had rarely seen such happiness on the face of a woman; merely being in this room that her daughter had used so often was, it seemed, a sort of communion with her, and in a few days’ time she would see her in the flesh and share her achievement.
If I had gone back to London, Lucy thought, I would have had no share in this. What would I be doing? Eleven o’clock. Going for a walk in the Park, and deciding how to get out of being guest of honour at some literary dinner. Instead I have this. And all because Dr Knight wanted to go to a medical conference tomorrow. No, because once long ago Henrietta stood up for me at school. It was odd to think that this sun-lit movement in an English June began to take shape thirty years ago in a dark crowded school cloakroom filled with little girls putting on their goloshes. What were first causes, anyhow?
“This has been very pleasant,” said Mrs Innes, as they stood once more in the village street. “And it is nice to think that we shall meet again so soon. You will still be at Leys when the Demonstration comes off, won’t you?”
“I hope so,” Lucy said, and wondered if she could cadge a bed from Henrietta for so long.
“And you have both promised, solemnly and on your word of honour, not to tell anyone that you saw us today,” Dr Innes said.
“We have,” they said, waiting to see their new friends get into their car.
“Do you think I can turn the car in one swoop without hitting the Post Office?” Dr Innes said, consideringly.
“I should hate to make any more Bidlington martyrs,” his wife said. “A tiresome breed. On the other hand, what is this life without some risk?”
So Dr Innes encouraged his engine and swung into this risky evolution. The hub of his off front wheel left a faint smudge on the Post Office’s virgin white-wash.
“Gervase Innes, his mark,” said Mrs Innes, and waved her hand to them. “Till Demonstration Day, and pray for fine weather for it! Au revoir!”
They watched the car grow small up the village street, and turned towards the field path and Leys.
“Nice people,” Desterro said.
“Charming. Odd to think that we should never have met them if you had not had a craving for good coffee this morning.”
“That is the kind of English, let me tell you in confidence, Miss Pym, that make every other nation on earth sick with envy. So quiet, so well-bred, so good to look at. They are poor, too, did you notice? Her blouse is quite washed-out. It used to be blue, the blouse; you could see when she leaned forward and her collar lifted a little. It is wrong that they should be so poor, people like that.”
“It must have cost her a lot not to see her daughter when she was so near,” Lucy said reflectively.
“Ah, but she has character, that woman. She was right not to come. None of the Seniors has one little particle of interest to spare this week. Take away even one little particle, and woops! the whole thing comes crashing down.” She plucked an ox-eyed daisy from the bank by the bridge and gave the first giggle Lucy had ever heard from her. “I wonder how my colleagues are getting on with their one-leg-over-the-line puzzles.”
Lucy was wondering how she herself would appear in Mary Innes’s Sunday letter home. “It will be amusing,” Mrs Innes had said, “to get back home and read all about you in Mary’s Sunday letter. Something to do with relativity. Like coming back the previous night.”
“It was strange that Mary Innes should have reminded you of someone in a portrait,” she said to Desterro. “That is how she seemed to me, too.”
“Ah yes, my great-grandmother’s grandmother.” Desterro dropped the daisy on to the surface of the water and watched the stream bear it down under the bridge and away out of sight. “I did not say it to the nice Inneses, but my great-grandmother’s grandmother was a little unpopular with her generation.”
“Oh? Shy, perhaps. What we call nowadays an inferiority complex.”
“I would not know about that. Her husband died too conveniently. It is always sad for a woman when her husband dies too conveniently.”
“You mean that she murdered him!” Lucy said, standing stock-still in the summer landscape, appalled.
“Oh, no. There was no scandal.” Desterro sounded reproving. “It was just that her husband died too conveniently. He drank too much, and was a great gambler, and not very attractive. And there was a loose tread at the top of the stairs. A long flight of stairs. And he stepped on it one day when he was drunk. That was all.”
“And did she marry again?” Lucy asked, having absorbed this information.
“Oh, no. She was not in love with anyone else. She had her son to bring up, and the estates were safe for him now that there was no one to gamble them away. She was a very good estate manager. That is where my grandmother got her talent from. When my grandmother came out from England to marry my grandfather she had never been further from her own county than Charles Street, West One; and in six months she was running the estate.” Desterro sighed with admiration. “They are wonderful, the English.”
Miss Pym was invigilating at the Senior Pathology Final, so as to give Miss Lux more time for the correction and marking of previous papers, when Henrietta’s meek little secretary tiptoed in and laid the day’s letters reverently on the desk in front of her. Miss Pym had been frowning over a copy of the examination paper, and thinking how badly words like arthritis gonorrhoica and suppurative teno-synovitis went with the clean air of a summer morning after breakfast. Emphysema was not so bad; it might be the gardener’s name for a flower. A sort of columbine. And kyphosis she could picture as something in the dahlia line. Myelitis would be a small creeping plant, very blue, with a tendency to turn pink if not watched. And tabes dorsalis was obviously an exotic affair of the tiger lily persuasion, expensive and very faintly obscene.
Chorea. Sclerosis. Pes Varus.
Dear goodness. Did those young things know all that? Differentiate the treatment of something-or-other according to whether it is (a) congenital (b) traumatic (c) hysterical. Well, well. How had she ever erred so far as to feel patronising about these young creatures?
She looked down from her dais with affection on them; all writing away for dear life. The faces were sober but not on the whole anxious. Only Rouse looked worried, and Lucy decided that her face looked better worried than smug, and withheld her sympathy. Dakers was ploughing steadily over the paper with her tongue protruding and an automatic sigh as she came to the end of each line and began a new one. Beau was confident and detached as if she were writing invitations; doubt was something that had never entered her life; neither her present standing nor her future life was in jeopardy. Stewart’s face under the bright red hair was pale, but a faint smile played round her mouth; Stewart’s future, too, was assured; she was going to the Cordwainers School, going home to Scotland bringing her sheaves with her, and Lucy was going to the party she was giving in her room on Saturday night to celebrate. (“We don’t ask Staff to individual parties, but since you are not quite Staff you could rank as just a friend.”) The Four Disciples, spread across the front row, cast each other communal and encouraging glances now and then; this was their own particular subject and obviously what they did not know about it was not worth mentioning; Manchester was going to get its money’s worth. Innes, by the window, lifted her head every now and then to look out at the garden, as if seeking refreshment; that it was not inspiration she sought was apparent from her unhurried progress through the questions; she turned to the garden for some spiritual comfort; it was as if she said: “Ah yes, you are still there, Beauty; there is a world outside this lecture-room.” Innes was beginning to look as if College might be too much with her. That tired line from nostril to mouth was still there.
Lucy picked up the paper-knife from Miss Lux’s neat desk, and considered her post. Three bills, which she need not disturb the holy hush by opening. A receipt. An Annual Report. A large, square, deep-blue, and very stiff and expensive envelope with MILLICENT CRAYE embossed in scarlet across the flap (really there was no end to the self-advertising instinct in actresses) which would be five lines of thanks with a broad nib and out-size capitals for her contribution to the Benevolent Fund. That left only Mrs Montmorency. So into Mrs Montmorency she inserted the paper-knife.
Maddam (wrote Mrs Montmorency),
I as done as you sed an sent the urgent by passel post. Registered. Fred put it into Wigmore Street on is way to work receit enclosed I as packed the blue and the blouses also underclose as per instruxions your pink nitie not having come back from the laundry I as put in the bedge instead hopping this will be all rite.
Maddam, please dont think that I presoom but this is a good thing. It is no life for a woman writin books and not havin no young company please dont think I presoom but I as your welfare at heart you ben one of the nicest ladies I ever worked for Fred says the same. A nice lady like that he says when look at the things thats around not write it isnt please dont think I presoom
yrs respectfully
Mrs Montmorency.
P.S. Wire brush in toe of swede shoe
Lucy spent the next fifteen minutes being touched by Mrs Montmorency’s concern for her, being furious with the laundry, and wondering why she paid education rates. It wasn’t public schools for everyone that was needed but a great many elementary school classes of not more than a dozen, where the future Mrs Montmorencys could be adequately taken care of in the matter of the Three Rs. Old McLean, their jobbing gardener at home, had left school when he was twelve, but he could write as good a letter as any University acquaintance of hers; and why? Because he came from a small village school with small classes and a good schoolmaster.
And of course because he lived in an age when the Three Rs were more important than Free Milk. They made him literate and left the rest to him. He lived on white-flour scones and stewed tea and died hale and hearty at the age of ninety-two.
She was roused from her musings by Miss Rouse. There was a new expression on Miss Rouse’s face, and Lucy didn’t like the new expression at all. She had seen Miss Rouse look despairing, smarmy, smug, and worried, but till now she had never seen her look furtive.
Why should she be looking furtive?
She watched her for a moment or two, curiously.
Rouse looked up and caught her gaze and looked quickly away again. Her furtive expression had gone; what had taken its place was one labelled Consciously Carefree. Lucy knew all about that expression. She had not been Form Mistress of the Lower Fourth for nothing. Every eater of illicit sweets wore that expression. So did those who were doing their arithmetic in French lesson.
So did those who were cheating at an examination.
What was it Henrietta had said? “She finds written work difficult.”
So.
Emphysema and all those flowery sounding things were too much for Miss Rouse, and so she had provided some aids to memory. The question was what kind of aids and where were they? Not on her knee. The desks were open in front, so that a lap was no safe billet for a crib. And one could hardly write enough pathology on one’s finger-nails to be of much help; fingernails were useful only for formula. The obvious solution would be the notes up the sleeve, with or without an arrangement of elastic, but these girls had no sleeves below the elbow. Then, what? Where? Or was it that she was just having glimpses of O’Donnell’s paper in front of her? Or Thomas’s to her right?
Lucy went back to her letters for a moment or two, and waited. All schoolmistresses know this gambit. She looked up casually at the Seniors in general and again went back to her letters. When next she looked up it was straight at Rouse. Rouse’s head was low over her paper and in her left hand she held a handkerchief. Now even on a handkerchief it is not possible to write anything that is helpful on so large a subject as pathology, nor is it an easy affair to manipulate; on the other hand handkerchiefs were not common objects at Leys, and certainly no one else was clutching one and dabbing a nose occasionally with it. Lucy decided that whatever sources of information Rouse had lay in her left hand. Her desk was at the back on the window side, so that the wall was to her left; whatever she did with her left hand was not overlooked by anyone.
Well, thought Lucy, what does A do?
Walk down the room and demand the handkerchief and find that it is a square piece of white linen, nine inches by nine inches, with the owner’s initials properly marked in one corner, and as candid as a good laundry can make it?
Demand the handkerchief and unearth a scandal that will blast the Senior set like a hurricane at their least stable moment?
See that Rouse gets no chance to use her source of information, and say nothing?
The last was certainly the most sensible. She couldn’t have obtained very much aid from anything so far; it would be doing no injustice to anyone to make her a present of that small amount.
Lucy left the desk and strolled down the room to the back, where she stood leaning against the wall, Thomas to her right and Rouse to her left. Thomas stopped writing for a moment and looked up at her with a quick smile. But Rouse did not look up. And Lucy watched the hot blood dye her sandy neck a dull red. And presently she put away the handkerchief — and whatever else that hand contained — in her tunic pocket.
Well, she had foiled the machinations of the evil-intended, but she could feel no satisfaction about it. For the first time it occurred to her that what was very naughty and deplorable in the Fourth Form was quite sickening in a Senior Final. She was glad that it was Rouse and not anyone else. Presently she strolled back to her desk on the dais, and as far as she could see Rouse made no further effort to obtain help with her paper. On the contrary, she was very obviously in deep waters. And Lucy was infuriated to find herself feeling sorry for her. Yes, sorry. Sorry for Rouse. After all, the girl had worked. Worked like a madman, if all reports were true. It was not as if she had been taking an easy way out to save herself effort. It was just that she found acquiring theoretical knowledge difficult almost to the point of impossibility, and had succumbed to temptation in her desperation.
This point of view made Lucy feel much better about it, and she spent the rest of her invigilating time speculating quite undistressedly about the nature of the crib. She would look again at the examination paper, and consider the enormous range of material it covered, and wonder how Rouse had devised anything at once helpful and invisible. She longed to ask her.
The most likely explanation was that there were two or three particular subjects that Rouse was afraid of, and that help with them was scribbled on a piece of paper.
Innes was the first to shuffle the written sheets together and slip the waiting clip over their upper edge. She read through the pages, making a correction now and then, laid the sheaf down on her desk, sat for a few relaxed moments taking in the beauty of the garden, and then rose quietly and came forward to leave her work on the desk in front of Miss Pym.
“Oh, catastrophe!” wailed Dakers; “is somebody finished? And I have a whole question and a half to do yet!”
“Hush, Miss Dakers,” said Lucy, as in duty bound.
Dakers favoured her with a radiant smile, and went back to her steady plodding.
Stewart and Beau Nash followed Innes very shortly; and presently the pile of papers in front of Miss Pym began to grow. With five minutes of the allotted time still to go there were only three students left in the examination room: the little dark Welsh Thomas, who presumably slept too much to be a good “study”; the imperturbable Dakers still plodding steadily; and a flushed and unhappy Rouse, who was plainly making heavy weather of it. With two minutes still to go there was only Rouse; she was looking confused and desperate; making hasty little excursions back and fore through her papers, deleting, amending, and adding.
The distant yelling of the bell put an end to her indecisions and to her chances; whatever she had done must now abide. She shoved her papers hastily together, aware that the bell meant an instant appearance in the gymnasium and that Fr?ken would not consider the ordeal of an examination paper any excuse for being late, and brought them up to Lucy at the double. Lucy had expected her to avoid her eye, or otherwise to display symptoms of awkwardness or selfconsciousness. But Rouse surprised her by a frank smile and a still franker remark.
“Whoo!” said Rouse, blowing her breath out expressively, “that was a horror.” And she ran out to join the rest of her set.
Lucy opened the much-scored offering and looked at it with compunction. She had been imagining things. Rouse had not been cheating after all. Or at least not systematically. That furtive look might have been the guilt of inadequacy, now she came to think of it; or perhaps, at the worst, a hope of hints from her neighbour’s paper. And that flush that had dyed her neck was due to her awareness of being suspected; Lucy could remember very well even yet times at school when the very knowledge that her innocent act was capable of sinister interpretation was enough to make her face burn with false guilt. Really, she owed Rouse an apology. She would find some way of making it up to her.
She stacked the papers neatly together, put them in alphabetical order from sheer force of habit, checked their number, and carried them upstairs to Miss Lux’s room, glad that it would not be her chore to correct them. There was no one in the room, so she left them on the desk and stood for a moment wondering what to do with the hour before lunch. She toyed with the thought of watching the gymnastics, but decided that she must not allow the performance to become familiar, and consequently devoid of wonder, before Demonstration Day. Having induced Henrietta to keep her until then — Henrietta had not required much inducement, it is true — she was not going to mar her own pleasure in the day by too many tastings beforehand. She went downstairs again, lingering by the tall window on the landing — how well eighteenth-century architects had understood how to build houses; nowadays landings were not things to linger on, but breakneck little corners lit, if at all, by a small circular light like a ship’s port-hole — and from there, beyond the courtyard and the opposite wing she could see the elms of the field that led to the stream. She would go and look at the buttercups for a little. There was no better way of wasting a summer hour than staring at a field of buttercups. So down she went, and along the wing, and so out to the covered path to the gymnasium, for beyond the gymnasium were the buttercups.
As she went down the covered way her eye caught a spot of colour in the grass that bordered the path. At first she took it for a flower petal and was going to ignore it, when she noticed that it was square, and certainly not a petal. She turned back and picked it up. It was a tiny address-book in faded red leather. It looked as if it had formed part of the fittings of a handbag; an old-fashioned handbag probably since one did not see leather nor workmanship like that nowadays. Idly, with her thoughts on the femininity of that vanished bag with its miniature fittings-there would of course have been a little tube of scent, and a gold pencil, and one of those ivory tablets to scribble engagements on — she opened it, and read, on a page crowded with writing in a tiny script: “Path. anat. changes as in traumatic. Fibrin in synov. memb. Tissues contr. by fibr. and folds of caps. joined to bone. Anchylosis. Fever.”
It meant nothing to Lucy as information but its meaning was obvious. She turned the pages, finding nearly all of them crowded with the same succinct information. Even the X page — devoted by the keepers of address-books to measurements for new curtains or that good story that would do for the W.R.I. speech next Tuesday — even the X page had cryptic remarks about rays. What bowled Lucy over was the comprehensiveness of it; the premeditation. This was no product of a last-minute panic; it was a cold-blooded insurance against failure. By the neatness and method shown in the compiling, it looked as though the entries had been made as each subject was studied. Had the notebook been of a normal size, in fact, it would have been nothing more than a legitimate précis of a subject. But no one making a précis would have chosen a book not much larger than a good-sized postage stamp when an equally portable but normal-sized notebook could be had for a few pence. The use of a book so tiny that a mapping pen had been necessary in order to make the entries legible could have only one explanation.
Lucy knew very well what had happened. Rouse had pulled out her handkerchief as she ran. She had never before carried the little book in a pocket, and her mind was divided urgently between the bad paper she had done and the fear of being late for gymnastics, so there was no care in the pulling out of the handkerchief. And so the little book dropped on to the grass at the edge of the path.
She walked on beyond the gymnasium and through the five-barred gate into the field, but she had no eye for the buttercups. She walked on slowly down the field to the coolness under the willows and the quiet green water. She hung over the rail of the bridge watching the weeds trail and the occasional fish dart, and thought about Rouse. There was no name on the fly-leaf, nor as far as she could see any means of identification in the book itself. Most schools taught script as well as current form in writing nowadays; and script was much less easily recognisable than current writing. A handwriting expert would no doubt be easily able to trace the author, but to what end? There was no evidence that the book had been used for any illegitimate purpose; no evidence even that it had been compiled with any sinister intent — although the presumption was strong. If she handed it over to Henrietta as lost property what would happen? No one would claim it, and Henrietta would be faced with the fact that one of her Seniors had prepared a précis that could be conveniently palmed at an examination.
If nothing was ever said about the book, then Rouse’s punishment would be a perpetual and life-long doubt as to what had become of it. Lucy felt that such a punishment fitted the crime admirably. She thumbed the tiny India-paper pages once more, wondered again what Edwardian elegancy had given it birth, and, leaning over, dropped it into the water.
As she walked back to the house she wondered how Rouse had managed the other Final Examinations. Pathology could be no less easy to memorise than Kinesiology or any of the other obscurities studied by the budding P.T.I. How had Rouse, the difficult “study,” managed with these? Was the little red leather book only one of five or six? Did one invest in a mapping pen for one subject only? One could, she supposed, buy very tiny address books if one searched long enough; though not perhaps so fine or so tiny as the little red one. It may have been the possession of the little red one which first put the thought of insurance against failure into Rouse’s mind.
She remembered that the result of the previous examinations would be exhibited on the letter-board by the students’ entrance, so instead of walking round to the front of the house as she had meant to she turned in at the quadrangle door. There were several Junior lists pinned to the green baize, and three Senior lists. Lucy read them with interest.
FINAL PHYSIOLOGY
_Honours_
Mary Innes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93
_First Class_
Wilhelmina Hasselt. . . . . . . . . 87
Pamela Nash. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86
Sheena Stewart. . . . . . . . . . . . . 82
Pauline Lucas. . . . . . . . . . . . .. 79
Janet Gage. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79
Barbara Rouse. . . . . . . . . . . . .. 77
_Second Class_
Dorothy Litlejohn. . . . . . . . .. 74
Beatrice Appleyard. . . . . . . . . 71
Joan Dakers. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69
Eileen O'Donnell. . . . . . . . . . . 68
Margaret Campbell. . . . . . . . .. 67
Ruth Waymark. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66
Lilian Mathews. . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
and the rest, below that mark, mere Passes.
Well, Rouse had scraped into a First by two marks, it seemed.
Lucy turned to the next list.
FINAL MEDICALS
_First Class_
Pauline Lucas. . . . . . . . . . . . .. 89
Pamela Nash. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
Mary Innes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
Dorothy Littlejohn. . . . . . . . . 87
Ruth Waymark. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
Wilhelmina Hasselt. . . . . . . . . 82
Sheena Stewart. . . . . . . . . . . . . 80
Lilian Mathews. . . . . . . . . . . . . 79
Barbara Rouse. . . . . . . . . . . . .. 79
_Second Class_
Jenny Burton. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73
Janet Gage. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72
Eileen O'Donnell. . . . . . . . . . . 71
Joan Dakers. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69
and the rest mere Passes.
And again Rouse managed to scrape a First.
FINAL KINESIOLOGY
_Honours_
Mary Innes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96
_First Class_
Pauline Lucas. . . . . . . . . . . . .. 89
Pamela Nash. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88
Sheena Stewart. . . . . . . . . . . . . 87
Wilhelmina Hasselt. . . . . . . . . 85
Ruth Waymark. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80
Janet Gage. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79
Joan Dakers. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78
Barbara Rouse. . . . . . . . . . . . .. 78
Another First! Three Firsts out of three tries. The girl who found written work so difficult? There was surely a strong case for the existence of more little notebooks?
Oh, well; this being Friday, tomorrow would see the end of examinations, and it was not likely that Rouse would, after this morning’s experience, bring any extraneous help to the test tomorrow morning. The little book prepared for tomorrow, if it existed, would be still-born.
While she mused over the lists (it was nice to see that Dakers had managed at least one First) Miss Lux arrived with the results of yesterday’s Final.
“Thank you for bringing up the Path. papers,” she said. “And thank you for invigilating. It helped me to get these done.”
She thumbed the drawing-pin into the board and stood back to look at the list.
FINAL HYGIENE
_Honours_
Mary Innes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91
_First Class_
Pamela Nash. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88
Wilhelmina Hasselt. . . . . . . . . 87
Sheena Stewart. . . . . . . . . . . . . 86
Pauline Lucas. . . . . . . . . . . . .. 81
Barbara Rouse. . . . . . . . . . . . .. 81
“Barbara Rouse, eighty-one,” Lucy said, before she thought.
“Yes, surprising, isn’t it?” Miss Lux said placidly. “But she works like a black. She is so brilliant in her physical work that I think it maddens her to be far down any list.”
“Innes seems to make a habit of heading the lists.”
“Oh, Innes is wasted here.”
“Why? The more intelligence one brings to a profession the better surely?”
“Yes, but with an intelligence like Innes’s one could head much more thrilling lists than these. It’s a waste.”
“I somehow don’t think that Rouse will get eighty-one for today’s paper,” Lucy said, as they moved away from the board.
“Why? Was she in difficulties?”
“Bogged down,” said Lucy; and hoped that she did not sound too pleased. “What a life it is,” she added, as the five-minute bell rang, and the dripping Seniors came running in from the gymnasium, ripping off their tunics as they tore into the bathrooms for a shower before the gong went. “When you think of the leisurely way we acquired knowledge. At university, I mean. If we sat a final examination, the rest of the day would almost certainly be our own to recover in. But these young creatures do it as part of their time-table.”
From the bathrooms came cursing and chaos. “Oh, Donnie, you swine, that was my shower!” “Mark, you brute, get off my foot!” “Oh, no, you don’t, my girl; these are my tights!” “God, look at my blisters!” “Kick over my shoe, Greengage, the floor’s sopping.” “Must you shoot the cold water round like that, you chump!”
“They like it, you know,” Lux said. “In their heart they like the rush and the overwork. It makes them feel important. Very few of them will ever have any legitimate reason for feeling important, and so it is comforting for them to have the image of it at least.”
“Cynic,” said Lucy.
“No, psychologist.” She inclined her head towards the row as they moved away. “It sounds like a free fight, doesn’t it? Everyone sounds desperate and furious. But it is all play-acting. In five minutes they will be sitting like good children in the dining-room with not a hair out of place.”
And so they were. When the Staff filed in to the top table five minutes later, there were the scramblers of the bathroom, standing dutifully behind their chairs, calm, and combed, and neat, their interest already absorbed by the thought of food. Truly, they were children. Whatever heartbreaks they suffered would be forgotten in tomorrow’s toy. It was absurd to think of them as harassed adults, trembling on the precipice edge of break-down. They were volatile children; their griefs were loud, and vocal, and transient. For five days now, ever since The Nut Tart had been so knowing under the cedar tree last Saturday afternoon, she had looked for some hint of abnormality, of aberration, of lack of control, and what had she found? One very normal and highly controlled piece of dishonesty; unremarkable except for its neatness.
“Isn’t it nice,” Henrietta said, helping out something that looked like cheese-and-vegetable pie, “I’ve got a post in Wales for little Miss Thomas. Near Aberystwyth. I am so delighted.”
“A very soporific atmosphere, Wales,” Madame Lefevre said, consideringly; blasting Henrietta’s whole conception with five gentle words.
“Yes,” said Miss Lux, “who is going to keep her awake?”
“It’s not who is going to keep her awake, it’s who is going to wake her in the first place,” Wragg said, with a greedy eye on the pie. Wragg was still near enough her College days to be possessed of a large hunger and no gastronomic judgment.
“Wales is her native atmosphere,” Henrietta said, repressive, “and I have no doubt she will know how to deal with it. In any case she is not likely to have any great success outside Wales; the Welsh are extraordinarily provincial, using the word in its literal sense. I have noticed before how they gravitate back to their own province. It is as well for them to go there in the first place if the chance offers. And luckily, in this case, it has offered very conveniently. The junior gymnast of three. That will suit Miss Thomas very nicely. She has no great initiative, I’m afraid.”
“Is Thomas’s the only new post?” Wragg asked, falling on the pie.
“No, there was one that I wanted to discuss with you.”
Aha, thought Lucy, here comes Arlinghurst at last.
“Ling Abbey wants someone to be wholly responsible for the younger children, and to take dancing as well all through the school. That is to say, the dancing would have to be of a high standard. I wanted to give the post to Miss Dakers — she is very good with small children — but I wanted to know what you thought of her dancing, Marie.”
“She is a cow,” said Madame.
“She is very good with little ones, though,” Wragg said.
“A heavy cow,” said Madame.
“It isn’t her personal performance that is important,” Henrietta said. “It is her power to inspire performance in others. Does she understand the subject sufficiently, that is the point?”
“Oh, she knows the difference between three-four time and four-four, certainly.”
“I saw Dakers teaching the babies at West Larborough their dances for their do last Christmas,” Wragg said, “and she was wonderful. I was there to crit. her, and I was so fascinated I forgot to make any notes at all. I think she would be just right for that post.”
“Well, Marie.”
“I can’t imagine why anyone bothers,” Madame said. “The dancing at Ling Abbey is quite frightful anyhow.”
This Pilatian washing of hands, in spite of its negative quality, seemed positive enough to all concerned. It was apparent that Dakers was going to Ling Abbey. And since Ling Abbey was a good place to be going to — if one had to be going to a school — Lucy was glad for her. She glanced down the room to where, even above this babel, Dakers’ high voice could be heard italicising her opinion of the Pathology paper. “I said that a joint went gummy, my dear, and I’m certain that’s not the technical word.”
“Shall I warn them both, Miss Hodge?” Wragg asked, later.
(Warn?)
“No, just Miss Thomas today, I think. I shall tell Miss Dakers tomorrow. It is better to spread the excitement out.”
As the Staff rose from their table and filed out, Wragg turned to the politely standing and temporarily silent students and said: “Miss Hodge will see Miss Thomas in her office when luncheon is over.”
This was apparently a ritual pronouncement, for the buzz broke out almost before the Staff had reached the door. “A post, Tommy!” “Congrats, Tommy.” “Hoorah, old Thomas.” “Up the Welsh!” “Hope it’s a thousand a year, Tom.” “Iss nott thatt the lucky thing, now!” “Cheers, Tommy!”
And still no one had mentioned Arlinghurst.
When Lucy first heard Arlinghurst mentioned it was not by any of the Staff but by the students themselves. She had spent Saturday afternoon with Fr?ken and her mother, helping to finish the Swedish folk costumes which the Juniors would wear for some of the country dances at the Demonstration. It was a lovely day and they had taken the piles of bright primitive colour to the furthest corner of the garden, where they could sit and look over the English countryside. Both cricket and tennis matches were “away” this week, so the garden was deserted, and no toiling figures marred the virgin green of the field beyond the stream. They had sewed in great beatitude, and Fru Gustavsen seemed to have reported well of Lucy to her daughter, for Fr?ken’s reticence had largely vanished, and Lucy was delighted to find that a young woman who had always reminded her of sunlight on snow was the possessor of a rich warm chuckle and a sense of humour to match. (It is true that Lucy’s sewing considerably shook Fru Gustavsen’s faith in her, but much must be forgiven the English.) Fru Gustavsen had gone back to the subject of food, and had held forth at great length on the virtues of something called “frikadellar”; which, it appeared, was a kind of mince. Lucy (whose cooking consisted of chopping up a few tomatoes in a pan at the last moment, adding whatever was to be cooked, and pouring some cream over the lot) thought it a very lengthy and complicated affair, and decided to have nothing to do with it.
“Are you doing anything tonight?” Fr?ken had asked. “My mother and I are going into Larborough to the theatre. She has not yet seen an English company. We would be delighted if you would care to come with us.”
Lucy explained that tonight she was going to a party in Stewart’s room to celebrate her Post. “I understand that Staff don’t usually go, but I am not real Staff.”
Fr?ken slid an eye round at her and said: “You ought to be. You are very good for them.”
That medicinal phrase again. As if she were a prescription.
“How?”
“Oh, in ways too subtle for my English — and much too subtle for the German language. It is, a little, that you wear heels; a little, that you have written a book; a little, that they don’t have to be just a tiny bit afraid of you; a little that — oh, a thousand littles. You have come at a good time for them; a time when they need a distraction that is not — distracting. Oh, dear, I wish my English was better.”
“You mean, I am a dose of alkali on an acid stomach.”
Fr?ken gave her unexpected chuckle. “Yes, just that. I am sorry you will not be coming to the theatre, but it is a great mark of favour to be invited to a students’ party, and you will enjoy it, I think. Everyone will be happy tonight, now that the examinations are over. Once they come back from the match they are free for the week-end. So they will be gay this Saturday. Off the chain,” she added, in English.
And off the chain they certainly were. As Lucy came in by the quadrangle door, leaving Fr?ken and her mother to go round to the front of the house where they lived, a blast of sound rose up round her. The rush of bath water on two floors, the calling of innumerable voices, the drumfire of feet on bare oak stairs, singing, whistling, crooning. Both teams had apparently come back — victorious to judge by the atmosphere — and the place was alive. The place was also excited, and one word was woven like a leit-motif through the babble. Arlinghurst. Arlinghurst. As she walked past the ground-floor bathrooms on her way to the stairs, she heard the first of it. “Have you heard, my dear! Arlinghurst!”
“What?”
“Arling-hurst!”
A tap was turned off.
“I can’t hear with the blasted water. Where, did you say?”
“Arlinghurst!”
“I don’t believe it.”
“But yes,” said another voice, “it’s true.”
“It can’t be; they don’t send First Posters to Arlinghurst.”
“No, really it’s true. Miss Hodge’s sec. told Jolly in confidence and Jolly told her sister in the village and she told Miss Nevill at The Teapot, and Miss Nevill talked about it to The Nut Tart when she was there to tea this afternoon with that cousin of hers.”
“Is that gigolo here again?”
“I say, Arlinghurst! Who would believe it! Whom do you think they’ll give it to?”
“Oh, that’s easy.”
“Yes, Innes of course.”
“Lucky Innes.”
“Oh, well, she deserves it.”
“Just imagine. Arlinghurst!”
And on the first-floor it was the same; the rushing of bath water, the splashing, the babble, and Arlinghurst.
“But who told you?”
“The Nut Tart.”
“Oh, my dear, she’s dippy, everyone knows.”
“Well, it’s a cert for Innes, anyhow, so it’s nothing to do with me. I’ll probably wind up in the L.C.C.”
“She may be dippy, but she’s not M.D., and she’d got it pat. She didn’t even know what Arlinghurst was, so she wasn’t making it up. She said: ‘Is it a school?’”
“Is it a school! My hat!”
“I say, won’t The Hodge be just dizzy with pride, my dears!”
“D’you suppose she’ll be dizzy enough to give us tart for supper instead of that milk pudding?”
“I expect Jolly made the puddings yesterday and they’re all standing waiting in rows on the hatch.”
“Oh, well, they can wait as far as I’m concerned. I’m for Larborough.”
“Me, too. I say, is Innes there?”
“No, she’s finished. She’s dressing.”
“I say, let’s throw Innes a party, all of us, instead of letting her give a little private one. After all, it’s —”
“Yes. Let’s do that, shall we? After all, it isn’t every day that someone gets a post like that, and Innes deserves it, and everyone will be glad about it, and —”
“Yes, let’s have a do in the common-room.”
“After all, it’s a sort of communal honour. A decoration for Leys.”
“Arlinghurst! Who’d have believed it?”
“Arlinghurst!”
Lucy wondered if the meek little secretary’s indiscretion had been prompted by the knowledge that the news was about to be made public. Even the cautious and secretive Henrietta could not sit on such a piece of information much longer; if for no other reason than that Arlinghurst would be expecting an answer. Lucy supposed that Henrietta had been waiting until the “bad” week was over before providing her sensation; she could not help feeling that it was a very neat piece of timing.
As she walked along the corridor to her cell at the end, she met Innes, buttoning herself into a fresh cotton frock.
“Well,” said Lucy, “it seems to have been a successful afternoon.”
“The row, you mean?” Innes said. “Yes, we won. But the row is not a war chant. It’s a paean of praise that they will never have to live this week again.”
Lucy noticed how unconsciously she had used the word “they.” She wondered for a moment at the girl’s calm. Had she, possibly, not yet heard about the Arlinghurst vacancy? And then, as Innes moved from the dimness of the corridor into the light from Dakers’ wide-open door, Lucy saw the radiance on her face. And her own heart turned over in sympathy. That was how it felt, was it? Like seeing Heaven opened.
“You look happy, anyhow,” she said, falling back on bald platitude since there were no words to describe what was shining in Innes’s eyes.
“To use a phrase of O’Donnell’s, I wouldn’t call the king my cousin,” Innes said, as they moved apart. “You are coming to Stewart’s party, aren’t you? That’s good. We’ll meet again there.”
Lucy powdered her nose, and decided to go over to the “old house” and see how the Staff were reacting to the news of Arlinghurst. Perhaps there would still be some tea; she had forgotten all about tea and so apparently had the Gustavsens. She rearranged the bottle of champagne which was waiting for Stewart’s party in the ice she had begged from Miss Joliffe, regretted yet once more that the Larborough wine merchant had not been able to supply a better year, but trusted (rightly) that Rheims and all its products were simply “champagne” to a student.
To go over to the “old house” one had to pass both the Seniors’ bedrooms and the first floor bathrooms again, and it seemed to Lucy that the orchestration of sound had reached a new pitch of intensity, as more and more students heard the news and passed it on and commented on it above the roar of water, and banging of doors, and the thudding of feet. It was strange to come from that blare of sound and excitement into the quiet, the cream paint and mahogany, the tall windows and space, the waiting peace of the “house.” She crossed the wide landing and opened the door of the drawing-room. Here too there was quiet, and she had shut the door behind her and come forward into the room before becoming aware of the exact quality of that quiet. Before realising, in fact, that the quiet was electric, and that she had walked into the middle of a Staff row. A row, moreover, if one was to judge from the faces, of most unholy proportions. Henrietta was standing, flushed and defensive and stubborn, with her back to the fireplace, and the others were staring at her, accusing and angry.
Lucy would have beaten a retreat, but someone had automatically poured out a cup of tea and thrust it at her, and she could hardly put it down again and walk out. Though she would have liked to for more reasons than one. The tea was almost black and quite cold.
No one took any notice of Lucy. Either they accepted her as one of themselves, or they were too absorbed in their quarrel to realise her fully. Their eyes had acknowledged her presence with the same absent acquiescence that greets a ticket collector in a railway carriage; a legitimate intruder but not a partaker in discussion.
“It’s monstrous,” Madame was saying. “Monstrous!” For the first time within Lucy’s experience she had discarded her Récamier pose and was sitting with both slender feet planted firmly on the floor.
Miss Lux was standing behind her, her bleak face even bleaker than usual, and two very unusual spots of bright red high on her cheek-bones. Fr?ken was sitting back in one of the chintz-covered chairs looking contemptuous and sullen. And Wragg, hovering by the window, looked as much confused and embarrassed as angry; as if, having so lately come up from the mortal world, she found this battling of Olympians disconcerting.
“I fail to see anything monstrous about it,” Henrietta said with an attempt at her Head Girl manner; but even to Lucy’s ears it had a synthetic quality. Henrietta was obviously in a spot.
“It is more than monstrous,” Madame said, “it is very nearly criminal.”
“Marie, don’t be absurd.”
“Criminal from more than one point of view. You propose to palm off an inferior product on someone who expects the best; and you propose at the same time to lower the credit of Leys so that it will take twenty years to recover it, if it ever recovers. And for what, I ask you? For what? Just to satisfy some whim of your own!”
“I fail to see where the whim comes in,” Henrietta snapped, dropping some of her Great Dane dignity at this thrust. “No one here can deny that she is a brilliant student, that she has worked hard and deserved her reward. Even her theoretical work has been consistently good this term.”
“Not consistently,” said Miss Lux in a voice like water dropping on to a metal pan. “According to the paper I corrected last night, she could not even get a Second in Pathology.”
It was here that Lucy stopped wondering what to do with her tea, and pricked up her ears.
“Oh, dear, that is a pity,” Henrietta said, genuinely distracted from the main point by this news. “She was doing so well. So much better than I had dared to hope.”
“The girl is a moron, and you know it,” Madame said.
“But that is nonsense. She is one of the most brilliant students Leys has ever —”
“For God’s sake, Henrietta, stop saying that. You know as well as any of us what they mean by brilliant.” She flourished a sheet of blue note-paper in her thin brown hand, and holding it at arm’s length (she was “getting on” was Madame, and she hated to wear glasses) read aloud. “‘We wondered if, among your leaving students, you had one brilliant enough to fill this place. Someone who would be “Arlinghurst” from the beginning, and so more part of the school and its traditions than a migrant can ever be, and at the same time continue the Leys connection that has been so fortunate for us.’ The Leys connection that has been so fortunate! And you propose to end it by sending them Rouse!”
“I don’t know why you are all so stubbornly against her. It can be nothing but prejudice. She has been a model student, and no one has ever said a word against her until now. Until I am prepared to give her the rewards of her work. And then you are all suddenly furious. I am entirely at a loss. Fr?ken! Surely you will bear me out. You can never have had a better pupil than Miss Rouse.”
“Mees Rouse is a very good gymnast. She is also, I understand from Mees Wragg, a very fine games player. But when she goes out from thees plaace it will not matter any longer that she can do a handstand better than anyone else and that she ees a good half-back. What will matter then is character. And what Mees Rouse has of character is neither very much nor very admirable.”
“Fr?ken!” Henrietta sounded shocked. “I thought you liked her.”
“Did you?” The two cold, disinterested little words said: I am expected to like all my students; if you had known whom I liked or disliked I should be unworthy.
“Well, you asked Sigrid, and you’ve certainly been told,” Madame said, delighted. “I could not have put it better myself.”
“Perhaps —” began Miss Wragg. “I mean, it is for gymnastics they want her. They are separate departments at Arlinghurst: the gym., and the games, and the dancing; one person for each. So perhaps Rouse wouldn’t be too bad.”
Lucy wondered whether this tentative offering was inspired by Rouse’s performance for Miss Wragg’s department at half-back, or by a desire to smooth things over and draw the two edges of the yawning gap even a little nearer.
“Doreen, my pet,” said Madame, in the tolerant tones that one uses to a half-wit, “what they are looking for is not someone who ‘wouldn’t be too bad’; what they are looking for is someone so outstanding that she can step straight from College to be one of the three gymnasts at the best girls’ school in England. Does that sound to you like Miss Rouse, do you think?”
“No. No, I suppose not. It does sound like Innes, I must admit.”
“Quite so. It does sound like Innes. And it is beyond the wit of man why it doesn’t sound like Innes to Miss Hodge.” She fixed Henrietta with her enormous black eyes, and Henrietta winced.
“I’ve told you! There is a vacancy at the Wycherley Orthop?dic Hospital that would be ideal for Miss Innes. She is excellent at medical work.”
“God give me patience! The Wycherley Orthop?dic Hospital!”
“Doesn’t the unity of the opposition persuade you that you are wrong, Miss Hodge?” It was Miss Lux, incisive even in her anger. “Being a minority of one is not a very strong position.”
But that was the wrong thing to say. If Henrietta had ever been open to persuasion, she was by now far past that stage. She reacted to Miss Lux’s logic with a spurt of fury.
“My position as a minority may not be very strong, Miss Lux, but my position as Principal of this college is unquestioned, and what you think or do not think of my decisions is immaterial. I took you into my confidence, as I always have, about the disposal of this vacancy. That you do not agree with me is, of course, regrettable, but of no consequence. It is for me to make decisions here, and in this case I have made it. You are free to disapprove, of course; but not to interfere, I am glad to say.”
She picked up her cup with a hand that shook, and put it away on the tea-tray, as was her habit; and then made for the door. Lumbering and hurt, like a wounded elephant, thought Lucy.
“Just a minute, Henrietta!” Madame said, her eyes having lighted on Lucy and a spark of amused malice appearing therein. “Let us ask the outsider and the trained psychologist.”
“But I am not a trained psychologist,” said poor Lucy.
“Just let us hear what Miss Pym thinks.”
“I don’t know what Miss Pym has to do with the vacancies —”
“No, not about the appointment. Just what she thinks of these two students. Come along, Miss Pym. Give us your frank opinion. After a mere week among us you cannot be accused of bias.”
“You mean Rouse and Innes?” asked Lucy, playing for time. Henrietta had paused with her hand on the door. “I don’t know them, of course; but it certainly surprises me that Miss Hodge should think of giving that appointment to Rouse. I don’t think she is at all — in fact I think she would be quite the wrong person.”
Henrietta, to whom this was apparently the last straw, cast her an et tu Brute look and blundered out of the room, with a muttered remark about it being “surprising what a pretty face can do to influence people.” Which Lucy took to refer to Innes, not to herself.
In the drawing-room was a very crowded silence.
“I thought I knew all about Henrietta,” Madame said at last, reflective and puzzled.
“I thought one could trust her to do justice,” Miss Lux said, bitter.
Fr?ken got to her feet without a word, and still looking contemptuous and sullen, walked out of the room. They watched her go with gloomy approbation; her silence was comment enough.
“It is a pity that this should have happened, when everything was going so well,” Wragg said, producing another of her unhelpful offerings. She was like someone running round with black-currant lozenges to the victims of an earthquake. “Everyone has been so pleased with their posts, and —”
“Do you think she will come to her senses when she has had time to think it over?” Lux asked Madame.
“She has been thinking it over for nearly a week. Or rather she has had it settled in her mind for nearly a week; so that by now it has become established fact and she will not be able to see it any other way.”
“And yet she couldn’t have been sure about it — I mean, sure of our reaction — or she would not have kept it to herself until now. Perhaps when she thinks it over —”
“When she thinks it over she will remember that Catherine Lux questioned the Royal Prerogative-”
“But there is a Board in the background. There is no question of Divine Right. There must be someone who can be appealed to against her decision. An injustice like this can’t be allowed to happen just because —”
“Of course there is a Board. You met them when you got the job here. You see one of them when she comes to supper on the Friday nights when the lecture happens to be on Yoga, or Theosophy, or Voodoo, or what not. A greedy slug in amber beads and black satin, with the brains of a louse. She thinks Henrietta is wonderful. So do the rest of the Board. And so, let me say it here and now, do I. That is what makes it all so shocking. That Henrietta, the shrewd Henrietta who built this place up from something not much better than a dame’s school, should be so blind, so suddenly devoid of the most elementary judgment — it’s fantastic. Fantastic!”
“But there must be something we can do —”
“My good if tactless Catherine,” Madame said rising gracefully to her feet, “all we can do is go to our rooms and pray.” She reached for the scarf that even in the hottest weather draped her thin body as she moved from one room to another. “There are also the lesser resorts of aspirin and a hot bath. They may not move the Almighty but they are beneficial to the blood pressure.” She floated out of the room; as nearly without substance as a human being can be.
“If Madame can’t do anything to influence Miss Hodge, I don’t see that anyone else can,” Wragg said.
“I certainly can’t,” Lux said. “I just rub her the wrong way. Even if I didn’t, even if I had the charm of Cleopatra and she hung on my every word, how can one reduce a mental astigmatism like that? She is quite honest about it, you see. She is one of the most honest persons I have ever met. She really sees the thing like that; she really sees Rouse as everything that is admirable and deserving, and thinks we are prejudiced and oppositious. How can one alter a thing like that?” She stared a moment, blankly, at the bright window, and then picked up her book. “I must go and change, if I can find a free bathroom.”
Her going left Lucy alone with Miss Wragg, who obviously wanted to go too but did not know how to make her departure sufficiently graceful.
“It is a mess, isn’t it?” she proffered.
“Yes, it seems a pity,” Lucy said, thinking how inadequately it summed up the situation; she was still stunned by the new aspect presented to her. She became aware that Wragg was still in her out-door clothes. “When did you hear about it?”
“I heard the students talking about it downstairs — when we came in from the match, I mean — and I bolted up here to see if it was true, and I walked straight into it. Into the row, I mean. It is a pity; everything was going so well.”
“You know that the students take it for granted that Innes will get the post,” Lucy said.
“Yes,” Wragg sounded sober. “I heard them in the bathrooms. It was a natural thing to think. All of us would take it for granted that Innes would be the one. She is not very good for me — in games, I mean — but she is a good coach. She understands what she is doing. And of course in other things she is brilliant. She really should have been a doctor or something brainy like that. Oh, well, I suppose I must go and get out of these things.” She hesitated a moment. “Don’t think we do this often, will you, Miss Pym? This is the first time I have seen the Staff het up about anything. We are all such good friends as a rule. That’s what makes this such a pity. I wish someone could change Miss Hodge’s point of view. But if I know her no one can do that.”
No one can do that, they said; but it was just possible that she, Lucy, might. When the door closed behind Wragg she found herself faced with her own dilemma. She had reason to know that Miss Lux’s first view of Henrietta’s reaction was much truer than her second. That mental astigmatism that Lux talked about was not great enough to exclude a doubt of her own judgment; Lucy had not forgotten the odd guilty look on Henrietta’s face last Monday morning when her secretary had tried to bring up the subject of the Arlinghurst letter. It had been an up-to-some-thing look. Not a Father Christmas up-to-something, either. Quite definitely it was something she was a little ashamed of. Astigmatic enough she might be to find Rouse worthy, but not cock-eyed enough to be unaware that Innes had a prior claim.
And that being so, then it was Lucy’s duty to put certain facts before her. It was a great pity about the little red book now dissolving into pulp among the weeds — she had been altogether too impulsive about its disposal — but book or no book, she must brave Henrietta and produce some cogent reasons for her belief that Rouse was not a suitable person to be appointed to Arlinghurst.
It surprised her a little to find that an interview with Henrietta on this footing brought back a school-girl qualm that had no place in the bosom of any adult; least of all one who was a Celebrity. But she was greatly fortified by that remark of Henrietta’s about “pretty faces.” That was a remark that Henrietta really should not have made.
She got up and put the cup of black, cold tea on the tray; noticing regretfully that they had had almond-fingers for tea; she would have very much liked an almond-finger ten minutes ago, but now she could not have eaten even an éclair. It would not be true to say that she had discovered feet of clay in Henrietta, since she had never made any sort of image in Henrietta’s likeness. But she had looked up to Henrietta as a person of superior worth to her own, and the habit of mind acquired at school had stayed with her. She was therefore shocked to find her capable of what was at worst cheating, and at the very least a bêtise. She wondered what there had been in Rouse to unseat so solid a judgment as Henrietta’s. That remark about “pretty faces.” That unconsidered, blurted remark. Was there something in that plain, North-Country face that had touched a woman so used to good looks in her students? Was there something in the plain, unloved, hardworking, ambitious Rouse that Henrietta identified with herself? Was it like seeing some old struggle of her own? So that she adopted, and championed, and watched over her unconsciously. Her disappointment over Rouse’s comparative failure in Pathology had been so keen that it had distracted her even from the urgent quarrel with her Staff.
Or was it just that Rouse had made good use of those admiring — not to say adoring — looks that she had sampled on the covered way the other morning?
No, not that. Henrietta had her faults but silliness was not one of them. She had, moreover, like everyone else in the scholastic world, served a long apprenticeship to adoration, both real and synthetic. Her interest in Rouse might be heightened by Rouse’s obvious discipleship, but the origin of that interest was elsewhere. It was most likely that the Henrietta who had been plain, and unloved, and ambitious, had viewed the plain, and unloved, and ambitious young Rouse with a kindliness that was half recognition.
Lucy wondered whether to go to Henrietta at once, or to wait until she simmered down. The snag was that as Henrietta simmered down, so would her own determination to beard Henrietta on the subject. All things considered, and with the memory of previous fiascos, she thought that she had better go now while her feet would still carry her in the proper direction.
There was no immediate answer to her tap at the office door, and for a moment she hoped that Henrietta had retired to her own room upstairs and so reprieved her from her plain duty for a few hours longer. But no; there was her voice bidding her come in, and in went Lucy, feeling horribly like a culprit and furious with herself for being such a rabbit. Henrietta was still flushed and wounded-looking, and if she had not been Henrietta, Lucy would have said that there were tears in her eyes; but that was manifestly impossible. She was very busy about some papers on her desk, but Lucy felt that until she had knocked Henrietta’s only activity had been mental.
“Henrietta,” she began, “I’m afraid you thought it presumptuous of me to express an opinion about Miss Rouse.” (Oh dear, that sounded very pompous!)
“A little uncalled-for,” Henrietta said coldly.
Of all the Henrietta phrases! “Uncalled-for!” “But it was called for,” she pointed out. “That is just what it was. I should never have dreamed of offering my opinion unasked. The point is, that opinion —”
“I don’t think we need discuss it, Lucy. It is a small matter, anyhow, and not one to —”
“But it isn’t a small matter. That is why I’ve come to see you.”
“We pride ourselves in this country, don’t we, that everyone has a right to his opinion, and a right to express it. Well, you expressed it —”
“When I was asked to.”
“When you were asked to. And all I say is that it was a little tactless of you to take sides in a matter of which you can know very little, if anything at all.”
“But that is just it. I do know something about it. You think I am just prejudiced against Miss Rouse because she is not very attractive ——”
“Not very attractive to you, perhaps,” amended Henrietta quickly.
“Shall we say not very obviously attractive,” Lucy said, annoyed and beginning to feel better. “You think I have judged her merely on her social graces, but that is not so.”
“On what else could you judge her? You know nothing of her work.”
“I invigilated at one of her examinations.”
Lucy observed with satisfaction that this brought Henrietta up short.
There was silence while one could count five.
“And what quality of a student could you possibly test by invigilating at an examination?”
“Her honesty.”
“Lucy!” But the tone was not shocked. It was a warning. It meant, if it meant anything: Do-you-know-what-the-punishment-for-slander-is?
“Yes, I said her honesty.”
“Are you trying to tell me that you found Miss Rouse — obtaining help during an examination?”
“She did her best. I haven’t spent the best years of my life in Fourth-Form circles without knowing the routine. It was at the beginning that I noticed what she was about, and since I didn’t want to make a scandal of it I thought the best way was to prevent her from using it.”
“Using it? Using what?”
“The little book.”
“You mean that you saw a student using a small book at an examination, and said nothing about it?”
“No, of course not. It was only afterwards that I knew about the book. All that I knew at the time was that there was something she was trying to refer to. She had a handkerchief in her left hand — although she hadn’t a cold, and seemed to have no legitimate use for the thing and she had that bag-of-sweets-under-the-desk look that you know as well as I do. There wasn’t anything under her desk, so I deduced that whatever she had was in her hand with the handkerchief. As I had no proof ——”
“Ah! You had no proof.”
“No. I had no proof, and I didn’t want to upset the whole room by demanding any, so I invigilated from the back of the room, where I was directly behind her, and could see to it that she got no help from anything or anybody.”
“But if you did not ask her about the affair, how did you know about a book?”
“I found the book lying by the path to the gymnasium. It was ——”
“You mean the book was not in her desk? Not in the room at all?”
“No. If it had been in her desk you would have known about it five minutes later. And if I had found such a book in the examination room I would have brought it to you at once.”
“Such a book? What kind of book?”
“A tiny address-book filled with Pathology notes.”
“An address-book?”
“Yes. A, arthritis — and so on.”
“You mean that the book was merely a book of reference compiled by a student in the course of her study?”
“Not ‘merely’.”
“And why not ‘merely’?”
“Because the whole thing was not much bigger than an out-size postage stamp.”
Lucy waited for this to sink in.
“And what connection is there between this book you found and Miss Rouse?”
“Only that no one else in the room had a bag-of-sweets-under-the-desk expression; in fact, no one else seemed to be particularly worried about the paper. And that Rouse was the last to leave the room.”
“What has that to do with it?”
“If the book had been dropped before Rouse came out of the examination room it would almost certainly have been picked up by one of the other students. It was a sort of dahlia red, and was lying very obviously on the grass at the edge of the path.
“Not on the path?”
“No,” said Lucy, reluctantly. “About half an inch off it.”
“So that it could have been passed many times by a crowd of chattering students excited over an examination, and anxious not to be late for their next class?”
“Yes, I suppose it could.”
“And was there a name on the book?”
“No.”
“No name? No means of identification?”
“Nothing except the script. It was in script, not current form.”
“I see.” One could see Henrietta bracing herself. “Then you had better bring me the book and we will take the proper steps to have the owner identified.”
“I haven’t got it,” said poor Lucy. “I drowned it.”
“You what?”
“I mean, I dropped it into the stream by the games field.”
“That was surely a very extraordinary thing to do?” Was there a spark of relief in Henrietta’s eye?
“Not really. I suppose it was impetuous. But what was I to do with it? It was a précis of Pathology, and the Pathology Final was over and the book had not been used. Whatever had been planned had not been carried out. Why, then, worry you by bringing the book to you? It seemed to me that the best punishment for whoever had compiled the thing was never to know what had become of it. To live the rest of her days with a question at the back of her mind.”
“‘Whoever had compiled it.’ That describes the situation, doesn’t it? There is not one iota of evidence to connect the book with Miss Rouse.”
“If there had been evidence, as I said before, I would have brought it to you. There is only presumption. But the presumption is very strong. A great many people are ruled out altogether.”
“Why?”
“Those who don’t consider themselves likely to be at a loss don’t waste time insuring against it. That is to say, those who are good on the theoretical side are innocent. But you yourself told me that Rouse finds written work extraordinarily difficult.”
“So do a great many others.”
“Yes. But there is another factor. A great many no doubt find difficulty with theory but don’t particularly care as long as they struggle through. But Rouse is brilliant at practical work, and it galls her to be also-ran in examinations. She is ambitious, and a hard-worker. She wants the fruits of her labours, and she is very doubtful of getting them. Hence the little book.”
“That, my dear Lucy, is psychological theorising.”
“Maybe. But psychological theorising is what Madame asked me to do, in the drawing-room. You thought I had based my opinion on a mere prejudice. I thought you ought to know that I had some better foundation for my theorising.” She watched Henrietta’s flushed face, and wondered if she might venture into the minefield again, now that she had proved that she was not merely wantonly trespassing. “As one friend to another, Henrietta, I don’t understand why you even consider sending Rouse to Arlinghurst when you have someone as suitable as Innes.” And she waited for the explosion.
But there was no explosion. Henrietta sat in heavy silence, making a dotted pattern with her pen on the fine clean blotting-paper; a measure of her troubled state, since neither doodling nor wasting paper was a habit of Henrietta’s.
“I don’t think you know much about Innes,” she said at length, in a reasonably friendly tone. “Because she has a brilliant mind and good looks you credit her with all the other virtues. Virtues that she quite definitely does not possess. She has no sense of humour, and she does not make friends easily — two serious disabilities in anyone who plans to live the communal life of a residential school. Her very brilliance is a drawback in that it makes it difficult for her to suffer fools gladly. She has a tendency — quite unconscious, I am sure — to look down her nose at the rest of the world.” (Lucy remembered suddenly how, this very afternoon, Innes had automatically used the word “they” in referring to the students. Old Henrietta was shrewd enough.)
“In fact, ever since she came here she has left me with the impression that she despises Leys, and is using it only as a means to an end.”
“Oh, surely not,” Lucy protested mechanically, while her inner self was wondering whether that were indeed so, and whether that accounted for a great deal that had puzzled her about Mary Innes. If being at Leys had indeed been a secret purgatory, a trial endured as a means to an end, that might explain that too-adult reticence, that air of concentration in a person who had no natural need of concentration, that inability to smile.
She remembered, irrelevantly, Desterro’s light-hearted account of how she changed her mind and decided to stay at Leys when she saw Innes. It was because Innes was not “of” Leys that Desterro had noticed her on that dreary autumn afternoon, picking her out from the milling crowd as someone from an alien, more adult world.
“But she is very popular with her colleagues,” Lucy said aloud.
“Yes, her own set like her well enough. They find her aloofness — intriguing, I think. She is not so popular with children, unfortunately; they find her intimidating. If you looked at her crit. book — the book that the Staff use for reports when they go to outside classes with students — you would find that the word ‘antagonistic’ appears again and again in describing her attitude.”
“Perhaps it is just those eyebrows,” Lucy said. She saw that Henrietta, uncomprehending, thought this a mere frivolousness, and added: “Or perhaps like so many people she has an inner doubt about herself, in spite of all appearances to the contrary. That is the usual explanation of antagonism as an attitude.”
“I find psychologists’ explanations a little too glib,” Henrietta said. “If one has not the natural graces to attract friendship, one can at least make an effort to be friendly. Miss Rouse does.”
(I bet! thought Lucy.)
“It is a great tragedy to lack the natural graces; one is not only denied the ready friendship of one’s colleagues but one has to overcome the unreasoning prejudice of those in office. Miss Rouse has fought hard to overcome her natural disabilities: her slowness of mind and her lack of good looks; she goes more than halfway to meet people and puts herself to great pains to be adaptable and pleasant and — and — and acceptable to people. And with her pupils she succeeds. They like her and look forward to seeing her; her reports from her classes are excellent. But with the Staff in their private capacity she has failed. They see only her personal — unattractiveness, and her efforts to be friendly and adaptable have merely annoyed them.” She looked up from her pen-patterns and caught Lucy’s expression. “Oh, yes, you thought my preference for Rouse as a candidate was the result of blind prejudice, didn’t you? Believe me, I have not brought up Leys to its present position without understanding something of how the human mind works. Rouse has worked hard during her years here and has made a success of them, she is popular with her pupils and sufficiently adaptable to make herself acceptable to her colleagues; she has the friendliness and the adaptability that Innes so conspicuously lacks; and there is no reason why she should not go to Arlinghurt with my warm recommendation.”
“Except that she is dishonest.”
Henrietta flung the pen down on its tray with a clatter.
“That is a sample of what the unattractive girl has to struggle against,” she said, all righteousness and wrath. “You think that one out of a score of girls has tried to cheat at an examination, and you pick on Rouse. Why? Because you don’t like her face — or her expression, if one must be accurate.”
So it had been no use. Lucy drew her feet under her and prepared to go.
“There is nothing at all to connect the little book you found with any particular student. You just remembered that you hadn’t liked the looks of Miss Rouse; and so she was the culprit. The culprit — if there is one; I should be sorry to think that any Senior student of mine would stoop to such a subterfuge — the culprit is probably the prettiest and most innocent member of the set. You should know enough of human nature, as distinct from psychology, to know that.”
Lucy was not sure whether it was this last thrust or the accusation of fastening crime on to plain faces, but she was very angry by the time she reached the door.
“There is just one point, Henrietta,” she said, pausing with the door-knob in her hand.
“Yes?”
“Rouse managed to get a First in all her Finals so far.”
“Yes.”
“That is odd, isn’t it.”
“Not at all odd. She had worked very hard.”
“It’s odd, all the same; because on the occasion when someone was prevented from using the little red book she could not even get a Second.”
And she closed the door quietly behind her.
“Let her stew over that,” she thought.
As she made her way over to the wing her anger gave way to depression. Henrietta was, as Lux said, honest, and that honesty made arguing with her hopeless. Up to a point she was shrewd and clear-minded, and beyond that she suffered from Miss Lux’s “astigmatism”; and for mental astigmatism nothing could be done. Henrietta was not consciously cheating, and therefore could not be reasoned, frightened, nor cajoled into a different course. Lucy thought with something like dismay of the party she was to attend presently. How was she going to face a gathering of Seniors, all speculating about Arlinghurst and rejoicing openly over Innes’s good luck?
How was she going to face Innes herself, with the radiance in her eyes? The Innes who “wouldn’t call the king her cousin.”