what indeed you expected it to be--a place where you slacked and
yawned and whiled the time away by pinching your neighbour and
trying to make the teacher lose her temper, and from which you
burst with a yell of relief the instant the last lesson was over.
Sometimes they sulked and had fits of crying, sometimes they argued
in the maddening persistent way that children have, 'WHY should we
do this? WHY does anyone have to learn to read and write?' over
and over again, until Dorothy had to stand over them and silence
them with threats of blows. She was growing almost habitually
irritable nowadays; it surprised and shocked her, but she could not
stop it. Every morning she vowed to herself, 'Today I will NOT
lose my temper', and every morning, with depressing regularity, she
DID lose her temper, especially at about half past eleven when the
children were at their worst. Nothing in the world is quite so
irritating as dealing with mutinous children. Sooner or later,
Dorothy knew, she would lose control of herself and begin hitting
them. It seemed to her an unforgivable thing to do, to hit a
child; but nearly all teachers come to it in the end. It was
impossible now to get any child to work except when your eye was
upon it. You had only to turn your back for an instant and
blotting-paper pellets were flying to and fro. Nevertheless, with
ceaseless slave-driving the children's handwriting and 'commercial
arithmetic' did certainly show some improvement, and no doubt the
parents were satisfied.
The last few weeks of the term were a very bad time. For over a
fortnight Dorothy was quite penniless, for Mrs Creevy had told her
that she couldn't pay her her term's wages 'till some of the fees
came in'. So she was deprived of the secret slabs of chocolate
that had kept her going, and she suffered from a perpetual slight
hunger that made her languid and spiritless. There were leaden
mornings when the minutes dragged like hours, when she struggled
with herself to keep her eyes away from the clock, and her heart
sickened to think that beyond this lesson there loomed another just
like it, and more of them and more, stretching on into what seemed
like a dreary eternity. Worse yet were the times when the children
were in their noisy mood and it needed a constant exhausting effort
of the will to keep them under control at all; and beyond the wall,
of course, lurked Mrs Creevy, always listening, always ready to
descend upon the schoolroom, wrench the door open, and glare round
the room with 'Now then! What's all this noise about, please?' and
the sack in her eye.
Dorothy was fully awake, now, to the beastliness of living in Mrs
Creevy's house. The filthy food, the cold, and the lack of baths
seemed much more important than they had seemed a little while ago.
Moreover, she was beginning to appreciate, as she had not done when
the joy of her work was fresh upon her, the utter loneliness of her
position. Neither her father nor Mr Warburton had written to her,
and in two months she had made not a single friend in Southbridge.
For anyone so situated, and particularly for a woman, it is all but
impossible to make friends. She had no money and no home of her
own, and outside the school her sole places of refuge were the
public library, on the few evenings when she could get there, and
church on Sunday mornings. She went to church regularly, of
course--Mrs Creevy had insisted on that. She had settled the
question of Dorothy's religious observances at breakfast on her
first Sunday morning.
'I've just been wondering what Place of Worship you ought to go
to,' she said. 'I suppose you were brought up C. of E., weren't
you?'
'Yes,' said Dorothy.
'Hm, well. I can't quite make up my mind where to send you.
There's St George's--that's the C. of E.--and there's the Baptist
Chapel where I go myself. Most of our parents are Nonconformists,
and I don't know as they'd quite approve of a C. of E. teacher.
You can't be too careful with the parents. They had a bit of a
scare two years ago when it turned out that the teacher I had then
was actually a Roman Catholic, if you please! Of course she kept
it dark as long as she could, but it came out in the end, and three
of the parents took their children away. I got rid of her the same
day as I found it out, naturally.'
Dorothy was silent.
'Still,' went on Mrs Creevy, 'we HAVE got three C. of E. pupils,
and I don't know as the Church connexion mightn't be worked up a
bit. So perhaps you'd better risk it and go to St George's. But
you want to be a bit careful, you know. I'm told St George's is
one of these churches where they go in for a lot of bowing and
scraping and crossing yourself and all that. We've got two parents
that are Plymouth Brothers, and they'd throw a fit if they heard
you'd been seen crossing yourself. So don't go and do THAT,
whatever you do.'
'Very well,' said Dorothy.
'And just you keep your eyes well open during the sermon. Have a
good look round and see if there's any young girls in the
congregation that we could get hold of. If you see any likely
looking ones, get on to the parson afterwards and try and find out
their names and addresses.'
So Dorothy went to St George's. It was a shade 'Higher' than St
Athelstan's had been; chairs, not pews, but no incense, and the
vicar (his name was Mr Gore-Williams) wore a plain cassock and
surplice except on festival days. As for the services, they were
so like those at home that Dorothy could go through them, and utter
all the responses at the right moment, in a state of the completest
abstraction.
There was never a moment when the power of worship returned to her.
Indeed, the whole concept of worship was meaningless to her now;
her faith had vanished, utterly and irrevocably. It is a
mysterious thing, the loss of faith--as mysterious as faith itself.
Like faith, it is ultimately not rooted in logic; it is a change in
the climate of the mind. But however little the church services
might mean to her, she did not regret the hours she spent in
church. On the contrary, she looked forward to her Sunday mornings
as blessed interludes of peace; and that not only because Sunday
morning meant a respite from Mrs Creevy's prying eye and nagging
voice. In another and deeper sense the atmosphere of the church
was soothing and reassuring to her. For she perceived that in all
that happens in church, however absurd and cowardly its supposed
purpose may be, there is something--it is hard to define, but
something of decency, of spiritual comeliness--that is not easily
found in the world outside. It seemed to her that even though you
no longer believe, it is better to go to church than not; better to
follow in the ancient ways, than to drift in rootless freedom. She
knew very well that she would never again be able to utter a prayer
and mean it; but she knew also
that for the rest of her life she
must continue with the observances to which she had been bred.
Just this much remained to her of the faith that had once, like the
bones in a living frame, held all her life together.
But as yet she did not think very deeply about the loss of her
faith and what it might mean to her in the future. She was too
busy merely existing, merely struggling to make her nerves hold out
for the rest of that miserable term. For as the term drew to an
end, the job of keeping the class in order grew more and more
exhausting. The girls behaved atrociously, and they were all the
bitterer against Dorothy because they had once been fond of her.
She had deceived them, they felt. She had started off by being
decent, and now she had turned out to be just a beastly old teacher
like the rest of them--a nasty old beast who kept on and on with
those awful handwriting lessons and snapped your head off if you so
much as made a blot on your book. Dorothy caught them eyeing her
face, sometimes, with the aloof, cruel scrutiny of children. They
had thought her pretty once, and now they thought her ugly, old,
and scraggy. She had grown, indeed, much thinner since she had
been at Ringwood House. They hated her now, as they had hated all
their previous teachers.
Sometimes they baited her quite deliberately. The older and more
intelligent girls understood the situation well enough--understood
that Millie was under old Creevy's thumb and that she got dropped
on afterwards when they had been making too much noise; sometimes
they made all the noise they dared, just so as to bring old Creevy
in and have the pleasure of watching Millie's face while old Creevy
told her off. There were times when Dorothy could keep her temper
and forgive them all they did, because she realized that it was
only a healthy instinct that made them rebel against the loathsome
monotony of their work. But there were other times when her nerves
were more on edge than usual, and when she looked round at the
score of silly little faces, grinning or mutinous, and found it
possible to hate them. Children are so blind, so selfish, so
merciless. They do not know when they are tormenting you past
bearing, and if they did know they would not care. You may do your
very best for them, you may keep your temper in situations that
would try a saint, and yet if you are forced to bore them and
oppress them, they will hate you for it without ever asking
themselves whether it is you who are to blame. How true--when you
happen not to be a school-teacher yourself--how true those often-
quoted lines sound--
Under a cruel eye outworn
The little ones spend the day
In sighing and dismay!
But when you yourself are the cruel eye outworn, you realize that
there is another side to the picture.
The last week came, and the dirty farce of 'exams', was carried
through. The system, as explained by Mrs Creevy, was quite simple.
You coached the children in, for example, a series of sums until
you were quite certain that they could get them right, and then set
them the same sums as an arithmetic paper before they had time to
forget the answers; and so with each subject in turn. The
children's papers were, of course, sent home for their parents'
inspection. And Dorothy wrote the reports under Mrs Creevy's
dictation, and she had to write 'excellent' so many times that--as
sometimes happens when you write a word over and over again--she
forgot how to spell it and began writing in 'excelent', 'exsellent',
'ecsellent', 'eccelent'.
The last day passed in fearful tumults. Not even Mrs Creevy
herself could keep the children in order. By midday Dorothy's
nerves were in rags, and Mrs Creevy gave her a 'talking to' in
front of the seven children who stayed to dinner. In the afternoon
the noise was worse than ever, and at last Dorothy, overcome,
appealed to the girls almost tearfully to stop.
'Girls!' she called out, raising her voice to make herself heard
through the din. 'PLEASE stop it, PLEASE! You're behaving
horribly to me. Do you think it's kind to go on like this?'
That was fatal, of course. Never, never, never throw yourself on
the mercy of a child! There was an instant's hush, and then one
child cried out, loudly and derisively, 'Mill-iee!' The next
moment the whole class had taken it up, even the imbecile Mavis,
chanting all together 'Mill-iee! Mill-iee! Mill-iee!' At that,
something within Dorothy seemed to snap. She paused for an
instant, picked out the girl who was making the most noise, walked
up to her, and gave her a smack across the ear almost as hard as
she could hit. Happily it was only one of the 'medium payers'.
6
On the first day of the holidays Dorothy received a letter from Mr
Warburton.
My Dear Dorothy [he wrote],--Or should I call you Ellen, as I
understand that is your new name? You must, I am afraid, have
thought it very heartless of me not to have written sooner, but I
assure you that it was not until ten days ago that I even heard
anything about our supposed escapade. I have been abroad, first in
various parts of France, then in Austria and then in Rome, and, as
you know, I avoid my fellow countrymen most strenuously on these
trips. They are disgusting enough even at home, but in foreign
parts their behaviour makes me so ashamed of them that I generally
try to pass myself off as an American.
When I got to Knype Hill your father refused to see me, but I
managed to get hold of Victor Stone, who gave me your address and
the name you are using. He seemed rather reluctant to do so, and I
gathered that even he, like everyone else in this poisonous town,
still believes that you have misbehaved yourself in some way. I
think the theory that you and I eloped together has been dropped,
but you must, they feel, have done SOMETHING scandalous. A young
woman has left home suddenly, therefore there must be a man in the
case; that is how the provincial mind works, you see. I need not
tell you that I have been contradicting the whole story with the
utmost vigour. You will be glad to hear that I managed to corner
that disgusting hag, Mrs Semprill, and give her a piece of my mind;
and I assure you that a piece of MY mind is distinctly formidable.
But the woman is simply sub-human. I could get nothing out of her
except hypocritical snivellings about 'poor, POOR Dorothy'.
I hear that your father misses you very much, and would gladly have
you home again if it were not for the scandal. His meals are never
punctual nowadays, it seems. He gives it out that you 'went away
to recuperate from a slight illness and have now got an excellent
post at a girls' school'. You will be surprised to hear of one
thing that has happened to him. He has been obliged to pay off all
his debts! I am told that the tradesmen rose in a body and held
what was practically a creditors' meeting in
the Rectory. Not the
kind of thing that could have happened at Plumstead Episcopi--but
these are democratic days, alas! You, evidently, were the only
person who could keep the tradesmen permanently at bay.
And now I must tell you some of my own news, etc., etc., etc.
At this point Dorothy tore the letter up in disappointment and even
in annoyance. He might have shown a little more sympathy! she
thought. It was just like Mr Warburton after getting her into
serious trouble--for after all, he was principally to blame for
what had happened--to be so flippant and unconcerned about it. But
when she had thought it over she acquitted him of heartlessness.
He had done what little was possible to help her, and he could not
be expected to pity her for troubles of which he had not heard.
Besides, his own life had been a series of resounding scandals;
probably he could not understand that to a woman a scandal is a
serious matter.
At Christmas Dorothy's father also wrote, and what was more, sent
her a Christmas present of two pounds. It was evident from the
tone of his letter that he had forgiven Dorothy by this time. WHAT
exactly he had forgiven her was not certain, because it was not
certain what exactly she had done; but still, he had forgiven her.
The letter started with some perfunctory but quite friendly
inquiries. He hoped her new job suited her, he wrote. And were
her rooms at the school comfortable and the rest of the staff
congenial? He had heard that they did one very well at schools
nowadays--very different from what it had been forty years ago.
Now, in his day, etc., etc., etc. He had, Dorothy perceived, not
the dimmest idea of her present circumstances. At the mention of
schools his mind flew to Winchester, his old school; such a place
as Ringwood House was beyond his imagining.
The rest of the letter was taken up with grumblings about the way
things were going in the parish. The Rector complained of being
worried and overworked. The wretched churchwardens kept bothering
him with this and that, and he was growing very tired of Proggett's
reports about the collapsing belfry, and the daily woman whom he
had engaged to help Ellen was a great nuisance and had put her
broom-handle through the face of the grandfather clock in his
study--and so on, and so forth, for a number of pages. He said
several times in a mumbling roundabout way that he wished Dorothy
were there to help him; but he did not actually suggest that she
should come home. Evidently it was still necessary that she should
remain out of sight and out of mind--a skeleton in a distant and
well-locked cupboard.
The letter filled Dorothy with sudden painful homesickness. She
found herself pining to be back at her parish visiting and her Girl
Guides' cooking class, and wondering unhappily how her father had
got on without her all this while and whether those two women were
looking after him properly. She was fond of her father, in a way
that she had never dared to show; for he was not a person to whom
you could make any display of affection. It surprised and rather
shocked her to realize how little he had been in her thoughts
during the past four months. There had been periods of weeks at a
time when she had forgotten his existence. But the truth was that
the mere business of keeping body and soul together had left her
with no leisure for other emotions.
Now, however, school work was over, and she had leisure and to
spare, for though Mrs Creevy did her best she could not invent
enough household jobs to keep Dorothy busy for more than part of
the day. She made it quite plain to Dorothy that during the
holidays she was nothing but a useless expense, and she watched her
at her meals (obviously feeling it an outrage that she should eat
when she wasn't working) in a way that finally became unbearable.
So Dorothy kept out of the house as much as possible, and, feeling