Ursula watched him fascinated. In the gaslight and gloom and the narrowness of the room, all seemed unreal.
‘Isn’t it a nasty morning,’ she said.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘it’s not much of weather.’
But in here it seemed that neither morning nor weather really existed. The place was timeless. He spoke in an occupied voice, like an echo. Ursula did not know what to say. She took off her waterproof.
‘Am I early?’ she asked.
The man looked first at a little clock, then at her. His eyes seemed to be sharpened to needle-points of vision.
‘Twenty-five past,’ he said. ‘You’re the second to come. I’m first this morning.’
Ursula sat down gingerly on the edge of a chair, and watched his thin red hands rubbing away on the white surface of the paper, then pausing, pulling up a corner of the sheet, peering, and rubbing away again. There was a great heap of curled white-and-scribbled sheets on the table.
‘Must you do so many?’ asked Ursula.
Again the man glanced up sharply. He was about thirty or thirty-three years old, thin, greenish, with a long nose and a sharp face. His eyes were blue, and sharp as points of steel, rather beautiful, the girl thought.
‘Sixty-three,’ he answered.
‘So many!’ she said, gently. Then she remembered.
‘But they’re not all for your class, are they?’ she added.
‘Why aren’t they?’ he replied, a fierceness in his voice.
Ursula was rather frightened by his mechanical ignoring of her, and his directness of statement. It was something new to her. She had never been treated like this before, as if she did not count, as if she were addressing a machine.
‘It is too many,’ she said sympathetically.
‘You’ll get about the same,’ he said.
That was all she received. She sat rather blank, not knowing how to feel. Still she liked him. He seemed so cross. There was a queer, sharp, keen-edge feeling about him that attracted her and frightened her at the same time. It was so cold, and against his nature.
The door opened, and a short, neutral-tinted young woman of about twenty-eight appeared.
‘Oh, Ursula!’ the newcomer exclaimed. ‘You are here early! My word, I’ll warrant you don’t keep it up. That’s Mr Williamson’s peg. This is yours. Standard Five* teacher always has this. Aren’t you going to take your hat off?’
Miss Violet Harby removed Ursula’s waterproof from the peg on which it was hung, to one a little further down the row. She had already snatched the pins from her own stuff hat,* and jammed them through her coat. She turned to Ursula, as she pushed up her frizzed, flat, dun-coloured hair.
‘Isn’t it a beastly morning,’ she exclaimed, ‘beastly! And if there’s one thing I hate above another it’s a wet Monday morning;—pack of kids trailing in anyhow-nohow, and no holding ’em—’
She had taken a black pinafore from a newspaper package, and was tying it round her waist.
‘You’ve brought an apron, haven’t you?’ she said jerkily, glancing at Ursula. ‘Oh—you’ll want one. You’ve no idea what a sight you’ll look before half-past four, what with chalk and ink and kids’ dirty feet.—Well, I can send a boy down to mamma’s for one.’
‘Oh, it doesn’t matter,’ said Ursula.
‘Oh, yes—I can send easily,’ cried Miss Harby.
Ursula’s heart sank. Everybody seemed so cocksure and so bossy. How was she going to get on with such jolty, jerky, bossy people? And Miss Harby had not spoken a word to the man at the table. She simply ignored him. Ursula felt the callous crude rudeness between the two teachers.
The two girls went out into the passage. A few children were already clattering in the porch.
‘Jim Richards,’ called Miss Harby, hard and authoritative. A boy came sheepishly forward.
‘Shall you go down to our house for me, eh?’ said Miss Harby, in a commanding, condescending, coaxing voice. She did not wait for an answer. ‘Go down and ask mamma to send me one of my school pinas, for Miss Brangwen—shall you?’
The boy muttered a sheepish ‘Yes, Miss,’ and was moving away.
‘Hey,’ called Miss Harby. ‘Come here—now what are you going for? What shall you say to mamma?’
‘A school pina—’muttered the boy.
‘Please, Mrs Harby, Miss Harby says will you send her another school pinafore for Miss Brangwen, because she’s come without one.’
‘Yes, Miss,’ muttered the boy, head ducked, and was moving off. Miss Harby caught him back, holding him by the shoulder.
‘What are you going to say?’
‘Please, Mrs Harby, Miss Harby wants a pinny for Miss Brangwin,’ muttered the boy very sheepishly.
‘Miss Brangwen!’ laughed Miss Harby, pushing him away. ‘Here, you’d better have my umbrella—wait a minute.’
The unwilling boy was rigged up with Miss Harby’s umbrella, and set off.
‘Don’t take long over it,’ called Miss Harby, after him. Then she turned to Ursula, and said brightly:
‘Oh, he’s a caution,* that lad—but not bad, you know.’
‘No,’ Ursula agreed, weakly.
The latch of the door clicked, and they entered the big room. Ursula glanced down the place. Its rigid, long silence was official and chilling. Half way down was a glass partition, the doors of which were open. A clock ticked re-echoing, and Miss Harby’s voice sounded double as she said:
‘This is the big room—Standard Five-Six-and-Seven.—Here’s your place—Five—’
She stood in the near end of the great room. There was a small high teacher’s desk facing a squadron of long benches, two high windows in the wall opposite.
It was fascinating and horrible to Ursula. The curious, unliving light in the room changed her character. She thought it was the rainy morning. Then she looked up again, because of the horrid feeling of being shut in a rigid, inflexible air, away from all feeling of the ordinary day; and she noticed that the windows were of ribbed, suffused glass.
The prison was round her now! She looked at the walls, colour washed, pale green and chocolate, at the large windows with frowsy geraniums against the pale glass, at the long rows of desks, arranged in a squadron, and dread filled her. This was a new world, a new life, with which she was threatened. But still excited, she climbed into her chair at her teacher’s desk. It was high, and her feet could not reach the ground, but must rest on the step. Lifted up there, off the ground, she was in office. How queer, how queer it all was! How different it was from the mist of rain blowing over Cossethay. As she thought of her own village, a spasm of yearning crossed her, it seemed so far off, so lost to her.
She was here in this hard, stark reality—reality. It was queer that she should call this the reality, which she had never known till to-day, and which now so filled her with dread and dislike, that she wished she might go away. This was the reality, and Cossethay, her beloved, beautiful, well-known Cossethay, which was as herself unto her, that was minor reality. This prison of a school was reality. Here, then, she would sit in state, the queen of scholars! Here she would realise her dream of being the beloved teacher bringing light and joy to her children! But the desks before her had an abstract angularity that bruised her sentiment and made her shrink. She winced, feeling she had been a fool in her anticipations. She had brought her feelings and her generosity to where neither generosity nor emotion were wanted. And already she felt rebuffed, troubled by the new atmosphere, out of place.
She slid down, and they returned to the teachers’ room. It was queer to feel that one ought to alter one’s personality. She was nobody, there was no reality in herself, the reality was all outside of her, and she must apply herself to it.
Mr Harby was in the teachers’ room, standing before a big, open cupboard, in which Ursula could see piles of pink blotting paper, heaps of shiny new books, boxes of chalk, and bottles of coloured inks. It looked a treasure store.
The schoolmaster was a short, sturdy
man, with a fine head, and a heavy jowl. Nevertheless he was good-looking, with his shapely brows and nose, and his great, hanging moustache. He seemed absorbed in his work, and took no notice of Ursula’s entry. There was something insulting in the way he could be so actively unaware of another person, so occupied.
When he had a moment of absence, he looked up from the table and said good-morning to Ursula. There was a pleasant light in his brown eyes. He seemed very manly and incontrovertible, like something she wanted to push over.
‘You had a wet walk,’ he said to Ursula.
‘Oh, I don’t mind, I’m used to it,’ she replied, with a nervous little laugh.
But already he was not listening. Her words sounded ridiculous and babbling. He was taking no notice of her.
‘You will sign your name here,’ he said to her, as if she were some child—‘and the time when you come and go.’
Ursula signed her name in the time book and stood back. No one took any further notice of her. She beat her brains for something to say, but in vain.
‘I’d let them in now,’ said Mr Harby to the thin man, who was very hastily arranging his papers.
The assistant teacher made no sign of acquiescence, and went on with what he was doing. The atmosphere in the room grew tense. At the last moment Mr Brunt slipped into his coat.
‘You will go to the girls’ lobby,’ said the schoolmaster to Ursula, with a fascinating, insulting geniality, purely official and domineering.
She went out and found Miss Harby, and another girl teacher, in the porch. On the asphalt yard the rain was falling. A toneless bell tang-tang-tanged drearily overhead, monotonously, insistently. It came to an end. Then Mr Brunt was seen, bare-headed, standing at the other gate of the school yard, blowing shrill blasts on a whistle and looking down the rainy, dreary street.
Boys in gangs and streams came trotting up, running past the master and with a loud clatter of feet and voices, over the yard to the boy’s porch. Girls were running and walking through the other entrance.
In the porch where Ursula stood there was a great noise of girls, who were tearing off their coats and hats, and hanging them on the racks bristling with pegs. There was a smell of wet clothing, a tossing out of wet, draggled hair, a noise of voices and feet.
The mass of girls grew greater, the rage around the pegs grew steadier, the scholars tended to fall into little noisy gangs in the porch. Then Violet Harby clapped her hands, clapped them louder, with a shrill ‘Quiet, girls, quiet!’
There was a pause. The hubbub died down but did not cease.
‘What did I say?’ cried Miss Harby, shrilly.
There was almost complete silence. Sometimes a girl, rather late, whirled into the porch and flung off her things.
‘Leaders—in place,’ commanded Miss Harby shrilly.
Pairs of girls in pinafores and long hair stood separate in the porch.
‘Standard Four, Five, and Six—fall in,’ cried Miss Harby.
There was a hubbub, which gradually resolved itself into three columns of girls, two and two, standing smirking in the passage. In among the peg-racks, other teachers were putting the lower classes into ranks.
Ursula stood by her own Standard Five. They were jerking their shoulders, tossing their hair, nudging, writhing, staring, grinning, whispering and twisting.
A sharp whistle was heard, and Standard Six, the biggest girls, set off, led by Miss Harby. Ursula, with her Standard Five, followed after. She stood beside a smirking, grinning row of girls, waiting in a narrow passage. What she was herself she did not know.
Suddenly the sound of a piano was heard, and Standard Six set off hollowly down the big room. The boys had entered by another door. The piano played on, a march tune, Standard Five followed to the door of the big room. Mr Harby was seen away beyond at his desk. Mr Brunt guarded the other door of the room. Ursula’s class pushed up. She stood near them. They glanced and smirked and shoved.
‘Go on,’ said Ursula.
They tittered.
‘Go on,’ said Ursula, for the piano continued.
The girls broke loosely into the room. Mr Harby, who had seemed immersed in some occupation, away at his desk, lifted his head and thundered,
‘Halt!’
There was a halt, the piano stopped. The boys who were just starting through the other door, pushed back. The harsh, subdued voice of Mr Brunt was heard, then the booming shout of Mr Harby, from far down the room:
‘Who told Standard Five girls to come in like that?’
Ursula crimsoned. Her girls were glancing up at her, smirking their accusation.
‘I sent them in, Mr Harby,’ she said, in a clear, struggling voice. There was a moment of silence. Then Mr Harby roared from the distance.
‘Go back to your places, Standard Five girls.’
The girls glanced up at Ursula, accusing, rather jeering, furtive. They pushed back. Ursula’s heart hardened with ignominious pain.
‘Forward—march,’ came Mr Brunt’s voice, and the girls set off, keeping time with the ranks of boys.
Ursula faced her class, some fifty-five boys and girls who stood filling the ranks of the desks. She felt utterly nonexistent. She had no place nor being there. She faced the block of children.
Down the room she heard the rapid firing of questions. She stood before her class not knowing what to do. She waited painfully. Her block of children, fifty unknown faces, watched her, hostile, ready to jeer. She felt as if she were in torture over a fire of faces. And on every side she was naked to them. Of unutterable length and torture the seconds went by.
Then she gathered courage. She heard Mr Brunt asking questions in mental arithmetic. She stood near to her class, so that her voice need not be raised too much, and faltering, uncertain, she said:
‘Seven hats at two-pence ha’penny each?’
A grin went over the faces of the class, seeing her commence. She was red and suffering. Then some hands shot up like blades, and she asked for the answer.
The day passed incredibly slowly. She never knew what to do, there came horrible gaps, when she was merely exposed to the children; and when, relying on some pert little girl for information, she had started a lesson, she did not know how to go on with it properly. The children were her masters. She deferred to them. She could always hear Mr Brunt. Like a machine, always in the same hard, high, inhuman voice he went on with his teaching, oblivious of everything. And before this inhuman number of children she was always at bay. She could not get away from it. There it was, this class of fifty collective children, depending on her for command, for command it hated and resented. It made her feel she could not breathe: she must suffocate, it was so inhuman. They were so many, that they were not children. They were a squadron. She could not speak as she would to a child, because they were not individual children, they were a collective, inhuman thing.
Dinner time came, and stunned, bewildered, solitary, she went into the teacher’s room for dinner. Never had she felt such a stranger to life before. It seemed to her she had just disembarked from some strange horrible state where everything was in hell, a condition of hard, malevolent system. And she was not really free. The afternoon drew at her like some bondage.
The first week passed in a blind confusion. She did not know how to teach, and she felt she never would know. Mr Harby came down every now and then to her class, to see what she was doing. She felt so incompetent as he stood by, bullying and threatening, so unreal, that she wavered, became neutral and non-existent. But he stood there watching with that listening-genial smile of the eyes, that was really threatening; he said nothing, he made her go on teaching, she felt she had no soul in her body. Then he went away, and his going was like a derision. The class was his class. She was a wavering substitute. He thrashed and bullied, he was hated. But he was master. Though she was gentle and always considerate of her class, yet they belonged to Mr Harby, and they did not belong to her. Like some invincible source of the mechanism he kept all power to himsel
f. And the class owned his power. And in school it was power, and power alone that mattered.
Soon Ursula came to dread him, and at the bottom of her dread was a seed of hate, for she despised him, yet he was master of her. Then she began to get on. All the other teachers hated him, and fanned their hatred among themselves. For he was master of them and the children, he stood like a wheel to make absolute his authority over the herd. That seemed to be his one reason in life, to hold blind authority over the school. His teachers were his subjects as much as the scholars. Only, because they had some authority, his instinct was to detest them.
Ursula could not make herself a favourite with him. From the first moment she set hard against him. She set against Violet Harby also. Mr Harby was, however, too much for her, he was something she could not come to grips with, something too strong for her. She tried to approach him as a young, bright girl usually approaches a man, expecting a little chivalrous courtesy. But the fact that she was a girl, a woman, was ignored or used as a matter for contempt against her. She did not know what she was, nor what she must be. She wanted to remain her own responsive, personal self.
So she taught on. She made friends with the Standard Three teacher, Maggie Schofield. Miss Schofield was about twenty years old, a subdued girl who held aloof from the other teachers. She was rather beautiful, meditative, and seemed to live in another, lovelier world.
Ursula took her dinner to school, and during the second week ate it in Miss Schofield’s room. Standard Three classroom stood by itself and had windows on two sides, looking on to the playground. It was a passionate relief to find such a retreat in the jarring school. For there were pots of chrysanthemums and coloured leaves, and a big jar of berries: there were pretty little pictures on the wall, photogravure reproductions from Greuze,* and Reynolds’s ‘Age of Innocence,’* giving an air of intimacy; so that the room, with its window space, its smaller, tidier desks, its touch of pictures and flowers, made Ursula at once glad. Here at last was a little personal touch, to which she could respond.