A Clergyman's Daughter Page 22

names of some of the people you were learning about in your last

  history lesson.'

  More glances were exchanged, and a very plain little girl in the

  front row, in a brown jumper and skirt, with her hair screwed into

  two tight pigtails, remarked cloudily, 'It was about the Ancient

  Britons.' At this two other girls took courage, and answered

  simultaneously. One of them said, 'Columbus', and the other

  'Napoleon'.

  Somehow, after that, Dorothy seemed to see her way more clearly.

  It was obvious that instead of being uncomfortably knowledgeable as

  she had feared, the class knew as nearly as possible no history at

  all. With this discovery her stage-fright vanished. She grasped

  that before she could do anything else with them it was necessary

  to find out what, if anything, these children knew. So, instead of

  following the time-table, she spent the rest of the morning in

  questioning the entire class on each subject in turn; when she had

  finished with history (and it took about five minutes to get to the

  bottom of their historical knowledge) she tried them with geography,

  with English grammar, with French, with arithmetic--with everything,

  in fact, that they were supposed to have learned. By twelve o'clock

  she had plumbed, though not actually explored, the frightful abysses

  of their ignorance.

  For they knew nothing, absolutely nothing--nothing, nothing,

  nothing, like the Dadaists. It was appalling that even children

  could be so ignorant. There were only two girls in the class who

  knew whether the earth went round the sun or the sun round the

  earth, and not a single one of them could tell Dorothy who was the

  last king before George V, or who wrote Hamlet, or what was meant

  by a vulgar fraction, or which ocean you crossed to get to America,

  the Atlantic or the Pacific. And the big girls of fifteen were not

  much better than the tiny infants of eight, except that the former

  could at least read consecutively and write neat copperplate. That

  was the one thing that nearly all of the older girls could do--they

  could write neatly. Mrs Creevy had seen to that. And of course,

  here and there in the midst of their ignorance, there were small,

  disconnected islets of knowledge; for example, some odd stanzas

  from 'pieces of poetry' that they had learned by heart, and a few

  Ollendorffian French sentences such as 'Passez-moi le beurre, s'il

  vous plait' and 'Le fils du jardinier a perdu son chapeau', which

  they appeared to have learned as a parrot learns 'Pretty Poll'. As

  for their arithmetic, it was a little better than the other

  subjects. Most of them knew how to add and subtract, about half of

  them had some notion of how to multiply, and there were even three

  or four who had struggled as far as long division. But that was

  the utmost limit of their knowledge; and beyond, in every direction,

  lay utter, impenetrable night.

  Moreover, not only did they know nothing, but they were so unused

  to being questioned that it was often difficult to get answers out

  of them at all. It was obvious that whatever they knew they had

  learned in an entirely mechanical manner, and they could only gape

  in a sort of dull bewilderment when asked to think for themselves.

  However, they did not seem unwilling, and evidently they had made

  up their minds to be 'good'--children are always 'good' with a new

  teacher; and Dorothy persisted, and by degrees the children grew,

  or seemed to grow, a shade less lumpish. She began to pick up,

  from the answers they gave her, a fairly accurate notion of what

  Miss Strong's regime had been like.

  It appeared that, though theoretically they had learned all the

  usual school subjects, the only ones that had been at all seriously

  taught were handwriting and arithmetic. Mrs Creevy was particularly

  keen on handwriting. And besides this they had spent great

  quantities of time--an hour or two out of every day, it seemed--in

  drudging through a dreadful routine called 'copies.' 'Copies' meant

  copying things out of textbooks or off the blackboard. Miss Strong

  would write up, for example, some sententious little 'essay' (there

  was an essay entitled 'Spring' which recurred in all the older

  girls' books, and which began, 'Now, when girlish April is tripping

  through the land, when the birds are chanting gaily on the boughs

  and the dainty flowerets bursting from their buds', etc., etc.), and

  the girls would make fair copies of it in their copybooks; and the

  parents, to whom the copybooks were shown from time to time, were no

  doubt suitably impressed. Dorothy began to grasp that everything

  that the girls had been taught was in reality aimed at the parents.

  Hence the 'copies', the insistence on handwriting, and the parroting

  of ready-made French phrases; they were cheap and easy ways of

  creating an impression. Meanwhile, the little girls at the bottom

  of the class seemed barely able to read and write, and one of them--

  her name was Mavis Williams, and she was a rather sinister-looking

  child of eleven, with eyes too far apart--could not even count. This

  child seemed to have done nothing at all during the past term and a

  half except to write pothooks. She had quite a pile of books filled

  with pothooks--page after page of pothooks, looping on and on like

  the mangrove roots in some tropical swamp.

  Dorothy tried not to hurt the children's feelings by exclaiming at

  their ignorance, but in her heart she was amazed and horrified.

  She had not known that schools of this description still existed in

  the civilized world. The whole atmosphere of the place was so

  curiously antiquated--so reminiscent of those dreary little private

  schools that you read about in Victorian novels. As for the few

  textbooks that the class possessed, you could hardly look at them

  without feeling as though you had stepped back into the mid

  nineteenth century. There were only three textbooks of which each

  child had a copy. One was a shilling arithmetic, pre Great War but

  fairly serviceable, and another was a horrid little book called The

  Hundred Page History of Britain--a nasty little duodecimo book with

  a gritty brown cover, and, for frontispiece, a portrait of Boadicea

  with a Union Jack draped over the front of her chariot. Dorothy

  opened this book at random, came to page 91, and read:

  After the French Revolution was over, the self-styled Emperor

  Napoleon Buonaparte attempted to set up his sway, but though he won

  a few victories against continental troops, he soon found that in

  the 'thin red line' he had more than met his match. Conclusions

  were tried upon the field of Waterloo, where 50,000 Britons put to

  flight 70,000 Frenchmen--for the Prussians, our allies, arrived too

  late for the battle. With a ringing British cheer our men charged

  down the slope and the enemy broke and fled. We now come on to the

  great Reform Bill of 1832, the first of those beneficent reforms

  which have made British liberty what it is and marked us off from

  the less fortunate nations [etc
., etc.]. . . .

  The date of the book was 1888. Dorothy, who had never seen a

  history book of this description before, examined it with a feeling

  approaching horror. There was also an extraordinary little

  'reader', dated 1863. It consisted mostly of bits out of Fenimore

  Cooper, Dr Watts, and Lord Tennyson, and at the end there were the

  queerest little 'Nature Notes' with woodcut illustrations. There

  would be a woodcut of an elephant, and underneath in small print:

  'The elephant is a sagacious beast. He rejoices in the shade of

  the Palm Trees, and though stronger than six horses he will allow a

  little child to lead him. His food is Bananas.' And so on to the

  Whale, the Zebra, and Porcupine, and the Spotted Camelopard. There

  were also, in the teacher's desk, a copy of Beautiful Joe, a

  forlorn book called Peeps at Distant Lands, and a French phrase-

  book dated 1891. It was called All you will need on your Parisian

  Trip, and the first phrase given was 'Lace my stays, but not too

  tightly'. In the whole room there was not such a thing as an atlas

  or a set of geometrical instruments.

  At eleven there was a break of ten minutes, and some of the girls

  played dull little games at noughts and crosses or quarrelled over

  pencil-cases, and a few who had got over their first shyness

  clustered round Dorothy's desk and talked to her. They told her

  some more about Miss Strong and her methods of teaching, and how

  she used to twist their ears when they made blots on their

  copybooks. It appeared that Miss Strong had been a very strict

  teacher except when she was 'taken bad', which happened about twice

  a week. And when she was taken bad she used to drink some medicine

  out of a little brown bottle, and after drinking it she would grow

  quite jolly for a while and talk to them about her brother in

  Canada. But on her last day--the time when she was taken so bad

  during the arithmetic lesson--the medicine seemed to make her worse

  than ever, because she had no sooner drunk it than she began

  sinking and fell across a desk, and Mrs Creevy had to carry her out

  of the room.

  After the break there was another period of three quarters of an

  hour, and then school ended for the morning. Dorothy felt stiff

  and tired after three hours in the chilly but stuffy room, and she

  would have liked to go out of doors for a breath of fresh air, but

  Mrs Creevy had told her beforehand that she must come and help get

  dinner ready. The girls who lived near the school mostly went home

  for dinner, but there were seven who had dinner in the 'morning-

  room' at tenpence a time. It was an uncomfortable meal, and passed

  in almost complete silence, for the girls were frightened to talk

  under Mrs Creevy's eye. The dinner was stewed scrag end of mutton,

  and Mrs Creevy showed extraordinary dexterity in serving the pieces

  of lean to the 'good payers' and the pieces of fat to the 'medium

  payers'. As for the three 'bad payers', they ate a shamefaced

  lunch out of paper bags in the school-room.

  School began again at two o'clock. Already, after only one

  morning's teaching, Dorothy went back to her work with secret

  shrinking and dread. She was beginning to realize what her life

  would be like, day after day and week after week, in that sunless

  room, trying to drive the rudiments of knowledge into unwilling

  brats. But when she had assembled the girls and called their names

  over, one of them, a little peaky child with mouse-coloured hair,

  called Laura Firth, came up to her desk and presented her with a

  pathetic bunch of browny-yellow chrysanthemums, 'from all of us'.

  The girls had taken a liking to Dorothy, and had subscribed

  fourpence among themselves, to buy her a bunch of flowers.

  Something stirred in Dorothy's heart as she took the ugly flowers.

  She looked with more seeing eyes than before at the anaemic faces

  and shabby clothes of the children, and was all of a sudden

  horribly ashamed to think that in the morning she had looked at

  them with indifference, almost with dislike. Now, a profound pity

  took possession of her. The poor children, the poor children! How

  they had been stunted and maltreated! And with it all they had

  retained the childish gentleness that could make them squander

  their few pennies on flowers for their teacher.

  She felt quite differently towards her job from that moment

  onwards. A feeling of loyalty and affection had sprung up in her

  heart. This school was HER school; she would work for it and be

  proud of it, and make every effort to turn it from a place of

  bondage into a place human and decent. Probably it was very little

  that she could do. She was so inexperienced and unfitted for her

  job that she must educate herself before she could even begin to

  educate anybody else. Still, she would do her best; she would do

  whatever willingness and energy could do to rescue these children

  from the horrible darkness in which they had been kept.

  3

  During the next few weeks there were two things that occupied

  Dorothy to the exclusion of all others. One, getting her class

  into some kind of order; the other, establishing a concordat with

  Mrs Creevy.

  The second of the two was by a great deal the more difficult. Mrs

  Creevy's house was as vile a house to live in as one could possibly

  imagine. It was always more or less cold, there was not a

  comfortable chair in it from top to bottom, and the food was

  disgusting. Teaching is harder work than it looks, and a teacher

  needs good food to keep him going. It was horribly dispiriting to

  have to work on a diet of tasteless mutton stews, damp boiled

  potatoes full of little black eyeholes, watery rice puddings, bread

  and scrape, and weak tea--and never enough even of these. Mrs

  Creevy, who was mean enough to take a pleasure in skimping even her

  own food, ate much the same meals as Dorothy, but she always had

  the lion's share of them. Every morning at breakfast the two fried

  eggs were sliced up and unequally partitioned, and the dish of

  marmalade remained for ever sacrosanct. Dorothy grew hungrier and

  hungrier as the term went on. On the two evenings a week when she

  managed to get out of doors she dipped into her dwindling store of

  money and bought slabs of plain chocolate, which she ate in the

  deepest secrecy--for Mrs Creevy, though she starved Dorothy more or

  less intentionally, would have been mortally offended if she had

  known that she bought food for herself.

  The worst thing about Dorothy's position was that she had no

  privacy and very little time that she could call her own. Once

  school was over for the day her only refuge was the 'morning-room',

  where she was under Mrs Creevy's eye, and Mrs Creevy's leading idea

  was that Dorothy must never be left in peace for ten minutes

  together. She had taken it into her head, or pretended to do so,

  that Dorothy was an idle person who needed keeping up to the mark.

  And so it was always, 'Well, Miss Millborough, you don't seem
to

  have very much to do this evening, do you? Aren't there some

  exercise books that want correcting? Or why don't you get your

  needle and do a bit of sewing? I'm sure _I_ couldn't bear to just

  sit in my chair doing nothing like you do!' She was for ever

  finding household jobs for Dorothy to do, even making her scrub the

  schoolroom floor on Saturday mornings when the girls did not come

  to school; but this was done out of pure ill nature, for she did

  not trust Dorothy to do the work properly, and generally did it

  again after her. One evening Dorothy was unwise enough to bring

  back a novel from the public library. Mrs Creevy flared up at the

  very sight of it. 'Well, really, Miss Millborough! I shouldn't

  have thought you'd have had time to READ!' she said bitterly. She

  herself had never read a book right through in her life, and was

  proud of it.

  Moreover, even when Dorothy was not actually under her eye, Mrs

  Creevy had ways of making her presence felt. She was for ever

  prowling in the neighbourhood of the schoolroom, so that Dorothy

  never felt quite safe from her intrusion; and when she thought

  there was too much noise she would suddenly rap on the wall with

  her broom-handle in a way that made the children jump and put them

  off their work. At all hours of the day she was restlessly,

  noisily active. When she was not cooking meals she was banging

  about with broom and dustpan, or harrying the charwoman, or

  pouncing down upon the schoolroom to 'have a look round' in hopes

  of catching Dorothy or the children up to mischief, or 'doing a bit

  of gardening'--that is, mutilating with a pair of shears the

  unhappy little shrubs that grew amid wastes of gravel in the back

  garden. On only two evenings a week was Dorothy free of her, and

  that was when Mrs Creevy sallied forth on forays which she called

  'going after the girls'; that is to say, canvassing likely parents.

  These evenings Dorothy usually spent in the public library, for

  when Mrs Creevy was not at home she expected Dorothy to keep out of

  the house, to save fire and gaslight. On other evenings Mrs Creevy

  was busy writing dunning letters to the parents, or letters to the

  editor of the local paper, haggling over the price of a dozen

  advertisements, or poking about the girls' desks to see that their

  exercise books had been properly corrected, or 'doing a bit of

  sewing'. Whenever occupation failed her for even five minutes she

  got out her workbox and 'did a bit of sewing'--generally

  restitching some bloomers of harsh white linen of which she had

  pairs beyond number. They were the most chilly looking garments

  that one could possibly imagine; they seemed to carry upon them, as

  no nun's coif or anchorite's hair shirt could ever have done, the

  impress of a frozen and awful chastity. The sight of them set you

  wondering about the late Mr Creevy, even to the point of wondering

  whether he had ever existed.

  Looking with an outsider's eye at Mrs Creevy's manner of life, you

  would have said that she had no PLEASURES whatever. She never did

  any of the things that ordinary people do to amuse themselves--

  never went to the pictures, never looked at a book, never ate

  sweets, never cooked a special dish for dinner or dressed herself

  in any kind of finery. Social life meant absolutely nothing to

  her. She had no friends, was probably incapable of imagining such

  a thing as friendship, and hardly ever exchanged a word with a

  fellow being except on business. Of religious belief she had not

  the smallest vestige. Her attitude towards religion, though she

  went to the Baptist Chapel every Sunday to impress the parents with

  her piety, was a mean anti-clericalism founded on the notion that

  the clergy are 'only after your money'. She seemed a creature

  utterly joyless, utterly submerged by the dullness of her

  existence. But in reality it was not so. There were several

  things from which she derived acute and inexhaustible pleasure.

  For instance, there was her avarice over money. It was the leading