A Clergyman's Daughter Page 26

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