Backwater · Chapter 3 (2/3)

Charlotte. Charlotte carried about a faint suggestion of relief. Miriam fled to her as she sat with the garden light on her hair, her lingering flush of distress rekindled by her amusement, her protective responsible smile beaming out through the endless blue of her eyes. Behind her painstaking life at the school was a country home, a farm somewhere far away. Of course it was dreadful for her to be a farmer’s daughter. She evidently knew it herself and said very little about it. But her large red hands, so strange handling schoolbooks, were comforting; and her holland apron with its bib under the fresh colouring of her face⁠—do you like butter? A buttercup under your chin⁠—brought to Miriam a picture of the farm, white amidst bright greenery, with a dairy and morning cockcrow and creamy white sheep on a hillside. It was all there with her as she sat at table reading “The Lamplighter.” The sound of her broad husky voice explaining to Miss Jenny had been full of it. But it was all past. She too had come to Banbury Park. She did not seem to mind Banbury Park. She was to study hard and be a governess. She evidently thought she was having a great chance⁠—she was fifteen and quite “uncultured.” How could she be turned into a governess? A sort of nursery governess, for farms, perhaps. But farms did not want books and worry. Miriam wanted to put her back into her farm, and sometimes her thoughts wearily brushed the idea of going with her. Perhaps, though, she had come away because her father could not keep her? The little problem hung about her as she sat sweetly there, common and good and strong. The golden light that seemed to belong specially to her came from a London garden, an unreal North London garden. Resounding in its little spaces were the blatterings and shouts of the deaf and dumb next door.

Miss Jenny left The Standard with Miriam after tea, stopping suddenly as she made her uncertain way from the tea-table to the door and saying absently, “Eh, you’d better read this, my dear. There’s a leader on the Education Commission. Would ye like to? Yes, I think you’d better.” Miriam accepted the large sheets with hesitating expressions of thanks, wondering rather fearfully what a leader might be and where she should find it. She knew the word. Her mother read “the leaders” in the evening⁠—“excellent leader” she sometimes said, and her father would put down his volume of Proceedings of the British Association, or Herbert Spencer’s First Principles, and condescendingly agree. But any discussion generally ended in his warning her not to believe a thing because she saw it in print, and a reminder that before she married she had thought that everything she saw in print was true, and quite often he would go on to general remarks about the gullibility of women, bringing in the story of the two large long-necked pearly transparent drawing-room vases with stems and soft masses of roses and leaves painted on their sides that she had given too much for at the door to a man who said they were Italian. Brummagem, Brummagem, he would end, mouthing the word and turning back to his book with the neighing laugh that made Miriam turn to the imagined picture of her mother in the first year of her married life, standing in the sunlight at the back door of the Babington house, with the varnished coach-house door on her right and the cucumber frames in front of her sloping up towards the bean-rows that began the kitchen garden; with her little scallopped bodice, her hooped skirt, her hair bunched in curls up on her high pad and falling round her neck, looking at the jugs with grave dark eyes. And that neighing laugh had come again and again all through the years until she sat meekly, flushed and suffering under the fierce gaslight, feeling every night of her life winter and summer as if the ceiling were coming down on her head, and read “leaders” cautiously, and knew when they were written in “a fine chaste dignified style.” But that was The Times. The Standard was a penny rag and probably not worth considering at all. In any case she would not read it at evening study. She had never had a newspaper in her hand before as far as she could remember. The girls would see that she did not know how to read it, and it would be snubby towards them to sit there as if she were a Miss Perne, scrumpling a great paper while they sat with their books. So she read her textbooks, a page of Saxon Kings with a ten-line summary of each reign, a list of six English counties with their capitals and the rivers the capitals stood on and the principal industries of each town, devising ways of remembering the lists and went on to Bell’s Standard Elocutionist. She had found the book amongst the school books on the schoolroom shelves. It was a “standard” book and must therefore be about something she ought to know something about if she were to hold her own in this North London world. There had been no “standard” books at school and the word offended her. It suggested fixed agreement about the things people ought to know and that she felt sure must be wrong, and not only wrong but “common”⁠ ⁠… standard readers⁠ ⁠… standard pianoforte tutors. She had learned to read in Reading Without Tears, and gone on to Classical Poems and Prose for the Young, her arithmetic book instead of being a thin cold paper-covered thing called Standard I, had been a pleasant green volume called Barnard Smith, that began at the beginning and went on to compound fractions and stocks. There was no Morris’s Grammar at Banbury Park, no Wetherell or English Accidence, no bits from Piers Plowman and pages of scraps of words with the way they changed in different languages and quotations, just sentences that had made her long for more⁠ ⁠… “up-clomb”⁠ ⁠… “the mist up-clomb.” She opened Bell’s Standard Elocutionist apprehensively, her mind working on possible meanings for elocutionist. She thought of ventriloquist and wondered dismally whether it was a book of conjuring tricks. It was poems, poems and prose, all mixed up together anyhow. The room was very still, the girls all sitting reading with their backs to the table so that nobody “poked.” She could not go on vaguely fluttering pages, so she read a solid-looking poem that was not divided up into verses.

“Robert of Sicily, brother of Pope Urbane And Valmond Emperor of Allemaine, Apparelled in magnificent attire, With retinue of many a knight and squire, On St. John’s eve, at vespers, proudly sat And heard the priests chant the Magnificat.” Should she go on? It was like the pieces in Scott’s novels, the best bits, before the characters began to talk.

… “and bay the moon than such a Roman and bay the moon than such a Roman,” muttered Nancie rapidly, swinging her feet. It would not be fair to read a thing that would take her right away and not teach her anything whilst the girls were learning their things for Monday. She hesitated and turned a page. The poem, she saw, soon began to break up into sentences with quotation signs; somebody making a to-do. Turning several pages at once, she caught sight of the word Hanover. “Hamelin Town’s in Brunswick, by famous Hanover city.” That was irresistible. But she must read it one day away from the gassy room and the pressure of the girls. The lines were magic; but the rush that took her to the German town, the sight and smell and sound of it, the pointed houses, wood fires, the Bürgers, had made her cheeks flare and thrown her out of the proper teacher’s frame of mind. She wanted to stand up and pull up the blinds hiding the garden and shout the poem aloud to the girls. They would stare and giggle and think she had gone mad. “The mountain has gone mad,” Nancie would mutter. “There is a mountain in Banbury Park, covered over with yellow bark,” Nancie’s description of herself. That was how the girls saw her stiff hair⁠—and they thought she was “about forty.” Well, it was true. She was, practically. She went on holding Bell up before her face, open at a page of prose, and stared at the keyboard of the piano just beyond her crossed knees. It aroused the sight and sense of the strangely moving hands of the various girls whose afternoon practice it was her business to superintend, their intent faces, the pages of bad unclassical music, things with horrible names, by English composers, the uselessness of the hours and terms and years of practice.

Presently the bread and butter and milk came up for the girls, and then there was prayers⁠—the three servants lined up in front of the bookshelves; cook wheezing heavily, tall and thin and bent, with a sloping mobcap and a thin old brown face with a forehead that was like a buttress of shiny bone and startling dark eyes that protruded so that they could be seen even when she sat looking down into her lap; and Flora the parlourmaid, short and plump and brown with an expression of perfectly serene despair, this was part of Miriam’s daily bread; and Annie the housemaid, raw pink and gold and grinning slyly at the girls⁠—Miss Perne, sitting at the head of the table with the shabby family Bible and the book of family prayers, Miss Jenny and Miss Haddie one on each side of the fireplace, Miss Jenny’s feet hardly reaching the floor as she sat bunched on a high schoolroom chair, Miss Haddie in her cold slate-grey dress sitting back with her thin hands clasped in her lap, her grey face bent devotionally so that her chin rested on her thin chest, her eyes darting from the servants to the girls who sat in their places round the table during the time it took Miss Perne to read a short psalm. Miriam tried to cast down her eyes and close her ears. All that went on during that short interval left her equally excluded from either party. She could not sit gazing at Flora, and Miss Perne’s polite unvarying tone brought her no comfort. She sometimes thought longingly of prayers in Germany, the big quiet Saal with its high windows, its great dark doors, its annex of wooden summer-room, Fräulein’s clear, brooding undertone, the pensive calm of the German girls; the strange mass of fresh melodious sound as they all sang together. Here there seemed to be everything to encourage and nothing whatever to check the sudden murmur, the lightning swift gesture of Nancie or Trixie.

The moment Miss Perne had finished her psalm they all swung round on to their knees. Miriam pressed her elbows against the cane seat of her chair and wondered what she should say to Miss Jenny at supper about the newspaper, while Miss Perne decorously prayed that they might all be fed with the sincere milk of the Word and grow thereby.

After the Lord’s Prayer, a unison of breathy mutterings against closed fingers, they all rose. Then the servants filed out of the room followed by the Misses Perne. Miss Perne stopped in the doorway to shake hands with the girls on their way to bed before joining her sisters in the little sitting-room across the hall. One of the servants reappeared almost at once with a tray, distributed its contents at the fireplace end of the long table and rang the little bell in the hall on her way back to the kitchen. The Misses Perne filed back across the hall.

“Eh, Deborah, are ye sure?” said Miss Jenny, getting into her chair at Miss Perne’s right hand.

Perhaps the newspaper would not be mentioned after all. If it were she would simply say she had been preparing for Monday and was going to read it after supper. Anyhow there was never any threat with the Pernes of anything she would not be able to deal with. She glanced to see what there was to eat, and then, feeling Miss Haddie’s eye from across the table, assumed an air of interested abstraction to cover her disappointment. Cold white blancmange in a round dish garnished with prunes, bread and butter, a square of cream cheese on a green-edged dessert plate, a box of plain biscuits, the tall bottle of lime juice and the red glass jug of water. Nothing really sweet and nice⁠—the blancmange would be flavoured with laurel⁠—prussic acid⁠—and the prunes would be sweet in the wrong sort of way⁠—wholesome, just sweet fruit. Cheese⁠—how could people eat cheese?

“Well, my dear, I tell you only what I saw with my own eyes⁠—Polly Allen and Eunice Dupont running about in the park without their hats.”

“Ech,” syphoned Miss Haddie, drawing her delicate green-grey eyebrows sharply towards the deep line in the middle of her forehead. She did not look up but sat frowning sourly into her bowl of bread and milk, ladling and pouring the milk from the spoon.

Miriam kept a nervous eye on her acid preoccupation. No one had seen the behaviour of her own face, how one corner of her mouth had shot up so sharply as to bring the feeling of a deeply denting dimple in her cheek. She sat regulating her breathing and carefully extracting the stone from a prune.

“Did ye speak to them?” asked Miss Jenny, fixing her tall sister over her pince-nez.

Miss Perne sat smilingly upright, her black eyes blinking rapidly at the far-off bookshelves.

“I did not speak to them⁠—”

“Eh, Deborah, why not?” scolded Miss Jenny as Miss Perne drew breath.

“I did not speak to them,” went on Miss Deborah, beaming delightedly at the bookcase, “for the very good reason that I was not sufficiently near to them. I was walking upon the asphalt pathway surrounding the lake and had just become engaged in conversation with Mrs. Brinkwell, who had stopped me for the purpose of giving me further details with regard to Constance’s prolonged absence from school, when I saw Polly and Eunice apparently chasing one another across the recreation ground in the condition I have described to you.”

Miriam, who had felt Miss Haddie’s scorn-filled eyes playing watchfully over her, sat pressing the sharp edge of her high heel into her ankle.

“Eh, my dear, what a pity you couldn’t speak to them. They’ve no business at all in the recreation ground where the rough boys go.”

“Well, I have described to you the circumstances, my dear, and the impossibility of my undertaking any kind of intervention.”

“Eh, well, Deborah my dear, I think I should have done something. Don’t you think you ought? Eh? Called someone perhaps⁠—eh?⁠—or managed to get at the gels in some way⁠—dear, dear, what is to be done? You see it is hardly of any use to speak to them afterwards. You want to catch them red-handed and make them feel ashamed of themselves.”

“I am fully prepared to admit, my dear Jenny, the justice of all that you say. But I can only repeat that in the circumstances in which I found myself I was entirely unable to exercise any control whatever upon the doings of the gels. They were running; and long before I was free from Mrs. Brinkwell they were out of sight.”